One of the persistent ideas that crops up in yogic understanding—an idea that also features prominently in Buddhism—is that the world is
Maya, an illusion. Or, to put it more precisely, our
perception of the world is an illusion. What we see isn't real.
Well, of course, this is entirely incorrect. What
is is, after all, absolutely real. It is what
sees it that is not real. And it's possible to offer an explanation of this—not that anyone wants explanations, mind you, since they have been formally banned in the Gurdjieff work—that is consistent with the difference between essence and personality.
Our consciousness, you see, isn't anything like we think it is. Consciousness itself has no self in the way that we understand self; it does have a self in terms of a higher understanding of self, but this is different than the cramped little box we understand self from. There are even individuals at higher levels; distinct individuals, including the astral bodies of those who used to live on this level, if they developed. Anyway, all of this is doctrinaire and consistent with what Gurdjieff said, despite the fact that it probably sounds like the rantings of a deranged individual. You'll just have to trust me on this one; I am not speaking from book learning.
So the self that we understand as the self is not the self. The personality is actually an accretion, a crystallization or a hardened concretion of substances, like a kind of calcite or plaque, that has developed around our essence-consciousness as we grow up. Essence–consciousness is the thread connected to the real consciousness that inhabits this body from a higher-level. When Gurdjieff spoke about the fact that man has higher centers in him, he was referring to precisely this inhabitation of the body by consciousness from another level, which has been covered up by "sand," like a forgotten civilization. And the enneagram is, of course, the famous "map of pre-sand Egypt."
Personality, as much as we love it, isn't even real. The
whole ball of wax is the illusion—what we believe, how we are, the things we are attached to, our aims and goals, and so on. There is, in other words an ersatz or illusory being in us that has grown up in a hardened ball around the real Being of consciousness that extends down into this level. The entire world of this being is illusory. It is incapable of seeing anything real, because it has no inherent reality of its own.
Consciousness arrives in bodies and penetrates them as an expression of itself. It doesn't arise in them; it exists before the body and it exists after the body. The body is a vehicle, in the same way that Vishnu rides
Garuda. This idea is, in fact, a rather exact expression of the relationship between the body and the higher self.
Personality dies at the end of the body's life. There's not much anyone can do about that; it is an artifice in the first place, and only useful insofar as this level goes. Yet we are totally wrapped up in it: we cling to it, not understanding that it is a bogeyman.
WE are the illusion. Ourselves.
When Jeanne de Salzmann explained that consciousness ought to be experienced as coming from behind the body or from above the body, she was referring to an initial—well, admittedly, perhaps not so initial—realization of the fact that consciousness exists independent of the body.
Clinging to the self, which has a completely illusory idea of absolutely everything—an inescapable idea of everything—is the chief source of our inability to achieve real understanding. Reading the words about it may seem to make it facile enough to grasp, intellectually at least, but it doesn't do us much good. And an enormous amount needs to be paid before an organic sensation of Being can begin to lead us in the direction of a right understanding here.
So this world I see—in the
way that I see it—is completely illusory, because the artifice that I inhabit, which interprets it, isn't real. It's certainly possible for "me"—
which does not exist—to become transparent enough for something real to take place. This is what inner work is for. Eventually, the stuff that personality is made of becomes thin enough for some light to shine through it.
Maybe then something real can be sensed.
I respectfully hope you will take good care.