🔎 Introduction
✨ In this powerful reflection, Master Woo Myung teaches that human beings do not truly live in the world — they live in a shadow world created by their own mind.
According to this insight, what we call “reality” is often just a collection of mental pictures, judgments, desires, and illusions. 🌌 These images form a private stage where each person acts out a scripted life, unaware that it is not the world of Truth.
This teaching invites us to step beyond illusion, leave the shadow stage behind, and live freely in the real world that exists beyond the mind.
ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG
We Must Come Out from the Shadows, the Illusions, into the World
Man has the mind of shadows,
and he lives in a shadow of the world.
Man thinks he is living in the world,
but he is not, because he takes pictures of the world
and on the stage of that mind of pictures,
he lives according to what is scripted in this mind,
as a slave to it.
Since he lives with this mind,
he is just an extra in a tragic play on that stage.
In this mind, there are all sorts of things:
there is this and that, judgment and discrimination,
aging, sickness, life and death,
the five desires and seven sins;
there is coming and going, cold and hot,
high and low, the great and the inferior.
It is a particularly difficult life,
because he is staging his opera on a fake stage.
Man thinks that he lives in the world because he is great,
but the world comes first, and he should be ashamed
for stealing everything in the world after being born in that world.
He should have just lived, as he was made and placed in the world —
what need was there to steal what belongs to the world
to make his own picture world?
This has only ever increased man’s suffering and burden
and stopped him from living with freedom.
Your stage is not real but fake and a picture.
If you think about the fact that you are living in a picture,
isn’t it clear that it is terrible and without life;
that it is illusionary?
If you escape from the illusionary stage,
and come out and live in the world of Truth,
you will have no worries,
and you will have the freedom of freedoms.
Such a life sets everyone and everything in the world free.
All human thoughts are pictures and illusions,
and they are all useless.
They are all futile delusions,
and even the fact that you are living is a delusion,
so you must come out from your mind world,
in order for you to live.
– Woo Myung
🌿 Reflect at Santa Clara Meditation
At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners learn how to discard the false mind of pictures and step beyond illusion. 🌠 Through meditation, one gradually leaves the shadow stage and awakens to the world of Truth, where life is no longer governed by judgment, desire, or fear.
True freedom comes not from changing the outer world, but from coming out of the mind world entirely.
