If you believe life is an illusion than what is the point of it? A dream/a fantasy/an unreality cannot be taken seriously. If you believe life is reality then what you say/do matters. Which is it?

I take it for real, and yes, it matters.

But it is possible for people to live in illusions and not know it - it's called insanity.

It's also possible for people to have delusions - neurosis.

Or be brainwashed.

Or simply mistaken and unaware of it.

The way out of any of these is to start trusting sense perceptions - they rarely mislead.

(Except for bi-polar or schizophrenia - which are biological in origin and need professional help.)

Your life is your experience. Whether that be shared with others or not is for you to decide. 

Define "rarely"? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable. Simple optical illusions can easily fool the eye,including all forms of video/and old tyme motion pictures. Have you ever "heard something" that nobody else in the room heard? Or "felt someone behind you"? How many times have you been in an argument over the color of something?

I'll agree that sense perceptions are pretty good, but I think they can and are easily mislead much more than most people would admit.

What is rare?

I mean it relatively, i.e., relative to perceptual norms as measured by psychologists.

There are certain types of perceptual illusions over which we have no control.

For instance, the moon appears huge when it rises over the horizon, but small in the midnight sky, yet its distance from the planet has not changed.

It is an illusion based about how the mind unconsciously measures distance based on things in the foreground. We see other objects silhouetted between ourselves and the moon, and whatever obejects these are are far closer to us than the moon is, so the brain reads the moon as being larger than it is due to the comparative sizes.

Some forms of dysfunction in the brain can cause illusions of the senses, such as heat stroke.

Some people have physical limits to their senses, such as colour blindness or genes which distort scent perception (eg of coriander/celantro.)

The distortions of eye-witness accounts have three sources - the first is their stat of mind while the event occurred -if the mind is highly emotional, distracted by thoughts and interpretations, or in any other way compromised or distorted, then the mind is not paying attention to solely the sense perceptions of what is actually happening.

The second is memory. People have widely divergent capacities for memory both physically and as a result of emotions and mental processes. good memory requires training and practise, particularly in the dicipline of remaining focus on just raw perceptions, and regular practice reviewing them consciously without distorting them with interpretations.

The third is the effects of things like media and police interrogations - which can plant thoughts or create false leads. Some people are highly vulnerable to this type of influence for numerous different reasons.

Sure, I've "heard" my name called, but I know it's figment of some odd glitch in my brain - I know it's not real. A real sound has direction, and a physical sensation in the ear. The mental one does not.

Felt something behind me - yes, but that one's reliable. So far, every time I turned, there was either a person or an animal there: someone in the street whose been looking at me, a dog or one of my horses, a bird in a tree or a wallaby.

Colour is highly subjective and influenced not just by the number of cone cells in our eyes, but also by language. Most languages have at least eleven names for colours, yet the eye can distinguish somewhere close to 10,000,000. We don't have enough names for them, so we use approximations like "peach" or "rose" which can lead to many misunderstandings. Or in Hebrew the colour indicated by turquoise is far more green compared to the bluer hue of the colour of the same name in English.

I think the main problem with sense perceptions is that most of us don't pay nearly enough attention to them. The more attention we pay, the better we become at perceiving the world around us more accurately.

Since it is an organic process,  it will always work within ranges and variabilities and yet, for the most part, sense data is much more reliable than what happens when we guess or assume. And much better than the overlay of interpretations, unless with specialist training.)

 Thank you for your thoughtful reply hartfire. The Donald Trump supporters live in the illusion that he will be a good president. There is nothing factual or provable that indicates anything of the sort but they are "deluded" by partisan politics to believe otherwise. I think they're "nuts" but not clinically insane. It's just that their politics clouds judgment and cripples logic. Whether they can break the chains of illusion/delusion that lock them in to those beliefs I doubt. As for sense perceptions, interpreting them must go through the brain. If the brain is not working properly or is in stasis/limbo there is no sense perception is there?

Thank you for your Sp and Happy Sunday to thee! :)

Agreed. The brain can work like clear glass, or like a slumped lense distorting everything.

But unlike glass, it requires education to be able to think clearly.

:):):)

Indeed Life is very meaningful, and everything we do does matter.
But there is more to life than just physical plane activity and awareness of life on the physical plane.

With our thoughts we create the world. That's why we should have good human values and awareness of the power of our thoughts and
Have good pure thoughts.

Because when the mind is still and no thoughts running through it, the
Physical World will disappear. What remains is that which has always been here...the absolute reality.

So our life as we know it is very meaningful. We can create love
Or we can manifest hate and fear
And confusion that will cement our world into a solid thought structure
without any awareness of the light within our Soul.

Our attachment to the thought structure will ensure that we never see anything more than the duality
and the illusion, which we hold onto
And believe as our only reality.

Our attachment is great because we have many lifetimes of seeing nothing else so we believe that is all there is.

Life is very meaningful and should be experienced in its deepest sense.
That's why we have always had Enlightened teachers in this world that have a complete understanding of life to show us our true reality.

And they all teach meditation
So we can open the door to
Understanding, awareness, and happiness. By looking within we see that which is hidden by the illusion of life.

Thank you for a very thoughtful and quite poetic response Baba! :)