Disillusioned?

Dis­il­lu­sion­ment can be dis­heart­en­ing. We all have our share of it, but we sel­dom look at the setup. It comes from our own illu­sions. After the res­ur­rec­tion of Jesus, peo­ple were still mop­ing around about what appeared to them to be his pre­ma­ture death. They had the illu­sion that he would sit on an earthly throne and reign as a polit­i­cal king for­ever. Despite the fact that Jesus told them he was going to do no such thing, they stayed stuck in their illu­sion any­way. After all, the illu­sion had been broad­cast a whole lot longer than Jesus had been preach­ing. It was a motif that went back for gen­er­a­tions.
We become dis­il­lu­sioned about peo­ple, careers, insti­tu­tions, events, our own actions, our health, and a mil­lion other major and minor things. We either admit our own mis­taken pre­con­cep­tions, or we whine about how things are not the way they are “sup­posed” to be.
“Sup­posed to be?” Therein lies the lie. Illu­sions are not real. They never have been. You have to go with what is. Real­ity may not fit the imag­i­na­tion, but the imag­i­na­tion is not the final arbiter. Instead, it is a tool. It can help cre­ate new things by first imag­ing — paint­ing the men­tal pic­ture of what might be — but it first has to respect what is actu­ally there.
Here are some illu­sions that are favorites of mine: that my body will not age, and that it will func­tion per­fectly; that peo­ple will always be their best, and that they had per­fect child­hoods; that insti­tu­tions have my best inter­ests at heart as their ulti­mate goal; that peo­ple are not still affected by the Gen­e­sis “fall” (because that hap­pened so long ago); that rea­son alone can fix what­ever ails soci­ety; that polit­i­cal sys­tems are not self-defeating. There are oth­ers I could add to the list, but I think you get the drift. You could add your illu­sions to the list too.
Mis­er­able? Check your illu­sion list. Mass illu­sion is just as painful as indi­vid­ual illu­sion. Search for the truth that sets you free. It is not what you expect. It is a whole lot better.