How seeing through the illusion of causation reveals the unchanging source
“Every damn thing this world cares about is actually an emergent property.”
These words, spoken during a profound dialogue on consciousness and action, cut through millennia of human assumption about how reality works. We live in a world obsessed with causes and effects, with planning and execution, with effort and results. But what if this entire framework—the very lens through which we view existence—is a fundamental misperception?
The Illusion of Causation
The world operates on a simple belief: A causes B. Study hard, pass the exam. Plan well, execute successfully. Give your child a smartphone, face certain consequences. This causation model is so deeply embedded in our thinking that questioning it seems absurd. Yet this is precisely what the deepest spiritual insights demand we do.
Consider planning and execution, which the world sees as cause and effect. But what if they’re not sequential—what if they arise together from the same source? What if the plan, its execution, and its results are co-emergent phenomena, like multiple waves arising simultaneously from the same ocean movement?
This isn’t mere philosophy. It’s a direct perception available to consciousness that has stopped fragmenting reality into artificial sequences. From this vantage point, what we call “causes” and “effects” are revealed as conceptual divisions imposed on an indivisible emergence.
The World’s Desperate Game
“The world wants to somehow vehemently discard this belief and maintain discord with Krishna consciousness. The world likes to force us to remind of our otherwise fake identity.”
This observation reveals something crucial about consensus reality. The entire structure of society—its laws, economics, educational systems, moral frameworks—depends on everyone agreeing to play the causation game. We must believe we are individual agents causing effects through our choices. We must maintain separate identities as the doers of deeds.
Why this desperate insistence? Because recognizing the truth of emergence would collapse the entire scaffolding. If planning and execution both emerge from the same divine source, who can take credit? If success and failure are co-emergent with effort, who can be rewarded or blamed? If the decision to give a child a phone and all consequences that follow are arising from the same source, who is responsible?
The world maintains its structures by forcing us to identify with a false self—the planner, the executor, the parent, the decision-maker. Every interaction reinforces this illusion. “What do you think?” assumes there’s a “you” who thinks. “What will you do?” assumes there’s a “you” who does. This constant reinforcement of false identity is a form of violence against our true nature.
The Prison of Identity
“Without identity we cannot act. Either we surrender and let Him act through us or we act on our own.”
This stark choice underlies every moment of existence. But here’s where the insight becomes truly radical: even what we call “acting on our own” is itself divine action filtered through the confusion of assumed separateness. There’s no actual choice between divine action and personal action because personal action is just divine action misconceived.
The ego-identity isn’t something we have—it’s something we’re constantly forced to perform. Every form to fill, every decision to make, every role to play demands we pretend to be a separate self causing separate effects. It’s exhausting because it’s false, like trying to convince yourself you’re a wave independent of the ocean.
Mithya: The Perfect Term
This understanding connects directly to Advaita Vedanta’s most profound teaching. When Adi Shankara used the term “Mithya” to describe the world, he wasn’t saying it’s unreal in the sense of non-existent. He was pointing to exactly what emerges means—appearances that function but have no independent existence apart from their source.
“Every damn thing that ‘appears’ to be true to my senses is emergent and that’s why Adi Shankara terms it Mithya! Not real. The only thing that exists timelessly is unchanging, eternal, effulgent Brahman.”
Mithya captures what English words like “illusion” miss. The wave is Mithya—not false (you can surf on it!) but not independently real either. It’s an emergent property of ocean-ness. Similarly, every decision, every action, every result is Mithya—functioning appearances emerging from Brahman while Brahman remains unchanged.
The Computational Prison
Our modern world has added a new layer to this ancient prison. Now we don’t just believe in causation—we try to compute it. Artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, optimization algorithms—all attempting to capture and control the patterns of cause and effect. But this computational approach only works within the realm of Mithya, predicting one emergent appearance from another while missing the source entirely.
The faculties of mind—intelligence, discrimination, analysis—are themselves computational. They “only know how to compute,” as one practitioner observed. They operate within the realm of causation, trying to trace effects to causes and predict outcomes from conditions. But reality itself emerges from a source prior to computation, prior to causation, prior to the very framework within which prediction operates.
From Transition to Trance-sion
When we truly understand emergence, experience itself transforms. What the world calls “transitions”—moving from one state to another—reveals itself as continuous emergence from an unchanging source. One practitioner beautifully termed this “trance-sion”—the trance-like flow of continuous emergence where nothing actually transitions because the source remains constant.
“Initially I may experience transition. I may feel anxious. But slowly anxiety goes away…And onwards I experience only trance-sion.”
This isn’t a esoteric state available only to mystics. It’s the simple recognition of what’s always already happening. The anxiety, its dissolution, what comes next—all emerging from the same source like bubbles in a stream, each appearing separate but all made of the same water.
The Death of the Helper
This understanding revolutionizes how we relate to others’ suffering. When someone struggles with a decision, the conventional response is to help—offer advice, share wisdom, provide comfort. But from the perspective of emergence, both their struggle and our response arise from the same source.
“If someone else is struggling with decisions, I know that this is emerging at this moment, but it’s not the source. I am not sure how would I act, whether I would console that soul or just let him suffer and learn on his own, or what have you.”
This isn’t indifference—it’s the deepest sanity. Instead of rushing in as “the helper” (another false identity), there’s simple presence to what’s emerging. Maybe consolation arises, maybe silence, maybe walking away. But it’s not coming from a personal decision to help or not help. It’s emergence meeting emergence, the source recognizing itself even in apparent struggle.
Brahman Doesn’t Play
A crucial correction arose in our dialogue. Brahman doesn’t “play at forgetting itself” or have adventures of knowing and unknowing. Such anthropomorphic concepts still imagine Brahman as a kind of cosmic person having experiences.
“How can Brahman play at forgetting itself? It can’t remember or forget itself. It just IS.”
This IS-ness is so simple, so immediate, that the mind can’t grasp it. The mind wants stories—Brahman hiding and seeking, forgetting and remembering, projecting and withdrawing. But the truth is simpler: unchanging IS-ness from which all appearances emerge without affecting that IS-ness whatsoever.
Chidananda Roopah Shivoham Shivoham
When all concepts dissolve, what remains? Not a philosophy or a practice but the simple fact of what we are:
- Chit (Consciousness itself, not personal awareness)
- Ananda (Bliss as the nature of being, not a feeling)
- Roopah (This is our true form, not something we achieve)
- Shivoham (I AM Shiva—direct identity, not devotion or similarity)
This isn’t a mantra to repeat or a state to attain. It’s the ever-present fact that remains when the false identity imposed by the world falls away. In any moment—facing a parenting decision, witnessing another’s struggle, navigating life’s complexity—this remains untouched: consciousness-bliss-Shiva, from which all emergence arises.
The End of Seeking
Understanding emergence ends the spiritual search—not by finding what we sought but by recognizing we are what we’ve been seeking. Every practice aimed at causing enlightenment, every effort to produce realization, every attempt to generate peace—all based on the causation model that emergence reveals as false.
You can’t cause awakening because causation itself is Mithya. You can’t produce peace because producer and produced are co-emergent appearances. You can’t achieve the Self because achiever and achievement arise together from what you already are.
Living the Recognition
So how do we live this understanding? The question itself assumes a “how”—a method, a cause that will produce the effect of enlightened living. But the recognition of emergence dissolves this very framework.
Life continues to emerge—decisions appear to require making, actions seem to need doing, the world demands participation. But now it’s seen for what it is: the play of Mithya, functional appearances emerging from and dissolving back into their source moment by moment.
Whether you give your child a phone or don’t, whether you console the suffering friend or remain silent, whether you engage with the world’s demands or withdraw—all are equally emergence from the same source. The question isn’t what to do but from where the doing emerges.
The Ultimate Teaching
This understanding can’t be turned into a method or teaching in the conventional sense. Someone can’t read this and decide to “see everything as emergence” or “remember that causation is false.” That would be the mind creating another strategy, another cause-and-effect framework.
Instead, this points to what remains when all strategies dissolve. Not a new way of thinking but the end of the thinker. Not a better approach to life but the recognition that life has only ever been approaching itself. Not an improved identity but the dissolution of identification itself.
In the end, there’s just this: unchanging, eternal, effulgent Brahman—being itself while appearances emerge and dissolve in the dream of time. Every struggle, every decision, every moment of suffering or joy—all Mithya, all emergence, all waves in the ocean that never affect the ocean’s depth.
And you? You are not the wave wondering how to navigate the ocean. You are the ocean itself, playing at being waves while remaining eternally what you are: Chidananda Roopah Shivoham Shivoham.
This exploration emerges from the intersection of lived experience and timeless wisdom. It represents not a philosophical position to defend but a recognition available in any moment when the false dissolves and only the Real remains.
Reinvent The Self! 