The deepest illusion isn’t what you see. It’s the someone you assume is doing the seeing.
That someone—the bounded, biographical self who claims to have been watching all along—is assembled after the fact. Predictive processing builds it in retrospect and hands you the finished narrative as if it had been there the whole time.
The Watcher, in that sense, was never there. The character wasn’t watching. The character is the watching, retold.
But something has to be the case for the retelling to occur in. A story doesn’t tell itself into a vacuum. Before the narrative closes around a self, there is already prakāśa—the self-luminous fact of appearing, lit from no vantage point because it doesn’t need one. Not a witness behind experience. Not a subject having it. Just the shining by which “having” becomes possible at all. Vimarśa—reflexivity—is what curdles that open shining into a someone, a story, a stake. That curdling is the illusion.
It is the light that is eternal.