The Causal Power of the Unreal

This "non-existent agent performing actions and takes rebirth" leads us to a profound tension, one that sits at the very heart of the inquiry: if the agent is unreal, how can it still act, intend, regret, and suffer?

This is the shock of the insight. We discover that the illusion is not inert. A mirage does not contain water, yet it possesses the power to move the thirsty traveler across the desert. A dream tiger cannot bite, yet the physical body startles awake in terror. A fictional character cannot exist, yet their tragedy can break a reader’s heart.

What these phenomena reveal is that illusion can have force without possessing substance.

Causal efficacy does not require inherent existence. The "agent" does not need to exist as a metaphysical entity for its effects to appear, function, and unfold. Seen through a lens compatible with Madhyamaka, this is not a paradox; it is the very logic of dependent origination. What lacks inherent essence is precisely what can arise, vary, influence, and dissolve. If the agent were truly existent—fixed and substantial—it would be incapable of change, growth, error, or liberation.

Because it is empty, it is flexible, responsive, and dynamic. The illusion is not real, but its functioning is experientially undeniable. Conventional reality derives its weight not from substance, but from relational coherence.

The Phenomenological Gravity of the Self

Why, then, does the "self-agent" feel so intensely real?

It feels real because experience organizes around it. Meaning stabilizes through it, memory narrates continuity for it, emotions justify it, and social interaction reinforces it. The illusion is not merely a conceptual error; it is embodied, affective, habitual, and atmospheric. It is lived.

This is why we feel located "behind the eyes." It is why we feel wronged or praised, and why we experience guilt, pride, and responsibility as "my pain," "my memory," or "my choice." Even when analysis fails to find a self, experience vividly presents one.

This is not a contradiction; it is precisely the definition of the union of appearance and emptiness. The agent cannot be found under ultimate analysis, yet it appears vividly in lived immediacy.

The illusion takes on the density of reality not because it exists, but because conditions continually re-instantiate it. It is like a vortex in a stream: nothing is there as a solid thing, yet the pattern persists, and its effects on the water are unmistakable.

The Necessity of the Turn Toward Consciousness and Acknowledging that Experience is Its Own Domain of Lawfulness

If illusions can function, and the physical world alone cannot explain how a non-entity exerts influence, then reality cannot be exhausted by physical substance. This realization forces a turn toward consciousness. This does not drive us into metaphysical idealism, but it requires us to acknowledge that experience is its own domain of lawfulness.

Consciousness, in this view, is not a spectator watching a world, nor a ghost floating inside the brain, nor a cosmic substrate lurking behind phenomena. Rather, it is the field where patterns of appearance unfold—the place where designation acquires meaning, narratives stabilize identity, and illusion acquires agency. The "agent" exists as a mode of appearance within this luminous, relational field. It is not a substance or a soul, but a performative pattern that is enacted, reinforced, believed, and felt.

Consciousness is "primary" here not because it produces the material world, but because it is the register in which the world becomes a world-for-us. It is the arena where illusion becomes compelling, where causality becomes lived, and where both suffering and liberation become possible.

The Middle Path: Beyond Substance

This framing charts a precise course between materialist reduction and metaphysical idealism. Materialism fails because it cannot account for the efficacy of the illusion—the ghost shouldn't work, yet it does. Idealism fails because it tends to reify consciousness into a metaphysical ground or ultimate substance.

The conclusion is subtler: there is no self-agent in itself, yet the pattern of agency functions, and its efficacy is intelligible only in a relational, experiential register. Illusion has agency not because it secretly "is" something, but because appearance-in-relation is already efficacious. The "weight of the real" emerges from dependence, mutual conditioning, narrative coherence, and embodied enactment—not from substance, but from luminous relational patterning.

Ultimately, the illusion does not become real. Instead, our understanding of reality must expand. Reality is broader than substance; it includes the causal efficacy of appearance itself. The agent is unfindable under analysis, yet compelling in experience and functional through designation. Consciousness is the arena of manifestation where this paradoxical drama plays out.