Several wisdom traditions teach that only Ultimate Reality—Brahman—is real, and that the world we inhabit is illusion, a veil of ignorance obscuring the truth that nothing “here” truly exists.
There is truth in this, but only so far. The world is illusory in the sense that it appears solid and permanent. What is actually present is energy and information in constant flux.
Between the idealist who says everything is mind and the materialist who says everything is matter stands process philosophy. It rejects substance ontology in favor of event ontology: matter is simply slow‑changing events, energy that has taken form.
But the illusion is not of something absent; it is an illusion of something present. When a rock falls on your head and leaves a bump, the rock is not unreal in the sense of nothing at all. It is one event interacting with another. Process philosophy insists there is something really there—just not what we normally assume it to be. The world is not unreal; it is misinterpreted.
