Why the ancient Indian’s Intuition of the Līlā of Māyā Was Right

— and Why It Wasn’t Mystical at All

By Victor Langheld

 

The ancient Indian intuition that the world is Līlā — a play — woven by Māyā — illusion — is usually dismissed today as poetic mysticism. But read through the lens of Finn’s Procedure Monism + simulation thesis, it turns out to be a structurally accurate diagnosis made without the mathematics.

1. Tokens in, worlds out

All communication across any boundary is digital (quantised): spikes, photons, packets, tin cans, pulses.

Nothing continuous, meaningful, or “world-like” ever crosses into a system.

Yet what appears inside (the observer = receiver) is continuous: space, colour, time, body, identity. This is only possible if the receiving system converts discrete tokens into local analogue displays.

That is exactly what a simulation is.

 

2. Māyā as analogue rendering

Māyā is traditionally translated as “illusion,” but that translation is misleading. It is not error. It is appearance-generation.

In modern terms:

Māyā = the system’s analogue renderer.

It is the function that fabricates the world you live inside from non-world-like inputs.

So the world is not false — it is constructed.

 

3. Līlā as procedural output

Why play?

Because the system is not presenting reality — it is performing it. The colours, the selves, the dramas, the heavens and hells are not imported. They are enacted by the constraints of the confinement space.

Reality is not (revealed). It is staged (‘as if’).

That is Līlā.

 

4. The fatal overreach

Where the Indians went wrong was not in calling the world illusion, but in promoting the renderer to divinity.

They intuited the simulation perfectly, but then mistook the function for a substance:

If the world is rendered, the renderer must be a universal consciousness.

That was the category error.

The renderer is not a cosmic mind.


It is a procedural artefact of confinement.

 

5. Final synthesis

They were right about this much:

The world you experience is not the world-in-itself, indeed its source.
It is the analogue play of local rendering engines
responding to digital constraint signals.

So yes — the universe you live in really is Māyā’s Līlā.

Not because it is mystical.
But because you are running a simulation.

 

The ‘Lila of Maya’ revisited

Consciousness as simulation

The Birth of Illusion

The druid said: “Life’s a game to be played for real”

 

 

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