Just as in a dream there is happiness and suffering, so in the waking state in the body; but in the supreme reality there is neither happiness nor suffering without cause.

The analogy between dream and waking states establishes an ontological equivalence: both are states of consciousness with content. Happiness and suffering appear in both. But the conclusion is not that everything is equally unreal; it is that happiness and suffering share the same structure in both states: they are produced by causes (hetu), they are not inherent.

“Ahetukam” —without cause— describes the parama-tattva, the supreme reality. It does not say that within it there is suffering or enjoyment without cause; it says that within it there is no suffering or enjoyment because there is no causality. Cause and effect are categories of appearance; reality is not subject to them because it is not an event but the basis of every event.

The Yoga Sūtra (II.15) states: “pariṇāma-tāpa-saṃskāra-duḥkhair guṇa-vṛtti-virodhāc ca duḥkham eva sarvaṃ vivekinaḥ” —for the discerning one, everything is suffering due to the processes of change, anguish, latent impressions, and the conflict among the movements of the guṇas. The solution is not to seek pleasures that do not change —they do not exist— but to transcend the plane where cause and effect operate. This transcendence is not a matter of “going somewhere else”; it is seeing that the place where we already are is no longer subject to the causality that seemed to govern it.