cause & effect

This duality is the basis of our whole understanding of time and causation, as one thing leads to another. One action has consequences; the effects which come from it.

Our understanding of causation – cause and effect – will develop quite radically during our spiritual journey. To begin with, as our awareness becomes greater, we will begin to see the effects in the cause, without having to wait for them to happen. For example, if we drink a lot of alcohol one night, the next morning we will have a hangover. We know it intellectually, even whilst we are drinking the alcohol, we know what the effect will be. But as we become more sensitive, we will be feeling something of that effect at the time of the cause. And of course, if we have that awareness of the hangover at the time of drinking the alcohol, then the drinking of the alcohol loses its desirability. Soon we find ourself teetotal.

That’s just one example. You will see the same in many areas of your life: relationships for example. We know the lifecycle; the falling in love, the honeymoon period, the coming down to earth and reality and beginning to see faults in the other, and then the antagonism and usually some dramatic and traumatic breakup. And as we’re drinking alcohol, as our sensitivity increases, we begin to feel, even at the beginning of the relationship, the whole lifecycle. It is as if that whole time span exists in the first moment. Well, that leads to the end of the romantic dream. It’s a tough one to swallow. Many people get stuck with this. But eventually that dream will pass away.

So this is one way in which the duality of cause and effect changes with our spiritual journey. It is as if the whole of time exists in the moment of the cause, so that there is no gap in time between the cause and the effect. The two have become one, somehow melded together in the moment.

But there is another way that this duality can disappear on the spiritual journey, and this is as we become more sensitive to causation, we begin to feel the whole network of causation: that everything that has ever happened has led to this one moment. So we can no longer highlight one past event which has caused the current effect. Instead, there is a whole interconnected network of causation that has led to this moment. And going into the future this moment will effect everything, for the rest of time. And when our feeling for this interconnectedness becomes total, then the margins between one event and another melt away, the boundaries disappear. Whereas before, our mind had been dividing things up into discrete events, afterwards we begin to feel the whole of existence as one continuous energy field, with no boundaries anywhere, with no separation, everything effecting everything else the whole time. And, paradoxically, when we are feeling life this way, totally interconnected, then we begin to feel this moment in an acausal way. Every moment is arising without any causation. Fresh, new; a creation of the moment. And when we are feeling every moment acausally, there are no longer any causes and effects to be found anywhere. In this state, we have transcended the duality of cause and effect.