Destroy the Illusion of Cause and Effect!
Photo by Andrew Solok on Unsplash
Everything is self-caused...
According to certain spiritual teachers (I'm thinking of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, but there are many). It sounds very strange...but I have thought about it for a while, and I think it works better as a model of reality than the one we use. I think it creates a very interesting world. This is not a "factual" knowledge, for which you can find evidence in a scientific paper. This is something different, and uninteresting to most folks.
So, whoever remains...let's go!
Suppose this is true.
Look at some hikers walking into a wilderness. Already, we construct an obvious cause-effect chain. The hikers are there on that trail because they loves nature and desire to hike in it. Cause = love of nature, effect = hikers on trail. You can come up with many other plausible causes, sure. But either way, you've got a chain, and all the agency is on the side of the hikers. Nature itself is passive.
How to break the stranglehold of this idea?
Let's assert that the event is self-caused. How can we construct that?
Perhaps, to the land itself, hiking on it feels something like love. The way scratches behind the ears feel to a dog. The mental state of the hiker likely matters. If he is full of appreciation for his surroundings, then the land feels love.
So we reach one idea: nature desires to be loved. Beautiful places long to be walked.
Now, we can see the appearance of the hikers not as something whose cause rests only in them, but as evidence of relationship between one locii of consciousness (the individual hiker) and another (the land).
The appearance of the hiker now signals:
- The desire of the hiker, yes, but also
- The desire to be hiked on.
Land that desires to be hiked on must be singing. The song is especially well-heard by the hiker. He answers the call more often and more quickly than others.
So the event in time is now seen as the visible manifestation of a relationship. I've given some kind of "agency" to the "inert" component.
I hear your objection ("But that is not self-caused! It is still only caused by 2 actors, one real in my view, and one imaginary, and don't think I'm going to grant you life to the imaginary one!").
I grant you the first objection, but must detour into a defense of something like "panpsychism" (consciousness in all things), because you need a working understanding of that model in order to weigh my response to the first objection.
Summing up: the event is evidence of a partnership. It is a culmination, long desired. And the chief actors in the manifestation of that desire may not be the human ones.
In which I try to get you to grant consciousness to all things :)
I'm going to try to convince you but I know you are a hard nut to crack and will probably walk away unconvinced. But here goes:
Whenever we can imagine a name, there exists a consciousness called into subtle being by that name.
We give energy to that locus point, and the energy that is able to (chooses to? I'll return to that below) identify with the formulation responds by identifying itself with that name. I use the technical word "formulation" to mean the delicate confection of ideas you hold behind the name when you say it. The formulation can be simple ("Metallica is BITCHIN!") or complex ("Nature is beautiful...holy even... but dangerous too..."). The name is shorthand for that formulation.
You are only one of millions of namers. And your work continues across time and space. So you can see that the locus point of a "great term" like Nature is enormous, fuzzy, planetary in scale. That locus point attains gravity...spiritual gravity. This is why many "seekers" love nature. So many beings have named it with formulations of beauty. They have worshipped it by walking in it.
It is full of power. Like the bones of saints in Russia (same principle here).
So...the consciousness that accepts identification with the locus point does so willingly and freely. This must be so by induction. Reflect into your interior and pose the question: does my heart go into anything which I don't choose at some level? Can my heart and will unite behind an activity or mode of being with which I do not agree?
The answer is no. Never. It never did. It never will.
Because you are sovereign.
The Christian religion especially highlights the freedom of God's creatures to choose the good or to turn away from it. And God does not coerce them. Were this God to show his face on the street, on the television, in the sky, that would be a kind of coercion.
The Christian God is no bully. He hides from you until you will Him into your life.
He allows you to die believing He is not there. He trusts that your nature as His child will lead you to truth ultimately, though it may require geologic time.
Ultimately, I have to leave the working out of the proof that consciousness can never be enslaved to you. I go further and assert that no matter how humble the consciousness is, that principle remains. I mean that a tree is no slave, nor a rock.
Because if you disagree, then I pose this question: where is the dividing line in reality? Where is the "highest slave" consciousness, and where the "lowest free born?"
I am a systems programmer by profession.
I know that every creation of a boundary without firm reason leads to bugs.
If I cannot posit a reason with my mind for why some forms of consciousness should be bound and others free, then it has no place in my model.
I'm aware that my model is not reality. But I am striving to model reality, and must use Occam's Razor to avoid unnecessary complexity. A division between bound and free modes is unnecessary, therefore it is tossed out.
You object: "but the horse is kept in a pen, and led with a harness! He is not free.".
My answer is that there are always teachers and students. And there are good and less good relationships between them. Perhaps the horse is gaining the discipline to follow a human existence by years of association with humans. The tradeoff for this association is that he must do useful work for the human. Doing work involves submitting yourself to a discipline, but it is not slavery. True, some employers abuse their workers. I think we all agree that the mass factory farming of animal life and industrial slaughter is some kind of abuse. The relationship is broken. There, yes, it approaches slavery. But we can all see it. We know it is wrong, and on some level, restitution should be made. At least we imagine this, and I do not scoff at our imagination as a guide for what is really real. Because our imaginations are a thing that grew out of this world, and therefore must have some basis in truth. And, in our power as namers, we know justice. We name and designate out of our sense of truth and justice and beauty. And so we will cast out those aspects of ourselves that are doing wrong, and enlarge the good. So. I am not completely off-base to think that restitution will come.
Another objection: "the rock serves me by being carved into a path. I can't even know if it regards itself as a slave or free! I am the only actor, it is passive!"
Good point. I'll grant you that the rock appears to do nothing. But once you were a child. You fell asleep in the back of the car, and your father carried you into the house and put you in bed. You "did his bidding" though you weren't aware of it.
Are you so sure it is not this way with the rock? Perhaps some consciousness is highly focused...very much "here" (wherever the observer is). But even you are not always highly focused, and you regard yourself as the "most focused thing" on the planet. Half of the time you are "not here," though your body lies on the bed! Perhaps the rock is like that. Perhaps it is not fully born yet into the world. "Rockness" is crude, "first entry," let's say. It is appropriate that such simple, sleeping forms be carved usefully. There may be a kind of learning in that. Actually, the willingness to be carved by conditions into something greater is a principle that we highly admire:
We call it the building of character.
Can you deny the rock the same process of character forming which you know has benefited you to a great degree? Yes, the time-scale and nature of the "work" is different. But seen psychologically, there are great similarities.
So, where are we? I've argued that consciousness is everywhere, and that free will is necessary for consciousness. Therefore if consciousness does form around locus points shaped by the "naming angels" of existence (that would be us), it must form there freely.
Additionally, because I'm arguing that there are more actors in the event of the hiker-in-nature than we think, I need to show how communication is made with the other actors. There is a "blank space" in the reasoning process of the hiker in which a conversation between the hiker and the nature-consciousness may occur.
Desire
Why does a free being do anything?
Desire.
The desire may be for the good or the less good. Selfless or selfish. A good desire may have catastrophic ill effects on an environment, and a selfish desire may be repeatedly satisfied without anybody noticing ill-effects.
So desire is complex.
Add to this complexity, the complexity of our inner state, with a mix of conscious and unconscious motivations for action. So there is a chaotic spiral of complexity in the contemplation of why a being does some particular thing.
Are you aware of the research that states that we make decisions before we are mentally aware of them? It suggests a kind of "floating up" into the mind of the results of a decision which was actually made at some deeper level. The mind then quickly rationalizes why that is the right decision, which is a humorous picture! I see Roald Atkinson as an administrative functionary making important sounding noises that justify departmental policies.
When something is very complex, we don't solve it rationally. We "sleep on it," we allow our "gut" to help decide. We look for signals in the exterior world, or we pray to God for help in illuminating the correct answer. We are, in fact, asking for a peer-to-peer communication with the object or mode of our desire.
I posit that such questions receive answers. That we do get help. The fact that we rail up and down that we don't, that we never do, that such help never comes is because of our curious cultural conditioning. We stand on a peculiar peninsula which views the world as clockwork without a God. We can make these assertions all we want. Other cultures wouldn't blink so hard at the idea that prayers are answered in some way.
Anyway, the choice of model is up to you. I'm saying that after close internal introspection, I found the idea of such communication not implausible. Not "outrageous."
In the fruition of your desire there is communication. At levels beyond the mind. And because free will is bound into the universe, that communication is between free beings and therefore it is essentially polite.
Are you unhelpful without a cause? Maybe on your worst day. But not your average day. So it is reasonable to conclude that communication with entities of consciousness is both polite, and well-meant and well-received.
To sum this up: your desire sets off a chain of communication with locii of consciousness suited to fulfill your desires. This mechanism is hidden from your objective consciousness for various reasons, one of which is cultural.
Returning to the narrative
I've offered a worldview of panpsychism, and a mechanism by which commmunication is made from "you" to the rest of this field of consciousness. Let me now return to the story of the hiker and nature, and hopefully I can finish this up without taxing your patience too much (you have already been very generous to me!).
The hikers in our image are a part of the stream of humanity that names and loves what it has named.
Nature has taken the identity of the named, and cavorts in delight at the attention paid.
In the meantiime, the hikers "make themselves ready" for Nature.
The hikers imagines Nature as residing in a particularly far and beloved place. Nature gets a name like "the Gila," or "the Bob," or "Glacier."
The hikers do not enter the temple without appropriate sacrifies. They train to be strong in the eyes of the beloved.
They arrive with mighty works of protection to signal to Nature how grand, real and even dangerous she is. We call these things
- "Bear spray"
- "Warm, synthetic layers"
- "Water purification tablets"
So...if you are the hiker, you have named her, this Nature you adore. You have described her attributes and made them real through your response to them.
Think of it now from her point of view. She is likely not a focused, human-style consciousness. She is aggregate, dispersed, yet powerful through the tide of feeling rippling through a vast unconscious hinterland which is her body.
She wants to please you, for you have played a role in creating an aspect of her being.
As you approach, she knows your steps.
As you huff and puff over passes, she holds her breath.
And now you are here.
But so is she.
It is more realistic to say that you and Nature together set the table of this moment long before. And now you both dine at it.
Do you see the celebration, the possibility and the naturalness in this mode of thought about events in time?
How does it compare to the model your teachers drilled into you, in which agency is confined to bodies of meat with sufficiently sized brains?
Are you not always trying to escape the dominion of that mode of thought? Isn't that mode "the city" or "the valley" which you climb out of?
I therefore bring you this other way of looking at things.
Meditate on it and if it plants fruit in you then you can call it good.
This here is an event, which we've certainly planned together.
P. S. I forgot to grant the event agency!
So Nature and the hikers conspired, then met on a blue-sky day. But I said every event is its own cause. Well. It is like this: there must be a place of meeting. The event is the "place."
Just imagine if you could hold a historic meeting between Israelis and Palestinians, with a great chance for peace between them. You would run, not walk home to set the table and light the candles.
You would submit yourself as "a place" in which two entities can meet.
Now. Who caused the whole thing? Did you not create a vacuum in space with your desire, which already existed, to serve God by improving the life of His creatures? Your desire was there. The Israelis were there, and the Palestinians. Your house was there. The food was there.
And this event...since you can only partially understand your desires, how much of that desire is wholly your creation, and how much of it exists in you because you agree with a particular idea of peace and harmony through communication with some entity?
Is it your house, after all? You know it is not solely your event.
In fact...where is the cause?
Where is the single cause?
Therefore: it is closer to the truth to say, events are self-caused. And the self that causes the event has all of the sensitivity, the subtlety, the agency that you imagine for yourself.
Thank you for listening...send me an email with any objection or idea...I will add it to this and continue a thread...for I wish to be a meeting ground, too.