The story with “Cause and Effect”
Are there alternative perspectives possible to the Cartesian linear world of singular cause and effect narratives and conceptual veracity? Is it folly to consider these alternative narratives? Especially in a time of crises?
Quote Jackson Peterson:
The Refutation of “Cause and Effect” and Dependent Origination
If we take Buddhist “dependent origination” as the single explanation for how reality is and how it works, this would be no different than the current, materialistic views of the physical sciences; reality is just the cause and effect interactions of material substances. This is the basic view that Buddhism has also been crippled by for centuries and it creates an otherwise insoluble paradox for practitioners of Dzogchen.
I doubt many have noticed this paradox nor have resolved it. But the view of dependent origination is one of the many errors of the lower yanas.
This means that the apparency in a movie, projected on a movie screen, of a person hitting another person on the head with a rock, the rock seems to be the cause of the appearance of blood on the victims head.
The only cause for the bloodied head to show up on the movie screen is the projector, the light bulb in the projector and the film reel.
Samsara is the looking at perceptual experiences as though the causative actions amongst various agents seeming to “interact”, is being attributed to the agents themselves, instead of seeing them as simultaneous projections of a single Source; like a movie projector, with the cosmic, universal movie appearing on the screen of mirror-like awareness (presence).
People, creatures, atoms, molecules and complex energetic formations, appear, move and act as “projected” from a single Source. None have any autonomy or free will to act on their own volition.
It’s not that a mind or brain generates thoughts, but rather the brain, mind and thoughts are projected simultaneously, not in a “cause and effect” linear sequence.
Likewise it’s not that the mind affects the body nor that the body affects the mind; both are being projected simultaneously from a single Source, without either influencing the other.
Reality or the universe is a projection which unfolds without interactions of “cause and effect” amongst the projected parts: the single causative agent is the Projector, the single Projector of the Cosmic Hologram (block universe).
When asleep, in a dream at night, we hold a rock in our hand and throw it at a window which breaks; it seems that our arm and strength propelled the rock which freely flew across pre-existing space into a pre-existing window and the contact of the fast moving rock “caused” the dream window glass to shatter.
But we know better: we know the subconscious mind generated all the actions in the dream. The rock was not propelled by our arm’s muscles. The trajectory was not through pre-existing space and was not determined by our “good aim”. We also know the rock did not “cause” the glass to shatter. The shattering of the glass was done by our mind creating the image of “shattered window glass”, not by the rock “hitting it”. The subconscious creativity generated every aspect much like a painter painting a picture. In a painter’s rendering of the same dream vignette, he would make it look like his painted rock actually shattered the glass, but again none of the painted images caused any effects upon each other. Cause and effect was implied but not the least bit real. The painter alone was the “cause”.
World famous quantum physicist David Bohm proposes that our “real” world is the same in principle. In his model the “subconscious mind” in this case, is called the cosmic, universal “Implicate Order”. It is the unseen Source from which all reality or phenomena arise or are projected outward as multi-sensory experience; a single Whole universe without interacting parts. He states that “cause and effect” is an illusion just like in the dream. This is based on the principles of quantum discontinuity and non-local causation.
“So it will be ultimately misleading and indeed wrong to suppose, for example, that each human being is an independent actuality who interacts with other human beings and with nature. Rather, all these are projections of a single totality.”
“We see, then, that each moment of consciousness has a certain explicit content, which is a foreground, and an implicit content, which is a corresponding background.”
“So we do not say that mind and body causally affect each other, but rather that the movements of both are the outcome of related projections of a common higher-dimensional ground.”
“Thus, as we have seen, the easily accessible explicit content of consciousness is included within a much greater implicit (or implicate) background.”
“Although this ground may not appear in ordinary consciousness, it may nevertheless be present in a certain way. Just as the vast ‘sea’ of energy in space is present to our perception as a sense of emptiness or nothingness, so the vast ‘unconscious’ background of explicit consciousness with all its implications is present in a similar way. That is to say, it may be sensed as an emptiness, a nothingness, within which the usual content of consciousness is only a vanishingly small set of facets.”
“Thus, since the quantum theory implies that elements that are separated in space are generally non-causally and non-locally related projections of a higher-dimensional reality, it follows that moments separated in time are also such projections of this reality.”
“Our overall approach has thus brought together questions of the nature of the cosmos, of matter in general, of life, and of consciousness. All of these have been considered to be projections of a common ground. This we may call the ground of all that is, at least in so far as this may be sensed and known by us, in our present phase of unfoldment of consciousness. Although we have no detailed perception or knowledge of this ground it is still in a certain sense enfolded in our consciousness, in the ways in which we have outlined, as well as perhaps in other ways that are yet to be discovered.”
Linear “cause and effect” is an illusion. Micro and macro reality, which Bohm calls the “explicate order”, are projections of this “Implicate Order”. The causes and effects arise simultaneously, not with the cause preceding the effect; but come from a common source, in a manner that reflects the principles or laws of quantum physics, but where objective phenomena are not influencing each other or interacting.
David Bohm:
“So we are suggesting that it is the implicate order (rigpa) that is autonomously active while, as indicated earlier, the explicate order flows out of a law of the implicate order, so that it is secondary, derivative, and appropriate only in certain limited contexts.” (Like a movie projection)
“All that is important here is that one finds, through a study of the implications of the quantum theory, that the analysis of a total system into a set of independently existent but interacting particles breaks down in a radically new way. One discovers, instead, both from consideration of the meaning of the mathematical equations and from the results of the actual experiments, that the various particles have to be taken literally as projections of a higher dimensional reality which cannot be accounted for in terms of any force of interaction between them.”
“On the other hand, quantum theory requires … non-causality and non-locality.”
“What is meant here by wholeness could be indicated metaphorically by calling attention to a pattern (e.g., in a carpet). In so far as what is relevant is the pattern, it has no meaning to say that different parts of such a pattern (e.g., various flowers and trees that are to be seen in the carpet) are separate objects in interaction.”
“A centrally relevant change in descriptive order required in the quantum theory is thus the dropping of the notion of analysis of the world into relatively autonomous parts, separately existent but in interaction. Rather, the primary emphasis is now on undivided wholeness, in which the observing instrument is not separable from what is observed.”
“We begin by proposing that in some sense, consciousness (which we take to include thought, feeling, desire, will, etc.) is to be comprehended in terms of the implicate order, along with reality as a whole.”
“…the actual ‘substance’ of consciousness can be understood in terms of the notion that the implicate order is also its primary and immediate actuality.”
“Why, then, do we not drop our fragmentary Western approach and adopt these Eastern notions which include not only a world view that denies division and fragmentation but also techniques of meditation that lead the whole process of mental operation nonverbally to the sort of quiet state of orderly and smooth flow needed to end fragmentation both in the actual process of thought and in its content?”
“The ‘implicate order’ does not rule out God, nor does it say there is a God. But it would suggest that there is a creative intelligence underlying the Whole, which might have as one of the essentials that which was meant by the word ‘God’.”
Quantum physicist David Bohm
The Sufis would claim that God is projecting the universe and ALL the phenomena and their apparent movements, like a single pre-determined cosmic, universal hologram or perhaps like Einstein’s 4D “block universe”. But the Sufis claim that you yourself are God, like being the “All Creating Monarch”, Kunje Gyalpo in Dzogchen or Shiva in Kashmiri Shaivism.
Dzogchen Master Pema Rigtsal wrote:
“In neither relative nor absolute reality is anything good or bad, and there is nothing in either to cultivate or reject.”
“Consider dream experience: therein we can infer (wrongly) that events arise from causes and conditions, that sowing crops brings forth a harvest, that consuming poison results in death, and that taking medicine assists recovery. But even though such events appear in sequence, neither the death after taking poison nor the healing after taking medicine, for example, can be said to be connected because the taking of poison and the death and the taking of medicine and the healing are all dream events. Each moment of perception of dream events is equal and the same, free of any imputation of causal linkage.” (like individual frames in a movie film-reel, whose content is not “caused” by the prior frame, nor affecting the next frames content).
“Since in the waking state every event is of the same dreamlike nature, any preferential judgment we make regarding relative or absolute reality is a function of delusion within delusion.”
“As Je Rongzompa said in Applying the Mahayana Method:
“As inside a dream, so outside: there is no essential distinction between a functional and a nonfunctional illusion. All phenomena in our waking state are also without reality and without foundation, like mirage, like dream, like reflection, like apparition.”
“Although, in a dream, a pot appears to function as a water container, it has no more functional capacity than does the reflection of a pot with water in it, in a mirror.”
(the water and the pot are being simultaneously projected from the same Source)
“There is no need to prove that dream appearances and their attributes are indeterminate, or have or do not have any functional capacity. Likewise, there is no need to prove that the appearances of relative delusion — our ordinary perceptions of inner and outer objects — arise as the products of causes and conditions, or that they are functional or nonfunctional: they all appear the same to both the wise man and the fool.”
“Appearances may be imputed as pure or defiled, but there is no need to label them either way because, in reality, cause and effect and truth and falsehood are mere intellectual imputation.”
Consider that you paint a picture of wood burning with orange flames leaping upward
. Next you paint clouds of white smoke billowing above the flames. When others look at the finished painting they have the impression that the burning wood “is causing the smoke”. But there is no causative relationship between the fire and the smoke. This needs to be seen regarding all phenomena in waking life too. Nothing is causing or effecting anything else, there are no interactive dependencies occurring.
*Edit* “Cause and effect” is one of many stories. */Edit*
- End Quote
What makes this “Mysticism” intellectually interesting for me, is that last year Stephen Wolfram proposed a “Hypergraph” computational model of reality that leads to similar conclusions, without taking away the space for “Free Will”.
References:
Stephen Wolframs Physics Project
Jan van Eijck, this post is not for you.
