Cause and effect is an erroneous notion
by Vic Shayne
author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment:
How to realize your true nature and end suffering
Cause and effect, as the concepts are commonly taught, is an erroneous notion. Those who speak about it tend to be repeating secondhand information. But anyone can find out for him/herself what cause and effect is really about. It takes a deep interest as well as persistent observation without judgment.
Of course there is cause and effect as a duality, but the real issue is that there is no singular cause or effect that happens. And this is why New Age spirituality is off base when its proponents teach that you can control your world and state of happiness by being proactive, or even exercising something called “the law of attraction.”
The part that is erroneous about cause and effect — or, karma —is the misguided idea that there is a single person, occurrence, or thing that is a cause (or an effect). To understand this better, we first have to consider what consciousness is.
Everything begins with an understanding of consciousness
Consciousness is the totality of all that is. It is the action, movement, creation, thought, destruction, all expressions of life and inanimate things, and the potentiality of what has yet to manifest into form. Everything that happens does so because of some prior event.
There is no singular cause or effect that occurs in isolation
NOTHING ever happens in isolation. It is the egoic mind, the sense of self (the egoic mind) that ignorantly believes that it is the doer, the cause of action. And it believes that it is the effect of the action of others and of itself. This just cannot be so, because no person can alter the movement of the entirety of consciousness.
What you are about to do, and what you have done, are the result of the entire action of consciousness that goes back into infinity. Consider any incident and this becomes obvious. If you wake up and brush your teeth, for example, this action is only possible because the body was able to get out of bed and go into the bathroom. The bathroom was created by construction workers, and the bed by factory workers, and the body by parents who had parents who had parents, and on and on. The ground on which your apartment or house sits is the result of the earth coming together to form a bed of dirt and rock. The toothbrush came about by a manufacturer that could only make toothbrushes because, to build the manufacturing plant, there were first construction workers, makers and pourers of concrete, bulldozers, a real estate transaction, and on and on. The brain of the individual whom you call “me” or “I,” had to be influenced by someone into feeling that brushing your teeth is important, because those influencers were influenced by others, and so on. Every single thing that brought you to this very moment, as well as the toothbrush, your bed, the alarm clock in your phone, and even the sun that lit up the morning, came about by countless, incalculable events that had to happen to bring you to the now.
Each of the tiniest of details that go into any cause becomes absurdly untraceable and overwhelming to the limited mind. Such is the nature of consciousness in its undivided, singular movement. Each and every action (cause) requires a preceding cause that is connected to countless other preceding causes. There is no end to it, and if you think about it, it’s hubris for the egoic self — the person you think yourself to be —to take credit or blame for anything at all. And it’s absurd to blame anyone for what they do; they are the end result of untold predecessors as well.
Cause and effect is an oversimplification
Cause and effect is an apparition, a false idea, to the egoic self because the egoic self fragments the totality of consciousness into digestible pieces. It is not seeing the wholeness of consciousness and therefore does not consider consciousness as the great “doer” of everything.
The sense of self tries to simplify what is too complex for it to behold.
