13 Beyond the Realm of Causality

          [The Boomerang Nebula, photo by NASA]

“How instantly the memory of God arises in the mind that has no fear to keep the memory away! Its own remembering has gone. There is no past to keep its fearful image in the way of glad awakening to present peace…And what is now remembered is not fear, but rather is the Cause that fear was made to render unremembered and undone. The stillness speaks in gentle sounds of love the Son of God remembers from before his own remembering came in between the present and the past, to shut them out.” ACIM 28-1

“God said: It is not understandable to you that there is no cause. There are reasons why and even proof given for everything, and yet I maintain that there is no cause. There is no cause.
…It is said that a germ caused a cold. There is all kinds of evidence of this. And yet I maintain that there is no cause. This is an important point. Remembering that there is no cause will prevent you from seeking a cause. It will prevent you from demanding justice. It may help you to move on in life as it is, and without anger.
…Sooner or later, you will stop looking for explanations. There is no explaining, beloveds. If you were to find cause, beneath that lies another cause and another. Causes seem to be endless, and yet I maintain there is no cause.” HL3231  

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Statements like “there is no cause, there is no time, there is no space, there is no you, the world is an illusion, etc.” appear to us as farfetched, unrealistic. Everything in the 3-D world seems to contradict them. Our senses seem to prove us exactly the contrary. They sound more like mind games than real possibilities, or even more, realities. 

Of course, we know that our way of thinking is linear, so is our logic. It is sequential, therefore consequential. Causality is seen as a linear sequence of “predictable” effects or events following a cause because causality is embedded in time and space. It is also dualistic in the sense that the cause is generally of a nature totally different from the nature of the effect. A virus as a cause of a certain disease has a nature that is different from the nature of the effects it provokes in the body. The cause is not intrinsically related to the effect as it has an existence of its own and it is separate by time and space from its effects. The mosquito responsible for malaria has a life of its own. Inside our body, every component seems to have a life of its own (mitochondria, bacteria, different types of cells, etc.).

If there were no time there would be no sequence, hence no con-sequence (what comes with the sequence). And if there were no time there would be no space because time and space require each other to produce the illusion of a real outside world. Without duality, there would be no cause. Something would not cause something on something else. The very idea of cause implies that there is a distance in time and in space between the cause itself and its effects, at least at the level of perception of our relative life on earth. Curiously, the term distance (di-stance from Latin and meaning standing apart) is an idea that contains both time and space and join them. Distance establishes a relation between two things by stating what separates them.

So is causelessness, like timelessness and spacelessness, conceivable as something else than a mind game?

Let’s reverse the proposition by saying that causality, like time and space, is a mind game. But how could it be?

 

 Causality is related to the memory of the past 

It might seem curious to use the expression memory of the past. Isn’t memory all about and exclusively about the past? We’ll see later on that it might not be so.

We have stated in a previous blog entitled “5 Time Appeared All at Once and Was Over the Instant It Appeared” that separation virtually happened as a thought in an infinitesimal fraction of an instant and didn’t last more than the time of a flash. It is gone for a long time but it is still in our memory, creating the illusion that we still experience its effects now. As the light from the stars we see now is a light that has passed in reality over the earth thousands or millions of years ago, the world we see now is already past, it was over a long time ago.

It seems then that,  in a part of our mind, the virtual part, we are not living at all in the present time. If we listen carefully to what we are exchanging in most of our communications, it is mostly all related to the past. Even when it concerns the future, it is based on past experiences and informations. What did you eat last night, what did you do last weekend? Where are you going for your holidays? How is your mother? What’s the temperature today? Every bit of information we use in our communication seems a mental image of a recorded past. So what we imagine living in the present is nothing but replaying a recording of what has been but no longer is. Yet, we have a glimpse that we have a present existence but it seems to run like water between our fingers. That must be the real meaning of separation. The present seems concealed to us and we are just replaying an old tape, CD or DVD but we believe it is happening now. Time and space don’t exist in the present, they don’t constitute the present. They are only an imagined past event produced by the thought of separation through the idea of causation.

The separation is never real but we believe it is. In fact, the single idea of separation created the Big Bang in the mind (a split) where we stopped being creators (without really causing anything) and started believing that we were caused by something outside of us. And the solid reality we perceive outside is only made of pre-recorded images in our mind. And all of our relative life is a past event. That is why we say that we are dreaming of our relative life. It has no real cause and it has no real effects.

From an oneness perspective, we need to reiterate that causality, time, and space are ideas consequential to separation. If only present exists, and it must be so, there can’t be real causality. How can eternity and infinity be caused, since it has no beginning and no end? Where is the sequence and where is the consequence if there is no cause? How can God be caused? Therefore, what we perceive as causality, usually identified as external causes, is a virtual consequence of our virtual belief in separation, which has always been and will ever be impossible. What came with separation was a selective memory that was used to interfere with Truth. Is the projection of a personal self not an attempt or an experience to interfere with the Truth of what we really are? By choosing to experience a personal self by forgetting who we really are, we created the illusion that we “caused” ourself or that we “were caused” by an external power. But this distorted idea of being the cause of ourself did last an infinitesimal fraction of a second because it is unreal, it is virtual, it is not sustainable for more than a billionth of a billionth of a second in eternity. Let’s say it is only a dream. So there is no cause to it.  As well as perception is a skill or device we projected through a body to experience the illusion of multiplicity or diversity, which seems irreducible to sameness or oneness, memory can also be considered as a device or skill that makes us believe that a perception of the past is occurring now. But it produces only an illusion of its presence, not real effects.

THERE ARE TWO MEMORIES

We absolutely live in the present but, in our relative existence, we live in the past. It is like we are spending our life in a cinema, thinking that it is the real-life going on on the screen, ignoring that the “real life” is waiting for us when the movie is over. Moreover, real life is going on while we are dreaming but is seems momentarily suspended from our awareness. The least we can say is that our mind is split.

Let’s say that living the movie is living in the memory of the past. We would then assume that living the present would be living in the memory of the present. But is there such a thing as the memory of the present?

We already said that in order to live separation as a reality in time and space, we had to conceal or obliterate what we really are in order to experience self-creation (the man-made self), that is self-causation. The idea of self-causation, another term to express separation, must have created a veil that obliterated the awareness of what we are, letting it sink in a momentary lapse of memory. Since what we are is eternally present, forgetting momentarily what we are is equivalent to losing the memory of the present to be able to live in the billionth-of-a-second past.

But our memory is selective because it follows our free will. We can choose to interfere with the Truth by living the past or we can make our memory unselective again by not interfering with the Truth. Then the memory of the present is restored and we start again to live the present in full awareness.

 We know that by denying that we did not create ourself, we created an impossible situation named alienation where we projected the causality we invented on the outside world (events, diseases, the others). This brings the idea of causality, in the personal self terms, very close to the idea of guilt and fear of God. It also generates the need for causal explanations and judgments.

In reality, the memory is neutral. It stores and keeps the messages we give it. It does not tell us what to do with them. What we draw from our memory is what we want to re-enact. And usually we want to re-enact effects rather than causes.

The memory of the present is a recall that God is our unique Cause. So it is up to us to choose which memory we want to re-enact. If we choose the memory of the past, we will say of whatever happens to us: “This is done to me. What did I do to deserve that?” If we choose the memory of the present, we will say: “I have been doing this to myself”. We have mixed up the cause and the effect, taking the cause for the effect and the effect for the cause.

We believe in causality as an instantaneous effect of separation like the Planck’s wall. By traversing this Wall, we fell into the fictive world of linear causality. We forgot about our status of Creators to endorse the illusion that we were caused by some external power: things started happening to us instead of us simply and eternally happening.

The same logic seems to be applicable to the idea of suffering and its pseudo-cause:

“God said: If the concept of suffering did not exist, would suffering be so far-flung? If suffering had not been ordained in the mind of man, where would it exist? Can suffering exist on its own?
…You say you do not choose suffering. You say it is foisted upon you. Yet where would it exist apart from your thought? Suffering is something that has to be adopted. It is not what you were born for or with.”  HL 980 

When we say that God is our unique cause, we are talking of a different type of causality, which is not linear, sequential, or consequential. If there are no effects without a cause, we are God’s effect. Moreover, God as a Cause is His own effect. But there is no separation, no time, no distance, no interference between the cause and the effect. And the effect is not a reaction or a consequence but a creation, an extension, because it is a causality in sameness, oneness where the nature of the effect shares totally the nature of its cause. In the causality of God, we, as an effect of God, become also a cause extending God, as God extends Himself in us. Since the effect cannot generate the cause, we cannot generate God but, as God, we generate children that will generate children. This causality is pure creation, pure extension without a shadow of redundancy.

 

Written by Normand Bourque on Feb 12, 2013