A course in Consciousness
Chapter 12. Space, time, causality, and destiny
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- 12.2. Speculations on the concepts of nonlocality in time and space
- 12.3. The concept of causality
- 12.4. The nature of laws
- 12.5. The concepts of destiny and God’s will
- 12.6. We are already here now
- 12.7. Maya, the divine hypnosis
Chapter 12. Space, time, causality, and destiny12.1. The concepts of space and timeIn the meditation for April 12 in A New of Jewels (1996), Ramesh says, "The crux of man's dilemma lies in the concept of time. While chasing his mythical happiness of the future, man has no time to enjoy the present moment. And actually there is no such thing as the present because by the time one thinks of it, it has already become the past. Therefore, what is vital is not thinking about the present but actually being the present moment -- and that is nothing other than enlightenment." On page 316 of I Am That (1984), Nisargadatta Maharaj says,
Because the body is bilateral, we conceptualize space into left/right. Because gravity and our sense of balance keep us right-side-up, we conceptualize space into up/down. However, even with our eyes closed and there are no visual images, there are still body sensations (called proprioception) that give us the sense of horizontal and vertical orientation and movement.
In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, successive wavefunction collapses (see Sections 6.3, 6.4) allow the concept of change to appear. Because the concept of time depends on the concept of change, we have the equivalencies: time=change=duration=succession. The concept of time is complementary to the concept of space, and forms a fourth dimension that is perpendicular to the three spatial dimensions. As with space, it becomes clear that time is only a concept if we compare the sense of "nowness" (from the sense of hereness/nowness) with the concept "now". The concept "now" implies the concept "then", which is equivalent to "not now". The unbroken wholeness of nowness has been broken into two parts, now and then. Without the concept of time, there is only the wholeness of nowness. One well-known attempt to point to the Reality that transcends conceptual space-time is the 1971 book by Ram Dass entitled, "Be Here Now". (Reportedly, at one time it was the third most popular book in English, next only to the Bible and Dr. Spock's baby manual.) The concept of time depends on the presence of thoughts of the past, thoughts of the present, and thoughts of the future (see Section 9.5). Without a comparison between these three kinds of thoughts, we could not form the concept of change. Without the concept of change, there is no experience, so all thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptions are experiences that depend on a comparison between thoughts. Time can be conceptually divided into two major parts, past thoughts and future thoughts, which are inseparable polar opposites (this is a more conventional division than dividing it into now and then as in the previous paragraph). The concept of now becomes nothing more than a thought of the boundary between past thoughts and future thoughts. (The real now is not a boundary, but is "nowness".)
Without the concepts of time and space, all further conceptualization is impossible. In particular, the concept of the personal identity arises from the persistency of the concepts of the body-mind, personal doership, and choice (see Section 11.4). Without such persistency, the conceptual “I” could not arise. Thus, the “I” depends on the concept of time. In timelessness, there is no “I”. We see only one thought at a time. Thoughts of the past, present, and future are what give us the impression that time exists. If we could see them all simultaneously, the concept of time would not arise. (There is a remarkably accurate saying: "Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.") We may have visions of the "future", even startlingly "real" ones, but these occur only in the subjective present. The same is true of visions and memories of the "past". These examples show that the "past" and "future" do not exist as separate eras but actually consist of thoughts in the subjective present, which is the only "time" there is. Consequently, just as there is no objective reality outside of the mind for space and the objects therein, there is no objective reality outside of the mind for time and the events therein (see Section 9.2). Whatever past or future there is exists only as concepts in our minds.
12.2. Speculations on the concepts of nonlocality in time and spaceThe Bell-Aspect experiments described in Section 4.3 showed that faster-than-light correlations can occur between events at two different points in space (see also Sections 6.5, 6.6, 6.7). This is what we meant by nonlocality in space. However, in Section 9.2, we said that the mind does not exist in space-time but that space-time exists only as a concept in the mind. Thus, nonlocality in space is nothing but a concept in the mind. In Sections 5.2, 9.4, we discussed nonlocal mind. By nonlocal mind we mean different minds appearing within the context of nonlocal universal Consciousness (not in the context of space, which is in the mind). (This is a more precise definition of nonlocal mind than the one given in Section 5.2.) By virtue of nonlocal universal Consciousness, minds can communicate with each other even though they appear to spatially separate. That is why faster-than-light correlations can occur between what seem to be widely separated regions of space. [Note: If space is assumed to be objective rather than subjective, there appear to be two different types of nonlocality (see Section 5.2). One type, such as remote viewing, is apparently independent of distance. Targ and Katra state in Miracles of Mind that the accuracy and resolution in remote viewing have been shown to be insensitive to distance up to 10,000 miles. With the same assumption of objective space, a second type of nonlocality is weaker the greater the distance between the two points. Because of this distance dependence, we cannot say that such phenomena are nonlocal in the strict sense. However, we shall continue to lump all such phenomena into the same category of nonlocality. One such example is the peace and tranquility that are commonly experienced in the presence of a great sage or in a group of meditators (discussed in Section 5.2 and further in Chapter 16) but which decrease rapidly with increasing separation. This type might be explained, at least in part, by the concept of the so-called subtle body, which is thought to be a nonphysical body that is associated with the physical body, but which can be spatially much larger (see, e.g., Marc Rich, Energetic Anatomy (2004). Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light, (1988), has a school in Florida where she teaches people to use auras for healing). Some people with psychic abilities are able to "see" the subtle body as an aura and can observe it expand and contract with the expansion and contraction of its awareness. (Possibly some of the readers of this course have this ability.) The second type of nonlocality in space might be caused by the overlap of the subtle bodies, which decreases with separation because of their finite sizes. The laws that govern the subtle body, which are not known, may allow it to be nonlocal in both time and space. Since we know next to nothing about it, we cannot say whether its nonlocality is limited or whether it can be sensitive to all phenomena that have ever existed and all that will ever exist.] Explaining nonlocality is a problem only if space is thought to be objective. If it is purely subjective, there is no problem (see Section 6.10).
12.3. The concept of causalityOn p. 9 of I Am That (1973), Nisargadatta Maharaj says, "Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free." And on p. 66, he says, "Seeking out causes is a pastime of the mind. There is no duality of cause and effect. Everything is its own cause." Seemingly, the most well established law in phenomenality is the law of causality, which states that the present and future are determined by the past. In fact, in everyday life, we usually use a more restricted form of this law, which states that a certain isolated set of events (such as your decision to take this course) at one time determines another isolated set of events at a future time (your active participation in this course). However, it is impossible to isolate any one event from all of the events that ever preceded it (e.g., it is impossible to isolate your decision from all of the preceding events of your life, and from all of the events in the lives of all of the people who have influenced you). Thus, isolated causality is a fiction because it requires the illusion of isolation of an event in space-time.
This discussion has profound consequences with regard to our concept of free will. The concept of free will is identical to the concept of "I", the freely willing, individual self that can freely bring about the satisfaction of its desires. This depends on the concept that there is an individual who is separate and isolated from the rest of the universe (see Sections 5.11, 5.12), who can freely choose his/her own desires (whose desires are unaffected by causality), and yet who can control to his/her satisfaction the causal chain of events in order to satisfy his/her desires. But, either causality is valid, in which case there can be no separate, isolated individual with freely chosen desires, or it is invalid, in which case there is no possibility that such an individual could ever cause anything to happen. However, even though an individual might be convinced in retrospect that he/she had no control over past events, he/she usually stubbornly clings to the belief that he/she has some control over future events. Such is the nature of identification in the face of lack of knowledge of the future.
We know that, within the concept of time, strict causality is impossible because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. However, if events are probabilistic rather than deterministic, then desires and actions also would be probabilistic, with no possibility of control over them by a purported doer. Thus, regardless of the degree of admixture of probability that exists in the concept of causality, it does not affect our discussion of free will and the individual. The doctrine of causality coupled with the concept of the separate, freely willing "me", is the doctrine of karma. This doctrine states that causality ensures that all of the choices that were made in "my" past determine what happens to "me" today, and, together with all of the choices "I" make today, will determine what happens in "my" future. One might think that the concept of volition or free will could provide the possibility of escape from past karma because it would allow us to begin a new chain of causal events uncoupled from the past. However, as we have just seen, the belief in free will is incompatible with the belief in causality. In fact, the belief in free will coupled with the belief in causality can easily result in guilt and regret for past actions and in anxiety and fear of future consequences (see Sections 5.13, 11.6). But, because there is no "me", all karma must be impersonal.
The belief in karma is probably largely responsible for the efforts of many religious people, particularly in Hindu and Buddhist countries, to attempt to renounce the world and all material things in order to escape from the inexorable wheel of reincarnation and bondage. They fail to realize that the real cause of bondage is the sense of the individual doer, and it is this that must be renounced. However, it is futile to ask the doer to renounce itself because by trying to renounce itself, it only reaffirms itself. The only true renunciation is the clear seeing that there is no doer. From this discussion, we see that any discretely identifiable cause must be an isolated, separate, object or event (an evident impossibility as seen above). Thus, the concept of separation is an intrinsic part of the concept of isolated causality. We have also seen that the concepts of separation and isolated causality are intrinsic parts of the concept of free-will and volition. We now can see why the individual has such difficulty in seeing the nonexistence of isolated causality. If isolated causality is real, then so are separation and free-will, the essential components of the ego. The ego insists on isolated causality because causality justifies its own existence! In the commonly held concept of causality, it is the past that determines the future. This concept is an arbitrary one and is held only because the past is presumed to be known, while the future is unknown, and there is the desire to predict and control unknown future events from known past events. However, as we have seen, the concept of causality reinforces the concept of the individual, who has a desire to exert some control over an unknown future. We might ask, "Within the concept of time, is it possible that the future determines the past, rather than the past determining the future (see also Section 5.16)?" There is no scientific reason that it could not. In fact, there are two types of solutions to the Schrödinger equation, the "retarded" solutions and the "advanced" solutions. The retarded solutions describe future events as being the result of past events. The advanced solutions describe past events as following from future events. Both types of solutions arise because all microscopic physical laws are just as valid in the reversed as in the forward time direction. However, in practice, the advanced solutions are always discarded as being "nonphysical" because to use them we would first need some knowledge of future events, and with them we could only predict the past, which is already known. Nevertheless, this leaves unanswered the philosophical questions, does the future determine the past, or does the past determine the future, or is it all determined or undetermined? Of course, such questions lose their urgency when it is realized that time itself is only a concept. Even if there is no law of causality, events do not necessarily happen randomly. It only means that they happen causelessly. Randomness implies absence of a pattern, whereas causelessness merely implies the absence of a cause for the pattern. By examining the manifestation, we can discern temporal and spatial patterns of events but we cannot discern a cause, since any pattern can happen causelessly. Buddhist meditation (see Sections 14.6, 24.2) helps us to become aware of the pattern but not of any cause for the pattern. The concept of causality is a correlate of the concept of objective reality, and the falsity of the latter implies the falsity of the former (see next section). 12.4. The nature of lawsIn addition to the "law" of karma, there are commonly supposed to be at least three other kinds of laws: a) Laws of God. These depend on how God is defined. If God is a word for the Unmanifest (Noumenon, see Section 9.3), then God transcends all laws because the Unmanifest transcends all concepts. Thus, there are no such laws of God. If God is a word for Consciousness, i.e., all that is (Section 10.1), then the laws of God encompass everything that happens, whether conceivable or unconceivable, predictable or unpredictable. While Ramesh uses the concept of “Will of God”, or “Cosmic Law” (see next section), there is no God that is separate from us or any other thing. b) Laws of nature. These are the laws that scientists seek to "discover". They are mathematical descriptions (concepts) of selected patterns of regularity that are observed in the manifest world. Consequently, as the observations change and become more refined, so do the laws. c) Laws of man. These are rules of behavior that are conceptualized by society in order to create and maintain order, and to preserve the existing power structure. As we have seen in the previous section, the law of causality is only a concept. Now we see that all laws are nothing but concepts. If laws really existed apart from concepts, they would be part of objective reality. But we have seen that objective reality can never be shown to exist (see Section 1.1), and indeed its hypothesis produces paradoxes in the interpretation of quantum theory (see Sections 6.9 and 6.10). Furthermore, whether or not an objective reality exists, our observations are the same (see Section 6.10). Thus, we can safely assume that laws are creations of the mind rather than properties of Reality. 12.5. The concepts of destiny and God’s willThe Libet experiments (see Section 5.9) showed that, in objective time, the urge to raise a finger is predetermined 100 ms to 1000 ms before awareness of the urge. The brain imaging experiments of Soon, Brass, Heinze, and Haynes (see Section 5.10) showed that the urge to make a left-right button-push is made in the brain up to 10 s before awareness of the urge. Logical reasoning shows that we have no more free will to react than a thermostat (see Section 5.11). Thus, it seems that we have no control over our actions. This concept of no free will is similar to the concept of destiny, which states that everything that happens to us is determined outside of time. It is different from the concept of determinism because destiny is not a result of deterministic laws operating in the past to determine the present and future. The concept of destiny does not require any laws at all, nor does it require the concepts of past and future. Ramesh sometimes suggests that Consciousness determines present events in order to bring about a specific future result. For example, if a sage (or anybody else) is needed in the future, Consciousness arranges for a body-mind to be born with the required genes at an appropriate time in the past, and raised with the required conditioning, to produce the future sage (or future somebody). This is similar to the concept that the future determines the past and present as was suggested in Section 12.3, i.e., that the present is postdetermined by the future instead of being predetermined by the past. The concept of "I" as thinker and doer cannot explain certain mysteries. Many people have wondered what made them make past choices that seemed so innocent or accidental at the time but which led to rather remarkable coincidences later. Almost everybody has wondered how seemingly unconnected events conspired to produce felicitous convergences or synchronicities at later times. Both situations suggest the concept of destiny, and the wonderment that they inspire represents the mind beginning to lose some of its grip on its concept of how the world "should" operate, thus allowing the intuition to reveal something totally new. In the January 2006 issue of the Advaita Fellowship newsletter, Wayne Liquorman (one of Ramesh’s first enlightened students, and now also a teacher) says of this matter: "The process that's happening in this Advaita is one of inquiry and examination; whereby you gain insight by looking at your own experiences. In the course of life, experiences happen. The question is, what was your part in bringing those experiences into being? “If you look back over your life you will see that people you never knew existed suddenly entered your life and brought with them enormous life changes. They might have been lovers, teachers, enemies or gurus. How could you have brought them into your life, if you didn't even know that they were alive? “Perhaps by looking at your history you will see that events happened in your life that were part of a much larger happening than what you could possibly create with your own physical being. If you can look at your own experience and your own background, you may begin to see that your present state is a product of huge forces outside of your egoic control. This teaching simply directs your attention to look. Insight follows or it does not. “Clearly, if you were in charge - if any of us were in charge and capable of creating our own realities - we'd all be saints! We'd be loving and kind and generous all the time, because when we're loving and kind and generous, we feel better, everybody around us feels better, and this translates into a better life. The fact that, despite our best intentions and our most earnest observations and efforts, we're still filled with positive and negative qualities seems to suggest a certain lack of control on the part of the organism. “If you look, and you are blessed to be able see the vast universal forces that were operative in creating who you are today, then guilt eases naturally, on its own. You don't have to make any efforts to reduce it; it simply dissipates in the seeing, as you understand that who you are and what you are is a function of the Universe. Both your finer qualities and those qualities that you and others might not like are part of this mixed bag that constitutes every human being." The concept of destiny (what Ramesh also calls "God's Will" or "Cosmic Law") is equivalent to the concept that everything happens completely spontaneously (causelessly). The latter is easily verified merely by watching to see that all thoughts appear out of nowhere, including any thought or urge to choose or to do (see Chapter 23). When Ramesh uses the term God’s will as an equivalent to the concept of destiny, he means God as Consciousness or Totality, not as an entity. The purpose of the concept of God’s will is to function as a power symbol that can undermine the concepts of the ego and the individual doer. The concept of a chain of causality is unnecessary if it is replaced by the concept that God's will is all there is. When we realize that "we" have no control, there is a sense of freedom and energy because control is bondage even if we think "we" are the ones in control. This freedom brings with it the awareness of a power that is mysterious and profound, the power of Consciousness (God). Ironically, if "we" try to use that power, it disappears. This is a twist on the saying, "use it or lose it". Instead, it becomes, "if you try to use it, you will lose it". If "we" toy with the power of God, "we" will get burned by disappointment and disillusion, but when we realize that "we" have no control, the power of God, even though subtle, becomes awesomely apparent. Some people are afraid that the concept of destiny would lead to a sense of fatalism. Fatalism implies that we know, or think we know, what the future will bring. This could result in a sense of resignation and inaction. However, in the concept of destiny, the future is uncaused and unknown, and this can bring a sense of curiosity, anticipation, and excitement. Other people have difficulty accepting the concept that the manifestation is not caused but just happens spontaneously. This difficulty arises from an unquestioning attachment to the concept of causality, which requires an identifiable cause for everything that happens. However, an attempt to preserve causality by proposing some entity, such as a god, that causes everything to happen solves nothing because it merely provokes the question, what caused the entity? This leads to an infinite regression of causes unless it is terminated by a causeless cause, or unmoved mover, which again is equivalent to a spontaneous happening. The unstated question behind the question, “Why is there not a god or entity who is willing or otherwise determining what happens?” is "Should 'I' be afraid of this god?" The answer is the counter-question, “Who is the 'I' that is asking the question?” This now becomes an exercise in inquiry. When the “I” is investigated, it becomes clear that it does not exist. Thereupon, all such questions disappear. Still another answer is the realization that the existence of such a god or entity can never be verified, which is evidence that it is nothing but an empty concept. The whole purpose of introducing concepts (thorns, see Section 13.6) such as spontaneous (causeless) happening, destiny, or God’s will, is to help make clear that there is no such thing as a doer (the original thorn). To show directly that there is no doer, we shall use the disidentification practices discussed in Chapters 20, 22, 23, 24. 12.6. We are already here nowIn the state of spiritual ignorance, which is the state of apparent boundaries and separation, the conceptual present is simply the boundary between the conceptual past and future, and cannot be perceived as such. Perception can see only change and nothing but change. This is the temporal aspect of phenomenality. However, pure Awareness, which is What-we-are, is timeless, i.e., absent of time. This intemporality is sometimes called the eternal present moment. After awakening, it is seen directly that temporality (change) is only conceptual, not real. Even in spiritual ignorance, it is easy to see that change can be perceived only because time occurs within timelessness. The motion of a uniformly flowing stream can only be seen from its banks because an object flowing with the stream sees no motion (change) of the water next to it. We can see change because we perceive it from a background of changelessness. This is direct evidence that our awareness is pure Awareness. We are nonlocal universal Consciousness, not individual mind. Similarly, we can perceive space because we are spacelessness. We can see objects because we perceive them from a background of objectlessness. This applies to any object, even to thoughts, feelings, emotions, and sensations. For example, we can feel pain because we are painlessness, and we can perceive a thought because we are the absence of thought.
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