Cause and Effect: Suspending time to achieve beingness

What causes things to be the universe, us, everything that is? Time and space play a huge role in causation. Physics, Einstein and scientists around the world have concluded that we live in a space-time continuum.

The only way we’re able to conceive of this, however, is in the mind. The universe in which we live is a conceptual one; it can only be envisaged. Without the implementation and cognition of thinking, the universe as we know it wouldn’t exist. Although we might think that everything simply is and we discovered it, we forget that rather we have interpreted it through our mind first. Without our conceptualizing it, there would just be awareness, presentness, but no sense of causation.

Causation is created via the space-time continuum. Without that concept there really is no causation possible. In a sense, everything is connected but the universe in and of itself is infinite in its possibilities. The universe contributes to even the smallest cause. This goes back to how our minds create the sense of the universe’s relationship to causes.

We can look into this a little further. I remember once hearing a story from a scientist who talked about how the asteroid that struck the earth about 65 million years ago, which ended the rein of the dinosaurs, could have been off course, hitting another planet like Jupiter or the sun (where most asteroids and meteorites crash), and that it wouldn’t have hit Earth if it had been off track even the slightest – I mean, such a small percentage it was almost comical. The chance of that one meteorite hitting our Earth was extremely small, yet that’s exactly what happened.

Everything in the universe – everything – is connected by causation. Since everything is tied together, nothing can really happen unless the entire universe conspires to agree to let that happen. There’s a saying I love: “If I pull a blade of grass, the entire universe shakes.” This statement shows how everything in the universe is interconnected and one cause has a ripple effect on all other causes.

It’s kind of funny because people work so hard at making things happen. If only they realized that unless the universe conspires to let that thing happen, nothing in their power can create it to happen. Likewise, if something’s going to happen, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

But that doesn’t render you powerless. When you suspend past and future (the time continuum) what you’re left with is no more cause and effect. This is what you find in the timelessness of now, if you can forget about the past and the future and just be aware of the present. Without time, there can’t be cause and effect, so what happens is that infinite possibilities emerge. Creative spontaneity, not knowing what’s going to happen, being present without any sense of prediction, and “just being” are all things that can occur.

Being present in the here and now becomes infinite in its possibilities, infinite in its beauty. The real universe, the ultimate supreme universe, is beyond our mind’s ability to grasp. Our mind categorizes things into desires, and these desires are split between pleasure and pain. Our mind likes certain things so we pursue them and grasp at them. On the other hand, when painful events occur our mind pushes them away and tries to keep them as far away as possible. But by the mind doing this, we miss out on the true reality of what is. Beingness right here, right now, with no space. Just “is-ness.” Just “beingness.” The constraints and the causation of everything suddenly vanish and we’re left with truly infinite possibilities of what is.

Those constraints the mind has created are limited and full of contradictions. For instance, we want health, yet we overeat. We want love, yet because of our fears we push people away. In beingness, in present awareness, infinite possibilities present themselves without pain and suffering, because we don’t conceptualize or categorize anymore. Those constraints are taken away and we can enter a world truly beyond our imagination.

Everything that we experience has countless factors that have contributed to its potential right now. But before that, beyond that which holds up our entire universe as we know it in our mind, is the supreme or ultimate reality. This is who we truly are. This is our true self. If we identify with our supreme self, then we see that everything the mind creates is created out of ourselves, our supreme and true self. If we realize there really is no cause, we see that there just is.

What happens then is that our minds relax. We suspend desires, fears and attachments. We start living in the here and now. We discover that when we live in the moment, all is well, all is beautiful, and ultimately there are truly no words for it. It just is.