Nothing is causitive

Erik: The past few days, Armelle and I have been having an absolutely splendid time just sitting around and delving deeply into the Course's teachings. Lots of lounging, meditation, lots of reading, a bit of deep sharing from time to time. Then of course, we still do the basics - sleep, sex, eating, drinking, not necessarily in that order... :-)

For me (and certainly for her as well, but I'll just speak from my own perspective now), my experiences these last few days, as well as for the two weeks prior, have brought about some very deep shifts in my mind. It sorta feels like I've undergone a quantum shift in consciousness, which has resulted in my being FAR less tolerant of mind-wandering and ego-judgments than I was before.

It started a couple weeks ago when we drove to Paris to spend time with some friends, and I noticed that it was actually becoming painful to THINK! It was as if my mind was saying, "Enough already! I'm retiring now... deal with it!"

As a result, I felt almost like I couldn't function normally anymore, but I was beginning to see what a blessing that is! I was deeply wanting only to be still and quiet, and let thoughts from the Spirit float peacefully into my awareness. But nothing else. Anytime I tried thinking with my ego, it started to give me a headache. Thinking about anything involving the past or future, including plans for the weekend like where we were going to eat that night or whatever, the thoughts just felt like heavy burdens that I couldn't bear anymore.

Fortunately, I knew it was a sign that the Holy Spirit was taking over my mind as I had been asking for, and not the early signs of alzheimers or something like that! :-) Also, to my good fortune was that the Spirit had brought me the symbol of a beautiful wife who is very adept at making plans with the Spirit's Guidance, for which I have been EXTREMELY grateful!

Since that weekend in Paris, things have continued deepening in that direction for me, where my mind is gravitating more and more towards perfect Stillness. Every day has been another journey into the mind, uncovering deeply held ego-beliefs that can then be released. And each time a belief is uncovered and seen as false, it's as if my mind has one less source of unnecessary thought to be burdened by. How freeing, and how thrilling this journey is!

The latest insight for me today was in regards to the concept of causation, and why nothing in the dream world has any causative power whatsoever. Intellectually, I'd known that metaphysical fact for several years - that nothing in the world really causes anything else, but I still hadn't understood exactly WHY that is.

Then, just a little while ago, an analogy came to me that I feel inspired to share here. What came to mind was the analogy of a symphony, where certain musical patterns repeat themselves over and over. In a symphony, or in any piece of music for that matter, there are certain melodic patterns that repeat themselves - sometimes in slightly different variations and forms (or played by different instruments), but always keeping within the same basic pattern.

Like, for example, in that famous Mozart symphony everyone has heard that goes Dah Duh Duh Duh da-na NAAA... Da-na Duh Duh Duh da-na NAAA... Da-na Duh Duh-Na Duh Duh Duh da da...

Okay, I'm not surprised if you don't have ANY idea what Mozart symphony I'm referring to, or if you think I'm a little retarded for thinking you'd be able to guess it from what I wrote... but regardless, here's the point:

The whole symphony has melodic patterns to it, which repeat over and over, but none of the notes in the pattern CAUSE the notes that follow. For example, suppose you were listening to that particular symphony with someone who wasn't very bright, and after hearing the song for a while, they suddenly said, "You know, every time that it plays the "da-na" part, the "NAAA" part always comes immediately after! Does the "da-na" part CAUSE the "NAAA" part in the song?"

Now, I realize that it's quite a stretch to imagine someone thinking that (even though we ALL think that way about the "notes" of the world), but that aside, if someone really asked this sincerely, you might answer them something like this:

"Well, no actually, the entire song was written, or CAUSED, by the author of the song, Mozart. His imagination was the CAUSE of all the notes in the song, and the notes are all just EFFECTS. None of the notes actually cause any of the other notes, because they were ALL caused by Mozart."

If you're a Course in Miracles student, then you can probably already see where I'm going with all of this. The entire cosmos of time and space is like a symphonic script that was written in one instant by our ego-identified imagination, and all for the purpose of making the deception of separation from God seem real and permanent. All of the seeming "happenings" (or "notes") of this "symphony" are were EFFECTED by this one decision for separation, but none of these "happenings" are actually the cause of any other "happenings".

For instance, it APPEARS that when you hit your head on something hard, or experience any kind of physical injury, that this CAUSES pain to be experienced. But in actuality, this is not true. Both "happenings" were like the notes written into the symphony to create the appearance of a pattern. This type of pattern repeats itself in the script of time and space so often, over and over and over again, that we become convinced in a "law" that says: physical injury causes pain.

And yet, we've all had the experience of seeing that cause-effect "law" break down. For instance, have you ever discovered an injury some period of time AFTER it must have occurred, and then realized that you were so focused on whatever else you were doing (this often happens to athletes while playing sports) that no pain was registered in awareness at the time of the injury? Obviously the state of consciousness had something to do with it in these examples.

In hypnosis, there have been lots of experiments which effectively show that pain is not a physical process, but a mental process. And therefore, the "law" we all believe in to some degree that physical injury CAUSES pain, must not be a true law.

And likewise, none of the "laws" we believe operate in this world are true laws. None are 100% consistent, and even if they were, it wouldn't make them laws. The patterns in a song can repeat themselves flawlessly over and over, but that never justifies the belief that certain notes CAUSE other notes.

The cause and effect relationships and "laws" we believe in related to this world are all only an APPEARANCE. Every apparent "happening" is really just an EFFECT of the ego's magic show. It's like a movie that was filmed in one instant, and nothing within the movie is the cause of anything else in the movie. The whole thing has only one cause, and that is our erroneous belief in separation. When we cease believing in separation, then we will no longer see the cosmos as anything more than a meaningless tapestry of moving images, kind of like those colorful screen-savers on people's computers. From the enlightened perspective, there are no separate "happenings" at all, but only the awareness of what is true (God) and what is false (perception).

Okay, back to my meditations... :-)