Sequence-ality vs. Cause-ality
Of all the challenges the nature and universe gives us, there are some that are so subtle that they become almost imperceptible to our consciousness. There have been some that are very easy to perceive despite the rudimentary nature of our education and experience. The individual, even by himself, is capable of perceiving what we call the “gravitational force”, heat, cold...hardness, softness...etc. as being part of the world inside which we must evolve.
To the question of knowing why the nature feels obliged to present itself to us, we simply do not find an answer if we do not accept the idea that everything that presents itself to us has its importance in our lives. Let’s say it more clearly that the line of our destiny is only made of choices between options that the universe introduced to us. In this notion, there is really a spiritual trap that we find hard to perceive: the existence, in reality, does not present itself to us; it only exposes itself to our way of questioning. The nature we perceive is only the depth of our investigation! It is by coming close to the fire that we understood that it can be hot. To know if the tree that falls alone in the forest with no witness makes a noise, we must first be interested in the question. We can see in this very popular example the depth of our investigation. We can affirm that when a tree falls, there are a lot of things that happen; but we can see that we got interested only on the noise it might make!
We can find a legitimate attitude in our tendency to question existence. It is by questioning that we find answers that, from now on, become included in what we consider our experience or wisdom. But we must also keep an eye on the partial nature of our question. If we remember that the nature only answers our questions, we will understand the partial nature of our experience. The eye simply does not know the smell of a flower, and the nose simply does not know the color of a flower.
If we believe we have understood the problem and that we can identify the trap set to our consciousness, we can now understand that our problem resides in the fact that we have made causality our method of investigation! When we find ourselves believing firmly that an event we are observing is caused by another, we are honestly taking a philosophical and spiritual risk. The reality is that we have observed that these events precede each other. Every time we have observed events that precede each other, we commit an intellectual and spiritual crime by making one the cause of the other. Let’s consider, for example, a spectator observing a drummer; what the spectator observes is the drummer beating his drum. He sees the hands that are vigorously beating the skin of the drum; he also hears a variety of sounds coming from the drum. The spiritual honesty of the observer stops there, even for the drummer, because he can only build his experience on the sequential aspect of the facts. He can observe that by placing his hands on a certain way, by hitting the drum a certain way, a certain sound comes from it. The frequency of this sequence does not make one event the cause of the other.
Every time we make one event the cause of the other, we are taking a gamble; the chance we have of being right is equivalent to the chance a gambler has in hitting the jackpot. This does not happen without spiritual consequences.
We must understand that, through our attitude towards existence, we became the biggest obstacle to our evolution towards the spiritual purity that is needed to access the Divine purity. The universe has its magic side that intervenes at every aspect of the becoming. If we stop believing that we know the causes of things and events, we are giving ourselves the chance of perceiving the fork of time inside which magic happens in the becoming. We must also recognize that if there is a secret behind a barbaric attitude, it is the assumption that we know the causes. The logical next step is the assumption that by eliminating the cause of an event we will eliminate the event. The barbarian will refuse to recognize that his choice of a cause is purely arbitrary and born of partial answers the nature has brought to his partial questions.
If you are sitting with your friends and you lose something, the first thing you do is wonder who took it. You begin to secretly blame each one of your friends for taking your lost item, and every one of them becomes a suspect. Spiritually, you are the sinner. What you are doing is condemning another person for no real reason other than suspicion. You have made innocent people criminals. The truth is, when we look for a cause of an event or things, we are only dabbling in the world of speculation. Who or what we blame is arbitrary and is a moral or social decision.
Instead of looking at the world from a cause-effect position, putting things or events into a sequence frees the observer from the tyranny of becoming. You protect yourself from being the “bad one”, from judging hastily and condemning innocent people, things or events.