1 minute read
Whatever There Is
Whatever There Is
All of anything which can be conceived of as “time” is, in an undivided cosmos, wholly present now. Any “process” in time, such as “change,” is—rather than continuous— simultaneous, spontaneous. In other words, “cause” is not at some specific point, in this immeasurable universe, and “effect” at some other designated point. As with man’s other concepts, the trouble begins when an attempt is made to identify and isolate cause and effect from a field in which there is no division, which is to say no separable thing, event or phenomenon. It is only our conception of time which permits such a conception as cause or effect.
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There is no cause, nor is there an effect, except to the mind which confines itself within limits. Where there is no cause and no effect, “change,” too, can be but another of man’s conceptual constructs. In a cosmos in which all things are essentially the same (“one”) thing, change can be only a movement of energy amongst itself...in a field of energy. And it is not even a movement, if there is admittedly not the element of time with which to measure it. Put another way, all change can be nothing more than meaningless from the “cosmic” viewpoint. Given man’s supposition that there is an activity which can be specified as change, there is no place where he cannot locate it. And given that all “things” are “change,” his attempts to anticipate and control it are vain. Control cannot even appear to be a reality, outside of his fabricated matrix of time and the presumed causes and effects that it alleges to chronicle.
The supposition of cause and effect is interdependent with our presumption of “subject” versus “object”—the individuated self as subject, in a “relationship” to such things or objects as “others,” “time,” “reality,” “death.” To the mind which posits such divisive, polarized concepts as “life” versus “death,” or “better” and “worse,” the singular Presence is stretched to the breaking point on the continuum of time/change. Man then attempts a failed harmony between such dualities as pleasure and pain. Thus man chronically views things and events in terms of the way they ought to be, or ought not to be, rather than perceiving the most simple and obvious of actualities: whatever there is, it is the way it is.
