QUOTE
Mandala Yoga Ashram - Wales U.K. - www.mandalayoga.net
From the Causal to Acausal
by Swami Nishchalananda Saraswati
According to science everything relates to everything else through cause and effect, action and reaction. We see this law in action moment to moment in our daily life: if you drop a tea cup, it shatters on the floor; if you put a match to straw, it burns. On a mental/emotional level one can also see this process in action. For example, if you get angry, it may lead to a physical fight or a bad feeling in others. If you are inflated with pride and egoism, then it may put others' backs up so that they then resist everything you say and do. These are simple examples of cause and effect in our life.
One of the aims of Yoga is to gain a deeper insight into the process of cause and effect, especially on the mental/emotional level. We start to see more clearly how negative attitudes and beliefs lead us inexorably into life-destroying experiences and situations. We see how entrenched habits, such as smoking, excessive drinking and over consumption of food, for example, dull our perception and in time, may lead to disease.
One can't just ignore, forget or even suppress habits for they tend to rebound on us. Suppression tends to induce eruption elsewhere. The way to overcome habits, negative attitudes and destructive emotions is to understand where they come from - their root cause. Seeing, really seeing, is to overcome. It may take time, but by simply 'seeing' the cause-effect process in our own personality, we can, in time, change and even eliminate complexes and disharmonious, life-negating attitudes and behaviour. For this, Yogic practices, especially Meditation, are indispensable.
As we go deeper in our understanding, we start to see how ingrained conditioning has enormous effects on a psychic level where our 'negativity' induces negativity in the collectivity. We realise that we are responsible, albeit in a small but not insignificant way, for the 'sweetness' or 'bitterness' of our family, work group, society - and even of the entire planet. Our thinking does influence the Whole. This becomes more and more obvious as we go deeper in our self-understanding.
As we practice Yoga, negativity is replaced with more and more positivity. There is no need to cultivate positivity: the space left after the removal of negativity is automatically filled with positivity. The individual gains by becoming more joyful and society gains by becoming a little 'sweeter'.
Goethe, the German philosopher (in line with Plato's 'World of Ideas') wrote of archetypes - patterns or images on the level of the Causal Plane, that are contained within the collective unconscious. These archetypes form the subtle underlying blue-print for all things manifest - flowers, trees, humans and so on - where the archetypes are the causes and their manifestations, in flowers and trees, are the effects. In Meditation, we start to Realise this subtle cause-effect relationship - the process where primal archetypes manifest into matter through the medium of quantum or mental energy.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, was fascinated by what he termed the process of synchronicity - seemingly random events which have a personally significant meaning. For example, you may start to think of a friend whom you haven't seen for a long time, only to receive an unexpected phone call from that friend the same day. Or, you are looking unsuccessfully for the source of a quotation when, almost unthinkingly, you pick up a book from your library, open it randomly, and there it is ! These type of things happen quite often.
Jung termed this process 'synchronicity' and he said that it is an acausal principle in that there seems to be no cause-effect process at work. However, I believe that this process is still based on the law of cause and effect, but on a level which we are not perceptive enough to realise. Synchronicity takes place in the hidden depths of the psychic - that is, at the transpersonal and quantum levels of existence.
This said, there is indeed a level of Being which is truly acausal, untouched by the law of cause and effect. It does not, however, occur or arise in the world of matter-energy, nor on the level of mind and psyche, but in the realm of Pure Consciousness. In the extraordinary Yogic text called the 'Yoga Vashishta', written several thousand years ago, the story is told of the crow and the coconut.......
A crow alights on a coconut tree and at the very same moment, by chance, a ripe coconut falls. These two unrelated events seem to be related in time and space, though in fact there is no causal relation. A man sitting under the tree would think 'it is because of the crow that I am now eating this wonderfully ripe coconut.'
The meaning of this parable is profound. It does not apply to the daily life of 'sticks and stones', where cause and effect is quite evident. Nor does it refer to the mental and psychic levels where, though less evident, cause and effect still function. It alludes to the relationship between Purusha (Pure Consciousness) and Prakriti (Matter-Energy-Mind) and the 'Transcendental Point' (Skt. 'bindu') where these two principles 'touch' each other. This is acausal.
In the story, there seems to be a cause-effect relationship between the crow and the falling of the coconut, but this is only how it appears and is due to our lack of understanding. If we could see the wider picture, we would see that there is no relationship between the crow and the falling coconut. In the same way, there is no cause-effect relationship between Pure Consciousness and the world of form, matter, energy and mind. This is a paradox which defies our normal logic.
The Bhagawat Gita declares:
"All this world is pervaded by Me (the acausal Consciousness) in My unmanifest aspect; all beings exist in Me, but I do not dwell in them." verse 9:4
By jumping beyond the world of cause and effect, we may be blessed with the Vision and Realisation of the Acausal. Yoga and deep Meditation allow us to plunge into this ineffable experience.
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