Hi Vineeto,
This is the quote I was referring to (link) :
Richard Yes, that is when that momentum is rolling. You are not setting the pace any more. (…). One feels alive, vital, dynamic. Things happen. One can no longer distinguish between me doing it and it happening to me. They happen simultaneously … cause and effect are left behind in the Land of Lament. It is absolutely thrilling.
And I was thinking about this yesterday, and it seems it is to do with time as it happens in actuality, in that all events only take place now. So as the ‘do-er’ “cause and effect” happens across the present-future continuum. In that as the ‘do-er’ ‘I’ set a plan in motion which will apparently ensure an outcome in the future. Like with the dishes, ‘I’ decide ‘I’ will ‘do’ it in the present and then ‘I’ have a distance to cross until the resolution in the future - that is the ‘weight’ of the burden. And yet when ‘I’ as the ‘do-er’ step aside ‘I’ notice that it all happens now, there is no distance to cross hence there is no burden to carry.
Of course effects are being caused by actions otherwise nothing would ever happen haha but it’s more that there is no distance between now and then to travel. Does that make any more sense without Zen spirituality / quantum theory?
Essentially it is that for the ‘do-er’ the cause is what ‘I’ ‘do’ in the present and the effect is what ‘I’ hope for in the future. And in fact this feature is what I have been the most fascinated about, that it all happens now and so ‘I’ am not needed to be ‘doing’ life, it is already happening. Perhaps it is correct to say that in actuality both cause and effect happen now, whereas in reality there is a ‘lag’, this ‘lag’ is the burden that ‘I’ carry as the ‘do-er’, it takes effort for ‘me’ to continually cross that distance.
The way I have been experiencing it today is rather fascinating, in that as soon as ‘I’ begin to engage in that - let’s say “cause then effect” manner, there is the experience of things already happening, and so that whole mechanism of ‘me’ moving from ‘here’ to ‘there’ becomes still born. This is like the end of ‘my’ control, as ‘my’ control has no relevance where this moment is already happening. It’s the experience of shifting from existing out of time to being locked securely in time. And it is indeed the case that cause and effect happen simultaneously in actuality, it cannot be any other way! My hands are causing these words to be typed out but there is no separation between the cause happening (fingers doing the typing) and the event taking place (the words being typed out), it all happens now. Whereas in reality it all happens in separate ‘periods’ of time.