03 September 2008
Simultaneous Time
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The
imagination and the dream state can be fantastic tools to help understand the
concept of simultaneous time. I’ve been interested in simultaneous time because
I believe that getting a grasp on it, and the idea of cause and effect in
relation to it, can free me from a great deal of unnecessary restriction. I
can’t say that I’ve got the concept down pat, but I’ve certainly learned some
things by toying with the notion.
Cause & Effect
The first time I read that cause and effect doesn’t work the way we think it
works was in the Seth material. Though interesting, the idea seemed ludicrous.
If I were to kick someone in the shins, my guess is that it would hurt. It
seemed pretty clear to me that my kick is the cause of the
effect which is the pain. In fact, there are limitless examples
of how an action causes an effect. And yet I was intrigued. What if it was true
that a physical act doesn’t cause a physical effect? How would it work in
actuality? What were the mechanics? Thereafter, I began to play with the idea.
I started to look at anomalies first. There have been quite a number of studies
conducted on people who don’t follow the usual rules of cause and effect. For
example, normally we say that if you run a sword through a person, it will
cause pain, bleeding, damage to internal organs, and perhaps death. Yet,
scientists have studied a man who had a sword thrust through him on a regular
basis (he made his living by giving demonstrations of this feat), and the man
suffered nothing as a result of being impaled. When the sword was removed, it
was as if it had never been there. All that the doctors could come up with to
explain this phenomenon was, “Huh.”
If you stop eating and drinking it, too, is supposed to cause death. And yet,
scientists have studied yogis who can go for long periods of time without
eating and drinking. In one case, the man reputedly stopped eating and drinking
decades ago. Doctors studied him for a few weeks under controlled conditions,
and they were baffled when there were no physical effects suffered as a result
of the deprivation of food and water. Once again, their explanation for this
was the equivalent of, “Huh.”
There is a ton of information out there on events that don’t follow the rules
of cause and effect. For instance, learning is supposed to cause knowledge. Yet
there are people who know things spontaneously. Medicine is supposed to cure
illness. Yet there are people who take medicine and die and people who take
nothing and get well. Old age is supposed to cause any number of physical
effects, everything from gray hair to reduced eyesight. Yet, there are individuals
that buck each and every one of these supposed effects. When you start to study
the exceptions, you find them everywhere.
These and many other inexplicables lend credence to the idea that maybe cause
and effect doesn’t work in the way we’ve been taught it works. As I explored
the exceptions, I began to ask myself how events actually work. Eventually, I
found that the best way to study the true workings of cause and effect was to
study the imagination and the dream state. What I found seems obvious now, but
it took a dream for me to get it.
Cause & Effect in A Dream
One night, I saw my coat in a dream. It was a perfect replica of my actual
coat. The detail, the weight, the tiny threads were as real as my everyday
coat. When I woke up, I thought, “Hey, where did that dream coat come from?” In
waking life, my Mom bought me the coat. We went to a store and she paid cash
for it. In waking life, my assumption was that the coat was manufactured from
materials in nature--in this case wool--and then brought to the store where we
purchased it.
Yet, in my dream, the coat didn’t come from a store. There were no dream sheep
that were sheared for the wool. No dream manufacturing plant put the materials
together. Dream trucks did not distribute it to a dream store where I went and
purchased the thing with dream money. None of that. Instead, my coat was formed
from no apparent “cause.”
That was the first time that this idea of no cause and effect seemed plausible.
I thought, oh, so innocently, “What if it’s the same in waking life?” Using
this example, what if the entire manufacturing process consists of a series of
choices that really have nothing to do with cause in the traditional sense?
That is, you could experience watching people sheer sheep because you hold that
idea. You could watch the wool being turned into thread because you hold that
idea. You could watch the thread being turned into material, and the material being
sewn into a coat because you hold that idea. You could watch trucks being
loaded and sit with the driver as he delivered the coats to a department store
because you hold that idea. You could experience all of that, but that none of
it really had much to do with the actual origin of the coat. That is, despite
that imagery or experience, the coat’s origin wasn’t necessarily those actions.
What if the real origin of the coat is the same origin of my dream coat? What
if the origin was something as simple as an idea?
If this is confusing, then let me go back. Think of an object in your mind. Say
it’s a book. Where did the book come from? The imagination bookstore? No. You
wanted to think of an object, and that object appeared to your mind’s eye. But
how was your mind able to make that form appear? First of all, you have to
admit that the form is real because you can perceive it in your mind. It’s not
nothing. It’s got form and color. But where did the form come from? How about
the images on the cover? The words written on the interior pages? What is the
origin of this thing that you’ve created in your mind?
Some people might argue that the image of the book is a memory, data stored in
your brain, and that you’ve conjured it from what you’ve seen throughout your
life. But that line of logic doesn’t work. Saying the image is a memory doesn’t
address how you’re able to make that image appear. In other words, even
if it was a memory, how’d you get the memory to appear to your mind’s eye?
What’s the real origin of the mental image? Second, if I ask you to change the
image on the cover of the book or the colors therein or make the book as big as
a house, you can’t argue that you’ve ever seen such a thing in waking life. And
yet you are able to make such an image appear in your mind with varying
degrees of vividity according to your particular abilities.
So again I ask, “What’s the origin, what’s the cause, of that image of the
book?” It’s not an imagination tree that’s been turned into imagination paper
and printed with imagination ink. I’m going to be bold here and say that the
origin of that image in your imagination is the same as the origin of my coat
in my dream and the origin of my actual coat in waking life. The origin is
the idea. The idea is the actual thing because ideas are form and motion.
Depending on the context, the idea will appear in different guises (i.e. there
will be differences between the imaginative image and the dream image and the
waking image).
You could say that there’s no external cause to the appearance of anything. There’s
the idea of a thing, and that’s the experience of a thing. The cause and
effect are one and the same: the idea. What varies is the context within which
the idea is perceived.
This is why it’s not necessarily true that a lack of food and drink will cause
death. That’s one idea. It’s not necessarily true that having a sword stuck
through you will cause you to bleed. That’s one idea. It’s not necessarily true
that learning causes you to know something. That’s one idea. It’s not
necessarily true that medicine will cure you. That’s one idea. It’s not
necessarily true that age affects your body. That’s one idea. And on and on you
go.
If you start to pay attention to your own personal experience, you’ll see all
kinds of situation where the supposed cause doesn’t have the effect that we’re
taught that it’s supposed to have because those people don’t hold those ideas.
I’ve known people who could swill massive amounts of alcohol and not get a
hangover (a trick I haven’t learned). In another case, we had a family friend
who died recently. She weighed well over 300 lbs. her whole life. She was not
what you’d call a health nut. And yet she lived a long, healthy life, even
though all the “research” says that she should have been dead or ill decades
ago. I’ve known people who hardly put out an effort, and fortune seems to shine
on them continually. Whereas other people I’ve known have worked themselves to
the bone and remained in a state of poverty, even when they’ve had an
education, connections, and determination. It seems illogical to make generalizations
about cause and effect when there are so many variations. It’s fair to say that
there is another order to events, and I think it’s this:
The cause is the effect. In simple terms, the real cause of any
effect is the mix of your ideas.
Simultaneous Time
I think examining the idea of cause and effect is necessary to understand
simultaneous time. I had to get a handle on it before I could even approach the
idea that all time is simultaneous because you can’t have the normal view of
cause and effect and say that all events are occurring at once because it
presupposes a before and after.
If all events are happening at once, then cause and effect must be something
else entirely.
Seth used the example of crime and punishment to illustrate the idea. He stated
that in simultaneous time you can’t say that committing a crime is the cause
of the subsequent punishment because both events exist right now. This only
makes sense if events themselves are ideas.
The reason I’m so fascinated by the idea of simultaneous time is that it’s
exciting to think that the events that I want to experience already exist. It’s
exciting to think that I’m not here slugging out a life in an attempt to
survive or, worse, to earn some sort of prize. Instead, I like the idea that
it’s a gifting set-up we have here, where your ideas are the key. It’s both a
practical and magical at the same time.
In this, I’m beginning to realize that ideas are not ephemeral. Not at all.
They’re visceral. They’re substantive. They’re alive, active, responsive, and
in motion. More importantly, they’re self-actualizing. And there’s plenty of
proof if you take the time to look for it. In other words, cause and effect
can’t be a law because there are too many exceptions. The exceptions are clues
to a different order. My experience says, over and over, that this order hinges
on your ideas.
Lately, this has become obnoxiously apparent. The words and phrases and stories
I hear people use matches their experiences to a tee. It’s amazing really. I
keep thinking that the relationship between a person’s experience and their
ideas is so obvious that I wonder that I never noticed it before. This begs the
question: How good can I, or anyone, get at piecing together ideas that make
for balls-out living? Because, frankly, if everything is happening in
the now moment, there’s a lot of great stuff to choose from. It all hinges on
your personal philosophy of life, the ideas that you bring together and tell
yourself are true.
When you see that developing a personal philosophy is more than some academic
exercise, that it actually forms the substance of your experience, the
possibilities expand exponentially. Your ideas become bait in an infinite ocean
of potential experiences. Time then becomes a mechanism for choice, and what a
perfect thing that is.
As a parting note: The little "Normal 0" above showed up on its own as I was posting this blog, making it official that there's nothing about me that's normal and that cause and effect doesn't function the way we think it does.
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About Samantha
Samantha Standish is a writer and a former intellectual property and corporate law lawyer. She received her B.A. in history with honors, and her B.A. in Spanish with honors, in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Barbara and went on to get her law degree Cum Laude from the University of Maine School of Law. In her legal career, Samantha worked in government and the private sector, most notably in the financial planning and software industry. In her personal life, she’s been married for twenty years and has a fifteen year-old home schooled son. Samantha resigned from the bar in 2005 and has devoted herself to bridge writing (making complex ideas about space/time easy to understand for the average reader) ever since, focusing mostly on self-help articles for artists and writing bridge books on the side. In her words, “The first forty years of my life were fact finding; the next forty years are about applying, expanding and exploring what I’ve learned.” Her books can be found at samanthastandish.com. Samantha’s NWV blog is titled The Magical Life.