Causes and coincidences
I have a problem with the words ‘cause’ and ‘effect’. They sound so rigid, so linear. The cause happens first in time, and is followed by the effect. And that is indeed the case — in everyday situations. I water the plants (cause) and they are more likely to flourish afterwards (effect).
I have also long been bothered by phrases like ‘going back to the source’ or ‘returning to the original principle’. The Greek philosopher Aristotle talked of the First Cause. To perceive the First Cause was to reach levels of perception that are not accessible in our everyday world. How can this be? If we are correct that causes happen before effects, then going back to the cause is like going back in time. How can we progress when doing so involves going backwards? We may as well not have been born! I now see that maybe it’s not quite like that.
To explore this further, I invite you to join in a thought experiment.
Picture, for example, a two-dimensional world. We, in our three-dimensional world, can imagine a group of people who can move backwards, forwards and sideways but have no conception of ‘up’ or ‘down’, above or below. Let’s call it ‘flatworld’. Cause and effect will work there in linear time, too. If one person bumps into another, one of them will be pushed away.
However, what happens if something appears from the third dimension, which we know about and the flatworlders don’t? If I drop a tennis ball into their world from above, to them it must seem that it appeared out of nowhere. The flatworlders don’t have the concept of looking up, so how do they explain where it came from? Its appearance doesn’t fit into their two-dimensional experience of cause and effect. Not only that, how much of the tennis ball will they see? Only the slice that intersects with the plane they live on. Will they be aware of the rest of the tennis ball in any way at all?
Maybe something similar happens in our three-dimensional world (let’s call it ‘roundworld’) when an occurrence turns up to us as mysterious, miraculous, inexplicable. You may have some strange stories of coincidences that still don’t make sense: combinations of events that seem to be so improbable that they are just plain weird. Just as with the tennis-ball dropping in on the two-dimensional world, something has happened that is not readily explicable within the internal terms of reference of our three-dimensional world.
Another ingredient in the story is about perception and permission. When we look up at the night sky there are light waves criss-crossing it, but to us it appears mostly dark. When light travels from the Sun we don’t perceive it until it reaches an interruption, such as planet Earth. Then the light is scattered and we see the sky as blue, the vegetation as green, the clouds as white. Other waves, such as cosmic rays, travel through solid matter. Our human systems are designed to pick up a small segment of these waves: the visible spectrum from red through to violet, sounds and smells, taste and touch. Which says that there are things going on all around us that are beyond our ability to perceive them. Our systems do not have that permission.
Could it be that there is a realm, outside our direct perception, that we can characterise as ‘the realm of causes’? The fact that our systems are designed to process only a segment of all-that-is does not preclude the possibility. If so, can we get a glimpse of it?
To perceive such a realm is going to be tricky. A non-standard state of mind is required. We are trying to reach beyond our three dimensions, after all.
Maybe there is a clue in that halfway state, midway between asleep and awake. You are cosy in bed. You don’t have to get up yet. The room is quiet. The dream you have just emerged out of is still real to you. Beyond your closed eyes there is no such thing as physical space. There are sensings and feelings and wonderings. Your faculties can explore and ponder. Maybe you see swirlings in your mind’s eye. It is a floating, timeless, soft place.
And then the alarm goes off. You open your eyes and — clunk! — you are back in the hard-edged daytime reality. Everything is sharp and defined and firmly locked back into three dimensions.
Starting from that half-asleep, half-awake place, let’s imagine that there is such a thing as a plasma realm of causes, outside physicality. Maybe it is more governed by resonances and frequencies than by physical location. It issues a pulse. This sends out a wave through the universe, like the ripples radiating out from a disturbance in a pool. When a ripple reaches beings with the equipment, the faculty to respond, then something happens. The ripple is interrupted. There is an effect.
Let’s imagine further that sometimes humans have the capability to interrupt a ripple, as long as there is sufficient resonance. Not all humans — just those who have built an assembly in themselves that is of a like frequency. They have built a net in themselves that can register the ripple. It leads to different perceptions, new thoughts, new ways of seeing. A new idea arises in one person or group of people and spreads through the world as they radiate it out from themselves. The idea appears as if from nowhere, and once explained and eventually accepted by others, it seems obvious.
A favourite example of this for me is Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift. Many people have looked at the map of the Atlantic Ocean and noted the curious correspondence between the coastlines of Africa and South America — how they could fit together like pieces of a jigsaw. Alfred Wegener was the first to suggest, in 1912, that they were indeed once joined, and that the two continents have long since drifted apart. It took more than half a century for his idea to become accepted. When I studied Geography at school in the 1970’s it was mentioned in passing, as an outlandish hypothesis.
Alfred Wegener saw what humans have seen in the 300 years since maps of the continents were compiled — and then he saw something more. He had an insight about what their configuration implied, and he had the training and education to flesh out the idea. He then spent years trying to show others what was blindingly obvious to him. Now, in the 21st century his original insight has grown and expanded into the discipline of plate tectonics, a university subject in its own right.
In Alfred Wegener’s case, he was the only person to pick up on the new perception. If the ripple issuing from the realm of causes is registered by more than one person, they may come up with similar ideas. For example, the principle of the lightning rod (which depends on the understanding that lightning is an electrical charge) was developed separately and simultaneously in the USA (by Benjamin Franklin) and by Prokop Diviš in what is now the Czech Republic. Did they both respond to the same ripple?
The author Doris Lessing wrote of the phenomenon. She had noticed the uncanny regularity with which a new idea turns up with several writers at the same time. (From memory, she wrote about it in the introduction to one of her books of autobiography. I haven’t been able to locate the exact source.)
Another example is the art movement called cubism, which appeared around 1907-1908. But who did it first appear with? Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso? The most probable answer is both, each in their own way and independently of each other.
The appearance of cubism could be part of a larger wave. The cubist movement called into question our idea of what reality looks like, and at the same time other thinkers were exploring this topic in their own disciplines. Three years earlier, in Switzerland, Albert Einstein wrote three articles which turned conventional ideas about physics and the Newtonian clockwork universe on its head. In Paris, Marie Curie was continuing her research into radioactive elements, which questions the hard edges of physical matter. In Vienna, Sigmund Freud at last gathered some recognition for his work into psychoanalysis — a discipline which calls into question our very perception of reality. His group of followers started meeting in 1908. And I am sure you can think of several more original thinkers who were active in the first decade of the 20th century.
So now, I see cause and effect in a new way. There are physical, linear causes which lead to measurable effects: for example, the sun shines and the ground is warmed. And there are invisible causes, whose existence I can only surmise when I look at the evidence of their outplay. Those are the really interesting ones. They give me a clue that we are players in a much bigger story than my hard-edged, roundworld perceptions would otherwise lead me to think.
