Consequences

One of the things we puzzle about a great deal in our lives is the stuff that lands in our laps. Where the heck did this come from? What the heck happened to my friend? Why is this happening to me? The world can sometimes seem a scary and hostile place. Or at least unnecessarily difficult.

The issue is simply that we’re taking it personally. What happens in the world is not about us. Really. Well, its about us, but not us personally but rather us as a whole. There is over 6 billion bodies, but just one person.

In the east, they have a saying – unfathomable are the ways of karma (action). The consequences of what we do are far too complex to be known. After all, how well do you know that butterfly in Brazil? But this does not mean the principles are complex. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Simple. Sometimes consequences will be immediate, sometimes they will go off into the universe and come back later. The reasons for that are as many as there events.

If we look at events in the present, we can see there are 3 ways in which consequences occur.

1) The effects of past actions. What has been done rolls around into our life. Sometimes the connection is obvious. Sometimes the source action is completely unapparent. But it is what it is. We know there is a connection simply because the process is testable.

2) How we respond to what arises in our lives. How we respond to events is what determines their consequences for us now. It determines whether we resolve the action or cause it to repeat back on us. It determines whether we find our life as a conflict or a source of growth.

3) Where we hold our attention. What we give our energy to. Do you spend your time worrying about your relationship or money situation, giving a bad situation energy? Do you stand against what you don’t like, feeding it energy? Do you spend your time dreaming about what might be or dwelling on past stories? Or do you focus mostly on the present, what is now in your life, what you want to support and increase? Of course, using your attention constructively takes practice, shifting old habits.

And this is not all nice and tidy. We’ll have areas of life where things are smooth and areas where we have some work to do. We have ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days.

Its worth observing that #2 and #3 are a direct consequence of our current awareness/ perspective/ state of consciousness. How we are within determines how things are without. (I could go off on a tangent on how consciousness is controlled by consciousness but thats another subject. The subject of The subject.)

We could say our present actions determine our future consequences but thats not exactly accurate. There is no future. No past either. There is only Now. This is a hard concept to explain if its not your experience. I go over the concept back in The Past, but suffice to say time arises out of the process of experience. As there is a process, there is a sequence. Mind manifests the sense of time by moving through it incrementally, one step at a time. But in actual fact, its all happening now. This does not mean its all happening at once – thats still a time concept. It happens in sequence, but not a sequence separated by time. Rather, by a flow in the now.

For conscious mind to process the world, it is limited to a one thing at a time ability, what Buckminster Fuller referred to as “Special Case”. Conscious mind can be creative and consider consequence, but it does so incrementally. The subconscious mind on the other hand is not limited by the same constraints but the conscious mind has difficulty processing any of that information. Creative and intuitive insights must be allowed to be as they are, then conscious mind will process them and turn them into meaning and language. If we let conscious mind lead, we will lose the flow of insight.

There is another wrinkle to Consequence. Consequences are not bound by our mental ideas of the linear concept of time. Physics has begun to see some of this in experiments. Quantum Nonlocality is a good example. This essentially indicates an interconnectedness of quantum particles that transcends limits of space and time. The underlying laws of Action and Consequence are the same way. The flow of energy, intention and consciousness are not bound by what we might think of as time and space. They simply operate within temporal rules in a local context. Outside of that context, there are no such rules.

Be with what is true for you. Just allow for reality to be a little bigger and more open than it may appear. Make that a LOT LOT LOT bigger. (laughs)

“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”
— Reinhold Niebuhr

Be with Serenity 😉

Davidya

Last Updated on November 8, 2018 by Davidya