Nisargadatta on Ajativada

 Questioner: Repeatedly you have been saying that events are causeless, a thing just happens and no cause can be assigned to it. Surely everything has a cause, or several causes. How am I to understand the causelessness of things? 

Maharaj: From the highest point of view the world has no cause. 

Q: But what is your own experience? 

M: Everything is uncaused. The world has no cause.

(All quotes from 'I AM THAT' by Nisargadatta Maharaj : sect/appearance and reality) 

Nisargadatta is not making some sort of Human point. He appears (good word that) to be holding the rather rigorous view called ‘ajativada’. Ajati meaning ‘not born’. What is unreal can have no origin. The cosmos is an appearance - ‘vivarta’. Vivartavada holds that the cosmos is not a freestanding or independent entity. It never emerges from the Absolute but remains within it. There is thus no causal chain in the sense of A causing B and B causing C or a train of distinct events. None of this happens according to the ajativada doctrine.  

This line of thinking has Buddhist overtones. In the Sunyavada view: ‘Emptiness is form, form is emptiness’ .(Sunya - empty)

The world does not have a cause says Maharaj. ‘That all depends on what you mean by cause's says Cyril Joad. One might see a certain similarity to scholastic thinking re contingency and causality in which the cosmos is retained within the will of the Absolute in a current way and not just prior to the ‘big bang's. The whole enchilada is kept in existence now.

Nisargadatta next moves to the material analogy. There are all kinds of vessels made of clay, all kinds of jewellery made of gold but in the final analysis there is only clay and gold in different forms.

M: Of course, everything is inter-linked. And therefore every- thing has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is, because the world is as it is. You see, you deal in gold ornaments and I — in gold. Between the different ornaments there is no causal relation. When you re-melt an ornament to make another, there is no causal relation between the two. The common factor is the gold. But you cannot say gold is the cause. It cannot be called a cause, for it causes nothing by itself. It is reflected in the mind as ‘I am’, as the or- nament’s particular name and shape. Yet all is only gold. In the same way reality makes everything possible and yet nothing that makes a thing what it is, its name and form, comes from reality.

But why worry so much about causation? What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes — why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

This is offered as a solution to the appearance of multiplicity. Vivarta (appearance) is a consistent doctrine in Vedanta. You only seem to see variety. There is only unity.

The questioner gets annoyed at this escalation up the metaphysical ladder. Actually one can sympathise at this noetic evasiveness.  

Q: Words like God, universe, the total, absolute, supreme are just noises in the air, because no action can be taken on them. M: You are bringing up questions which you alone can answer. Q: Don’t brush me off like this! You are so quick to speak for the totality, the universe and such imaginary things! They cannot come and forbid you to talk on their behalf. I hate those irres- ponsible generalizations! And you are so prone to personalize them. Without causality there will be no order; nor purposeful action will be possible.

The Questioner has a valid point. God is not a bystander. This existence has a divine purpose. Q wants to align himself with it, just that, and let what comes by grace happen in its own time.

Q: My own feeling is that my spiritual development is not in my hands. Making one’s own plans and carrying them out leads nowhere. I just run in circles round myself. When God considers the fruit to be ripe, He will pluck it and eat it. Whichever fruit seems green to Him will remain on the world’s tree for another day.

What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.  

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.