Written by Clark Woolley
Over many millennia, facilitating the survival of our species, our ability to control our environment grew through our evolving mental capability to measure and control change. As we became self-aware, having the ability to see ourselves as separate from change, we saw ourselves as observers and actors in the world around us. Through memory, the concept of time evolved, enabling us to divide change into segments, past, present and future. Experiencing events happening consistently in sequence, we were able, through reason, to develop the concept of cause and effect, refining our segmentation of change.
What is Change?
We have an increasing ability to understand and manage the manifestations of change in energy and matter, and have an immense accumulation of data and knowledge on a myriad of aspects of our existence. However, do we know what change is?
What is the cause and effect relationship? Ordinarily this relationship is understood as first the cause, then the effect. Can there be a cause without an effect? Can there be an effect without a cause? At some point, is not every effect a cause and every cause an effect? So, are cause and effect one event (cause/effect)? We segment our experience in terms of cause and effect in time units, from less than a nanosecond to multiple billions of years, and in spatial terms, from the quantum level to the cosmos.
Is Cause and Effect Real?
Is the concept of cause and effect about what actually is or about how we think? Is change a succession of two part cause and effect events or is it one continuous process that is arbitrarily segmented by the human mind? I believe that reasonable answers to all of these questions indicate that the latter alternative is the reality.
“….space and time are not discovered by humans to be objective features of the world, but are part of an unavoidable systematic framework for organizing our experiences.” (1)
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” (2)
An incredible number of cause/effect events create an apple pie. This is the reality of continuous change.
Where Does Cause End and Effect Begin?
Obviously, the concept of time is the essential aspect of cause and effect. First the cause and then the effect, but, as we have seen, in reality they are not two separate, sequential events. Only in our minds are they separate. Without memory we would not be aware of the cause of an experienced effect. We would not be able to measure time. Which leads to the question, without memory is there a thing as “time”? Is time real, or just how we organize our experience of change? Time is how we think about and measure change.
We have self-awareness, which enables us to see ourselves as separate from our environment, and we have memory that enables us to measure change. It follows that
“time is the intuitive form of our intellect and is, therefore, foreign to the thing itself,….the truly real is independent of time and hence is one and the same in every point of time.” (3)
The “thing itself” is not the matter or energy observed, it is the more basic aspect of existence, change, which we divide in our minds into segments to enhance our understanding and control. The segments are mental concepts, not reality. We are unable or at least uncomfortable without thinking in terms of dualities.
What is Existence?
Ultimately we have the duality of existence and non-existence. The dictionary tells us that:
exist – to have being,
being – existence,
existence – the state of being,
is – be,
be – exist,
real – existing as a thing, and
reality – quality of being real.
This circular definition of existence, being and reality tells us nothing. Is existence definable without the concept of non- existence?
“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ [Because] I understand that this glass is already broken….” (4).
When the beautiful glass goblet is broken; many little pieces of glass have been created. Except in my memory, the previous form of the glass, as a goblet, has ceased to exist. Nothing lasts. Every thing ceases to be.
The wave I see approaching the beach exists, but in ten seconds it will break on the shore and not exist. And, every moment that wave exists it changes in shape, form and mass, so in those ten seconds there are many thousands, millions of different waves that I see as one. The wave I see is “already broken”, as it changes every moment, ceasing to exist as it was, changing into different forms, until it finally “breaks” on the shore, no longer the wave I saw. What I thought I saw was a single wave approaching the beach, when, actually, I saw many momentary expressions of the ocean, wind, and currents. I did not see a thing, I saw a process; the wave was an expression of the ocean. A wave is not a thing, it is a verb. As is the ocean. The ocean is “waving”.
The goblet and the wave ceased to exist. They are no thing. They are glass fragments and water swirling down the beach back into the sea.
What is nothing?
Can there “be” nothing? To “be nothing”, the state of being nothing, the state of not being something, would be something. Something is a precondition to define nothing, which is the absence of something, not vice versa. If “something” does not exist, nothing exists, absolute nothing would be ____ . Nothing is a concept, not a reality. Nothing does not exist, therefore, there is only existence (something). If there is something, there cannot be nothing. Nothing does not exist, which is what nothing “is”.
On the other hand, the existing something(s) is (are) not permanent. No thing lasts. Nothing is permanent. Ultimately, every thing ceases to be. Everything is ultimately, nothing. Every thing becomes not that thing. Every thing, before it is, it was not, and after it is, it is not. From no thing, to a (specific) thing, to no thing (not that specific thing), which is another (other) thing(s). Dissolution and creation are inseparable. It is one process, dissolution/creation. The not-being of one thing is the new being of another thing. Not being, to being, to not being, and that not being is a (different) being. Everything is the nothing of something else. Everything is nothing and that nothing is everything. Ultimately, nothing and everything are the same. Constant pervasive, ongoing change is something/nothing.
Reality is a Verb
Things do not exist and move through time. They are the manifestation of change. They do not change; they are the changing, an indescribable process. Their existence is not change; change is their existence. Things are what they do, how they manifest themselves in change. Reality is not a thing, it is a verb. Being/non-being is change.
If reality is change, is not the concept of permanence is an illusion, derived from our limited perspective? Driven by our feelings of insecurity, we are often frustrated as we strive to for certainty and permanence in a world of change. But that is another story. Atoms now linked in our DNA were in the stars for eons. The entrapment of these atoms can be seen as a transient biological event, as the Milky Way galaxy is a transient astrophysical event.
“… humanity is a brief epidemic of microbes.” (5)
Billions of years from now, as our star evolves into a red giant, the earth will end in a death spiral into the sun. So much for permanence from the earth’s perspective. Before then we may have moved on to another habitable planet, if we don’t succumb to a natural disaster or self-destruct in the meantime, but we will be an unimaginable different “we”.
“The times they are a-changin‘” (6), but, actually, not just the times, everything is “a-changin’ “, everywhere and always. With due respect to our species many eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians, the really hard question is, what is change? How can it be defined without the concept of nothing? There must be a remembered past to define any change. Without memory there is no change, only now, change without subjectivity. Dualities, comparisons, dominate our thinking, but is duality thinking a valid representation of the reality of constant change or are the concepts of being and non-being just examples of time bound human ideas? Is reality process, and that’s all there is? Change is not the essential nature of everything, it is everything (and nothing).
Change is not a characteristic of reality, it is reality. Energy and matter, collectively, are merely the “stuff” of reality, the expression of reality perceivable by us. Reality is infinite change.
Every thing, like the goblet, is “already broken.” Change is the ultimate reality, yet this reality is no thing; it is a verb, a process. Reality is nothing, the driving creative force of the universe.
Notes:
1) Immanuel Kant
2) Carl Sagan
3) Schopenhaurer
4) Attributed to Achaan Chaa – Thoughts Without A Thinker – Mark Epstein, M.D., pages 80-81.
5) Robert Frost
6) Bob Dylan
