Understanding The Acausal


In essence, what I have termed the acausal is not a generalization - a concept - deriving from a collocation of assumed, imagined, or causally observed Phainómenon, but instead that wordless knowing which empathy reveals and which a personal πάθει μάθος often inclines us toward. That is, the acausal is a direct and personal (individual) revealing of beings and Being which does not depend on denoting or naming.

What is so revealed is the acausal nature of some beings, and the connexion which exists between living beings. This particular revealing may be termed acausal-knowing, as distinct from the causal-knowing that results from observing Phainómenon.

Hitherto, beings and Being have been approached, understood, by means of our known physical senses - by Phainómenon - and by what has been posited on the basis of Phainómenon, which has often meant the manufacture of categories and abstract forms which beings are assigned to on the basis of some feature that has been outwardly observed or which has been assumed to be possessed by some beings or collocation of beings.

The new revealing of beings and Being means that our faculty of empathy - or more correctly, a developed faculty of human empathy - should be added to the five Aristotelian essentials, and which now six essentials enable us to come to know both the reality external to ourselves and the reality of ourselves, as individuals. That is, it is the combination of causal-knowing and acausal-knowing that can incline us toward a knowing of Reality and thus which manifests thoughtful-reasoning, a reasoned or balanced judgement [ σωφρονεῖν ].

Furthermore, when it is said that it is the acausal (or acausal energy) which animates physical matter, imparting to that matter what we observe as life [1], this animation is not some cause-and-effect (or even some assumed acausal effect) but rather the state of such matter being alive - that is, of there being a living-being (a biological organism) as distinct from a non-living being (ordinary physical matter). Furthermore, Life [ ψυχή ] does not exist as some causal form or abstraction sans beings, but is rather what we perceive as the nature of those beings which are observed to be alive, and which nature (or character) only empathy currently reveals to us.


Acausal Postulations

The nature of living-beings that empathy reveals is of acausal connexions between all living-beings, sentient and otherwise, and this leads us to the understanding that our own self-identity, our separateness and independence and even our assumed uniqueness in causal Time and causal Space, are causal presumptions. That is, a product of Phainómenon, of only causal-knowing. Since such causal-knowing is incomplete, lacking as it does acausal-knowing, it is thus not a sound basis to use in the matter of making ethical judgements.

Acausal-knowing leads us to some postulations regarding the acausal. One of these is that the acausal differs from the causal by reason of being a continuum of acausal Space and acausal Time, in contrast to the causal geometrical Space and linear causal Time of the causal continuum of Phainómenon. This in turn leads to the postulation of acausal energy, which is assumed to be 'that-which' might be a possibly observable attribute of a living-being having the hitherto causally-observed attributes of life. This then leads to the postulation of such acausal energy having certain attributes [2], of some or all of these attributes possibly being observable by the development of observational/experimental techniques perhaps partly based on acausal energy, and of such acausal energy therefore being manifest or capable of being manifest, as energy sans beings, in the causal continuum.

However, while these may seem reasonable assumptions about the nature acausal, about acausal Phainómenon, they are still only assumptions, and thus may not necessarily re-present that nature, accurately or otherwise. Indeed, such postulations concerning the nature of the acausal might merely replicate the error of imposing assumed causal forms upon that-which, being acausal, is formless.

For all that the acausal-knowing which empathy currently reveals to us is: (1) of a personal knowing of other living-beings and of ourselves in the immediacy-of-the-causal moment, and of (2) how the acausal itself is not some 'essence' behind or beyond the causal and beyond causal forms, since such an 'essence' is but itself a postulated ideation.


Or, expressed somewhat differently, our acausal-knowing is simply a revealing of the matrix of nexions which are living-beings, and thus of -

" The Cosmic Perspective – that is, [an] acceptance of ourselves as but one fragile fallible microcosmic nexion only temporarily presenced on one planet orbiting one star in one Galaxy in a Cosmos of billions of Galaxies. This is the essence of wu-wei – a knowing, a feeling, of Being; a knowing, a feeling, of The Numen, the acausal Unity, the Cosmos itself; and a knowing, a feeling, once described in that ancient wisdom termed Tao, and yet which even then, as now, could not and cannot be described by or contained within that one, or any, particular term."  [3] 






David Myatt
2011 CE


Notes


[1] Currently, we observe or assume life by the following seven attributes: a living organism respires; it moves; it grows or changes; it excretes waste; it is sensitive to, or aware of, its environment; it can reproduce itself, and it can nourish itself.

[2] Some of the attributes of acausal energy, expressed in terms of acausal mass (analogous to causal mass/energy) might be the following:

(1) An acausal object, or mass, can change without any external force acting upon it - that is, the change is implicit in that acausal matter, by virtue of its inherent acausal charge.

(2) The rate of change of an acausal object, or mass, is proportional to its acausal charge.

(3) The change of an acausal object can continue until all its acausal charge has been dissipated.

(4) Acausal charge is always conserved.

(5) An acausal object, or mass, is acted upon by all other acausal matter in the cosmos.

(6) Each acausal object in the cosmos attracts or repels every other acausal object in the physical cosmos with a magnitude which is proportional to the product of the acausal charges of those objects, and inversely proportional to the distance between them as measured in causal space.

[3] The quotation is from my essay In Pursuit of Wisdom (2011 CE).