Causal - the immovable cause that moves all things

From Book One - 'The Depths of the Divine', by Ken Wilber

'The Causal

In the subtle level, the Soul and God unite; in the causal level, the Soul and God are both transcended in the prior identity of Godhead, or pure formless awareness, pure consciousness as such, the pure Self as pure Spirit (Atman = Brahman). No longer the 'Supreme Union' of God and Soul, but the 'Supreme Identity' of Godhead. As Meister Eckhardt put it 'I find in this breakthrough that God and I are one and the same'.

As we will see, this pure formless Spirit is said to be the Goal and Summit and Source of all manifestation. And that is the causal.


Going within and beyond even this pure Source and pure Spirit - which is totally formless, boundless, unmanifest - the Self/Spirit awakens to an identity with, and as all Form, all manifestation (gross, subtle and causal), whether high or low, ascending or descending, sacred or profane, manifest or unmanifest, finite or infinite, temporal or eternal. This is not a particular stage among other stages - not their Goal, not their Source, not their Summit - but rather the Ground or Suchness or Isness of all stages, at all times, in all dimensions: the Being of all beings, the Condition of all conditions, the Nature of all natures. And that is the Nondual.

I have chosen Meister Eckhardt and Sri Ramana Maharshi to illustrate both of these 'stages' (causal and nondual), since we find in both of them not only a breakthrough to the causal, but also through the causal to the ultimate or Nondual, and as inadequate and misleading as words here invariably are, at least an indication of these two 'movements' can be clearly and unmistakably discerned in both of these extraordinary sages.

Sri Ramana Maharshi (echoing Shankara) summarises the 'viewpoint' of the ultimate or Nondial realisation:

   The world is illusory;
   Brahman alone is Real;
   Brahman is the world.

The first two lines represent pure causal-level awareness, or unmanifest absorption in pure or formless Spirit,; line three represents the ultimate or nondual completion (the union of the Formless with the entire world of Form). The Godhead completely transcends all worlds and thus completely includes all worlds. It is the final within, leading to the final beyond - a beyond that, confined to absolutely nothing,  embraces absolutely everything.


Eckhardt begins by pointing to the need, first and foremost, for a transcendence or 'breakthrough' (a word he coined in German) from the finite and created realm to the infinite and uncreated source or origin (the causal) a direct and formless awareness that is without self, without others and without God.

'...For in this breakthrough I discover that I and God are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for I am an immovable cause that moves all things.

Therefore am I also unborn, and following the way of my unborn being I can never die. Following the way of my unborn being I have always been, I am now, and shall remain eternally.'

In order for God and the Soul to exist, there must be a duality or separation between them, and this duality, says Eckhardt, obscures the primordial Godhead:

'When I stood still in my first cause, there I had no God and was cause of myself. There I willed nothing, I desired nothing, for I was a pure Being in delight of the truth. There I stood, free of God and of all things. But when I took leave from this state and received my created being, then I had a God.'

This Godhead is radically free of any finite or created thing, whether of matter or nature or minds or vision s or soul or God. Eckhardt refers to this as completely transcendental, free, or unmanifest state by words such as 'Abyss', 'unborn', 'formless', 'primordial origin', 'emptiness', 'nothingness'.

...

This emptiness is not a theory. Even less is it poetry (which I have often heard). Nor is it a philosophical suggestion. It is a direct apprehension (direct 'experience' is not quite right, since it is free of the duality of subject and object, and since it never enters the stream of time and thus is never 'experiential' in any typical sense) - free of thoughts, free of dualities, free of time and temporal succession:

'I speak therefore of a Godhead from which as yet nothing emanates and nothing moves or is thought about. Even if the soul were to see God insofar as he is God or insofar as God can be imagined or insofar as he is a thought, this same insufficiency would be there. But when all images of the soul are taken away and the soul is only the single One, then the pure being of the soul finds resting in itself the pure, formless Being of the divine...

Neither space nor time touch this place. Nothing so much hinders the soul's understanding of God as time and space. Time and space are parts of the whole, but God is one. So if the soul is to recognise God, it must do so beyond space and time. For God is neither this nor that in the way of manifold things of earth, since God is one. if the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time and space or any other object, it cannot know God.

Know then that all our perfection and all our bliss depend on the fact that the individual goes through and beyond all creation and all temporality and all being, and enters the foundation that is without foundation. they must arrive at forgetfulness of objects and no-self consciousness - and there must be absolute silence there and stillness.'

In this state of formless and silent awareness, one does not see the Godhead, for one is the Godhead, and knows it from within, self-felt, not from without, as an object. The pure Witness cannot be seen, for the simple reason that it is the Seer (and the Seer itself is pure Emptiness, the pure opening or clearing in which all objects, experiences, things and events arise, but which itself merely abides). Anything seen is just more objects, more finite things, more images or concepts or visions, which is exactly what it is not.'

Ref. Wilber, K. (2000). Sex, Ecology and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution. Boston: Shambala Publications. 309-313.