Published on 12, July, 2020
Causality has always been a fascinating subject to me. A fun thought exercise I like to do is trace back events that needed to happen for things in my life to exist as they do now, and see what's the most obscure thing that was vital to that series. That and the understanding of the probability of any given individual's existence has made me appreciate how intricate every single life is. We're all products of a specific series of events, consisting of a near incalculable number of nuances and distinctions that we might never hope to fully understand and appreciate.
I learned in recent years the concept of Laplace's Demon. A hypothetical being capable of observing every particle of the universe and its current momentum, if I recall it right. That such a being, with a sufficient intellect, could accurately predict the future if it could calculate where every particle has come from and in what it's present momentum is.
Thinking about these things has given me the opinion that chaos is just our inability to fully calculate the momentum of all of the contents of the universe. That every single thing that happens, could not have possibly happened any other way, because the series of events that lead to every moment were put in motion from the instant the universe was created.
I'm not an individual. I don't have free will. I don't make choices. Everything I do, I was always going to do exactly as it pans out. And any element of it that goes unpredictably is simply my lack of awareness of all the elements contributing to whatever comes out of it. But that even then, those elements were always guaranteed to come into play at that moment.
It might sound like I'm trying to absolve myself of responsibility for my decisions. But if I'm right, then I was always going to come to these conclusions, so who's to say what's right and wrong?
But in all things I try to keep an open mind. What do you all think?
I like to refer to the 32nd hexagram of the iching, second line moving, on this question.
From the Thomas Cleary translation:
32nd hexagram, Constancy“When strength is balanced and one deeply understands the firing process, masters the ability to adjust to changes, is constant in timing rather than by minding, constant in the Path rather than in things, constancy being without form or trace. This is constancy in which regret disappears.•hexagram 32 then changes, with the 2nd line moving, to hexagram 62 “Predominance of the small” which says“The call of a flying bird should not rise but descend. This is very auspicious.