There are no random events

Everything that has ever happened in the entire history of the universe has brought me to exactly this point, right here, right now, in this room, on this day, typing these words. There are no random events - everything is a result of countless billions of causes, interrelated, interlinked, operating together like the cogs in some kind of giant timepiece.

There’s a cobweb on the light above my bed and I realise that this is no random occurence either; a million different causes, different actions and interactions was necessary for precisely that cobweb to be here on precisely that light in precisely this house, in precisely this moment. The interrelated web of causes included this house being built, and all the countless people involved in that process; those that bought the land, constructed the materials and assembled them, fitted the furnishings, manufactured the actual light - and by extension, everyone that has ever been involved in the lives of the people that did these things: their families and the countless generations that led them to be there precisely where they were at the time of doing what they were doing, all the innumerable people that supported their lives, including the people that built their homes and were responsible for producing food and the basic necessities of life in order to sustain them, in order that they might live to one day assemble the house in which I live and the light at which I’m looking.

What is inescapable is that all our lives are inextricably interlinked with the lives of thousands - millions - of other people. Every action and reaction and cause and effect was necessary for anything and everything that you care to look at to be as it is, now. Every cause and effect that has ever been set in motion led that particular spider to be in my room when it was and to set up home above my light. Every cause and effect that has ever been has led me to be living in this house, as I am, and to notice that spiderweb.

This massive interrelation underscores the spiritual notion of oneness being at the very heart of our existence. There are no isolated occurrences, no random events. And moreover, it could be said that:

“There is not a single atom in the universe that’s out of place. How could there possibly be?”

Those words came to me a while back when I was in the midst of a particular turmoil and they hit home which such force and power that they cut through my feelings of resistance and melted my pain like ice in the sun. The mind loves to cut reality into bite-size chunks, to divide the indivisable and compartmentalise, label and pass judgement. But all these notions of ‘this and that’ are ultimately illusory; they are mind-created. They are stories. When everything is seen as it truly is, it is all part of a vastly interconnected tapestry, deftly interwoven and each part inextricably linked the other. There’s ultimately little point in focusing and isolating individual parts of the design and mentally designating ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It’s all part of the tapestry and everything is there, not by chance, but by a series of interrelated causes stretching back to the very origin of the universe.

Everything that has ever happened since the beginning of time was necessary to bring you to this moment now, sitting where you are, reading these words and whatever else you have been doing, thinking, feeling or experiencing. We’re all drifting in this vast ocean of eternity, gently being carried upon a tide of cause and effects, each moment birthing the next by virtue of an unseen multitude of invisible causes. When you observe the infinite interrelatedness of life and get an appreciation for the true profundity of it when mind no longer cuts it down into digestible, seemingly separate chunks, you get a sense of the infinite. It becomes easy to see why Byron Katie declares that, for her, reality (that which IS) is synonymous with ‘God’. You step out of duality and enter a state of oneness in which all is actually quite perfect as it is, even what previously appeared to be unspeakably ‘bad’. It’s all really just part of an unspeakably vast tapestry, dark threads and light, and when viewed from an elevated perspective we become less likely to chop that tapestry up with a pair of rusted scissors, brandishing handfuls of cut cloth in our raging fists and declaring that we KNOW what reality is for us, and what’s ‘good’ and what’s ‘bad’. From such a limited, grasping, delusional perspective we really don’t know anything at all. The mind simply doesn’t have the capacity to understand the totality of life in its true perspective; all it can do is grasp onto its erroneous concepts and judgements and continue to tear things up with those scissors.

Only the heart, or that deeper state of consciousness below and above mind, can ever grasp the expansive perspective of which I suddenly caught the barest glimpse this morning when looking at that cobweb and musing at the fact that everything that has ever happened since the beginning of time was necessary in order for that cobweb to be where it was and for me to be there in order to witness it. When you think of things along those terms....isn’t EVERYTHING pretty darned mind-blowing?