We've all heard of cause and effect. People often talk of it and state how one thing causes another thing to happen. It's generally accepted to be the way of the world: something makes something else happen. But it's not really how it seems.

There isn't really a cause that makes an effect happen. That's just a useful (but inevitably inaccurate) way of describing how the world works. What I mean is that there isn't a divide between a 'cause' and an 'effect'. There isn't one thing then another thing. There also isn't a knock-on effect, where a cause brings an effect which then becomes the cause for another effect, and so on. That's not really what is happening. That's just a way of understanding or describing what is happening.

So what is really happening? There is an appearance of flowing change. The continual flow of change isn't really divided into causes and effects. Just as time isn't really divided into seconds and space isn't divided into centimetres. We use those terms to describe the world, but they are human made and not real in themselves. We don't really perceive one thing that causes an effect to happen. We perceive what seems to happen.

Let's look at an example. Consider a dog barking and a cat running away. It's fair to say that the dog barking causes the cat to run away. That makes sense. But it's not wholly accurate. We could say that the cat makes a noise, which causes the dog to see the cat, which causes the dog to bark, the cat hears the barking and this causes the cat to flee. So we could say the cat hearing the bark is the cause of the cat running away. But we're just picking at other points that aren't really discrete points. More accurately this is a flow of activity without any true dividing points. There are no true distinct points that are causes or effects.

We can go a bit deeper and consider the cause of the universe. It's accepted by many that the universe was created or caused by the Big Bang, where a singularity exploded into activity. But, although this is a good theory, there is a problem with it. If we assume that causes are real, then what caused the first cause? Ultimately we can say that the singularity has no cause. It wasn't created. The singularity is prior to the appearance of time and space. It is formless and without change. But then what caused the explosion and the beginning of time and space?

The Non-Duality answer to this is that there was no explosion, the singularity remains intact. The universe only seems to explode from a singularity into a multiplicity. All the while the universe, or What Is, remains complete as it is. This ties in with the recognition that there is no 'cause and effect'. There is only the appearance of flowing change within the content completeness of the singularity.

Any cause we attribute to an effect will not be wholly accurate. Better to drop the idea of cause and effect and look to the greater understanding that there is no separation or multiplicity, no beginnings or ends. The universe is a complete undivided singularity. It appears to flow with change, but it is always complete in itself.