Causation (that is, how effects are produced) is implicit in Buddhism but not as a theory which lends itself to semantic determination. It needs underscoring that the Buddha was a real mystic—not a maker of metaphysical theories. This implicity is spiritual and, therefore, ineffable.
For those awakened, the transcendent spiritual medium as the implicit cause, converts into the consequent through craving with no reversibility on the part of the consequent. There is only a succession of consequences which boils down to impermanence.
On an everyday level, as we experience this condition through our senses, we are always perceiving the consequential, temporal world, i.e., samsara. From a different aspect, as spirit, we are falling into time transforming into mass/energy entities (satkaya) which is our normal human body.
To escape this down falling condition we must reverse time, going back to zero (shunya) time. This involves intuiting the timeless, pre-fall state of the spiritual medium, itself, which is eternal and non-local.
On the question of reversing time, going back to zero, spirit must correctly imagine (samyagdrista) itself, timelessly. This is, incidentally, the first part of what many Buddhists refer to as the Noble Eightfold Path.
Then, after spirit rightly conceives (samyagdrista) itself, it then begins to progressively dissolve its desire for further temporality, working backwards to zero time (i.e., embodiment reversal). This reversal of the temporal condition, it needs underscoring, takes a very long time to accomplish, but it can be done.
By reversing our temporal condition, spirit becomes increasingly distinguished from the temporal body. This is called “wisdom” or prajñâ, in which spirit is continually distinguishing itself from the temporal body more and more. (This is also disembodiment and nirvana—though not final nirvana.)
What is hard to imagine for us is that from the moment of our conception in our mother’s womb we have, as spirit, been converting spiritual being into time and the same, samsara. This is difficult for us to imagine because we can’t envision the spiritual side of ourselves as timelessly detached without being, in some degree, already detached.
Only when the first moment of detachment/disembodiment occurs and we sense the power of spirit or pure Mind, directly, can we get a good grasp on the fundamental truth of real causation and how, as this spiritual medium, we have fallen into dependent origination, going serially from one birth to the next.
While all this sounds pretty heady. It isn’t. We simply have to believe that we are causing ourselves to become time entities and that this can be reversed by following the Buddha’s path.
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