Closer To Ignorance
Various self-proclaimed spiritual teachers, citing Buddhism, Grudjief, and even Kant, propose performing various arbitrary tasks that are supposedly intended to interrupt the automatism of the practitioner and, horribly, place him outside the chain of cause and effect and thus bring you closer to God. This is completely impossible. No exercise, meditation, promise, or thought will ever take you beyond cause and effect.
Such proposals may not be intended to be harmful, but rather result from conceptual confusion about what philosophers meant by “cause and effect,” and they mix metaphysics with a practical exercises in a way that collapses under inspection. First we must separate two different claims.
One claim comes from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Kant did not say that events themselves might occur without causes. His argument was more precise. He argued that causality is a structural rule of human cognition. The mind organizes experience through categories such as cause, time, and substance. Because of this, everything that appears to us as an event must appear within causal structure.
Kant’s point was epistemological (relating to the theory of knowledge), we cannot know the thing-in-itself independently of these structures. But this does not mean that by performing a strange action of moving the chair back and forthwe somehow escape causality. That would be like saying you can escape gravity by jumping slightly differently.
The second claim comes from Arthur Schopenhauer, who analyzed the principle of sufficient reason in his early work The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Schopenhauer identified several kinds of “reasons” which are causal relations in nature, logical relations in thinking, mathematical relations, and motives in human action. The crucial point is that human actions belong to the domain of motives, which are themselves a form of sufficient reason. If you wash that is already clean, the motive is still present. The motive might be curiosity, obedience to a teacher, a desire to perform a spiritual exercise, boredom, or the hope of gaining insight. That motive is already the causal explanation of the action. In no way does it move you beyond the causal chain and brings you colser to god. This is hilarious
