Cause and Effect...

Basically, events have nothing to do with what you think of as cause and effect. This is perhaps apparent to some degree when you study dream events, for there the kind of continuity you are used to, connecting events, largely vanishes.

Instead events are built up, so to speak, from significances. But let us forget that term for a moment and consider association, with which you are already familiar, since your stream of consciousness operates in that fashion. By its very nature each consciousness is a particular, peculiar, and unique focus of awareness which will experience any possible realities through its own characteristics.

It also "stamps" or "impresses" the universe with its own imprint. No portion of the universe is inactive or passive, regardless of its seeming organization or its seeming lack of organization. Each consciousness, then, impresses the universe in its own fashion. Its very existence sets up a kind of significance, in whose light the rest of the universe will be interpreted. The universe knows itself through such significances. Each consciousness is endowed with creativity of a multidimensional nature, so that it will seek to create as many possible realities for itself as it can, using its own significance as a focus to draw into its experience whatever events are possible for it from the universe itself.

Put more simply from another viewpoint, each of you as you know yourself has certain abilities and characteristics of your own. You experience reality through the cast of those abilities and characteristics, but you also stamp the universe with that particular imprint of individuality that is your own, and you attract those events that are suited to your nature and no other.

Significances fall or happen in certain patterns, and when these become very obvious they appear as cause and effect. They are simply heavy-handed significances. Your associative processes and habits are perhaps the closest examples that can give clues of how significances operate. Even then, however, associations deal with the passage of time, and basically significances do not. You might think of your aunt Sarah, for example, and in a few moments the associative process might bring you images of periods in the past when you visited your aunt, of her friends and neighbors, the articles in her house, and episodes connected with your relationship.

At the same time Aunt Sarah, unbeknown to you, might pick up a blue vase, one that you had just seen in your mind as belonging on a shelf in her living room. Touching the vase, your aunt Sarah might think of the person who gave it to her, now on the other side of the continent. That person, perhaps thinking of buying a present for someone, might settle upon a vase in a flash of inspiration, or suddenly begin humming a song with the name "Sarah" in the title, or possibly even think of your aunt. If on the other hand any opposing associations existed anywhere along the line, the "chain" of associations could be broken. The last lady might consider a vase, for example, but reject the idea. Because of the time element, it seems to you that the first episode caused the others, and that your first association concerning your aunt brought about the "following" events.

The inner significances, however, the associations, existed all at once, to be tuned into at any time. They had their reality basically apart from time, even though they appeared within it.

Actually the three sets of events could easily occur to the three people at once, and if no normal communication happened no one would be the wiser. The inner tapestry of events deals with just this kind of association. Emotional intensities and significances compose the nature of events. In dreams you work with the kind of intensities involved, exploring multitudinous significances. These are like charged emotional patterns, formed of your own highly personal emotions and intents.

Using such significances as yardsticks, you accept or reject probable events. You imprint the universe with your own significance, and using that as a focus you draw from it, or attract, those events that fit your unique purposes and needs. In doing so, to some extent, you multiply the creative possibilities of the universe, forming from it a personal reality that would otherwise be absent, in those terms, and in doing so you also add in an immeasurable fashion to the reality of all other consciousness by increasing the bank of reality from which all consciousness draws.

There is no such thing, basically, as random motion. There is no such thing as chaos. The universe, by whatever name and in whatever manifestation, attains its reality through ordered sequences of significances.

These are kept separate in various systems of actuality, while still combining in an overall fashion. You understand the cause-and-effect kind of order, but this is built upon the non-causal aspect of significances. In a way the dreams that you recall are like numbered paintings, tailored to fit your own intents and purposes, fitting the contours of your mind so perfectly that you forget the larger experiences from which they are drawn.

Physically and psychically the dream itself is the result of the most precise kind of calculation and activity, in which complicated dramas and interactions occur, often highly charged and intense, and yet cut off from the body's full participation. These significances, then, involve from your end certain biological cues that regulate the intersection of psychological events with physical activity in time and space. Only when all conditions match your own highly specific requirements are the necessary cues activated to give you the physical experience. To that extent in dreams you are "on hold", involved with a range of action too wide to fit the contours of practical earth experience. These significances set up their own codes, then, so that physical events must be coded in a certain fashion, and dreams in another.

Your dream perceptions seem physical --- you walk, run, eat, and perform other physical functions. And in a way dreams are like variations of the theme of your life, though in reality your life is the theme you have chosen from those possible versions. You are steeped in that inner reality from which your dreams spring, and the farther away you go from the dream state into inner reality, the physical aspects of events largely vanish. It would seem to you that experience becomes broader but less specific, but such is not the case. Experience does become broader, but it changes in quality so that, for example, one moment in your terms of such experience would provide the working material for five years of dreams.

This larger experience from which your dreams are finally formed, involves you in a kind of journey. It is as if you joyfully leave the normal paraphernalia of usual life behind, and ride aboard your own greater psyche into vaster seas of experience.

You leave behind the physical nature of events and go into those areas in which events are formed. In a very real sense, you encounter the universe in a more direct fashion, using inner senses that are far more ranging. Using your own indestructible validity, or vitality, as "bait", you go forth to draw from the universe the raw material of experience. You are yourself, yet at that level you are also a part of that universe from which that self springs, and its power and vitality are your own, to be uniquely focused. In those terms you are aware of all of the activities of your own greater psyche as it participates in --- and contributes to --- the infinite existence of psychic consciousness as you understand it, and becomes aware of the psychological realities that form the framework of its own stability.

Events do not become physical, then, unless certain requirements are met, and certain codes activated.

Experiences of your inner self occur at their own intensities. The knowledge is translated into information that is broken down in the dream state into more specific data, highly symbolized, suiting individual requirements and then "run through the body" in a kind of ghostly trial fashion.

(at a cellular level there is a direct cognition involved in which each consciousness knows what each other one is doing, its "position", and the implications of its experience. The entire fabric and framework of time and reality at each point is ascertained, and the probabilities probed and understood. Your cells are aware of the motion of the planets, all of the probabilities concerned with its physicality, and of all circumstances regarding the body's equilibrium, stability, and survival. The body is then formed constantly as the result of these computations)

It is then further processed into individual significances, drives, or intents, which convert it into the required codes that will then determine the nature of actualized waking events. Data must be of particular kinds of intensity before they register as physical matter, or are experienced as physical events. Part of this processing occurs in the dream state, and creativity plays a large part in the preliminary process.

You are always immersed within your inner self whether you are waking or sleeping, or whether in your terms you are alive or dead, It involves conditions in which direct knowing primarily operates. It is your "natural" state of being.
(thanks ever S&J)