From lecture 245, CAUSE AND EFFECT ON VARIOUS LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS:

In the sphere of your present reality every act has its consequences. It is much more difficult to see the same relationship between your thoughts, or your subtle inner attitudes, and your overall life circumstances. The more developed a person is, the more he or she can perceive cause and effect on the less obvious levels. On this path, the development of this perception is very strongly emphasized and becomes gradually more acute.

If you commit an overt act — you kill someone — the consequences will be obvious. But if you malign another human being by questionable accusations, ill will, blindness or stubbornness; if you refuse to give him or her the benefit of the doubt and do not attempt to be open and create a different reality through honest communication with this person, your thoughts are killing him. This secret “killing” has just as severe consequences as a physical killing. At first the effects of such actions may not be easy to perceive. But as you progress in your development and raise your consciousness, you will see that there is a definite connection between cause and effect even when the cause is not an overt act but a hidden thought previously ignored.

In your three-dimensional world, and in your present state of consciousness, you find yourself to be in many areas half-way. Your world is neither all good nor all bad. Your personality is neither all good nor all bad. You neither live in heaven nor in hell. You represent a combination of both extremes. Many of you doubt that there are other worlds, other realms, and therefore other states of consciousness. Your being half-way should be a clear indication that your sphere cannot possibly be the only reality in the universe. If some good exists in you and in your world, greater degrees of goodness must exist. Therefore, a plane of all-pervading goodness must also exist. The same applies to the bad: If there is a little bad in you and your world, there must also exist spheres of consciousness in which there is more bad, and, finally, where all is bad.

You are also half-way as to cause and effect, or rather your perception of it. It is not the object of your perception that changes. It is your vision that changes as you grow.

An act is irreversible. Its momentary consequences are irreversible. You may later modify the act, you may try to correct it if you see that it was a mistake. You may see the inner current that led you to the act, you may use the act as material to raise your consciousness and widen your vision and perception. This way you may, in time, neutralize the effects of a negative act. But at the moment the act is irreversible, the consequences cannot be annulled. If consequences exist at the moment as a result of the act, but can be eliminated in time, after the elapse of some time, you can gradually begin to see that cause and effect is very much connected to time. Your state of development creates a corresponding reality. This reality contains three dimensions: It consists of time, space, and movement; it also contains the particular degree of cause and effect you can experience.

If you cannot see that your acts have specific consequences, it is impossible to see them and use them as indispensable tools for the development of your soul. For example, if you do not believe that a negative thought has specific and actually quite tangible results, how could you possibly be motivated to correct the thought? In time your perception will alter, you can undertake the correction of these thoughts, so that, again in time, the effects will be eliminated. In the same way, your life-affirming, positive and truthful thoughts, attitudes and actions have corresponding desirable effects. If you are unaware of the relationship between cause and effect in all areas of your life and believe the effects to be coincidental and haphazard, you will not be encouraged to improve the causes that you create, you will not perceive that love and goodness are the supreme power, and you will not be supported and strengthened by this truth.

Let us say you are compelled by inner forces to commit an impulsive destructive act. The pain and remorse that this act will cause may be instantaneous. You long for a state of being in which you can undo this act, as if it never happened. Yet you know that in the world you live in this is impossible. How then can it be that in higher realms there is no cause and effect? Perhaps at certain times you can deeply sense that “underneath” this level of cause and effect there exists a level in which you can be completely untouched by either the cause you have set in motion or by the effect you have brought about. It is your higher self which is unaffected, the divine part of you that does not participate in any negative thoughts, and is not part of your destructive attitudes or actions. But those layers of your personality that are still involved in false perceptions and therefore in untruthful attitudes and unloving, destructive acts, must work themselves out of this morass. This will happen in time. Cause and effect and time are intrinsically connected as different manifestations of the same reality.

You can perhaps also begin to perceive that the three-dimensional world with its limitation of time, space and movement, with its duality, with its cause and effect, is directly related to and connected with impurity, distortion, limitation of vision and perception. Your three-dimensional perception is an untruthful overall view of the world. At the same time the limitations of time, space and movement, the struggle attached to duality, and the law of cause and effect become the very tools the soul needs to transcend this entire realm of consciousness. Perception is the cause of certain actions, which create certain effects. The effects can be the medicine needed to overcome distorted perceptions which create the causes which in turn create these effects. I have spoken to you before about cause and effect and the medicine.

In the highest state of consciousness only the highest, best, most creative and beautiful causes are set in motion. In this enlightened state of consciousness, cause and effect are immediately discernible and almost simultaneous; there is no time-lapse between cause and effect. The cause is the effect. The thought is the act. The most subtle and secret attitude creates immediate results and consequences. There is no space to travel in-between cause and effect. They become truly one, as all becomes one on this level of being. This is why you can sense, at certain times of grace, that somewhere deep within exists a realm of being in which no matter what happens, you remain unalterably pure, divine and good in your essence.