Non-Linear Causality: The Wiggly Way of Ecosystems, Nature & Interdependence

Join Rohini for this exploration of one of the most humbling truths of the living world: that life does not move in straight lines.

Non-linear causality is the way of Nature, of ecosystems, of healing and relationship. It’s the spiral rhythm through which life self-organizes, regenerates, and evolves — not through control or prediction, but through interdependence and emergence.

Rohini unpacks the contrast between linear causality, the worldview of Newtonian physics and scientific materialism — where every cause has a single, measurable effect — and non-linear causality, the realm of quantum mechanics, ecology, and Mystery, where everything is entangled and alive in relationship.

Through the lens of complexity science, animist cosmologies, and ecological examples, this episode invites you to see the world not as a machine, but as a living web of reciprocity and feedback.

Explore how this understanding transforms the way we experience creativity, healing, and Life's timing, how it frees us from the compulsion to control outcomes, and reawakens our trust in Life’s innate organizing intelligence.

To live with awareness of non-linear causality is to remember that we are Nature, woven into a vast, sentient network of interconnection.

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Intro & Outro Music: Coniferous Forest by orangery on Pixabay.

Transcript

welcome, welcome to root and rise where we explore the living intelligence of the earth, of Our bodies and of the endless ways that consciousness animates the world as matter, not simply through matter. I'm Rohini, and today we're leaning into a theme that I'm really excited about. I love this topic, and it has shaped my understanding of both inner and outer transformation, and it's non linear causality, which is the way of nature and ecosystems and interdependence and evolution itself.

Because, as it turns out, life doesn't unfold in straight lines. It loops and spirals and folds and unfolds according to rhythms that defy our attempts to control it to understand or comprehend on this very linear, analytical, mentally graspable level.

And yet, when we begin to feel this pattern, when we begin to sense it moving through our own bodies and our relationships and our creative processes, it feels like remembering as always, I want to invite you to land in the body as we begin to listen and feel for what resonates and what doesn't, and to let your body's wisdom be your barometer.

So this is quite a vast topic, and this one episode is definitely not going to do it justice. I could talk about it for a long time, including my own personal experiences with it, but I'm feeling like a good place to dive into it would be to understand why non linear causality can feel so radical and maybe even challenging because of how we've been trained to think about cause and effect for centuries. Our dominant scientific worldview was, and to a large extent, still very much is, shaped by Newtonian physics. Newton's Laws imagined the universe is a vast machine, and it's predictable and measurable and deterministic you push a ball, it rolls. You apply a force, it moves. Every effect could, in principle, be traced back to a clear, identifiable cause. And this is linear causality, one cause, one effect, neatly arranged in a straight line. It's the way of scientific materialism, which is that reality and the world, including our bodies and the earth and the cosmos, is a series of mechanistic interactions, where each piece behaves independently and outcomes are, in theory, calculable.

I guess it's quite elegant and neat in its precision, but it's also profoundly limited. It's not the whole picture.

It cannot account for many phenomena, including things like emergence and feedback loops and the delicate webs of interdependence that we see in living systems in living ecosystems.

So then enter the weird world of quantum mechanics. Here. The Universe refuses to obey Newton's neat and tidy rules.

Particles exist in probability fields.

They're entangled across space and time, and time is also understood as non linear, which corresponds also to how global indigenous traditions view time in the quantum universe, observation itself shapes outcomes. Cause and effect are no longer strictly linear. They ripple, they loop, they resonate. One action may cascade in unpredictable ways, creating effects that are far beyond the original intent or measurement.

So in other words, quantum mechanics kind of exemplifies nonlinear causality, which governs interconnection and emergence and relational intelligence.

It hints that the universe at its deepest level isn't a predictable machine with separate and unrelated parts that have nothing to do with each other and that can be controlled, but a living, responsive, entangled and interdependent system, and quite a wild one at that.

So to be clear, I'm not saying that linear causality and Newtonian physics are incorrect or invalid. When I stub my toe on something, it hurts. If I put my hand on something very hot, I'll burn myself, although those are actually examples of lightning swift feedback loops that are happening within my nervous system, and feedback loops are an expression of non linear causality.

But what I'm saying is that linear causality and scientific materialism do have an objective validity. It's just, again, they're not the whole picture.

They're like the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Or another way to say it is that they exist within a larger context, within the context that is observed in quantum mechanics and in ecosystems, a larger context that indigenous science and ancient spiritual traditions like the Vedas have described for millennia, and that quantum theory is now confirming, And in this larger context, a context that totally mystifies the linear tenets of scientific materialism and our linear left brain thinking processes in this larger context, non linear causality Is this spiraling, looping, often non local rhythm that is conducting this orchestra of the living, responsive world that we inhabit everywhere in nature, from ecological ecosystems To the ecosystems of our body minds, there's a rhythm to the living world and to time itself that doesn't move in straight lines. It spirals and weaves. It folds back on itself again and again. Or I love the way Alan Watts put it as only he could.

"You're only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You're trying to straighten out a wiggly world, and no wonder you're in trouble."

And when we start to see life in this way as wiggly rather than as a one directional line of linear, mechanical clinical causes and effects, when we start to perceive the underlying web of relationships and feedback loops And of backwards and forwards happening simultaneously, something within us begins to reawaken, something that maybe, as young children, we were able to observe and Intuit about the world Before our socialization processes began, and as adults, art and music and poetry and mythology and storytelling can take us back to this experience and being in nature, of course, in Any case, when we feel that reawakening or that remembering our compulsion, our addiction to control and to predict and to make it all make sense to the thinking mind, it begins to loosen its grip, and This is when a much deeper understanding can land, which feels more like a Gnosis, that deep and spontaneous inner knowing that completely bypasses the thinking mind's ruminations.

And this is the terrain of nonlinear causality, the understanding that life, nature, consciousness, move through loops and spirals and sudden leaps rather than neat and predictable sequences, without discounting the things that do seemingly unfold in predictable sequences, which are, again, not the whole picture, but some of the content within a much larger context, non linear causality is the way of ecosystems, of river systems, of The nervous system, of healing, and it's also the way of the mystery with a capital M, which may be the closest word in the English language, that can point towards this larger context that I've been talking about, nonlinear causality. Is this invitation to not just lean into the mystery, but to really situate ourselves in it.

We are in it, and it is happening through us and as us and the linear thinking left brain, analytical mind hates that.

So when we think in linear terms, we imagine a world that's simple and tidy. A causes B, which leads to C. Effort equals outcome. Good actions bring good results. It's formulaic, it's clinical. We're trained to look for singular explanations, single truths. It's either or, which is inherently polarizing, but nature, which includes us, our bodies, our sensations, our emotions adheres to nature's operating system of both and rooting down and rising up. This is why linear causality and scientific materialism are not discounted or invalidated, but again understood as a part of a much larger non linear unfolding in ecological ecosystems. Non linear causality can be seen in domino movements or like a ripple effect, for instance, in the way that energy flows in a non linear way through food webs. And central to all food webs is the all important flow of solar energy from the sun to green plants, which is the source of that energy flow, cyclical movements are another example of nonlinear causality, where a cause leads to an effect, which in turn has an effect on the original cause. So for example, as I observe here on the land that I live on in the Mojave High Desert in California, when one of the mature beaver tail cacti plants die, the decomposer critters of this land, like the ants and the stink bugs, they decompose and decay the dead plant matter that releases nutrients back into the earth, that feeds and nourishes the other plants, and it reminds me of how the ancient Egyptians revered the humble scarab beetle, otherwise known as the dung beetle, as a powerful symbol of alchemical transmutation and transformation, which is a cyclical, circular movement, and it's the foundation of all psycho spiritual processes of alchemical transmutation.

Non linear causality can also be seen in two way, movements where one particular relationship or event in nature can have simultaneous or mutual effects, kind of like each aspect of the event has a simultaneous effect on the other. It's not one way and linear.

And the most obvious example is with pollinators. We have some beautifully wild desert Rosemary bushes just outside our house, and the effect of the bees pollinating the rosemary blooms has a simultaneous effect on the bee and the bloom and the rosemary bush and its ecosystem.

So these are just a few examples of non linear causality in nature, which can show up in so many different ways and also merge and intersect like an ever expanding interrelated Venn diagram.

It's not chaos, though it may look like that from the outside.

It's like a patterned complexity, an interdependent dance where everything affects everything else, usually in ways that are not perceived by our physical senses.

And this is also known as complex systems theory, and its principles are everywhere once you know how to see them in ecosystems, a seemingly small change, say the removal of wolves from Yellowstone here in the United States can ripple outwards in unpredictable ways without wolves, deer and elk populations exploded and vegetation was stripped and river banks eroded.

But when wolves were reintroduced decades later, the landscape transformed again. The migratory movements of deer and elk changed trees, regrew streams and rivers altered course. It wasn't just wolves caused change. It was wolves as one node in a vast relational web influencing behavior and soil health and hydrology and songbird patterns, every cause was also an effect, and every effect another cause looping back on themselves and spiraling and rippling outwards, no straight lines and a whole lot of wondrous wiliness.

This is the non linear heartbeat of nature, and this is also how shamanic healing practices from indigenous traditions from around the world operate.

What is healed or resolved or integrated in me is known to ripple back down my ancestral line and forwards into future generations, because as nature, none of us, human beings exist in vacuums.

In human life, though we often resist this elegant complexity. The mind craves predictability and control, and that's there's nothing wrong with that.

We want healing to follow a straight and linear timeline. We want effort to equal immediate reward. Otherwise we failed.

We want to know that if we do the work, it will pay off in clear and measurable ways. And there's nothing wrong with that. Inherently, it's just that life doesn't move like that, healing and growth and transformation, they follow the non linear way of ecosystems, not factory assembly lines.

You might spend years doing inner work with no visible progress, and then one morning, everything rearranges, a conversation, a scent, a dream, and something releases that's been locked for decades. It's not the conversation or the scent or the dream that caused that things have been working away under the surface until the right conditions were created and ready and ripe For that catalyst and for this new emergence to happen.

From the outside, it looks sudden, even miraculous, but in truth, countless unseen, micro shifts have been accumulating beneath the surface like tectonic plates quietly building tension until the landscape itself transforms.

That's nonlinear causality, the LEAP or shift or change that emerges when an invisible threshold is crossed and when the conditions are correct and appropriate in mythic and spiritual traditions, this pattern is ancient and universally understood.

Mystics and indigenous teachers have long described the world as a living, sentient web, not a machine. Every being, every element, is in conversation. The wind carries messages. The Rock carries memories. The River doesn't cause the soil's fertility, the elemental union of water and earth through irrigation creates the conditions for the inherent fertility of both water and earth to emerge through the soil in These cosmologies, causality isn't mechanical. It's relational. Things don't happen because of each other, but with each other and in their own nonlinear time cycles, meaning itself becomes the connective tissue.

CG Jung called this Synchronicity or meaningful coincidence, a dream and a real world event align, not through direct cause and effect, but through resonance and relationship with the Living web of the world that our physical senses can't apprehend, but Our non physical senses can but we've just been trained to ignore and suppress our non physical senses, the psyche and the world are mirrors reflecting each other through a pattern that's non Linear but deeply coherent in many animist worldviews, this coherence is the breath of spirit, the invisible intelligence that weaves the seen and the unseen together.

Nonlinear causality invites us into humility and into beginner's mind, it reminds us that we're not the sole authors of our stories and nor the master planners and controllers of our lives.

We participate, yes, but in collaboration with countless other forces. Some we can sense our ancestors, the Earth, the tides of emotion and thought that can move through the collective field. And some we just can't name at all to live in awareness of non linear causality is to recognize that the world is far more alive and participatory than we've been taught.

It's to see that a conversation that you have with a friend may ripple outward, influencing a stranger across the world, that your act of tending your inner soil might shift the way that you dream and the way that you relate, and that honoring your grief and giving it the space to transmute might feed A future that you will never see.

There's an old Sufi saying which goes, "when you take one step towards the beloved, the beloved takes 100 steps towards you", and nonlinear causality feels like that life meeting us halfway in ways that defy our logical sequencing.

And the nervous system inherently works in this way. It doesn't heal in a linear way.

You can't force trauma to release on your schedule, you create conditions of safety and coherence and trust, and then the innate intelligence of the system reorganizes itself, often unpredictably.

Healing isn't the result of doing something right. It's an emergent property of relationship with your body, your environment, your inner world, your soul.

And like all relationships, it requires us to listen and offer our attention with care, and of course, the body is an ecosystem.

Each organ and system is communicating in feedback loops. The breath regulates the heart. The heart influences the gut. The gut shapes emotion and mood, as we now know, through the enteric nervous system, emotion and mood influence our breath, and that's just one particular loop. There are so many that are going on and moving and looping and resonating throughout our bodies and our nervous systems, no one single part is in control. Healing arises from the intelligence of the whole from interdependence itself.

One of the things that comes to mind when I'm thinking about non linear causality is the underground, subterranean mycelial networks.

Each fungal thread, a hypha, connects trees and plants and soil in a living circuit that's in constant communication. Information moves dynamically and in a sentient way, adapting to conditions, nutrients, warnings, water and even electrical impulses travel through this underground web our energy, the energy that we offer to the land that we live on, also moves through this web.

A dying tree may release its stored carbon into the network, which other trees then use to grow and death becomes nourishment, loss becomes a continuity.

And if you were to trace the causal lines here, you'd get lost almost immediately.

There's no single cause of the forests vitality, only relationships and exchanges and feedbacks. There's no single thread or single authority, no king or commander in chief who controls the flow nature's ecosystems are in stark contrast to man's empires.

Life sustains itself through relational intelligence rather than through linear command.

And that, I think, is one of the deeper teachings of this moment on Earth, our dominant culture still clings to linear causality, to the fantasy that we can isolate problems and symptoms and fix them with single solutions.

Climate crisis, let's invent cleaner technology. There's a mental health epidemic. Let's find the right pill.

Ecological collapse? Let's protect few species, but these are symptoms pointing to deeper relational breakdowns, disconnections in the non linear web of cause and effect that sustain life.

The way forward won't be through isolated interventions, but through re weaving relationship within and without when we restore the integrity of the relationships between land and water and land and human and human and non human, and ego and soul healing naturally begins to emerge, not because we caused it, which is the patriarchal savior complex at work, But because we created the conditions for it to emerge.

In complexity science, this is called emergence, the arising of New Order from relational interaction.

It's how flocks of bird move as one without a leader, how culture shifts and evolves through countless subtle choices and conversations. Emergence can't be forced or predicted. It's something that we participate in, not control.

From a spiritual view, emergence is what happens when the unseen patterns become visible, when the potential hidden in the field suddenly takes form.

To the materialist, it's the miracle that seems to appear out of nowhere, but in truth, it was always woven in, waiting for the right conditions.

That's how nature evolves, and it's how we as expressions of nature also evolve.

When you really begin to feel this, not just understand it intellectually, but sense it in your bones, something changes. You stop grasping so tightly, and you begin to trust timing, even when it doesn't make sense. You start to listen for patterns and start to respond instead of trying to control circumstances, you learn to attune to life as a living conversation, rather than as a problem to solve.

And maybe you start to notice how much synchronicity is already present in the background of your days, the universe communicating with you and supporting you and co creating with you, although, in truth, there's no separation between you and the universe, between us and the universe. That's just language, the inner guidance to pull out that particular book from your bookshelf and casually open it up to whatever page to read exactly the thing you needed to know or remember in that moment that may even send you on a journey of learning and discovery and healing. This is the divinatory practice that's known as bibliomancy. And divination itself is the art of participating in and making meaning from this larger conversation that's taking place, or like the phrase that you overhear somewhere that echoes something that you dreamed the night before, the person who appears right when you're ready to see what they mirror back to you.

We could see it as superstition or meaningless coincidence, or we could broaden our vantage points and recognize it as participation, participation in this larger context, the mystery that's constantly unfolding and communing, attuning To and paying attention to the language of synchronicity definitely opens us up to participating in this larger, non linear unfolding.

It's what happens when you recognize that causality at its deepest level is not mechanical, it's relational and alive.

So what does it mean to live this way, to live as though everything is connected, not just in theory as a nice idea, but in an embodied way?

It can start with cultivating awareness of feedback, which means making time and space for pausing and presence and deep listening and offering our sacred attention to life's non verbal communication and to our intuitions guidance.

It could be noticing how your inner state affects your outer environment and how your environment shapes your inner world. It means understanding that tending your nervous system is a way of tending the earth, because calmness and presence and care ripple outward through the collective field, it means sensing that when you heal a relational pattern in yourself, you shift something in The ancestral web that extends beyond linear time.

Every choice, every thought, every act of kindness or cruelty, doesn't just happen. It echoes. And that echo isn't linear.

It spirals through generations, through ecologies, through stories, and none of this is about rigid perfection and beating ourselves and others with the judgment stick we're all still healing from and evolving out of the indoctrinations of empire and colonialism. So let's be gentle and compassionate with ourselves and with each other, and call up playfulness and wonder when we can as we tune into life, because they set in motion a cascade of lovely, beneficial biochemistry in our bodies, and cultivate A spacious capacity in our nervous systems so that we can be in co creative relationship with our larger, ecological and cosmic identities. Nature is always teaching us this, if we know how to listen, when a seed falls to the ground. It doesn't sprout because we command it to or will it to.

It waits. It senses the conditions and waits for moisture and warmth and darkness and time, and then when conditions align, life bursts forth in its own time from a linear view. Again, this may appear miraculous, and there's actually deep value in cultivating the art of beginner's mind and seeing the miracles all around us. The word miracle itself comes from the old French and Latin meaning object of wonder.

But from the nonlinear perspective of nature, it's simply the intelligence of relationship, the right elements meeting in the right moment, which, to me, even from the nonlinear perspective, is just as miraculous and wonder filled, and I feel like that's what we're being called back to right now, that deeper rhythm of soul aligned participation, that trust In life's timing, that humility before the mystery capital M, mystery of interdependence, nonlinear causality is the way of the earth herself. It's how ecosystems regenerate, how storms form and dissolve, how the human heart heals after breaking, and it's how civilizations collapse and new ones emerge. And we can also see it in art, how art is born, or how love begins, or how Revelation shows up unplanned.

It's this reminder that life isn't something that we can diagram.

It's something that we're inside of. Life is doing us, and the more that we honor that the more we can move with its currents.

So if you happen to find yourself at some point, maybe now, at some point in your life, in a season where nothing makes sense, where your efforts seem scattered or unrewarded, and your path feels unclear, your outcomes feel unpredictable.

Maybe this is the invitation to trust that life is moving you and moving through you in nonlinear ways. And the main work that we're called to do at times like this, and really at all times is to be present and to tune in and to listen and to trust that guidance and to respond and respond in alignment with your body's resonance and dissonance your intuitions, pings and nonsensical pushes and pulls in this way or that way.

It's to trust that the work that you've been doing, even if it's invisible inner work, is gathering force beneath the surface and to trust that one day without warning, the forest floor will bloom.

This is how nature works, and you are nature too. We are nature.

The biggest wound of patriarchy and of empire is our collective cultural enforced forgetting of that fundamental truth that we are nature and all of the existential meaninglessness and isolation and addictive behaviors that that brings language, to a very large extent, creates our meanings. And our meanings create our experience. And in the English language, we have literally relegated nature as something external to us. This is how the Cambridge Dictionary defines nature, 

"all the animals, plants, rocks, etc, in the world, and all the features, forces and processes that happen or exist independently of people, such as the weather, the sea, mountains, the production of young animals or plants and growth"

 nature exists independently of people.

There's so much that could be said on how that creates our experience as humans in this world, including this normalized, pervasive existential meaninglessness that's so endemic in our culture, not to mention how this idea that nature exists independently of people flies in the face of indigenous Wisdom and indigenous science, and maybe gives just a tiny bit of a clue as to why this unsustainable post industrialized culture is where it's at right now, on the verge of collapse. But I think for now, I'll leave it with asking you to radically reject the false meaning that we are separate from nature, the meaning that we have been indoctrinated with unconsciously in our culture and through our culture, and that has infiltrated our cultural consciousness.

We are nature, the body can feel the truth of this.

When we can begin to have an embodied experience of this truth and live inside the awareness of nonlinear causality, we begin to feel less alone because we sense the vast web of relationship the that we are inherently a part of, and we see that our lives are not isolated little stories, but living threads in a much larger tapestry, and that our joy and our grief and our healing and our art, all of it, contributes to the collective field of becoming and emergence.

And that everything, everything, participates in shaping everything else, not in a straight line, but in a living spiral, in a Holy entanglement, which is the way of Nature herself. You

thank you for being here and for listening as always. If this episode has evoked something in you, or stirs something in you, a memory, an image, a sense of recognition. I invite you to sit with it and let it ripple through your own web of meaning and resonance.

And as always, I would love to hear from you if you have questions and reflections, ways to connect are in the show notes of this episode.

And also, I am collaborating with three amazing, wise, brilliant women on the first of hopefully, what will be many more online events to help us navigate through these wild and paradigm shifting times. And it's called stewarding the emergent. And it's going to be free or donation based. It's happening on December the 10th, and I'll be sharing more about that and the link to register in upcoming newsletters and podcast episodes. So stay tuned until next time.

May your path unfold in its own wild, non linear rhythm, and may you trust the intelligence of your becoming, and may you always remember that you are a part of this living web.