CAUSE AND EFFECT

By Jorge D. Lomboy
March 15, 2016



A cause is a reason for an action or condition.  It is a motive or something that brings about an effect or a result.  It may be a person or thing that is the occasion of an action or a state, especially an agent that brings something about.  A cause is a ground of legal action, a principle or movement militantly defended or supported.  To effect means to bring about something that inevitably follows a cause, an antecedent, an accomplishment, a fulfillment or, in medical terms, a side-effect. The word effect goes beyond its verbal meaning as it refers to actual achievement of the final result.  The law of cause and effect presupposes that nothing happens without a cause, that every cause produces an effect and that every action has an opposite reaction.

Accidents don’t just happen, they are caused.  All life long we have been scanning the sources of peace at a personal level, the level of each of us working with our hearts and our minds.  We take turns fighting for the cause of peace here and abroad in an embattled world of troubles and problems, of trials and tragedies, of fortunes and misfortunes.  No matter what we do it is clear that however we work with our hearts and minds, peace is in a twilight zone and never came to us in a crystal ball.  Cause and effect will forever impact our lives, our future and our destiny on this planet.  So whatever we do today,tomorrow and every day of our lives, we sow the seeds of our own future in this lifetime and sow the seeds for the future of this planet.  The search for peace is a good cause but with war and peace the effect is transcending insecurity.  The Buddhist teachings on karma make it easy for us to understand the workings of cause and effect.

The word karma means the force generated by a person’s actions held in Hinduism and Buddhism to perpetuate transfiguration and in its ethical consequences to determine the nature of a person’s next existence.  From the writings of Pema Chodron, karma put very simply tells us that each moment in time, whether in our personal lives or in our life together on earth, is the result of our previous actions.  According to Buddhist teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we have sown for hundreds of years over the course of many lifetimes.  It is also the case that the seeds you have sown yesterday have their results in your own life today.  And the seeds that the United States has sown in the last year, the last five years, the last fifty years, the last hundred years and so forth, are having an impact on the world right now.  And not just what the United States has sown but all the countries that are involved in the world situation today, being as painful as it is.  We have been sowing the seeds for a long time.  I know many of us feel a kind of dissolution about whether all this can ever unwind itself.

You reap what you sow, I reap what I sow.  We reap what we sow, we harvest what we plant and every nation reaps what it sows.  This biblical message is going to happen at the level of individuals working with their own minds because even if these tumultuous times and convoluted events are the result of seeds that have been sown and reaped by whole nations, these nations of course are made up of millions of people who, just like ourselves, want happiness.  By karma, Buddhist teachings also say that the seeds of our present day actions will bear fruit hundreds of years from now.  This may seem like an impossible lifetime to wait but if you think in terms of sowing seeds for your children’s future and your grandchildren’s future and your grandchildren’s grandchildren’s future, perhaps that is more real and immediate to you.  Karma reinforces the scriptural passage that we reap what we sow.  Before man we are held responsible for the effects of our own words and actions and before God we will answer on how well we have thought and acted while in the body.  The words we speak and the things we do are the causes that produce effects, they are the seeds we sow that bear fruit someday, somewhere, sometime.

Cause and effect impact every person’s life both directly and indirectly.  It is having an effect on the social conditions happening in our neighborhoods, our communities and our society in general.  It is the driving force behind every mission, every movement and every endeavor.  It persists in a multi-cultural, multi-racial and multi-national society brought forth by freedom with enormous diversity.  The rich want to live in peace but without security peace is an empty shell.  Insecurity has driven the rich to become greedy and the effect is misery to the rest of us.  The poor struggle to live in peace but without justice peace is vain.  Injustice has driven the poor to defy authority, break laws and commit crimes, and the effect is tragedy to the rest of society.  While the rich are obsessed with security, the poor are obsessed with justice.  This illustrates cause and effect.

The effect of greed and the effect of injustice are the bottlenecks in finding stabilizing solutions to peace.  Greed and injustice are the primary causes of man’s inhumanity to man.  To the rich, no peace is meaningful without security.  To the poor, no peace would be comforting without justice.  The very affluent will never be happy without security.  And the very destitute will never be happy without justice.  I have no doubt that the rich and the poor alike want to pursue that cause of peace and live in harmony but find themselves on opposite sides because greed caused by insecurity and injustice caused by greed are a deadly mixture.  There is nothing wrong with anyone struggling for security but it is wrong to tolerate greed and wrong to tolerate injustice for the sake of security.

The most enduring of all struggles in human history is the cause of equality.  The Constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.  Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.  The struggle for equality in America is the struggle for America ’s soul.  The ugliness of inequality stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America .  Equality means simply that no handicap is imposed by society upon any ethnic group or anyone of foreign descent to prevent them from realizing the best that is in them.  The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the scope of equality enjoyed by its minorities.  When white, black, brown and every other color decide that they are going to treat each other equally by meeting on the level and parting by the square, then and only then are we going to see the workings of cause and effect in the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God.

We don’t need to look beyond our borders to recognize the terrible impact of cause and effect in our lives.  We run the risk of feeling insecure due to uncertain times and unstable conditions.  We are witnessing right here and now a progressive retrogression in our relationships with one another and a growing distrust in our leaders.  The government shutdown was not accidental, it did not just happen.  It was caused.  It is caused by too much politics, too much power play and too much talk when it is time to act.  The effect of the government shutdown is not only felt on Wall Street alone, it is also seen in the lives of people on Main Street .  Bits and pieces of cause and effect are tied up to me and to every first person.  They speak to you and to every second person, and they follow them and every third person.  The cause I embrace, the cause you pursue and the cause others personify will radiate the effects of what I want to be, what you want to be and what others want to become. They are the indicators of the essence of our being and living.  All outcomes in our lives are determined by the thoughts we keep thinking, the words we keep speaking and the actions we keep doing, summing up the earmarks of cause and effect.