What Causes The Cause-And-Effect Thing?

BIMBO CABIDOG

Life is experienced through change. It reflects things or phenomena, coming and going, in a flux. Each state turns to another. The continuum of change defines existence.

Work defines a human being. The dog barks. That’s what a dog is. Each of those actions and motions manifests change continuously repeated from beginning to end.

The philosopher says that nothing is permanent. Deeds, situations and conditions pass. Being, now, turns to its opposite later. Thesis and antithesis, Hegel declared, lead to synthesis.

The world turns. Evening turns to day. Stormy weather becomes fine next. Turbulence lapses into calm. In the same way that no one remains happy all the time, suffering and oppression go.

The glory and the golden age of empires recede to shameful disgrace. Strong rule crumbles. The castle that towered for an age goes the way of its builders’ fate. On its once proud halls, decay sets in.

The old gives way to new, which gets old afterwards. Ending for one is beginning of another, which also ends later.  But through all these, life advances, finds new horizons, climbs another level.

How short is the time of man! Boast of his dominion and superiority stumbles on the truth that other spans of existence beyond his little dwelling place are in millions of years.

The moonlit and starry night was already there billions of years before the first Homo sapiens appeared 150 millennia ago. They will still be there when the last civilized dude is gone.

But why be obsessed with the matter of time? Yes, men enslave themselves to it. But what if they find out that time has really no existence of its own. One day, the concept of time may not even be remembered.

Nothing is constant except change. But something in every coming and going is not change itself. It drives change, as a physical law converts energy to mass, mass to energy, on and on.

What keeps the sun shining and seating day by day? Or what makes the earth keep on rotating from east to west every 24 hours? Science has all sorts of explanations that men hold to be true and inviolable. But it also may be possible that scientific explanations long held as truth aren’t exactly true.

They base on patterns for one, but patterns are being proven now to be unreliable in making conclusion, simply because they are themselves subject to change. Trust only what is actually happening.

A simplistic way to know the driving force behind change is to find out how it happened. If there is smoke, there must be fire. Change as an effect surely must have come from a cause. But ultimately, it will be asked: what causes the cause-and-effect thing?

Does reality happen because of human preference or cosmic influence? Does it care about moral standpoints, religious perspectives or political persuasions, whatever they are?

Cause-and-effect reality is tricky. But change doesn’t owe to any expectation. It is what it is, not in conformity to someone’s judgment of good or bad. It owes only to the force, and that force is life.