Originally Posted by Terumoto

There you go, trying to name a cause and effect.

Cause: Sex

Was the cause sex? What caused the sex? What caused the cause of the sex? Why wasnt the cause the fertilization of the egg by the sperm?

Effect: Childbirth

Was it? You could say the effect was pregnancy. You could say the effect was a loss of money due to the cost of raising a child.

What cause and effect does, is pick two tiny little parts of a continuous flow, and label one a cause and the other an effect. Sure, maybe the cause is A cause, and the effect is AN effect, but they are not THE cause and effect. We label these things, and then we forget that we did it, and we are left with a puzzle. What is the actual cause, or the actual effect? What makes these events lead to eachother? In reality, we never even had to call events causes or effects in the first place, because there are no seperate events.

Life moves along like water in a river. It is all connected, just as the river is connected to it's mouth and the ocean, and all of the "events" or things going on are like whirlpools in the stream. Because you go there today, and you see a whirlpool. You go there tomorrow, and you see a whirlpool... But it isnt the same whirlpool, because all the water is changing every second. What is happening is not what we should call A whirlpool... It is more like a "whirlpooling," it is an activity, not a thing. In this way, every so called "thing" can be called an event. A house is not a house, its a "housing," a cat is not a cat, its a "catting." We look at a flame and say, there is a flame on top of that candle, when it would be more correct to say there is a "flaming" on top of that candle.

We do not need the idea of causality to describe how a prior event influences a following event, because it just flows.

ANY events cause can be traced back to the beginning of time. Like a child who behaves badly, he might say "well its not my fault, my parents brought me up badly." When you go to the parents they say their parents brought them up badly, and you cant go to hassle the grandparents because theyre dead, but if you could it would trace all the way back to adam and eve eating the fruit in the garden of eden. And you could ask her and she'd say "Oh, it wasnt my fault, the serpent persuaded me to eat the fruit." Then you could go to the serpent and say "Why did you make eve eat that fruit?" ... And he would probably wink. He knows that the present is the cause of everything, and the past does NOT drive the present, if anything, the PRESENT drives the PAST.

In actual life, the idea of cause and effect is useless. It's only use is naming the shallow causes and effects that we pick out of a continous, eventual flow completely arbitrarily.