Chaos & Effect

“Everything happens for a reason” is a common post event logical deduction that is used to make sense of something that happened, seemingly outside of our control, against our will and expectations but that came to have some kind of effect on our journey through the experience of being alive. 

It is a construct that carry some uncertain suggestions.

1. That there is a reason, a meaning (often of higher nature) to the experience and that this is kept hidden from us. 
2. That this reason is predetermined by some force outside of us (often of higher nature) with which we can’t clearly communicate. 
3. For 2) to be true it would be necessary to admit that we have little to no control of the outcome of our actions and thus questions the suggestion that there should be such a thing as free will.
4. The expression often comes as an explanation based on the will that there is a meaning to our personal existence. 

Ironically, these axioms that lay the ground for the expression become quite contradictory as “everything” includes the moment of the expression and if free will is off the table it suggests that the process wishes to explain its own existence through us to remind itself (?) of its own existence. It would be a feedback loop, which unbeknownst to me at least carry little meaning or reason besides just being an endless echo. 

An alternative way to deduce reason from events that were outside of our control that we later come to make sense of could be to say “Everything happens” and its reason for happening is a chain of events, a natural process of cause and effect that is always moving towards equilibrium, to keep things in balance. There is nothing personal about it, you just happen to be a part of it, the expression of life. In this sense you are the endless feedback loop, even if your personal experience of it isn’t endless. The problem is that we tend to confuse this universal entropy as something that is happening to us personally and we tend to project our involvement in it as something very important when all we are is but a speck of dust in the context of a highly intelligent harmonic process that is life. Complex and chaotic from our perspective perhaps, which is probably why we comfort ourselves with expressions such as “everything happens for a reason” or “life doesn’t happen to us it happens for us”. Both suggesting that the planets revolve around us, for us, and that our existence is a path to unveil the purpose of they would do so. Life happens through us, we are nothing but fortunate to get a glimpse of it for a relatively short time. As for purpose, there is nothing else in life’s nature than to express itself and you are that expression, for now, and so is everything else around you.  

If we can come to terms and realize the difference between being an expression of life and the experience of being alive it becomes easier to see how far free will actually stretches. We stand quite incapacitated to change the causes and effects that is the natural process of life, not that we haven’t made one hell of an effort to ignore this in attempting to bend the world to our will. But the consequence of these actions is not us taking control of the process, it is merely just challenging the scales that strive towards keeping things in balance to the point where it now seems almost irreversible to restore harmony with us as a part of it. 

This is what happens in the confusion, that while wanting to change our experience of being alive we instead try to change the process of life expressing itself. 

If we are a speck of dust in the infinite context of universal entropy, our free will is but a fragment of that speck of dust, and yet in the context of how we receive the experience free will reigns autonomously. Free will could be described as the liberty to explore our experience in harmony within the limitations that life gives us. The limitations stretches no further than our physical attributes and the time that we are blessed to experience them. It is true that our mind can reach further than our body but in our interaction with the environment around us the transmission will always be physical motion (technology has faded this reach and by the use of tools we, since very early on, learned how to extend our minds intention further than our physical periphery).

Will, different to want, is not the entitlement to “do as we desire”. Want leads to a pursuit of personal pleasure, where the “why” leads to a “what”.  While will, the volition of acting, is more about the “how” we walk the path, whatever the pursuit may be. The freedom that lies in “how” we direct our actions is only restricted to the point of “no choice” under very rare circumstances and outside of those situations there is always choice i.e free will of how to act. The why, in this case is nothing but an abstract story that in itself also becomes a feedback loop that we often get caught in but actually carries no inherent meaning. Another saying that explains this is “Action speaks louder than words” where the how of the what is concrete while the explanation, argument, or the Why is abstract construct. 

So, yes things happen for a reason, there’s always a cause to an effect. The process of life is a constant domino game that just goes on as an expression in itself. The way that  it affects us is not personal, life or the universe is not “out to get us” it doesn’t have a divine plan that we are supposed to figure out. The experience of it though might feel very personal but it is within our capacity to use what we have to receive this experience in a way that serves our nature. Often, in my experience, when the expression “everything happens for a reason” is used it points to an event that we found significant. Something unexpected that happened outside of our control and unintentionally but that touched our experience, perhaps threw us off balance, knocked us down or at least just slightly nudged us enough to witness the appearance of things from a new perspective. If you decide there is reasoning to be found within that, congratulations; your mind is fully functioning and your narrator still on the job. Just be careful and don’t confuse reason with meaning.