BEING AT CAUSE VS BEING THE EFFECT
What often gets our attention and then our reaction are events that are the dramatic effects of that which was launched before. We react to the effect and as a result, we become an effect. When things bother us, we are being affected by essentially............ effects. It's like trying to respond to the cracking of a whip at the point at which the sound of the crack is made. Misplaced focus coming too late. It's like trying to make the changes in our society by whom we elect for office. The circumstances are an effect and we lose our ability to be at cause by just reacting to them. In his great novel, War and Peace, Lev Tolstoy (my son was named after him) stresses the point that leaders are just the "outcropping" of the collective cultural consciousness. And in case you didn't get the point in the novel, he writes an essay to this same "effect" at the end of the book. So what would it mean to be at Cause? First, to recognize that we are a...