Having established that something exists, the series takes its second step: everything created is simultaneously a cause and an effect.
Not one or the other, depending on where you look. Both, always.
The chain
The examples are deliberately mundane. A tree becomes a house — the tree was the effect of its own causes and is now the cause of the house. Rain feeds the ocean, which produces the evaporation that becomes rain.
Nothing in the created world is only a beginning or only an ending. Every link is both, which is what makes it a chain rather than a series of separate events.
Thoughts are causes too
The extension to the mental world is where this stops being physics and becomes the foundation of everything else in the system.
Thoughts and actions are causes in the same sense: they produce real effects, and those effects shape what you subsequently experience. Not metaphorically — the same principle operating in a different medium.
That is the whole basis of karma. Karma is not an additional law layered on top of cause and effect for moral purposes. It is cause and effect, applied to the mental world and followed across more than one life. Which is why the material keeps insisting karma is not punishment: nobody administers cause and effect.
No first cause
The chain is described as infinite in both directions — no beginning, no end.
This forecloses the oldest question in philosophy by rejecting its premise rather than answering it. A first cause would have to be an effect of nothing, which contradicts the fact just established. The same move made about the chicken and the egg and about eternity: the mistake is looking for a starting point, not picking the wrong one.
The section on the implications of an infinite reality is the philosophically heaviest stretch in the series so far.
What stands outside
The most important section, and the one that connects this fact to the first.
Everything created is subject to cause and effect. The I is not. It is not a link in the chain; it is what the chain is happening to.
That distinction does a lot of work. It is why the being is not simply a product of its history — if the I were an effect of prior causes, there would be nobody there, only the chain running. And it is why karma is educational rather than deterministic: the consequences arrive, and something that is not itself a consequence receives them.
It also explains the structure of the whole system, in which everything observable changes and one unobservable thing does not — the pattern running through the fixed point, zero, and the unmanifested I.
The third fact, announced at the close, is logic and regularity.
Key ideas
- Everything created is simultaneously a cause and an effect — every link in the chain is both.
- Thoughts and actions are causes in the same sense as physical events, producing real effects.
- Karma is not an extra moral law but cause and effect applied to the mental world across lives.
- The chain is infinite in both directions, so a first cause would have to be an effect of nothing.
- The I stands outside the chain — not a link in it, but what the chain is happening to.
Chapters
- Can the mystery of life be solved?
- The second basic fact — cause and effect explained
- Examples in the physical and mental worlds
- Visualising the chain — Martinus' cause and effect symbol
- The eternal "I" — what is beyond cause and effect?
- The philosophical implications of an infinite reality
- Conclusion and next fact — logic and regularity
About this article. It summarises the video above from The Eternal World Picture. The writings of Martinus Thomsen are published by the Martinus Institute.
