"Every cause has its effect; every effect has its cause; everything happens according to law."
The sixth Hermetic principle. Nothing happens by chance. What we call chance is merely a name for causes we cannot see or have not traced — a gap in knowledge, not a gap in law. Every event stands in an unbroken chain, each effect the cause of the next, the whole cosmos running on lawful connection from top to bottom.
The Hermetic twist is that the chain runs across planes. Higher planes of causation can govern lower ones, and most people live as effects — carried along by causes set in motion by heredity, environment, suggestion, and the moods of others, mistaking this drift for their own will. The teaching is to rise, in the Kybalion's phrase, "to a higher plane" and become a cause rather than merely an effect: not to escape the law, which is impossible, but to move up the chain and act upon the lower planes instead of being acted on by them. This is the philosophical root of intentional practice — choosing to be a cause.
Why It Matters to Kenneth
The principle is the quiet argument behind every discipline Kenneth returns to. A library rewritten sixteen times, a drum part played ten thousand times, a route walked daily for a year — these are all refusals to be a passive effect, deliberate causes set into practice until the practice returns something the drift never could. Creative Work is cause-and-effect chosen on purpose: staying with a thing long enough to become the cause of what it becomes.
It also sharpens the Algorithm Eats critique. Engagement optimization works by keeping users on the effect side of the chain — reacting, scrolling, carried by causes designed elsewhere. To recognize the pattern is the first move up a plane; to design differently, the For Humans way, is to hand the causal position back to the person instead of harvesting their effects.
Related
- Hermeticism — the tradition and the other six principles
- The Principle of Mentalism — the mind that acts as cause
- Karma — the Eastern law of cause and effect across lives
- Creative Work — being a cause through patient practice
- Algorithm Eats — systems that keep users on the effect side
- For Humans — design that returns the causal position to the person