Every single thing that happens on this planet has a cause and an effect whether the thing that happens is naturally created or artificially created by human beings. There is a reason why something happens and there is a logical explanation for the effect of the thing that happened.

If a hurricane hits your house, there is a logical meteorological explanation for why the hurricane formed and the track that it took. Meteorology is the human attempt at not only predicting weather, but also explaining why it happens. Meteorology attempts to explain the causes and effects of weather.

Science in a more general sense, attempts to explain the cause and effect nature of our planet. By understanding those causes and effects, we can better understand how the planet works. Ultimately, that helps us to adapt to our continually changing planet.

At a much smaller scale, individual human experience is also a process of cause and effect. If you get into a fight with somebody, there was an original cause for the argument. Human story tends to place blame, however cause and effect doesn’t look for blame, it looks for the original cause and asks whether or not the effect is logical.

If somebody cuts me off in traffic and I get mad, does my anger make logical sense? It might. What was the original reason the person cut me off? Do we have access to that information? No. Can we see the full structure of cause and effect in this scenario? No.

For the most part, people don’t see the full structure of cause and effect that is running underneath the experiences they have. Because they don’t have access to that, the gap gets filled with human story. We make up reasons why things happen to fill in the missing information.

In the case of being cut off in traffic, there is an underlying cause for why the person drives the way they do. We’re only seeing the effect of those experiences through that person’s immediate perceivable actions. We don’t have the whole story. The full chain of cause and effect remains unknown.

Why does that matter?

It separates the effect of the story we tell about the experience from the effect of the experience itself.

When we narrate an experience, it has a mental and emotional effect. It makes us feel something. That feeling generates more narrative explanations. With more narrative explanations comes more feelings.

The experience itself also generates feelings. But humans naturally add to those feelings through narration and story.

Back to being cut off in traffic. The experience itself was very minor and, assuming no accident, no harm was done. Where does the anger we feel come from?

Mostly narration and story.

The story of how somebody “should” drive. The story of right and wrong. The frustration at having to hit the brakes quickly.

We don’t have access to the original chain of cause and effect that turned into cutting people off in traffic. We only have access to the action we perceived. Because of that limited access to information, we instead narrate the story about how people are rude and need to learn to drive.

All experience functions in this way. Whatever the event is that you’re experiencing or witnessing, it has a much longer cause and effect chain running underneath it. Nothing ever happens in isolation.

Cause and effect is not subject to our opinion of it. The hurricane doesn’t care that you don’t want it to hit your house. And your preferred outcome is not taken into account as the hurricane moves along its path. The same is true with most experience.

When you go to a restaurant, there is a huge chain of cause and effect in place for the restaurant to exist, for the waiter or waitress that is serving your food to be there, for the money it took to buy the food you ate, for you to have a car to get to the restaurant, and for all the other cars and things you passed along the way to the restaurant. All of those things create their own cause and effect chains. There are literally millions of cause and effect chains in place just so you could go have one meal in a restaurant. The only thing any of us really care about is whether or not the food we ate was good.

Think about that for a second.

Millions of chains of cause and effect and the only thing most people care about is their immediate experience of that restaurant. A tiny sliver of the entire cause and effect chain is the point of focus that creates the narration of the experience.

Most people dismiss all of this when something goes wrong. “It’s not my problem.”

Why does it get dismissed? Because if they had to acknowledge all the other things, the story would seem selfish and petty. So to maintain the story we dismiss the vastness of cause and effect that creates every individual experience we have as something that isn’t ours to deal with.

Every single human being does this every single day. It is not unique. It is not only selfish, petty people. It is everybody, including me.

We have been taught that the most important thing is whatever is happening in front of us in the moment, to the exclusion of almost everything else.

Writing the framework taught me to expand my view from the sliver of whatever was happening to the vastness of how I got there in the first place. There is an entire chain of cause and effect that I am completely unaware of, that I can no longer just dismiss as not my problem, and that I must consider when deciding how to respond to what’s happening in my life.

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It is not based on religion, morality, spirituality, or any other existing belief system. It does not prescribe outcomes nor does it determine right and wrong. It works on the neutral idea that if there is a cause there will be an effect. I can talk and you can ignore me. The cause is me saying something. The effect is being ignored. Both things are neutral when they exist outside of human perception and belief.

Human perception is the thing that makes any cause and effect non-neutral. Hurricanes don’t have opinions but they can cause significant problems for the people they affect. The hurricane is a neutral part of nature until it is perceived by or impacts a human being.

The framework is not designed to correct or change our perception of experience. It attempts to identify how and where human narrative, explanation, belief, or meaning-making overlay the experience. How do those things affect the natural sequence of cause and effect already in motion?

The framework identifies a sequence of cause, effect, awareness, and choice that every human being uses to interpret and interact with their experience.

1. The cause is the event itself.

2. The effect is the automatic internal thoughts and feelings a person has in response to their experience. These are not under our conscious control.

3. The awareness is the first moment the conscious mind allows us to process our experience.

4. The choice is what we do based on our awareness of and the effect of the cause.

New chain sequences interact with every other existing chain sequence. The framework refers to this as Relational Loop Theory. Nothing happens in isolation. Our awareness and choice are affected by beliefs, previous experience, current experience, mood and stress levels. Those things are pre-existing causal chains or sequences that affect how we perceive the new chain.

There is no judgment of whether the chain should or should not exist. Every event has a cause. The effect of that cause is logical when the cause is understood through a neutral lens. Logical effects are not the same as wanted effects. What people want and don’t want is based on human emotion and preference.

Our preferred outcome has no effect on the outcome of the causal sequence. A hurricane doesn’t care that you don’t want it to hit your house. The outcome of the hurricane is logical given existing weather patterns, water temperature, and so on. The logical outcome is not always preferred, but it is logical in the context of cause and effect.

Every single experience across human history, when looked at through this lens, can be explained logically. It doesn’t make those experiences any more or less horrific, it just separates the cause and effect sequence from the human interpretation of it.

Unlike most existing belief systems, trauma is not left outside the system as an anomaly. Human life shows us that trauma is just part of the human experience, therefore it can and should be explained through cause and effect. When the cause is traumatic it slows down the sequence.

1. The cause is the event itself.

2. The effect is the automatic thoughts, feelings, or physical effects that occur. This could be a fight or flight response, post-traumatic stress disorder, or other emotional, mental, or physical effects or injuries. All of these things are outside of our conscious control.

3. Awareness is the first opportunity for conscious thought. However, if there are lasting emotional, mental, or physical effects, our awareness is delayed or not available at all.

4. Choice is delayed until awareness is restored.

The chain essentially hangs or pauses until awareness and choice are available. An example of this would be somebody in an abusive relationship for years that decides, seemingly out of the blue, to leave. Awareness and choice stalled until the person gained just enough awareness that allowed them to make the choice to leave.

Awareness only needed to be present briefly for the person to make a conscious choice. The chain will pause until the person does so or until life ends, whichever happens first.

Most of us have chains that are paused or hanging because we don’t have the mental awareness or ability to deal with them. We have experiences in our lives that we have been unable to work through. That is a paused or hung chain because awareness is not yet available. No choice has been made.

Those stalled chains continue to effect present experience. Just because we’re not acting on a given chain, doesn’t mean it’s not having an effect. We think we’re isolating it because in some cases we’re just ignoring it, but in truth it continues to affect our every day life. Ignored chains can and do impact other chains.

Every single experience we have creates a chain that is impacted by other already existing chains. Chains are opened and closed depending on experiences and outcomes. The framework fully explains how causal chains work and how human interpretation, belief, and meaning-making affect those chains.

These are the fundamental concepts of the The Philosophy of Integration framework. What will follow in subsequent posts is a shorter, more accessible explanation of the framework for those that are curious but don’t want a new project.

You can find the entire framework here.

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This site is home to The Philosophy of Integration — a public framework exploring cause, effect, responsibility, and coherence.

You’ll find the framework itself, ongoing writing on Substack, and a small shop for live seminars, short reads, and tools.

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