I'll Pass on that Portion of Blame, Thank You

Causality, action and consequence, can help us to understand why good people have bad things happen to them. With the right conditions causes will mature as consequences. Very often the cause and the consequence do not occur in the same lifetime. So while causality assures us that there was a cause, we usually don’t know what it was. We just see the consequence.

We learn the principle of causality not to be able to blame the person who is suffering from their negative consequences. Blame should never enter our minds. Why? Because we’ve done terrible things ourselves so we’re in no position to throw stones. Second, blaming does nothing to solve the problem or improve the future.

This is especially important when we learn of an abusive situation. Both the abuser and the abused are caught up in an extremely complex karmic chain of events that we—and they—are unaware of.

Seeking to punish, we will not be able to rehabilitate and educate both parties. And without rehabilitation and education, this cycle of violence will continue. And having planted our own negative seeds in angrily wanting punishment, we will have laid the groundwork for our own suffering in the future.