ACTION AND REACTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume 78, Issue 24102, 22 October 1941, Page 4

ACTION AND REACTION

"Every action produces fruit which has to be eaten," according to a welltried Buddhist doctrine, notes a writer in the News-Letter. This doctrine has striking correspondences with the concept of modern physics which defines Action as energy multiplied by time. This multiple—the extension of still cosmic will into a fourth dimension, or the marriage of force and time, gives biijih to radiation whose waves can take shape either as Mind or as Matter, both having their being equally in electrically charged particles functioning as semiautonomous fragments of the eternal "Logos" named in the first chapter of prompted to make personal use of your time, so will you bear fruit which you cannot escape eating, but. the Buddhist adds, the spirit in which the fruit is eaten depends 011 the individual himself, and he is thus free to implant the seed of new actions. In other words, pre-determined though each action may seem in retrospect to have been at the moment of performance, the most important determinant cause was the individual's free choice of mental attitude —humble or proud, courageous or self-pitying, penitent or rebellious — toward the consequences of some previous action. To those who believe that mental attitudes themselves are purely dependent on bodily or environmental circumstances there will appear to be a logical flaw in this sequence of reasoning, but the more one studies the motives actuating the human mind, whether that of savage or of philosopher. the more evident is. it that its most valuable faculty is an unknown quantity or divine spark not subject to the three-dimensional science of logic.