You are awareness, the phenomenon of knowing arising due to your constituent cause and conditions, you become your actions and you continue in the effect of your intentional actions before or after death. This is naturally self-evident like pain, disease, old age or death.

You continue in the effect of your own actions, whether tangible or intangible. For your own good, you should live in a right manner, act in a right manner and leave the right effect through your intentional actions for your own good or for the good of what you value.

However, due to ignorance, you may live in a wrong manner, you may perform wrong actions, and you may wrongly impact yourself and your ecosystem through your intentional actions.

Wrong Effect of Intentional Actions Due to Ignorance

Due to self-ignorance, you may believe yourself to be eternal immortal inner self or spirit independent of your constituent cause and conditions. By believing that you are eternal immortal self that can continue intact after death, you may believe in life after death. As inner self, you may believe in past birth and next birth or after life.

Eternal immortal reality of inner self or inner being independent of constituent cause and conditions is your hallucination or imagination and has no real existence except in your fantasy due to self-ignorance. The effects of your intentional actions are your continuity after your death. You are born in the effect of your intentional actions, for example, your children, the ideas you institutionalize in the society, your contribution to your ecosystem, etc.

You Continue in Your Effect

You are awareness, the phenomenon of knowing arising due to your indispensable constituent cause and conditions including processes of life. You become your action, you continue in the internal and external effect of your tangible and intangible intentional actions. This is how you attract the consequences of your actions and effect of your actions just like, as classically said, “calf attracted to its mother”. You create your internal and external ecosystem through effect of your intentional actions.

For example, if you create a weapon for a wrong reason, it is more likely to end up in battlefield and get destroyed; however, if you plant a fruit tree for right reason, it is more likely to attract life or if you create a kitchen knife, it will end up in a kitchen rather than get destroyed on the battlefield. Right motives and right actions give rise to right effect and finds place in right ecosystem.

The effects of your action will find its destiny just as water, air, earth, and heat find their destiny in the endless recycling of nature and universe. The way you live and act in the present will determine the future of the effects of your actions. A good present contributes positively to a good future regardless of your beliefs in eternal spirit with life after death or next birth.

The way you live, act and effect, has to be right for you and for others. You have a choice to make regarding how to live, what actions to take and what impact to leave.

Impermanence Through Endless Recycling

But even the effect of your actions is neither eternal nor permanent. Nothing is permanent. Everything dies or changes, disintegrates, disperses and gets endlessly recycled through the law of impermanence.

Just like a wave of water settles and disintegrates into different waves, so also you disintegrate and continue after death as multiple varied effects of your intentional actions. Nothing continues intact and nothing is permanent in the endless recycling of life, society, nature and universe.

Hence you should be detached in order to be happy with the impermanence, act ethically and effect benevolently.

Actions by individual and the effect of those actions stay in the ecosystem of which they are a part. Hence society should encourage ethical life and benevolent actions for a benevolent impact.