The four reminders are:
1) Life: How incredibly fortunate we are to be alive and to have the time to develop ourselves spiritually.
2) Death: How this situation will absolutely, positively end. Death comes for all of us. We don’t know when and we don’t know what it will bring.
3) Karma: What comes around goes around - the way we live our life and treat other people affects us.
4) Desire: Accumulating more things, getting more famous, accomplishing great things all in order to build up your identity, is a huge fucking waste of time.
This contemplation is on cause and effect - Karma. The Sanskrit word “karma” really means “action”, which naturally carries with it “result” or lots of results. I’m sure you’ve all heard of “the butterfly effect” from chaos theory, which is the idea that a single tiny event, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in Japan, can cause a tornado in Kansas… not directly of course, but through setting off a chain reaction that would have been impossible to foresee.
“Uncountable causes and conditions” is a frequent phrase in Buddhism, which points to how everything effects everything else in this present moment.
So since everything is interconnected, and since we can’t possibly tie every action to all of its downstream results, we have to be careful, thoughtful, mindful of what we do.
How we treat ourselves, how we treat others, really matters.