The Great Law

We’re at the beach. Splashes of lavender and pink begin to color the sky. Then that big orange ball drops out of sight. It looks like it’s dropped into the sea.

Oh, the sun is setting, we say. But the sun isn’t setting. It’s standing still. We’re spinning away from it at a thousand miles an hour.

There’s more to life than what we think, more than we can see with our eyes. Some things are true whether we see and believe them or not. Things aren’t always as they appear.

There’s an old story circulating in writers’ circles. It’s about a writer who lived in the outer regions of Alaska a long time ago. One day he decided to take a journey to a place called New York. He made the trip, then came back to his people. He wanted to tell them everything he had seen: “They have skyscrapers. Airplanes. Vehicles that go very fast and don’t need dogs to pull them. Things that you can’t imagine or comprehend I have seen.”

The people in his hometown pooh-poohed him. They couldn’t imagine it, so they thought he was lying, making it all up. The writer took another trip to New York. When he came back this time, he used a different approach.

“It’s okay there,” he said. “They have a couple roads and it’s a little warmer. No big deal.”

Well, when he said this all the people oohed and aahed. He had told them something they could comprehend, something their minds could take in, something that was palatable and digestible enough for them to believe.

If someone told us we could have the life of our dreams by harnessing our gift of free will, we’d laugh them off. At least, I know I would. It would be more than I could believe.

If someone came along and told us we could make our lives a little bit better by thinking about the choices we made each day and then using our gift of free will to steer a slightly different course, we’d probably agree.

So, by understanding the law of cause and effect and the power you have to choose, you can improve your life a little bit.

But the truth is, you can change things a lot.

“Meldid, come with me,” my Tibetan guide, Lami, said toward the end of my trip to Tibet. (He couldn’t say Melody, so he called me Meldid instead.)

He dragged me through dug-up city streets into a monastery in Lhasa. Three monks were sitting on cushions in the corner. Another monk was helping a woman, probably in her thirties, shake a container of sticks until some of the sticks wiggled out and fell onto the floor.

The container of sticks reminded me of a large version of Pick Up Sticks, a children’s game I used to play.

“What’s she doing?” I asked Lami.

“Shhh. Watch carefully,” he said. “She’s having her fortune told.”

The monk looked solemnly at the way the sticks had fallen, then led the woman to the corner, to the cluster of fortune-telling monks.

“Tibetan scriptures contain both knowledge and wisdom,” Lami said. “They hold all information for everything in our world—past, future, and present—from how to build an airplane to what to do about a problem with a child.

“From the way her sticks fell, the monks will pick a scripture. That verse will answer her question.”

I can only guess what question the woman asked the monks. She looked weighted down, concerned, sad. Was her relationship going to work? Were her finances going to improve? Was her child going to be okay? Was someone she trusted betraying her now or would he or she do it again? Was an ill family member or friend going to recover or die? Was her own health going to improve? Was life going to bring her more of what she wanted and less of what she didn’t, or would it be the other way around?

Whatever the monks told her about her fate didn’t make her feel better. They consoled her, but she looked sadder and more distraught when she left.

Now it was my turn to see what the scriptures had to say.

I shook the container of sticks. Then the monks talked to Lami, chattering in a language I didn’t understand. Lami turned to me.

“The scriptures say it is very important that you do only what you choose.”

I rolled the words around in my head several times. Did the monks mean I had carte blanche, an open ticket to life? Did they mean I shouldn’t surrender my free will to anyone but God? Oh, I get it, I thought later, still mulling over those words. I can do whatever I want. Anyone can. But that wasn’t what they meant.

The monks were saying, “Honor the gift of free will, and be aware of the Great Law of Cause and Effect.”

For every action force there is a corresponding reaction force which is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. Sir Isaac Newton identified the law, but it doesn’t apply just to the world of science. It applies to our behaviors and choices and the spiritual realm, too.

We don’t just get our choice; we get the consequence that choice creates.

Sometimes the choices we make are inconsequential. They create no significant results one way or the other. We go to bed at nine o’clock or ten. No big deal. But most of the choices we make don’t affect just us; they create consequences that affect other people too.

There’s a ripple effect, like dropping a pebble into a pond.

In the 1960s a mathematician and meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, made a discovery that wasn’t new: no matter how hard they tried, the best meteorologists couldn’t accurately predict the weather. This wasn’t because there was unexplained chaos taking place in the atmosphere and the world. The unpredictable nature of things was due to forces that either couldn’t be seen or that people had overlooked. These small causes could stop a storm that was brewing or create one that wasn’t foreseen.

At first Lorenz thought it took a seagull flapping its wings to create a ripple in the weather pond. Then he changed his theory to what is now popularly known as the Butterfly Effect.

If enough butterflies in China flapped their wings, that flapping could eventually create turbulence that would cause a storm in the United States. There was order in the world. But we couldn’t always see that order because there were more causes and effects taking place than we could see with our eyes and understand with our minds.

Given enough time to garner force, the smallest causes could evolve and create a big effect—interfering with or changing what was observable and what we predicted was going to occur.

Sometimes it’s easy to see what causes what. Other times we look around, scratch our heads, and say, “What caused that?”

The answer may not be in plain view, but it’s simple. Whether we see it or not, a force occurred that created it. Somewhere way far away a butterfly flapped its wings.

Small decisions—sometimes with predictable consequences and sometimes seemingly inconsequential—can alter our fate and the destiny of the world. One choice with enough butterflies flapping their wings thrown in can be the gateway to heaven or hell.

With so much riding on our choices, why doesn’t someone just tell us the right thing to do and which choices to make? Why doesn’t someone just hit us over the head with a stick when we do something wrong and drop a cookie in our laps when we do right? Why can’t we immediately foresee the result of each decision we make?

“If we lived in a world where the effects of negative action were immediately manifested as pain and suffering, the element of choice would disappear from our lives,” wrote Michael Berg in The Way.

We’d be like trained monkeys trying to get the cookie or avoid the stick.

Cause and effect—and the illusion of space in between—safeguards our gift of free will.

This section contains stories that illustrate how the Great Law of Cause and Effect works. As you read the stories about choices people have made, don’t just feel how it feels to be them. We may say we’re connected to everything and everyone in this world, but we can’t connect to the world around us unless we first connect to ourselves.

Remember, there’s more to life than what we think.

Feel how it feels to be you.

From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter

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