Natural Law

All humans seek to live rich and inspired lives.  They seek a healthy body, loving relationships, and inspiration in their daily activities.  But how does one do so?  Should all views on the matter hold equal weight?  Well – yes and no.  It is true that each individual, each unique expression of the divine (please navigate here to explore the spiritual nature of reality if you have not already) has distinct needs for self expression and fulfillment, but there are general principles that apply as well.  These general principles are a result of natural laws just as your capacity to jump in the air is regulated by the natural law of gravity.  For the sake of clarity, we will explore these laws at the varying levels of creation starting at the macrocosm, navigating our way down to the human level.

 

Law is defined as^[1]:

 

something that is fixed or set.

 

In nature, laws are conditions that are fixed or set to varying degrees that regulates the order and expression of reality.  The more transcendent the level of reality (i.e. the higher the spiritual or causal planes of existence), the more fixed the laws are.  The lower in the planes of existence (i.e. the material or effective plane of existence), the less fixed the laws are.  For example, the law of existence explored below is supremely fixed.  There are no varying levels to existence.  On the lower planes of existence, however, “laws” such as gravity appear fixed, but are actually quite variable^[2].  Further down still, “laws” that seem to govern social interaction may seem relatively fixed but have even greater variability.

At the most transcendent level, 5 laws exist that govern all of creation^[3].  Please follow the sourced link to read further descriptions of each law and a variety of sub-topics naturally unfolding from them.

 

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• You Exist
• Everything is Here and Now
• The All is One The One is All
• What You Put Out is What You Get Back
• The Only Constant in The Universe is Change, Except The First 4 Laws.

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The 7 Hermetic Principles below are another, closely related account of natural laws that have more relevance in our 3rd dimensional human experience on Earth^[4].  These laws are traced back to ancient Egypt, and provide the same foundation that pervades all major mystical spiritual traditions throughout the ages (Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Sufism, & Yoga):

 

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• The Principle of Mentalism (you exist)
• The Principle of Correspondence (the all is one…)
• The Principle of Vibration (change)
• The Principle of Polarity
• The Principle of Rhythm (change)
• The Principle of Cause and Effect (what you put out…)
• The Principle of Gender

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With careful observation of nature, you can see all of these laws at work.

 

With the most transcendent implications, the attempt to unify the theory of general relativity and quantum physics gives rise and probability to the fact that time and space are not fixed, objective truths.  They merely exists due to the specific degree and configuration of forces in our material universe currently.  This suggests that all information and potentials within the fractal-holographic universe we live actually exists eternally and simultaneously.  In the grandest scale, that all physical laws that we reliably observe, such as the aforementioned hermetic and modern scientific, can be transcended^{[5, 6]}.

 

You Exist…Everything is Here and Now…The All is One; The One is All…

 

However, within our experience as humans on Earth within the 3rd dimension these reliably observed physical laws become relevant.  We observe that all phenomenon are simply physicalized vibrations of frequency.  Furthermore, the nature of vibration displays an inherent rhythm.  This exists within the microscopic level of reality, but do we not also see rhythm in solar patterns, social patterns, and the changing of the seasons?  Newton also most convincingly displayed that every action has an “equal and opposite reaction,” (cause and effect).  And lastly, as is discussed in other places on the site and central to such traditions as Buddhism, the very characteristic of life is movement or change.

 

By choosing to recognize and honor these laws, we can live in greater wisdom, harmony, and joy.  Knowing that the signature of life is change, one does not become excessively attached to it’s conditions.  Knowing that winter follows fall, a wise person prepares.  Knowing that you reap what you sow, a wise person sows great things.

 

But what are great things?  This is where morality comes into the equation.

 

Morality

Morality can become easily misunderstood, and blind adherence to authorities prescribing morality without understanding its foundation in nature has produced many heinous acts in history from ignorant order followers.  But the concept of natural morality is very simple when you return to it’s essence.  Morality is the distinction between good and bad.  These are not arbitrary distinctions but that which is either helpful to a being (good/moral) or harmful to a being (bad/immoral).  As an example, it is good to provide a growing tree with adequate water and sunlight, and it is bad to intentionally deny it of those conditions knowing the harm that it will cause.  However, providing a rock with adequate water and sunlight is neither good nor bad because it does not help or harm it.

With this interpretation, it is easily understood why a person would decide that morality is relative – because it is relatively relative.  Different beings have different needs at different times.  However, this is simply because each scenario has many contextual variables, necessitating subtly different or drastically different actions to be deemed moral.  Yet the criteria that qualifies moral action is the same: choices that are intended to and do help a being or beings.  Stated in another way, moral choices are those that are intended to and do produce syntropy.  Syntropy is the ability and tendency of a system to produce greater order and complexity.  You may be more familiar with it’s antithesis, entropy, the tendency for a system to decline into disorder^[7].

 

So, despite an acts rightness or wrongness being relative when compared to the same act being done in a different situation, every situation has inherently more right and more wrong choices.  It takes discernment, understanding, and wisdom to know within each situation.  As Aristotle would say:

 

Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose.

Please observe the Natural Law Expressions illustration to get better sense of how morality is extracted from nature.

 

What Love Really Is

From this example, you can actually learn what true love is as well.  Like morality, it is not an arbitrary distinction decided upon by the community in which you live.  In it’s purest expression, it is actually often counter to culturally accepted values.  Love is a natural symptom of true knowledge and understanding of the nature of the universe as well as our place within it.  This is true much in the same way that fulfillment is a symptom of the progressive realization of a worthy goal.

 

When you see yourself and divinity in everything, love is a natural expression.  When you understand that morality is behavior that brings order and harmony (syntropy), love become a natural expression.

Establishing Coherence, Joy, and Freedom

Having a firm grasp of the above information gives an individual the necessary foundation to lead a healthy and joyous life.   Yet as was explored in the spirituality section and is further reinforced here, we are all unique divine expressions of the creative force underlying creation.  Our soul, mind, and body are unique configurations of spirit/energy.  Furthermore, the lessons needed for soul growth vary among people.  So to lead the fullest and richest lives possible, it is essential that we express our divinity authentically and gain in the right wisdom.

 

But how can you tell if you are?

 

Everyone has opinions, and popular culture is dominated by illusions and values opposed to natural law.  This is where the internal work of personal transformation comes in.  The alchemists of the middle ages referred to it as the Magnum Opus (the great work), while closer to the modern era Carl Jung described it as individuation.  In this Great Work that is the refinement of the soul, we are given the tools of our thoughts and emotions.  To become fully individuated is to sort through the incoherence of the thoughts/ beliefs we inherited to those that align with Natural Law and our unique divine expression.  We come to know this inner coherence through the integrity of our beliefs and the emotions that we feel.

 

Emotions are discussed regularly in terms of positive and negative without a full disclosure of what those terms mean.  The root word of positive is posit.  Posit means “to assert,” coming from the Latin word positus, meaning “placed, situated, standing, planted.”^[4]  Therefore, something that is positive is something that asserts your unique expression of divinity or is planted firmly in the truth of who you are.  Similarly, a positive reaction to a situation is one that likewise asserts your unique expression.  This positivity yields expression, joy, excitement, and passion.  The root word of negative is negate, which comes from the Latin negare, meaning to “deny, say no.”^[5]  Therefore, something that is negative is something that denies your unique expression of divinity.  The negation of expression is depression.  Thus, prolonged negativity yields depression, fear, and apathy as it’s emotional manifestation.

 

When one lives in harmony with their divine expression they feel excitement, joy, and find their place as a harmonious note within the grand symphony that is the cosmos.   The irony is that most people seek harmony in life by choosing a persona, often at odds with their true expression, to fit within social norms and incessantly attempting to control their life conditions.  To actually create harmony, one must simply be who they are in a state of openness and authentic expression. From this authentic state of being, the right conditions to support us and our intentions will naturally arise.

 

This may seem confusing, so lets look at some examples of how this works.  On an individual basis, we have become well accustomed to the notion of flow in an athlete or artist’s work.  Such practitioners often describe being in a state of openness and receiving in which a performance works through them as if they were a conduit through which a higher will was acting.  Their cognitive, emotive, intuitive, and physical faculties were effortlessly engaged and integrated to produce the most harmonious results from this state of openness and authenticity.

 

This harmony through effortless, authentic expression works on a more collective level as well.  Recollect for a moment the movement patterns of schools of fish or flocks of birds.  With hundreds of members in movement, the entire group can move in unison without disjointedness or collision that would seem to be inadequate when attributed to traditional spatial sensory cues.  New theories have been presented that suggest the individual members are tapping into a form of collective unconscious, similar to Jungian theories, or what the theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldake would call morphic resonance.  In other words, it is suggested that these animals are not making traditionally conscious decisions governing their movement.  When each individual is in their flow state, there is a sort of higher ordering principle producing the harmony we see in their collective movements.  In other words, harmony, like love, is a symptom of authentic expression, both as a member of the species of life one is as well as the unique individual within that species.

 

Don’t we see this at all levels of nature as well?  The ecosystems around our planet are very complex and yet very delicately balanced to maintain the conditions necessary for life.  None of the life forms existing within these systems need to adhere to a certain contrived standard of living or require an authority to enforce such a standard.  By each individual simply spontaneously being who and what they are, order and harmony is reached within the system as a whole.  Again, there seems to be a higher ordering principle at work [please watch the video illustrating Cymatics here if you have not already from the spiritual page].

 

So, returning to the example of your human life, to experience harmony, order, expression, and joy, you must relinquish any desire to organize conditions you believe are suitable for them.  You must know that they are a natural symptom of your authentic expression as an individual.  It is when external conditions are attempted to be controlled that chaos, evil, and disorder arise.  Again, please look at the above Natural Law Expressions diagram.  Doesn’t this now bring the current state of human affairs and the human condition into a new light of clarity?  With the incredible presence of governing bodies and man made laws, the very instruments of control used have created the chaos we observe [please watch this video illustrating spontaneous order vs. centralized control here for further insight].

Where Did We Go Wrong?

It is revealing to know that most ancient mystery traditions and spiritual groups knew and shared the natural laws elaborated on above.  For example, the predecessor to the three Abrahamic faiths today (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) was Zoroastrianism.  The central concept within Zoroastrian teachings is the promotion of truth, justice, and order through “good thoughts, good words, good deeds.”  When one lives rightly, they contribute to the syntropy within creation.  When one lives in lies, deceit, and delusion, they contribute to the decay, or entropy, of the cosmos.  We all share the duty of maintaining order in the cosmos through our just or unjust choices in life^[8].

 

In the Christian faith, a central concept is Sin.  In the original Greek writings of the New Testament, the word used was ἁμαρτία or hamartia^[9].   Hamartia means “to miss the mark” or “to err.” 

In tragedy [Greek theater], hamartia is commonly understood to refer to the protagonist’s error or flaw that leads to a chain of plot actions culminating in a reversal from their good fortune to bad. What qualifies as the error or flaw can include an error resulting from ignorance, an error of judgement, a flaw in character, or sin.

So, individuals and society as a whole became sinful, miss the mark, due to their ignorance of Truth/Natural Law, subsequent errors in judgement, and eventual immoral action.  This misunderstanding directly causes the decay of their life and tragic fate.

But if this knowledge has been disseminated for thousands of years, why do most not know about it, or worse, reject it?  Why is there so much dis-ease and turmoil in the nations of the world?  It is a complex subject, but it is largely due to the poor quality of and values that guide the education of children within industrialized nations, both within the home and in public education.  Natural Law and a complementary Liberal Arts educations has been completely taken out of school curriculums and parental guidance, replaced with social studies, economics, and the material sciences.  These are very valuable studies, but are not the core of a good education.

 

Look at the accompanying graphic to see how human potential is developed through education.  The process starts with knowledge from personal experience.  The proper employment of logic allows the capacity for understanding.  This knowledge and understanding is then applied as wisdom to future decisions to produce reliable and desirable results.

To use an analogy for greater clarity in how this process works, think of a computer.   The way our “hardware” and “software,” so to speak, operates is very similar to one.  You are familiar with using a computer by the user-friendly interface that it offers to access information and use applications.  You open a chrome internet browser or access your Photoshop image editor to execute whatever computing function you desire.   However, those applications and the interface must be formatted with an operating system, like Windows or Macintosh, that is comprised of specific rule sets that allow for the functionality you enjoy.  It is only with coherent and well defined programming that you are able to consistently generate the computers output.  If the code was poorly written with many rule sets that contradicted each other, the computer would be difficult to use and unreliable.  It would crash, often produce random results, and make using it generally frustrating.

 

We humans operate much in the same way.  All of our behaviors (output on the screen) are a results of the underlying operating system we have that was established in our formative years of childhood (analogous to formatting a computer).  This “software” of rule sets is founded in our basic beliefs and the methods we use to process experiences, our thoughts about them, and our emotional states in response to them.  The quality of our operating system is in direct correlation to the quality of our actions in response to life experiences.  If the “code” is written poorly and is full of incoherence, then our output (behaviors) will lead to crashes, unreliable results, and frustration.  In other word, a faulty human “operating system” will lead to chaos, disorder, and unneeded personal suffering on the “screen” of life.

With inadequate or false information (from study materials and socialization), a person will ingrain false assumptions and poor logic (software).   They will then not be able to interpret their life experience well, and, subsequently, their maturity as an individual can be severely stunted, producing erratic and harmful behavior.  With individuals en masse being “formatted” the same way, chaos and disorder will permeate the society.  The inadequate knowledge and false assumptions present in the current schooling system are the neglect of the foundational spiritual, logical, and emotional education of an individual that allow them to be autonomous, free-thinking individuals.  In short, we have opted for teaching the youth what to learn rather than how to learn, and usually only practical subjects intended to perpetuate our economy of commodity consumption.  The effects of such a corruption in education due to a lack of proper mental exercise leads to a mental degradation similar to that which is observed in the physical body due to improper physical exercise.  For an in depth exploration of America’s deficient schooling system, please watch this interview with John Taylor Gatto, a New York 8th grade instructor for 30 years.

 

Things can be changed, however.  We can begin to produce syntropy within our societies once again through understanding, wisdom, and love if we decide to make a cultural shift.  This shift will necessitate that we re-examine the very values that underlie our communities and the way that we educate the future generations.  Do we value short-term benefits more than long-term?  Can we admit that our valuation of material commodities is excessive and harmful to us as well as the planet?  Can we accept responsibility and admit the error in our values and thinking?  Can we return the harmony between societal laws and norms with natural law?  It is our choice, your choice; the choice between truth or illusion, harmony or chaos.

 

What do you choose?