A Musing: What Goes Around IS Around

The Universe as a Self-cleansing Proposition

HUMAN LANGUAGE IS RIFE with cause-effect expressions like “As you sow, so shall you reap,” “Things will eventually come back to haunt you,” “Crime doesn’t pay,” “You’ll get yours,” “good karma,” “bad karma,” “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and “poetic justice.” We’re used to hearing “What goes around comes around” as a way of explaining the idea that certain consequences, whether they are desired or not, accrue as a result of certain behaviors.

It may in fact be that “consequences,” if any there are, already exist as part and parcel of one’s “context”—one’s operating presumptions. That is, that they are evident within the entirety of one’s personal “energy composition” and as one’s perceived or manifested reality.

In that way, context operates like (or as) a surrounding cloud or energy field. Consider Charles Schulz’s Pigpen character wandering about in his personal dust cloud, creating, unawares, a margin of distance between himself and others, oblivious to the obvious. Such a field, whether displaying a warning sign or an invitation, already contains a complete set of operative elements and information.

“Consequences” might run the gamut all the way from “missed opportunities” (connections, exchanges, introductions, business) not known to have been present, to red-carpet treatment everywhere all the time. In a cause-effect time-based reality, consequences—without the negative connotation—along the lines of “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene II)—are merely results or outcomes. Without time in the picture, they might be thought of as descriptions, or attributes, of contexts.

Contexts operate “instantaneously” and “take effect” “immediately,” upon their invocation. (The quotation marks here help emphasize the “time” words that are being used to communicate an idea where time is specifically being excluded as a factor.) The process of invoking context is not judgmental (in the sense of relating to “good” or “bad”) but, rather, mechanical. Simply, the context is the outcome. Right now. Already in operation.

So if it’s true that A → A (Context A yields Context A and all that comes with that context), and B → B, C → C, and so on, then paying attention to outcomes can allow us to identify contexts that are in operation—a kind of reverse engineering.

For example, a friend of mine once told me about a time she was a novice player in a poker game with a lot of people at the table. She said all she kept focusing on during every hand was just being able to stay in the game. Round after round, she kept squeaking by. Ultimately, it got down to her and one other player, and she ended up winning. Taken to its extreme, the context “I just want to stay in the game” leads to the very outcome she got. In retrospect it’s easy to see the power of such a context, calculated or not.

The Golden Rule is a heuristic (a discovered principle of workability) that in the most basic way acknowledges the power of context. Having an insight into the mechanical nature of context leads to a patently clear understanding of why the Golden Rule has been around for (a human) forever: the ancient directive is simply a principle of existence that carries its own built-in restraints and calls to morality.

Further, in recognizing that context is a “self-cleansing” proposition, I tend to trust the unequivocal justice of my own innately ethical human self and in general no longer see the need to “argue with the universe.”

At a deeper level, I see that the Golden Rule yields the logic that if there is no separation at the level of substance, then what’s the sense of putting into the world anything but what one wants more of?