Dear Tom: The Unity law of mind action seems to be an example of the principle of cause and effect. A simple rendering of cause and effect is an example of a Newtonian or mechanical worldview. Given our contemporary understanding of a dynamic, multifocal quantum perspective, what are the implications for the idea that any effect can be simplistically traced back to a given cause?

—S.B., San Francisco, California

Dear S.B.: Greetings to all my friends in the Golden State. You are raising a complex and controversial issue, one that I’ve written about before in this column—whether the spiritual practices taught by Unity are better understood as immutable divine law or as principles and tendencies. Because this complex question keeps reoccurring, I’d like to answer it more completely, starting with some historical background.

Classical civilizations believed the divine powers caused natural phenomena and virtually every event in life. God, or the gods, sent rain and sunshine depending on the inscrutable divine will. Then Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) broke the supernatural model of nature by declaring that everything in the world could be understood as math and mechanics. He wrote: “The latest authors, like the most ancient, strove to subordinate the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics. … God created everything by number, weight, and measure.”

Newton’s elegant system reduced the whims of the gods to absolute, immutable scientific laws. No longer did we have to imagine God cranking up the sunrise or spreading stars across the sky at night; Newton gave us a way to figure the science behind it all. And it works, or we wouldn’t be able to shoot rockets to Mars with ultimate precision. But science has begun to learn that, at the subatomic level, this elegant, cause-and-effect mechanical model of Isaac Newton isn’t necessarily so. The fact is that current scientific theory speaks less and less of laws and more of aggregate tendencies and probabilities, less about matter and energy and more about matter-energy events. The physics behind this new quantum paradigm are at once far too complex and counterintuitive to explain here, although a good primer is the popular movie What the Bleep!? Down the Rabbit Hole.

However, to help you understand the new model, I offer you this behavioral example: Think about a college football game. If the home team scores a touchdown, we can predict with 100% accuracy that the stadium will erupt with cheers. However, we can predict less accurately what will happen in seat D-321. Perhaps the seat will be empty, or the person in seat D-321 will be from out of town and rooting for the visiting team or will have personal problems which distract him or her from celebrating. In the aggregate, we have some degree of certainty. Individually, we have only probabilities and tendencies. The same is apparently true with subatomic particles. In the aggregate, science can predict what will happen to billions of atoms with astonishing accuracy, but the behavior of an individual subatomic particle is not so inevitable. Science today speaks less of immutable laws and more in terms of probabilities and tendencies.

If we apply this quantum understanding to spiritual practices, it becomes readily apparent why sometimes we get results and other times we don’t. If we consider that God works through cause and effect—do this and that must happen—then we are indeed operating out of a Newtonian worldview. However, what if we recognized that there is this pesky quantum thingee which is operational, if the subatomic particles themselves had a measure of free will? Maybe there’s a random factor programmed into the mix, something to keep us moving, mystified, evolving, and learning. Something to test our resolve and make us try again, and again if necessary. Something to build our faith that regardless of appearances to the contrary, God is good, life is good, and God has everything under control.

It seems to me that the important factor in spiritual life isn’t controlling the outcome or demonstrating this or that. Some Buddhists believe the most important element in spirituality is detachment so that whatever happens we can stay centered and accept it with gracious dignity and strong faith. Faith in God really isn’t about controlling power or immutable laws: it’s about employing the divine principles with love and entrusting the outcome to God. If we are confronted with a circumstance in which we would like to be healed, prospered, or filled with joyful success, we have spiritual principles to help make those things come about more effectively. The law of mind action is one of them: Thoughts held in mind produce after their kind.

In this westernized version of karma, you get back what you send out. However, I would modify the above with the addition of your “dynamic, multifocal quantum perspective” and a Buddhist postscript: You tend to get back what you send out, but whatever happens, stay centered and be at peace.

—Thomas Shepherd