The first year · Lesson 6
The Pendulum and the Chain
The Principles of Rhythm and of Cause and Effect, and what the book says about chance and free will
Hello again. Today’s saying is “The measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left.” It asks you to watch for the swing back. A good day, a bad day, a high tide, a low one. Two chapters today, about twenty-five pages, and the book is in a lively mood. Let’s go.
The reading
- Chapter XI: Rhythm The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 159–169 · about 1,998 words, 10 min
- Chapter XII: Causation The Kybalion: A Study of the Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece, pp. 171–182 · about 2,096 words, 10 min
About 20 minutes in all. Each link opens the book at the first paragraph.
Before you read
- Chapter XI covers the fifth principle, Rhythm. Chapter XII covers the sixth, Cause and Effect. You met both in one line each back in Chapter II. Now each gets a full chapter.
- Rhythm grows out of the chapter you just read. Polarity gave us two poles. Rhythm is the swing between them. Keep the picture of a clock’s pendulum in your head as you read.
- Both chapters start with physical things, like tides, seasons and dice. Then they turn to people: our moods, our pleasures and our choices. Notice where that turn happens. It is where the book stops talking about nature and starts talking about you.
- Chapter XII is full of small, homely examples: dice, a coin, a falling stone, a speck of soot. They are the fun part, and the quiz asks about them.
In a nutshell
Chapter XI: Rhythm
The book says everything swings back and forth, like a pendulum or the tide. The swing runs between the two poles of Polarity, though it rarely reaches the very end of either. It shows up everywhere: in suns and worlds that are born, die and are born again, in nations, in fashions, and in our own moods. A time of high spirits is followed by a low one. The authors say the masters learned to escape the swing of their moods. They rise to a “higher plane” of the mind and let the backward swing pass under them. The book calls this the Law of Neutralization. Next comes the Law of Compensation: a swing one way is matched by an equal swing the other way. The book says this holds for pleasure and pain, too. People who feel joy keenly also feel pain keenly. The authors tie this to the belief that we live many lives. Last, they say everything has its price. What you gain, you pay for with what you lose.
Chapter XII: Causation
The book says nothing happens by chance. “Chance” is only our word for a cause we cannot see. The authors show this with the throw of a die and the toss of a coin. They say one event does not “create” the next. Each is a link in a long chain of events that runs back and forward without end. Even the smallest thing has millions of causes behind it. Then the chapter turns to free will. The authors say they won’t argue it out. But they do take a side: both sides are half right. Most people, they say, are pushed along by their moods, their families and the world around them, with very little freedom. The masters learn the rules and rise above them. They become causes instead of effects. The chapter ends by saying that law rules everything, yet a person is not a mere machine.
Highlights
Everything flows out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall; the pendulum-swing manifests in everything
The opening of the Rhythm saying. Read it aloud and you can hear the swing in it. The idea that everything flows is very old, as you will see below.
It is akin to rising above a thing and letting it pass beneath you.
The book’s plainest picture of its Law of Neutralization. The swing still happens, it says, but the master is no longer riding on it.
Chance is but a name for Law not recognized
The heart of Chapter XII in six words. The rest of the chapter is examples that try to prove it.
The further the creation is from the Centre, the more it is bound; the nearer the Centre it reaches, the nearer Free is it.
The book’s answer to the free will question. It calls this a saying of “the ancient writers,” but it doesn’t say which ones. Freedom here is not all or nothing. It grows the closer you come to the center.
Man may use Law to overcome laws, and that the higher will always prevail against the lower
The book’s way out of a trap. If law rules everything, are we just machines? No, it says. A higher law can beat a lower one, and a person can learn to use it.
Words to know
- Rhythm
- A regular swing back and forth, like a heartbeat, the seasons or the tide.
- Pendulum
- A weight on a rod or string that swings from side to side, as in an old clock.
- Compensation
- Balancing out. The book uses it to mean “counterbalance,” a swing one way paid back by a swing the other way.
- Neutralization
- The book’s name for rising above the swing of your moods so they don’t carry you with them.
- Causation
- The way causes lead to effects. The book’s other name for the Principle of Cause and Effect.
- Free will and Determinism
- Two sides of an old debate. Free will says we choose freely. Determinism says every choice has causes that fix it.
- Reincarnation
- The belief that a person lives many lives, one after another, in new bodies.
- Heredity
- What you get from your parents and grandparents through birth.
The real story
Our notes, not the book's.
The book calls these ancient Hermetic teachings. The ideas are old, but this telling is from its own time. The swing of opposites goes back at least to the Greek thinker Heraclitus, around 500 BC, who taught that opposites belong together. Later writers summed him up as “everything flows.” The book’s Law of Compensation is close to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Compensation,” printed in 1841. Emerson says every gain has its cost and every loss its gift, and New Thought writers read him closely. The debate over fate and free will is just as old, and many thinkers have tried a middle path like the book’s. Notice, too, that the book’s proof comes from its own day: Webster’s dictionary and “modern science.” Science does not find that moods swing like a clock, and the many lives of Chapter XI are a belief, not a finding. Still, these two chapters are some of the clearest in the book, and their pictures stay with you.
Quiz
Answer from the notes or the reading, in any order; you can change an answer at any time. Each answer says why, with a link to the page.