The First Caveat: Anything Can Cause Anything
The first and most powerful caveat to emerge dictated awareness and perspective more so than a resolve of specific issues. That caveat is simply, “Anything can cause anything.” A subsequent insight posed another question. If anything can cause anything, then how is it possible to know what is causing what? At this time, my studies were limited to trying to solve a physical problem with a physical solution. By this time, I had acknowledged a possible interaction with the other spheres of influence. But I had no real clue as to how I might evaluate them or what to do if I suspected involvement of one or the other possibilities.
For that reason, I initiated a study of the laws of cause and effect and discovered a seemingly illogical and disturbing predicament. Cause and effect are predictable in the physical realm, which includes everything that can be experienced with the five senses. This is the realm of firm boundaries containing matter, objects, and three-dimensional existence. This is the domain of the material world. This realm is made up of day-to-day experiences.
In fact, the laws of cause and effect govern the physical world. It is possible to determine how far we can travel on a tank of gas, what time the sun will rise and set, how long it will take a meal to cook, how many calories must be expended to burn a pound of fat, how much pressure is required to separate a paper towel, or how much our monthly payment must be increased to reduce a mortgage and get out of debt. Regardless, finding the anything that could cause the something I was confronted with became a fundamental premise for the working model that would allow me to directly resolve these illusive symptom complexes.