Choice and learning

The Law of Attraction is clear about choice: All any living being has power over in its life is its own choices, and everything that happens to the being is a result of its own choices. I know people argue against this – heck, I’ve argued against it: Suppose a meteor falls from the sky and hit me on the head – how is that my choice? Of course, when we argue against choice, what we mostly are saying is that the choice concept should only apply if we know the potential results.

Nice thought, but irrelevant. Life doesn’t work that way.

Here’s the way life really works: If I get hit on the head by a meteor, that’s the result of every choice I made in my life up until that specific time and place. I am the one who has directed my body to take every step along the way until I reach the one spot in the whole Universe that ends up with me in the line of impact of that one meteor. No one else lives in my body or inhabits my mind and has forced me to do what it took to get me in that one spot. And the meteor is not about me at all – it isn’t aiming to hit me, it’s only following its own path. Even if someone tied me up and sat me in a chair at the point of impact, I still took every step myself to get me to the person who did that to me. I’m the one responsible, because I made every choice along the way – even though I didn’t know that it would get me crushed by a meteor. (I guess that’s why the word “oops” was invented!)

Making choices to do things without knowing what the end result will be makes it sound like everything is just about meaningless chance but it’s not, because although I don’t know what the results will be, someone (or something) does know: My soul. I’ve got a soul (so does every living thing) and my soul has a higher purpose for my life.

Although we don’t generally know much about our soul’s higher purpose for us, we can figure out some things. The Law of Attraction teaches us that if we trust to our higher purpose, we can use our emotions to make the choices in our lives. It’s like playing the game of Hot & Cold: Positive emotions are the warm and hot, and negative emotions the cold. When we choose based on positive emotions, we are on the path of higher purpose. When we choose based on negative emotions, we are not on that path.

Why do we have to play this game? Simple: Our souls are part of the infinite and we, incarnate in these bodies, are finite. Finite beings cannot comprehend infinity, we don't have the capacity for it. Our souls aren’t hiding anything from us, no more than an adult hides anything from a baby - the adult world is just not comprehensible to a baby, as babies don't have the capacity for it.

For babies, things are pretty cut and dried - they get hungry, that upsets them and they cry. They get fed, they are satisfied (after a burp) and they smile. Babies start out with instincts (to cry when hungry, to smile when satisfied) and follow them blindly. As a baby’s instinctive actions are experienced they are stored – along with the associated emotions (pleasure, pain, positive emotions, negative emotions – hot and cold). Babies soon grow from instinctive action to using stored information (emotions + experiences) to make choices of actions in order to get certain results.

The baby is learning.


Learning is about acquiring (accumulating, not being born with) the skills or knowledge to do something. When we learn, we experience something and then store that experience along with the emotions that we felt at the time. We use what we’ve learned to make our future choices. The emotions associated with the learned experiences are the guideposts for making the choices both in daily life and from the higher purposes point of view.

Next: How horses make choices and learn – and what it means for the human/horse relationship.