By: BK Hans      
Source: The Daily Guardian https://epaper.thedailyguardian.com/view/2880/the-daily-guardian/15     
Dated: August 23nd, 2025

Many of us see laws as something boring, restricting, or even punishing. There are different levels of laws, human-made laws, laws of matter/nature, and the spiritual laws. Laws are abstract, invisible, hidden, but they determine our life experiences, in fact our reality. Human laws made by governments have the aim to make societies function more smoothly. These limited and constantly changing laws have a great impact on our lives, but are far from being perfect. Whereas the laws of matter and spirituality never change and always function accurately, whether we are aware of them or not. If we understand them, we can know how everything functions, foresee the outcome, and can therefore actually plan our future according to our wish and also have a feeling of security. Questions like, ‘Why is this happening to me?’, What is going on in the world?’, ‘Why are things simply not fair?’, ‘How can this be?’, indicate that we have not understood those eternal laws of life. Then we are unable to act in accordance with them and our experience of life is often not to our liking.

Therefore, thousands of scientists have made efforts for millennia to discover the laws of matter, to be able to use matter for the benefit of humankind. The resulting innovations, like the mobile phone, would astound our grandparents. Since our body is made from matter, we are constantly confronted with the laws of matter. Therefore, let us look at some of the laws of matter most relevant to us, those which deal with movement and change.

Newton was the first to discover some of them, the laws of motion.

1. The first law of motion is of inertia – matter has the nature of being inert. By itself it will not move, it just ‘wants’ to sit there for eternity.
2. The second law is of acceleration – once matter begins to move, initiated by some force, it will keep on moving at the same speed in the same direction. To make it change direction or speed requires extra power from outside.
3. The third law is of cause and effect – for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In a spiritual context this is sometimes referred to as karma, however karma is not a spiritual law, it is a physical law. This law keeps the universe constantly moving in a completely determined way.

Another crucial law which deals with movement is the second law of thermodynamics, also called Law of Entropy. It states that any closed material system, a body, a planet, a society, a chair, always moves only in one direction – from order to disorder, from new to old, from concentration to dissipation, from strong to weak, from purity to impurity, from harmony to disharmony.

We see the effect of this law at work around us everywhere. All material things eventually disintegrate. The physical body ages constantly and deteriorates, societies go down, etc. Looking at the essence of those laws, matter actually is something very boring and strange. It is inert, resistant to change, totally determined, and knows only one direction - down towards weakness, chaos, end, and death. Still, there is nothing wrong with matter, it is as it is. If we were only the body made from matter, we should in fact experience these laws and their effects - the nature of matter - as natural.

But surprisingly, this nature of matter stands in complete contrast to our inner nature, which longs for peace, harmony, beauty, purity, strength, creativity and permanence. Therefore, we must be something more, something other than the physical body. All religions and spiritual traditions have told us for thousands of years that there is a soul, a spirit in the body. The only conclusion can be that eternal life, love, peace, purity, inner power, harmony, are aspects of the nature, the laws of the soul. In essence, we are souls, not bodies.

This leads to the understanding that we humans have only one root problem, from which all other problems in the word derive. When we think we are matter, bodies, we get the whole package, since the nature of matter cannot be separated from matter. Then inertia, growing weakness, deterioration, loss, death etc., become our predominant experience in life, with all the consequences we can watch in the daily news.

There is only one simple solution for the whole of humanity. We have to completely disidentify from matter, from the body. When we succeed in that task, our inner experience of life is no longer governed by the material laws, but by the original nature of the soul.

This fundamental change in our consciousness will automatically lead to an inversion from the law of karma, which mandates equal give and take, to the first spiritual law, the law of love. Love is expressed mainly in two ways. First, feeling totally close to someone, like being one, and secondly, constantly giving without any expectation. That shift is, in essence, what Christ taught in his sermon on the mount. Besides that, the first of the famous old hermetical cosmic laws, which states, ‘mind over matter’, will become naturally accessible once again. The growing entropy in the physical world, obviously leading faster and faster to more chaos, can only be reversed by the intervention of an energy from outside the system, which we have at hand. But as long as we think we are matter, we are mentally caught in the system and cannot bring about the necessary turnaround.

Comprehending the depth and relevance of the above, it becomes clear why the teachings of the Brahma Kumaris emphasise the practice of becoming soul conscious. The soul is seen as a small point of light, which means it has no expansion in the physical. Even from the logical and mathematical perspective that is the only imaginable nonmaterial image. Practicing and experiencing this non-physical identity will gradually open the door to unlimited spiritual energy and enable us to eventually reverse everything that has gone badly wrong.

 
BK Hans is a retired environmental lawyer      
and is based in the Brahma Kumaris