Cause and Effect, and What It Is Not

The sixth principle denies chance. The Kybalion allows that things called chance happen, but treats the word as a name for a cause not yet perceived, and builds from that to a distinction between being a cause and being an effect. Its image is a set of planes of causation: most people are moved by influences descending from planes above their own, while a trained will rises to a plane from which it moves rather than is moved.

Two comparisons sharpen it. It is not karma. Karma in its Indian settings is a moral accounting that tracks intention and runs across lives; the principle here is mechanical and makes no moral claim whatever. And it is not fatalism, although it can be read that way at speed. The book's point is that a lawful world is precisely what makes deliberate action possible, since a world of genuine randomness could not be acted on reliably at all.

What it shares with both is a resistance to testing. No observation could count against a principle stating that everything has a cause, because any apparent exception is redefined on the spot as a cause not yet found. That is a philosophical objection rather than a historical one, and it is the standing criticism of this principle among readers who take the rest of the book seriously. The atlas records the principle, the practical distinction it draws, and the objection, without adjudicating between them.