I don't much believe in luck. Not in this universe. I figure if something happens, somebody probably made it happen. Maybe a lot of somebodies.

As you move up the Bridge, your ability to correctly place cause improves. But low on the Bridge (and even at Clear), it can sometimes be difficult to pick apart the causation for events.

So I have an existential question for people out there who are smarter than I am about these things.

Some years ago, my wife and I were living about an hour north of where we are now. We'd been doing the one-hour commute for a few years, and we were pretty fed up with it. We decided to move back south. So we put our house up for sale and prepared to find a house closer to our business.

As it turned out, we put our house on the market just as a real estate boom was starting. We sold our house for twice what we paid for it. And managed to find a house close to work that fit our needs and was well within our price range. As an added bonus, just about that time, gas prices skyrocketed, which would have made a commute from our former northern house much much more expensive. So we dodged a bullet on that one, too.

Now, since I generally discount luck, I figured that somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have sensed that now was the time to act with regard to selling our house and moving. Some part of me must have been able to see the real estate boom and the gas crunch coming. At least that was my take on it.

Now, here's another more recent event. A month or two ago, I reckoned it was time to replace the aging server on our internal computer network. It was slow and we had had to institute a few work-arounds to accommodate its age-related quirks. So I embarked on a plan to replace Pokey. I had a much newer machine named Poindexter which was not being used. So I started the lengthy process of transferring control and software over to it. In our case, this was a tedious process which took the better part of a week to accomplish, including testing and such. We left Pokey on the network as a backup, but Poindexter was finally functioning as the new server.

About a week later, late at night, I heard a loud POP! a couple of rooms away from my office. I got up to investigate, hoping something precariously stacked on something else might have simply fallen over. When I entered the room where the noise originated, there was a powerful smell of burnt electronics. I looked around, and there was the old server. Then I noticed that there was no noise coming from Pokey, whose fan would normally be making a fair amount of noise moving cooling air in and out of the computer's case. Uh oh.

A post mortem on Pokey proved that yes, that was where the pop came from. Some electronic component had disasterously (and loudly) failed, and Pokey was well and truly dead. Fortunately, Poindexter had taken over Pokey's role, and this didn't present a real crisis for us.

As subsequent days rolled by, I kept going back to how fortuitous it was that I had just previously decided to replace the one computer with the other. At the time, I decided to put it down to the phenomenon I mentioned earlier, where you know in the back of your mind something's going to happen (Pokey's going to fail). As a result, you take action to avoid catastrophe, without realizing you're doing so because you know in the back of your mind about the pending disaster.

I mentioned this to my wife, who came up with an alternate explanation. In her mind, perhaps now that we didn't need Pokey anymore, our postulates keeping it going ended, and it finally failed. In other words, we'd been propping up the old machine with our intention and postulates. And now that we didn't need it any more, we stopped propping it up. And it just broke.

My wife's a pretty smart cookie, and I suspect she's right about this one. But it brings up a quandary about present time actions and the future. There are two cases here. One, there's a pending future event which must be avoided (or taken advantage of) by present time action. There's no question that the upcoming event is not solely your doing. Without knowing consciously about the future event, you take the proper present time action. Happy ending. Two, you take present time action, and avoid a future disaster when your postulates change because of the action you took. Happy ending.

The existential question is this: the causation in each case looks different, but are they really different phenomena? Is case one really different from case two?

If you know the answer or can provide an LRH reference which addresses the question, feel free to comment.