The Allegory of the Door and the Cats: Causality, Synchronicity, and the Will — A Metaphysical Theory of Success

 

The Allegory of the Door and the Cats

I keep several cats in my garden. They are well-fed, sheltered, and safe — yet they are always at the door, watching it, testing it, slipping toward it whenever it opens. In their eyes, the door is the key to all good things. They have learned — or think they have learned — that if they can just get inside, food will follow.

This belief is not an idle guess. For most of their lives, it has proven correct:
Door opens → they enter → food appears.
To them, this is not an approximation. It is an absolute truth, as certain as the sun rising.

But I know otherwise. I am the source of their food, not the door. The door is merely a passage, a habitual part of the usual sequence, but not the cause. Sometimes I open it and give them food; sometimes I open it and give them nothing. Sometimes I feed them without the door opening at all.

They cannot grasp this. When the door opens and food does not come, they do not revise their thinking; they simply feel it — a low, quiet sadness. They wait longer than usual, eyes dimming, tails drooping. The world feels wrong to them, though they cannot say why.

And in those moments, I see something more than simple animal disappointment. I see the first shadow of what, in human life, would be called despair — the dull ache that comes when reality fails to match the causal chain you thought governed it. 

If I were to broke the pattern too often, they might give up on the door altogether, wandering aimlessly to beg from neighbors or scavenge outside the garden. They would search inefficiently, driven by hunger and confusion, perhaps to their eventual ruin. Not because they are weak, but because their entire world was built on a link they could feel but never truly understand:
Them → Door → Food.
They cannot see the hidden truth:
Them → Me → Food — with the door only incidental.

And so they live in a quiet drama: the door sometimes keeps its promise, sometimes betrays it, and they never know why. Their small joys and their small despairs both flow from this mystery.

From Allegory to Analogy: Synchronicity 

Cats → Man
I → God / Cosmos Maker
Door → Causality— the web of natural regularities: gravity, evolution, chemistry, economics, habit.
Feeding → Success, i.e., Desired outcome, whether survival, health, success, or meaning.

1. Man’s Faith in Causality

Just as the cats believe the door guarantees food, Man believes that the right causal chain will guarantee the desired result. Science, planning, and effort are all built upon this conviction. And, like the cats’ belief, this conviction holds in the overwhelming majority of cases — enough to shape his entire mental world.

2. The Hidden Structure: Will above Causality

In truth, if a Cosmos Maker exists, He is the source of outcomes, not causality itself. Causality is a conduit He built into the world — the normal unfolding of the great cosmic clock, much like Leibniz imagined. In quantum terms, this clock’s regular ticking is like the unitary evolution of a wavefunction, proceeding smoothly and deterministically. Yet His Will can override this mechanism. Such interventions are rare but decisive. These are like instances of direct observation in quantum mechanics, when the unitary evolution is interrupted and the system is fixed into a definite state by an act beyond its own internal dynamics.

• Negative intervention: The causal chain is complete, but the outcome is withheld.

• Positive intervention: The causal chain is incomplete, yet the outcome is given.
  These are the cosmic synchronicities — moments when the apparent rules break, for reasons that remain opaque.

• Synchronicities/Anti-Synchronicities: Thus, the Cosmos Maker’s Will can override the mechanism of the Cosmic Clock in two forms. In anti-synchronicities, the causal chain is complete — I did everything I could — yet the outcome is withheld, the Will holding it back. This is like a measurement that collapses the system into an unexpected, unfavorable state, halting the expected evolution. In cosmic synchronicities, the causal chain is incomplete, yet the outcome is granted, as though the system were fixed into a favorable state by an act beyond its own internal dynamics. These “unfavorable” and “favorable” states are such only from the perspective of Man; from the perspective of the Cosmos Maker, both interventions are equally favorable, for both are willed by the Will.

3. Existential Angst

When causality “fails,” Man rarely understands that the chain has been interrupted by something beyond it. Instead, like the cats, he feels it — as confusion, sadness, depression, even existential angst. The deeper the faith in causality’s absoluteness, the sharper the emotional wound when it collapses. This is the essence of many personal and civilizational crises:

• “I did everything right — why did this still happen?”

• “I barely tried — why was I rewarded?”

4. Providence 

In most cases, reaching the “critical amount” of causality produces the expected result. But this is not an inviolable law; it is a permitted regularity. The Cosmos Maker can choose to block or accelerate it. Leibniz’s “cosmic clock” remains mostly accurate, but here we add the Cosmos Maker observation effect: the hand of the Maker sometimes touches the gears.

5. Constraint on the Cosmos Maker

Just as I cannot feed my cats in the normal course without first opening the door, the Cosmos Maker usually works through creating the causal channels embedded in the universe. But in the unnormal unfolding — the moments of direct observation — outcomes can occur without any causal chain. These are the rare and disorienting miracles of existence.

Thus, the emotional lives of my cats mirror our own.

Their quiet despair when the door fails them is the same existential ache Man feels when the expected causal chain collapses. Their joy when the door surprises them with food is our joy when life gives us more than we deserve. And their inability to see the true link — them → me → food — is our inability, or unwillingness, to see that beyond causality, there may stand a Will that both sustains and transcends it.

Faith as a Spiritualized Version of Door → Food

Even in religion, much of what is called faith in God is actually faith in a causal formula.
Man says to himself:

“If I do good deeds → I will go to heaven.”

But that is not faith in God’s truth, beauty, or mystery. That is faith in a predictable input–output mechanism — a spiritualized version of door → food.

Just as the cats think that opening the door guarantees food, many religious people think that performing a set of actions guarantees salvation. In both cases:

• The causal link may be valid most of the time,

• but the link exists inside the Will of the one who created it.

If the Cosmos Maker’s Will is truly free, then even the most perfect causal chain — be it moral, ritual, or scientific — is still conditional. The Maker can block the expected outcome, or give it without the full chain being present.

And here lies the deep discomfort: genuine faith is trust in the Will itself, not in the reliability of the formula. But formulas are easier to hold onto than the mystery of a free Will. That’s why both cats and humans cling to their causal chains, even in domains meant to transcend them.

Summary

In this allegory:

The cats are Man.
I am the Cosmos Maker.
The door is causality. 
The food is success. 

Like my cats, we believe that if we activate the right causal chain, the outcome must follow. And in most cases, it does — enough to build our whole mental world upon this conviction. But if a Cosmos Maker exists, it is not causality itself that sustains us; it is His Will. Causality is the conduit He has woven into the universe, the normal unfolding of the cosmic clock. Yet His Will can even override this cosmic clock.

When this override comes negatively, we follow the causal chain and the outcome is withheld — and we feel the same quiet despair as the cats, though we call it depression, grief, or existential angst. When it comes positively, we fall short of the causal chain and yet receive the outcome — and we call it luck, blessing, or miracle. These moments are the cosmic synchronicities or anti-synchronicities, where the Maker’s hand touches the gears.

In most cases, reaching the “critical amount” of causality produces the expected result — just as, for my cats, the door usually leads to food. But this is not a law of nature; it is a permitted regularity. The Maker can block or accelerate it as He wills. And just as I cannot feed my cats in the normal way without opening the door, the Maker usually works through causal links. Only in the unnormal unfolding does He bypass them altogether.

Thus the moods of my cats mirror our own. Their joy when the door delivers is our joy when life rewards our efforts. Their despair when the door fails is our crisis when the expected outcome does not arrive. 

And their blindness to the true link — them → me → food — is like our blindness to the deeper link: us → Cosmos Maker → success. We fail to see that, beyond causality, there may stand a Will that both sustains it and transcends it.

In our basic model, it is true for both cats and Man that the Cosmos Maker works in two ways:

1. Leibniz’s Clock — representing causality, and corresponding to unitary evolution in quantum mechanics: the smooth, lawful unfolding of the wavefunction according to the Schrödinger equation.

2. Interventions or Observations by the Cosmos Maker — representing synchronicity (positive or negative), and corresponding to direct measurements in quantum mechanics: events that collapse possibilities into actualities, not by internal necessity, but by an external and decisive act of the Will.