Freewill or Destiny? Which One is More Powerful?

This is probably a question almost everyone on the spiritual pathway has pondered over at some point or the other. Almost an eternal question, it has been answered by many enlightened masters over time and yet remains as elusive and fresh as ever because unfortunately, there is no straight yes or no answer here. We neither have free will, nor is all of life pre-designed. Let’s see if we can unravel it somewhat.

Many people tend to imagine that there is a higher power designing the minutest detail of our lives and wonder if we have any free will at all, and I don’t believe this to be the case. Destiny in my view is merely the predictability of life as we see it.

If we throw a ball up, it is its ‘destiny’ to come down. If it falls on a trampoline, it is its destiny to bounce up and down for a long time unless something or someone interrupts that process, the journey of the ball being a consequence of external circumstances. As human beings we have the limitation of not being able to account for absolutely all the factors in a situation, but in totality it is quite predictable, and this is what psychics can sometimes tap into.

If this was a person and not a ball, and if it was life, not a trampoline we were talking about, how much of a role does free will play in changing this destiny? In short, can we learn the lessons life is trying to teach us, earlier than we were meant to learn them?

Free will and destiny intertwine way more powerfully than we imagine. For instance, imagine that a person finds a hundred dollar bill on the street, pockets it, gets caught and gets beaten up for it. If this happens a few more times, we can say he has free will if he finds another note on the ground, but we know that there’s no chance he would pick it up. Here his action is very much a part of his destiny, because that is what he has learned so far.

If on the other hand, he had the opportunity to enjoy that money, his approach to it would be different. So while we can attribute the idea of free will to life, truth is that what and how we think is nothing but a result of lifetimes of conditioning.

So far we’ve been talking about the internal state, our own mind, our decisions and our reactions and responses. What about the external situations that shape our lives and world? Those of us who have experienced it will vouch that it is our inner state which shapes our outer reality.

And therefore our outer reality too is nothing but a consequence of our lifetimes of conditioning (or if you do not believe in reincarnation, our generations of conditioning as science is now starting to show that trauma gets biologically passed on from one generation to another *).

So, does free will even exist at all?

Yes it does, but most people do not have access to it. When we are a product of our circumstances, any decision we make is nothing but a by-product of our conditioning and it can easily be predicted by a good astrologer. The…