What is “destiny?” Simply put, destiny is the manifesting/manifested result of karma. What does that mean, though?
Well, you wake up every morning. Stuff happens. Sometimes you consider this stuff to be “good” stuff, sometimes “bad.” How you classify this stuff is a matter of perception, which we’ll discuss on another day. The fact of the matter is, any day that you wake up… stuff will happen. As sure as stuff will happen, you will react to said stuff. Cause and effect. One way to take control of your life at any given moment is to become a person of action, rather than a person of reaction. Most people initially react significantly more than they initially act.
Whether you are acting or reacting in any given moment, you are generating a karmic force. Any action that you take must be proceeded by a thought. You cannot perform any action without initially having thought of said action; it’s impossible. Don’t mistake my over-simplified example as a law. Karma is a topic that we’ll discuss at length in the future, for now we are grossly over-simplifying. The point is, every moment of every day with the thoughts you think and the actions you perform, you are making deposits into your own personal karmic “bank account.” At the same moment, you are making withdraws from the same account. The manifestation, which is to say “the appearance in or on the physical realm,” of the results of this karmic account is what we refer to as “Destiny.” Because fundamentally, destiny is that which happens to you in any given moment; it’s not just the epic events that are destiny. When it comes to the facts of the matter, it has to be all or nothing. You meeting and marrying your “soul mate” is no more or less your destiny than what you ate for breakfast… again, since we’re presently dealing with a gross over-simplification.
The standard argument then, is this: If everything is planned out like this, then where does Free-Will come into it or are we simply characters in a Universal play that is already pre-determinded such that we get no say in our own lives?
The answer is yes and no. See, that karmic account that you are perpetually crediting and debiting from… it has existed for as long as you have existed as a consciously aware individual being. Now, there was a particular point at which this came to be. In a nutshell, the biblical story of Adam & Eve is a metaphor for this event, which every single person alive on the planet Earth today experienced. This is explained in great detail in T & D, but regrettably there’s no way to properly condense that into an acceptable length for use within this blog post. In a nutshell, every single one of us was given a simple trial, or test, and every single one of us on Earth failed. Those who passed, there was no cause for them to exist in this world of birth and death and birth and death… those who passed said test skipped this grade and went directly to that place which we shall all go once we work ourselves out of this karmic hole that we have dug for ourselves. See, life as we know it is basically just a cul-de-sac on the road of existence. We turn into it, and whoops realize it’s a cul-de-sac and eventually we reach the end, turn around go back and get on the main road. No matter who you are and what you do and how you feel about yourself or any other human being… we’re all just hanging out in this cul-de-sac, some of us on our way in and some on our way out, but we are all in this Universal cul-de-sac together. Because we all failed that which T & D terms “the trial test of the sexes.”
Now, from that point on, we began this karmic system of credits and debits. So you see, you have been accessing this account for an amount of time that can fairly be called “eternity.” From our human perspective, it might as well be forever, in that it extends back well beyond a time such that we are able to remember or even conceptualize. In that amount of time, you have been pauper and prince, man and woman, grandparent and child… you have been hater and hated, lover and fighter, noble and pathetic. The sum part of your entire past is credited into your account; every thought and action you have ever create and performed is there on the ledger. Only you are responsible for this ledger. There is no absolution. Jesus didn’t die for your sins to be wiped clean. That is simply another metaphor; a metaphor for the moment when you acknowledge accountability for your actions and resolve to correct them… which is simply restoring to balance all that you have caused to be imbalanced as a result of these past thoughts and deeds. Once you accept this accountability, Jesus has thus died for your sins… metaphorically speaking. So… don’t let him die in vain, or something.
That aside, I hope I have effectively established the existence of this karmic account and how, as a result of innumerable past lives, you have basically set up a system such that seemingly random events can now take place in any moment of any day… all of which are your destiny, as dictated by your karma. So, you see, you do have free will to react to your present circumstances, but that reaction will cause manifestation at some future point the circumstances that exists as a direct result of that prior action. You will then react to those circumstances, which are then your destiny, and said reactions (and thoughts related to said actions) become karmic deposits towards that future manifestation. Never forget; all things are cyclical.
When next we meet, we’ll speak more directly about karma.
