Watching Paint Dry

I expect this to be a short post. I’m going to kick around my ideas about free will, karma and fate.

I one of my MeetUps, the other day, the other person there said that once a true psychic predicts something, it’s preordained fact, it will happen and nothing can change it. He didn’t believe in free will at all, apparently. (He wouldn’t directly answer that question, but he sure implied it.)

I find that so sad, to believe that you are locked into a meaningless existence that you can’t change. (I could say a lot of things at this point, about people using karma, fate or psychic predictions as way to avoid responsibility for their actions and as an excuse to not lift a finger to change anything, but that’s not the point. At least I don’t think it is.)

Let’s take karma. Call it what you will: “What goes around, comes around,” or “What you do unto others will be done unto you:” Who and what you are today is the result of what you did in the past. The classic version of karma says that you work your way up from low life forms, (bugs) to higher, (humans) and then you work your way up the social classes, through good deeds and spiritual enlightenment. But poor choices will put you in a worse condition next time around. My biggest problem with this is it’s only a short step from “You get what you deserve,” to “I’m well off, so I must deserve it, and he’s poor or lame, he must deserve it also, so there’s no reason to have compassion for the less fortunate, it’s their own fault. Ouch! There are other tweaks to the idea of karma, but I don’t buy any of them for they all have suffer from the same problem of saying that your lot in life is, in one way or another preordained. You realize that this idea comes from a culture with a ridged cast system, you can see why this belief would be popular among the upper casts to give justification for the subjection of the lower.

The concept of Fate makes me equally uncomfortable. Here, your life is planned out and you’re just along for the ride. You don’t get to make any choices, because, no matter what you do, everything will come out the same. In other words, no free will at all, just a illusion of free will. To me that says that nothing you do matters: You don’t deserve any credit for any success or blame for failures. It’s all just a video game where, no matter how you play, you always end up in the castle, marrying the princess, like it or not. One thing that fate never makes clear, is who or what decides you fate in the first place? Who writes the script that you are living out and how is it done?

So, with fate, you are just a robot, playing out a script, but with karma, your actions can actually have some meaning, but only in another life. They both seem born out of static societies and designed to keep them that way by telling all the classes the things are supposed to be the way they are, do don’t rock the boat.

What I do believe in? Well, I believe that we come into this life with certain goals, talents and challenges, that we chose for ourselves. What we do with those is up to us. All that I’ve read, heard from my clients, and from fellow practitioners, tells me that the biggest problems we have in life, tend to come from not working towards our goals. It’s not because we don’t achieve them, it’s because we’re not working on them. That’s an important distinction. If, when all is said and done, we don’t achieve our goals, there is no punishment involved. it can mean the we choose to take the lesson over again, perhaps tweaking the parameters a bit to have a better chance of success. Or because we did partially get it, so that part of the lesson needs to be changed.

Repeating the same lesson until we get it can look like karma. But it’s neither punishment or reward, and more like retaking a class you didn’t do well in. And it’s important to remember that our human values of wealth, social class and the importance of being human verses a cat or a dog, are completely meaningless outside of this existence. Your station in life really has nothing to do with your “past performance,” because you can chose anything you want, when you’re planning your life from the other side. It’s all Monopoly money. Beautiful, ugly, plain, healthy, sick, weak strong, smart, dim, all the same. It’s like playing D&D, you pick your characters’ attributes and play the game. When the character dies, you pick another set and go at it again. Most of us have lived so many lifetimes that it all blurs together, all the matters is the experience and the wisdom gained.

Which brings us back to free will. Without the ability to make meaningful choices, we have no reason to exist, we are no more than little robots running our programs. I believe that it’s up to us to make the meaningful choices to discover and honor purpose, overcoming our challenges in the process. I find that is the only way to achieve true peace and a sense of accomplishment. I found this especially difficult because it really seems that I wondered quite far from my path, and it’s taking some wrenching changes to get my self heading in the right direction.

That sounds quite different than how it actually went down. What happened was that I was waking up, bit by bit, and making changes on the inside. Over time, I noticed that parts of my life didn’t fit any more, like outgrowing your clothes, I eventually found it impossible to continue on doing the same things, on the outside. I ignored it as long as it could, but I reached a point where I could no longer adjust, and I had to break the old paradigm, resulting in those wrenching transitions I mentioned. Transitions that I’m still weathering. It’s easy to look back and see how necessary certain trial were and how getting through them seemed the inevitable result of your efforts, but it sure doesn’t look that way when you’re in the middle of the mud, up to your neck in alligators and swim’n for the shore.

I sure wish I had a magic marker that would tell me I’m on the right path, but I don’t. as strange as my life seems at times, I’m getting that it’s only going to only get weirder, in ways that I’m not comfortable speculating about in public just yet. The possibilities are exciting, but I’ve noticed that every jellybean comes with some broccoli. To put that another way, every opportunity and insight comes with a price: responsibilities and obligations. I’m seeing now that no responsibilities means little freedom to do and be what you want. Take on more responsibilities and you get more freedom. I’m speaking in general here, because simple taking on obligations can easily tie you up rather than give you freedom. True freedom requires some personal responsibility, and taking on some obligations, and, if you don’t you soon lose that freedom. One way or another.

I want my freedom, but I’m still balking and squirming at the accompanying responsibilities. My insight for today could be that I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding responsibility. I wanted the perks but not the obligations of being in charge of my life, and that painted me into the corner that I’m trying to get myself out of today. I wonder if the paint is dry yet?