Sigmund
Freud once quoted, "Most
people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and
most people are frightened of responsibility." It seems that we are responsible for all
our actions and all our results/outcomes. Other way of saying the same thing is: we are responsible for our destiny and freewill.
Most of us will acknowledge that we
never accept the above claim totally. We always do it in parts, that too, as
per our convenience. Also we always change sides, in such a way, that it suits
our ego. For example., When we get rewards/awards, we claim that it was my
action and freewill. But when rejection/criticism comes our away, we say that
we are not responsible for it, and so and so person, or so and so situation
(destiny), is the cause for it. Can you see the game, we are playing with
ourselves. We are not even honest with ourselves. Most of the teachers
mentioned that ''honesty with one selves is the key to bliss". But who
want bliss? (see the Freud statement above).
We agree for a compromised
life (slavery) because we do not want to take responsibility. We should either
totally believe that everything in our life is due to others or external
actions (destiny) or everything is due to our actions (freewill). In choosing
the either way, we may reach bliss. But are these two ways of analyzing are different at all or are they same? They seem to be same. This Karma Yoga
statement says the same, "Do your actions (freewill) without bothering
about the results (destiny)". Destiny will be according to you, if you
just concentrate on your freewill.
It is rather interesting
to see that, the attributes of a spiritually inclined person is totally in contrast or opposite to common person (which we discussed above). If someone gives him/her
any reward/award, he/she will immediately disown it, mentioning it as effort of
others, but if someone criticizes him/her for anything, he/she will immediately
accepts and own it. Why this difference in thinking? Essentially, a spiritual
person always tries to reduce his/her ego by his/her actions, but a normal person always enhances
his/her ego by his/her actions. This observation is a good method that can help
distinguish the nature of person, but not foolproof though. It is sometimes misused
by few persons to cheat others. Anyway, truth cannot be hidden for long.
A really ideal person will
not bother about either freewill or destiny. He/she just lives, without really
thinking too much about it. So then how to reach this ideal state, where, both
the notions (freewill/destiny) disappears from our mind. The notion can
disappear, only when, we can prove that these are same. Destiny is same as
freewill and vice versa.
Vivekananda had a deep
understanding on this topic. One of my senior colleague today mentioned this to
me. Vivekananda considered all past moments as destiny and future events as
freewill. Destiny can be defined for events that are already happened, while freewill is futuristic. We will happy to agree with this statement. So if destiny has to
merge with freewill, the past has to merge with future. In other way, time
should disappear from our understanding, and we can reach timeless state.
Let us use notion of time
so solve this mystery. Let us say, we are now at time T = 0. Then, let us imagine
that we have freewill over next DeltaT time. After executing our freewill for next
DeltaT time, we are in time (T = DeltaT). Now at time (T = DeltaT) looking backwards, we cannot
change anything, then it can be considered in the domain of destiny. Can you notice the difference? At time T = 0, we
thought we have freewill for next DeltaT time, but at T = DeltaT, we think that the
previous DeltaT is destiny. So it is really freewill time or destiny time? If
the time is same, then the destiny and freewill are also same. What we have
done here? We have taken assistance from Einstein Theory of Relativity. We have shifted the observer at different instants of time to define our notion of destiny and freewill. Basically, this understanding tells us that, destiny as well as freewill are only time notions and it is only our imagination. Going
little deeper on this, if we make DeltaT tending towards zero, i.e. very very small
time, we may be able to nearly merge destiny and freewill.
There can be a another way of looking. We never acknowledge the enabling situations that exists around us which helps us to execute our actions. We take them for granted. Even when we are executing our freewill, there is infinite destiny around us which is present, that enable us in execution. Otherwise how we can do anything. This destiny is sometimes referred as 'grace' by many masters. Freewill can only exist with the help of destiny. Difficult to accept, but true.
Thanks for reading. Your
valuable comments are welcome. Learning by sharing
