Fate Or Free Will: Who Am I Really?

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This is my response to the @tribesteemup bi-weekly question “what makes you into the person you are today — is it all destiny or do we play a hand in shaping who we are?”

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Sandor Clegane: You’ve changed Little Bird... Heard you were broken in rough.
Sansa Stark: Without Littlefinger and Ramsay and the rest, I would’ve stayed a little bird all my life.
— “The Last of the Starks”, Game of Thrones, S08E04.

^{Sansa and the Hound reunite}

 
Whilst many folks were upset (and they do have a point) at what could be the excusing away of abuse, many others saw this as a strong woman owning her experiences — horrific as they were — and acknowledging the role they played in bringing her to the present moment.

I’m not going to say that everyone agrees with this point of view; in fact I can easily agree with the contrary opinion that many people I know — men and women — hold.

On the other hand, I feel this is completely true for my experiences in life. The person I am right at this very moment owes his gratitude to the choices I’ve made in the past and the experiences I’ve had due to those choices.

The day after my final High School exam, I sat on the couch at home and opened up Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. That book inspired me to read more Science Fiction, to discover different ideas about spirituality, politics, and culture. I chose to pursue University studies in History, Philosophy, and Literary Criticism.

By the end of my first year, I was dissatisfied with University and chose to pursue a career in backstage theatre production as a Stage Manager and Lighting. I made some new friends, smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of fun; but I didn’t really feel I fit in with thespians.

So I went and found myself boring, mundane jobs usually in sales and telemarketing. I was bored and restless. One day I picked up Graham Hancock’s The Sign And The Seal, a book about his search for the lost Ark of the Covenant and remembered my love of ancient history and mythology, so I re-enrolled into University, this time studying Archaeology, Anthropology, and Comparative Studies in literature, culture, and theology.

My studies inspired me to discover more about different cultures, so I travelled to the USA and spent time on “the Rez” and learned about Lakota spiritual practices. I spent years exploring shamanic practices, astrology, and tarot.

I took a subject on Eastern Religions, and first came across Taoism. Reading the Tao Te Ching and the I Ching, I became inspired to learn more and found someone to teach me Tai Chi.

When I became ill with Graves Disease, my fascination with Taoism inspired me to turn to Chinese Medicine for healing. The system fascinated me so much, I enrolled in a course to learn it, and ended up building a successful clinical and teaching career.

I could go on, but my point is that I made choices; and the consequences of those choices led me to make further choices, and so on and so forth. Where I am now and who I am today is a result of those choices.

Even contemplating this reflection... I ask myself, “did I really make this choice? When I read Stranger In A Strange Land, I was struck hard by the concept of personal sovereignty, which is why I chose a philosophy subject which covered the topic of ‘free-will and self-determination’. I decided the concept resonated with me, and so I chose to live my life in such a way that I took responsibility for my thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions.

What about before all this — did I make choices of my own free-will before?

As a child, I was subjected to the opinions and behaviours of my family. Children are like sponges: they absorb everything they are exposed to. As a young child, I had no idea that there was ‘normal’ beyond the ‘normal’ of my family culture. I wonder now, how many of my choices as a teenager were essentially influenced by my conditioning?

The practices and intentions of the 全真道 Quánzhēn Dào (the Complete Reality school of Taoism) are based on the presupposition that we are all born with a unique, innate nature, but over time that nature is suppressed by layers of acquired conditioning that comes from family, peers, schooling, community, and society. The pursuit and act of enlightenment is the capacity to make choices that are purely made from our true nature, not our conditioning.

In many respects, all those choices I made over the years have brought me to the point where I am learning more and more about these ideas, where I continuously question my thoughts, words, and deeds and ask, “is this me, or something else?”

The ancient Chinese believed that alongside our true nature we also have a 命 mìng, which is often translated as ‘destiny’, ‘life’, or ‘purpose’. This idea eventually gave rise to the use of astrology as means to predict what awaited each of us in life. Astrology became a map of one’s fate.

When I was learning (Western) Astrology, I found it eerie how exactly my birth chart described my personality, my strengths, weaknesses, loves, and fears. While this helped me understand my Self, I also wondered whether my life would be more than what my fate was.

So I stopped ‘reading’ the stars and began to consciously live my own life. Before making choices, I would evaluate whether if it was my true nature influencing my decision, or my conditioning. I would consider my higher intention, and possible consequences, and then take action (or not). Basically, I enabled my free-will.

And yet, here is the weird thing about all of this. I would later look at the astrology charts and ephemeral tables and notice that movements of the planets seemed to tell a story of what had happened with remarkable accuracy.

This disturbed me — on the one hand, the possibility that astrology may in fact be real. On the other hand, that I did not have free will and that forces large than me and any other humans may be pulling the strings of our puppet-like existence. So I decided to work an experiment: whatever ‘astrology’ said would happen, whatever decision it advised me, I would do the opposite.

Of course, I proved that I did have free-will. What happened in my life was not ‘written in the heavens’, and was not predetermined. Sure, I made choices that were ‘mine’, but they also weren’t exactly the ones I would have ‘naturally’ made, nor were the outcomes necessarily desirable. Which of course left me even more confused than before.

Is there such a thing as ‘destiny’, do we ever have ‘free-will’? Honestly, I have no idea. I’m going to give a completely cop-out answer and say that in a way I believe both nature and nurture have played a role in shaping who I am today.

I’m not going to be so full of hubris and state that what I believe is the case with every other human... because I honestly don’t have the data or evidence to make that statement; but at least in the context of my life such as it is at present, it’s the only perspective I can give with any degree of confidence.

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