In Life, everything is
predetermined. And yet everything is up to you!
No, I am not contradicting myself.
On the other hand I am merely summing up what Life really is. It is,
essentially, what you experience between two ends of this paradox __ where you are
born without your asking for it, you are given a lifetime without your
inability to control anything that happens to you and at the same time, you
have the opportunity, the choice, to live your Life fully, in bliss!
So, is there a destiny? A friend raised
this question after the ghastly manner in which a 20-year-old girl died in an
accident on Sunday. The news made headlines in the papers and left all of us
shocked. The girl, with a gaggle of friends, was at a place which is more that
25 km from the accident spot. For no earthly reason, these girls, seem to have ventured
out for a drive in the wee hours of Sunday morning and were on a highway on the
outskirts of Chennai when the accident happened. All other occupants of the car
survived the crash, except this one girl. So, someone who knew her and was shocked
therefore beyond description said, ‘She literally walked into her death trap.
It was destined.” That prompted my friend to ping me for a perspective.
Destiny is a subject that I too have
often tried to understand. I don’t claim I have the answer that you may relate
to. But I will share what I have learned through my Life and experiences__and
what I find acceptable to me as an intelligent perspective!
Hard as it may appear to instantly
believe, given our scientific grooming and our temperament for logical inquiry,
our entire Life is in the hands of a Universal energy that is at the same time
inscrutable and marvelous. At once compassionate and cruel. Totally
understandable and yet completely incomprehensible. This is the energy that
powers us all __ the breath that we take, and so does every living organism.
From birth to death, of this lifetime in human form, we live to a pre-ordinance
which we are completely unaware of. To that extent, it is all pre-determined. Even
so, we do have the opportunity, the free will, to respond to Life as it happens
to us.
Since none of us has seen God, in
the manner in which each of our religions insist he or she exists, I would like
to conclude that God, Fate, Destiny are excuses that mankind has invented to
take the easy way out of remaining accountable in Life! We abdicate our
responsibility towards our lives by dumping the blame on a God, an unknown Fate
and an inscrutable Destiny. Osho, the Master, explains this well, in his
trademark, in-the-face style: “There is no fate, no destiny. You are just
trying to dump your responsibility on something that does not exist. And
because it does not exist, it cannot resist you; it cannot say, "Please
don't dump your responsibility on me!" God is silent, you can dump
anything on him __ no resistance, because there is nobody to resist. Fate is
again the same. You fail in love, you fail in other matters. It hurts that you
have failed. You need some kind of ointment for your wounded heart.
"Fate" is a beautiful ointment and freely available. You don't have
to pay for it. You can say, "What can I do? Everything is decided by
fate." Success or failure, richness or poverty, sickness or health, Life
or death, everything is in the hands of an unknown power called fate
"I am doing my best, still I go on failing. I am following all the
moral principles preached to me, still I am poor. And I see all kinds of
immoral people becoming richer, getting ahead, becoming famous. It is all
fate." It gives you solace. It gives you solace that you are not
reaching your goals. It also gives you solace that if others have achieved
success, there is nothing much in it, it is just decided by fate. So, on the
one hand, you are saved from feeling inferior; on the other hand, your jealousy
enjoys the idea that the successful person is successful only because fate has
determined it that way: "It has nothing to do with him; he's not superior
to me." God, fate, destiny--they are all in the same category:
throwing your responsibility onto something that does not exist.”
My understanding is an extension of
Osho’s point of view: If there is birth, there will be death. So, what’s so
intelligent about calling someone’s death, a well-known, inevitable reality,
his or her destiny? What’s the point in sulking and blaming your fate__when
things go wrong, when we know for sure that things WILL go wrong? What is the
point in calling a God, who you fear, unkind? Isn’t it obvious that you will
fear something only when it does not meet your expectations in some manner __
being unkind being one of them!? I would, for the same reason, want to find
someone who loves__not fears__God, call God unkind!
So, the moot point is Life will
keep happening to you, the way it wants. You can accept it and be happy and
content or you can resist it and sulk. This act of responding to your Life is
what is free will all about. And that free will is within your control, even if
your own Life is not!
Let’s take two examples of two
exemplary women to understand how deployment of free will really impacts the
quality of one’s Life:
 |
| Chitra Singh |
Chitra Singh, the ghazal singer and
maestro Jagjit Singh’s wife, came out of her self-imposed exile to pay tribute
to her husband. She has been interviewed in the latest issue of People magazine.
22 years ago she had lost her son Vivek in a car crash, then her daughter
Monica committed suicide in 2010 and Jagjit himself passed away in 2011. She
admits to Dhaval Roy that she made repeated attempts at finding her voice
again, but failed each time: “Life has been so kind and unkind to me at the
same time that singing doesn’t come to me anymore. One’s voice is a very
delicate mechanism. I just choked up and stopped singing. So, I did not leave
music, it left me.” So, that is her response, employing her free will, her way,
to living, to a predetermined Life design.
 |
| Shagufta Rafique |
In the same issue of People, I
encountered the amazing story of Shagufta Rafique, who once was a dancer in
bars in Dubai and a prostitute, who has not become a screenwriter, dishing out
hits like Raaz 3 and Murder 2, in Hindi cinema. She tells Divya Unny: ‘My
stories are cheap and melodramatic like me. I am not a trained writer. A course
cannot teach you how to tell stories. You need to have a flame burning within
you which translates into something relatable. Life has taught me that. I have
been a whore too long to erase that part of my Life. I have always dreamt of
telling my story. And my own film will be the biggest test of my strength.”
And, that, dear friends, is her response, employing her free will, her way, to
living to a predetermined Life design.
Bliss is what happens when you
choose, through your free will, to accept, celebrate and love, your Life’s
design, or destiny. When you rue your design, blaming your fate, you will
suffer. When you live your Life lovingly, you will meet God __ your God! And
that God is bliss!
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