On fate

"I believe this is a playful universe, one with humor and wit, which regularly tests the strength of our resolve to self-determine the course of our future.

Whenever we do what Fate claims to have destined for us, it's one more victorious point in its battle against Free Will. The more obediently we follow Fate's call, the more accurately that fortune-telling-style astrology will predict our future. It was written in the stars, after all.

When we buck the likeliest trend, though, and choose to co-creatively fight for a different outcome, Fate doesn't just throw up its hands like a poor loser and go running home to Mommy. It plays a different hand. It pulls out tricks from up its sleeve. It flashes options that are novel, yet with eerie familiarity to something we've known before—parallels or outright repetitions, apparent opposites that boil down to the flip-side of the same coin. The compelling charge of this familiarity, whether we immediately recognize it for what it is, beckons us. But is this just another side-street connector-road leading us right back to that main thoroughfare we thought we'd diverged from?

Assuming we haven't yet resolved our inner conflict—and are not as ready to adopt a single self-determined avenue as our own as we'd hoped—which way do we go? Is Fate plotting to re-entrap us on some path of least resistance, or might we engage the uncannily familiar conditions with different actions?

In my playfully poetic universe, Fate does not hold the highest roost in the land. From down one or another of the seemingly comparable roads comes a calmer, quieter, purely loving voice of God (for lack of a more concise and widely-understood label), whispering a call to any and all who believe in evolutionary purpose: to grow further toward conscious, open-hearted loving-kindness in all we do; and to grow away from inherited behaviors, motivated by pain or fear, that block this expression. Fate, an underling, reports to this God, its job to weave the testing-ground scenarios through which we may learn to lovingly choose what's correct for us.

Our minds, meanwhile, are often just self-indulgent miscreants who'll say anything to have us believe they are in charge, though they're not. When the mind lacks rational understanding of why a choice may indeed be the correct one, it reports back that we don't know what to do. But that isn't entirely true, is it?

We might not know why we should make this certain choice… only that we know we are being called to it. The voice of God speaks clearly, though softly: 'This is where your greatest evolutionary potential resides. Proceed, with love.'

This blows me away.