Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

have ‘control’ in some measure, but not over the intended consequences. Indeed, our very effort to acquire control over Nature and life seems to be having the opposite effect.

Even fate itself seems fated; it too has no control over its delivery and disposition. The reality of life is that, nothing else is as dissimilar, as divergent and as disparate as fate; all other differences, physiological, biological, racial are no match for fate. The same set of circumstances or the same configurations appear to yield different results for different individuals. We cannot even tell how much of what we imagine as human will or effort is not fate in disguise. There is a difference between the ‘irremediable event’ and how we react to it. They are part of the same, the two sides of the same coin. Charles Swindoll wrote that life is 10 percent of what actually happens to us, and 90 percent of how we react to it. One can quibble with the percentages, but there is little doubt that our attitude or the mindset we bring to bear has much to do with how an event affects us. But some will argue that that our reaction itself is part of our predetermined fate.

While we can debate how deterministic fate is in life, we all agree that our final fate is death, at least as of now. It is said that when the gods created man, they assigned death to man and kept life to themselves. What we humans call life is but the process of dying and a prelude to death, and how we prepare for the process is the call of manhood; and the gods must be laughing at our desperate attempts to wiggle out of it. Like Shakespeare’s Romeo we are all ‘Fortune’s fools’. An English proverb says that ‘he who is fated to be hanged shall never be drowned’. As the French proverb goes, you often meet your fate on the road you take to avoid it. No matter how deep we dig into the bowels of Nature, and advance in

 

narrowing the possibilities and probabilities of life, we always run up against indeterminate contingencies outside the context under inquiry and laws of casualty. That raises the troubling question: is human effort really a waste of effort? Some say that what we call ‘effort’ is itself the divine will at play, and that we are simply the medium of a certain action that has to be done at a certain time and at a certain place on earth. According to the karma theory, the present effort is a past consequence; we reap the fruits, good or bad, of our past actions, which means that while we can influence our future life through our present effort, the present fate cannot be changed. Others say, as it is said in the Yoga Vasistha, that “without doubt a former fault is extinguished by the current good qualities.”541 The fact is there will never be a definitive conclusion, and we cannot discern whether fate has a life of its own or it is subjective insufficiency of human knowledge, or if it is a divine instrument to maintain order. Indeterminism or fate or fortune or chance seems ingrained in the complexity of  human life. And every culture has tried to grapple with it in multiple ways. The Romans, for example, worshipped it as a deity. Fortune is also compared to a wheel. In actuality, much of human effort is to get out of fate’s cruel grasp and make life profitable, productive, and pleasant. Even accepting grudgingly that many things in life could go wrong and that often, as Murphy’s law postulates, when things can go wrong they will go wrong, we still want to mitigate the adverse effect by the search for some kind of a ‘middle path’, in which fate may determine what will be in one’s life but, how that actualizes becomes a matter of man’s own choice.

We all may say, at a moment of helpless exasperation, ‘such is life’ or ‘life is unfair’, but as the French author La Rochefoucauld puts it wittily, but truly, “All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.”542 While most people will concur that fate or destiny does have a role to play in life, what is open to debate is whether it is frozen or flexible, and how much of it is amenable to human effort? In fact, all life is, to use a popular phrase, to bend fate ‘like Beckham’ to our will, and make destiny dance to our tunes. Phrases like ‘it is my fate’, ‘fate of earth’, ‘human destiny’ and ‘designs of destiny’ have become clichés. Cutting across cultures and continents and up and down the ages, there have always been two kinds of people: those who believe in ‘letting things happen’ and those who believe in ‘making things happen’. The subtle difference between the two, notwithstanding, the underlying idea is some sort of predetermination, absence of choice, and the presence of a power that determines the outcome of an event before it occurs. The difference implies some sort of negation or dilution of another frequently used term ‘free will’, which, in its absolute sense, means that we are the masters of our fate with total control over our actions and their consequences. Although the existence of free will is the foundation of science and it implies that through our actions we can control the future, many great scientists like Einstein (‘I am a determinist; I do not believe in free will’) have supported the notion that we cannot affect the future any more than we can change the past. David Shiang, in his book God Does Not Play Dice, says that the solution to the free will problem can be summed up in five simple words: you cannot affect the future; he goes on, “our future may be ‘before us’ and not yet traveled but the road is already designed”. According to the Advaita philosophy, the ‘problem’ arises because we, under the spell of ‘maya’, fail to differentiate between reality and appearance.

We will never be in a position to say what really is or what really happens, but we can only say what will be observed in any specific individual case. Any reality is nothing more than

 

 

 

541 B.L. Atreya. Samvid (tr.). The Vision and Way of Vasistha. 2nd edition. 2005. Samata Books. Chennai, India. p.95.

542 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.42.

 

that. “For there to be fate, there would have to be someone to whom separate things could happen or who could observe other things happening in some predetermined manner. For there to be free will, there would have to be someone who could choose between separate things. All these ways of thinking belong to the illusory world of duality.”543 In the present context, in which appearance is the only reality that we know, the important issue is how fate and free will impinge on human behavior and their impact on the future of the species. The way man is behaving, so irrational, suicidal, and destructive, makes us believe that we are simply playing out our fate according to the directions of our destiny. Between the two ‘absolutes’ of fate and free will, some settle for the middle ground: that is, the conviction that there are external forces that influence, if not determine, our individual and collective lives; but it leaves a lot of room and scope for our will and wisdom to make our choices and pave our passage into the posthuman future. We do feel overwhelmed by forces that apparently defy our decisions and flout our control and yet we constantly exercise choices that lead to consequences which again are not always what we intended to yield. The apparent contrasts of chaos and cosmos, chance and cause, accident and purpose, order and disorder mark much of human life. Man has long bemoaned the vagaries of vidhi (destiny) or the fickleness of fate for apparently harassing good men and favoring evil ones. Some like Saint Augustine opined that fate is God’s will, and Greek tragedy viewed it as a deterministic power that ruled humans and even the gods.

Both logic and prudence argue in favor of the ‘middle’ course; that is, let fate play its games but do your utmost to spice it to your taste. Translated into theological terms, it is tantamount to believing in divine omnipotence and omnipresence, but behaving as if human effort can make a decisive difference. And since every effort has a consequence we should ensure that that consequence is positive and beneficial to others. We have no other rational alternative except absolute inaction or absolute anarchy. Then, we come to the practical question. If we can make a difference with our behavior, what should we do to improve the odds in our favor and to better the destiny of the species? One view is that by assessing the way we manage our past and present, we can make reasonable assumptions about our future. It has also been said that fate is the outcome of the past, and free will, that of the present.544

H.P. Blavatsky stated that the “destiny of every man and the birth of every child, whose life is already traced in the Astral Light — not fatalistically, but only because the future, like the past, is ever alive in the present”.545 Setting aside for a moment the question of divine will, we are left with two ‘moral aims’ related to how we behave towards others. The greatest good to the greatest numbers might not always be the answer but it is still the closest. A close second could be non-injury to fellow humans, if not to life, in thought, word, and deed. We must not forget, not even for a moment, that all three are postscripts of the past and postcards of the future. And their fall out impacts other people, particularly the defenseless. While thought has a subtle effect, word creates a cascading context, but human deeds directly determine human destiny. The Upanishads underlined the virtue in one’s own actions, “As a man acts, so does he become. A man of good deeds becomes good; a man of evil deeds

 

 

 

 

 

543 Fate and Free Will. Advaita. Accessed at: http://www.advaita.org.uk/discourses/real/freewill.htm

544 Sri Chinmoy. Fate and Free Will. Accessed at: http://www.srichinmoy.org/spirituality/god_the_supreme/the_cosmic_game/fate_and_free_will/

545 H.P. Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine: the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Vol. I. Cosmogenesis. Part.1. 1978. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.105.

 

becomes evil. A man becomes pure through pure deeds; impure through impure deeds.”546 If these two principles, greatest good and non-injury, motivate human effort, then we might stand a fair chance of deserving divine grace. Jainism gives more importance to self-effort or purushartha than even fate or karma. The scriptures also highlight the importance of divine grace and mercy as indispensable to help us navigate in the turbulent waters of human life.

Many saints have welcomed what is fated as divine grace, but most mortals pray for grace to spare them from the vagaries of fate.

We forget the fact that the fate we bemoan is the fate we have made for ourselves through the continuum of our thoughts, words, and actions; we create fate every day, nay every minute, we live by our behavior. Our fate is our fortune. The principle we apply to human interaction, that there is no action without consequence, that we must take responsibility for our actions, we do not apply to life as a whole. Down the ages, we have put fate outside the vortex of our actions. The belief that the ‘force of destiny’ always seems to outwit human ingenuity is ingrained in human consciousness, and that theme has been the stuff of mythology and great works like Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Spanish