"I trust that everything happens for a reason, even when we're not wise enough to see it." - Oprah

[kuriku]

To what extent can faith be believed in? If I am destined to end up somewhere as someone, will I still get there if I do nothing? Will I be moved from this seat if I refuse to move on my own? Is destiny fulfilled, or is it simply reachedAnd if destiny cannot control me, if it cannot bend me--then why should I bend forth to its will? If destiny is

Comments

[onfeynyuan_shen]

there was something in the movie "forrest Gump" about this; basically it suggested, maybe it's a little of both - sometimes things happen to you, and sometimes the fate you get is based on the decisions you make and have made...

Some people believe in randomness, others than everything is fixed in that personalities and so on will react a certain way because of their natures, so the 'free will' is an illusion, so that people are just another extension of predictable machines that we just don't understand fully, yet. There are some more far out ideas along the lines of 'every possible reality exists', parallel worlds of these different possibilities, and the movement of consciousness through this 'structure', the 'act of perceiving', forces reality to 'choose' a particular state (schroedinger's cat thought experiment... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schroedinger%27s_cat ) anyways, if reality were an unchanging pattern matrix, and time passed because consciousness moved through it, both cause and effect become perceptual artifacts that merely help us piece together our 'motion' through the structure and the 'making sense of' the perceptions as they relate to each other; as Carlos Castaneda might have suggested, one might be able to change one's perceptions in such a way, and or one's relative 'motion' through this structure, to perceive a world which suddenly seems to function based on different rules and principles; in such a case, the 'fundamental laws of the universe' could be attributed more accurately to the nature of the particular consciousnesses pattern of travel through, or interaction with this 'static structure'. A simpler analogy than that, might be of wearing glasses that have a certain colour filter, or let you perceive certain colours/things, but not others, so people wearing different glasses may see very different aspects of the world, and interpret it differently; or someone facing a sunset, seeing a brightlight in the sky and everything else in shadow, or someone facing away from the it, seeing the light of everything reflecting back.

Err what's my point? I guess it depends how people connect the dots ... science wouldn't 'work' if there was 'no predictability whatsoever', but perhaps we (c/w)ould 'know everything' and so on if there was no 'randomness' or 'undecideability' in the universe... black boxes, as it were.
I think we tend to have less choice in things than we often think, when we feel like we are controlling things, but more than we realize, often, when we are feeling helpless...
Being somewhere 'mentally', as a practice... is probably almost as good an exercise as anything else, for... becoming more of deciders of our own fate... increasing our own awareness, 'consciousness', of ourselves, our own perceptions, the world around us, and of the interactions of things and our knowledge of this, and the meanings we give all of this.

What I mean is, if one's imagination was good enough, going through the motions in one's mind of doing things is almost as good as doing things in real life... harmonizing the two in deep focus can do amazing things ... i think the imagination thing is called 'creative visualization', some athletes etc do it... there's a good scene in "The Last Samurai" that sort of does something like this...
When the gates of perception are in tune with the truth of the world, um one can attain like 'zen archery' sort of things ... is that a little bit like there being a 'fate'? the people can predict?

Wow, I'm rambling.

[onfeynyuan_shen]

If you watch the matrix, some key ideas are 1)knowing or thinking you know the future, can change the future. 2) something like you can't see past a choice you don't understand (in the future) sci-fi/ fantasy, not necessarily real, but ... it suggests, unless there are nested loops (ie you saw the future, but thought knowing would change it, so didn't believe it, so it happened anyways, etc) choice is relevant - even if some of your choices may be somewhat predictable, you must rise to meet your fate, in that opportunities present themselves, but conscious will and effort are necessary to realize them. But if people are part of a 'greater conscious will' than themselves, Gaia, God, hive or collective mind, than perhaps once again you might see things as being fate.
ack that's enough.