Destiny is not what you will be, Destiny is what you really are || Acharya Prashant (2015)
Acharya Prashant: The topic today is ‘Destiny and Freewill’. The mind has always been interested in knowing about these. The individual that we sometimes call as man, sometimes refer to as ego, sometimes as the self – the fragmented self – is always curious about this particular topic, because it is related to his freedom.
He wants to know whether he really does have any freewill, any choice, and any real power to determine things by himself, or is it a totally deterministic world. That’s what makes everybody very curious in this topic.
The ego wants to know, to what extent things are destined, and to what extent does its own discretion, its own will and volition apply and matter. And when we look at it, at least superficially, it appears that these two or a combination of these two are the only options that are available to us. It seems that man is either destined or he enjoys a freewill, or his predicament, his position lies somewhere in between, but on the same plane.
And the first glance also suggests as if these two are opposites of each other. As if those who talk about destiny are taking a position counter to those who talk about freewill. At least that is how psychologists look at it. So a Skinner (referring to the 20th century psychologist B. F. Skinner), for example, would say that we are purely mechanical, and had all of our past been known, our future could be predicted with absolute certainty – it is just that we do not have all the data of the past. So he says that everything is destiny, there is nothing called freewill. And then there are other intellectuals who take a counter position and say that man’s consciousness has an important role to play, not everything is predestined.
