Free-Will, Choice, and Pre-Destination...

My idea was that your free will comes into play before you are born... free will to choose the life you will have based on your karmic debt and the soul lessons you need to experience in order to learn and move on spiritually. You still have free will to choose where you go next in life but from a set series of options. It is not possible in life to just decide on a certain lifestyle. How can you decide to say get a degree, travel the world and recover from being a drug addict if you have three children, are a single parent and on benefits? There would be certain things you would have to be able to do in order to choose that life path. It may be that that is your life path but by making the wrong choices from the menu you have taken yourself away from that, and hard work is in order to get there. You would have to start making all of the right decisions from there on in, based on your set options. You would have to analyse how you got to where you are in order to retrace your steps back to yourself.. Having laid out all the clues for yourself before you were born. If you remembered what you were here for after you were born, then what would the point of reincarnation be? You would still already know everything.

My feelings on this are based on my life experience. They are the conclusions i have come to based on what i have lived through and when i have died. I have nearly lost my life a number of times. Lets just say, i am lucky to be here. Now i am making the right decisions, i am back on my path. That's all i know...... I live my life according to my philosophy... and it is mine... i have come through all of that and am now indeed doing all of those things and many more. More than i ever knew i had the capability to do. I had free will to only a certain extent. I had the free will of making the decision to work hard at getting out of that situation or the free will to stay there and let it deteriorate. Every time you make a decision, you have the next set of options before you... Well, it works for me anyway! Whenever something isn't going right, i look at the situation and think, well i'm not going the right way, i've been bumping into these same two walls for weeks.. what am i missing?

I digress a little, i humbly apologise, i am explaining why i think the way i do...
Also to say the above hopeless scenario could be fixed but not with the ckick of the fingers. Limited free will.

In regards to this subject, the essayist Brian Takle writes:

[quote]
What constitutes making a choice? Is there anything beyond simple cause-and-effect chains? Do we live in a Skinnerian prison, bounded by our past experiences? [At the time of the crucifixion, Jesus] enters the nirvana of emptiness. No purpose. Neither fear, nor desire. Only will. The gift, the sacrifice, made by will alone overcomes everything. There is no higher why.

[At the time of the crucifixion, the Shadow Figure asks Jesus why does he sacrifice himself, and Jesus

I wouldn't agree that we 'give up' our free-will before taking birth, and that it only exists when we are in a 'non-born' state. Srila Prabhupada described that whatever we desire in our heart at the time of death, and whatever karma we have coming to us both determine our next birth in the world.

I would agree that it's all about choice. Making the right choices - making the choices that you know will please Krishna (God) rather than simply trying to please yourself. The path of inner surrender. 'Bhakti'.

Om Tat Sat,

Das

Why don't you tell me what you think free will is then, and how you can exercise it in our society... Because i obviously have no idea what it is. Are we born with free will??? Hmm... interestring how i never had any in my home life. Free will to do what suffer at the hands of an abusive parent? When does it actually come into play then... when your old enough to vote.. please explain.. i must be missing some vital point here.

P.s i'd like to hear what YOU think, not what it say's in a book... unless you've written it.

i just found this quote in a book, it seemed fitting somehow ( even though i just stated no quotes!! Sorry!)

Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Jean-Jaque Rousseau.

Hi Sashwah,

Thanks for the question, in reply the reason I often give quotes (most from Bhagavad-Gita) is because I believe the opinion of Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita is far more important than my own. I'm no perfect soul, but in my opinion Krishna is. No quotes in this one though :-)

I would define free-will as 'the ability to make independent decisions'. A computer could never make an independent decision it just follows a programme. We may not be able to control everything about our life, but we can decide how to react to act to things which occur, either internally or externally. It's a limited free-will.

Say we catch an illness, we don't have the free-will to suddenly 'un-catch' it, but can decide how we deal with it - i.e seek treatment, take medicine or ignore it etc... Other people might define the term differently? Is this similar to what you were thinking?

That is exactly my point....free will is alway's limited. I still believe we are given it though before we are born.. absolute free will to choose your path to the divine. I am actually very interested in the Krishna conciousness, after having spoken to a few followers. We have a centre that i live near for seven years. I thought it was quite interesting that my philosophy isn't tooo disimilar to Krishna conciousnes, although not as indepth maybe at this stage of my life.. i'm 35.

Glad we sorted that one out

Originally Posted by sashwah

free will is alway's limited.

Originally Posted by DASA

It's a limited free-will.

But is free will limited by the limitations we put on it?

I don't mean that a child who is in an abusive family situation actually chooses to be there... But it is fear and parental programming that prevents the child believing that they can escape from that situation... I'm not saying that the child is wrong - believe me... I am most definitely not saying that...

BUT it is belief that keeps that child in that situation... they believe they deserve their treatment... they believe they cannot escape it... they might even believe that this is 'normal' behaviour......

But as far as God/creator/spirit/whatever goes, it was not "God's" choice that they receive that treatment.... the treatment comes about as the result of a series of choices......... the abusive parent isn't programmed by "God" to be abusive.... it comes about as the result of a series of choices....... choices that they themselves have made and probably choices that were made by people in their past that have affected them.............

But surely, we have options in everything that we do.... I'm not saying that the choices are obvious... and I'm not saying that it was a deliberate action if we make a 'wrong' choice - for example walking across a road in front of a car.... but we did have the choice of whether we crossed the road at that time....

I don't know if I'm making sense at all..........

To attempt to clarify what I'm saying... both sashwah and DASA say that free-will is limited.... but is it limited by whoever/whatever 'created' us (who/whatever we believe in) or is it limited by the limitations that humans in their human-ness put upon it....?

I must admit that I