The whole debate between free will and destiny is something I’ve spent a great deal of time mulling over, and I’ve found that one’s beliefs on the subject hinge on two interrelated concepts: the nature of the Divine (what I call Oneness) and the purpose of physical reality. If a person believes that destiny exists, they also tend to believe in a strongly personal Creator who has a definite plan for us and all existence. If a person believes in free will, they tend to conceptualize the Divine in far less personal terms (if at all) and see life-purpose as far more free-form.  Yet I personally break from this mold. I believe that Oneness can be very personal, yet I believe strongly in free will. So allow me to lay out my reasoning and show how I came to this conclusion.

If there is such a thing as destiny, it must be put in place by God, or the Divine, or the Higher Powers, or whatever limited little name you wish to give the Unlimited. If this is the case, then the Divine must have requirements, desires, or preferences of some sort, otherwise there would be no destiny. So my question then is this; what sort of preferences would the Divine have? One does not have preferences simply to have them. They must fill some need, whether it be psychological, emotional, or what have you. Yet we are talking about Oneness, That Which Is, the source of everything in existence, the Alpha and Omega. How could such a Being need anything?

A second and related issue I have with destiny has to do with Time. For something to need anything, there has to be Time involved, because there must be a moment when the thing desired is not possessed, another when it is either achieved or thwarted, and a process or transition from one to the other. Thus for the Divine to have any desires or needs, the Divine must be bound up by Time. Yet science has proven that Time is actually an aspect of physical reality, that there is not Time and Space, but what they refer to as the Time/Space continuum. For Oneness to be bound in time would then be a limitation upon the Unlimited, an obvious contradiction.

Thus in order for Destiny to exist, it must be possible for the Divine to have requirements and be limited by Time, yet there cannot be anything the Unlimited does not have, and the Creator must exist independent of Time, thus I cannot see how Destiny can exist.

Yet there must be a purpose to physical reality, otherwise it would not exist either. So where does that leave us? This quandary bound me up for a very long time, until a friend sent me a link to a very nifty video called “How To Imagine 10 Dimensions”. It is about 11 minutes long, but completely worth the watch.

The important point is this: when a conscious being makes a choice, a “fracture” occurs in 6th dimensional “space”, a splitting off like the branches of a tree, one path representing one choice, the other the opposite. What this means is that every choice, every possibility, exists multidimensionally. This was the final piece for me, because this meant that no requirements could possibly exist, since all possibilities already do! I cannot have a specific destiny when an infinitude of Jim Strucks exist in an infinitude of possible worlds doing an infinitude of different things, and the same holds true for everyone else.

This also solved my conundrum concerning the purpose of Reality. Put simply, the purpose is Experience. There is only one thing which a singular consciousness cannot do, no matter how transcendent, and that is to understand itself if there is no basis for comparison. For “I” to exist, there must be “not I”, for “here” there must be “there”, and so on. Thus Oneness created All That Is within/from Itself in order for there to be a way for it to experience Itself as Itself, and also as not-Itself.

We, as conscious beings, have a most important job. Since we perceive reality in a linear fashion, we can make choices and create those multi-dimensional fractures of probability I mentioned before. Basically, each time a conscious being makes a choice, it doubles the possible ways the One Soul can experience Itself by splitting Reality into two.

Thus, our entire purpose is to make choices, and which choice we make is completely irrelevant as far as the One Soul is concerned, since from Its point of view, all choices and results exist. But this does not mean that it is all meaningless, not at all! Our choices make all the difference in the world to us. It is through our choices that we forge our experience, our particular perspective. The more consistent we are with our choices, the stronger our particular experience becomes, the more we are able to tap into the creative power within us. Therefore, the closest thing we have to an official purpose in life is to decide and proclaim Who We Are. Thus, in many ways, we are on the same voyage of self-understanding and self-creation which Oneness, only in microcosm.

I’ve been chewing on the idea of happiness for a long while now, and I’ve noticed something; it seems like it’s far easier to get a grasp on what happiness is not than what it is. We are told that happiness is Stuff or Self-Sacrifice or Falling In Love, that happiness is basically anything our society can turn into a product or an escape, yet all of those ideals are demonstrably lacking. I think that half the reason that people get involved in alternative religions is due to a dissatisfaction with society’s ideas about happiness.