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Fate & Freewill Are Not Opposites!
Astrology is founded on the idea of “destiny” – the idea that you were destined to be a certain way, and that certain events and experiences were fated to occur in your life. It goes a step further and says that the lights in the heavens have something to do with all this. Somehow by observing the patterns among the heavenly bodies we are supposed to be able to understand the destiny of people and things down here on earth.
This is quite a claim, I admit. The opposition protests, “I make my own destiny. I have freewill and the stars do not have power over me!”
I agree. You make your own destiny. You have freewill and the stars do not have power over you. But I will go a step further and tell you that you make your own destiny because you have freewill!
Freewill Causes Fate
There used to be this board-game, Clue. My parents, aunts and uncles used to enjoy playing it and I would join them, to the best of my elementary-school ability. The game was about trying to figure out who killed who in which room and with what. “The butler killed her in the drawing room with a candlestick.” So let me ask you, Who is responsible for the murder: the butler, the drawing room, or the candlestick?
Simple: the butler. Yes the candlestick, drawing room, etc. were accessories, but the guilty party is the butler and I presume that after the game is over the police of the board-game universe are going to take him to trial and put him in jail.
Why is it the butler, not the candlestick that goes to jail? Simple: the butler is a person and the candlestick isn’t. What’s the difference? One is alive and the other isn’t! One has freewill and the other doesn’t. The candlestick and the drawing room have no freewill so although they were directly involved in killing the poor fictional lady, they are not put on trial. The butler has freewill, therefore he is the one that gets put in the slammer.
Thus I say, “Fate exists because freewill exists.” The ability to make a choice includes the responsibility for the repercussions of that choice. Fate is nothing but being held accountable for the “good” or “bad” results of the free choices we make and have made.
And so I also agree that the stars do not “have power over” us. The stars do not influence, create or decide your fate. You do. What do the stars do? They enforce fate.
Actually, even that is a little bit misleading. The stars and planets themselves do not directly enforce your fate. Rocks and gasses floating at tremendous distances from us cannot enforce anything, no matter how “new age” you try to slice it. However, these heavenly bodies are observable extensions of the universe which is the true enforcer of fate; much like the hands on a clock are the observable protrusions of much more complex clockworks operating beneath. It is the universe herself which observes all of our decisions and holds us accountable for the repercussions we call “fate.”
Why The Universe Corrects Us
Why does the universe hold me accountable for my choices? Because she is our mother.
A mother takes care of her children and sees to it that they grow up right. When a child does something negative the mother must correct, and when the child does something positive she must encourage. The child is pretty oblivious to the whole thing. To him it just seems like sometimes mom is nice and sometimes she is nasty. But gradually the child grows into a good adult, in spite of himself, largely as a result of the kind and often laborious corrections and encouragements of his mother.
Similarly to us it seems like sometimes life sucks and at other times it is a bed of roses. The truth is that all of our fate is the kind hand of our mother.
How Can Paterns in the Sky Have Anything to Do With This?
How can the positions of observable celestial bodies reveal the nature of my destiny? Because a mother cannot just silently punish and reward, she must also communicate with her children. At certain times and circumstances the universe wants to communicate more directly with us. One way she does so is through “body language” – the positions of the stars and planets that form what we can see of her body.
In short, the position of planets and stars communicate to us about our destiny simply because the universe wants it that way and makes it that way.
The Huge Scale of All This
Every single baby is born with a different fate. Why, because they all have made different choices in their past. But what is the past of a newborn child???
Now we have to talk about reincarnation.
This brings in a whole religious connotation. Personally I am a big fan of religion, but for a lot of people it brings up irrational emotional issues which don’t help us think clearly. So if you don’t mind I would like to avoid religious connotations and discuss this in a more scientific manner. There is a physical law called “conservation of energy.” It states that energy is never lost, merely transferred from one state to another.
That’s reincarnation.
You and I are a wonderful type of energy and therefore we never cease to exist. Death is merely our energy going through a “change of state.” You and I have existed beginninglessly. That’s a long time. All that time we have had freewill, and all that time we’ve been using it. We’ve got a lot of fate piled up as a result. No child is truly “newborn.” We are all carrying over the lessons and encouragements remaining from our previous lifetimes’ use of freewill.
The scale of astrology is huge and it’s really quite a shame to see it used so lamely in such debased forms and in pursuit of such thoroughly mundane concerns with little or no awareness or knowledge of its grand, spiritual scale. Although love, romance, and bank accounts are not unimportant and are valid topics for astrology – the much bigger and more important topic is that we are eternal beings who for some strange reason currently exist in a temporary universe and that universe herself is trying her best to help us “grow up” and attain our true inherent potential as supra-universal, transcendental spiritual beings.
I would like to give you an understanding of astrology which is aware of and benefits from both its common mundane applications and the uncommon transcendental context.
- Vic DiCara
