Destiny vs Karma vs Free Will

A friend asked me an interesting question recently. They hadn't been able to attend an event they'd very much wanted to, and pondered out loud - was this the result of destiny, karma, or simply an unforeseen result of a free will choice?

Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay

The most empowering belief I've found on this topic is to treat them all as free will choices - with different levels of awareness and memory. Something might seem like destiny or karma because you don't consciously remember the cause. Or because you were not aware of the implications of a decision.

For example, when I went to uni I initially studied chemistry. I didn't enjoy it much, and did quite poorly. I switched to mechatronics engineering - which was a much better fit for me. Was this destiny? After I started studying engineering, I remembered how much I'd loved playing with LEGO as a child. So I saw how the things I had focused on early in life (constructing physical things and solving puzzles) gave me an affinity for my studies and work. This was much clearer explanation than attributing it to destiny.

Maybe my interest in engineering came from karma? Had I done something good in a past life which gave me an edge? Or done something bad which led to my failure with chemistry? I simply don't know. So using this explanation offloads responsibility to something that can't be unpacked or understood further. It doesn't help me. Dan Davies, author of The Unaccountability Machine (2024), would call that an 'accountability sink'. It lets me blame past karma for a situation - good or bad - but doesn't help me take any meaningful actions.

So what if I attribute that situation to a series of choices? I chose to spend time on a range of interesting things, which didn't include much study - so I did poorly at chemistry even though that wasn't my conscious goal. I chose to change my degree to something that seemed more interesting, which turned out to be incredibly rewarding. But then when that path ran out of excitement, I was able to choose again and make a career change.

There's another layer to this. Why is it useful to understand how a situation came to be? So we can avoid it if it was unpleasant, or recreate it if we enjoyed it.

From the level of the conscious self, understanding situations as choices is practical - but incomplete. Sometimes things happen that are just too... convenient. You wake up one morning and it seems every possible thing that could go wrong does - you sleep through your alarm, spill your coffee, get cut off in traffic, mess up the client meeting. Or the opposite: find the perfect parking spot, hit it off with a stranger who becomes a lifelong friend, get a job that shows you a new passion. You can't explain these things from your conscious choices alone.

My belief is we each have a higher self - a higher consciousness. An expanded mind, aware of the wider context of our actions and consequences. This is the seat of our intuition. What science calls "higher sociocognitive functions" [1]. What some religions call the soul, or divine self. The more we can connect to this for guidance, the more we can act in harmony with our conscious and unconscious choices in life - making things flow more smoothly and joyfully.

For example, after working for several years as an electrical engineer I wanted to create more abstract systems - something closer to pure creativity. I shifted to software engineering, which was more fulfilling. I wouldn't have made this change - which took a lot of work and some time unemployed - if I hadn't listened to an inner intuition that I could do something even better.

What this means is we don't need to consciously think through every past situation to understand the choices that led to it. We usually want to understand these past situations so that we can avoid them - and make better decisions in the future. Instead of trying to understand the past, we can make the best decisions we can in the present - augmented by our higher mind, or intuition.

How to develop that higher mind connection is a topic for the future.

Reference:

1. McCrea S. M. (2010). Intuition, insight, and the right hemisphere: Emergence of higher sociocognitive functions. Psychology research and behavior management, 3, 1–39. https://doi.org/10.2147/prbm.s7935