Destiny is the structure above all structures, the forcing function of life that dictates everything that surrounds us from outside and within.
What is NOT destiny?
People think destiny is avoiding taking action.
Well, don’t be this guy lol. 😛
Anyways, I am going to explain the esoteric knowledge, the mystery of the present moment, and what it means to be a human with the capacity to experience godliness.
We live in a deeply mysterious world. It means we don’t know what we don’t know. Here’s some nuance:
“We’re used to calling out the overconfidence of people, like political commentators who make bold predictions and then move onto the next bold prediction when the previous one fails to materialize, never acknowledging their poor track record.
But lack of metaknowledge cuts both ways. “I know that I know nothing” is a sentiment often misattributed to Socrates, and sometimes taken to be a statement of great humility and self-knowledge. But the statement makes the mistake of metaknowledge in the opposite direction—we are often unaware of the depth of our own knowledge.” –Tommy Blanchard (Substack: Cognitive Wonderland)
Our minds are full of gaps we don’t notice. There are things we don’t realize we don’t know, but also things we don’t realize we do know. Knowing something isn’t the same as knowing we know it. To misquote Socrates again, knowing thyself (or at least, our state of knowledge) is hard.”
It implies what seems like truth on the surface level is almost always a facade or illusion of the mind. The astonishing part is how easy it is to forget this. We attribute such blunders to our stupidity. In truth, we just have an incredibly poor memory.
Memory is of two types. 1) Normal memory. 2) Mindless-memory.
Normal memory is our past.
Mindless-memory is our subconscious mind. We can’t access it by normal sight. But we can work with it.
Mindless-memory can be understood by the following example.
There was a guy in the town who took his cows to eat grass. He rested there near a tree while they were eating.
One cow got far away while he was still asleep. He woke up to realise there was one cow missing. He felt he must go look for it. But the second thought came to him: “What if the other cows go missing while he searches for one?” So instead he wrote on a tree’s trunk as a signboard for people to notice it:
“Cow missing.”
He came there next day. Nobody brought his cow. Nobody saw his signboard.
He thought to himself whether he should have gone to find out or not. Not doing so was indeed a mistake, he felt this strongly.
He ignored his intuition. We do this all the time. In the hope that our cow will find her way back on its own by the grace of a Saviour.
This is also one of the most fundamental mistakes people make when they think about destiny; They think of destiny as a servant they have hired for them to dictate it at their whims/demands/will.
Then the question arises:
How does it apply in your life?
Destiny is like a magician who gives us control to choose our own cards but ultimately we are dealing with his deck and playing his game. So we play his game by our will. We are not separate from the magician; we are built of magic.
(Fun fact: My cousin Shri helped me write the above paragraph who apparently was the very person who helped me see that I must explore the topic deeply. He wouldn’t know it because he did it by “accident.” But I have let him known. Isn’t it magical?)
Intuition is the form we inhibit as our inherent godliness in its most tangible form.
How can you use your intuition to unlock the godliness within?
To quote Bhagwad Gita:
तस्मात्त्वमुत्तिष्ठ यशो लभस्व
जित्वा शत्रून्भुङ् क्ष्व राज्यं समृद्धम् |
मयैवैते निहता: पूर्वमेव
निमित्तमात्रं भव सव्यसाचिन् || 33||
“tasmāt tvam uttiṣhṭha yaśho labhasva
jitvā śhatrūn bhuṅkṣhva rājyaṁ samṛiddham
mayaivaite nihatāḥ pūrvam eva
nimitta-mātraṁ bhava savya-sāchin.”
Therefore, arise and attain honor!
Conquer your foes and enjoy prosperous rulership.
These warriors stand already slain by Me, and you will only be an instrument of My work, O expert archer.
Explanation:
Being an instrument is about being Hanuman to your intuition/godliness/lord Rama within.
When we are not habitual of listening to our intuition it weakens. In such a case, we can start with noticing our fears. Because fear is the polar opposite of intuition. It is a reaction. A survival instinct. The default setting/societal-conditioning of our body. So people tell you to chase your fears as a way to break-free. But that’s only effective when you are chronically ill.
Once you are healthy, you don’t need fear to tell you what to do. You can drop your fears. Work from your intuition alone. If it says something, you follow it. If it doesn’t, you simply stand/sit still. To practice this is to love.
Love needs courage to manifest itself through. Every action has that quality of divinity to it. This is what we mean by godliness within. A few people can try to escape facing their lives in its entirety and still it will be a realisation directly dawn to them that destiny is the inevitable truth of our lives.
It is important to note here I am essentially implying that our intuition is godly by definition. Since our daily lives include a series of actions in each passing moment, the collection of which we call our life, so we must decide what to do according to our intuition. Where does intuition come from is the very source/god/destiny we are referring to again and again. So if you have been wondering about that question, you have my respect. Because it implies you have great self-awareness/quality of attention.
Why is destiny an inevitable truth of our lives?
First we need to understand why we deny our destiny/intuition.
1. We deny our destiny because the guilt-shame duo traps us into the cycle of victimhood. Because we are addicted to being in a certain way.
In other words, we are addicted to the stories we tell ourselves. The simple remedy for so much drama is to breathe properly: let it be. let it go. aka breath in; breath out. Feel it each time at your nostrils. This is the Buddhist technique of meditation. (Buddhist book recommendation: Being Nobody; Going Nowhere by Ayya Kehma if someone is interested in diving deeper.)
2. Destiny is also what you can’t accept but you know in your heart you will have to. You have to give up your sense of doing/being a doer if you ever want to experience your destiny. Destiny is not a principle in stone or in air. It is an experience like a park-walk is an experience.
Once you have experienced it you can’t ignore it. you start experiencing it everywhere. It is the experience before all experiencing.
3. We get stuck at our non-destiny because that seems like the default way to be. but once you completely reject the idea that you are a machine you no longer behave like one. This is so important to convey here because one perpetually thinks they are trying to create an empire of sorts and in truth all they are doing is creating sand castles.
I think when we create these castles in accord with our destiny we no longer create just castles, we create breadcrumbs for us to be a witness to all that happens aka be a light to ourselves. like finger pointing at the moon so they are still not the real thing. What is the real thing then? Maybe it is unexplainable.
There is no escaping one’s destiny because nobody can hand out the truth to you out of thin air. Even though the truth can be found in the thin air. But you have to find it for yourself. But it doesn’t mean going anywhere but embracing the present moment.
The present moment:
1. The instagram generation experiences the present moment as an anticipated memory. – Daniel Kahneman
But this mistake is ancient. What is the right perspective then?
It is so simple that you are gonna miss the point. I say that at the start so that you don’t walk out with the expectation that ‘I am going to be incredibly rich, famous, and attractive using all this meta knowledge to my advantage.’ Because I know how your mind works. It is not your fault though.
“People think being in the now is about feeling bliss only. Untrue. Being in the now is about feeling anything and everything — agony with joy, rage with calm, fear with love…all at the same time each moment. Because that’s what every moment consists of — polarity and duality. When you feel it, and give it your complete attention, it cracks open into the ultimate bliss! That’s when NOW becomes blissful. But the bliss doesn’t begin with the bliss. It begins with embracing the messiness of the NOW.” -Ashi Singhal (Substack: HeyEmotions)
Anyways what matters most is you commit to the present moment relentlessly. It means you have to be immersed in life. Whatever is happening you are embracing it with open arms. You are preferenceless. When you truly are, you don’t want anything different than what life already is/has given you/perpetually brings to you.
2. Actions happen on a small level before they happen on a big level.
It is like this: The future and the past are part of the present moment, not the other way around. The present moment is so vast that it can contain time and still remains infinitely bigger than time can ever be.
A few principles to understand this magic:
A) Logic is as useful as logic because it can help us see the magic of things. It is a way of seeing magic.
B) The role of magic:
Magic is often involved because it is happening all the time. No-thing ever happens without God’s will.
We are all walking each other home. This is all there is to destiny. We don’t even know what we don’t know. They fooled us for we fooled ourselves first and foremost. There was never an “I” to be ambitious about. Reading all this is surely hurting your ego. That’s your conditioning. It is so strong that things in front of you feel like foreign and even antagonistic.
We all share only one destiny: God. It doesn’t matter that we arrive from different paths. It matters that we are meant to coincide. Become one. It is non-duality in practice. It means we are different but not two.
Have you ever wondered why sufficiently advanced research/study anything always culminates into some sort of paradox? That’s because nature/universe/god have no conflict to begin with.
The mind is the operating system/vision-statement. The body is the bureaucrat/CEO. The soul is the electricity/life-force/fuel.
See you have to understand one thing: you can only take one step at a time. I know that always translates like this in your mind: “It will take me more time to finish the things I am doing. Then move on and finish the next thing so an empire can be built very fast.” But all that is a distraction and you can simply choose to ignore it. Because everyone operates at their unique pace and rhythm. So it’s better to focus on one thing at a time.
Our beliefs are the karmic rent. I have figured this out on my own. Not like there’s ‘I/me’ that relates to this so-called sense-of-self. A sense-of-self is a social contract between ’I/me’ and others . It is essentially a division between you and I manifested through language itself. That is why there’s such a strong emphasis on silence when it comes to meditation practices.
It is not very hard to do, you can simply decide to be awake at every moment. Pay attention. When we say pay, it means you are already full of it. You have to believe that. Then you will be able to operate from that belief. See once you start operating using your executive manager, you will be able to do it. You will be able to experience life force in its rawness. You don’t have to fight for it. Fighting is in-built in us. Because that’s how we protected our interests for as long as we can remember so our operating system is made of war. or lust.
Once you see that it is hard to not give up lust for more meaningful things. For me personally this is like a victory in a game lol. I struggled from my lust for so long.
It was not really my destiny to be stuck there. That’s how I know it is always God. Nothing less.
Hence ego can be used to go towards egolessness using this framework.
Astrology as a placeholder for enlightenment.
Future-seeing is the clarity of vision.
See once you finally see that time is incredibly fake. You are able to perceive something timeless.
What is time?
Since asking what is destiny implies asking what the future is, how does it look!
Time is suffering.
I don’t care if this is the most bizarre description of time you’ve ever heard. You have to stick with me unless it makes sense to you. Ready?
Simply, people are into all kinds of identification. What is an identity?
Identity is whatever you call “I” or “me.” It is within time. Hence is not real. Barring the practical need to address each other/exist in the material world, which again within time. Hence is not real.
So yes, the difference between magic and logic is time/suffering.
Time also means there’s something to look forward to.
A lack of suffering means there’s not a lot to do except to get out of the way of the grand flow called life/Prakriti.
Both explanations (of time) are useful and correct in their own place. That brings me to the meta point of the divine order among endless chaos is what enlightenment is all about. Because what is messy can stay that way only because it’s part of a grander structure. What is that structure? We will find out soon. For now I want you to stay with the fact that how time correlates to, connects with, and is the source of whatever it is that makes you miserable.
There’s an infinite amount of activity/movement going on in the universe. Each vibration belongs to you in the sense that you are the part and the whole; the all-encompassing silence within all things.
Timelessness is the place where you begin your spiritual journey.
Recently I was asked to define what spirituality is. That led me to thinking how can I do that task in a responsible manner. Hence you get this long explanation of why we even need this question, let alone the answer.
When you try to foresee your future it is essentially an attempt to change your present. Unless you are an earnest witness who is only willing to see it without changing anything about it.
When we can appreciate, defend, understand structure then only we can use it to advance our causes. There’s a thin line between being resourceful and exploitative. If you go against the structure you are doing the latter. If you upheld structure at all costs, you are the former. In the former case, the structure works for you somehow magically then.
Too many people don’t understand astrology. Neither do they care to dive deeper. Astrology must be used as a tool in hindsight to understand the nature of our planets. That info. might or might not be useful for what happens in our lives.
The reliable thing among all the noise is how our emotional states navigate reality. This is the ultimate replacement for the western therapy talks. because it tells us about our spiritual growth. Not who we should/must attack to gain what.
Plus reality is cyclic, not linear.
Karma is what you do unconsciously and what is left unattended to. We eventually have to make up for it.
What is spirituality? It’s your right to realise enlightenment.
So what matters is one’s ability to get awakened, one breath at a time.
If you can’t/won’t do that, you are playing a losing game. All your achievements and loved ones you’ll lose to death/Shiva.
You don’t do that. You simply awaken. The more you will awake the more the taste of wakeness will be there for you to drink from. it’s impossible to go back to living a suboptimal life then, which means you are not optimising for something impermanent anymore.
Think about it. You have been incarnating for centuries. You have looked at the wrong places so far. It’s time to look within.
This all looking within is done in the present moment btw. not in the past or future. Think of it as a portal.
Forget the future and past alike. Be so immersed in the present moment that you forget yourself. This is the definition of liberation in my books.
People think all this awareness business is like some sort of propaganda to keep them from making money or enjoying pleasure.
This is not what it’s about. Enjoy all the pleasure. Make all the money. It’s simply about being aware of your intuition, intention, thought, speech, and action. In that order. I think it explains very well how one fixates on going here and there in search for no-thing which is available to us here and now.
My relationship with the world changed once I decided on my spiritual path.
Earlier everything was about finding the right spiritual path for me. The key question is: how do I know my path is right?
Satisfaction. If I don’t get that, I am doing something wrong.
The difference between abstractions and working theories is that the latter is incredibly useful to people in some direction. Your principles are in the direction they are ultimately useful in. For me, that’s still spirituality. So I need to have a clear how and why of that.
What I have gotten incredible at over the years is mapping my actions to my theories. I have had a very tough time when it comes to solving some of these confusions. But I am feeling conflictless at the moment. Like I know exactly what I am doing.
To be in this position is my only achievement. We all deserve it. Just playing my role in all this.
Sometimes it does seem I don’t know all the details about it. But it is enough to know the next 3 steps sometimes.
That’s because you don’t want to be caught red handed in a strategic pitfall and you don’t want to look too far ahead so that you miss the present moment.
I don’t really know if there is a right path for me. What I know is there is a path for me. Leave the righteousness to the spectators. Be so immersed in walking/running/crawling/sleeping on your path that you are not able to worry about anything else.
People say the world is a Maya. Of course it is. As long as you play your part in it, you are alright. How can Maya not have God? How can anything ever be different from God? Those who struggle with a sort of denial with respect to desires in the world are just afraid whether they will be able to realise them.
I know because I have spent long enough being like that. Ultimately whatever is into you will manifest itself in the external reality. Your job is to watch the movie “insert your name.” Not participate in the story with the grace of knowledge that there’s no You that is directing it. It feels like ‘oh, how can that be? I shit, eat, and drink.’ That’s all I do. But let me tell you if you give up your losses and wins alike to whatever you consider bigger than yourself everything will take care of itself.
Destiny is desire + action + authenticity + courage + integrity + patience. you practically control 5 out of those six elements, leaving out the desire part.
Where do desires come from?
It remains open for debate. But they are not yours. You did not create them. You did not choose them even. You are cursed with them. I am using that harsh tone to demonstrate how much it sucks to not have your desires fulfilled or have them realised. In either case they betray you. The curse is in the fact that if you do not surrender to them, you will never be able to walk towards God. The good news is once you surrender to them, you are no longer in confusion. You are not really afraid of fear either.
You know God will be there to protect you from the things that are too dangerous. So you respect the process. But your desires can’t become/stay your master anymore. Because you have given up the very ownership of your desires. You have surrendered them to a higher power. This will gradually open all the doors of heaven for you; one little observation at a time.
To be a watcher is to observe yourself. Two people, namely Krishnamurti and Osho, I really respect who are polar opposite in nature have said the same thing. If you have a Rolls Royce you do not need a bicycle. That’s why I am telling you these two are all you need depending on who you feel more connected to personally/resonate with more.
I actually do not know anything.
My intention behind sharing this seeming discovery about destiny and its workings is an attempt to point out how mysterious things actually are. Yeah, yeah these words can only get you so far.
The bad news and the good news
The world is a graveyard. You are standing on a minimum of 10 dead bodies. Please know that it won’t be too late before you die. You will have to see it. Not just theoretically rot learn/memorise it.
You have never learnt from your experience. Because you have always fooled yourself. Please learn that all your attempts at sticking with anything pleasant have been futile. All you have earned in life is an ocean full of Dukkha. If this is not telling of the graveyardness of the world, I don’t know what is.
This will be hard to digest for those whose complete source of entertainment is conflict. I am not writing for such unconscious people anyway. I am writing for people who are on the verge of getting conscious/being awake in their endeavours and need a little help in taking a plunge over the fence.
Anyway, what matters the most is whether you follow a traditional Sadhana or not.
I am not here to tell you if you should get enlightened. I am here to remind you you must get enlightened. This is the only purpose. This is the destiny we all share.
Enlightenment is your one and only birth right. No wonder we started with a strong sense of human rights awareness. That too with a name like that: “The Awakened Youth.” Probably this is the first time I have real confidence in living up to that mark. That’s how I know this (enlightenment/The Awakened Youth) is my destiny too.
The inner guru
When you do enough Sadhana, you come to realise the guru outside was just a pointer to the guru inside. It doesn’t mean when we meet a person with divine qualities we don’t practice complete devotion. Please understand the root of one’s conflict is falsely thinking in binaries, etc. You can just choose to learn more about the context. All advice without context is poison. Every piece of advice with context is a gift. Even seemingly contradictory advice understood in their due context can complement each other. That’s what they hide behind when they say ‘life is paradoxical.’ It means they can’t put it in just one box. It is ever present, all-encompassing, and only contradictory on an illusory level.
Why will all of this go right above your head?
That’s because you are deeply insecure. So much that you can’t even consider whatever is served to you on a platter like that. You are brainwashed. It’s not your fault. But now you don’t get to complain that nobody told you or reminded you. Because I did and you ignored me with a long face like that. Checkmate!
What should you do now?
No matter how hard one tries escaping their destiny it is impossible. That’s why one has to embrace whatever happens with open arms. Stoic has coined a nice phrase for the sentiment: Amor Fati. The love of fate. Whatever is happening we love it with all our heart and body and soul. That’s because we know the universe is conspiring for us to get us connected with our very essence. How is life not a perpetual love affair then? It is. Why would you ever say bye to your beloved? You would never. How fortunate we are, it is not separate, different, or distant from us even for a moment! How is life not a gift then? It is.
Your job is to accept it.
Fun fact: I started writing this post in the hope that I will arrive at some surface level understanding of destiny such as predicting career and love.
But I have found that bit completely irrelevant as I dived deeper into the subject.
The following is all about how money and status and being in the world in general works.
The Mother protects, nurtures, and supports us always.
The deeper point to understand about this cosmic order is by definition we can’t know anything about it using so many words and pointers because they only serve as a distraction beyond a point. So we must respect that the mystery of life is going to be a mystery of life. We must learn to be reverent for it to support us, nurture us, and protect us.
Our mistakes are cosmic plots. We are flowers. Beautiful to interact with, dangerous to pluck. This interaction is the meaning of life.
Footnotes:
What is love?
In love, you essentially are not different from the beloved/love because you are the lover/love. In love, you want to lose yourself to only be a placeholder/space/container for the beloved. That too you don’t want to remember. You want to completely forget yourself.
No rocket science. You will miss the point only if you resist it. Resistance is an inability to be humble. It means you must be free of corruption.
