“There is no destiny.”
“We all write our own story.”
“Anything is possible for you right now.”
Over the past few days I’ve read similar variations of this statement from multiple personal development teachers, psychics, tarot card readers and yes, even astrologers, and each time it made me cringe.
As someone who spends most days reading astrological horoscopes, i.e. maps of individual people’s destinies, I’ve got the idea that something different is true.
Not only do I know that we each have a destiny, I want to share this revelation with everyone because it’s the key to leading a happy, successful life.
How do I know that destiny exists, you ask?
Because of retrodiction.
Prediction is foretelling the future. It’s hard to prove that it works because questions like, “Did the prediction affect the outcome by influencing the subject somehow?” start to come up. For example, if I look at your birth chart and tell you that you are going to find $10 tomorrow, you’ll start looking for $10 bills everywhere and are more likely to find it.
Retrodiction is knowing the past. It’s easy to prove because if I just met you and I start telling you about specific events and experiences from your past, something’s clearly going on. If I give you a Vedic Astrology reading in which I say that you got divorced three years ago and moved houses when you were five years old, there’s no way I could have known that, unless…
…Unless destiny is real.
How could the past be predictable unless some of the events in our lives are fated?
Believing in fate is not very popular because it implies that there are things in life that we can’t change, which we’ve been told isn’t true. We can change anything if we put our mind to it and take action, right?
No. No, there are things we definitely cannot change, such as:
– The gender, race, country, socio-economic class and domestic situation that we were born into. We can’t go back and decide to be born differently.
– The preferences and choices of the people around us. For example, if our country elected a president we dislike, we didn’t choose that and we can’t rewrite history and change it.
– Hardwired behavioral patterns from our past traumas, attachment styles, and deepest wounds. We can work constructively with these things but we can’t change the fact that they happened.
Someone of can come get a reading from me at any time in their life and I can see these types of things in their chart.
If there are things we cannot change about our past, we might consider that we also have a default future, aka a destiny.
Do we have free will? Absolutely. Can we apply our free will anytime we want to? Not exactly.
While the future is not written in stone, it does depend on our mindset and our actions.
The idea that we can create our destiny is partially true.
Our thoughts determine our conscious actions and unconscious reactions. Our state creates our thoughts. But what creates our state?
Certainly things like exercise, diet, sleep, our overall health, our experiences and our thoughts (it’s circular) create our state. We have some control over some of these things some of the time.
Do you know anyone who claims to have total control over all of these things? I don’t care who it is, I’m here to tell you that they are lying to you. No human being is choosing their state, thoughts and actions 100% all of the time (or even close).
In some blessed moments we are making conscious choices according to what we want for ourselves. In other moments we are asleep at the wheel and acting by default.
Those default reactions dictate how our lives unfold.
One way they tend to occur is in the most emotionally charged and dramatic moments when we are unable to control our most basic instincts.
When we think that our survival is threatened our conscious awareness tends to go out the window. Our ancestors, traumas, wounds and unconscious memories act through us. We have a lapse in critical judgment and say mean things to a loved one, abruptly quit a job, or eat things that are bad for us.
The other way our default actions work is through natural talents and inclinations. We can’t help but be good at what we’re good at. In some cases we worked hard and had the discipline to become talented, but where did that drive come from? It is a quality that already existed within us. We become successful, we develop a good reputation, and we think we did it.
We have the power to choose how we act and react in every moment, but the odds can be stacked heavily against us or in favor of us, and what we are trying to accomplish isn’t random either.
Only by knowing the ways we are shaped by our destiny can we begin to have true free will.
Thousands and thousands of years ago ancient rishis (“seers”) in india realized this and discovered a correlation between destiny patterns and the movement of the planets against the backdrop of the stars. They saw how our astrological birth charts show the way we are “seized” by certain planetary energies, causing us to do predetermined things.
The system they developed, Vedic Astrology, is one of the ways we can begin to know ourselves better, to understand how we are wired so that we can apply more and more of our free will in every moment. We can see why we are drawn to make certain choices and then take a step back to decide if we really want to move in a certain direction.
We all need someone who can shed light in the darkness, hand us a map, and lead us through the places where we are most blind.
A great Vedic Astrologer can be that person for you. I would be honored to be that person for you.
If you want to discover your destiny and find your free will, you can go here to learn more and book a Vedic Astrology Reading.
