Young, adult or elderly, female or male, rich or poor, learned or otherwise, the goals we set ourselves structure the path of our own choosing to experience the world.
Life for us is an odyssey between the poles of birth and death in a bewildering experience of the emerging self that is intertwined with our relationship to the Cosmos, which anchors and affirms our being. How we live is determined by our choices, which rest on the nature of our values. Unless, of course, as some people do, we believe that we are at the mercy of chance so that all planning is pointless or, as fatalists believe, that our life has been predetermined for us and that there is nothing we can do to change it. If neither is the case, then we must also come to the realisation that the life we lead in the present is the result of the choices we have made in the past and the future direction of this life will depend on the choices we make right now as well as the goals we have set for the future. Thus the responsibility for our life rests solely with ourselves. These choices may lie far back, so that we may no longer be aware of them or go back even further to a previous existence on earth. The latter become dominant factors in the determination of the circumstances of our birth. Thus the popular saying ‘accident of birth’, which refers to the apparent randomness of the circumstances of one’s birth, is actually a fallacy. The lawfulness only becomes apparent when we take our whole existence into consideration, not only one short earth-life. [Continued]
By
[Read the full article by subscribing to the magazine]
