- Published: January 18, 2022
- Updated: January 18, 2022
- University / College: The Ohio State University
- Language: English
- Downloads: 7
They based its meaning on how they interpret it. In spiritual perspective, one definition of destiny is that destiny is a result of one’s own decision. There is this unwavering conviction that every person living today has a real purpose in life, and a unique destiny to fulfill. It directs people to take charge of their future, in a practical, down-to-earth approach that is realistic, and not beyond anyone’s reach. Everyone wants to be self- reliant, and enjoy a rewarding life filled with the happiness that comes from knowing your accomplishments which are part of your destiny, not just and chaos.
This is the only true happiness that really sticks with you throughout life (Address, 2003). Most of us never get beyond working, spending, recreating, and dying. Hardly anyone today finds the true Destiny they were meant to fulfill. An example of willful action: Suppose there is a person who is drunk and has a badly maintained car. He decides to drive his car in a drunken state down a steep mountain side and he does so at high speed. If he were to at some point skid off the road down the mountain side, whose fault would it be? Would that be an accident caused by destiny or an accident caused by lawful action?
Well, it is willful action as he could have chosen not to drink and drive. He could have ensured that his car was better serviced and could have driven slowly. Destiny is the reason for all. In our present life, we only meet soul’s adamant with whom we had contact in earlier lives. It is because of the residual balance of our deeds also called as “ karma”. Until a small percentage of karma between two souls adamant remain. The two keeps on meeting in every future manifestation. This is what the doctrine of destiny is all about. The stranger we meet on the road again and again may have been our dear sister of the previous manifestation.
Alternatively, it may have been our mother in the earlier manifestation. Whatever the relationship is, it is still destiny that has bid us to meet. Only if we hear the sweet small inner voice of our soul coming from within our heart, it is possible we recognize the old soul (Kumar 3). Destiny is spiritual in nature and can only be overcome with a spiritual remedy which is spiritual practice. Depending on the severity of destiny, appropriate levels of spiritual practice needs to be done to overcome destiny. Intense spiritual practice in terms of quantity would mean about 12-14 hours f practice a day.
In terms of quality, it means that the person does all his daily activities as service to God, with a lot of desire and with the primary purpose to attain God. Medium spiritual practice in terms of quantity would mean about 4-5 hours of practice a day. In terms of quality, it means that the person does most of his daily activities as service to God. Destiny depends on your disposition and spiritual thinking. One with pleasant disposition and Godly thinking and continues to suffer and work harder will have a good destiny. The ones that contradict will have a bad destiny.
An example of a destined event: Take the case of another driver who is sober. He drives carefully and maintains his car in a perfect condition. He too drives down the same mountain side observing all precautions. All of a sudden a portion of the road collapses due to a landslide and he meets with an accident. In this case the person had no control over the landslide that occurred and hence this is a destined event. This means that destiny really comes if human beings gain enlightenment and salvation. Destiny in political view has different interpretation from other perspectives.
It is mostly described and explained on how nations seek to find ND change their destiny for a specific purpose especially in achieving power over the others. One example that describe destiny in political area is the Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny was the 19th century American philosophy that created a nation. According to Michael T. Leverage “ Manifest destiny existed and still exists as the philosophy that embraces American history as a whole. ” In a more specific way, Manifest Destiny is defined as a movement that powered American life and American culture. It is a philosophy that created a nation.
In 1845, the term Manifest Destiny conveyed the idea that US was zestfully destined for its expansion. It describes the fundamental want and need of Americans to explore and conquer new lands and establish new borders with no limit to area or country. It is God’s will that Americans should spread over the entire continent and control and populate the country as they see fit (Leverage 1). During this time, places that are part of American territory were forced to be under control of Americans. That is why, lots of war were happening in the nearby places including Mexico and Florida.
In the promotion of Manifest Destiny, there were lots of aliases used. One designated name was Imperialism. If God and mission were the road to Manifest Destiny, imperialism was the light that lit the way (Leverage 5). American Businessman in the late 1 800 and 1 900 strongly believe in America extending its authority by political, military or economical means over other lands. Imperialism was the reason why America extended an interest beyond the Pacific. Another way to disguise Manifest Destiny was to promote the philosophy of White Man’s Burden. Rudyard Kipling made this philosophy famous in his poem of the same name.
He stated that, as a world power, the US had the burden to help the inferior people of the world adjust to Christianity. He also warned the united Sates that it would not be an easy task to take on the role of a world leader. In defense of America’s presence in the Philippines he said, “ Duty determines destiny’ (Barrios 15). In its many forms, it is seen that manifest destiny really controlled the America’s destiny. America would not be America without the phenomenon of Manifest Destiny. Without it, American territory Valued be as big as the property surrounding its first settlement.
The philosophy that built American history was the rationalization that expansionists everywhere used to justify arterial growth. Some used the Manifest Destiny Doctrine as a political philosophy stressing tradition and social stability, while others used it as a simple reason to explore new lands. Americans used Manifest Destiny as their proclamation of superiority and insisted that their conquests merely fulfilled the divine mission that man is impelled by forces beyond human control (Leverage 2). Because of the notion of Manifest Destiny, America’s drive to explore and conquer new lands will never die.
It has no end and is perpetual and everlasting. As long as land exists, manifest destiny will always intention because land is considered as an infinite commodity on Earth (Beaumont 23). The idea of Manifest Destiny today still remains in America. We know that America today is considered as the strongest country in the world. Moreover, they have also the best culture and government in the world. This gives the idea that they have the right to spread out and take more territory so as to put more of the world under that culture and that government. But today, Americans no longer believe on this idea.
They believe that they have the best system Of government. They have gone to great lengths to try to make other Mounties like Iraq and Afghanistan to be more like them. Manifest Destiny also transformed into being more about policies than territories. They are not so concerned with occupying other countries but they want them to have the same or at least similar policies that they have in the US. Spiritual and Political perspectives are very important for defining destiny. However, personal perspective is also significant because it imparts knowledge and information from different people.
In personal perspective, according to Blair Waldron, destiny is just for losers. It’s just a stupid excuse to tit for things to happen instead of making them happen. But according to Dry. Athena Sadie notes about Destiny, she questioned, “ Is really a destiny inevitable or an excuse? ” According to her wherever in the globe we may be seated right now, we probably heard “ it wasn’t meant to be” at least once in our lifetime. If this is 100% true, aren’t we victims to mental captivity with very little space to explore the infinite possibilities of our talents, interests and creativity?
What exactly is destiny? If it was “ destined” an individual was “ meant” to become an engineer someday, does this mean he would inevitably hose that particular avenue regardless how much effort he applied during his academic phase? Does a child born in the slums have to permit her “ destiny” to compel her to remain in the same environment forever instead of trying hard to seek a more comfortable life? It’s ironic how we give ourselves a pat on the back when we succeed, while we conveniently label failures as an effect of destiny.
How much authority do we have in reality, over this unpredictable journey we call life? If all life’s events were already pre-planned doesn’t that make us nothing less than programmed robots with hearts living aimlessly without emotional liberty? This constant Tug-of War between our goals and destiny throws us into a dilemma compelling us to make a diligent decision. All classic men and women of time, without a shadow of doubt, faced challenges chaperoned with antagonism and enmity. The distinction in their struggle is their admirable courage against permitting anyone to trample their dreams and passion.
They imagined beyond what they heard and chose to die actively trying rather than keep on living passively without pursuing their goals. The world would not be advanced and developed as it is today if all those great icons didn’t strive to make a difference. They didn’t wait for destiny to sweep them off their feet, rather they paved their pathway perspiring. We were all born with at least one unique talent. Its our responsibility to discover and mold it to a work of art. Don’t give destiny as an excuse for lethargy. Instead, make our existence significant. Destiny is also defined as a pre-destined future.
It is sometimes or most of the time, events in our life which are destined to happen. There’s William Jennings Bryan, winner of the famous 1 925 Scopes Trial, believing firmly in our own power to direct fate: “ Destiny is not a matter Of chance, it is a matter f choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it IS a thing to be achieved. ” Rachel Starr Thomson, however, disagrees with it. He said, “ In destiny there was nothing, either righteous or sinful, I could do to ward off fate. My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Destiny is a real thing. The forces directing it have been active for a long, long time. We cannot see the Piper, perhaps, but we can certainly hear the tune. According to Rachel Thomson, “ Predestination is a misleading word, I think, for it concedes too much to our temporal way of thinking. God is not pre or post anything. He is present to everything. God does not look down rows of dominoes or into crystal balls. He does not have to wait for anything. Nor does he wonder what will happen. Nothing is uncertain to him, as the future is uncertain to us.
There is not predestination but destination, not predestine but destiny. This follows from divine omniscience and eternity. ” But our free will follows from the divine love. To love someone is to make them free. To enslave them is always a defect of love. Now since divine love is God’s very essence, while omniscience and omnipotence are only attributes f that essence, therefore if one of these two truths had to come first in the sense of being more primordial and non-negotiable than the other it would have to be freedom. Thomson further said, “ l do not think either truth needs to be compromised.
I think we can do as much justice to the sovereignty of God as a Calvinist and as much justice to the free will of man as a Baptist. Yet it would not compromise the very essence of God to deny predestination. Aryanism, the theological viewpoint that denies predestination and emphasizes the role of man’s free will in receiving grace from God, may be ring. But it is wrong at a relatively technical, theoretical level. Denying human free will, on the other hand, would cut out something immediately essential to the Christian life: personal responsibility.
If am a robot, even a divinely programmed robot, my life no longer has the drama of real choice and turns into a formula, the unrolling of a pre-written script. God loves me too much to allow that. He would sooner compromise his power than my freedom. ” During also of the interview held last March 201 2, Millers Dadaist, a student from LCP, gave also her own perception about destiny. She said, Destiny is something that happens without actually expecting it to happen or without intending it to happen that way. ” Lewis Debatable concurs with this view in his explanation of destiny that it is something that occurs without setting expectations.
He further explained that for all the things we are planning, too much expectation should be set aside. The best route to truly experience something for what it is, is to drop all expectations. If a person stops himself from even going down the road of creating expectations, he can freely focus on the moment at hand, and free to focus on the moments down the road as well. Expectation also creates fear because he think what he desire may or may not happen. Free of expectations, we can just go with the flow of the universe and not be affected by the outcomes that we encounter.
Every outcome can serve to move us towards greater realization of our desires (Tan 2007). Without expectations, we truly would be able to experience each coming moment for what it really is and our destiny will surely come to our way. Causality is a phenomenon whereby one cause is the effect of another. If all causes are known, then theoretically all effects can be known and predicted with absolute certainty. Causality cannot begin or end itself because, by definition, in a purely linear system, every cause is the effect of another preceding it, a “ causal chain” that extends forever into the past.
In truth, a causal chain is finite; it begins and ends with choice. Freewill is the only true cause; all else is purely effect. Thus, freewill is both beginning and end; causality merely mitigates and facilitates freewill by creating consequence from choice. Without multiple choices, there is just causality. When you perceive only one choice or one effect, you become a passive link in a causal chain initiated by someone else. The more knowledge and understanding you have, the more genuine choices you see, and the greater your role becomes as cause rather than effect. It is lack of knowledge that places one under the influence of causality.
You cannot change what you cannot see, because without seeing you cannot choose. Destiny is the causal consequence of choices made outside our realm of linear time. Because we do not see our fate, we cannot accurately change it. So we become a passive link in the chain of causality initiated by a hyper dimensional source. In the case of fate, that source is our Higher Self, a greater aspect of our being with whom we are merge after physical death to view our recent incarnation and plan another. In this planning phase, while merged with the Higher Self we choose the key lessons and events that characterize our upcoming incarnation.
Once incarnated, the original choice to learn those lessons has already been made. As the Oracle said in Matrix Reloaded, the point is to understand why they Were made and therefore learn the lessons prompted by destined events. Destiny decides what lessons must be learned and why. Alternate events can lead to the same lessons learned, so it is not the mundane details of events that are ruled by destiny, but rather their core meanings. Because freewill decides the timing as well as the qualitative nature of how lessons are learned, neither timing nor quality of experiences is definite (Ferguson 2011). We are creator or destroyer of our own destiny,” the common phrase found in most books on Self-Development. It views humans as an active agent of his life and capable of constructing his own experiences out of external real-life experiences. Earthly experiences can be considered as an unprocessed sender Of data but humans are active, process-abele recipients of the data. It means that world experiences before reaching us may be either costive or negative, but, once it reaches us, we have ultimate ‘ decision making power’ to allow the influence to impinge us positively or negatively.