Temple of Isis

By Cassonya Douglass

Subject:**Predestination***

 Just what is predestination? Is our life already planned before birth? If it is, why do we strive to change our lives when the future is already preordained so cannot be changed? Is there anything WE CAN DO to change our lives?

 Not so long ago, and in some countries still, it was thought that you were born into a certain class and there you stayed. It didn't matter how intelligent you were or how hard you worked to raise yourself. The prevailing wisdom was: "If god didn't want you to be in that class you wouldn't have been born into it."

  Today, at least in this country, it is what you make of yourself that counts. Washington was born on a plantation while Lincoln was born in a log cabin yet both became president. Were both of them preordained to become president, so that it didn't matter where they were born?

I believe that before we are born the different souls meet and we plan out our lives. This is done in much the same way a person going to college plans what their goal in life will be and so chooses the courses in college that they will need to take in order to reach this goal. We get together with other souls and decide who will be the parents in this life. We then choose our country, our nationality and our sex. All these choices are made along with our life decisions. Maybe in our last life everything came easily so in this life we have built in some obstacles that we will need to overcome before we can reach our goal. Do you sometimes wonder why people would put obstacles in their own path when they could just make the decision that their life would be easy? The answer is that humans like a challenge. They constantly challenge themselves. But sometimes a soul will decide that this time around they want to take things easy and slide through life as if it were a two-week vacation where all they need to do is to recline in a hammock. 

We, the soul, have made our life choices and it is now time to be born. A cartoon of a six-month old baby shows very well what happens next. The baby states that at this moment in time she could answer all the questions of the universe but in six-months time she would have forgotten it all. That is how it should be and usually is. A baby gets so tied up in living and learning that she forgets what the reason was to be born.

We are now born but we have forgotten all the plans we made while still just a soul. So how can we accomplish the plans and goals that we set before birth if they are now forgotten? The plans may be forgotten but they are still there hidden in the computer that is our minds. If we have a talent that talent frequently will give us no rest until it is developed and used. Because we have free will we can deny that talent but we will always feel as if something is missing in our life.

Then there are the people who seem to always 'know' just what it is that they want to do with their lives. They will take on any hardship in order to accomplish their goal. Their entire mind is set on accomplishing this goal. The rest of us, though, seem to be wandering in the wilderness of life. If we are preordained for something we can't seem to find out what it is. We ask for help and for guidance but the answer that comes back doesn't seem like an answer at all. We seem to take wrong turns more often then right ones. Why? If we have chosen our path before birth why do we seem to be wandering in that wilderness? Can it be that because we do have free will we chose one time to take the wrong turn and because we did we now find ourselves lost? Maybe the souls that we planned our lifetimes with also took a wrong turn and thus changed their future and by extension ours? Or maybe we are searching for something not knowing that we already have it. So often we overlook that which is right beneath our nose.

There is another way to look at predestination. Suppose you want to go to California. California is your destination. How will you get there? You can walk the entire distance or you can ride a bike or drive a car. You can take a bus, a train or a plane. You will eventually reach California. Did it matter what mode of transportation you used or if you decided to stop and sight-see on your way? The object was to get to California and you made it. Maybe that is all predestination is. Predestination may be only the journey from birth to death that we try to make as interesting as possible. It may simply be a journey where we try to learn as much as possible so that when we finally leave this life we can truthfully say we have lived.

What do you think?

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