FATE, CHANCE, DESTINY

Two talks by MBM given in March, 1950

 

People ask the question as to the justice of things.  Ask it in regard to the personal too.  Think there is no order, or else try to find it.  Search.  How the question was answered of old, that is something to find out, and then to do a little research ourselves.  (Here MBM reads clippings from a paper that has a bearing on the subject.)  Tragic events make us think.  When things are pleasant we do not do much thinking.  When there is a lack of water we think about rain-making.  See what you can discover that will challenge your question about fate, justice, law, sequence, the rightness of things, destiny, luck.  What are these things?

Fate.  The nature of things to happen as they do.  Entire history of the universe predestined.  The nature of events fixed and inevitable.  The story about Confucius and the pupil who was late.  Destiny.  The inferior man sought to change fate.  Fate and fortune.  What Confucius said is fate.

Old Testament.  Prophets.  Hoseah, 12.  Re punishment.  Fate in the hands of some operating agency.  Jehovah.  View of the orthodox Jew: My will is against you.  (the Lord’s)

Greek philosophy.  Fate of doom in a family.  Fate a part of the substance of Greek tragedy.  The opening up of thought at the time of Aristotle.  Was creation by chance they asked?  No.  Aristotle was trying to separate chance from law.  Story of the plowman who found a pot of gold as he was cultivating his field.  That brings in fortune or luck.  Definite causes and indefinite causes.  Definite that the man was a plowman.  Also that someone hid that pot of gold.  But the plowman was not plowing for gold.  Finding it, represents indefinite cause, fortune or luck.  Greek thinking was like a wedge into our modern thinking.  Things as they are.

(Here MBM told of a little incident which occurred to her, a particle of dust flying into her eye as she was crossing Park Avenue.)  This represents an indirect or indefinite cause.

The sinking of the Titanic.  We must perceive that there are more things operating in the world than humans.

Karma.  Retribution or personal fate.  Strong in the East.  That someone who has committed a crime will suffer from leprosy.  The Buddhist idea of merit or demerit is strong, but in doing physical things.  Christian lore, as in the Roman Catholic Church and the high Anglican; that all mankind shares in the sin of Adam and Eve and has to pay the price with Adam and Eve.  That that is our fate.  The Church to extricate them.  Ceremonial of appeasing the gods.  Sacrifice.  Tried hard.  Something had to be put right.

The way out considered to be willing and obedient.  That was according to the Hebraic law.

Chance.  Comes from the idea of the fall of the dice.  Happening as the result of an unknown factor.  Luck something like it.  Entices you…….. Luck, fortune or chance may be favorable or unfavorable.  Fortune, as in the early Greek, would be exemplified by the peasant turning up a pot of gold.  That was fortunate.  Fortune became for Rome the goddess of Chance.

Necessity.  That which is unavoidable, irresistible.  Negation of freedom in voluntary action.  Eastern.  World cycles about which man can do nothing.  Prayer wheels.  The thought that maybe the powers that be are amenable to influences.  But then we would not have Law.  Or is there to be another law?

Destiny.  Means to stand — something that has been pre-determined.  Determined in advance.  Sometimes seen as favorable, sometimes not.  Predestination.  It is also used for the ultimate goal of persons, things, the universe.

Karma.  From the Sanskrit.  The law of cause and effect in behavior.  Not as in the Hindu Tradition, that if a person had slain a cow he would be blind, but that the crime works ethically upon the self.  In some forms of Buddhism it is said that the result will be wealth or poverty.  What will happen to them environmentally.  Karma is much more subtle than that.

The next step is philosophical.  It takes us to our turning point.  The book entitled “Thrice Greatest Hermes”.  Processions of fate.  If you are only an earth man or woman you belong in a procession of fate.  Sequence of cause and effect.  Here the first indication that there are different levels of fate.

Now the concept of free will.  If fate swallows us up entire, there is no free will.  Is there free will?  We are governed by nature equally – subject to the laws of the physical world – and by fortune differently.  Free will governs us each as we wish.  According to free will as our determinant, not just wish.

Naturally we are concerned most about ourselves.  Or the close up.  In being so concerned we forget that there are many forms of activity and life going on about us simultaneously as we are going about ourselves.  Incident of the particle in MBM’s eye.  Not related to anything human.  I am going my way, not having anything to do with that particle, yet there was a collision.  An incident in my career and of that particle.  There was some cause back, like the life of the rocks, erosion etc. birds, insects, etc.  Example of the Elm disease.  There is no spite in the operating agency that brings about changes to frustrate us.  But these many forms of life are all sharing this planet with us.  We are only primary if we can make ourselves so.

Floods, cycles etc. — none of these things are fate.  Water goes about its own path.  Never duplicates.  Bring collisions.  Little by little man is learning these things.  Many disorders formerly laid to fate have been eliminated.  Many forms of blindness have been overcome.  Research.  Damming of the rivers.  Folk have been superstitious.  It is a fact that our increasing knowledge about things has removed what we will now call superstition.  Many of the ideas about fate in the past were superstitions.  Have been removed by the penetration into the ways of things.  As we push out our understanding we need to discover how much of our idea of fate is superstition, ignorance.  I can only begin our subject this evening.

The Greek mythos.  To show you that in old teachings have been reaches to these things which we now enlarge, using richer language in our own day.  In the Greek mythos there is the story of the Fates.  That will be the foundation for next week when we come to the profounder side of this study.

Themis, the daughter of the Titans, the gigantic forces which shaped the earth.  She was the wife of Jupiter.  Themis stands for Law and Justice.  The three fates, Hesiod tells of the mystical side of Ancient Greece.  Says the fates were born of darkness, ignorance.  The threads (spun by the fates) mean sequence, following of cause and effect.

The three Fates dramatize three different kinds of thread.  The foundation of the three-fold man.  But the great triplicity — body, soul and spirit.  The three classic stages of man’s development.  The thread of Lachesis is the thread of the sequence, cause and effect, of earth.  It includes that particle in my eye.  Clotho, cause and effect as it operates in the soul.  Atrophos, cause, sequence of cause and effect, as it effects nous, or spirit.  Each have their fate or sequences of causes and effects.

Effect of the causes man delivers into the thread of each.  So each one is weaving his own fate.  The beginning of the esoteric side of the teaching of fate.

Fate mainly relates to Clotho, as far as man is concerned.  Our karmic action is primarily related to earth, Lachesis.

The last word has not been spoken in regard to esotericism.  There will be progress in our understanding and insight, as in regard to other fields.  Profundities should be our guide.  We have left them with the old.  Our work and our insight is new, of today.  The esotericism I am giving out is coming out now.

 

FATE, CHANCE, DESTINY

Second lecture of series given by MBM in March, 1950

 

Re soul and spirit.  No explanation of anything in this world that does not look beyond this world.  Agnosticism is out-moded.  Esoteric teachings imply more than a physical world, more than the ordinary person who has not searched knows.  These teachings are hidden only because folk make no effort.  This lack of effort holds good for humanity and for the individual.  In esotericism the emphasis is on the individual.  Because we go forward individually.

Therefore in the discussion of fate, necessity, destiny, including also luck, fortune, we must take into account that man is more than just a physical being and that this world is interwoven with things beyond the physical.

Return to the idea of the three-fold fate.  The fate of earth.  The thread spun of cause and effect, sequence, uninterrupted.  The sequence of the natural law.  There is also the fate, or thread, that belongs to the soul.  And finally, the thread which belongs to spirit.

Illustrations from the current press.  The lake in Africa that is drying up, with sufferings in consequence to the hippopotami there.  Is that their fate?  Again the meeting of the definite and indefinite laws of cause and effect.  First the drought, that has nothing to do with the hippos.  But if the hippos are there where the drought is they experience that suffering — the price of it, and it is their fate.  Because they are there.  The question of the shortage of water here.  Brings up ideas of rain-making.  Possibilities to overcome the lack of rain.  For the reason that mind has played a part in it.  There is fate, but also the possibility of the interruption of fate.  Men’s minds have begun to work on the events of earth and to shape them.

It is the same with the psyche.  In that we are freed from much that would have been our fate if today was as in the medieval ages.  Wherever we move in earth there are indefinite factors that may come upon us and which are not our fate.  (Something about a man milking the cows and what happened to him but I do not have that material.)  A story in the current issue of the magazine “Life”.  This story is in regard to what happened in a church in Nebraska, where a fire broke out just at the time set for a choir rehearsal.  What occurred was that all the members of the choir were detained in their homes, for one reason or another so that no one arrived in time to be caught by the fire, and no one was injured.  Was it luck?  Indefinite cause?  What was it?  I have made it a point to find out something about this and what occurred is that this was undertaken from the other side.  As an illustration of how the other side can interfere with events and circumstances here.  Not because the lives concerned were especially important, but as an illustration.  On the other hand eighty people were lost in a recent plane disaster.  It was the greatest loss of life in any single plane disaster.

Re the Nebraska church – is it an act of God?  There is increasing intention from the etheric plane to make folk recognize the interlocking of planes.  The people in Nebraska, in the incident of the church fire, could be easily influenced.  The ethers were flexible, pliable.  This was an extraordinarily successful experiment from the other side.

Now a plunge into certain profundities.  These can alone answer some of the questions you have in mind about fate.  It of course implies another state of being.  When you undertook to come to earth, for you did or you would not be here, there was certain conditions to be met.  Those conditions are arranged for your benefit, as near as possible to suit what you can undertake or need.  When you undertake that, you come into a set of conditions in earth, some family or environment, and they bring upon you certain barriers, certain limitations.  It is as though we were each actors and had been engaged for a role in a play.  The role will require certain things of us.  We in our turn are committed to the conditions of the company which is giving that play, the manager, the environment, whether they have much equipment or poor equipment, etc.  They give to you the limitations for the time of your engagement, which you have accepted.  Everyone plays a role; everyone has a part in it.  But not knowing the conditions, forgetting, we become impatient, and do not realize that we ourselves had a part in the choice of the circumstances in which we are now placed.  For the time of your life in earth, the fate that functions in that environment is around you.

It may be the fate of the family whose cows were killed by the lightening bolt.  That life would be your fate and you could get out of it only in the same way that the man is trying to get out of so many fates.  Compare the medieval period.

Another aspect.  Man has free will, volition we call it here.  What is free will?  There is no single answer but a kind of spread of the idea.  Your free will differs from mine, or anyone else’s.  Free will is a potential which is liberated as you prepare the field in which it is to operate.  The example of the farmer who buys 100 acres, of which only 5 are cleared.  He can’t do what he wants until the field is cleared.  You can’t have free will except as your ignorances, habits, prejudices are removed and you come to grips with the issues.  But free will is in the core of everyone’s being.  It begins to function as you prepare the field for it.

Example of the hands (playing on the piano) but not equally free on the piano keyboard.  Free will a precious thing for which we have to do battle.  And we have it.  As man overcomes the fate of vicious diseases.  But many have worked long and hard to free man from certain diseases.  That freedom that you and I have to move, because a particular disease was interrupted by the mind-law of the doctors, and therefore we are free to move, is a treasure won because others, not we, have made that ground free from trees and rock, and it is now plowable.

The field of psychology.  Neurotics.  Inhibited in their functioning as a free agent.  Their free will is locked up.  By their fears, anxieties, ignorances, prejudices.  As these are removed territory is won.

Behind all this is the picture of man’s evolution.  All of us started long ago on the path of development.  The allegory of the Garden in the Hebraic scriptures illustrated the freedom of man to choose.  It stands apart from many other allegories in that respect.  If you will go down to earth and start this evolution you will become wise as a god, (indication in the scripture) but it will cause much difficulty.

Free will was at the very beginning of things.  You have forgotten it.  We have continually the right to choose.  Man needs to know the difference between what is constructive and what is destructive.  We are doing it in every department of life that belongs to the physical.  The time is come when folk will do the same thing in regard to themselves, in regions where it is more valuable than in the physical.  The physical world is only temporary for us.  It is good to improve it, but it is an incident.  It is not the big thing.  The big thing is the use of volition to the larger life.  Here, too, we have free will.  No one will ever force anyone to undertake the quest for the great realities.  Because our pattern of evolution is set up on choice, free will.  We have it at little points.  Strategic points.  In all sorts of ways our lives are in our hands.  We accept what we do.  We rebel and do not like it, but we do not apply to these things (quest for the great realities) the same inquiry and resource that we have in the building up of our objective world.  We have not yet made that transition.  It is a critical one.

Returning to the larger perspective, the over-all view.  As monads, we all of us chose to come into earth.  And coming into earth we accepted, though we do not see it as a whole, the conditions of the earth’s situation.  Like the actor who has a dim picture of what is before him in accepting this or that role in the play.  They take their fortune, luck, chance as to whether or not this play will be a success, and they share in the success or the failure.  They share in the experiences along the road.  As in a family, you share in the experiences of that family.

As we grow older we may see fit to shake it off.  Because it has left so many imprints psychologically of that.  We do not go away psychologically.  We are therefore, under the fate, until our minds, instigated by free will, choose to find out how we can free ourselves from that particular set-up which is inimical to the drives within us.

There is something of this idea of fate, in a superficial way, seen in astrological charts.  I have never seen a chart read philosophically, so the real significance is lost.  The chart can, if the set-up is correct, can give something of the conditions and trends that are in the self — not fate, but circumstances.  It is however just as the farmer with the 95 acres of forest and rocks is fated to have only 5 acres productive unless he does something about it.  If we have grown, and cleared new territory, fate was only momentary, in the large sense.

Returning to the illustration of the church in Nebraska: Someone might say, what is the use of prayer?  If this is my fate, and they pray for help, what part in the mathematical equation has prayer?  What part has it in the interruption of fate?  It is impossible to take our lives in earth as though they were the whole measure of it.  That kind of prayer, petition, may reach someone — not God.  What agency is involved?

If you had learned about metaphysics you would know that there are many folk on the other side who are glad, in fact eager, to influence the factors in earth and that they can to some degree.  The main degree that they can do is to impress.  That is the chief factor.  And these folk, in Nebraska, were all impressed.  One was put to sleep…….All simple things, which could be maneuvered because these folk were simple.  They were not intellectuals.  The make-up of the intellectual is inimical.  It is possible that changes can come about by what is called the prayer of appeal, or intercession.  Sufficient data is available if you doubt.  There is evidence regarding the interlocking of planes.  You are to blame if you do not know it.  It has only begun.  Its real birthday was in April, 1848.  The conscious interrelation of planes.  There was relationship before, but now of a wholly new kind of relationship.

A little review.  First the overall factors which any soul coming into earth meets and accepts, for a time.  If they use their mind and effort, there is a breaking away from that fate.  There is also the possibility of modifying fate by relationship with other planes.  Therefore fate is not a stationary thing, a finality, but a temporary limitation.  It is meant to be there, has been accepted by us, and from time to time it is shot through by the indefinite causes, better known as luck, fortune, chance.  And that the monad, in the course of the evolution, is gradually progressing to a state where fate is increasingly negligible on the physical plane, and can be so on the psychological plane, and so on up.

The overall note, or word, that we should take account of here is destiny.  In philosophic writing it is used for the ultimate, the final, the fulfillment by man of his whole being.  It is the highest culmination.  That is when living begins.  There is only existence now, and in many planes after.  Richness, power, sensitivity, and power of functioning, that is otherwise not to be known.  That destiny is the same for all, in the large sense a fulfillment.  But again, free will enters the picture.  And free will, coupled with ignorance and lack of desire to use effort, hold any one of us from destiny.  Therefore we may say that fate is something that is on the way to destiny.

Now we have to understand also a little about the quality of fate or destiny.  You would choose something happy, would you not?  You would probably choose well-being, in one way or another.  Favorable circumstances.  You would not choose poverty.  We would know that the things we thought we wanted are not the things we want at all when we are seriously considering issues.  Maybe the circumstances of a wealthy home, or this or that race, would not provide us with the circumstances that we want.  Every actor does not want to play a pretty role.  What did you come down for?  This is the ground in which we are to work out our freedom from fate.

Most of us have short range plans.  That is, one experience in earth at a time.  There are others whose lives have been planned long ahead.  The figure of Jesus and the prophecies in the Old Testament.  There are a few who have accepted long time roles of responsibility, and all the ardors that come with it.  Most folk accept one role at a time.

But if there is the long range anticipation, the carrying out of a project, that is not to be measured in terms of freedom or happiness, in the usual sense; for he who looks for happiness won’t find it.  Happiness is a by-product.  We are happiest when we are doing those things for which we came down.

The pattern of Jesus had to have space — generation upon generation — to make it in full, the anticipation of the allegory.  Prophecies.  Such a figure as this was a long range planning, to set out a terrifically noble and extensive allegory.  That pattern required much tragedy, no happiness in the usual sense of the word, and the struggle to keep in tune with prophecy.  Remember, there was outlined a long range view of fate.  That is not so for everyone, but only for the few.  It brought with it crucifixion.

When you have accepted a role you have signed a contract.  And the fate of what you have undertaken is with you.  Out of that fate you can loosen yourself considerably, and that is part of the exercise which was intended when you accepted it.  Like the seed in the ground.  It does not stay there.  It exercises its volition and comes up.  We have the same drive in us but we have stunted it, and turned it downward, so it is nearly exhausted in regard to things of the earth, the realm of Pluto.

We need to get some understanding of life that gives us the full sweep, so we can see it in pattern, and the sense of destiny. . .  . and along the way accept the fate from which we try to extricate ourselves, even as the seed tries to extricate itself, not stay put.  If you stay put you haven’t solved the problem for which you came.  It makes man strong in his own being.  Full of initiative and resourcefulness.  Does not need courage, because it has never to fear.

There is fate, and fate is the uninterrupted sequence of cause and effect.  Both in regard to body, soul, and mind.  In the course of accepting fate, we have modifications coming upon us, because there are many activities at cross currents with each other; and that is good, sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant.  Indefinite circumstances, because of the many lives expressing simultaneously in earth.

Power, quality, strength, insight, understanding, giving power to the monad.  The grand scheme of evolution.  There is no fate final and determined.  Then there would be no progress.  But because these things are so interlaced there is flexibility.  Room to exercise some degree of free will, to push out from the restraints, and to win that much power for the next time, and so make our ascent.  So fate, or necessity, no longer cause fears, and luck and fortune no longer beguile.

You can become conscious of why you came to earth.  Beyond the subconscious are the drives which have not been fulfilled by the personality.  The personality is the compromise between what you intrinsically are, which we call heritage; between what your family and race want you to be, and what your environment has influenced you to be.  The compromise between those three shapes the personality.

Back of that is the drive that belongs to the real you.  In proportion as the real you drive has come into the personality at all it begins to work, extremely often, as restiveness.  Sometimes there is a degree of conscious restlessness, as if the personality knew it was not you, and what it wanted to do, but did not know what it was….

(Here MBM answered a few questions, of which the following are fragmentary notes.)

Question about sin.  Things have been built up in regard to sin which are inherited from the environment, but have no basis in fact.  There is no such thing as inherited sin.  The sins of the fathers, refers to the body.  Diseases such as Paresis.  They carry on until they die out.  Has nothing to do with the monad.

– – – –

Specific prophecies are rarely safe.  General ones, yes.  There are too many free wills.  Too many momentums under the natural law.  Can’t be foreseen, because too complicated.  The aim with an astrological chart.

– – – –

Free will operates according to the age of you as a monad, your development.  The more you are developed as a being, the freer you are of fears, superstitions, old-fashioned ideas.

 

 

Fate, free will and destiny

Lecture III in series

Foundations of Philosophic Living

MBM   February 1936

 

Parts of our physical body (are) like tiny entities, each going its own way, yet held together by the life of us.  Each has its fate, or sequence of behavior patterns.  If not interrupted they go on in their natural sequence; the procession of fate marches on, inexorably, often to our discomfort.  Fate of the body, Lachesis.

“The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children.”  Hebraic.  The way we live does affect the future.

Clotho sits in the moon.  The allegory speaks of the moon as the symbol for the soul.  And the thread of the soul, or the sequence of acts, or behaviors – causes and effects – work with the soul as with the body.  “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”  Heart is figurative, as with the moon.  It means: as you are behind your apparent behavior, so are you really.

If you conceive of the soul, you must conceive of it as an entity.  That entity, whatever it is, has its own set of laws – goes through a series of proces.  What man does that is not visible — his reasons, his motives, these are what, in his present human life, are related to the soul.  They are what man, in this life, may understand of the soul.  They too set up series of cause and effect: “As a man soweth, so shall he reap.”  This has to do with karma.  Karma is related to the soul by Clotho.

Man as he is in earth: There is the cause and effect of our behaviors.  If you are aggressive, pushing, you come to be known as that kind of a person.  A set of interests develops about us among our friends and associates in business.  The cumulative effect works on our relations.  Of course there is fate: cause and effect.  There is the fate that belongs to the bridge player, – to the business man.  It operates on his actions in the business world, but not on himself.  There (in the business world) they are uninterrupted.  Your type develops as the result of fate.

This fate can be changed, – the same as the fate that belongs to the bubonic plague.  The philosopher and the theologian argue that there is always an area open for choice. Future choice.  The past makes for predispositions; and our tendency is to go into the path already ordained by our past behavior.  But is there no area of choice?  If you are honest you know that you have.  Following in the path is going the easier way.

Here is where leaders of philosophical thought have sought to press home their point: that man has a degree of option; and that degree of option exercised leads to an increased degree of option.  A little exercise of any power unfolds that power, increases it, and we can use more.  Determination, concentration, ethical principles.

 

 

The Moral Law

from series The Teachings of Pojodag

MBM   1928