Discover your destiny
The only way to know what to do
People are talking endlessly not only about morality and moral rules in general, but about what they think you should do specifically.
Date? Not date? Get married or not? Have children or not? Hustle hard and get rich — or lay low and get out of the hamster wheel? Do the responsible corporate job or quit and open your weird startup? Escape to the countryside or create a futuristic metropolitan enclave? Everybody seems to have their answers, trying to impose them on the rest of us. We are surrounded by a shrill new Heideggerian “they” that never shuts up, forever tugging us here and there, and once we have regained balance, again comes at us with the worst advice at the worst possible moment.
If this gets on your nerves, good for you: it’s the first step to actually start becoming sovereign, or morally self-sufficient, as I like to call it. More often than not, however, people get needlessly confused: they adopt some kind of half-truth they read somewhere, try to force it on the reality of their situation, and then wonder why they land in the dirt, face first.
“You are not a man if you aren’t married”
“You are not a man if you are married”
“You need to have a business”
“A business is financial suicide”
“Get a loan” / “Never be in debt”
“Don’t have children to save the planet”
“Have children to save your race”
“Be brave and openly fight the system”
“Don’t be foolish and stay hidden”
“Be an artist” / “Be an entrepreneur” / “Slow down” / “Get busy”
Etc. pp.
Similar nonsense is peddled about all kinds of important and not-so-important aspects of life when people put some fragment of a theory above experienced reality. Only classical music is good. No, just 60s music is good; no, that was a psyop, and the Beatles ripped off blacks, or was it Satanic overlords who created them to poison the youth in the first place?
Just as nobody’s sweeping theory can replace one’s responsibility to develop and own a distinct musical taste, so it is with the more important decisions in life. It’s up to you, and only you can know (feel, sense, taste) how to proceed in the right direction, at this particular moment in your life’s journey.
Of course, it is important to listen to advice from those wiser than us. But to create our specific version of a worthy life, of which there’s an infinite number, is our very own sacred duty. Besides, there’s a massive gap between listening to personal advice from wise people and adopting some silly rule from some random grifter on the internet. Or from a wise person on the internet, for that matter, if the advice is not the result of a personal encounter in a loving state of openness. Usually, advice-givers will just project and generalize their own personal paths (which may have worked for them), mistaking those for eternal features of reality. Not, to be clear, that any life choice is as good as any other; moral realism is a thing.
It’s just that there are uncountable varieties of worthy lives to be lived, just as there are of degrading lives. Formulas never work qua formulas.
But here’s the real kicker: in the end, what we should or shouldn’t do depends on our personal destiny. Yes, free will is real, but to anyone who has paid attention to how life unfolds, it is also clear that not everything is possible. Indeed, the “possibility space” we are navigating on a personal level seems to be restrained by some sort of dynamic rules we can’t fully comprehend. Life is more like a web of canals and rivers, allowing us to jump from one branch to another at certain junctures while still inevitably reaching certain landmarks no matter which path we take. Other aspects of our route we may have more control over, and we may be free to completely mess it all up, too. There is, in short, no way we can achieve certain things in this life; other things we may achieve to a degree by applying brute force, but it would be precisely that: forced, and ultimately a dead end on the destiny map. Still others come naturally to us, yet we don’t know the destination and meaning of it all: it’s a process of discovery. Which means our job is precisely that: to discover — gradually — what our destiny is, open to all kinds of possibilities, including ones that we may not like. Especially those, in fact.
More often than not, our dreams and aspirations, our stated goals, are mere projections of our ignorance about ourselves and the world, powered by base biological drives for comfort and homeostasis. We paint an imaginary future in our minds that feels good, a mere balloon inflated with hot air and utter cluelessness. What our destiny actually is, we don’t know, and if we knew, we wouldn’t like it; hence God mercifully keeps us blind until we can be trusted not to run from it. This explains two seemingly contradictory ideas found in religious and esoteric thought: on the one hand, it is said, everything in life should be effortless, flowing, natural, undisturbed, still, centered. On the other hand, we should be disciplined, willpowered, listen to the right kind of authority, go hard against our inclinations, wants and personality-society-biology-temperament-conditioned sloth-slumber.
The solution to this conundrum is easy to put into words, nerve-wracking to put into practice: where our destiny is concerned, we need to relax and get out of the way; let it flow, man. Stay open and trust your destiny. But to do that, we often need to fight a monstrous uphill battle against the derailing and crazy-making forces of entropy within and without. Which includes all those people who try to tell you there is only one true path, one worthwhile way of life, one universal destiny. Screw them.
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In Vedic philosophy there's the concept of swadharma, which is Dharma in the universal sense, that of living consciously in accordance with moral law, prefixed by swa-, referring to oneself, one's own particular Dharma as a strand in the greater whole. Compared to Western notions of individual destiny, swadharma feels somehow humbler and more unassuming. It's like saying I have a way that is unique to myself and that only I can properly fulfil, yet through the fulfilling of it I naturally express my devotion to Dharma as a whole.
Individual destiny in the Western sense feels by contrast at once more alluring and more burdensome. There's a restlessness to it, an urge to emulation which is largely absent from its Indian equivalent. Whether that's a good or a bad thing is probably pointless to argue; or maybe some blending of the two concepts might yield the best outcome. Either way, however, I feel it must come down in the end to listening as deep within ourselves as we can in order to find our own true way forward.
This is why knowing our limitations are important. Working within those boundaries allows for creative action. No such limitations or boundaries and it is all dream, dissipation and frustration.