Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Destiny

One of our all time favorite topics . Is there something called destiny , do we create our own destiny , is it all upto us ?

For me my opinion on destiny has been changing over the years but the pattern has been somewhat like this . When things are going great then it is I create my own destiny , when things hit a rough patch or more accurately when I have trouble keeping up with some of my tough decisions , then it is destiny and that is how it was meant to happen .

So past few years have gotten me to think on this subject believing and unbelieving it at the same time . It was only recently when I read an excerpt by Jaggi Vasudev that something struck a cord . He says 100 years ago if a 4 year kid died of a disease we would say it is his destiny . Today we have methods to make sure that a 4 year old kid does not die , what happened to his destiny now , we have changed our destinies.

Man has been meddling with nature in so many ways , when the first ice age occurred that destroyed all dinosaurs it was the destiny of dinosaurs . But now if we drown due to global warming it is destiny , we have created this . Man is becoming his own creator in certain ways .

As we are becoming more aware of our surrounding and the laws that guide it , a lot of things are coming out of the purview of destiny . It is only the things that we dnt understand that still fall under the label of destiny .

The thing that got me thinking more deeply on this was showing of horoscopes before marriage that is still very religiously followed in india . 50 years back a girl was married of to a guy from one of the families that were related to us or stayed in the same village as us . That was the extent of our social circle and so the girl's destiny lay in that village . Now we use the internet to find matches and are reaching out to people who we could not have contacted or even thought about 50 years back . So internet has changed our destinies in a certain way . Even after meddling with our destinies in so many ways we still believe that the stars above will tell us how each one of our lives are going to be .

Sadhguru says if you were to leave your life and death both in the hands of the creater then you can say " Ohh this is my destiny and this is how it is supposed to be " but now we want to meddle with our lives as well as our death and still believe destiny will take care of everything .

Maybe that to an extent is the problem with India too , we still believe God will come and take care of everything for us . It is high time we realize he will not , either we stop changing all of his creations to suit us ( which we would not ...) or take things into our hands and build them up responsibly.