One of the most basic questions – in one’s life – is: is our life dictated in advance, in other words; does everyone has a destiny? And it is not just one question but there are several questions:
What is destiny? Is it a finished script, or an incomplete script with some limited free choice in it?
Is it at all desirable for a person to meet his destiny (if such a thing at all exists), or that destiny is restrictive, and thus a person needs to create his life from nothing?
Is destiny a tough script or headlines with which one can improvise?
Does a person lives without a choice the destiny that was dictated to him, or he is making his own life by a free choice?
Not to all of the questions here will be given answers, but an effort will be made to take a stand about most.
And let’s begin with definition; what is destiny?
Well, destiny is living one’s life according to a blueprint that exists in oneself as a genetic code. When a building is being built its ‘destiny’ is to be built according to the architectural plan (The blueprint), thus its destiny is to be structured in a particular way and it has a certain life span and certain people with certain income will live in it, but the contractor or the project manager do not have to flow the architectural plan… And if the building has got no architectural plan (not possible) than it has got no ‘destiny’.
Destiny is not the end product that a person has to dance in complete accordance to it as a marionette, for the blueprint of a person’s life is raw material.
Every person has a blueprint for his life, the question is: does he lives according to it?
So he has got two options: to live according to the blueprint or to deviate from it, with it this destiny appears in different people with varying degrees of strength and power. With some people their destiny is weak, and with others it might be very dominant.
And back to the question: does a person manages to connect to his internal blueprint?
If a person did indeed succeeded in connecting to his own individual blueprint – then he is like a driver with a map (or an application of the roads) and still he can choose to be assisted by the map (or the application). To live without a map is being not connected to the blueprint. A person without the map might not reach his destination.
A destiny is a meeting point between an inner print and outer reality. Living without a destiny is living in the meeting point between an adopted self and reality.
An adopted self – personality (in Gurdjieff teaching) – is a result of over clinging to social norms. Most people do not live in accordance with their inner code and so a person could not be in touch with a road which was meant only for him.
One, therefore may come to think that a life without a destiny is a life of chaos, whereas life with a destiny is a fixed and clear route, well not exactly; in a life which is according to social norms the person is actually fixed in functions that he has to be fitted in. And in order for him to get to his destiny he has to get out of the social fixation and move into an unclear situation, to a void, and then – from this void and uncharted area of freedom -he might connect to his inner print, now he has the possibility for a destiny.
And to clear it further; destiny is according to an inner D.N.A. – life of fixation is according to indoctrination from the outside. In both cases one is not free, in both cases it might look the same. But there is a world of difference between them.
And there are people that fall between the two chairs; from one end they cannot live according to stiff social norms but from the other end they cannot find a way to their inner voice and live their life according the inner code printed in them. And thus they live a lost life, like a ship without a wheel in the ocean, simply they are the outsiders.
Michelangelo said the following: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”.
The blocks of stone around the statue are our dogmas, manners, nationality, education, our profession, and the masks we put on our real face, (so we would be fit for the general conventional norm). Life which is being arranged according to the stone around the locked figure –is life which looks like life, it has got the image of a life, but almost nothing is happening from within to without. Real actualized life is coming from within, not suffocated by the outside. In the adopted life there is no self-actualization, only orientation to this statue can give birth to one’s destiny.
What is generally accepted is burying the inner print and around it we build an adopted personality.
Non actualized life, in which there is no meeting with this hidden statue – is life on the external plan of existence.
Gurdjieff: in ‘the law of accidents’ – says that man generally is exposed to uncontrolled changes that a person who is connected to his destiny –is not exposed to. And these changes are produced by exterior shocks, which he can never foresee. Thus he goes, carried by the streams of life and by his own mood fluctuations. In his illusory life, ordinary man is governed by the Law of Hazard, or Law of Accident. He called this life: mechanical life, and in mechanical life accidents happen because the inner compass, the inner center of gravity, is paralyzed.
Destiny is much to do with recognition of one’s type, his typological essence.
In mechanical life there is happiness, misery, suffering and pleasure, in destiny life there is mainly the match between what could be and what is happening for real.
When one discovers his own destiny – it transcends all of what filled his life until this point; nationality, relationships, family, work, and more, with it does not come to say that he has to give up them totally but his priorities changes; destiny is at the top and the rest comes after. And this is not to say, at all, that he has no conflict between his first priority and the rest of the priorities, indeed there could be even a clash between his prime priority and the rest, so he needs to remind himself again and again his true mission, which is to be true to his destiny, as hard and demanding as it could be on the other priorities.
Gabriel
