“Is It Destiny?”
by Kelvin Chin
Life After Life Expert
What if you’ve heard (or maybe even experienced yourself) that you have the ability to make choices before you come into this lifetime? To sort of plan out your life before you actually live it.
For example, some people speak of their minds or souls “choosing their parents” before they come into a new life. Other people speak of choosing their friends and certain other relationships before they come into a new lifetime.
Does that mean that is their “destiny”? Does that mean they will definitely run into those people in their new lifetime? That those relationships are “meant to be”?
First of all, a theme that you will see running throughout many of my blog essays on the subject of experience ‘on this side of the veil’ and ‘on the other side of the veil’ is that there’s not much difference — or at least that there is less difference than we realize — on both sides.
I think that also applies in this case.
My experience is that we have Free Will all the time. On this side of the veil and on the other side of the veil. In other words, while we are alive in physical bodies, and while we are alive in nonphysical, energy, or so-called ‘light’ bodies.
So, I think that some people who may have remembered that they have made choices before they came into a new body and reincarnated into a new lifetime have confused or conflated that issue with the idea of “Destiny.”
Merely making plans based on expressed desires does not guarantee the outcome of the plans. If the outcome was guaranteed, that would be predetermination — that would be “destiny.”
The fact that they may have made plans to meet up with — let’s say — parents, or friends, or lovers, or whomever they may wish to encounter in the new lifetime — does not guarantee it will happen. And it does not guarantee that it will happen in the way that the person desires it to happen.
Said another way, just because we are not in the physical body does not give our minds any more power to manifest what we want than when we are in a physical body. Our minds are equally powerful whether we have a body or not. I think that fact is far too overlooked by most people who think about consciousness, awareness, and the power of the mind.
There is far too much division or bifurcation in the way people view the mind — viewing the “human” mind (meaning when it’s in a physical body) as ‘weaker’ than when the mind is associated with a non-physical ‘body’ (when it’s an energy form).
I think this is a classic mistake.
The mind or soul is distinct and separate from the body, and has its own power and eternity that is distinguished from the physical body completely.
Contrary to the common bifurcation belief, if our minds are in fact eternal, as I have written in other blog essays, then the mind is as powerful as it is at any time whether it’s associated with the physical body or not.
Therefore, if we are deciding and making choices and expressing our desires to plan and create a certain reality in our next life before we fully take on a new body, those are choices we are making — maybe even powerful choices — but they are not ‘written in stone.’
They are strong desires we are expressing to ourselves and to the other minds involved in those relationships. And to the extent that those other minds are open to it and interested in reciprocating those desires to initiate or continue certain relationships with us, then those relationships may occur in that next lifetime when we take physical form.
However, for all sorts of reasons, based on choices that both we may make as well as the other minds involved in those relationships may make, those relationships will take various twists and turns along the way that are unknown to all of the minds involved at that particular moment in time. Free will operates all the time. And as such, all the various choices that all of the minds will make at any given moment in time, will dictate and control the various and many diverse outcomes that are possible.
So, as I said, nothing is written in stone.
Probabilities? Yes. But, Absolutes? No.
BUT IT FEELS LIKE…
It may actually sometimes ‘feel like’ there is some element of ‘predestination’ when we meet up again with an ‘old’ friend from many, many years ago. In fact, we have all probably had that experience in our ‘present-day’ lives — where we meet back up with an old friend after 2-3 years, and the conversation continues as if it ‘never missed a beat,’ there was never a gap — it is seamless. I think we can have similar conversations that may continue after 50, 150, or 1,000 years — and have that same feeling of familiarity, of continuity.
But, instead of immediately jumping to calling that “destiny,” I think we should begin to call it something else — for the sake of our own clarity.
Maybe instead call it the result of our own lucid thinking and planning, that due to the depth of our relationships with others over the span of Time, we have consciously decided to try to rekindle our very old relationships.
And by doing so — by calling it what I think it actually is — we will accomplish at least two things. We will avoid giving credit to something or someone we don’t know exists — the elusive and invisible so-called “destiny.” And more importantly, we will begin to acknowledge our own power as individual minds with the choice to plan and nurture what is important to us — our relationships — and in doing so, we will be honoring, respecting, and truly feeling the depth of those connections to the degree they deserve.
FINAL THOUGHTS…
It’s not “destiny” just because you made decisions early on. It’s the same thing as setting up a company in present time and making certain decisions when you set up the company in your Board of Directors strategic planning meetings. That does not determine all your actions after you set up the company. You can change the direction of the company at any time — in fact that happens all the time — and many times — during the lifetime of the company.
I think the fact that we can make certain life choices before we come into a new body and start our new lifetime in physical form is no different.
And so, what does that mean to each of us on a practical level?
That means that we need to continually live in the present — make decisions and assessments based on what we know at that moment — based on memories that we may have that go way back perhaps to other lifetimes or maybe even to immediately prior to this lifetime. In other words, use whatever is available to us in our database of information from whenever, and use that informationin our continual present to make decisions on the ground in the now — in our current life — that seem most appropriate at the time.
So, it’s not about living in the past. And it’s not about looking for guaranteed outcomes.
It’s about living in the present. Fully in the present. And fully in the present with as much knowledge in our database as possible from whatever the sources we have available to us.
Using our full mental capacities at the time to make our own decisions, to live an effective, productive, enjoyable and happy life, as much as we can.
Kelvin H. Chin is a Meditation Teacher, Life After Life Expert, and Author of “Overcoming the Fear of Death,” “Marcus Aurelius Updated: 21st Century Meditations On Living Life” and “After the Afterlife: Memories of My Past Lives.” He learned to meditate at age 19, and has been teaching Turning Within Meditation and coaching others in their self-growth for 40 years. He helps people understand their life challenges through their individual belief systems, and helps them find their own solutions. His past life memories reach back many centuries, and he accesses those memories in his teaching and his coaching in the same way all coaches draw on their own available experiences for perspective and effective analogies. He can be reached at www.TurningWithin.org.