Dion Fortune
Destiny and Free Will
As I enter the final quarter (of my life), I am becoming a busy student again. I have more than twenty BIG books piled up waiting to be read this winter (which is starting early in Montana - the high expected to be 18 degrees a week from today.)
You might think astrology makes up my main selections. Wrong for two reasons. 1) Most astrology books are encyclopedic and boring. I have a half dozen of them unfinished right now. 2) I have other interests which are more inviting even if there were better astrology readers available.
I am spending time with two particular authors now: Dion Fortune and William Quan Judge. I mentioned Fortune a few weeks ago.
Her book The Secrets of Dr. Taverner gives fictional - more or less - histories from the cases of this unconventional (meta)physician. Taverner runs a nursing home and works like Sherlock Holmes to resolve his patients’ psychic and psychological dilemmas.
After WWI, Fortune worked with a Dr. Moriarty who inspired this book. I found most of the stories magical as well as enlightening.
In a story titled The Soul That Would Not Be Born, Taverner says to Rhodes, his assistant, “Now I think we can guess the cause of the trouble. I wonder whether you are aware of the mental processes that precede birth? Just before birth the soul sees a cinematograph film (as it were) of its future life; not all the details, but the broad outlines which are determined by fate; these things it cannot alter, but according to its reaction to them, so will its future lives be planned. Thus it is that although we cannot alter our fate in this life, our future lies entirely in our own hands.”
Through my astrology work, I had been coming to Dr. Taverner’s belief regarding FATE for some time and thought it nice for him to show up and put the concept down so clearly. Proof is still a long way off. But, I believe the idea bears meditation.
Another note on fate comes from WQ Judge’s book called Echoes of the Orient. He borrows from Mabel Collins’s Through the Gates of Gold, “Destiny - the inevitable - does indeed exist for the race and the individual. But who can ordain this, save the man himself?”
That is a bit of a head scratcher. It also hints that Destiny is bigger than we know because, in fact, we are all part of Entities much bigger than our own little incarnations.
You ask, “Where does Free Will fit in?”
My reflection suggests that Fate and Free Will are two sides of the same coin. A bit like when scientists tell us that Light has the nature of both waves and corpuscles.
The belief supported by such thinking as:
"Free will is doing gladly and freely that which one must do.” (Carl Jung)
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” (Anon)
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Comments from George Nemec, Dallas, TX:
I totally agree that Free Will and Destiny are one thing and not in
opposition to each other.
People that use destiny as a cop-out for not taking their divine power seem
to have many problems.
The best example is Islam when they say - "It is the will of Allah".
Nothing will resolve in this world when you are fatalistic (leaving
everything up to destiny - fate - the force).
My understanding is that destiny is the energy of the lives of other (what
the universe presents you moment to moment) - what is external. Free will
is your response (play in the moment or choose something different) - what
is internal.
Regards,
George