Fate vs. Free Will

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Reluctant as I am to disappoint anyone, I should tell you from the outset that the question that you have perhaps come here to have answered, a question that has exercised various minds over the course of many hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, is a question that has no answer. Many people, having attained their own answers to this question, become very attached to their perspective on whether fate or free will predominates, and in each age a strong preference for a particular perspective tends to develop. The innate human tendency to exaggerate means that, when presented with an option to move either in the direction of moderation or of extremism, a majority of humans will automatically veer towards extremism. For example, many new age people (I am of course generalizing here) believe themselves to possess so much free will that they can pretty well change anything just by deciding to change it. And while this is indeed true for everybody; to some degree, it is true for some people to a greater degree than it is for others; and even those whose free will seems abundant will generally find it scarce at certain times in their lives. Here is another unanswerable question: suppose we have the desire to change, and we actually follow through on the change; does that change happens because we had the free will to effect it, or rather because we were fated to make the change and it simply showed up at that point? To those people who are most fated to go through life with narrowed minds we can apply the Sanskrit term kupamanduka. Kupa means well and manduka means frog; to a frog that lives at the bottom of a well the sky is a small circle that seems far, far away. So long as the frog remains at the bottom of its well, it will remain with its misperception. If, however, either by the action of some fate-as for example a bucket dropping down into which the frog can

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