Understanding Destiny 1 – What is pre-determined and what isn’t

[Course at College of Vedic Studies, London, UK]

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Have a short break So I talked today about how even a performance centred field like sports sports players understand that there is something beyond our control so somebody might call it God, somebody might call it faith people may have their own superstitions they try to appease the unknown to get the results so in sports performance matters but performance is not all that matters and what applies to sports that is like an intensified, dramatised microcosm of life that applies in life also so the modern ethos is karma centred you work, you get the results and science and technology they, it’s appeared as if they have brought things which were previously not in our control and that’s how it may seem that now we can control everything so previously we couldn’t see if our vision went down now with eyes, with specks we can see but the notion that we can, yes we might be able to control some more things than the past but that doesn’t mean that we can control everything the notion that we can control everything seems empowering but it is also disempowering because if I claim that I am responsible for my success then I alone am responsible for my failure failure doesn’t just be a vitamin event, it becomes a person and then that can be psychologically damaging the large part of the mental problem that people face today is because they have been brought up with the idea that you should be able to control and achieve and if you are not able to control and achieve something wrong with you and you are just not able to accept that so karma vata, it can be psychologically damaging, similarly the other extreme is daima vata, that everything is disjoint, that is also disempowering I talked about how the the South American tribe just accepted defeat because of their fatalistic belief about certain science being a precursor of defeat so there may be some people in modern India who might be fatalistic but if you go back to the bhakti text, they are not fatalistic Ram accepted Kaikeyi’s sentence of going to the forest not because it was destiny but because he felt that was the best way he could do his duty to his father and if he had been destiny centred, then he would have just let Ravana abduct Sita but he fought to get Sita back because as a husband, he considered it his duty to protect his wife so how do we understand this concept of duty centredness in a more philosophical sense we discussed about how the word karma has different meanings, action, reaction system of action, reaction and good action and we focus on karma primarily as action in this discussion so normally, action produces a result cause effect correlation is the basis of our day to day functioning, it is the basis of science but when a cause doesn’t seem to produce an effect or an effect comes in the absence of a cause then rather than questioning the whole system of cause and effect correlation you have to see if there are any other factors involved like if AC is not cooling, then there is some window open because of which AC is cooling so if karma is not producing phala what does it mean, something else is involved over there, that something else is there so destiny is basically the sum total of our actions whose reactions have not yet come to us and that sum total comes to us at different times throughout our life the actions that we do, they contribute to the positive stockpile, positive side of the stockpile of karma the bad actions that we do, they contribute to the negative stockpile, the reactions that we get, they are called as prarabdha and aprarabdha prarabdha is what is already got in the course of our life, aprarabdha is what we will get in the course of our life as we move forwards and just as a farmer has to sow and plough that is karma, the rains come, that daiva and the passage of time is there and the harvesting season, the phala comes like that in our life, we do our duty and the destiny is favorable results come, but when the results come, we don’t think about destiny at all, I work, I got the result and if the results don’t come, then what has happened, we start questioning, but daiva always is present and when our karma doesn’t produce the phala, rather than getting frustrated, we accept that there is some unfavorable daiva but my work is not going anywhere my karma will contribute to a favorable daiva in future so we will have a 5 minute break and then you can join and we will continue afterwards