Spoiler Alert: This exploration offers no definitive answers or tidy conclusions. These are contemplations meant to be lived, questions that can only be answered within the quiet of your own experience.

Voices from the Great Mystery

Humanity has always lived in the space between being the master of one's fate and a pawn of the gods. Before we dive into the why, we must acknowledge that we are joining a conversation that has echoed through every temple, library, and forest for millennia:

• From the Bhagavad Gita (Hinduism): "The Lord dwells in the hearts of all beings... by His illusive power He gently causes all beings to move as if they were fixed to a machine."

• From the Quran (Islam): "Every man’s fate We have fastened on his own neck."

• From the Book of Romans (Christianity): "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son."

• From Ralph Waldo Emerson (Secular/Transcendentalist): "Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect."

• From Mary Oliver (Poetry): "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

These voices represent the two ends of our internal tug-of-war: the machine-like certainty of destiny and the wild, precious urgency of choice.

Predestination

Growing up in a faith tradition that leaned heavily into predestination, we were told our paths in life and afterlife were set. Yet, I witnessed a strange contradiction as we were often criticized by other fundamentalist denominations. They claimed that if you believed in predestination, your actions cease to matter and that belief would ultimately result in an eternal trip to hell.

The hypocrisy became most visible in the aftermath of life’s highs and lows. If a tragedy struck or a blessing arrived, the immediate refrain from those well-meaning critics was, "It was the Lord’s plan." This creates a convenient, if frustrating, loop: if everything is pre-written, does the pen in my hand even have ink? It felt then, and feels now, like a cosmic scapegoat. If an external God is the architect of this life, then I am merely a character in a play, absolved of the weight (and the power) of my own choices.

Soul Contracts

As I met folks in more fluid spiritual circles, I encountered the concept of Soul Contracts. The idea is that your higher self, the divine you, planned your life’s major lessons before you ever incarnated.

But I have to wonder: Is this really any different from "God’s Plan" simply because the idea or source of God changes?

While the Soul Contract allows for more flexibility suggesting we choose the timing or the manner in which we learn our lessons, it is still a blueprint we cannot escape. If I am just fulfilling a contract I don’t remember signing, where does my current, conscious accountability live? Are we simply swapping a "God in the sky" for a "Self in the stars" to avoid the discomfort of total agency in the present?

The Celestial Blueprint

This leads us naturally to the stars. For many, astrology serves as the ultimate cosmic evidence for a life already written. We look at a natal chart, a frozen snapshot of the heavens at the moment of our first breath, and see a complex web of planetary alignments that seemingly dictate our temperament, our struggles, and our successes. "It’s just my Saturn Return," we might say to explain away a year of hardship, or "I’m a Scorpio, I can’t help being intense."

But does the map create the territory, or does it merely describe it? If our lives are indeed written in the stars, we face the same dilemma: are the planets our puppet masters, or are they mirrors? When we treat astrology as a fixed destiny, we turn the zodiac into another version of predestination, using the movement of Mars or Mercury as a sophisticated bypass for our own behavior. The real magic isn’t in the alignment of the planets themselves, but in how we choose to dance with the energies they represent.

Reclaiming the Shadow

The shift happens when we move God from a throne in the sky to the Spark within ourselves. If we accept that we are sacred pieces (sons and daughters) of the One, the dynamic of accountability changes entirely. We can no longer look upward to place blame or wait for a cosmic pardon. We have to look inward.

This is where the heavy lifting of Shadow Work begins—the process of exploring the hidden, suppressed, or "unacceptable" parts of ourselves that we so often project onto destiny. When we reclaim accountability, we begin to see the villains in our lives not as tests from an external force, but as mirrors reflecting our own unresolved shadows. We stop asking why life is happening to us and start investigating what we gain by staying in repetitive, sometimes painful cycles. Ultimately, this work reveals that we often use predestination, in its many forms, as a shield to avoid the discomfort of change. Reclaiming our power means admitting that while we may not control the wind, we are the ones choosing how to set the sails. We stop being victims of a pre-planned existence and start being active participants in our evolution.

Where Does That Leave Free Will?

Perhaps free will isn't the ability to change the final outcome, but the consciousness we bring to the journey. If we are the Divine in human form, maybe free will is the choice to stop running from our own shadows and start taking responsibility for the reality we are co-creating.

Accountability isn't a burden handed down by a judge; it is the ultimate expression of our own power. If a river is predestined to flow toward the ocean, the water still possesses the free will to swirl around a rock, to crash against the bank, or to sit in a quiet, reflective pool. The destination may be settled, but the quality of the journey belongs entirely to the water.

A Final Contemplation

When we drop the need for a scapegoat, whether a judgmental deity or a rigid soul contract, we are left with a terrifying and beautiful responsibility. We are no longer characters reading lines; we are the playwrights in the middle of a revision.

I invite you to sit with these questions:

• If there were no Plan dictating your life, how would your choices change today?

• Are you using your beliefs as a bridge to your highest self, or as a bypass to avoid the heavy lifting of personal growth?

• What kind of world are you currently choosing to author?

The answers aren't in a book or sermon. They are etched in the choices you make when you realize that the hand holding the pen... is yours.