“Everything happens for a reason.” I have heard this phrase a couple of times recently. People seem to use it when something either really good or really bad happens to them. They say, “If I hadn’t worked at that restaurant, I wouldn’t have met my husband.” Or “If I hadn’t gotten the insurance money from that car accident, I never would have been able to travel around Europe.” They believe that this was their fate or destiny. And many conclude that if they have a destiny then there must be a God or a Higher Power with an ultimate plan. For some, having the belief in an all-powerful God seems to relieve them of their own responsibility.
This logic is clearly flawed. Dependent events are events that occur ONLY after a previous event. For example: If there’s smoke, there’s fire. In dependent cases, you can say –“If A, then B” and “If not A, then not B” But in the cases above, the events are independent: Meeting her husband did not depend on working at the restaurant; she could have met him another way. And his travelling around Europe did not depend on getting into an accident. He could have saved money or borrowed money to travel. There are actually billions of possibilities since we, as humans have the power of CHOICE. What I believe in is CHOICE and RANDOMNESS. The truth is, the outcomes in our lives are due to a combination of our choices and random events
Saying everything happens for a “reason” suggests that humans have no free will and no choice. If that were really true, then EVERY choice we made of every second of the day would actually not be a choice at all but would be part of “God’s Plan”. This idea is ludicrous! That would imply that it is God’s Plan that I’m having a bowl of cereal and a cup of herbal tea this morning for breakfast. You can’t say that there is a God who creates and controls everything and yet also claim that humans have choices in the same breath. These two concepts are mutually exclusive. How can you possibly say that an all-powerful, all-knowing God controls some things but cannot control others? Would that mean that I could choose what to eat for breakfast but that my decision to move to another country was God’s will?
I’m currently reading a book right now in which the woman preaches that if we listen to and follow God’s will then we will lead a happier, healthier, more peaceful life. This theory fails, too. If our inner voice is God speaking to us and we can choose whether to listen to it or not, then we are still in fact CHOOSING! And if there are people on this planet who are choosing NOT to follow God’s plan, then God has hardly any power or control at all. I mean, if there are billions of people out there doing what THEY want to do, then the world is basically just random chaos. Additionally, if it were true that we were all just robots programmed to follow some divine plan, then we wouldn’t even be aware that we had any choices! What makes us human is our conscious awareness.
I do believe that there is a part of us that leads us to make good choices. Some call it our inner voice or our intuition. Although most things in our world are out of our control, we do have power because we have the power to CHOOSE. When we live in the present with awareness it’s much easier to hear our inner voice of wisdom. When we listen, we have the power to make good choices and wise decisions. This is really the key to living a happy, healthy, peaceful life. Perhaps ideally, we would all be living in tune with our wiser self, without fear.
We sometimes cannot stop bad things from happening and we cannot always produce the good results we want but we CAN expand our awareness as much as possible. Yes, it’s scary to think we are all just random life in a random, chaotic universe. On the flip side, though, think of how exciting it is to accept that life is filled with infinite possibilities!!
One choice opens up millions of new possibilities and opportunities. With a few big choices and thousands of day-to-day choices, I have changed my world and created a whole new reality for myself. Imagine that behind each door you open lies millions of other doors. Let’s say, you make one big choice, door A, and once inside you now see doors from one to infinity. You pick another door which also has an infinite number of doors behind it. Life becomes an infinite, seemingly miraculous, spiral or possibilities, opportunities and connections. This is the magic of the universe. What appears impossible is really just a domino effect, a constant process of change and evolution. The universe is an infinite web of probabilities and outcomes. Everything is the result of zillions of previous choices and random events, all interconnected.
Rather than having faith in God or a Higher Power, why not have faith in YOURSELF? It’s when we take responsibility for our actions and own our feelings that we we truly EMPOWER ourselves. Rewriting the serenity prayer I would say, “I have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”
truthtrips 