Become who you were meant to be
Really nice and really loaded title, would you agree? It means that you are not who you were meant to be. You are someone else, and that flies in the face of determinists.
Determinists say that your life is scripted, and you have no choice about it. You choose what you have in store for you. You have no free will.
But the truth is that human beings do have free will.
So what is this “who you were meant to be” stuff? Determinist or free will stuff… good question.
Every choice is somewhat pre-determined by the past, by the family you were born into.
The past gets into the choice by the mind storing everything that happened to you and placing it in your future as something to avoid, or something to repeat.
When you get hurt, or laughed at, or feel ashamed about, you vow never to do that again. That places it square into your future, and it sits there, blocking your view, preventing exercising your free will, it sits there like a golem, it sits there as the only choice there is.
There is a favorite example I learned in a born again Christian magazine I picked up at a train station some 15-20 years ago. It has made a profound difference in my life. It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with explaining why our life looks the way it does, why we are the way we are.
Here is the story
Imagine driving on a mountain road that bends around the mountain climbing higher and higher. On one side the mountain, on the other side the abyss… the ravine, the depth.
It’s a beautiful morning, your radio blasts your favorite music, and you love your life.
As you go around yet another bend, you see, horrified, a car crash on the road. The road is narrow, and you need to choose how to avoid your certain death.
