Is Your Life Mapped Out? Your Mind and Free Will vs Destiny by David R. Hamilton, Ph.D.

These are questions we all ask ourselves, but it’s hard to get past conjecture or gut feeling to find any definitive answers. Now, in this groundbreaking book, David Hamilton looks at hard scientific evidence to bring us closer to understanding the balance between the forces of destiny and the power of free will.

Exploring the new scientific research into presentiment – how the mind and nervous system are able to perceive events ahead of time – David examines the origins and nature of consciousness and how the mind influences the experiences of our lives. Drawing on research in such diverse fields as quantum physics, epigenetics, solar cycles, astrology, and even reports of life after death, David shows that there appears to be an element of predetermination in life, but also suggests that there is much opportunity for us to take control of our own destiny, allowing us to shape our lives and our world with powerful results.

David R. Hamilton acquired an honors degree in biological and medicinal chemistry, and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry before working as a scientist in the pharmaceutical industry for several years. His research into the mind-body connection ultimately led him to leave that profession and become a motivational speaker. He went on to co-found an international relief charity, and he appears regularly in the media. He spends most of his time writing, giving talks, and leading workshops.
Website: http://www.drdavidhamilton.com

Quantum entanglement, Mystery of Destiny, Free Will – Dr David Hamilton, Glasgow,

David Hamilton looks at hard scientific evidence to bring us closer to understanding the balance between the forces of destiny and the power of free will.

Exploring new, cutting-edge scientific research into the nature of time, and drawing on fields such as quantum physics, epigenetics, solar cycles and even reports of near-death experiences, David explores how, rather than being a question of one versus the other, destiny and free will can in fact work simultaneously in his fascinating new theory, ‘The Tree of Probable Life’. He shows how, ultimately, we create many of the conditions of our own lives and offers some powerful, practical principles that can bring amazing results.

Latest book: Is Your Life Mapped Out?: Unravelling the Mystery of Destiny vs Free Will
By Dr. David Hamilton

After completing his PhD, David worked for 4 years in the pharmaceutical industry developing drugs for cardiovascular disease and cancer. During this time he also served as an athletics coach and manager of one of the UK’s largest athletics clubs, leading them to three successive UK finals. Upon leaving the pharmaceutical industry, David co-founded the international relief charity Spirit Aid Foundation and served as a director for 2 years.

While writing his first book, David taught chemistry and ecology at James Watt College of Further and Higher Education and tutored chemistry at Glasgow University.

Now a bestselling author of 6 books published by Hay House, he offers talks and workshops that fuse science, the mind, and spiritual wisdom.

Is Karma Real? Why Do Bad Things Happen? (Part 2) ~ Deepak Chopra

Because suffering is part of human life, everyone asks why it exists, and the answers we give to ourselves make a great deal of difference. Explanations lead to action, for one thing. Billions of people choose religion as a way to accept suffering or to try and escape it. In the first post of this series we began with the opposite of religion, however. The modern tendency, deeply influenced by science, is to explain the bad things in life as random and accidental. This explanation also leads to action. If you accept that random events will bring pain into your existence, with no blame or guilt on your part and no higher being who is punishing you, you won’t behave like a devout Christian or Muslim.

The notion that science has raised us above superstition has become a stick that staunch atheists like Richard Dawkins use to beat religion over the head. Yet the issue is subtler than the war between belief and skepticism. In the world’s wisdom traditions suffering has a cause and therefore a solution — such is the message of every great spiritual guide. The answers that they delivered have shaped civilization. In the first glow of discovery, Darwin and Freud, not to mention Marx, were eager to throw out the worst of religious excess. Yet as we saw in the first post, substituting randomness for God was not a psychological step forward. An accidental universe is almost impossible to live with for creatures like us who shape our existence to be meaningful.

If the good parts of your life are to have meaning, the same must be true of the bad parts. That, too, is a continual message delivered by the world’s wisdom traditions. How, then, are the dark and the light related to each other? There are cosmic answers to this question, and by a kind of trickle down effect, the cosmic answer turns into the answer we accept in normal, everyday existence.

Here are the basic choices for how the two aspects of life, pain and pleasure, came to exist.

1. Two universal forces contend for control of creation, one being good, the other evil. Human beings are caught in this titanic struggle between light and darkness.

2. Creation cannot exist without destruction. These forces are not opposites but two sides of the same eternal process.

3. The only real existence transcends good and evil. All events that we perceive as good or evil, pleasurable or painful, are illusions compared to the “real” reality, which is whole and therefore not divided into opposites.

4. Creation was originally good, with no blemishes, and life was without suffering. Then sin entered the world through human error and disobedience. After that disastrous event, creation changed.

5. The cosmos is presided over by higher beings who sport with humans. Our experience of pleasure and pain reflects a game that is played out beyond our ability to comprehend it.

6. The cosmos is in the state of constant evolution. Good and evil, pleasure and pain are prompts to guide us forward in our own evolution.

7. The relationship between this world of light and darkness and some other world cannot be known. Going beyond pleasure and pain reveals a kind of emptiness, which is the only escape route, despite our yearning for higher purpose.

Although there are countless variations on these seven themes, they will serve as a template for how people explain good and evil as cosmic forces. For the devout, there is no mixing of stories — a fundamentalist, whether Christian or Muslim, adheres to the teachings of his faith. Yet increasingly we feel confused; some bits and pieces of each explanation tug at us. On some days we watch the news and an airplane crash is shrugged off as a terrible accident. On other days a well-known villain gets his comeuppance, and we tell ourselves that good has won out over evil; a just punishment has been rendered.

Confusion makes it more difficult to lead a meaningful life. In the back of our minds, we’d prefer to know, with some certainty, that our lives mean something, that we aren’t pawns in a game of blind chess. In an effort to tell yourself a consistent story about who you are and why you are here, you can’t escape the temptation to choose a cosmic explanation, even if it’s the explanation that rests on randomness. Depending on which explanation you finally accept, your whole life will unfold along a path. Call it a spiritual path or not, the implications are spiritual. You are testing through your daily actions how the universe works; you are making a silent wager over the state of your soul (for atheists, the wager is that the soul doesn’t exist).

In later posts we’ll see how each of the seven cosmic explanations alters your existence and guides your choices in life. As a preview, here are the primary decisions that each of us can choose:

1. You can live to obey God and resist the temptations of the Devil.

2. You can choose the most creative life.

3. You can decide to offer yourself in service to others.

4. You can seek to purify yourself of sin or bad karma.

5. You can pursue enlightenment in order to go beyond the world of illusion.

6. You can work to maximize your inner potential, speeding up the process of evolution.

7. You can become a co-creator of your own reality, aligning yourself with cosmic intelligence.

These are big choices based on big stories about how creation works. They are the most fascinating issues but also the most troubling that we face every day. Your ability to settle these issues becomes the most important power you possess, once you realize how deeply your life reflects the workings of the universe.

(To be continued)

Why Do Bad Things Happen? (Part 1) ~ Deepak Chopra

As the blame game continues to engulf politics, with neither side agreeing on any measure to get the country out of trouble, except for trivial half measures, one thing is obvious. You can’t figure out how to fix bad tings until you know why they happened. This applies to society but also to our personal lives. Bad things cause pain, suffering and confusion. They overturn the rhythm of normal life. Fear and anger surface, breaking apart a person’s emotional picture of reality. By “emotional reality” I mean the assumption that your existence can be calm, secure, prosperous, and unthreatened. Different as they are, a terrorist attack, bankruptcy, and a diagnosis of cancer are all bad things that create the same responses inside us.

The way to meet bad things is complicated. Being inconvenienced at the airport in the name of national security isn’t the same as pursuing cancer treatment or rebuilding your credit record. Yet there are similarities. Bad things need to be countered by returning, if possible, to a calm sense of normality where the pursuit of happiness is possible once more. Words like acceptance, balance, healing, community, compassion, justice, and security come to mind, but they are generic. Each bad thing is personal, no matter how vast the scale.

So, looking at it personally, why do bad things happen?

Let me sketch some answers and connect them with fix-its that might work along with those that won’t help at all.

Accidents: Some bad things are random. Auto accidents, sudden illness, and acts of God like tornadoes and floods fall into this category. In modern times, when science explains the universe and evolution through random chance – even “the accidental universe” has been proposed – people are more aware of chance occurrences than at any time in the past. In an age of faith, almost nothing was random. God had his reasons for even the slightest of misfortunes, and the larger ones, like the Black Death, were enormous acts of God, a phrase that meant divine retribution, not our current usage, where acts of God are mindless natural events.

When bad things happen by accident, we should feel no personal responsibility; morality lets us off the hook; there is no blame to pass around. But in reality the emotional freight is huge. Accidents remind people of how helpless they are. They instill survivor’s guilt and post-traumatic stress. The very unpredictability of accidents is what frightens us, and therefore, to regain a sense of control, our psyches thrash around, often in a panicked state, until we concoct an answer to fill the void.

Even as everyone around you keeps repeating “It’s not your fault,” when a bad thing happens, you can’t rest easy until you satisfy the unconscious need to explain the inexplicable. Why did burglars hit the house next door and not mine? Why did I survive the roadside bomb and not my buddy? Accidents throw us into strange and uncanny emotional territory. This leads to a schizoid division between rational understanding, which knows that tornadoes and bombing deaths are random – and emotional instability, which finds random events the most stressful kind. Repairing this self-division is the primary way to deal with bad things that are accidental.

What works: The first step is to be aware that you are fighting an inner war between reason and emotion. The second step is to realize that both sides are right, even though they are in conflict. The third step is to give both sides their due. The fourth step is to inform both sides that neither is going to win the battle. The fifth step is to find a place inside that isn’t at war, a place where you feel safe, complete, and no longer agitated.

What doesn’t work: constant repetition of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior. Relying on reason as a means of tamping down emotions, using repression, suppression, denial, avoidance, and distractions. Using emotion as a way to act out helplessness through panic, hiding from the world, isolation from family and friends, spiraling depression, victimization, and other negative emotional states that display a lot of action but never find an escape route.

It’s not as if we lack knowledge about post-traumatic states. Everything I’ve touched on is taught in Therapy 101, but making these steps personal isn’t easier just because you — or a therapist, counselor, or minister – knows how to analyze what’s going on. Self-awareness is the key, and it moves in different directions with every passing hour. Feeling safe one minute and panicked the next, at peace today but devastated tomorrow, keeps a person from any sense of control and normalcy. Without an anchor of objectivity, the healing process becomes chaotic and thus fuels the threat of randomness that is the problem you are trying to solve. The situation calls for a place of stability inside, however difficult that place is to find. Self-awareness if fluid, yes, but it rests upon a solid foundation known as the core self.

The reason that accidents and random disasters affect some people far more than others goes back to how secure they are in their core self. It’s not the only reason; we have to leave room for factors that are mysterious or unknown, perhaps even unknowable. (Sometimes we are faced with tragic irony, as i the recent sad stories about the trapped Chilean miners whose rescue made world news; a year later they face major psychological problems of depression, divorce, the inability to hold a job, and so on, all the marks of a mind that cannot come to grips with randomness but will never cease struggling against it.)

Finding your core self isn’t a mystery. The following steps are the most helpful, even though some may seem tangential to self-awareness – they set the stage of it anyway:

- Keep close to family and friends. Restore your daily routine. Do the external things necessary to fit into the rhythm of everyday life.

- Connect with other people who have gone through your situation. Become familiar with the various stages of healing. Look for support from those who know the lay of the land. Don’t isolate yourself.

- Be easy on yourself. Forgive your relapses into obsessiveness or panic. Be patient with the mind’s healing process and its ups and downs. Don’t believe in your worst moods; take the attitude that they are steps of normalization, not personal weakness or failure.

- Don’t trust the voice of fear. See fear as one emotion among many, not a reliable guide to danger. When fear and anxiety become strong, resist the urge to hide and disguise your feelings. Exposing fear to the light of day is one of the best ways to counter it.

– Take meditation and stress release seriously. The core self lies deeper than the level of moods, emotions, rationalizations, and defenses. Those layers are thick; we are used to inhabiting them. We aren’t used to seeking the source of the self in consciousness. To find the core self requires two things: actually experiencing it and removing the obstacles that mask it.

– Realize that distress creates a fog of illusion. The illusion can be so powerful that you feel fated to be unsafe, threatened, confused, and self-divided. Actually, these are all false states. Do everything you can to reach clarity, and the first step is to know that clarity is possible.

- Experiment with different avenues of healing. Conventional medicine is of minimal use, since the system is set up to offer short doctor’s visits followed by a pat on the back and a prescription. The healing arts cover a vast field, and there is wisdom out there that you should seek to take advantage of. Don’t give up early or easily.

Ultimately, the bad things that happen to us by random chance belong to the texture of life. They aren’t a sign that you have been singled out or cursed. They don’t indicate that you have sinned or that God hates you. The fact that we react so drastically to accidents reveals something deeper, that the texture of normal life is a thin layer of security, beneath which deeper waters stir. We will discuss those deeper waters in the next post.

(To be continued)

The Adjustment Bureau: Does God Change Our Minds, or Do We Change God’s? ~ Cathleen Falsani (updated)

Cathleen Falsani
Religion Columnist aka “God Girl”

It goes by many names: Kismet. Adrsta. Predestination. Determinism. Destiny. “God’s will.”

The ancient Greeks dubbed it “Moirae” and gave it personality — Fate. Or, rather, “The Fates,” three female supernatural beings who spun, pulled and cut the literal threads of life that controlled when a person was born, what they did with their life and when and how they
died.

In an intriguing new film that explores themes of fate, destiny, divine and human (free) will, that same idea is called “The Adjustment Bureau” — an otherworldly bureaucratic organization controlled by an unseen entity (or, perhaps, deity) known as “the Chairman.”

A cadre of caseworkers in fedoras and dark suits — a cross between G-men, IRS agents and guardian angels — carry out the Chairman’s will by making sure we humans don’t stray off course. They track our movements and decisions on a kind of heavenly GPS device and make small “adjustments” to our decision-making processes.

The idea is to keep us on a predetermined track — on a course we know nothing about and can do nothing to change.

In “The Adjustment Bureau,” God’s G-men carry out their duties on the periphery of the natural world where the curtain separating the here from there is as sheer as gossamer. They’re around us all the time, everywhere, watching and, occasionally, tinkering as needed.

The clandestine machinations of the Adjustment Bureau are revealed to David Norris (Matt Damon) a young, rising political star running for U.S. Senate in New York. On the eve of his first unsuccessful bid for the Senate, Norris has a chance encounter in the men’s room of the Waldorf Astoria with a beautiful ballet dancer, Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt), who is hiding from hotel security after crashing a wedding reception upstairs.

Their attraction is immediate and powerful. Emily is charming, whimsical and passionate. David is enchanted and transformed by her honesty. They kiss — instant soul mates — and then Elise makes a Cinderella-esque exit without ever giving David her name.

That encounter was part of David’s fate, we learn, but it was “fated” to just be a one-time thing. They were not “supposed” to meet again, ever. But when they do meet again on a city bus, David strays from his preordained course. That’s when the Adjustment Bureau’s agents
intervene.

The curtain is pulled all the way back when David walks in on Bureau agents “adjusting” his business partner in the conference room of their venture capital firm. He tries to run, but the Bureau minions capture him. In an empty warehouse, Bureau honcho Richardson (John Slattery of “Mad Men”) explains to David what they’re up to and then warns him not to tell a soul, unless he wants his brain to be rebooted (i.e. erased) at the Chairman’s behest. He is not to see Elise again. It’s not part of the plan.

But the heart wants what it wants, and David begins searching for Elise. After three years, he finds her on the street, and their bond is cemented a bit more than with just a kiss.

A romantic comedy wrapped in a science-fiction thriller with ample chase scenes and intrigue, “The Adjustment Bureau” traces David’s attempts to alter his destiny, a move that will, he’s warned, have significant consequences for the fate of his ladylove and the rest of the world.

The film poses a question that is left open-ended when the credits roll: Is it possible to change our fate?

The Chairman — i.e., God — has written the stories of our lives and the Big Story of the world. God knows how the story begins and ends. But is that story set in stone? If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, is there anything that happens in our lives that isn’t part of God’s
will and design?

Are human beings, created with a free will, capable of changing God’s mind? And if we are, what does that say about the nature of the Divine?

It’s a question theologians have wrestled with throughout the ages, without ever finding a true consensus. It’s no wonder that the filmmakers appear unable — or unwilling — to provide a clear answer to such a spiritual/existential conundrum.

In the film, David appears to change his fate first by chance and then through his own volition.

His story changes. The Chairman does a rewrite. Or does he?

In a universe ordered by such an Almighty, perhaps there is no such thing as chance.

With the Chairman holding the eternal pen, what passes for serendipity might just be kismet in a clever disguise