FREE WILL
Hare Krishna everyone, please accept my humble obeisances
My Question is, ” Do we have Free will or everything is already Fixed.”? If we have free will then how does it works? what are the decisions we can take in our life and things are already fixed or decided?
- 3 Replies
Hare Krishna!
All glories to Srila Prabhupada!
Krishna has given all of us a minute independence which is called as free will. If there is no choice given to us, then there is no difference between living entities and dead matter.
Life is not a plain static script already written somewhere but we do have the ability to make free choices in our life.These 6 things are fixed in our life- Our birth, death, happiness, distress, honor and dishonor.
The situations that we face in life are basically pre destined based on our past actions or karma. So for example if someone takes birth in a rich family, someone is suffering diseases, someone is highly educated, etc all these factors are pre destined based on our past karma.
But the way in which we respond to situations in our life is in our hands. This is not pre destined. This is our free will. We may choose to complain for the problems we face or we may be able to see Krsna’s hand in every situation that we face in our life. This is the free will that Krishna has given us. Our intelligence is to use this free will to come close to Krishna.
Another thing which is not pre-destined is bhakti or our devotion to Krishna. This is completely in our hands how we choose to perform bhakti under the guidance of sadhu and shastras. No astrological chart can predict this. In fact our astrological chart changes once we start performing bhakti!
To summarize – situations related to birth, death, happiness, distress, honor, dishonor that we face in our life are fixed but how we respond to those situations as well as our decision to perform bhakti is our free will.
In your service,
Ram Krishna Dasa
Hare Krishna Prabhuji Dandwat Pranam 🙏
Thank you so much for this wonderful explanation, grateful for your help. Haribol 🙏
just realized that i had access to the treasure chest of wisdom…… fortunately found the key to it right now…and enjoying the transcendental wisdom it is lighting in my heart.. much gratitude, thank you very much, pamho, ys, msdd
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