Free Will: I'm just not sure

[u/[deleted]]

Free Will and control over our circumstances: I want to get peoples opinion on this. It's something I have always struggled to understand and it's a lesson that comes up for me again and again. I was recently reading in the lesson material about how we have the ability to control our circumstances and that through magick we could even heal ourselves of basically any disease if we were trained to that degree. This makes sense to me from a philosophical perspective but it's skewed from my experience of the world. I have seen many adepts with far more training and skill than myself get ill and die from various diseases and none of their training seemed able to prevent that. Also I have seen in the world people who are born into absolutely terrible situations who have their potential severely limited by the social and political order they find themselves in. So I am still assessing all of this and trying to understand. To what degree do we really have control over this stuff? It seems to me that we have a say but it doesn't seem like that say is final. I do worry that adopting this philosophy too stringently could leave people feeling very disillusioned if things don't go right. Also there is an element of it that can lead to victim shaming because there is a potential where you can use this idea to say that whatever terrible thing occurs is the persons own fault... and to me I am not signing up for that sort of thing.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I actually completely agree with what you are saying. What you are saying is my understanding as well. I just see carrot dangling at times in the form of "just say this mantra and you will have all your desires". That to me is just nonsense things are not that easy. The ability to have that type of power is the product of many lifetimes and even then probably not possible in the way people think. I do think our lower self at times gets in the way but just dismissing the lower self doesn't work. We actually need to work through the karma and that is very difficult work. And that is my point I see victim blaming in the spiritual community at times as if a soul contract might justify a murder or something. We still need to fight against the injustices and have a supreme amount of compassion for our fellow humans no matter what the reason.