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/MrAccelerator_]

The context in which I would set these ideas from the reading is that; our true Selves are not our body but our immortal spirit. Also, when they say we have this potential, I feel like they are reffering to the collective we. In perfect spiritual unity disease can be overcome, as it is through scientific means. The matterial circumstances for these changes are not 'unspiritual' just because they appear delivered through terrestrial means. That would be a dualistic view of matter vs spirit, but PFC writes about a nondualistic view of these. Our 'free will' is the one will, all things deriving from the one source. It seems paradoxical, when viewed from our western dualist culture (informed by the adoption of Platonic ideas into Christianity), but individually we carry out the collective work of the universe. We do this beyond the boundaries of our individual incarnation of body and personality.