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> [A]ll actions are actually predefined by your own experience. Your past actions and deterministic plumbings of material body constrain the future possibilities but they do not remove the possibility of further choice, in the general case. Rumi's father -- both father and son were Muslim mystics -- tells an amusing tale of how the question of predeterminism and free-will was settled in their day in his spiritual diary: In Khwarazm the great majority [are] Mu'tazilis. No one there ever
claims to have had a 'vision of God'. The people think of themselves
as freely acting makers of their own lives. If they meet up with
Jabriya, one who believes everything is predestined, they cuff him
about the head and say "It's God's plan that I do this."
Khwarazm is tough on the predestined people. Their houses are plundered
and as they walk about in poverty they are clubbed and beaten. Mu'tazilis,
on the other hand, enjoy the wealth they seize from the Jabriyas, these
lazy ones who never initiate anything. "That is God's business" they say.
Theirs, evidently, is to suffer in both worlds.
As for the faculty of 'Choice' in the Human being, he wrote: "By the One who sets the Earth with rivers pouring through in mist
below mountains, and two oceans with a strip of land in between" (27.61),
we move the elements into various shapes without their consent, but
Human beings, unlike water and trees, have a choice. They are given dignity,
discernment, and the evolutionary wisdom that can move from death to new
life, again to die and be restored on another level of Existence.
You have many choices about the ways you live and work and change and survive.
Say you fall into an ocean. You may give up and sink, or you may try to
swim to the shore.
Salvation is your decision.
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