Determinism vs Free Will
- Abhijeet Chauhan
- Oct 6
- 11 min read
Updated: Oct 10
Determinism vs Free Will: Why Knowing Your Patterns Sets You Free
"You had been defeated before, and you were afraid that it could happen again. You had already achieved things, and you were afraid you might lose them. But at the same time, something stronger than any of that prevailed: the desire to find your sword." Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom
There's a question that haunts everyone who's ever had their chart read, their patterns exposed, their karmic blueprint laid bare: If everything is predetermined, what's the point of trying to change?
I've watched this question paralyze seekers. They receive their DestinySync report or Jyotish reading and walk away feeling trapped by cosmic forces beyond their control.
"If this is my destiny, if these patterns are inevitable, then why struggle against them?"
This confusion stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of Determinism vs Free Will & what these ancient systems actually reveal.
The Architecture of Karma: What Your Soul Actually Chose
Before we can understand free will, we must first understand the karmic framework within which it operates.
In Vedic wisdom, karma is not a monolithic force it's a sophisticated system with distinct layers:
Sanchita Karma is your soul's total accumulated karmic account—the vast storehouse of all actions across lifetimes. It's mostly unknowable and infinite.
Prarabdha Karma is the specific portion of that storehouse your soul selected to work through in this lifetime. This is what appears in your birth chart—the experiences, challenges, and relationships that are destined to manifest.
Kriyamana Karma is what you're creating right now through your choices and actions. This is your free will in motion, your capacity to generate new karmic consequences.
Agama Karma represents your future intentions and plans—the karmic seeds you're planting through your thoughts and aspirations.
"What was done by free will today acts as the cause of what is experienced as fate tomorrow." Hart deFouw & Robert Svoboda, Light on Life: An Introduction to the Astrology of India
Your birth chart doesn't show random cosmic forces. It reveals the karmic curriculum your soul chose to master in this incarnation.
The Soul's Conscious Choice: Why You Selected This Difficulty
Here's what most people resist understanding: your soul chose this specific karmic curriculum before incarnation.
The difficulties in your chart, the challenging relationship patterns, the career struggles, the family dynamics that trigger you, these weren't imposed upon you by cruel cosmic forces. Your soul selected these precise experiences to accelerate its evolution and clear accumulated karmic debts.
As Paramahansa Yogananda taught:
"Life is like a great chain in the ocean of God. When a portion of the chain is pulled out of the waters, you see only that small part. The beginning and the end are hidden. In this incarnation you're viewing only one link in the chain of life, the past and the future, though invisible, remain in the depths of God." Paramahansa Yogananda, Past Life and Pending Karmas
The more challenging your life, the more ambitious your soul's agenda. You didn't come here for an easy ride you came to master yourself through conscious engagement with your karmic patterns.
Your birth chart isn't your destiny it's your karmic curriculum made visible.
"We are the result of all kinds of influences and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves; nothing original, pristine, clear." J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
But here's the crucial distinction: you are not the karma. You are the consciousness that can work with it.
When your chart reveals patterns like chronic people-pleasing, compulsive achievement, or emotional withdrawal, it's not condemning you to eternal repetition. It's illuminating the specific karmic curriculum your soul chose to master in this lifetime.
Your chart reveals your Prarabdha Karma the portion of your vast karmic storehouse that's been activated for conscious transformation. These patterns became visible because they're ready to be worked with, not because you're trapped by them.
The moment you see the pattern clearly truly see it, not just intellectually understand it you engage your Kriyamana Karma. Your free will awakens. The pattern persists, but you're no longer unconsciously possessed by it.
The Shadow and the Light: Why Resistance Reveals Truth
Notice what happens when you read an accurate description of your patterns. Your first instinct isn't relief it's defense.
"I'm not that controlling." "
I don't always avoid intimacy.""
This is too simplistic."
As Debbie Ford reminds us:
"All of your so-called faults, all the things which you don't like about yourself are your greatest assets." But our resistance to seeing these patterns isn't a bug, it's a feature. Debbie Ford, Dark Side of the Light Chasers
Your unconscious programming has survived by remaining invisible. When suddenly exposed to conscious light, your psychological defense mechanisms activate like antibodies attacking a foreign virus. The part of you that benefits from the pattern fights to preserve its territory.
That defensive reaction isn't your authentic self speaking, it's your conditioning protecting itself from dissolution.
This is why shadow work is so difficult. We've spent decades perfecting the art of not looking at what keeps us stuck. We'd rather suffer the familiar pain of the pattern than risk the unknown territory beyond it.
The Difference Between Determinism & Free Will (Fatalism and Navigation)
There's a crucial distinction most people miss:
Fatalism says: "This is my karma, so I'm powerless."
Conscious navigation says: "This is the karmic pattern my soul chose to master. How do I engage with it skillfully?"
"You must mourn the loss of your younger self, the person who has gotten you this far but who is no longer equipped to carry you onward. You must envision and become one with your future self, the hero of your life that is going to lead you from here." Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery
Your Prarabdha Karma shows you the spiritual curriculum you enrolled in before birth. Like a river, it has direction and momentum. You can exhaust yourself fighting against the current. You can be swept along unconsciously. Or you can learn to navigate these karmic waters with awareness and skill.
Your patterns aren't obstacles to overcome, they're the exact spiritual gym equipment your soul ordered for its evolutionary training.
The Real Question Isn't Whether You're Free
The question isn't whether you have free will. You do.
The question is: How much of your will is actually free?
If you're unconsciously running the same relationship patterns your parents ran, is that free will? If you're reacting to triggers from childhood trauma you haven't processed, are you choosing freely? If you're making decisions based on fears you can't even name, where's the freedom?
Most of what we call "choice" is just unconscious programming playing out. We think we're driving, but we're on autopilot.
Real freedom begins when you see the autopilot clearly enough to choose your internal state while it runs. The autopilot will run—but will you be conscious or unconscious while it does?
Why the Pattern Persists (Even When You Know It)
Here's where it gets uncomfortable: knowing your pattern doesn't automatically change it.
You can read your DestinySync report, recognize yourself perfectly, feel that jolt of "Yes, this is exactly me" and still find yourself running the same cycle a week later.
Why? Because patterns persist for a reason. They serve you in some hidden way. The workaholic pattern protects you from feeling worthless. The people-pleasing pattern shields you from rejection. The intellectual analysis pattern saves you from emotional vulnerability.
The pattern isn't just random conditioning, it's a survival strategy that worked once. Your unconscious mind keeps running it because it doesn't know you're safe to try something else.
This is why insight alone isn't enough. Recognition is just the first step.
The Three Stages of Conscious Evolution
Stage 1: Recognition You see the pattern clearly. You can name it, track it, predict when it's likely to activate. This is what a deep chart reading or DestinySync report provides. You're no longer unconscious, but you're not yet free.
As Jung wrote in The Red Book:
"The spirit of the depths took my understanding and all my knowledge and placed them at the service of the inexplicable and the paradoxical." Carl Jung, The Red Book
Recognition is the first awakening, but it's not transformation.
Stage 2: Interruption You catch yourself mid-pattern and create a pause. Maybe you're about to overwork yourself into exhaustion, and you actually notice the compulsion before acting on it. Or you feel the urge to analyze your way out of a feeling, and you choose to sit with the rawness instead.
This stage requires immense patience with yourself. You're rewiring decades of unconscious programming while the old neural pathways still run strong. Most people give up here, mistaking the difficulty for failure.
Stage 3: Conscious Choice You don't change what happens, you choose your consciousness while it happens. You will work late (that's predetermined), but you can work late with anxiety and self-worth issues, or work late with conscious acceptance of what is. The action is the same—the emotional state is your free will. That state determines your karma..
This isn't willpower overriding instinct it's consciousness choosing how to dance with your conditioning.
As Ford beautifully puts it: "
We evolve into the self that we yearn to be by learning to embrace all that we are and all that we have experienced no matter how difficult it has been." Debbie Ford, Dark Side of the Light Chasers
But consciousness doesn't work that way. It's patient, persistent, gradual. Like water wearing down stone.
Most people expect to leap from Stage 1 to Stage 3 immediately. They read their patterns, try to change everything overnight, then feel defeated when they slip back into familiar grooves.
Your Chart Is a Diagnostic, Not a Prison Sentence
When you understand your astrological blueprint whether through DestinySync or traditional methods, you're not learning about your fate. You're receiving a psychological diagnostic of your unconscious programming.
Some souls incarnate with natural emotional resilience. Others inherit generational anxiety. Some arrive with innate confidence. Others carry the wounds of ancestral trauma in their energetic field. These aren't moral judgments, they're simply the starting conditions of your particular incarnation.
But incarnation isn't predestination. How you work with those starting conditions—that's where your power lives.
As the Persian wisdom saying goes:
"He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool – shun him. He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a child – teach him. He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep – wake him." Persian Wisdom Saying, Ps giTa
Your chart wakes you up to what you know but didn't know you knew.
It shows you:
What unconscious triggers are likely to activate your conditioning
What survival strategies you use to feel safe in an unsafe world
Where your greatest growth edges live
What gifts want to emerge when you stop defending against life itself
This isn't limitation, it's liberation through understanding. Instead of being blindly driven by forces you can't name, you can walk your path with conscious awareness.
The Sacred Paradox of Conscious Conditioning
Here's the paradox that shatters most people's linear understanding:
The more clearly you see your patterns, the freer you become, while simultaneously accepting that you can never completely escape them.
Your conditioning doesn't dissolve when you become conscious of it. The anxious soul will still experience anxiety-triggering events. The people-pleaser will still encounter situations requiring them to please. The perfectionist will still face their perfectionist patterns
But everything shifts. The anxiety-triggering event happens, but you experience it consciously rather than unconsciously. The people-pleasing situation unfolds, but your internal state while doing it changes.
Same external pattern transformed internal experience. That transformation is your karma.
You learn to dance with your patterns instead of being danced by them.
As Coelho writes:
"The ship is safest when it's in port, but that's not what ships were built for." Your conditioning is the safe harbor you've known. But your consciousness, that's the ocean calling you toward your true purpose. Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom
You were not born to be safe. You were born to be awake.
Why This Work Cannot Be Avoided Forever
You might be thinking: "This sounds exhausting. Can't I just live my life without dissecting every pattern?"
Of course you can. Most people do.
But unconscious living costs you:
Your patterns don't stay static when left unattended—they calcify and intensify.
As Wiest observes:
"Usually when we have a problem that is circumstantial, we are facing the reality of life. When we have a problem that is chronic, we are facing the reality of ourselves." Brianna Wiest, The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery
The workaholic works themselves toward death.
The people-pleaser disappears into others' needs until they forget they exist.
The analyzer thinks themselves into complete paralysis.
The empath drowns in everyone else's emotions until they can't feel their own pulse.
The survival strategy that kept you safe at seven becomes the prison that destroys you at forty. From Newton's research, we learn that souls who refuse to take responsibility for changing their patterns can become so stuck they ultimately become spiritual ghosts—trapped between worlds, unable to move forward.
As Ford writes:
"It is not the easy path to love what we have hated, to love what we have feared, to love what has haunted or hurt us. It often seems easier to hold on to the pain of the past rather than the healing of this moment. But I promise you it is not easier." Debbie Ford, Dark Side of the Light Chasers
Your unconscious patterns will run you harder and harder until you either wake up or break down. The question isn't whether you'll face your conditioning, it's whether you'll do it while you still have energy to transform your relationship to it, or after it's calcified into life-destroying compulsions.
Consciousness is not optional for those who wish to live. It's the price of admission to your authentic life.
The Only Freedom That Matters
Real freedom isn't the absence of conditioning. It's conscious awareness WHILE your conditioning plays out.
When you know you're prone to people-pleasing, the people-pleasing situations will still come (predetermined). But you can please others with resentment breeding in your heart, or please others with conscious awareness of what you're doing.
When you recognize your tendency to intellectualize, the trigger will still activate (predetermined) but will you intellectualize unconsciously or hold awareness while it happens? The pattern runs either way. Your consciousness while it runs = your karma."
This isn't about becoming perfect. This is about becoming conscious.
And consciousness, it turns out, is the only freedom that actually matters, because it's the only freedom that can't be taken from you.
Everything else is just more conditioning wearing the mask of liberation.
Your Moment of Choice
If you've read this far, something in you recognizes the truth of what's been said.
Maybe you're exhausted from running the same relationship patterns your family has repeated for generations. Maybe you're tired of work cycles that burn you out but never truly fulfill you. Maybe you keep hitting the same walls despite years of therapy, meditation, and spiritual seeking.
The question isn't whether you have unconscious patterns every human incarnation comes with them. The question is: are you ready to see them clearly enough to transform from victim of your conditioning into conscious collaborator with your soul's purpose?
Your resistance to this moment is just another pattern trying to keep you safe in the familiar prison of unconscious living.
But something stronger called you here. The same force Coelho describes:
"Something stronger than any of that prevailed: the desire to find your sword." Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage: A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom
Your sword is your consciousness. Your freedom lives in wielding it wisely.
The future you desire can only emerge from conscious relationship with the patterns that have shaped your past.
Feeling stuck or disconnected from your purpose? You don’t have to figure it all out alone. Whether it’s exploring your shadow, discovering the right tools, or seeking guidance, the journey begins with one step.
Let’s navigate it together. Explore our resources, book a session, or dive deeper into the modalities that resonate with you. Your true path is waiting—take the step today.
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