Is Life Predetermined or Are We Free to Choose?

❤❤❤. 🙏🙏🙏.Thank you.

Oh my god the last words🙏💕!! So beautifull

Its predetermined

lol why should we care. its our ego that talks - oh is life this or that...life is. live it best you can. peace :) rupert you tha man. god woman hahahhaah lol.

…thank you for this 9.20 minutes of pur love…I can feel it to the infinity of my soul, and down to the last sequence of my DNA…🙏🍀💕☀️👋…

This melted my heart. It has to be one of my absolute favorite exchanges of beingness. 💕

So very lovely....Beautiful ❤

There is zero free will. Everything in life is pre determines

Love you Too ❤. Wonderful opening question.

🙏❤

We’ve gotta deal with the cards we’ve been dealt.

Why would God be a woman 😂

God is just what is, it has no gender.

Just being.

It was funny though.

Excelent Question

I love you Rupert ❤. Fall Short of words to express my gratitude for your compassion and love towards humanity 🙏🙏❤️

Rupert looks great with his hairs natural coloring. Rare these days to see some of the big name teachers allowing themselves to grow old gracefully. It helps us all. I have to laugh every time I see a recent pic of Gangaji, an 80 yr old non dual teacher who looks 40. She's a mockery to nature.

I'm so glad the questioner said, to "serve all beings", which means all forms of life. Another great video, wonderful explanation. ❤❤

No clear answer to the question about free will!
Maybe because he thinks we dont have free will, he avoided to answer!

There's no way anyone can know the answer to this question. It's an individual "belief".

🙏🤍💛🧡❤️🩷💜💙🩵💚🤎🩶

""This is not a personal problem, it is a philosophical question. Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. And both answers are true for all questions about life. In a way, everything is predetermined. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness .If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind – if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind – then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free .Consciousness means freedom; matter means slavery. So it depends on how you define yourself. If you say, ”I am only the body,” then everything about you is completely determined. A person who says that man is only the body cannot say that man is not predetermined. Ordinarily, persons who do not believe in such a thing as consciousness also do not believe in predetermination.

Persons who are religious and believe in consciousness ordinarily believe in predetermination. So what I am saying may look very contradictory. But still, it is the case. A person who has known consciousness has known freedom. So only a spiritual person can say there is no determination at all. That realization comes only when you are completely unidentified with the body. If you feel that you are just a material existence, then no freedom is possible. With matter, no freedom is possible. Matter means that which cannot be free. It must flow in the chain of cause and effect. Once someone has achieved consciousness, enlightenment, he is completely out of the realm of cause and effect. He becomes absolutely unpredictable. You cannot say anything about him. He begins to live each moment; his existence becomes atomic.

Your existence is a river-like chain in which every step is determined by the past. Your future is not really future; it is just a by-product of the past. It is only the past determining, shaping, formulating and conditioning your future. That is why your future is predictable.

Skinner says that man is as predictable as anything else. The only difficulty is that we have  not yet devised the means to know his total past. The moment we can know his past, we can predict everything about him. Based upon the people he has worked with, Skinner is right, because they are all ultimately predictable. He has experimented with hundreds of people and he has found that they are all mechanical beings, that nothing exists within them that can be called freedom.

But his study is limited. No Buddha has come to his laboratory to be experimented upon. If even one person is free, if even one person is not mechanical, not predictable, Skinner’s whole theory falls. If one person in the whole history of mankind is free and unpredictable, then man is potentially free and unpredictable. The whole possibility of freedom depends on whether you emphasize your body or your consciousness. If you are just an outward flow of life, then everything is determined. Or are you something inner also? Do not give any preformulated answer. Do not say, ”I am the soul.” If you feel there is nothing inside you, then be honest about it. This honesty will be the first step toward the inner freedom of consciousness. If you go deeply inside, you will feel that everything is just part of the outside. Your body has come from without, your thoughts have come from without, even your self has been given to you by others.

That is why you are so fearful of the opinion of others – because they are completely in control of your self. They can change their opinion of you at any moment. Your self, your body, your thoughts are given to you by others, so what is inside? You are layers and layers of outside accumulation. If you are identified with this personality of yours that comes from others, then everything is determined.

Become aware of everything that comes from the outside and become non-identified with it. Then a moment will come when the outside falls completely. You will be in a vacuum. This vacuum is the passage between the outside and the inside, the door. We are so afraid of the vacuum, so afraid of being empty that we cling to the outside accumulation. One has to be courageous enough to disidentify with the accumulation and to remain in the vacuum. If you are not courageous enough, you will go out and cling to something, and be filled with it. But this moment of being in the vacuum is meditation. If you are courageous enough, if you can remain in this moment, soon your whole being will automatically turn inward. When there is nothing to be attached to from the outside, your being turns inward. Then you know for the first time that you are something that transcends everything you have been thinking yourself to be. Now you are something different from becoming; you are being. This being is free; nothing can determine it. It is absolute freedom. No chain of cause and effect is possible."

Dear Rupert. I didn't find a direct email to you, so let me at least use this comment to sincerely thank You. For Your amazing work that allowed me to achieve that final shift in consciousness in an incredibly short time. I cannot fully express how grateful I am right now. I have finally arrived at the place; I have never left. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. With deep love, John.

I agree with you

So wonderful, beautiful thank you so much Rupert.✨️🙏✨️

In the Sufi tradition destiny is described not prescribed. It’s a description not a prescription. Being that God is beyond space-time He already knows all that is and will be but we have free will to choose. God out of his shear grace decided to allow us to choose. This is not true of all circumstances. There are some situations that we have no choice in. We don’t choose our gender, we don’t choose the house hold we are born into. We don’t choose to get sick or get in a car accident. In some cases, like the aforementioned we have no choice. However, there are some aspects in our life where we’re given a choice and the will to choose and that is our experience. We choose whether to lie in a certain situation or tell the truth. We choose to believe or not believe in God. It is these choices that we are held accountable for. If everything was scripted then life would be pointless. If we had a choice in all matters then we would have all chosen to avoid suffering and poverty. ❤

I'm a little confused so he is basically saying act on your impulses from an open heart not a closed heart correct?

"love and understanding is the same for all of us but expressed differently through each of us..." blessings ❤❤❤

The sincerity of the heart. So Beautiful ❤🙏🏻

Wonderfull sense of humor and love. Thank You

One thing that may debunk free will is how many of us have deja vu or dreams of the future. Now i do agree you have the willl to decide to be in your higher self in that given moment or choose to be in the suffering mind of ego

THANKS ALOT......

We are all walking eachother home. I feel we have already chosen our path with Divinity. We just live life to find out WHY we chose what we chose and dance while we sing life's song.

Zero free will 😂😂😂

Isn’t free will the freedom to choose between God and ego ? If we don’t have that freedom Rupert’s efforts are pointless. Although you could argue his actions are predetermined and so are ours.

Me, for example, have had several mystical experiences. I only know that there is a God. That everything is cyclical or seems to be. As I persive it, you can live dreaming or awake.
Now I'm at the point where I feel like everything is like scenarios. And these scenarios often repeat themselves. To be free, I will skillfully flee from certain scenarios. As Jesus of Nazareth said: For those who BELIEVE, everything is possible. For God (the true and good one), nothing is impossible. Greetings from Spain. And be strong. Don't let nobody fool you. Love and peace ❤️

How beautiful it is to see Life this way.. ! Thank you 🙏🏼

Man can't be without Ego, so God is the answer to our "state of consciousness" in every moment to guide us back to our "home", where we came from❤

Thank you.

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🙏🙏🙏

Loved watching Jillian in the Biggest Loser! Glad to see her promoting healthy food policies - tough job to stand against the big weights, but if anything can do it, it’s her leading the way ✊

Robert Sapolsky would disagree with these views.

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Neither the human body nor its EVIL spirit, is "LIFE The Real Self" ( "AWARENESS" ) which is an Offspring and Child of "The LIGHT", "The LIFE of GOD" !

This Universe including the human species is just a "STORY", displayed in the form of "Virtual Reality" in a very, very small Display Register of "The Processing System of LIFE"... Without the knowledge of "The Processing System of LIFE", nothing can be changed in the human experience...

Thank you. I love you.

❤❤❤thank you so much🙏

I adore you Rupert. I needed this today. Praying for US ALL …… (Cute young man asked this wonderful question too. Too sweet. Ah the love!)

Spoke directly to me in light of US election. Thank you

The answer is nice and funny. However the comments about God doesn't make much sense to me. The ways of the Lord are, from a human point, unsearchable (Romans 11:33-36), which implies that we can never know if her/his original script are sometimes changed or not.

This is love in action. Thank you Rupert.