the 'lords of karma' have their
say, presenting the balance
to be worked on this lifetime

you have your say as of the
age of reason to decide
how to handle the present

Only the starting point of the illusion i.e. seeming your ethnicity, specific aspects of physique, religion in home or not etc. All the rest of completely determined by your choices of perception and therefore vibration from birth (: or perhaps in the prenatal stages :) because there are an infinite number of potential paths from any given point and you make a using sensory self and your Self (: all of YOU :) ensures life unfolds accordingly. It's just a creative experience for it's own sake.

Hi, @Grace. Perhaps you have heard of The Great Debate. This is the philosophical argument between free will and determinism.

Determinism is the belief that "all events in the world are the result of some previous event, or events. In this view, all of reality is already in a sense pre-determined or pre-existent and, therefore, nothing new can come into existence."(1) If you go with determinism, then everything you did after incarnation would be the result of that first decision. Everything after that decision would be determined by that first decision. I am oversimplifying determinism here- there are many facets to this belief. Genes that a person are born with would help "keep" you within the bounds that you selected before birth; this is assuming that you also chose to whom you would be born. I would think that you would choose that crucial factor in helping you to achieve your desire.

I have to say that the idea of pre-selecting your life makes some sense. Many people seem to have been born with a strong purpose and seem to achieve much because this purpose is so strong in them. Proponents of determinism would have to say that if you, Grace, came here with an "agenda", then everything you do after that decision would come out of that original point. I would think that if you somehow got off track (which determinism would say is not possible), then you would feel a sense of "wrongness" about the life events you are experiencing.

The other side of "The Great Debate" is Free Will. Free will is defined in this debate says that "we as conscious human beings are free to make genuinely undetermined choices in circumstances where we are genuinely able to do so, and where we so freely, or (relevantly) constrainedly, choose to do so."(2) As manifesters, we must align with this side of the debate. We believe that at any given moment, we are creating our reality. So if we did decide to experience certain things, then at any time, we can choose to move in the direction towards your goals.

I know that your question has to do with that original choice, and the idea that we choose to experience certain things after we incarnate. But I thought it would make sense to discuss The Great Debate, because I sense that you need a way to understand that if we do choose our lives before birth, how that would play out, and how much we can change from that decision. You asked,

Can I change my mind now? Can I remove or change whatever I decided upon?

If life comes out of determinism, then no, you could not change events from your original decision. Determinism is the way of science in the 19th century. That world has set and finite laws, and everything obeys those laws. That is a way of thinking about reality that served for a time. So maybe you are trying to understand how it would play out in life if you made a pre-life decision to experience a certain reality. Believing deterministically, then would mean that in this life, even that decision you made in Heaven before birth would follow that determinist constraint. You would then be stuck with that decision throughout that lifetime.

But we know better about the nature of reality. Quantum mechanics tells us that at a deep level, reality does not flow deterministically. Manifesting tells us that we are always choosing, whether we want to admit it or not. Free Will would go along with that idea.

There is genuine freedom in the world. When we observe it from the outside, it takes the form of quantum-mechanical unpredictability; when we observe it from within, we call it our free will. We know that the reason why our behavior is unpredictable from the outside is that we have ultimate freedom of choice. This freedom is the very essence of our personalities, the treasure of our lives. It is given us as the first element of the world we come into.(3)

This is what I think, for what it is worth. I do think that we choose to experience certain events in our lives before birth. I have mentioned this in some of my writing here on IQ. I have told that I remember leaving Heaven (or whatever you choose that reality before birth). I know that I chose to experience a certain path, but I "jumped" too soon, and many of the circumstances I have experienced have felt wrong to me; I have sensed that wrongness all my life. Maybe you sense something, as I do. Struggling against this wrongness, trying to set everything back to our original choice fits with manifesting also. Perhaps that is why you and I are here on IQ. We want to know that we can align ourselves any way we want. I know that I was looking for a way to "get back on track"- maybe that track is one I chose.

The crux of it is this: Say you chose to experience suffering. Some would say that is totally crazy, but there are lessons to be learned in suffering. We learn patience, humility, grace (pun intended), and even, perhaps, we want to explore a greater spirituality that can sometimes be found in suffering. I won't get into that belief, but I think you catch my drift here. If you were sure you chose that as an experience before birth, then you would not struggle so much with all the problems associated with your decision to "suffer". (I have explored this as I have tried to give some meaning to my own suffering. You might check that out. I found much about the lessons of suffering in spiritual writing.) One example of this is the struggles I have having to use a wheelchair. I really hate being in my wheelchair, and having someone push me around. (Freudian slip? Hmm.) My ex-husband liked me in my wheelchair. He would push me right past the things I wanted to see if he felt that it was not to his purpose. This made me nuts. Wade does not do this, but I still hate losing my free will when I have to ride in that chair. I try to control everything. It is pretty silly of me to direct every little thing that happens when I am "incarcerated" in the chair.

So to finish up this long spiel...When you think in a deterministic way, you are confining yourself to those conditions you set for yourself before birth. But I ask you this (and myself): If something "feels" wrong, then did we indeed choose to experience it? If we are struggling, then perhaps it is because we did not want that for ourselves. It is a twisty little conundrum. Are we struggling against events because we did not choose to experience those events, or because we find those experiences really difficult?

I have to thank you for asking this question. Writing this answer has helped clarify my own thinking about how my life has gone, and about how I struggle against reality sometimes. I am responsible for how I respond to the events that unfold in my life, no matter whether I chose them or not. As I suggested, maybe this is why you and I came to Inward Quest. What is even more profound is the idea that I am always creating my reality with my thinking. In this light, then, if something feels wrong, then all I have to do is shift my thinking towards free will, and I must try to remember that I am creating everything that is going on.

Blessings,

Jai ♥♥♥ :)

(1)http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/determinismandfreewill.html (A good link explaining The Great Debate)

(2 +3)Ibid.

Even if you are in this world of duality what is stopping you from making any personal choice you want? standard? peer pressure? rule and regulation? who made those choice? for what reason?

if they made some choice that affect other people why can you not make choice that affect you alone?

Who can blame you for making choice for your self?

Let me ask you this: if someone plan a trip and on is trip he encounter obstacle that was not plan will he make a proper choice to first remove the obstacle if not possible go around it if not possible change plan. or will he say can I make different choice if their is obstacle on the path? one way or another he will have to learn from this and make the proper choice.

So what is stopping you from using the time imparted to you wisely?

Let there be light, be the light that you can be,experience and enjoy.

My current view is that, as in any debate of this type, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

The soul determines the circumstances of the birth. That bit is pre-determined. From then on it's up to free will.

Free will is however constrained by the birth circumstances, or what is known as destiny. The fact that you and I are sitting in front of our laptops, typing away this stuff, instead of being born as chickens and ending up as dinner tells me that we have no conscious control over our birth circumstances. Once we are born as humans or chickens, we accept certain boundaries which no amount of LOA or free will can change. A chicken can wish all it might to become a lion, but it will never be one - at least not in this life. Similarly, the fact that some people do not get LOA or the fact that I am not as good as @Stingray in manifesting is probably down to whatever limitations our souls accepted before birth.

Yes, in theory everyone can change their circumstances by conscious use of LOA, but who detrermines if they "get" LOA or not in the first place? It's certainly not them. The vast majority of people go through their lives unfulfilled, unhappy and unaware of this stuff. It's not their fault if they were not given the equipments to appreciate these things in the first place.

Update following conversation with @Grace

I am not saying someone else is granting you permission to start getting it. The entity that gave you the permission is also you, but not the physical you. You yourself before incarnating chose your circumstances, and I am saying the physical you is now bound by the boundaries of those circumstances. You and I clearly have chosen to be born in circumstances that would one day allow us to live in relative comfort amidst technology and expand much more easily than, say, the soul that decided to experience life as a member of a nomadic tribe in Africa.

It's not a question of whether his life is better or worse than ours, but the boundaries are different, and those boundaries are set as soon as the soul decides what kind of life it wants to experience. The nomad who has never seen a book or a radio is much less likely to come across and apply LOA than you and me. Do you agree?

The boundary you chose gives you a lot of room to grow, but it's still a boundary. If you choose the life of a nomad, you must know that you are likely to enounter a certain kind of life experiences which are likely to mould the physical you in a certain way, and you are much less likely to enounter certain other experiences (e.g. LOA) in that incarnation. So what the soul decides to a large extent determines how far we are going to go in this particular life.

Now I know we can change the boundary. I know that I can walk through walls if I really, really believe I can. But the problem, you see, is that I don't have the power to believe that. It's not in my control at this point in time to give me that power. Yes, you will find one person in a million who has that power. Who decided that it'd be that specific person with that power but not me? Certainly not that physical person, and certainly not this physical me. It's something beyond our physical selves.

There is one other important angle. If we accept the premise of LOA (which I totally do), then we are saying everything has a cause, and that cause is always thought.

If we accept that, then we cannot in the same breath say that it's completely random when someone would begin to "get" the metaphysical side of life and start acquiring powers of various degrees. That must also have been decided by a cause, which is also thought.

But that thought couldn't have been thought by the physical person - because it's self-referencing. That point in time where someone "gets" it and starts a spiritual journey must be set by an entity other than the physical person, because the physical person is not even aware that there is something worth "getting" in the first place. And in my opinion, it's the soul that ultimately decides when the physical body "gets" it.