Achariya Fritz Kramer
Speaks on "Fate and Freedom"
Sunday, April 10, 2016 at 11:00am
"It was meant to be." How often we hear those words used to explain events and circumstances in our lives. Yet, if we subscribe to the idea that things are just meant to be, where is our agency? Where is our free will? From time immemorial, great souls have taught that action, effort and responsibility are foundational to the spiritual path. Does destiny play a role too? Let's gather together in the Temple this Sunday to contemplate fate and freedom.
—Acharya Fritz
From the Gurus and Swamis AUM
"There is no such thing as fate; you make your own destiny. God has given you independence to shut out His power or let it in. You have more strength to overcome difficulties than you have troubles to overcome. You can remedy your mistakes because God has given you reason and will. First you must make up your mind; then hold your will steadily to your purpose until it is completed. Discipline yourself to develop your sleeping spiritual powers. Claim your divinity. Unite your consciousness with God, and receive blessings direct from His hand."
—Swami Yogananda Paramhansa
"If it be true that we are working out our own destiny here within this short space of time, if it be true that everything must have a cause as we see it now, it must also be true that that which we are now is the effect of the whole of our past; therefore, no other person is necessary to shape the destiny of mankind but man himself."
—Swami Vivekananda
"By the process of spiritual involution, the law of Karma draws us into the bondage of the phenomenal world. And, by the way of spiritual evolution, this same law again sets us free in the universality of the Self."
—Swami Premananda
Noble Thoughts:
"God's greatest gift to man
In all the bounty He was moved to make
Throughout creation -- the one gift the most
Close to his goodness and the one He calls
Most precious -- is free will."
—Dante Alighieri, Paradiso
"Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment."
—Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
"The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most enormous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free."
—C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity