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difference between fate and destiny

Free Will: the Difference Between Fate and Destiny

When I was little, I struggled with the idea of fate, destiny, and free will. Every now and then, I asked myself how free will and fate are related. I never doubted that we have a free will, but often it seemed to me like we live a pre-paved path leading us to a carefully chosen destination.

Until I turned 21, I kept bouncing between the polarities of being active and applying my free will and letting my life passively flow by because it was already set in stone, or was it?

I know that I’m not the only one who struggles with the thought of where the free will begins and what the difference between fate and destiny is. It wasn’t until I began shaping my fate into a destiny that I understood their true meanings. And I want to provide you with examples so that you understand what the exact difference between fate and destiny is.

The terms fate and destiny are often used interchangeably. However, these two words represent completely different quality of being. If you understand the difference between fate and destiny, you unlock the secret door to your highest potential.

The Greek Origin of Fate

The Greek etymology of the word fate comes from the words Moirai or Moerae that are translated into English as the Fates (Latin: Fata). The three Morai are represented by 3 Greek deities who are the incarnations of destiny.

Clotho

Clotho is the first sister of the Three Fates who is responsible for spinning the human life. One of Clotho’s decisions is the choice of who and when someone is born. Thus she overlooks the flow of life and decides what souls she lets in.

Lachesis

Lachesis‘ name can be translated as the “disposer of lots” or “to obtain by the will of the gods.” As the middle sister, Lachesis determines the fate of a person and measures its length. It’s Lachesis who decides how long we live and what our fate is.

Atropos

Atropos is the last of the Three Fates, and her name can be translated as “inevitable.” Atropos is responsible for cutting the thread of human life and thus deciding the timing of death.

The Three Fates

The Three Fates work together, Clotho spins the thread of human life, Lachesis measures its length, and Atropos cut the ribbon of life when she considers it’s the right time.

According to Greek mythology, the Three Fates appear within 3 days of a baby being born, and they determine the baby’s fate.

Interestingly, the Three Fates are daughters of Darkness (Erebus) and Night (Nyx), which sheds some light on why fate usually feels heavy, and it takes a strong will to transform it to destiny (read more below).

We can find the story of the Three Fates across the globe under different names. I like to look at mythology as a map of the unconscious mind. When we attentively listen to its stories, we learn a lot about human life. Now let’s jump on the difference between fate and destiny.

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1. Fate

Fate is a roadmap to life, and we receive it before we are born. Perhaps, it was the Three Fates that chose its primary settings and its length.

Before we’re born, we choose our fate together with our soul (higher self). Based on our soul’s evolution (past and parallel lives), we decide what kind of framework will best benefit us.

It can be time for you to learn how to stand up for yourself in this life. Thus your higher self chooses opportunities for you to practice your worth. You’ll be involved in situations where you have to draw your boundaries and learn to say no.

Therefore, you might have to experience karmic romantic relationship early on in life that will teach you that sometimes you have to choose yourself and leave.

Fate includes:

  • The initial point: our parents, gender, country, culture, society.
  • The struggles: endurance tests such as illness, accidents, emotional hardships, a divorce of our parents or our own.
  • The heights: success, love, “lucky” coincidences, when someone saves us unexpectedly, someone puts us on the right track, etc.
  • Our people: before birth, the souls agree with each other to meet in a particular lifetime to enhance each other’s growth.
  • The exit point: the timing and the means of our death.

As you can see, fate offers us a pretty solid framework upon which we navigate our lives. At first glance, you may argue that there isn’t much space for free will, but don’t worry because there is plenty.

We always have free will. But we don’t always choose to exercise it.

Fate is the safe path that we shouldn’t be able to mess up too much with our choices. Fate is what we experience if we live according to the primary settings of the game called life.

When you live according to your fate, you feel like life happens TO you. You may feel powerless, victimized, and you may envy “lucky” people. Fate is the life on auto-pilot. Fate is the low maintenance way of living, but there is nothing wrong with that – it’s merely a choice.

In my work with clients, I always communicate with their higher selves, and it has taught me a lot. I’ve noticed that sometimes people choose to experience “easier” lives to catch a breath after experiencing some major shifts (or traumas) in their previous lives.

2. Destiny

Destiny is what you create out of fate by applying your free will. This is where life gets exciting.

If you live your destiny, you’re on a faster track of growth. Together with fate, we were also endowed with destiny, which represents our higher potential (I don’t say the highest potential- more on that later in the “liberation from destiny”).

We have an option to grow beyond fate’s primary settings and shape our fate into destiny.

Destiny is what you do with your life when you encounter your touch points. I call “touch points” the situations when we have an option to move past our family conditioning and choose a life based on what we want as opposed to what our subconscious mind was trained to choose.

This is when we truly BEGIN to act on our free will.

As long as we live our fate (and the behavioral patterns that we inherited from the family and society), we don’t use our free will because we live based on our initial conditioning.

Imagine that someone would say; you’ll experience XYZ in this life. And then you go and experience XYZ.

Where is there room for free will?

It doesn’t mean that this XYZ isn’t amazing, and it doesn’t teach you lessons because it does.

But if you’re tired of XYZ, then it’s time to examine other letters of the alphabet. On the contrary, when you step into your destiny, you take XYZ and shape it to SGASLK or anything else that you prefer.

Along with the fate – the necessary “minimum” that we’re here to experience – we also have an option to set ourselves free and experience an entirely different life. 

The Difference Between Fate and Destiny

Let’s have a look at a couple of examples of the difference between fate and destiny.

Fate   Destiny
Your parents don’t show you love, and you grow up with the feeling that you’re unworthy, and you carry a deep-seated sadness in you.

 

As a result, you subconsciously repeat the same pattern – your relationships fail, you don’t trust others, you don’t ask for a pay raise, etc.

When you turn the primary setting – the unloving parents – to destiny, you stop blaming your parents. You realize that you chose this experience to make you stronger. It’s your advantage and not pain that you need to carry for the rest of your life.

You realize that there is enough love that is independent of one particular source (your parents). This experience also helps you to become a more compassionate person.

You learn how to create loving bonds with others and yourself.

You experience a car accident (or another form of fate’s struggles – touch points for the soul).

 

If you act on fate, it’ll make you feel like a victim, and you may even grow bitter and aggressive toward others.

If you turn the car accident to destiny, it may motivate you to train your mind to enhance the healing of the body.

 

It can also open you up to the realization that life is short, and thus, you change your job or pull out the list of forgotten dreams and begin to make them come true.

Let’s say that you meet a person of your dreams. They are perfect, and you experience love as never before.

 

Then something happens, and they leave. Your heart is hurting so much that you give up on life.

Because of this experience, you guard your heart safely under thousands of locks so that you prevent potential future pain.

The person who flips the fate to destiny acknowledges the pain and doesn’t try to suppress it. Instead, they let their heart stay wide open and allow the pain to transform them.

 

Such a person may use the heartbreak as the invitation to the underworld – to the land of our shadows and fears – and then come back to the light stronger than ever before.

This is a path of a lightworker.

 

Where Free Will Begins?

To answer the ultimate question of whether there is free will, I’ll share with you my understanding.

We do have free will, but we often unconsciously choose to act based on how we’ve been conditioned instead. These choices are 100% automatic, and we may believe that we’re making our own choice when it’s not true.

As a coach, I often see people coming to me and thinking they’re making conscious choices. But when we unlock their subconscious mind, only then it becomes apparent that it wasn’t the case. It also took me to transform my life to begin being more conscious.

Our fate is our most probable timeline, and that’s why some people can “predict” your future.

When you become more conscious of your decisions, you can turn the touch points into your destiny.

The purpose of touch points is:

  1. Awakening. The trigger moments of our lives serve our awakening. Even if we are already spiritually awakened, we can always awaken into a higher level of consciousness.
  2. Testing our maturity. The quality of our choices shows how mentally, emotionally, and spiritually mature we are. If we make unconscious choices, we’re still asleep. Thus we continue living our fate.
  3. Recalibration. The key points help us to recalibrate to a higher frequency. It’s not necessary, but often when we endure a lot of pain, our frequency rises.
  4. Releasing karma. This can be best seen in relationships. We meet an old karmic partner, and now we have a chance to release our karma with them.
  5. Crucial turning points. Another example of touch points is when we’re going through crucial turning points. During this time, our soul hopes to awaken within our 3D being. Or anchor more of the soul’s energy.

How we approach the touch points of fate and destiny determines our future. We can upgrade ourselves if we apply our free will in these moments. That usually means that we don’t act as we’ve always acted, but instead, we make a fully conscious decision.

Free Will, Destiny, and Fate

There is no conflict between free will, destiny, and fate. If we look at how they interfere from a higher consciousness, we see that they beautifully align with each other.

From a higher perspective, everything already exists. It’s like a computer game where what happens if the main hero chooses something is already coded in the system.

All these potentialities already exist, but the main hero doesn’t have to choose them all. When he plays a game called fate, he goes with the easiest path and gathers his points.

When he applies his free will, he realizes that there are more possibilities of playing the game. If he does one move here, it unlocks a new setting within the game.

If the main hero is really doing well, he can also start helping to redesign the game completely and create more possibilities (read below).

So, yes, there is free will, and yes, there is fate as well. It’s up to us which one we choose. Of course, most people act on fate and also free will depending on the situation. But the proportion in which we do it can change.

3. Liberation from Destiny

Let me tell you something about liberating yourself from destiny, which is something that I haven’t heard anyone talking about yet, but I know that it exists.

As you act more and more on your destiny – you flip every misfortune to its light aspect and grow from it. Eventually, there comes the time when you set yourself free from destiny altogether.

Thus you liberate yourself from fate, destiny, and even your life purpose. In other words, you grow faster than it was expected for the given lifetime. Thus you become an actualized master of your life – the pure creator who is unbounded by constructions of this reality.

I believe that this is the path that the Masters who have walked on this planet have chosen. They moved beyond the sufferings and joys of this world and became free spirits.

I know that it may sound like a too out-of-reach idea, but, once again, there is nothing mystical or impossible in spirituality. It’s a matter of choice and practicing your free-will.

This post was originally published on Nov 6, 2018, and updated on Apr 7, 2020

 

Watch my video on Free Will, Fate, and Destiny

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