In this episode, Dr. Robert Svoboda explores Fate vs. Free Will and the Law of Karma

So the truth is that everything in your life is totally faded and you have no free will whatsoever… Not. It’s also not the case that you have total free will and you can do whatever you want to and there’s nothing to stop. You, you, whatever you can imagine you can do. Not, not, not, not for sure. These two exaggerations, these two, these two delusions are very common delusions and they’re common because people can’t seem to understand the alignment that has to happen in every individual, between the degree of fate that they have in a particular area of life and the degree of free will that they have in that area of life.

In some areas, clearly we have more free will than others. We have the free will when we have a plate of food in front of us to determine how much of that food we want to eat, but what kind of food is going to end up in front of us when that’s gonna happen, how much that will be, that often is more fated than how we’re gonna interact with the food, for example. It is very true that sometimes in areas where we think things are totally fated.

We may be able to find a little bit of space for free will, and in some spaces where we think that there is nothing but a blank slate and on which we can write whatever we want to, we. Eventually, find that in fact, we can’t have written everything we wanted to because there were limitations that were not possibly evident at the moment where we attempted to make that initial effort in that direction. It all goes back to our prarabdha karma.

The Kamas that cause us to be born in the place where we are born with the parents, with the language, with the culture, with the genetic inheritance, with the inheritance of all the past lifetimes that we have, and all of these things together are limiting to a substantial degree what we’re gonna be able to do in life. But within that initial group of limitations, many, many different ways that things can be manipulated. We are dealt out a hand of cards, but we have a choice as to how we can play those cards.

There is destiny, there is free will. They’re working together. So at any one moment, some things are going to be more destined. They’re gonna appear to be more fated, and that’s in those areas where the kamas are dridha, where they’re fixed. In other areas, the kamas will be less fixed, adridha. And in some areas they will be Dridha-Adridha. They will be fixed, but not totally fixed. We can make some Adjustment to them. One thing that we do need to remember, however, or actually two things, is the number one thing is the more you use up your free will in this lifetime, the less free will you’re going to have available.

You have a certain amount of wiggle room, but the more that you use it up, the more you fix things in a particular way, the more fixed those things are going to be and the second thing is the more kamas that you perform in this lifetime, good or bad, those karmas are gonna be strongly influencing what your prarabdha is going to be in your next lifetime. They’re going to be influencing how much fate, how much th Dridha karma, and how much free will, how much Adridha karma is going to be manifesting for you next time.
So think less about what’s going on for you right now and more about how you would like to strategize, having a greater amount of free will in the future, which may require you to limit your free will in certain circumstances here in the present because of the influence of the past.