EP 111: How to Master Your Destiny

Today is a NEW kind of podcast for you! This time I've taken a chapter from a book, read selections to you and interjected my thoughts and ideas alongside the author. 

The subject is a question that we each face in life: Is everything fate, or do we really have free will? And how much of our lives are we truly responsible for?! How do our daily thoughts and behaviors shape our future?

If you want a deeper dive into these questions and a look at how fate, free will, character, natural law, faith, and truth are all connected, listen in on today's conversation between me and author James Allen.

Here's a link to the book online to follow along: https://archive.org/details/masteryofdestiny00alle

If you like this podcast, and want more of this kind, please let us know!

Make sure to get your FREE copy of the first TWO CHAPTERS of my book The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution In the World here: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript: 

I'm super excited to be with you today, and I'm going to try something different that I haven't ever done before. I've picked up the book Mastery of Destiny by James Allen, and I've been reading it every morning for the last few days. There is so much meat in here and it talks about so many valuable things. If you want to go grab it, I'll link a copy of it. It's in the public domain. I'll link a copy of it in this podcast and you can follow along with me or you can just listen along as I read it. But I'm going to read it and then I'm going to comment. I'm going to walk through it just through chapter one today and talk about my takeaways from it, my thoughts about it, what I loved about it, and things that I'm practicing from it. This has so much good information and it fits so beautifully with what I'm all about, with the power of the natural moral law, and how we can grow and become who we want to become, but there are parameters around that, laws and principles around that. This book happens to be one of the bonus materials in the academy, so you don't have to read it, but you can. I thought we would just spend some time in it today, and it will give us the opportunity to talk about some really important concepts.

Before we do that, I just want to ask you if you're enjoying this podcast and it's been a blessing to you and people that you know that you will go ahead and leave a review and pass it along to whoever you think may benefit from it.

Let's get into this chapter and see how this goes. And if this is something that you end up liking, please let me know. Shoot us off an email or go in and comment on socials or whatever and just give me some feedback. Let me know if this type of podcast is something that you would like more of if this is beneficial to you.

So chapter one is called “Deeds, Character, and Destiny.” There's a quote right out the top by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that says “The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”

That was Emerson, and that's the beginning of this first chapter. Here we go. As I read along, I will pause and let you know what's James Allen speaking and what's me. This is is the beginning of the chapter.

“There is and always has been a widespread belief in fate or destiny that is in an eternal and inscrutable power, which apportions definite ends to both individuals and nations. This belief has arisen from long observation of the facts of life. Men are conscious that there are certain occurrences which they cannot control and are powerless to avert. Birth and death, for instance, are inevitable, and many of the incidents of life appear equally inevitable."

So this is me now. This is something that I actually talk about in my upcoming book, How Truth Makes Us Free, and actually just talked about recently in the “4 Types of Problems and Four Solutions” that there are certain things in life that we have no control over. And because of that, we feel like maybe we've been shaped and destiny has determined who we are going to become or fate has sent us in that direction. We actually do this a lot in our modern world with like therapy and psychotherapy. There's this thing where we're always talking about our childhood and what kind of childhood that we have. And I've gone there a lot too, like these criminals had this terrible childhood and all of that kind of stuff. And that is sad. It can help us make sense, maybe of why people choose certain things. But actually plenty of people who have been through those really hard things didn't choose to become a criminal. So it's not fate that connects the dots between the childhood and who we are today. But anyway, we do relinquish people of a lot of personal responsibility because of the way that we talk about our childhood issues and things that we've gone through and how hard our lives have been and we forget that everyone's had a hard life and has had things that are very difficult to overcome.

So this is back to Allen. “Men strain every nerve for the attainment of certain ends. So we have certain goals, certain things that we want to accomplish, and we're trying really hard to get there. And he says, gradually, they become conscious of a power which seems to be not of themselves, which frustrates their puny efforts and laughs, as it were, at their fruitless, striving and struggle. As men advance in life, they learn to submit more or less to this overruling power, which they do not understand, perceiving only its effects in themselves in the world around them, and they call it by various names, such as God, Providence, Fate, destiny, etc.

Men of contemplation, such as poets and philosophers, step aside, as it were, to watch the movements of this mysterious power, as it seems to elevate its favorites on the one hand and strike down its victims on the other, without reference to merit or demerit. The greatest poets, especially the dramatic poets, represent this power in their works, as they have observed it in nature, the Greek and Roman dramatists usually depict their heroes as having foreknowledge of their fate and taking means to accept it. But by so doing, they blindly involve themselves in a series of consequences which bring about the doom which they are trying to avert. Shakespeare's characters, on the other hand, are represented as in nature with no foreknowledge except in the form of presentment of their particular destiny, thus, according to the poets, whether the man knows his fate or not, he cannot a, and every conscious or unconscious act of his is a step towards it.”

So this is just, you know, these ancient Greek poets who talk about the man who is going to kill his father and marry his mother mother. And then he does everything he can to run away from his fate, and then he goes right to it. Or this is Hamlet, who talks with the ghost of his father in the middle of the night and tries to not be the one who murders everybody and that ends up doing it. So this is one perspective on life. And James Allen is right that in history, in our poetry, in certain places and spaces, we have had a tendency to talk about how we aren't responsible for where we're at in life, how we're not responsible for the choices that we've made. They're not our choices because we were fated for that to happen. We have good luck or bad bad luck. We have bad childhood or good childhood. We're set up for life where we're not. We're of a certain race. We're of a certain culture. We had privilege. We whatever, we're doing, you can, if you look very long, very hard in our culture, you'll see our modern version of how destiny and fate are determining things, of how how people aren't responsible for their actions, of how they got where they are, not because they're a bad person, but just because, unfortunately, certain stuff happened to them. That is a perspective of many, many people, and it's a way in which we as human beings kind of let each other off the hook. You know, you had a bad childhood. You're of a certain race. You were born poor or in Harlem or whatever. And so you aren't held to a certain certain standard or you aren't expected to be of a certain caliber person or the things that are in your life are not your fault.

So James Allen goes on, “Omar Khayyam's moving finger, this is a poem called “Moving Finger,” is a vivid expression of this idea of fate,

‘The moving finger writes and having writ moves on, nor all thy nor wall lure it back to cancel a line, all thy tears out a word of it.’

Thus men in all nations and times have experienced in their lives the action of this invincible power of law, and in our nation today, this experience has been crystallized in the terse proverb, quote, man proposes God disposes. But contrary as it may appear, there is an equally widespread belief in man's responsibility as a free agent. All moral teaching is an affirmation of man's freedom to choose his course and mold his destiny, and man's patient and untiring efforts in achieving his ends are declarations of consciousness of freedom and power. This dual experience of fate on the one hand and freedom on the other has given rise to the interminable controversy between the believers in fatalism and the upholders of free will, a controversy which was recently revived under the term determinism versus free will.”

And by the way, this was written in the early 1900s.

Allen goes on. “Between apparently conflicting extremes, there is always a middle way of balance, justice, or compensation, which, while it includes both extremes, cannot be said to be either one or the other, and which brings both into harmony, and this middle way is the point of contact between two extremes.”

So this is me talking now. What he's presented to us is that there are two ways of looking at human behavior and human outcomes, whether or not we achieve our goals, the kind of lives that we're leading. One says, it's fate or destiny, and the other says, it's personal responsibility. And that's why this book is called Mastery of Destiny. He's trying to teach us how we can be the masters of our destiny. We can determine where our lives will go. And he's trying to empower us to see that things can be different, that we don't have to blame our childhood or our parents or our poverty or our spouse for where we are in life. We have the power to make things different. The next thing he's going to say, is so profound. What he's talking about here is that, okay, these are two extremes. It's all personal responsibility or it's all fate and determinism. And if it's all one or the other, then there's some big group of people that are just fundamentally wrong about human nature. So who is it that's wrong?

This is Allen again, and he goes on, and this first sentence, I think, is so incredible. He says, "Truth cannot be a partisan, but by its nature is the reconciler of extremes.”

I love that so much. Reconciler of extremes. I really believe that.

Allen says, “…in the matter which we are considering, there is a golden mean…”

That's straight from Aristotle, who said, when he talked about the virtues, that there's extremes in every “virtue,” that we could be all one way or all the other, but virtue is in the middle. True virtue is the golden mean.

Now Allen is saying, truth is that golden mean. It's the reconciler of these extremes.

Allen goes on, “…it brings fate and free will into close relationship wherein, indeed, it is seen that these two indisputable facts in human life, for such they are, are but two aspects of one central law, one unifying and all embracing principle, namely, the law of causation and its moral. aspect. Moral causation necessitates both fate and free will, both individual responsibility and individual predestination, for the law of causes must must also be the law of effects and cause and effect must always be equal. The train of causation, both in matter and mind, must be eternally balanced, therefore eternally just, eternally perfect.”

This is Audrey speaking now. He's saying something so profound, and he's describing in kind of a new and different way the natural law, the law of human nature, the moral law, the eternal law, whatever you want to call it. He says that just as there are laws that cannot be broken in the material world, in the world of matter, so in the world of mind, because mind is ultimately who we are as human beings. Our mind is not our brain and our mind is not our body. Our mind is the controlling and directing force by which we utilize our body, our soul and our body working together. So there are laws, he's saying, that are in effect in the world of mind, the spiritual world, the inner world, that are equally just and equally perfect, and that this law of cause and effect is just as in physics, it's working all the time in the lives of our minds and thoughts and our actions, and that it's just in as perfect and just as those laws, as when it is working in physics and other places.

He goes on, “Thus, every effect may be said to be a thing preordained, but the predetermining power is a cause and not the fiat of an arbitrary will.”

So effects, this is me again, are not just things that happen willy nilly, too, us. They are attached to a cause. and it must be so. It is universally fixed and we cannot change it.

He goes on, “Man finds himself involved in the train of causation. His life is made up of causes and effects. It is both a sowing and a reaping. Each act of his is a cause which must be balanced by its effects. He chooses the cause, this is his free will, he cannot choose, alter, or avert the effect. This is faith. Thus free will stands for the power to initiate causes, and destiny is involvement in effects. So both of, this is me again. So both free will and fate are part of this natural law. This is a different new way of looking at how natural law is in action in our lives all the time. That we choose something, we choose with our thoughts, and we choose with our actions. That's our deed. That's our act. That's our free will and motion. and then there is an effect that is attached that we have no control over. So James goes on, it is therefore true that man is predestined to certain ends, but he himself has, though he knows it not, issued the mandate, that good or evil thing from which there is no escape, he has by his own deeds brought about. it may be urged, this is him saying that other people may make this argument. It may be urged that man is not responsible for his deeds, that these are the effects of his character, that he is not responsible for the character, good or bad, which was given him at birth. If character was given him at birth, this would be true, and there would then be no moral law and no need for moral teaching. But characters are not given ready made. They are evolved. They are, indeed effects, the products of the moral law itself, that is, the products of deeds, character results of an accumulation of deeds which have been piled up, so to speak, by the individual during his life.”

I've written something here at the top of this page about this cause and effect issue, about the personal responsibility to choose, and then the effect which comes about, which seems to be our fate. This is what I wrote:

Because there is a good and an evil, and because cause and effect are linked, when you, quote, pick up one end of the stick with your act, you pick up the other end, which is the effect of that act. We cannot know the exact effect that is attached, but we can rest assured that the good is attached to the good and the evil is attached to the evil. Choose good actions, and you can be confident of good outcomes, which are manifest predominantly in the shaping of your own character. Because we can't control or determine the choices of other people, we can only choose our own actions and forge our own character. We can't expect certain ends, certain effects to be attached to certain actions.

I'll go into more of this when Allen talks about the shaping of character, but I just want to make sure, as we have into this, that we clear away a little bit of dust because I've had to learn this the really hard way, and I hope to kind of shorten that learning curve for you. This is why I said that the effect on the other end of that stick when we pick it up is going to be the shaping and molding of our character. The strengthening of us as a human being, our personal growth, any neurons that are linked in our brain, any physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional strength, that we develop, we are developing daily all the time with our actions, and we're doing it for good or for ill. The good are those things that cause us to grow and become and develop and strengthen and be empowered. And things that are evil weaken there around doubts and fears and angers and resentments. They're a canker to our growth. They're an obstacle, they damn us. And so one of the things that we tend to do that I've done a lot is I've tried to create my own sticks. In other words, I've tried to tell God and the universe and the natural law, the effects that I want attached to my good actions. I want to say that because I did these good things, certain outcomes should happen in my life. And if I don't see those specific outcomes, then something's broken, then there's not good and evil. Then there's not a moral law. Then cause and effect aren't real. Then God doesn't love me. So on and so forth. Then religion isn't true, then, et cetera, et cetera. And that's what we don't get to control. That's what he's really trying to drill down into is that the effect effects are predetermined and they're predetermined in the way that we're shaping ourselves, because even God will not interfere with the free will of any other human being. They must strengthen themselves and they must bring about the life that they want to have with their own actions, picking up their own sticks, good or evil, and experiencing the effects of that choice reverberating forward in the future. We don't get to decide what those effects will be. We can just trust and know that this moral law is always an effect and it has been put in place by a just and loving God, and those effects will be for our benefit. They will be good if we pick up the good as we know and understand it. I'll get to the correction around that that God offers for us in just a minute when Allen touches on it. But I just wanted to make sure that we're clear the scope of what this is and what it isn't and what it can be and what it can't be.

Allen goes on, "Man is the doer of his own deeds, as such he is the maker of his his own character, and as the doer of his deeds and the maker of his character, he is the molder and shaper of his destiny. He has the power to modify and alter his deeds, and every time he acts, he modifies his character, and with the modification of his character for good or evil, he is predetermining for himself new destinies. Destinies disastrous or beneficent, in accordance with the nature of his deeds. Character is destiny itself. As a fixed combination of deeds, it bears within itself the results of those deeds. These results lie hidden as moral seeds in the dark recesses of the character awaiting their season of germination, great growth, and fruitage.”

This is me again. Many great authors, great men and women who have understood the natural law, equate it with the law of the harvest. And I don't think there's a coincidence that this is talked about so often in scripture as a way of understanding ourselves in the way that reality works, that we can see in the material world how the law of the harvest works, and the more fruit and the more abundant that fruit is, the longer it takes for those effects to accumulate on themselves themselves. An apple seed from seed to a full-blown tree with fruit, the great harvest, takes five years, three to five years at best, to be able to harvest hundreds and hundreds of apples. Well, that's quite a time delay. And that's why the law of the harvest is so important to keep in the back of your mind. You will not always, in fact, you will not usually experience the effect of your choice today today. You will experience the effect of that choice years from now, or months from now, or weeks from now.

Allen goes on. "Those things which befall a man are the reflections of himself.”

This is me. You really are the maker of yourself. You really are today, and I've heard many other authors say this the way Earl Nightingale says it is, you are today who you really want to be and where you really want to be, whether you'll admit that to yourself or not. Because who you are today and where you are today is the accumulation of millions upon millions of micro choices day in and day out that you yourself have made. And right now, as you look around in your own life, you see the effects of those choices and those things that you love about the effects you are responsible for and the things that you hate about those effects, you are responsible for in the sense that they could be different if you decided to be different. And this is so empowering because it means that there is so much more that we can do to change the life that we're living if we are unsatisfied with where we are. And that usually, in my experience, doesn't mean swapping out a husband or even necessarily changing out a major career path or any of those kinds of things, it means making daily small, different choices and letting the seeds of those germinate and grow.

Allen goes on. “That destiny which pursued him, which he was powerless to escape by effort, or avert by prayer, was the relentless goal of his own wrong deeds, demanding and enforcing restitution. Those blessings and cursings which come to him unbidden are the reverberating echoes of the sounds which he himself sent forth. It is this knowledge of the perfect law, working through and above all things, of the perfect justice, operating in and adjusting all human affairs that enables the good man to to love his enemies, and to rise above all hatred, resentment, and complaining. for he knows that only his own can come to him, and that, though he be surrounded by persecutors, his enemies are but the blind instruments of a faultless retribution. So he blames them not, but calmly receives his accounts and patiently pays his moral debts.

This is me talking now. This is karma or the law of reciprocity that we see written about and talked about for centuries and centuries and centuries in every major culture and every great spiritual work throughout history. This is the way in which we can live truth and obey God and harmonize with the natural law, because we know that good is always returned to us. We know that this law is in force and that adjusts God put it in place and that good is attached to the good and that we're forging our character with every choice. And that is why we can love our enemies and rise above all hatred, resentment, and complaining, because we know that as we choose good, good will come to us.

Allen goes on, “…but this is not all. Man does not merely pay his debts. He takes care not to contract any further debts. He watches himself and makes his deeds faultless.”

Now, I want to say something here. This is Audrey talking. And what I wrote here is that we cannot do this. We cannot make our deeds faultless. We are flawed human beings. We don't have all knowledge, and we can't always make perfect choices. We can choose to educate ourselves. We can choose to discover, uncover, and align ourselves with those principles that are part of this natural law. We can improve our finances. We can improve our marriage. We can improve our health through obedience to those principles of the natural law, and we can then claim for ourselves the good that comes of those good choices, that it might not look exactly as we imagined, but it will improve, it will grow, it will heal, it will be better, as we choose to obey and comply. But there is a sense in which we'll never arrive. We will never make all of our choices and actions faultless. That is why we need a God who atones, who corrects. We can constantly course correct by using that atonement and letting it cover the wrong act and correct justice. And sometimes it helps us avert some of the consequences of our wrong actions. Sometimes God is merciful enough that when we say this is all repentance is, when we say we're sorry that our actions weren't faultless, when we ask him to keep correcting us, to keep realigning us with his law, His mercy covers us and he can help us to avert maybe some of the disastrous effects of an action we innocently took because he's so merciful and loving, or maybe he softens those effects. Or maybe he shows us how we can make things better or learn from those negative effects. And those negative effects stay in force because we haven't corrected them by asking him to help us fix it. And that's all repenting is. It's simply a course correction. It's simply choosing to realign ourselves with what we know to to be most good and true and beautiful and asking God to help us get there. We can ask Him to help us find those laws that we can live that will keep us out of trouble in that area. Blaine and I had trouble in our finances for many, many years because we didn't course correct and align ourselves with true financial principles. And as we did that, the law of the harvest kicked in, and over time, month by month, year by year, our finances strengthened and strengthened and strengthened because we aligned ourselves with those laws, we delayed our gratification, and we let the law of reciprocity and the law of the harvest be in effect in our financial lives.

Going back to Allen, “While paying off evil accounts, man is laying up good accounts. By putting an end to his own sin, he is bringing evil and suffering to an end. And now let us consider how the law operates in particular instances in the outworking of destiny through deeds and character. First, we will look at this present life, for the present is the synthesis of the entire past, and the net result of all that a man has ever thought and done is contained within him,”

I want to pause for one more minute and just emphasize again, what I've said, and I'm not the originator of these ideas. This is what I've read over and over again from great men and women that I know and trust, that this law is immutable, we cannot change it. That as Blackstone says, as William Blackstone taught, that our happiness is affixed, that as we choose to pursue our real and true happiness, which means aligning ourselves with God's laws, that God has so loved us and so cares about us, that our happiness is attached to choosing the good. The good and happiness are attached to each other. And that doesn't always mean perfect feelings of happiness, but it means peace and contentment and other positive feelings, confidence and assurance, etc. So we are the result of all we've thought and done. It's contained within you and I in this very moment. And when we fully accept that, we take on the power that is ours to take hold of, to assert, to wield, and to make our lives different in whatever way, if we want them different.

Allen goes on. “It is noticeable that sometimes the good man fails and the unscrupulous man prospers, a fact which seems to put all moral maxims as to the good results of righteousness, out of account, and because of this, many people deny the operation of any just law in human life, and even declare that it is chiefly the unjust that prosper.”

One quick resource that comes to mind on this for me, this is Audrey talking, is, what is seen, what is not seen by Frederick Bastiat, who basically says says this same thing. He walks through what Allen is about to walk through, a hypothetical situation in terms of a man's relationship with work. And Bastiat does the same thing because he's an economist. He does the same thing with economics. And both men demonstrate that the moral law is always in harmony with our best interests, that we thrive to the highest level when we're the most good, that we think that the pathway to what we want lies through choices that hurt us or hurt others. We wouldn't think of them as hurting us, but we would know them to be wrong or be uncertain about whether or not they were right, that we see people prosper. Let’s say, for example, that are rich who cut corners or who break the law. But actually, this higher law always catches up with them and they feel the consequences of it. If they're struck down in life in the midst of their wealth, those consequences come to them in the next life. But they come to them in this life as well because there's almost no one that dies at the height of their wealth who obtain that wealth illegally or immorally, who doesn't have their reputation permanently stained because those things are found out upon their death. So this law of restitution and reciprocity is always in force. Now he's going to give us this hypothetical situation, but you could go read what is seen what has not seen and see it happen again. Bastiat gives that example there.

Allen goes on. “Nevertheless, the moral law exists and it is not altered or subverted by shallow conclusions.”

He says, sometimes we think that the unscrupulous man prospers and that he gets good results, and that this is why there's not a moral law. But it's not. I love how Allen says this. It's not altered or subverted by shallow conclusions. When people don't think deeply enough about it, and when they don't really work out the details, that doesn't mean that they're right. And this is something that lots of people don't want there to be a moral law. They don't want there to be a solid, all the time, good and evil. And so they come to show shallow conclusions, and often what I find is that they haven't thought about it deeply enough. They've only thought about it on a surface level.

Okay, Alan goes on. We're going to finish out this chapter the next few minutes. He says, “It should be remembered that man is a changing, evolving. The good man was not always a good man. Even in this life, there was a time in a large number of instances. when the man who is now just was unjust, when he who is now kind was cruel, when he who is now pure was impure. Conversely, there was a time in this life in a number of of instances when he who is now unjust was just, when he who is now cruel was kind, when he who is now impure was pure. Thus the good man who is overtaken with calamity to day is reaping the result of his former evil sowing. Later he will reap the happy result of his present good sowing. While the bad man is now reaping the result of his former good sewing, later he will reap the result of his present bad sowing.

Characteristics are fixed habits of mind, the results of deeds, an act repeated a large number of times becomes unconscious or automatic, that is. It then seems to repeat itself without any effort on the part of the doer, so that it seems to him almost impossible not to do it. And then it has become a mental characteristic.”

So that was Alan explaining to us that sometimes we think that habits are so fixed that we can't be different, that we have become a certain kind of person, but they can always be unworked. They can be rewound, so to speak. We can choose differently. So here's his example.

This is Allen. “Here is a poor man out of work. He is honest and not a shirker. He wants work and he cannot get it. He tries hard and continues to fail. Where is the justice in his lot? There was a time in this man's condition when he had plenty of work. He felt burdened with it. He shirked it and longed for ease. He thought how delightful it would be to have nothing to do. He did not appreciate the blessedness of his lot. His desire for ease is now gratified, but the fruit for which he longed, and which he thought would taste so sweet, has turned to ashes in his mouth, the condition which he aimed for, namely, to have nothing to do, he has reached, and there he is, compelled to remain till his lesson is thoroughly learned. And he is surely learning that habitual ease is degrading, that to have nothing to do as a condition of wretchedness, and that work is a noble and blessed thing. His former desires and deeds have brought him where he is, and now his present desire for work, his ceaseless searching and asking for it, will just as surely bring about its own beneficent result.”

This is me talking. I actually know someone in this situation, and I've actually seen this kind of thing play out. It seems extreme because maybe you know someone who always worked really hard and then got fired and then spent a year trying to get work, and this doesn't describe their circumstance. But that's not really the point that Allen is making. Allen is trying to make the point through this example, and Bastiat makes the point through a different example, and we could give a lot of examples that this law is just that it's always working itself out and that we get what we desire most. We will always get what we desire most. That is how the world is constructed, and that is why it is a just world, because your deepest desires will be realized. And so you have to be intentional about what those desires are, and you have to intend the life that you really want to have. It makes me think of all the times that we were involved in these different, like business circles. And one of the things that we would often be told is, you need to envision and you need to have affirmations. And more often than not, that envisioning in those affirmations were around monetary gain and physical things, cars and homes and outfits and travel. And people would blindly follow these financial wizards and these business gurus and follow their example and desire those things and envision those things and affirm those things to themselves. And then when they received those things, they found that other things in their life had fallen apart. In other words, they'd gotten what they desired most, but actually it wasn't the right thing to desire. We talk about this in my Mothers of Vision Masterclass. We did a mother's Vision event a few years ago. We recorded it. You can actually purchase it at the TheMissionDrivenMom.com. But I talked about this type of issue that we have to be careful what we desire. And because we will get it. And we'll find out that that actually wasn't what we really wanted. What we really wanted was something else. We wanted peace. We wanted good relationships. We wanted financial stability. We wanted a feeling of accomplishment or success. We wanted to be somebody or have, you know, attain like recognition or whatever the case might be, we just have to be careful because if we desire it enough, or if we desire nothing, we'll get nothing. Right? That's that's how that great law works. And his point in this example is that this man desired ease and he achieved it, only to find out that that wasn't what he actually really desired, what he, and he learned that it's better to want what God wants for him. And that's work, to be industrious, to be busy, to be contributing, to be serving in meaningful ways. That's what he ultimately really wanted. This is, you know, why retirement? People decline rapidly when they retire. And unless they stay busy serving in some other meaningful capacity, they unravel.

So this is the way in which we uncover the aspects of the natural law and come to see those things that are really best for us. We desire the wrong things, we obtain them, and then we learn that that's not actually what we really want. So he will stay in this condition until he's learned the lesson that it holds. I've actually read this many places as well, that we are in the conditions that we are in because of the people that we are and the struggles that we face are the struggles for us individually because there's things we need to learn. And the conditions that we dislike that we're in currently will fall away when we learn the lesson that those conditions hold for us. And often it's key principles that we can begin to align ourselves with.

Okay, Alan goes on and I'm going to finish out this chapter, I've got about a page left. He says, “No longer desiring idleness, his present condition will, as an effect, the cause of which is no longer propagated soon passes away, and he will obtain employment. And if his whole mind is now set on work and he desires it above all else, then when it comes, he will be overwhelmed with it. It will flow into him from all sides, and he will prosper in his industry.

Then, if he does not understand the law of cause and effect in human light, in human life, he will wonder why work comes to him apparently unsought, while others who seek it strenuously fail to obtain it. Nothing comes unbidden. Where the shadow is, there also is the substance. That which comes to the individual is the product of his own deeds.

As cheerful industry leads to greater industry and increasing prosperity, the labor shirked or undertaken discontentedly leads to a lesser degree of labor and decreasing prosperity. So with all the varied conditions of life, as we see them, they are the destinies wrought by the thoughts and deeds of each particular individual. So also with the vast variety of characters, they are the ripening and ripened growth of the sowing of deeds.

As the individual reaps what he sows, sow the nation, being a community of individuals, reaps also what it sows. Nations become great when their leaders are just men. They fall and fade when their just men pass away. Those who are in power set an example good or bad for the entire nation.

Great will be the peace and prosperity of a nation, when there shall arise within it a line of statesmen who, having first established themselves in a lofty integrity of character, shall direct the energies of the nation toward the culture of virtue and development of character.”

This is me again for a minute. Just think this is what was happening when America was founded. The men who were in charge were men who were striving for virtue and who were trying to make choices that improved their characters. And they saw that we needed a nation of people who were of great characters who pursued virtue. Today, we have leadership who may be virtuous in some regards and understand the importance of personal character, but to the degree at which they pursue that, and at which they encourage those who follow them to pursue that is the degree to which we will truly have liberty.

Allen goes on, “Knowing that only through personal, industry, integrity, and nobility, can national prosperity proceed. Still, above all is the great law. Calmly and with infallible justice meeting out to mortals their fleeting destinies, tear-stained or smiling, the fabric of their hands. Life is a great school for the development of character, and all, through strife and struggle, vice and virtue, success and failure are slowly but surely learning the lessons of wisdom.”

So that is chapter 1 of Mastery of Destiny by James Allen. If you liked this type of podcast where I read to you and interject my own thoughts and ideas in the middle of it, please give me some feedback and let me know that you would like more podcasts like this one. And I will start doing more of them as I study and write and come across things that I feel will be of benefit to you. I will produce more of these podcasts where we read and learn together. Thank you so much for joining me, and I will see you next time.