While travelling along the road, as we come across successes and failures, pain and suffering, we learn lessons about life.

From birth to death, we all travel through undulating roads to complete our life’s journey. This journey is only in forward direction. However, this journey can be ended untimely and abruptly by the God or the invisible force governing this universe. We must therefore continue to grow so as to perform this journey happily and smoothly. This is like a journey through a desert where we encounter not only parched and barren land with cactus and thorns leading to despair, sadness, pain and suffering but also oasis or the green patches of land giving us joy, happiness and inner peace. Hence, life’s journey is not smooth and in fact it’s like a ride on the roller coaster. There are ups and downs and sometimes these can be steep ones also giving us challenges and conflicts. While traveling along the road, as we come across successes and failures, pain and suffering, we learn lessons about life. Everything that happens to us and to our dear ones also helps in our learning process. As we grow older, we also learn some bitter and hard truths of life by personal experiences.

Undisputedly human nature is fundamentally very fragile and venerable because of undercurrent fear and anxiety (though mostly unreal and unfounded) we all encounter quite often in our life. Most of the time, things just don’t happen as we plan or foresee. Most certain thing about life, as we often feel, is the uncertainty. Many a times, even small and insignificant events can have vast and devastating effects on our life. When we travel along the undulating road with patches of rocky and barren land as well as the green patches of oasis, some very obvious questions come in our mind and we struggle to find answers to those hard questions of life. The very first question, which I feel quite important, is ‘whether we are the architect of our own destiny’? What’s the extent and role of ‘free will’ in shaping the events and the destiny of our life?

We all know that destiny is not a matter of chance but an outcome of choices or decisions we make especially on critical moments of our life. Destiny is not a thing that comes automatically to us but to be achieved. In other words, the decisions we take all the time shape our future or in other words, the destiny. How far the decisions we take are fully conscious or the rational ones? Or does our subconscious and conditional mind influence our decisions. Now we know for sure that the subconscious mind is larger and faster than the conscious mind, and can account for as much as 90% of our activities each day. According to Cell biologist, Bruce Lipton, the subconscious is 500,000 times faster compared to conscious mind at what it does. If majority of our decisions are taken by subconscious mind and the conditional mind then we are not, to that extent, responsible for our destiny. In that case, our subconscious and conditional mind on which we have no control plays a very important role in shaping our destiny.

There is another fundamental and related question that arises quite often along the life’s journey is ‘whether the life is deterministic or it is the randomness that governs our life’. We are generally not sure about its answer because every one of us interprets life in own peculiar way based on our experiences. Sometimes we feel that we all are helpless and powerless individuals witnessing random events which are supposedly purposeless and meaningless in life. In other words, we live in a world where events just happen for no apparent reason. This feeling is often reinforced when we witness pain and suffering in our life as well as in our family and at that time the world looks like a hell. Another diametrical opposite worldview is that we are powerful humans having ‘free will’ and the ability to achieve whatever we desire in life hence we are not fragile and helpless individuals. There is off course another set of people who sometimes believe they are fully empowered individuals who can chose their own destiny but when they are subjected to severe pain and agony in their own life or in the life of their near and dears they see this world as hostile and meaningless. Very often we fall in this particular category of taking life as uncertain and purposeless.

Being a conscious being, whenever we are in waking state, we experience thoughts, emotions and feelings. We all have very unique behavior and temperament and accordingly we identify with a set pattern of thoughts, feelings and particularly the emotions. When we become emotionally addicted to particular sets of emotions or life’s circumstances, then it becomes very difficult to change those circumstances and we love to maintain such atmosphere or the relationships which provide such emotional states. That’s why we generally tend to live in a self created comfort zone and we resist whenever an opportunity arises to come out from that zone. Many a times this very mental conditioning poses a hindrance while undertaking a forward journey.

Our capacity for change and transformation is reflected in our human spirituality. There are different stages of spiritual growth or development. Gradually as we learn life’s mysteries and complexities especially through painful experiences, we become more spiritual unless and until we stay back and resist those positive change in us. However, many a times those changes are abrupt and fast. As we grow spiritually, we can take on more and more of other people’s pain and then the most amazing thing happens. The more pain you are willing to take on, the more joy you will also begin to feel. And this is truly good news of what makes the journey ultimately so worthwhile (Scott Peck in Further Along the Road Less Traveled, 1997) This very spirituality helps us in releasing negativity from our actions, emotions and thoughts and leads us to higher level of consciousness. Once we reach to that stage, we can lead to find the meaning and purpose of our life and answer “Why we are here and what are we suppose to do in this life?”