Your Destiny is What You Make of It

Jan 1, 2004, 12.00am IST


All along, you've been shaping your destiny unconsciously. But you can also work on it consciously. If you make the effort to access your core and realise that everything is your responsibility, and shift your focus inside you, then you can rewrite your destiny.

All the time, your focus is scattered, because what you consider is 'you' and 'yours' is your house, car, wife, child, pet, education, position, and power. If you are stripped of all these things, you will feel like a nobody. So what you call yourself is what is spread around you.

'You' means it is you, not this carpet, wall, child, or anything else. 'You' is just you. Right now, you're not an established being; you are a scattered being. You are not you; you are a crowd. The crowd's fate is always predestined.

Once you act as an individual, the indivi-sible self can no longer be divided; it is this. It cannot be here and there. Once you become a true indivi-dual, your destiny is within your grasp; it is yours.

Those who are in a hurry to grow spiritually avoid getting into marriage, children and relationships because the moment you have a spouse, you get identified with 'this one'. Once you have children, you get identified with them. Now, 'you' includes them also.

Once you get identified with them, one by one, you get identified with too many things. Your identity gets scattered.

However, searching for the real 'you' does not mean denial of family or social situations. The root of all identification is in the two fundamental accumulations: body and mind. Once removed from these two, 'you' become free from all identifications. In this freedom you become the master of your own destiny.

The body is the source of all attachments. But you don't have to keep searching for non-attachment somewhere else. You don't have to go about distancing this and that in your life, but once you get scattered, your destiny becomes pre-ordained. Whichever way your karma is, it just goes that way.

The significance of Sanyasa or Brahmacharya is just this: Shifting the whole focus to you. When I say you, it is just 'you', not your body or mind. If you are unable to be like that, you just choose one more identity.

When you say 'you', make it 'you and your Guru'. You attach yourself to the Guru without any hesitation, because you have no entanglements from the other side. You can get as entangled as you want with him; for he is not going to get entangled.

The moment you are ripe, you can drop the relationship. With other relationships, it is never so. If you get entangled, even if you want to become free, the other will not let you go.

Either you can reshape your destiny or, if such awareness does not come, the Guru can help you do it. You just create a longing to grow, to dissolve, to know. What has to happen will happen. Once you become an individual, your destiny becomes yours.


If your destiny is in your hands, you would naturally choose freedom and not bondage because the deepest longing of every life is to become free from the very process that one refers to as life or death.

So once your destiny is happening in awareness, the next step will just happen by itself, because life within you has the intelligence to choose freedom, not bondage.

Only because your destiny is being created in unawareness, you go about weaving bondage around yourself.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev