Man lives a two-fold life, an outer material life and an inner emotional-mental life. His outward deeds and actions are simply the result of his inner thoughts and feelings. They may take centuries to materialize, often not till a later birth, but ultimately they do.
The world which you do not see, the unseen world of thought and feeling, is the real world of causes; the world which you see around is the world of effects. Because man tends to express his inner self by his outer actions, it may safely be said that his outer life corresponds to his inner life.
The world as a whole in itself is nothing else but the expression of Divine Ideation, the very thought of God expressed. Man, in his own little way, is also a creator and is creating his own world- the world of his own experiences-the expression through which he lives.
That chain of causal connection between man's inner thought, his inner feeling, and his outward experience, is unseen. But it is there, and it is there by a subtle force, the law of destiny. Destiny is something entirely self-created, self-earned, whether it is for good or for evil.
If man does not know that whatever he gives out in life to the world is ultimately thrown back to him by destiny, that does not excuse him. Nature never excuses ignorance. Man is the builder of his own life, the creator of his own fate, both outward and inward.
Destiny is not a blind force; it is one expression of that greater cosmic Intelligence which rules the universe. It has a purpose to fulfill, and that purpose, so far as man is concerned, is an educative one. Destiny is like a balance, if you depress one side of the' scale you find the other side goes up in proportion.
Destiny restores the balance in man's life because she wishes him to understand himself, his powers and possibilities as well as the fact that he is here to fulfill the higher purpose of his incarnation. Destiny is quite impersonal and universal. It has no sense of retribution.
There is no motive of punishment in that great force. As a man creates his own destiny by his thoughts and feelings and actions he gets back unerringly from life sooner or later what he himself gives to life. There is no escape.
You are here to learn, to learn who and what you are. That is the purpose of your incarnation, and the experiences of life are the lessons which will ultimately teach you. Mostly you learn blindly and unconsciously, but still you are learning.
It is unfortunate that most men learn more from sufferings than from pleasures. Unfortunate because they seldom learn enough with a single sorrow. It has to be repeated, perhaps getting worse with each repetition, until the lesson is etched into the heart, burned into the mind.
Until you arrive at the real self, you are distorted and warped; you cannot think truthfully and you cannot act truthfully. Go back and look at your past; you will see how, even in this birth, you have created much of the experience through which you have gone.
Many of those very warnings were present in former lives; they reappear in succeeding lives and they bring with them the destiny which is attached to them. There is a second kind of destiny: the fate which has been stored up for you in previous embodiments and which will be allotted to you in some future earth-life.
That represents the greatest mass of destiny which is attached to any individual, because naturally he can work out only a little in a single life. That does not affect you now, but it will affect your next earth-life.
If you shoot at an object in a jungle, believing it to be a tiger, and after the trigger has been pulled, and the bullet sped on its way, you see that the object is a man, a friend of yours, you cannot recall the bullet and lodge it in the gun again. The bullet must take its course.
The body in which we are born in this particular incarnation, together with the circumstances and environments attached to it, is the bullet which was shot out from your past, and the past cannot call it back again.
It must speed its course. All future shots, however, belonging to the lives that are to come, can be recalled, can be stopped at their very source, That is, it is possible to stop creating any fresh destiny as well as to wipe out the possibility of all future incarnations, because they have not yet begun.
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