The Coexistence of Destiny and Free Will

The Dance of Fate and Freedom

Seekers have wrestled with this paradox for millennia. At times life feels predestined — as though the script is already written, each page waiting to be turned. And yet, if every choice were fixed, the experience itself would be meaningless. Free will must be real… and yet destiny cannot be denied.

The truth is sharper than comfort allows. Destiny carries the blueprint. It ordains the great thresholds of the Path: the archetypal gates, the initiations of the Work, the openings of the chakras. They arrive only in their appointed hour, and only to the soul whose archetype they belong to. No striving, no forcing, no ritual can summon them early. They belong to destiny.

But destiny does not open them automatically. Free will must forge the key — and only the Work can turn it. If the vessel has been bound to children, to unchecked eros, to the chains of matter, then the key is never made. The appointed hour passes and the gate does not open.

What then? The gate is not lost forever, but it is lost for this lifetime. The soul must return in another body, and begin the Work again from the very start — Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Putrefaction — until it is once more brought to that same threshold. Only when the work has been fulfilled will the key exist, and the gate will open.

Thus fate and freedom do not cancel each other; they interlock. Destiny designs the gate. Free will forges the key. The Work alone turns it. Without the Work, the soul circles endlessly, returning to face the same gates in lifetime after lifetime.

This is the true dance: not two equal partners, but a single braid. Destiny is the column — fixed, vertical, immovable. Free will is the key — fragile, costly, exact. And the Work is the turning — the only act that opens the way.

To walk the Middle Path is to see this clearly. Not to soften the paradox, but to live it: the gates are given, but they open only when the Work has made you ready. And if you refuse, you will begin again — until readiness is won.

Yet no labor is ever wasted. Even when the vessel is bound to children, to lineage, to the wheel of flesh, the soul can still walk the Middle Pillar. Every act of honesty, restraint, balance, and inner Work lays a foundation that endures beyond death. The Gate may remain closed in this lifetime, but the imprint of striving is carried forward. And in the next return, the burden will be lighter, the ascent swifter, the threshold nearer — like a memory half-remembered, a déjà vu guiding the way.