Updated: There Is No Predestined Spiritual Fate

I've changed my mind on "destiny" or "God's plan." As in, our life is *fully* orchestrated by spiritual forces outside our control. Nothing is set in stone. You're the author of your life.

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Post-script: This post has understandably caused some misunderstanding due to the title (previously “There is No Grand Spiritual Narrative”). I’ve published reader responses here. I want to clarify, I’m not saying there is nothing spiritual or supernatural in the universe that we are connected with. Or that there aren’t laws or commandments to reality. Just like you will burn your hand on a hot stove, I think there are moral and spiritual rules and codes embedded within the universe. For example, worship or hatred of others or self will not produce well-being and contentment. No matter how much one may want to live a happy life rooted in hatred or self-worship, that will not change the fact that that is a path of unending suffering.

Similarly, I do think we may all have been gifted with some higher callings or constraints even about what our role in the universe is. I will never play basketball like Michael Jordan, end of story. No amount of exercising agency will change that. And I’m open to using words like “God” or the “divine” to allude to the “creator” of this natural order of things — even if I think that such semantics are primitive and reductive on some level.

There may be a spiritual narrative to the universe and God may have a plan for you and me. And maybe there are ways to sense this. But I was pushing back in my piece on what I think is an erroneous perception of “God’s plan” or “spiritual destiny.” As I wrote in the piece, when I rose to sudden success in 2020 I thought God was taking control of my life and blessing me with these incredible outcomes. “Young voice of reason” seemed like my spiritual destiny as many around me reinforced. As with a lot of things, there may be a seed of truth in that — but this view deprived me of agency and responsibility over my destiny.

For reasons perhaps too personal to share, I’ve grown up with a view that luck, destiny or spiritual fortune accounts for a lot of success (career, relationship, well-being etc). I’m not ready to dispense all in that bucket (this feels painfully reductionistic — how do you quantify “luck” or “spiritual destiny”). There is a degree of luck. But I’ve seen way too many people around me attribute a lack of success or fulfillment (or the opposite) in certain domains as being due to their “destiny” or “God had other plans for me.” Did he? How can we be so sure? As with the family friend described at the end of this essay, he views his lack of success in the relationship realm as pure destiny or misfortune engineered by the universe. Granted, some bad luck/bad timing and certainly larger forces beyond his conscious awareness, from the perspective of someone like Gabor Mate or Joe Dispenza, there is an almost mathematically clear delineation as to why this person continues to suffer in highly predictable ways (see my podcast with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris on the hyper-orderliness of mental illness).

To conclude, in my experience people sometime use “God’s will” or “destiny” to absolve any responsibility and ownership in their actions as conscious agents in this world. And maybe you could even say that their firm, unwavering beliefs have almost unconsciously handcuffed them. We all have a glass ceiling in terms of our potential. But we need not lower it when it could be far higher. Wisdom and knowledge can show us that — show how we’re not free but he we could be. If it wasn’t for some of the aforementioned prominent thinkers, I may have also been locked into thinking my past and current life challenges are predestined and tied to my future.

No thanks.

I choose to live my life as a conscious agent with freedom — constrained but mysteriously expansive — and responsibility, including for things I was not in control of before.

There may be a grand spiritual narrative, but I don’t think there is a grand spiritual destiny. Certainly not one we can use to justify our suffering or remove responsibility.

(In an upcoming piece, I’m gonna be reflecting on sensing a spiritual narrative in my life, not a destiny!)

— Rav

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Four years ago, I wouldn’t have written this. Back then, I was freshly emerging into public life—an ambitious young journalist and podcaster interviewing my intellectual heroes, fueled by a quiet belief that I was on some kind of cosmic mission. I felt chosen. Guided. Protected by a higher force that would reveal the path as I walked it.

Part of this came from the unusual level of success I experienced at a young age. By 20 or 21, I had built a significant platform. People from all kinds of backgrounds—Christian, Hindu, spiritual-but-not-religious—would tell me I was “blessed” or “gifted” by God. I remember family members saying, “People spend decades trying to get their writing seen. You’ve done it straight out of high school. You are incredibly lucky.”

And it did feel like a mystery. How did a kid from a semi-rural Canadian town end up writing viral political commentary on America’s most contentious issues—race, identity, BLM—and get taken seriously?

My most viral essay — also my first major fore into the political realm.

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That sense of destiny was also reinforced intellectually. Around that time, I read

Sam Harris

’ book on free will, which persuaded me that all human action was the result of genetic and environmental factors outside our conscious control. Even randomness doesn’t equate to free will, Harris argues.

Harris doesn’t believe in some divine spiritual destiny, but the philosophical determinism he argues for left me feeling like life was unfolding exactly as it was supposed to. My successes were never really mine—they were inevitable. As Harris has said in various podcasts, even feeling proud of one’s achievements makes no sense within a truly deterministic framework.

Then came my explorations into Eastern philosophy. I joined a spiritual reading group studying the Ashtavakra Gita, often considered the most radical text in the Hindu canon. The book insists that ego, identity, and personal agency are illusions.

“All things happen by themselves, as in a dream. You are not the doer.” (Ashtavakra Gita 15.5)

According to this nondual view, your true self isn’t the thinker, the achiever, or even the sufferer—it’s the vast, silent awareness beneath all experience. You’re not the storm, you’re the sky. You’re not the movie, you’re the screen.

I still believe there’s profound wisdom in that. I studied Advaita Vedanta more deeply in university and continue to find its insights rich and necessary, especially for the hyper-individualistic, de-spiritualized West. How that integrates with the necessary exercise of agency foundational to human flourishing, I’m not sure yet.

But here’s what I’ve come to realize: the psychological software I downloaded through this cocktail of early success, philosophical determinism, and Eastern non-doership turned out to be deeply disempowering.

I now believe: there is no grand spiritual destiny.

In the sense that life is not governed by a divine plan or destiny. That doesn’t mean life is random or meaningless—it just means that we aren’t passengers in a car driven by God, the universe, or karma. We have to take the wheel ourselves. I’m also open to re-framing destiny or “God’s plan” as something we co-create, participate in, or are called to as conscious agents. Like a higher calling that if we abide to, will produce many fruits. And if we fail to follow it’s course, we may suffer. I’m open to that though not married to it either.

This might sound obvious to some. But for people like me—who imbibed the belief of “things are going to work out” because they suddenly started to or because the universe was supposedly conspiring in their favour—this realization cuts deep.

It’s important to say: I didn’t always feel this way. In childhood, I felt more cursed than chosen. I lived with the fear that I would suffer like people close to me had. So when success finally came, it felt like a cosmic reversal—like I had finally earned the favor of fate. Even during my darkest depressive episodes, I felt like I was still climbing some upward arc.

But that belief—the idea that I was being led toward greatness by unseen hands—no longer holds up.

Why? Well, for one, the science of determinism is far less settled than I once believed. My neuroscientist friend

Bobby Azarian

has helped me see how shaky some of the arguments from people like Harris and Sapolsky really are. (We’re doing a podcast on this soon.)

But more importantly, life itself humbled me.

Since 2022, my career has stagnated. During the Covid years, I was at the forefront of covering vaccine injuries and lockdown overreach. I was signal-boosted by Rogan, Bret Weinstein, and others. But when the mandates faded, I lost direction. I didn’t want to become the guy who just churns out weekly articles on mRNA vaccine side effects. But I also didn’t know what else to do.

That loss of clarity—of creative fire—was challenging. And in hindsight, I see how much of it was shaped by a toxic passivity. I believed I was “going with the flow.” That “the universe would take care of me.” That “God has a plan.” That surrender was spiritual.

But it wasn’t true surrender. It was stagnation. It was unconsciousness. An ability to exercise real agency. And it came with a heavy price.

What I see now is that surrender can only follow ownership. To let go of control, you have to first step into it. You have to be an agent before you can choose to not attempt to over-extend agency when we reach our limits (we don’t have total agency over everything, of course). That’s what people get wrong. They confuse surrender with complacency. But true surrender is an act of will.

This realization hit me in the most unexpected of ways—during a casual conversation with a family friend who subscribes to a kind of fatalistic Hindu or Sikh philosophy. We were joking about this couple my mom and I met before a Weeknd concert: an average-looking guy with a stunning, radiant girlfriend. My mom and I were impressed. “Look at him go,” my mom jokingly said. “That guy must be doing something right,” I thought.

But this friend replied, “Some plants with weak roots bear beautiful fruit, and others with strong roots bear nothing. That’s just how nature works.”

I could tell he meant it sincerely—but I found this belief to be deeply self-defeating and harmful.

Sure, there’s some truth in it. Life is unfair. Some people meet the love of their life at 18. Others go decades without meaningful connection. Luck and randomness are real.

But what good does it do to focus on that?

This person then proceeded to point out how objectively high-achieving he is and how he graduated from one of the world’s top universities yet is lonely, miserable, and completely lacking in love in his life.

It was clear as daylight to me how many unhealed inner issues were getting in the way of this person finding love and I challenged him quite firmly.

“Women don’t like a man who blames everyone for their problems…their kids, ex, family members etc. They can read a man’s depressed, sad, victimhood energy a mile away and don’t want anything to do with that.”

I came off a bit more aggressive than I would’ve liked (I have little patience for people who don’t take responsibility of their life), but it wasn’t an accusation—it was an observation grounded in my own process. Through therapy, Joe Dispenza’s course The Formula (and his incredible podcast on relationships), and conversations with psychologists and coaches, I’ve come to see how our inner world profoundly shapes our interactions with others. No amount of external success or credentials can override a nervous system locked in resentment or self-pity.

This friend couldn’t accept it. He said all of those people I mentioned—Dispenza, my therapists—were likely snake oil salesmen selling their services or at least living in some delusional dream world untethered from reality. The world is biologically determined. And some of us are just doomed to be alone.

I don’t buy it.

Yes, we don’t control everything. We didn’t choose our genes, our upbringing, our traumas. But we do have a role to play in how we respond. We can take action. We can heal. We can grow. And we can choose to align with something higher, if we feel called to.

Not because it’s our fate. But because we’re willing.

The spiritual determinist might say: “Maybe it was God’s plan for you to lose momentum in your career and eventually de-convert yourself from determinism, so you’d take back control of your life but really the universe is orchestrating all this behind-the-scenes.”

Maybe. But that’s not a helpful framework for anything. It’s unfalsifiable. It discourages action. It keeps you waiting instead of creating.

And at this stage of my life, I’m done “going with the flow” in a passive, complacent sense.

So here’s where I’m at: I still believe in grace. In mystery. In the power of letting go and forces outside our control.

But I also believe that we are the ones who write our spiritual narratives—not some nebulous cosmic force. Surrender, too, is a choice. A discipline. A courageous leap we decide to take.

Go create your own story. Listen for guidance, yes. But act. Take ownership. And when it’s time, surrender—not passively, but with intention.

Shalom.

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