Amor Fati

All of us have discontent with our current life situation. We wish we had more, lived somewhere nicer, didn’t have to work as hard, found somebody to love us unconditionally, had better health, better genetics, or simply that we could find sustainable happiness. In some sense, this discontent is related to our deep need for meaning in life. In another, it’s the result of biological evolution as it drives us to improve our situation. “Necessity is the mother of invention” as the adage goes. The problem is that necessity and discontent will never provide happiness.

As a Yogi, a Christian, and a Stoic, I must share my belief that the goal of life is to find meaning and, when you find it, you will be filled with endless joy. Though the three disciplines have very different descriptions of proper action, they lead to very similar places.

The stoics have, perhaps, the easiest route to understand and they call it Amor Fati or Love Your Fate. The primary concern of the stoic is to determine where we have agency and take action there while accepting everything else, like the serenity prayer. The past is, quite obviously, not something we can ever have agency over. Therefore the best possible path forward is not only to accept our fate, but to love it. Epictetus says in the Enchiridion, “Don’t seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will - then your life will flow well.” This way of living drives us to love and absolute ecstasy with our daily lives because every moment we live is exactly the moment we wanted. Chrisippus puts it this way, “This is the very thing which makes up the virtue of the happy person and a well flowing life - when the affairs of life are in every way tuned to the harmony between the individual divine spirit and the will of the director of the universe.” The path to happiness is not acquiring our desires but desiring what we have. In a classic story of Alexander the Great, Alexander’s path is obstructed by a philosopher. One of Alexander’s men shouts, “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” The philosopher responds, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.” This is the stoic response. In discourses, Epictetus comes dangerously close to a Christian statement in saying, “But I haven’t at any time been hindered in my will, nor forced against it. And how is this possible? I have bound up my choice to act with the will of God. God wills that I be sick, such is my will. He wills that I should choose something, so do I. He wills that I reach for something, or something be given to me - I wish for the same. What God doesn’t will, I do not wish for.”

God’s plan is one of the fundamental beliefs and arguments in all of Christianity. The nature of an all knowing, all powerful God leads logically to the conclusion that God’s plan is complete and absolute, leaving no room for human agency. This belief is commonly called Calvinism, and the contrary Arminianism, leaves room for human agency (generally referred to as free will) despite the logical difficulties. I choose not to engage in the debate on the stoic premise that the resulting belief has no impact on our actions. However, both beliefs center on the fact that God has a plan for His people. God is perfectly good and so His plan is also perfect. Therefore, whatever the circumstances of our lives, we either exist inside of God’s plan or outside of it, and the safest place to be is, of course, inside of His plan. This means that a missionary called by God to move to dangerous territory is safer moving toward danger than resisting God’s plan and remaining in seeming safety, and the same logic follows for any believer. Part of the Lord’s Prayer states, “Your [God’s] will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven,” and belief in this statement is the meaning of being a believer in Christianity. Oswald Chambers, in writing about 1 Corinthians 6:19, “Do you not know that… you are not your own?,” and tells us to, “Let Him have His way. If you refuse, you will be of no value to God in His redemptive work in the world, but will be a hindrance and a stumbling block.” Therefore, obedience to God is how we remain in His plan and enjoy the benefits of it. Chambers also tells us that, “The weakest saint who transacts business with Jesus Christ is liberated the second he acts and God’s almighty power is available on his behalf.” So obedience results in freedom. God’s character is unchanging, meaning that we are redeemed regardless of our choices. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” -Romans 5:8. The only question is whether we will realize his redemption. Chambers again tells us, “God’s revelation of Himself to me is influenced by my character, not by God’s character.” And also, “God will not discipline us; we must discipline ourselves. God will not bring our ‘arguments… and every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ’ (2 Corinthians 10:5) - we have to do it. Don’t say, ‘Oh, Lord, I suffer from wandering thoughts.’ Don’t suffer from wandering thoughts. Stop listening to the tyranny of your individual natural life and win freedom into the spiritual life.” To the Christian, obedience results in freedom and obedience comes from Godly discipline. Living in God’s plan is understanding that whatever comes to pass is the best possible circumstance for us because God willed it, and He loves us. This feels very different from the yogic path because yogis often don’t believe in God but rather a divine universe.

Yoga teaches that we all have a history of patterns of thought and action, called samskaras (ruts). Some of these we developed ourselves and others are the result of past lives, born into us. Regardless of the origin, we must allow these paths to come to fruition in order to move past them. If we wish to be rid of an evil samskara, whether we developed it in this life or before, we can wait for it to manifest and deal with the consequences, or we can meditate and encounter it as part of our ego. Through experiencing and owning the fact that the samskara is part of our ego, it can be released without manifesting bad consequences in our life. Through this process, we rid ourselves completely of our ego and become enlightened. Enlightened people describe this experience as ecstatic oneness with all of existence and entering and sustaining this state often is the goal of yoga as commonly defined today. This implies that any bad occurrence in our lives is the result of past samskaras working themselves out. We could have worked them out ourselves, but didn’t, so now they manifest. This drives the western idea of karma as it gives incentive for right action in the moment in order to build a good future for ourselves but there’s another side to this coin. It also means that we should be thankful that those bad occurrences worked themselves out in the moments they do. These samskaras, like ruts, get deeper and more profound in time as our mind wears the same thought patterns again and again. The bad occurrence helps us eliminate the samskara that could have grown and manifested much more strongly in the future. Therefore, the yogi is thankful for all experiences, good and bad, much like the stoic who loves their fate and the Christian who trusts in God’s plan.

Applied to ourselves, amor fati, while difficult to practice is easy to see and accept as an idea but taken to the extreme it can feel truly evil. Being that yoga has worked through these ideas for hundreds to thousands more years than stoicism and Christianity, it’s easiest to see the extreme there. Seekers of yoga are obsessed with seeing the world as it actually is, and so they were always aware that some people have seemingly unreasonable levels of bad experiences, with children being the obvious example. Children are forcibly inducted into war, sold into slavery, and even worse, which raises the question, “how could a child have acquired such karma in such a short life, with a child’s heart?” I’m not sure about the origin of belief in reincarnation but it seems to me that it could have been to answer this question. A child could not have acquired this karma for themselves and so they must have karma from past lives. Having worked that karma through in this life, they now can look forward to better future lives. My personal bias finds this belief evil. It resulted in the caste system in India, and many similar structures, following the thought that people’s karma would lead them to be born into better or worse situations. I balk at this application of these ideas and take this as an example of dogmatic belief, and all dogma ends in human evil. Personally, my primary value is to avoid dogma at all costs understanding that my view of the world is parochial at best.

The stoics, on the seeming opposite end of the spectrum, also respond to the question of undeserved suffering. They return to the fundamental question of the stoic about whether we have any agency in the problem. If yes, then take action, and if no, accept it and respond with amor fati. This allows us to accept these seeming evils without concern unless we can end the suffering. It may be difficult to accept that the world is full of evil occurrences when we feel that it should be good but then again, observe the world and I doubt you’ll disagree. This tack on the problem is terribly difficult to accept until we realize we have no choice. There are many evils in the world that we ought to end, because we can. All other evil simply exists and so must be accepted.

Christ himself taught us much about this type of suffering. Jesus never complained, always helped those suffering around Him, and approached the downhearted with understanding and love rather than criticism. He also wept. Jesus, the Creator of the universe made man, understands our response to death and wants to end this suffering. Like the ancient yogi, modern Christians rationalize unjust suffering with the afterlife. Believers “go to a better place” we say, and so the goal is to ensure in the final moments that our loved ones come to faith. Even as an adolescent, I found this rationalization empty. Very few people have ever returned from death and none left us a written record of the experience. We have no data and therefore all understanding of the afterlife is guessing at best. However, the good news of Christianity is that God’s justice directed at our evil was fully covered by Christ. Therefore, I know that God is good, wants the best for us, and He knows what the afterlife holds. Trust in God’s plan is trust that, even in death, He is in control and is directing the best timeline. The only path forward is absolute faith in the creator.

Amor fati, trust in God’s plan, or the working out of samskaras all present consistent arguments to help us deal with our discontent in the world. It feels helpful to close by putting together the mindsets, beginning with the stoic version. Evil exists. We can accept it and there is pain and difficulty involved or we can fight it. If the fight results in less pain then we should. If the fight is futile then we have increased the pain and suffering by taking it into ourselves. In owning pain, we create thought patterns, or samskaras, of suffering that change our view of the world and interaction with it. Truly, we become some of the evil that we wanted to end. So we should introspect and meditate on our thought patterns and fix them only on the Creator. “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows,” -James 1:17. Or the converse as stated by Plato and Epictetus, respectively: “If it pleases the gods, so be it. They may well kill me, but they can’t hurt me,” and “He was sent to prison. But the observation ‘he has suffered evil,’ is an addition coming from you.”