If you follow the path governed by the society and your environment, then your future is destined. But if you reject it, break away from it then it is not pre-determined. You are not going to repeat like caged parrot, you are going to be free, when you reject the social and psychological structures built by society.
Credit ~ Talks by Krishnamurti in India 1963
Question: Are we not the creatures of destiny?
Krishnamurti: Is that of very great importance? Are you not the creatures of environment? When you are a Hindu, a Muslim and when you are so conditioned, obviously, you can foresee that you are the creatures of your condition and therefore of time, the creatures of a particular culture.
We live in this world, you and me. We are confused, we are unhappy; there is immense struggle, conflict. Is it possible to be free of all this? Or are we everlastingly destined to live like this? If you say that we are destined to live in this chaos, in this confusion, in this conflict, and it is inevitable, then there is no problem; once you accept that as inevitable, you have no problem. Then you have the problem: how to decorate your conflict, how to make it a little more refined - but, deep down, you have no problem. But if you say, ''Is it possible to step out of it completely?'' then it becomes an astonishing, vital, question. And to answer it, not verbally, not theoretically, to answer that actually, in daily living, you need tremendous vitality. And to have that vitality, you have to observe, you have to be alive, you have to be intensely sensitive.
Obviously, if you are lazy, if you accept, if you function mechanically, you become a poor imitation of the computer. That is your destiny obviously; that is the truth.
To be free of destiny, you have to reject it. And to reject psychologically, you need vitality. I am not talking about putting on clothes or doing silly absurd things that people do. You have psychologically to reject the whole structure of society of which you are a part - not reject it but deny it. If you reject it, deny it, in life and not in idea, then you are free of all destiny, nothing is ordained.
I said that a man who functions within the psychological field of a social structure is destined; almost certainly he will function like a cog in a machine. But when a man rejects that psychologically - not being ambitious, not being greedy, not following, not accepting authority, and so on - when he rejects all the psychological structure of the society of which he is, he rejects because he has understood all that. When a man has understood and therefore denies all that, for him there is no destiny; he is not a slave to circumstances.
Credit - Osho ~ From Misery to Enlightenment
Destiny means predetermined; my tomorrow is already predetermined by somebody. I have not even been consulted – as if it is none of my concern, I am nobody, just some playing cards in somebody’s hands; whatsoever he wants he makes out of me. Whatever game he plays, that is my destiny. And this is thought to be respectful?”
And the professor was not saying something crazy. That is what is thought all around the world. I said, “I can understand why you are shocked, because you have never thought about the word destiny. How can I have a destiny? I have not determined it. Then who is the guy who determines it? And what right has he got to determine it? He has not even asked me. I don’t know him; we have not even been introduced. Just for courtesy’s sake he could have asked me, ‘This is going to be your destiny – do you like it or not?’ But nobody has even bothered that much.”
Man has no destiny. And I say unto you that it is only man who has not any destiny. Dogs have; buffaloes have; donkeys have. They move on certain rails. Each donkey throughout millions of years has lived the same routine life: the birth, the love affair, and the difficulties of marriage, children, old age, all hopes shattered, all dreams unfulfilled, and the darkness of death. All the donkeys have lived that way, they are still living that way – but not man.
In fact, I want to say to you that all men are not behaving like men. A few are behaving like monkeys, a few are behaving like ... but none even tries to assert, “I am a man.” But that assertion contains so much, it is almost immeasurable.
So first: man has no destiny. Once you understand it, almost all your problems disappear. I say “almost” – perhaps ninety-nine percent disappear; one percent remains. I want it to remain. Ninety-nine percent of your problems are created by deviating you, by driving you into ways which are not for you. But whenever I said that this is an insult, the reaction was the same – a shock. Slowly I became aware that people don’t use words consciously. What they are saying is almost like a parrot, perhaps worse than a parrot.