isn't the first rule of psychics don't tell people what's supposed to happen? cause that's...

Rules?

It's like time travel. If you interfere in any way - you will change what's going to happen, to whatever extent.

Either you believe in inescapable destiny, or you do not. If you believe in it, then nothing you do will influence the outcome in any direction no matter what, so you are completely free. If you don't believe, then you approach destiny as a person who has no way of foreseeing outcomes, so you might as well act like a free agent. In both cases, no rules.

I would say it is rather the opposite. When going to the past from the future you want to be very careful as you don't know what changes might alter it from the future you came from. Think of it as a river which can take certain types of change without altering its flow, but if you make a minor change in the right place the river might have a completely different character downriver from before.

If one believes in an unconditional state like destiny, then it won't matter what steps such a person takes to avoid the future outcome because destiny will find that person. I don't think Newtonian physics apply. It's totally in the realm of faith and belief. That's why I'm curious as to why somebody would apply laws or rules. I realize that laws aren't necessarily rational—far from it. It's just that unconditional, absolute states like destiny are a law unto themselves, not subject to it from outside forces. That's why it's so weird that there is a code of conduct. Does that make sense?

i love this philosophical debate on time travel and destiny

well in my culture, that's what the past people always said. my mom used to say it to me too, that I shouldn't tell anyone about my dreams, especially if it is a bad dream.sometimes when I do something and it feels like a dejavu. I start thinking that I might have done the dejavu thing in one of my dream that I forgot when I wake up, coz I remembered my mom said that dreams that u forgot sometimes came true/happens.

"Hey, Cosmic Waitress! I'll have a side of destiny to go with my freedom fries." Umm, no, I don't think I have an iron in this fire. I am interested in it though.

I know that there are two Sanskrit words concerning destiny: "karma" which is like your cause and effect example: Object + Motion = Equal and Opposite Reaction. There are about 600 variations on the Sanskrit word for karma including personal karma, family karma, tribal karma, racial karma, neighbour karma, cultural karmas, religious karma, karmas related to the places you live, national karmas, political karmas, karma related to your physical body, your thoughts, your desires, your health, your big toe ... and that's about all I can think of off the top of my head, and I didn't even reach a dozen. So, they've given the subject a LOT of thought. Basically, karma is a side effect of life and you can't escape it, although, according to the people who know these things (which I am not), you must if you would experience Nirvana or Paradise, and not be reincarnated into the form worlds again. Some Buddhists and Hindus do consciously try to not cause any further karma by not acting, not moving, not thinking, not feeling and, eventually, not breathing. So they negate their existence. I suspect this is a very impractical way to live for most.

There is also "dharma" which is more like inescapable destiny, or like the parcel of accumulated karma from past lives (as written on the Akashic records) which are our inescapable lot to deal with in this life. In a way, one could say that "death" is the inevitable dharma of every human life.

There is also a Judaic way of looking at destiny, but they describe it more in terms of "Torah" or the Law, and it seems to be related more to a kind of duty to God combined with luck. I suppose luck is a very watered down form of destiny.

Long ago, I came across a Zoroastrian verse that had to deal with how all of man's (meaning humanity's) actions and destiny are governed by the stars, but that once a man became purified by the Divine Fire, he was no longer subject to the whims of the stars.

The Western hermeticists taught that the state of Transfiguration liberated the soul from creation and destiny.

Oh, and there is a fantastic magic realist novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez called "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Jorge Luis Borges liked to write about it, too. If you like trippy, thinky lit, those are two good sources!

In each example above, destiny or dharma seems to be inescapable as long as we are alive and kicking, but nowhere are we provided with field guides to dealing with it if the destiny is foretold, other than that most of these major world religions don't place much stock with psychics or the practice of psychism, and see it as a ... distraction? ╮(￣▽￣)╭

I should think there are two different issues here; destiny in the more religious sense, and having some sort of foretelling of the future. The first (destiny) may or may not be avoidable and may include the second (some sort of foretelling) depending on interpretation and religion. But that doesn't mean that anyone who feels that they have had some sort of premonition about the future necessarily believes in destiny, especially in the religious sense. For all we know, though our normal experience of time is linear in one direction we might be able through quirks in time we don't even understand, by dreams and such connect in other ways than we normally do.

My point here is that whether or not we have a destiny in the religious sense is a separate discussion as to whether or not we might know the future in a more mechanical sense. In both cases the question remains can it be avoided? Destiny in the more religious sense probably not, but by definition you'll never be certain of your destiny until life is over. In the second more mechanical sense I would say yes, as no course of events can't be changed, though it may be harder than some people think. As a historian I can say there are usually more than one reason why things happened the way they did.

Oh, gosh, if you can read Borges and GGM in the original Spanish, what a treat you're in for! You will probably get a much better sense of the meaning than I did, although I must say I am proud of my edition.

I see what you mean. To be sure, I follow my "gut" a lot, which is to say that if I'm walking out at night in a city and I get a sketchy feeling in my gut about a blind corner up ahead, I will listen to that warning and cross the street or find an alternate route. If I get a creepy feeling that something's 'off' about some bloke I'm talking to, I cut the chitchat short and walk away. I've always called that sense 'instinct' though, and assumed it was the same as any animal experiences. If I were to have a dream about being in a car accident on a certain street on a certain day, then I would probably avoid that street and cars in general on that day.

But I've had premonitory dreams in the past and they aren't that literal, which is more the reason why I wouldn't be inclined to speak about them to others. I can just imagine what my friends would say, "Girl, you dreamed about a car crashing into a light standard. How the hell did you get 9/11 out of that?" In other words, it means something to me, but everything of use to others is lost in translation.

The thing is, if I sense a disaster or accident or something criminal ahead, in no matter what form the communication comes to me, I WILL talk about it to others. It's stupid not to, like throwing people under a bus when you can save everyone. So why the rules about keeping mum?

Also, I tend to ponder a lot about the levels of difference in instinct (because I've worked with people who have suffered because they suppressed their instincts and bad things happened to them.) At some point, it seems to flip into an experience of reality which people call 'wisdom'. But that wisdom isn't the same as how religion talks about wisdom, which is tied to varying experiences of enlightenment, which have nothing to do with whether good or bad things happen to us during our regular life.

I guess that's my longwinded way of saying that the definition of 'destiny' is very confusing, just like the definition of 'wisdom' is confusing. I've always thought of destiny as something written in the substance of creation, unavoidable and a law unto itself. A premonition isn't destiny, however, but an omen or instinct of something which COULD happen if you don't act to influence the outcome when you recognize it coming up. It's kind of like, when you see thunderheads in the sky barreling towards you, it's a good idea to take shelter.

Nah- that's just us humans being utterly predictable and unimaginative, not to mention egotistical. You know the kind of thinking that they or now is different so the rules don't or won't apply to them, and yet it always does.

...just want to tell you something not related to all this discussion...

I loved your comment...your way of writing is beautiful...
are you a writer perhaps? seems like you do that for living! xD
ヾ(☆▽☆)

Thank you. No, I'm not technically a writer, although I am required to write for my job. I am not a journalist or science reporter.

BWAHAHAHA-Hurghgh ...I choose my words carefully. At work, that is. Elsewhere, not so much.

I see cases in which they do tell em but the predicted events still goes its way cuz i guess it was all part of it

Or people just can't help but still respond the same way despite having been told and even if they believe. Think how hard it might be to get ONE person to respond differently to a given situation than they otherwise would to change the outcome. If you need a whole group of people to change their response. It will depend on their personality and how flexible a mindset they have whether an individual is likely to respond differently or in the end go with "tried and true".

A flexible mindset is absolutely required if people pay attention to instincts, because instincts tend to contradict observable sensory data. When clients start to delve into certain types of past trauma, for example, they often zero right into that moment when they made a decision to go against what their instincts or feelings were telling them. Not that this makes them complicit in their own victimization—that's a whole other discussion. Because instinct has an irrational quality, we are socially trained from early on to ignore those signals and subsume them to more objective processing, one which interferes by throwing the person into a state where they are second-guessing themselves at critically decisive moments.

Sometimes instincts can lead you astray as well. But what I was referring to was more the conscious choice between choosing to react to a situation as you normally might, or doing something different, which may even be slightly out of character. Take for example someone who is generally not prone to violence, in fact very against it, and yet explain that they must react to the threat before them lethally with no hesitation or the future of x is grim. For argument's sake let's say they believe in what's at stake, but what are the odds of whether or not when it came to it they'd still believe that a peaceful and rational solution could be found rather than having to use violence? This isn't about being completely anti-violence, but just a person who avoids the use of it normally. That mental habit may hamper if all of a sudden they need to consciously choose to act with lethal intent. Some will recognize the necessity, while others will try to rationalize why there really is no need for violence and by extension for them to be violent.