Is Our Life Pre-determined?
An excerpt adapted from Selecting Your Psychic: From Main Street to Wall Street
by Victoria lynn Weston
The relationship between a psychic reading and free will raises one of the most compelling questions about prediction: If the future can be seen, can it also be changed?
Suppose a psychic accurately describes an event that has not yet happened.
Has the psychic seen your future—or merely one possible future?
And if you change your actions after hearing the prediction, was the psychic wrong? Or did the reading itself alter what came next?
These questions take us beyond the familiar idea of fortune-telling and into far more provocative territory: the nature of time, choice and human freedom.
Is the Future Already There?
We ordinarily experience time as a sequence. The past is gone, the present is occurring and the future has yet to exist.
But physics offers a more complicated picture.
One philosophical interpretation of Einstein’s theory of relativity suggests that past, present and future may exist within a larger continuum of space-time. From this perspective, time may not be passing in the simple way we experience it. Our consciousness may merely be limited to perceiving one moment at a time.
If so, perhaps psychic perception does not create an image of the future. Perhaps it extends beyond our ordinary field of awareness and detects an event—or the emerging structure of an event—that already occupies a place within that continuum.
It is a fascinating possibility. It also creates an immediate problem.
If a psychic can predict the future, are we truly free to change it?
Psychic Prediction or Probability?
Nothing is more frustrating than receiving a strong prediction from a psychic you trust, only to have the event fail to occur. The explanation often offered is: “You changed it through free will.”
That answer can sound suspiciously convenient.
Yet the failure of a prediction does not necessarily mean that nothing was perceived. A psychic may have detected the strongest probability developing from the people, motives and circumstances present at the time of the reading.
Understanding how psychic readings predict the future begins with recognizing the difference between certainty and probability.
A probability, however compelling, is not always a certainty.
Imagine standing at the beginning of a road. Its direction is visible. Unless something intervenes, you can reasonably anticipate where it leads. But a road may contain exits, obstructions and intersections. You may change direction. Another person may make a choice that affects you. New information may cause you to reconsider everything.
The psychic may perceive the road ahead. The deeper question is whether you are obligated to remain on it.
What Do We Mean by Free Will?
The idea of free will has challenged philosophers, theologians and scientists for centuries. At its heart are two very different concepts of human freedom.
The first is sometimes called contracausal freedom: the belief that, under precisely the same circumstances, a person could still have chosen differently.
If you could return to an earlier moment in your life—with the same history, personality, desires and knowledge—could you make an entirely different decision?
This view suggests that human choice can transcend heredity, conditioning and circumstance. Our ideas of praise, blame, remorse and regret appear to depend upon it. We say, “I could have acted differently,” because we believe another choice was genuinely available to us.
But was it?
Every decision arises from something: desire, fear, experience, temperament, necessity or belief. No choice emerges from an absolute vacuum. Even rebellion against our conditioning may itself be the result of earlier experiences that taught us to rebel.
The second conception is contextual freedom. Under this view, you are free when you can act according to your own wishes without being forced or prevented from doing so.
If you choose to change careers and no one compels or restrains you, that decision may be called free—even if your personality, disappointments and ambitions made the choice increasingly probable.
Contextual freedom does not require us to be independent of every influence. It asks whether our actions reflect our own interests, needs and considered judgment.
Most discussions of free will within psychic practice appear to rely upon this second meaning.
The psychic may perceive what you are likely to do. But the perception itself does not force you to do it.
How Psychic Readings and Free Will Intersect
Here we encounter a fascinating paradox.
If a psychic warns you about an approaching difficulty and you act upon that warning, the predicted event may never occur.
Does that make the prediction inaccurate—or useful?
Suppose a reading suggests that accepting a particular business offer will create complications. You investigate more carefully, discover information you had overlooked and reject the offer. The predicted trouble never materializes because the reading helped you avoid it.
In that case, the value of the psychic reading cannot be measured solely by whether the prediction came true. Its value may lie in the awareness it created.
The same principle can apply to a relationship, career change, property decision or business opportunity. A reading may reveal the direction in which events appear to be moving, but insight changes the person who receives it. Once you possess new information, you are no longer making the same decision under precisely the same conditions.
Perhaps this is where psychic reading and free will meet.
A psychic reading does not necessarily announce an unavoidable fate. It may illuminate the consequences already forming around your present choices.
Can a Psychic Reading Change Your Future?
A responsible psychic should not make you feel powerless before your own future.
The purpose of a reading is not to replace your judgment or make your decisions for you. It is to broaden your perspective—to identify patterns, motives, opportunities and potential consequences that may be difficult to recognize when you are standing in the middle of a situation.
Some events may possess tremendous momentum. Others remain fluid. Still others depend upon the choices of people whose intentions may change.
Free will may not mean that we can become anything, choose anything or escape every consequence. It may mean that, within the circumstances we have inherited and the conditions confronting us, we retain some power to respond.
The most meaningful question, then, may not be:
“Is my future already decided?”
It may be:
“If I could see where my present choices are leading, what would I choose to do differently?”
That is where a psychic reading becomes more than a prediction. It becomes a conversation with possibility—and an opportunity to participate more consciously in what happens next.
What Possibilities Are Forming Around Your Decision?
A psychic reading for an important decision can help you recognize possibilities, consequences and influences that may not yet be obvious.
If you are contemplating a career change, relationship, property decision or business opportunity, a private psychic reading can help you examine the direction in which events appear to be moving—and the choices that remain yours.
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Read the entire chapter – available for digital download from Amazon
Selecting Your Psychic; from Main Street to Wall Street – digital copy from Amazon
