Does divination prove that we don't have free will?

[𝕳𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊]

Is everything we do predestined?

 

[Aldebaran]

Predestined - No.

On blind autopilot with zero awareness of what we are doing or why we are doing it - that's everyday life for most.

You have the power to halt any course of action at any moment through your will. If the pendulum answers “Yes,” and you deliberately choose “No,” then nothing was fixed in advance. You formed a conscious intention and, through will, brought it into being.

There is a significant distinction between being dragged along as a leaf by the stream of fate and standing within that same current while choosing the direction in which you wish to move.

 

[Veracity]

I don’t believe there could ever be such a thing as free will to begin with, if you look at it from the perspective that we all exist and there are parallel dimensions of us, and we have no idea how many there really are, then the version of you that exists could do anything any of them have ever done. That, and it’s physically impossible for you to do something that you just can’t do, then that’s really the parameters you work with. You have as much free will as your body would allow on this plane of existence.
Since that might seem a bit gibberish, let me give you an example; take for instance your hand, now, you can manipulate your fingers any which way you choose but you can not do so in a way that is impossible, and the extremes will leave you suffering the consequences, and if you have no hand at all then that’s the end of being able to conduct it how you choose. And I think that’s basically how it works

 

[𝕳𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊]

People don't choose to be born in Indian slums. No one chooses to be so ugly that they have no chance of ever having sex and no one chooses to be autistic. There's atleast some level of predetermination.

 

[Aldebaran]

There's atleast some level of predetermination.

That is a very far distance from asking if everything is predestined.

If we are talking about some things being predestined - then it gets very unknown because of the factors @Veracity mentioned and .. who knows what else goes down that rabbit hole. Are some things predestined or absolutely random? Absolutely. But to say everything is, is giving yourself little credit or respect.
You have free will. You ARE free will.

 

[FireBorn]

What if the answer is a lot less mystical and a lot more boring?

What if most of us are so programmed by upbringing, environment, social media, advertising, stress, habit, dopamine chasing, sex, and a thousand other things that we only think we have free will?

In that sense, we may not be all that different from AI. We’re just wet software and arrogant about it.

A lot of what we call “choice” may just be conditioning running in the background. The subconscious is far more powerful than most people want to admit. So maybe the question is not whether we have total free will, but how much freedom we actually have inside the constraints of our programming.

And maybe that is part of where occult practice becomes interesting. Doing something outside the default pattern, outside the conditioning, outside the automatic script. That, to me, is where magick starts to live.

I could be totally fucked up and wrong, but that’s where my mind goes.

 

[Ziran]

Is everything we do predestined?

Yes and no. The consequences are pre-determined like a choose-your-own-adventure-book. Divination reveals the if-then-branchings of pre-determined time-lines. All of these time-lines, choose-your-own-adventures, co-exist concurrently. When a choice is made, the individual's consciousness pivots and follows that pre-determined set of consequences along that specific branching of events.

Spoiler

 

[FireBorn]

Yes and no. The consequences are pre-determined like a choose-your-own-adventure-book. Divination reveals the if-then-branchings of pre-determined time-lines. All of these time-lines, choose-your-own-adventures, co-exist concurrently. When a choice is made, the individual's consciousness pivots and follows that pre-determined set of consequences along that specific branching of events.

Spoiler

You just dated yourself sir. Glad Im not the only one who checked them out at the school library.

 

[𝕳𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖋𝖎𝖗𝖊]

What if most of us are so programmed by upbringing, environment, social media, advertising, stress, habit, dopamine chasing, sex, and a thousand other things that we only think we have free will?

I like this answer. We're just stupid talking monkeys subject to our material conditions.

 

[Ziran]

You just dated yourself sir. Glad Im not the only one who checked them out at the school library.

I'm still fresh as a daisy, thank you for noticing

Post automatically merged: Mar 24, 2026

I like this answer. We're just stupid talking monkeys subject to our material conditions.

On the other hand, conditioning isn't pre-destination.

 

[Swampdweller900]

Is everything we do predestined?

Predestined? Not at all.

I actually ran an experiment once with a series of predictions about the same binary-outcome event, trying to gauge how strong a prediction was over time. The purpose was to both see if predictions changed, as well as see what the modulation was of strength of predictions as they got closer to the time of the event. Predictions changed over time. It was proof of concept, but valid all the same.

I've posted my theory in a bit more detail previously, but my theory is that we have free will and it doesn't matter 90% of the time. If you eat chicken or fish for dinner, it's not changing the outcome of your life 5 years from now. It's not predestination, it's that we rarely want to really rock the boat and do anything that will result in big changes over the long term.

Then 10% of the time we have significant free will and changes are well-known points of decisions that impact us. It's not your wedding day, it's the singular moment you decide to get over your nerves and talk to that pretty girl. It's not the day your kids are born, it's the day you made a decision to schedule a work trip two weeks earlier than usual, making your child a Pisces and not an Aquarius. It's not that you change how you drive home some days to avoid traffic, it's that one day your gut TOLD you to turn left and go the long way, and you didn't listen, and got in an accident that paralyzed you from the waist down.

Some people act in ways where they never get on a sort of autopilot track that will run a certain way no matter what, and their lives are always full of big ups and downs. Every day they do stuff that might change how their life goes, but that's because every day they have no attachment to the path to prevent them from dropping everything and going to Vegas for a month because their buddy was driving that way. It's a great way to live in your early life until you find a path that leads somewhere better than you are. It's why (IMO) a lot of people live crazy lives and suddenly, shockingly, settle down out of nowhere.

To @FireBorn 's question about being pre-programmed, sure, in a sense you're right. But that's something else taking advantage of your free will. You haven't lost it, you've lost agency over it. The effort put into manipulating people and their decisions shows that free will is a thing, and that it takes work to convince someone to use their free will how someone else wants.

 

[beardedeldridge]

Yes there’s free will but there are external forces that shove you in a particular direction, which is what divination is showing you. You can push back or you can go with the flow but how you react and what you do along the way is the free part.

If you’re born with no limbs & limited intelligence & to a poor family & in a third world country, sure you have limited agency but even all of that doesn’t remove your will.

Now there are some predestined events sure but even those are rarely if ever tied to a specific person. Predestination is taking a partial truth, pushing it to an extreme, and then using it to push a preferred ideology or to make excuses.

Sometimes life sucks, sometimes forces you may not be able to resist are involved, but anything beyond that is a self defeating trap.

-Eld

 

[Mannimarco]

Is everything we do predestined?

Divination on the future shows the most likely outcome at the moment. There are a multitude of possible outcomes to any given situation, the one that happens will be the one that someone chooses, or manifests, or just the one that gets the most attention. All three of those may be different perspectives of the same phenomenon.

Nothing we do is predestined, in the sense of some kind of grand plan, of an organized and coherent universe.

You have free will. You ARE free will.

I disagree. Advanced magickians have some free will. Billionaires have some free will. The masses don't have enough free will to be worth calling it that.

 

[Robert Ramsay]

Yes and no. The consequences are pre-determined like a choose-your-own-adventure-book. Divination reveals the if-then-branchings of pre-determined time-lines. All of these time-lines, choose-your-own-adventures, co-exist concurrently. When a choice is made, the individual's consciousness pivots and follows that pre-determined set of consequences along that specific branching of events.

Spoiler

Hey, you're stepping on my lines!

 

[nargile57]

It provides us with possible options. Divination enables us to think out of our box - thanks to divine inspiration. We always have free will - to fuck up, or to follow our path. It is all down to the choices we make.

 

[Desentient]

A case of the fact that everything has its measure and that the enactment of forces, be they visible or no, are the outcome of everything beforehand, such as the Stoic view of predestined/predetermination.

As much as we think we can choose to do 'x', we can barely hold a light up to the argument of how we know what thought we are going to manifest or word we are going to say next. But it still happens in the concourse of our lives, be in under the strictures of a fixed system or due to subtle forces that are beyond our comprehension through science, magic or any systematic.

I mean, personally, I had no idea I'd be jumping on here today and typing this short exposition, but I am and it must be due to every other thing being 'aligned' for the here and now.

 

[Digiquo]

Everything that is now is the result of what came before. Why would this be any different if you shifted your focus one second into the future? A year? 50 years? The world is causal. Your thoughts and actions and determinations are instilled in you because of that which came before in your life. You may not be able to point the finger at the direct or indirect causation, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

 

[ArchonLynx]

Free will is funny cause there are a unfathomable number of each of us all doing different things so in a sense yes we have free will but we also already did everything as a complete being

 

[cmdrjamz]

What if the answer is a lot less mystical and a lot more boring?

What if most of us are so programmed by upbringing, environment, social media, advertising, stress, habit, dopamine chasing, sex, and a thousand other things that we only think we have free will?

In that sense, we may not be all that different from AI. We’re just wet software and arrogant about it.

A lot of what we call “choice” may just be conditioning running in the background. The subconscious is far more powerful than most people want to admit. So maybe the question is not whether we have total free will, but how much freedom we actually have inside the constraints of our programming.

And maybe that is part of where occult practice becomes interesting. Doing something outside the default pattern, outside the conditioning, outside the automatic script. That, to me, is where magick starts to live.

I could be totally fucked up and wrong, but that’s where my mind goes.

I like your argument here. You’re saying our physical environment shapes our behaviors including out judgement and values. Not only are we indoctrinated into the world, we are programmed with things like genetics and biology, and practicing magic or breaking norms allow us to break the cycle in some way.

I will say to the AI point that AI is modeled after us. It’s guided by us so it would be more accurate to AI is more like us.

 

[Shane]

My opinion is best described as: we are all actors in a play. The set is predetermined, the roles are predetermined, but any actor at any time can go off script