QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
WITH
ZEN TAO

Q: Is it better for me to try and lead a celibate life, and to deny my instincts to marry and have children, because I believe that I can follow my spiritual path more easily and more quickly if I walk the path of life alone?  Even if it is in my destiny to marry and to have children, can I make the decision not to do so?

ZT: Firstly, I would say that it would be most unwise of you to deny your destiny, even if such a course of action were possible.  Recognise that whatever God decrees for you will take place, no matter what your little will would like to think.  However, on rare occasions, a human destiny can be changed, not because an individual demands and wills it, but because the Lords of Karma can see that a greater benefit will come from the change, not just for the individual concerned, but for all the other souls with whom that soul has a common destiny, and so they initiate the change.  Remember the expression "No man is an island, entire of itself."   You are never alone.   Every day the God in you is meeting and greeting the God in everyone around you.  Every day you are fulfilling God's Will, God's Plan, even though you are not aware of it on a conscious level.  Life is a great drama and you are an actor in that drama with a role to play.  What would happen if, to use the example of Shakespeare, you were Hamlet and halfway through the play you suddenly decided that you didn't want to play Hamlet according to the script but according to your own whims and fancies?  Chaos would result.   None of the other actors would know what was going on!  The drama would lose both purpose and meaning.  

Secondly, recognise that it was you that chose your destiny, usually with the help of great spiritual beings, before you even incarnated and took physical form. You chose your destiny, firstly, to settle your karmic account, that is to say to pay off negative karma and to reap the benefit of positive karma and, secondly, because you could see that it would help you to grow the most spiritually, to learn the lessons you most needed to learn.  Let me give you a simple example.  Let us suppose that you had experienced several lives as a celibate priest and had pursued a life of spiritual devotion single-mindedly, so much so that you had lost some of your humanity.  The path had become more important to you than the people that you met on that path.  So it was decreed that you should experience an incarnation as a family man, with a wife to love and honour, with children to raise and nurture, so that you could focus your being on your humanity once more and restore balance in your life.  However, after fathering three children, you tired of the day-to-day responsibilities, your soul remembered the lives of old as a celibate priest, and you felt the need to return to your old ways.  Now which path would most serve you the best?  Abandoning a wife and children, with the karma that goes with such an act, or returning to the ways of old, with which you were more comfortable, and which you wrongly believed would help you to evolve more rapidly.  Remember the lesson of this planet - Sacrificial Service in Love - and decide for yourself.  You might not want to accept what you have chosen to experience in this life, but be certain that you chose it, and that it is for your highest good.  

Has it ever occurred to you that the greatest spiritual growth for you may come from raising children?  Perhaps one of your children may be destined to teach you the very lesson that you need to learn in order to break the mold that you have created.  Perhaps you have offered to take on this life as an act of sacrifice in order to be the father of a very special soul, who will achieve great things in the world, in whose footsteps you will willingly follow.  The role of the celibate priest is a destiny that very few souls seek and embrace, for a very good reason.  It is a difficult path to walk and remember that when I say celibate I mean celibate in body, mind and soul.  It is not an act of denial, but a state of inner being, a state when you truly lose all identification with body consciousness.  You have chosen your destiny; you have no one else to blame for it!  You have chosen your role in society, the part that you have to play in the great Drama of Life, the karma you are to transmute, the wife that you are to marry, the children that are to come through you.  It is not for you to like or dislike your role; it is for you to accept it.  It is not for you to place values on the roles that you want to play, to say, for example, that the priest is more advanced than the father, that the esoteric is to be valued more than the mundane.   What would have happened two thousand years ago, for example, if a simple carpenter and his wife, with little social status and money, by name Joseph and Mary, had decided that they did not want to become parents?   I can assure you that it is in the acceptance of God's Will that you will find true happiness, that your restless soul will be stilled.

Q:  Presumably, if one truly felt that one should not marry, it would be wrong to do so just because society expected you to do it?

ZT:  Of course it would.  That is an entirely different question.  Not everyone is destined to marry, and even if you do marry, not everyone is destined to have children. You must always be true to your inner voice, your conscience, but be sure that it is your inner voice and that you are not playing mind games in order to avoid your responsibilities.  Remember that happiness lies not in doing what you like, but in liking what you have to do.  Again I would remind you of the lesson of this planet - Sacrificial Service in Love.  So few today are prepared to sacrifice even the very least of their desires.  The world is becoming more and more self-centred, more and more concerned with the individual rather than with the whole.  The greatest gift that you can give your Creator is to lay down your life for another, and by lay down your life I do not mean death, I mean by the sacrifice of your wants and your desires in order to help another.

Q: If we were in the least bit psychic then we might have some idea of our destiny, but most of us have no idea whatsoever.  It seems so unfair.  How are we supposed to follow our destiny if we don't know what it is?  I meditate for hours on my future but have no feelings at all.  Are we not meant to know?  Is it all meant to be a dark secret?

ZT: The very fact that you are aware of the force of destiny is a sign of your spiritual awakening, but I would think, my son, that 99.99% of the population has no concept of their destiny whatsoever or, even if they think they do, they are wrong!  Now I'm not picking on you when I say that you are ill equipped to handle your destiny.  If you knew what was in the future for you, you would probably try to avoid it or change it, especially if it involved pain or suffering.  For example, suppose that you knew that your firstborn son was to die of a painful disease in his eleventh year.  Could you live with and accept that fact, or would you strive to change it?  Would you blame God for his death and feel that you had been unfairly treated, or would you be happy for your son and rejoice in the fact that he only needed to touch Earth for such a short period of time and that he could throw off his restricting body of clay and return to his true home, to his true Father?  Would you treat that child the same as your other children? The drama of life is, thankfully, hidden from most of you.  You do not know your future, although that knowledge is there and is available to the soul that has the consciousness to handle it or, should I say, to accept it.  If you know the drama, then the drama no longer has meaning and purpose; it is no longer a teaching tool.   The drama is fixed; the only choice that you have in the matter is in how you respond to it.

Those that seek to know their destiny, to know what lies in the future, do so usually because they are discontented with the present.  They do not realise that how they choose to experience the present in no little way determines how they will experience the future.  The present is but a preparation for the future. The future does not determine the present.  Though you may have the destiny, shall we say, to be a great scholar, and to teach many people many important things, if you do not work now and learn to become that scholar you will fail to achieve the highest that your destiny is offering you.  Do not think that the goals that are laid out for you in your destiny are something that you will automatically achieve, like putting 10 pence in a slot machine and getting a ticket.   What you meet in life is your destiny, but what you make of it is up to you.   To revert to the analogy of the drama once more, you are actors on the stage of life and just as on the stage of the theatre, so there are good and there are bad actors.  There are actors that give real life and meaning to their roles, who truly move you, and there are actors who, even though they speak the words and act the parts, leave you totally unmoved.  However I would like to make it very clear that destiny is not an exam that you pass or fail.  Your destiny embraces every possibility of choice that you will make during your lifetime.  Every choice, and the results that flow from that choice, are a learning experience.   Indeed, after death, when you go over your life with the Lords of Karma, you will learn much of your self from observing the choices that you made.  This will be the preparation for your next life, for your next destiny.

Q:  So are you saying that we just have to do the best that we can in the present, forget about the future and let our destiny unfold as has been ordained.  We have no choice in the matter.  Is that what you are saying?

ZT:  It would be true to say that certain people have intuitive feelings about their destiny.   For example, they will know intuitively that one day they will live in another country.  They will know that one day they will be standing in an auditorium and talking to thousands of people.  Yes, they will even know that in this life they will have two wives, not at the same time, I hasten to add!  They feel these intuitive thoughts within themselves, not that they particularly seek them or desire them, but just because they come into their conscious being.   Similarly some people 'know' at the very first meeting the person that they are going to marry.  They 'know' how many children they are going to have.  Others have a very clear understanding of the profession they are to follow in life.   If you listen to a young child, being fresh from the higher planes of life and relatively unconditioned by the aura of human society, they often have a clear understanding of their future, indeed, of the future of the Earth.  They come prepared for a very different Earth to the one that their parents inherited.  These soul vibrations surface in the mental realm and sometimes can lead to confusion and disorientation.  In the olden days a seer could be burnt at the stake for knowing the future.  Today they are simply mocked.  Nevertheless the Force of Destiny does exist on every level of creation.  It is the wise soul who listens and attunes to this Force, not to change It, not to avoid It, not to publicise It, but to become one with It.  It is the wise soul who chooses to flow with this Force rather than to swim against It.

Q:   I often hear people talking about destiny and implying that when something goes wrong in their lives that it is their destiny and that it is therefore unavoidable.  For example, someone gets married, has kids and then after a few years decides to get divorced and says it was meant to be; it was in their destiny.  Is this correct or are they simply trying to explain away their own mistakes and weaknesses?  Is everything that happens always due to destiny?  Do we have no choice in the matter?  Are we simply puppets on a string that God is jerking?

ZT:  Destiny can best be described as a broad path along which you walk whilst you are in physical existence.  Every single soul has a destiny, a plan for its life, and evolved souls chose their destinies most carefully.  They chose the race and the country into which they are to incarnate.  They choose their parents.  They choose their social society and their friends.  They choose their marriage partner and agree to allow certain children to come through them.   Often times the same soul group incarnates together for life after life after life. Your brother in one life is your wife in the next, is your father in the next and is your daughter in the next. And so it goes on for thousands of lives!  All of this selection happens on the higher planes of life before the soul even takes physical birth.  An aware soul that has incarnated for many, many lives usually has a strong sense of its own destiny.  The soul is aware that it is walking along a predestined path and that no event happens in its life by chance.  However, only souls of aged evolution and wisdom are permitted to know their destiny, because inherent in that knowledge is the acceptance of it, is the recognition that it is God's Will for them. You cannot change your destiny.  You might postpone it for a short while, but you cannot avoid it.  Even if you commit suicide, you will have to return in another life to face the same destiny.  Every soul enters and leaves the great Drama of Life at its appointed time.  There is no such thing as an accidental death!

How many of you, if you knew that your destiny was to die tomorrow in a car accident, would actually get in your car tomorrow and drive?  Would you not choose to stay at home and to leave your car in the garage and try to avoid your destiny because you did not want to meet it?  So each of you, according to your point of soul consciousness, is permitted to a degree to have an awareness of your destiny, especially of the ten-year cycle in which you are living.  Furthermore, if you go into deep meditation on your birthday you will receive strong feelings about the year that is to come.  Inherent therefore in any such situation is the process that I will call preparation.  As we are approaching Easter let us consider the destiny of the Master Jesus, as he went up to Jerusalem two thousand years ago.  Was he proceeding blindly to his fate or was he fully prepared and ready to accept what was going to happen?  Had he not through prayer and fasting come to an understanding of his being and of the purpose of his destiny?  He did not travel along that road to Jerusalem unknowingly, stumbling in the darkness, fearing the outcome.  He knew that he was following his destiny.  There might have been moments of doubt and uncertainty as he identified with his body consciousness, as are recorded in the Bible, but ultimately he knew that he was following His Father's Will for him and in that certain knowledge he walked the path willingly and freely, even to the extent of forgiving those who persecuted and crucified him.  For when you recognise that everything that manifests is God's Will, is God's Plan, who is there to blame?  Truly every part of our beings is in God's hands, so what is there to fear?