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KARMA AND FREEDOM
over necessity by which it converts necessity to its own use and thus frees itself from it. The human agent is free-he is not the plaything of fate or driftwood on the tide of uncontrolled events. He can actively mould the future instead of passively suffering the past. The past may become an opportunity or an obstacle Everything depends on what we make of it and not what it makes of us." (Prof. S Radhakrishnan: An Idealist View of Life. p.279).
6 FREE WILL VERSUS FATALISM
The controversy becween free will and fatalism is still going on in the West and no one has come to any definite conclusion. It is a great pity that the doctrine of Karma is mistaken for fatalism. Fatalism is the doctrine that all events are subject to fate and happen by unavoidable necessity.
Fate is otherwise known as luck or fortune. That undefinable mysterious something which brings trials, successes and failures to man, which shapes and moulds him by teaching lessons of various sort, which takes care of him like a mother, which brings various sort of experiences, which brings cloudy days and days of bright sunshine, which raises a beggar to the level of a landlord and hurls down a mighty potentate to the level of a street-beggar, which gives different kinds of fruits and experiences to two people of equal talents and capacities, which made Napolean at one
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