Before awakening, fate is fixed; after awakening, there is freedom is a proposition, within Beyond-the-Algorithm thinking, concerning the relation between fate and freedom. It holds that, before one awakens to the Awaring, every path a life can take is like a reel of film already shot: causes and effects interlock link by link, and everything is fixed fate. But once one awakens to the Awaring, one discovers that all of this — including even the most ultimate cause and effect — is manifested by the Awaring, “created” by the very person who lives it without that person ever knowing, and therefore is, in essence, infinitely free. The original formulation runs: “Before awakening, every path has its fixed fate… but after awakening to the Awaring, you discover that everything is infinitely free; even the most ultimate cause and effect is manifested by the Awaring… we are ‘creating’ everything without knowing it.” The proposition treats “fixed fate” and “freedom” not as two opposing worlds but as two appearances of one and the same reality under two states of cognition.
Two Appearances of One Reality
The heart of this proposition is not to argue over whether “fate is fixed or free,” but to point out that the answer depends on the level of cognition the observer occupies. In the unawakened state, a person is embedded in the web of cause and effect and experiences certainty: whatever happens has its source, every path is locked by what came before, like a reel of film already exposed and only waiting to be projected. This is continuous with the causal structure described in Effect Precedes Cause: The Event Casts Its Blueprint Backward — seen from the inside, cause and effect are iron.
But this certainty is merely a product of perspective. What awakening reveals is that this whole causal web is itself Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring: the observer is not a character thrown by fate into the plot, but the plot’s hidden author. So “fixed fate” is not overturned; it is taken up into a higher layer of “freedom” — a person experiences fixed fate precisely because he himself created that fate and then forgot he had done so. Fixed fate is what freedom looks like in the state of forgetting; freedom is what fixed fate looks like in the state of awakening.
Awakening Is Seeing Clearly, Not Rewriting the Code
The most crucial qualification of this proposition is its answer to the question of what awakening actually changes. Here a clear distinction is drawn between two things: awakening is awakening to the real, not editing the code of the game. Most people’s expectations of awakening point in exactly the wrong direction —
Teacher Gao with the cheat-mode is guiding everyone to awaken to the real; he is not editing the code of the game. And yet everyone wants to know how the code of this illusion works — indeed, whether there is some way to go in and tweak the code.
Hidden here is a distinction: what people want is to “defy heaven and rewrite their fate” at the level of the illusion — to find the code, rewrite the parameters, and make reality rearrange itself according to their will. But this is exactly where the effort is misdirected, because no matter how much you edit the code at the level of the illusion, it is still maneuvering within the illusion. The freedom awakening brings is not “I can rewrite the plot,” but “I see clearly that the plot was all along manifested by me.” The former is still spinning around inside the products of The World Is Created: A Theory of Creation; the latter goes straight to the creator itself. This is the same principle as To Apply Effort Is Already to Err: Awakening Is Seeing More Clearly, Not Believing More Deeply: the direction of awakening is to see more clearly, not to grip more tightly and change more.
Conjuring Illusion Within Illusion Is Life Itself
Once we grant that awakening is seeing clearly rather than rewriting, a question follows: if one already knows this is a game, knows that everything is unreal, should one — can one — still experience and pursue those “false” pleasures? The answer —
A lot of the time people want to conjure illusion within illusion, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that idea — it’s like getting a massage when you’re tired. Even though it’s all unreal, this too is life itself.
“Conjuring illusion within illusion” means: knowing full well that it is illusion, one still fashions a further layer of illusion within the illusion in order to experience it. This is not condemned as obsession or backsliding. Seeing the real clearly does not require renouncing experience; just as knowing that the comfort a massage brings is impermanent and will dissolve in the end does not stop one from getting a massage when tired. This guards the proposition against sliding into nihilism — awakening does not require a person to regard all experience with cold detachment from then on; it lets a person, having seen clearly, still freely choose to throw himself in. This forms a subtle tension with, and a mutual completion of, To Know the Illusion Is to Leave It: To See Through Is to Be Free: to know the illusion is to be able to leave it, and one may also know the illusion and yet still play within it — in neither case is one any longer bound by the illusion.
When You Are Omnipotent, Set Limits, and the Game Becomes Fun
If after awakening there is infinite freedom and omnipotence, will “infinite freedom” itself not, on the contrary, drain the meaning out of experience? A game metaphor supplies the most crucial link of this proposition:
The one thing you have to do is switch off the “golden finger,” set yourself constraints, make the game hard — only then does it become fun… Press that “brave” button and delete every memory.
This metaphor explains why fixed fate exists and why it is necessary. A being who is omnipotent in a virtual world will find that the game has lost all its fun — with no difficulty, there is no experience. So the truly brave move is to switch off the golden finger of one’s own accord, set limits on oneself, and delete the memory that one was omnipotent all along. Brought down to the human condition, this means: forgetting that you are the creator, and experiencing fixed fate and cause and effect, is precisely not a punishment but an act of deliberate design — a constraint that infinite freedom imposes on itself so that experience can take place. By this, “before awakening, fate is fixed” and “after awakening, there is freedom” are unified under a single intention: fixed fate is the shackles that freedom willingly puts on in order to play this game. This line of thought — “achieving experience through constraint” — shares its source with the judgment in Cognition Constructs Reality: Both Danger and Role Are Set by the Mind that role and situation are set by the Awaring.
Breaking Through the Impossible Boundary
This proposition is not pure speculation; it traces back to a childhood memory, offered as personal proof that “consciousness and trust influence the outcome” — the firm childhood belief that there was still somewhere to go beyond the scene boundaries set by a game —
I always believed there was still somewhere to go beyond the scene boundaries the game had set… I kept trying, and I really did cross the edge of the screen and walked into a place that “shouldn’t exist”… The meaning of this memory: from a young age I was breaking through boundaries others thought impossible. Consciousness and trust influence the outcome.
From this experience two layers of meaning emerge. First, the boundary that is universally taken for granted is not necessarily a real boundary; what is called “impossible” is often merely a setting not yet crossed. Second, consciousness and trust themselves take part in shaping the outcome — believing there is a road beyond the boundary is the precondition for actually arriving there. This bears out, at the level of experience, “we are ‘creating’ everything without knowing it”: crossing the edge of the screen is a tiny instance of creating reality oneself while believing one is merely “discovering” it. This piece of personal proof pulls the abstract theory of creation back down to ground that can be experienced, and it echoes the mechanism in Cognition Constructs Reality: Both Danger and Role Are Set by the Mind by which the Awaring sets the outer scene.
Sources
- Manuscript — “Before awakening, every path has its fixed fate… but after awakening to the Awaring, you discover that everything is infinitely free; even the most ultimate cause and effect is manifested by the Awaring… we are ‘creating’ everything without knowing it.”
- Manuscript — “awaken to the real, not edit the code of the game”; “people want to conjure illusion within illusion… this too is life itself.”
- Manuscript — the game metaphor of the golden finger, self-imposed limits, and deleting memory.
- “My Archive” — the childhood memory of crossing the edge of a game screen: “Consciousness and trust influence the outcome.”
See also
- Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring
- The World Is Created: A Theory of Creation
- To Know the Illusion Is to Leave It: To See Through Is to Be Free
- To Apply Effort Is Already to Err: Awakening Is Seeing More Clearly, Not Believing More Deeply
- Cognition Constructs Reality: Both Danger and Role Are Set by the Mind