The Book – Preface

Musings · Preface

On what we carry before we begin — genetics, inheritance, and the slow awakening of free will.

We like to believe we begin with a blank slate. That life, at its start, is an open page — unwritten, unclaimed, full of pure possibility. But this is a beautiful fiction.

Long before we draw our first breath, two powerful forces have already been at work shaping us. The first is genetics — not merely the colour of our eyes or the architecture of our bones, but something far more intimate: the lived experience of those who came before us, encoded at the cellular level. The events that befell our ancestors, the hardships they endured, the fears they carried — these did not simply pass with them into the earth. They left marks. Science now tells us that significant experiences can inscribe themselves into DNA, that trauma and resilience alike can be inherited not as memory, but as disposition, as tendency, as the particular way a body braces itself against the world.

The second force is what psychologists call transgenerational transmission — the unconscious emotional inheritance passed down through family patterns, cultural traditions, and unresolved wounds. Our ancestors’ ways of loving, fearing, coping, and surviving ripple forward through generations, shaping our instincts and behaviours long before we have the awareness to question them. We arrive in this world already carrying luggage we did not pack ourselves.

And because life, in its elegant design, requires two to create a new one, the inheritance doubles. Two lineages, two histories, two sets of unfinished stories — converging in a single new human being.

Culture and Society

The complexity deepens still. We are born not only into a family, but into a particular society, a particular culture, a particular historical moment. During the years before we develop the capacity for independent choice, these forces exert an enormous gravity on who we become. The family, the community, the era — together they form what we might call a constellation, and it is this constellation that gives shape to what many traditions call destiny.

Every culture, in its own language, has reached for this idea. In Buddhism, pratītyasamutpāda — the web of interdependent arising. In Chinese tradition, ming — the mandate of one’s allotted nature. In Islam, qadar — divine decree unfolding in time. In ancient Greece, the goddess Moira, who spun the thread of each life before birth. Different words, woven from different worldviews — yet all pointing toward the same recognition: that we do not arrive in the world as isolated atoms, but as knots in a vast and intricate web.

Dharma and Free Will

Alongside destiny, there exists another determining force — the underlying order of things. The laws that cannot be circumvented: the physical limits of the body, the universal patterns of the mind, the endless flux of energy and change that flows through all living systems. This framework is not a cage. It is, if anything, a gift — for when we stop fighting the nature of things, life becomes considerably easier to inhabit.

And yet. Within this framework there exists something extraordinary, something that belongs to each human being without exception: the power of choice.

From the moment of birth, a slow and luminous awakening begins. In the first year of life, an infant gradually becomes aware of itself — of its body, its surroundings, the patterns of cause and effect that govern its small world. This awakening does not end in childhood. It continues, if we allow it, for an entire lifetime. We learn more about the world. We learn more about ourselves. And with that knowledge, we grow increasingly capable of shaping our lives through conscious decision.

It does not mean we stop seeking counsel. The perspectives of others remain essential to growth. What it means is that we are, at last, the final author of our own choices. We gather what we need, we weigh what we know, and then we decide — and we bear the consequence of that decision, without blame, without deflection.

When a decision leads us astray, we accept it, learn from it, and choose again.
When a decision bears fruit, we receive it with gratitude — and move on.

In the Christian tradition, this is called free will. But the principle is universal: in every moment, without exception, the capacity to choose is ours. To accept or to resist. To endure or to transform. To reach toward something or to release it.

Free will, understood deeply, is among the greatest gifts available to a human being. However determined our circumstances may appear, there exists a point — reachable through awareness, through the slow and patient work of self-knowledge — where we can rise above our conditioning. Where we can begin to act from something freer than habit, freer than inherited pattern, freer than fear.

When you understand that every event, every situation, every encounter can be interpreted in more than one way — that the meaning we assign to our experience is itself a choice — a door opens. Not an easy door. But a real one.

The day this understanding settles into you — not as an idea, but as a lived certainty — will be the day of your awakening. It will be the first day of the rest of your life. You will not be able to change everything at once. But you will be able to begin changing everything.

And beginning, it turns out, is sufficient.