The future is extremely complex, and only a Lord Buddha can say exactly what will happen. However, the future is not certain; anything can happen, but sometimes it is impossible to change your future. My teacher explained this in one of his speeches with a good example. Let’s consider a boat in the ocean. We all know that the ocean is vast and immense. Consequently, there are several possibilities for this boat—it can go west, east, north, or south. Now, let’s imagine that in its path, there is a large iceberg. The captain of the boat rushes at full speed towards the iceberg. Unfortunately, he realizes too late that he’s going to hit it and wreck the boat. No matter how hard he tries to break, the boat will hit the iceberg (inevitability). Similarly, it is impossible to avoid the consequences of bad anantariya Kamma, no matter what good deeds one does thereafter. Yes, the future can indeed be deterministic. However, we have put in place the causes for this future to be deterministic. Arahant Santati established the causes of his enlightenment in many past lives. We are free to establish the causes but we do not control the good or bad results.
However, if the captain spots the iceberg in advance, he can avoid a collision. The causes that enable avoiding the collision include the captain’s vigilance and maintaining a safe distance from the iceberg. If any of these causes is missing, an accident may occur.
There is a story in the suttas, where Lord Buddha talks about two homeless people who could have become extremely rich by being secular, or who could have achieved magga phala if they became bhikkhus. They had the Kamma necessary to do well on both the mundane and supramundane levels. However, their lack of education was their downfall.Mahadhanasetthiputta Vatthu
- With Jhanas and Iddhis, it is possible to see one’s past lives but also future ones!! However, these lives are not deterministic; they are based on our happiness in the present moment. As long as we maintain this goal, these lives will surely come true. There is a Burmese monk who was a friend of one of my teachers. He developed jhānas and Iddhis. Through this, he was able to see the future lives that awaited him. In many future lives, he is a yogi or bhikkhu who continues to develop good gati, but in some, he falls into apayas as an animal or into nirayas. Please translate it into English or your language, because the site is in French.
The Vision of his past and future lives
Through meditation, we can all access the knowledge of our past lives, which in Pali we call paṭiccasamuppāda ñāṇa. This, however, requires great maturity because this knowledge can only be developed based on jhāna and direct knowledge of cause and effect, nāma rūpa pariccheda ñāṇa.
- To develop paṭiccasamuppāda ñāṇa, our samādhi must first allow us to distinguish moments of consciousness. These appear by the millions in the blink of an eye. Then we direct our mind to the present moment of awareness. Then we follow the link to its cause, that is to say, the previous moment of consciousness. The latter leads us to the knowledge of the one before, and so on. With training, the process speeds up, especially for periods already revisited. As we start from the present, we begin by reviewing our present life, our childhood, our birth, and our gestation. Then immediately behind the first consciousness of our present life, in other words, our fertilization, we become aware of the last consciousness of our previous life, our last death. You can visit this site by going through one page after another. But you can also click on links to directly access certain information.
- On the same principle, we can also access precise information by following kammic links. Compared to the knowledge of our past lives, that of future lives is carried out according to a reversed process. We start from the present moment and then direct our mind towards the awareness that will result from the present awareness, and so on. Knowledge of future lives develops, as it were, on continuity probabilities based on current conditions. However, unlike the past that has already passed, this future seen in advance is not immutable as if everything were pre-established. But it is not completely random either. We are fortunately free from certain choices such as that of applying ourselves to doing what is necessary to progress towards Deliverance. But the margin of free will is very small compared to the mass of conditioning that has shaped our physical and mental behaviour (gati) for so long.