taryal:It is true that one’s gati can influence these conscious sankharas (and perhaps does to an untrained mind) but they are not necessarily deterministic and a human can use them to significantly change their gati.
Yes, but what causes the human to want to change their gati in the first place? Is it out of no where? There has to be a cause. Here i argue that the reason why someone wants to change their gati in the first place is because of their previous gati/ 5 aggregates, which is caused by their previous 5 aggregates so on and so forth. There is no room for a doer! It is because there are causes. It is because their very own gati that encourages them to change their gati. Even to stop maladaptive dreaming, you have to change your habits, but what causes you to change your habits in the first place? Other habits before that/ external influences.
taryal: But humans do have the ability to change their destiny.
In the conventional sense yes, we can “choose” whether we want to walk across the street blindfolded or not, we can choose who we want to associate with, but i’m saying in the sense of the absolute truth, at the citta level, the reason why we do all this is nothing more than the outcome of the 5 aggregates and the outcome of the causes at the moment, it is not caused by our additional “free will”.
Since the dhamma is about cause and effect, I would think that if all the causes are known, all the effects are known. There is no room for “own decision making”, because what we do are based on the causes. And that’s why the absolute truth is that there is “no doer”, “no me”, but we have the distorted perception that there is, until we reach the Arahant stage.
Here I would like to make the case that for the story of Ven. Sariputra predicting the outcome of the war, if the Buddha had seen into the 5 aggregates of every soldier in the battlefield, if he could see the kings, generals, worms and birds on the battlefield, and even the butterfly that would flap its wings across the world that may shift the wind, everyone else in the 31 realms present, basically every single thing that influences the war, he would not only be able to predict who wins, but also the number of casualties, the total number of stabs, down to the citta level who dies when. This is because he is fully aware of the causes, hence he will be fully aware of the effects.
I am taking inspiration from Laplace’s Demon, “if someone (the demon) knows the precise locationand momentum of every atom in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.” Here, instead of just classical mechanics, if Laplace’s demon knows the full knowledge of the world, the laws of kamma and the 5 aggregates, he can derive the past, present and future citta of everyone.
This is what I mean by determinism, everything is determined by the causes, there is no room for an extra “agent” to change the causes, because the agent himself is a product of cause and effect.
I think this is worthwhile contemplating because it would help us remove our perception of self too, if we see that whatever we do is due to the pre-existing causes and not a “doer”