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Death may be "fated" in the sense that every physical life form on earth must die to make way for new life, but reincarnation theory offers the idea that each of us chooses his or her life path before birth, including where that path ends. Assuming that each person uses a succession of varied lifetimes to learn all the lessons that fit the evolving soul to graduate to a more enlightened existence as pure spirit, death would become the end point of each life and could be chosen to fit that particular life-plan best.

For example, if I were to plan out a life as a novelist, I might opt for a body with a good chance of surviving into its eighties, since many great works of fiction have been the products of their authors' accumulation of both experience and writing technique. If, on the contrary, I wanted to live a life as a champion athlete of some extreme, high-profile sport like high-peak mountaineering, I might plan for death to occur early enough to spare me an old age crippled by severe physical damage incurred during my youthful exertions.

There are other considerations as well: if I had in mind a life as a powerful national figure, someone bringing enormous changes that would benefit the many but enrage the few, I might accept an early exit at the hands of an assassin in exchange for being remembered fondly for many centuries after my death. Similarly, a life designed to aid others by sacrifice could have an early end built into it, as might a life chosen to pay back a karmic debt to a victim of some excess of one of my former lifetimes.

This is not to say that reincarnation requires a roadmap, or that the individual spends each lifetime doing nothing but keeping appointments that he or she can't remember having made - that would be just as dull and, basically, meaningless as a life plotted out by some supreme being running us like rats through a maze for his own amusement and edification.

The idea is that each life acquires its depth, drama, and unique flavor precisely from the inter-action of the reincarnated soul's rough plan of action with the vagaries of chance, natural law, and the life-plans of others. At any time chance may intervene and cancel via train wreck my plans to become, say, an old and respected theoretical physicist, or it may prolong a life that I set up as, for example, a few decades spent finishing up the business of a previous life that was cut short.

In this scheme of thought, death is a choice at the end of many other choices, although it is always conditional upon the cooperation of the rest of the universe. If a giant asteroid is heading for Earth at this moment at great speed and with no chance of diversion away from our planet, then the deaths of all of us would indeed by "fated" with such a heavy hand that none of our choices would signify.

No one can prove that death is chosen, or fated, or directed by "God", which is why this question is endlessly debatable; in the absence of proof, I personally incline toward the answer given by reincarnation theory: everyone must die, but in each lifetime you make a choice about the timing and the circumstances of its ending - a choice which may or may not be cancelled by the lively, unpredictable interplay of circumstances that makes up the dance of life on the physical plane of existence.

Learn more about this author, Suzy Charnas.
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