I enjoy when I have to question my own beliefs and explore them more thoroughly. I am both a fatalist and someone that believes heavily in the Law of Attraction, so in some aspects those can seem like very contradictory ideologies, but it's really all a matter of our own perspective view of reality. I view everything that exists as energy at its' base and today I'll do my best to explain how a fatalist can believe in the Law of Attraction without being in conflict with oneself.
I shared this post yesterday as part of my curation and it may have been part of what led me down this particular rabbit hole. If I view all consciousness as energetic existence, which I do, then understanding how energy operates is fundamental to my own life. Law of Attraction is based around the entire concept of like energy attracting other like energy, and in turn, focusing on what we do want attracts it just as easily as focusing on what we don't want will lead to a perceived negative outcome. So what does this have to do with fatalism?
From a fatalist perspective, everything happens for a reason and leads us down the only path that we could have ever taken. It's a more or less "all in" approach to existence. The problem that I feel some people have with fatalism is that they use it as an excuse or justification for their actions instead of seeing it as a cause and effect chain of events that lead from one point to the next. Regardless of our own awareness or interactions with the universe around us, we can see from the double-slit experiment that unobserved energy is more or less endless infinite potential at any given point. The act of observing it is what defines it and changes it.
If we look at life from an observational standpoint, we are the observer and thus the one defining and shaping our own energetic existence. From this perspective, fate is not some thing that happens to us and we are not at it's mercy, but it's more of a connective force that connects us from one point to the next. Law of Attraction, at least in my mind, requires the acceptance and understanding that we are all infinite possibilities of ourselves at all times. I have heard others try to describe this as infinite parallel universes running simultaneously, and while I don't really dwell much on that school of thought, it makes sense in my mind that if we are all of these infinite possibilities of ourselves that there can also be infinite versions of existence playing out at all times, it just isn't really relative to the current state of existence we are occupying so I don't worry about any other reality than the one I want.
In this observational state, call it zen or mindfulness or whatever you want, if we are aware of all of these possibilities that exist, then that also seems to conflict fatalism. On the contrary, I view fatalism as recognizing that there are different pathways throughout existence, but that we can't choose to walk every one of them at once. For example if I said everyone reading this should raise their hand, there are now an infinite number of possibilities for what happened. Everyone is now either aware or unaware of that request, those that are aware either complied or did not comply, but there are an infinite combination of all of those events and participants that could comply as well as an infinite level of awareness that could have been reached in regards to the outcome. Some people will exist without ever having known that I existed in the first place for example, so while it's irrelevant from their perspective, it's as relevant to anyone that is aware as they want it to be.
If existence were a movie, perhaps fatalism would be playing out every possible scenario based on every possible change or interaction possible, and ultimately settling on one final perspective. In turn, someone has to be the director, but we can't be both the director and the actor at the same time. Perhaps this is also why I don't put much stock into the concept of time. If we think in terms of energy and how it goes from point a to point b, at any given instant it isn't actually moving. It is either always somewhere or always nowhere. There is no in between as it's simply the path from point a to point b that the energy occupied. Thus while we can change ourselves and our own perspective to affect the outcome of our desired reality, fate still handles the details in between and connects the paths from one point to the next. At any given point, we can alter ourselves and thus change the reality we exist in accordingly. Namaste.