A working essay on pre-incarnation choice, soul-level design, and the only freedom that cannot be taken from us. Acknowledgments to Stever Rousseau, the inspiration for this reflection.
We do not invent our lives from nothing.
We find ourselves in bodies we didn’t choose, born into families we didn’t pick. We arrive in a country, speaking a language, living in a particular class and time, surrounded by beliefs and histories that existed long before us.
Whatever else may be true about consciousness, a human life begins as an arrival into specificity.
We are born with certain traits: male, female, or identities that don’t fit neatly into those labels. Our ethnicity, skin color, facial features, and genetics are given. Our temperament, health, and neurology are set. Some of us have wealth or opportunity, while others do not. Some grow up in stable homes, while others grow up in chaos. Some have safe streets, while others face danger. We might have a loving mother or one who struggles to show care, a father who stays, or one who leaves. Family histories can carry trauma or gifts. We inherit the effects of war, migration, privilege, or marginalization. Some doors open easily for us, while others never do.
These are not abstract variables. They are the architecture of a lifetime.
Calling it architecture is intentional because it means something was already built and set up before you had any say in it.
Cause precedes us.
This truth is both clear and hard to accept. It’s clear because we see it everywhere. It’s hard because part of us wants to believe we created our own lives, that we chose our parents, our bodies, and our challenges, as if picking classes from a list, and then set out to master them. That idea can be comforting. It makes the world seem fair, our suffering seem chosen, and gives us a sense of control that eases our fears.
But another part of me suspects that the deepest honesty begins when we admit we did not originate our lives. We did not create any aspect of their specificity.
At least, not for the everyday version of ourselves, the person with a name, memories, and a nervous system shaped by our experiences.
So the question arises: Who decided who we would be before we incarnated? Was it us—this self, this person, the one reading or writing these words? Or was it a higher consciousness: the originating soul, the higher self, the intelligence that stands behind and beyond the personality?
The field was already in motion.
I want to say this in a way that feels more accurate than “fate” or “destiny,” because those words can become rigid, moralizing, or simplistic.
The field was already in motion.
When we are born, we step into a world already in motion, shaped by biology, culture, history, myth, shared trauma, and the long story of humanity. By the time we showed up, the story had long been unfolding. It began long before our parents met, before our grandparents moved countries, and even before our ancestors faced significant events such as slavery, power, or displacement.
The footage goes back even farther.
If we want a practical place to start, we can look to the beginnings of human civilization: tribes, empires, religions, economies, hierarchies, and beliefs. Who we become is never shaped alone. Humanity’s path profoundly influences us: the stories our culture tells, the roles it offers, the wounds it ignores, and the systems it supports or rejects.
In that sense, a life is not only personal; it is historical.
We enter a world shaped by choices made before us, some wise, some disastrous, and which affect us in ways we never chose. We often continue what came before. Sometimes we are here to make up for something, to carry what was left unfinished, to change a path that went wrong, or to keep things going because the world needs some things to stay the same.
And this is not a sentimental picture. It is a sober one.
In this honest view, the question ‘Did I choose this?’ becomes complicated. If life is already in motion, then any choice we make isn’t made in isolation. It’s like making choices while already being carried by a river.
Two schools of thought: the planning room and the sovereign soul
There is a well-known metaphysical school of thought that holds that, before we incarnate, we, as individual souls, gather in a kind of life-planning room with other souls. Together, we choose roles, make agreements, and decide, “You’ll be my mother.” “You’ll be my brother.” “You’ll betray me so I can develop discernment.” “You’ll mentor me so I can remember my gift.” “We’ll meet at the perfect moment and unlock each other’s next chapter.” In this view, life is collaborative design, a sacred contract, and a script we ourselves authored.
Another view holds that our everyday selves never had that kind of power. We didn’t choose our parents, gender, ethnicity, birthplace, or economic status. We didn’t pick our health or our talents. Those choices were made by a higher consciousness, our originating soul, or a deeper intelligence that might be us in a larger sense but not us in our daily lives.
This view insists on a hard humility: our life is not ours to design.
Both ideas try to answer the same question: How can a wise universe allow so much suffering, unfairness, and randomness? The planning-room story gives meaning by saying pain is chosen. The higher-self story gives meaning by saying a wiser part of us is in charge, not our everyday self.
But here is what interests me: regardless of which view is true, we still have to live our lives. And we face the same fundamental human dilemma: even if we did not create the footage, we must still make meaning from it.
What is ours: interpretation
If I strip this down to the one thing that feels undeniable, it is this:
What is ours, fully and irreducibly, is interpretation.
We may not control the footage, but we participate in the edit.
Interpretation is not minor or just a mental exercise. It’s the story that shapes how we function. It affects what we notice, fear, expect, tolerate, pursue, believe we deserve, and how we face the unknown.
Interpretation is where we decide what the world means.
Interpretation is where we determine if we are cursed or initiated.
Interpretation is where we decide whether our pain makes us unlovable or more capable of love.
Interpretation is where we decide whether life is worth living.
Interpretation is where we decide whether power is dangerous, whether intimacy is safe, whether life is hostile, whether God is absent, whether hope is naïve, and whether beauty is real.
Interpretation is also where we either accept our culture’s stories without thinking or start to see and question them for ourselves.
Because we don’t just inherit DNA, we inherit myth.
We take on the beliefs of our family, culture, religion (or lack of it), social class, and the time we live in. We learn what our people call ‘normal’ or ‘impossible.’ We inherit what they shame, what they celebrate, what they avoid talking about, and what they expect us to be to fit in.
And then, often without realizing it, we mistake those inherited beliefs for truth.
This is why interpretation is so central. It is the doorway through which we either stay asleep in the tribe’s story or wake up into a story we can consciously participate in.
The documentary metaphor: God as director, us as editor
A life is not a novel we write from scratch. It is more like a documentary.
In a documentary, the filmmaker doesn’t create the raw material. The material is real life: events, people, and moments that actually happened. The filmmaker can’t change what was filmed, but can shape the story by choosing what to highlight, connect, leave out, or show to the audience.
So here is one way to hold it:
God is the director.
We are not in charge of the footage.
But we participate in the edit.
That’s where real power is, not in the fantasy of total control, but in how we engage with life. It’s the power to respond, and the power to refuse to let our circumstances decide who we are inside.
Even if we never chose our particulars, we can still choose, moment by moment, how we meet them.
Of course, sometimes our choices are limited by trauma, poverty, disability, oppression, time, caring for others, or grief. Sometimes, choice is as small as taking a breath, setting a boundary, or deciding not to give up on ourselves for just one more day.
But even microscopic choice matters, because it is the beginning of authorship.
So who decided: the individual or the higher self?
I don’t think our current selves chose the details of our lives, not in the way people sometimes picture it, like picking from a cosmic catalog.
But I also don’t think we are victims of an arbitrary universe.
The synthesis I lean toward is a form of layered agency:
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- At the level of the personality-self, we did not choose our body, birthplace, parents, or inherited circumstances. We arrived into a moving field.
- At the level of the soul or higher self, there’s an intelligence that agreed to or accepted certain conditions, not as a perfect plan, but as a way to match what the world needed and what the soul came to learn, fix, or show.
In this view, a ‘life plan’ isn’t a strict script. It’s more like a blueprint with certain themes, a landscape, or a curriculum that’s real but not controlled in every detail.
Even if the higher self shaped things, we still have to live through it without full memory or understanding, and with all the limits of time, feelings, and fear.
Which means the only honest question is not “Did I choose this?” but:
What does it ask of me now?
What kind of person am I becoming as I meet it?
What meaning am I making, and is that meaning worthy of my life force?
The part that doesn’t change
Regardless of whether we chose our lives before we got here or a higher intelligence chose them for us, we still face the same task.
We have to live in conditions we did not originate.
We have to face what we’re given, what we inherit, and the world around us. Again and again, we must choose whether to let these things shape us without thinking or to engage with them on purpose.
I don’t think anything really changes about the human assignment, regardless of how much choice we had “before.”
The assignment is always this:
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- To see what is true.
- To grieve what was lost.
- To stop pretending we control what we do not control.
- To take responsibility for what we can shape: our interpretation, our participation, our ethics, our boundaries, our willingness to grow.
- To create meaning that isn’t shallow, meaning that can handle complexity without turning into blame or denial.
If life is like a documentary, then growing up means learning to edit our story honestly.
Not in a way that lies about the footage. Not in a way that paints over suffering with spiritual platitudes, but in a way that refuses to let suffering be meaningless, and refuses to let meaning be a form of self-deception.
This is where our freedom lives:
Not in origination, but in meaning-making.
Not in control of the field, but in the way we meet the field.
Not in choosing the footage, but in choosing the edit.
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