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Daniélou, Alain – The Way to the Labyrinth [translated by Marie-Claire Cournand]

Is our destiny foreseen, foreseeable? We only have a vague sense of it; but when we reverse the march of time and follow the unfolding course of our lives from old age back to childhood, a great many things begin to make sense and suddenly fit together. Chance is no longer a factor, nothing happens by accident. Childhood is the consequence of maturity, the culmination of the future. It is not a question of predetermination, simply a reality of the world. Every moment of our life exists simultaneously in the wondrous and divine substratum of eternity.

Each of us lives several different lives. We can describe a man in many different ways, all of them contradictory; but we should never try to combine these portraits, incomplete as they may appear. Our spiritual destiny-the role each of us must play in the great comedy of the world-is independent of our emotional, sensual, even our intellectual lives. Moralists are always led astray by their desire to connect these different aspects of man's nature. We often find ourselves struggling against our fate, when it frightens us or seems too heavy a burden to bear. But there are times when we must be totally open and surrender to those mysterious inner forces that inspire our most irrational acts, sometimes in defiance of human law; for it is in those very actions that we most truly fulfill not only ourselves but the humble role we have each been assigned in a world whose ultimate design we cannot know.