Can a person die before his time or is it always fate or fate?

It is a false concept, although widespread, to say that there is a plan in everything. If so, we would not have free will.

When it is said that even a leaf that falls is under the will of God, it means to say that everything is under his Laws, which are perfect. However, there is no direct effect of the will of God that determines that, at that moment, the leaf will fall or not fall.

Well then: we, as Spirits, before entering the realm of conscience and choice, are guided solely by instinct. It is he who guides us, for example, when we are animals: hunger makes us look for food, anger helps us to kill the animal that will serve as food and fear keeps us away from dangerous conditions. When we are an animal outside the top of the chain, many times we are killed to serve as food for another animal (see: there is no harm in that, but good, because we are following the Law of God). After death, the Spirit of the animal, which still lacks self-awareness and the ability to choose and, therefore, does not suffer morally, is very quickly reused in another animal that is born.

After entering the realm of free will, we progressively choose our lives, planning them in general terms. If I was very attached to jealousy, which causes me difficulties and suffering, once we understand this, we choose a way of life that will provide us with possibilities to deal with this imperfection. Friendly spirits participate in this planning who, throughout life, help us, influencing us, inspiring us and often leading us to situations that may be useful to ourselves.

All this was necessary to highlight: we are Spirits living incarnations in dense matter. We are therefore subject to spiritual laws and the laws of matter. The latter make us exposed to the conditions of matter, such as, for example, a torrential rain that causes a commotion in a mountain, that comes down on the houses, a volcano that explodes, an earthquake that generates a devastating tsunami or, still, a comet that hits the planet and destroys it completely. The idea of “collective karma”, therefore, is FALSE (in fact, the idea of karma, as we know it, is false).

From another point of view, we are also subject to the choices of other incarnate Spirits. See: God and the superior spirits respect the free will and time of men. This is why there is no divine interruption of a war, nor of a small-scale crime. Of course, good spirits try to dissuade bad choices through their influences, but in the end, man is the one who chooses to listen to them (or to his own conscience) or not. On the other hand, a person who is leading himself into a situation where he becomes a victim may also try to be inspired, if possible, to deviate from it. How many individuals escape accidents and crimes because of a dream or an insistent thought, or even through an event that causes them to get in the way?

Of course, this is not a concession to special people. We all have good spirits who love us, without exception, but we are often too far away from their influences or turn a deaf ear to their suggestions.

One more logical observation that we make is that when a person dies from a crime, he is NEVER “paying” for something from the past (but he may, of course, have been the victim of his own carelessness, when, for example, he gets into a criminal or dangerous environment of their own volition).

Finally, we arrive at the realization: the genre and the time of death can, yes, be planned before the incarnation of the Spirit, but the course of life can, of course, change this planning. There is no predetermined destiny, because if there were, we would be mere puppets in the theater of life. We can change our plans – and we often do. We can even create a disease, by our actions, that kills us sooner than planned, and we can also get rid of a disease or condition that would take us at a young age, if a series of conditions allow (and it is NOT part of these conditions what they call of "deserving".

Think of that person who crosses the street without looking: it is not a Spirit that impels him to such an act, but his own carelessness, a bad habit. Through this bad habit, he may, at any moment, encounter a car speeding along or a driver looking the other way, and he may crash and die. Think, too, of the parachutist who jumps out of an airplane, putting his life on a parachute. Instinct tells him to be afraid to do it, but his will, the fruit of choice, falsifies that instinct, and he, anyway, launches himself. If the parachute fails and he dies, it was not God who wanted it that way, nor a Spirit who spoiled the parachute, but the laws of matter themselves.

We believe that this thought was clear, but we close by highlighting what Kardec presents in Practical instructions on spiritist manifestations:

FATALITY — from Latin. fatalites, in fatum, destiny. Inevitable fate. A doctrine that supposes that all the events of life and, by extension, all our acts, are predestined and subject to a law from which we cannot escape. There are two kinds of fatality: one arising from external causes, which can affect us and react on us; we could call it reactive, exterior, eventual fatality; the other, which originates in ourselves, determines all our actions; it is personal fatality. In the absolute sense of the word, fatality transforms man into a machine, without initiative or free will and, consequently, without responsibility. It is the negation of all morality.

According to the spiritist doctrine, by choosing its new existence, the Spirit practices an act of freedom. The events of life are the consequence of choice and are related to the social position of existence. If the spirit must be reborn in a servile condition, the environment in which it finds itself will create events very different from those that would present itself if it had to be rich and powerful. But whatever that condition may be, he retains free will in all the acts of his will, and he will not be fatally drawn to do this or that, nor to suffer this or that accident. Due to the chosen type of struggle, he has the possibility of being led to certain acts or encountering certain obstacles, but it is not said that this must happen infallibly, or that he cannot avoid it through his prudence and his will. That's why God gives you the ability to reason. It is the same as if you were a man who, in order to reach a goal, had three paths to choose from: the mountain, the plain or the sea. In the first, the possibility of finding rocks and precipices; in the second swamps; in the third, storms. But it is not said that it will be crushed by a stone, that it will get stuck in the marsh, or that it will be shipwrecked here and not there. The choice of path itself is not fatal, in the absolute sense of the word: man will instinctively take the path in which he must find the chosen test. If you have to fight the waves, your instinct will not lead you to take the mountain path.

According to the type of tests chosen by the Spirit, man is exposed to certain vicissitudes. As a result of these same vicissitudes, he is subjected to drags from which he must escape. He who commits a crime is not fatally driven to commit it: he has chosen a path of struggle that can excite him to it; if you yield to temptation, it is through weakness of your will. Thus, free will exists for the Spirit in the errant state, in the choice it makes of the tests to which it must submit, and it exists in the condition of being incarnated in the acts of corporeal life. Only the moment of death is fatal: because the kind of death is still a consequence of the nature of the tests chosen.