"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." — Emerson
Rudolf Steiner:
41. In the third of the last Leading Thoughts we pointed to the nature of the human will. Only when this is realized do we enter with understanding into a sphere of the world where destiny or karma works. So long as we perceive only that system of law which holds sway in the relations of the things and facts of Nature, our understanding is entirely remote from the laws that work in destiny.
42. When the law in destiny is thus perceived, it is revealed at the same time that destiny cannot come into existence in the course of a single physical life on Earth. So long as he inhabits the same physical body, man can realize only the moral content of his will in the way that this particular physical body, within the physical world, allows. Only when he has passed through the gate of death into the sphere of the Spirit can the Spirit-nature of the will come to full effect. Then will the Good and the Evil be severally realized — a spiritual realization, to begin with — in their corresponding outcome.
43. In this spiritual realization man fashions and forms himself between death and a new birth. He becomes in being an image of what he did during his earthly life; and out of this his being, on his subsequent return to Earth, he forms his physical life. The spiritual that works and weaves in destiny can find realization in the physical only if its corresponding cause withdrew, before this realization, into the spiritual realm. For all that emerges in our life by way of destiny proceeds out of the spiritual; nor does it ever take shape within the sequence of physical phenomena.
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