The Essence of Christianity

GA 68a — 13 September 1910, Bern

54. The Essence of Human Destiny

There are riddles of life, the attempt to solve which has not only a scientific value, but also, in the truest sense, a value for our steadfastness in life, for our hopes in life, indeed a value for our strength to work in life. And without question, one of these riddles of life is that which is contained in the meaningful word of human destiny.

It depends on how we can endure fate. It not only wants to be understood and grasped, but also borne. There we see how, seemingly through no fault of his own, man is led astray by powers.

It is precisely in the face of this most characteristic question that what we call science, research of the human mind, is powerless.

You just need to visualize a few things, but before the eyes of the soul, then you will see that this is not the case, that in a way, to the superficial eye, our destiny is not only very dependent on what happens to us, but on how we are. Compare: a person with a melancholic temperament will feel what is meant by the word destiny quite differently than a choleric person.

We hardly pay attention to the things that confront us in our daily lives and how everything is interwoven. Every person will have been able to have experiences to an extent that they could resent their fate. But there is a reconciliation with fate. It consists in the fact that self-knowledge is true, genuine self-knowledge, an unbiased look into our inner selves.

Goethe: “Know thyself and live in peace with the world.”

Because of the connection /?/, which we have lost /?] with the world and because of a fate full of suffering, which does not always have to be met through one's own fault, through vices /gap].

The question of the [gap].

Sleeping and waking. During sleep, one's own inner being is drawn out into another world.

For our unhappiness, we can be grateful to the powers of fate. Through our happiness, we come to something else. In happiness, we are passive, we accept it. But if we recognize that people's lives follow one another and that each subsequent life bears the fruit of the previous one, then we will learn to use our happiness to sow seeds for future lives.

The luck to use to combine our activities /?).

As on the day you were born into the world,
The sun stood in greeting of the planets,
You immediately thrived [and went from strength to strength],
[...]
Here you must be, here you cannot escape
[...]