The Problem of Destiny

We must reckon with the fact that the connexions with the environing world which are produced in the soul through thought forces are not the only ones, for as a rule, we are only aware in very exceptional cases of the way in which our subconsciousness thinks. You have often heard me say that our thinking activity does not end with the threshold of consciousness, for the human being has an incessant thought activity in his subconsciousness, or we might also say, in his super-consciousness. But the human being cannot in any way realise what this more encompassing form of consciousness really means to him. We could ask each person: “Why have you not met with this or with that accident this morning?” For it would have been possible in the case of every person to have met with some accident. Sometimes we realise to a certain extent how matters stand, but we are very seldom able to see the whole connexion. Sometimes we may feel an aversion to do a certain thing; we may leave home, for instance, half an hour later, and afterwards we may discover that in the meantime an accident has occurred along the way, an accident we would have met with had we left half an hour sooner. In this case our subconsciousness has been active, our subconsciousness has made us loiter. These subconscious influences are always there, but generally we cannot perceive them.