6. Intuitive Insight in the Happy and Serious Hours of Life

But what carries us through the stream of life in our souls? One word indicates it to us, a word that is full of meaning: human destiny. How do we grasp destiny as long as we cling only to the externals of material existence, as long as we only want to combine these externals with the combining mind bound to the brain? How do we grasp destiny? We regard it as something that befalls us, that comes to us; we speak of the “fortuities” of life. In one of the last lectures it was already mentioned here how, without touching on spiritual science, these fortuities of life make a very different impression. If we examine ourselves at any moment in life, what we actually are, what we have become, and then look back in our lives to a certain point in time after our birth, we find that we have become what we are because certain coincidences of fate have befallen our ego. Perhaps we experienced real failures once during our youth: when we had to solve an ordinary school task, we could not solve it, or we solved it wrongly; but because we solved it wrongly, it had this or that consequence for us. But these consequences have become deeply ingrained in our soul; they still sit inside our soul in old age. But the fact that we can make a quick decision in a particular case in life is the consequence of what earlier brought us failure. In this way we have been able to strengthen our powers. What we are now, we owe to what fate has brought us.