2. The Human Soul, Destiny and Death from the Point of View of Spiritual Science

And with this higher consciousness, something occurs that may now be called an expansion of the soul's power, which is already present in ordinary life, but which in ordinary life extends only to the ordinary experiences of memory. We remember what we have experienced in ordinary life from a certain point in time after our birth; we can recall these experiences in our soul, we can also say to ourselves: If we could not remember, we would not be what we are. We owe our memory to what we appear to be. We must be able to look back on our lives. This ability to look back on our lives is expanded and intensified by the meditation on fate, but it must be taken so far that we really feel in our deeds our fate as we otherwise feel in our body. Then a new power of the soul arises for us outside of our body, which goes back behind our birth. We now, as we do through the memory of the events since a certain point after the birth, envisage events that lie before birth, that we have lived through in a spiritual life that preceded our birth, and we know that, as we make ourselves what we are in ordinary life, through what we have already gone through in this life, that we have made ourselves out of the spiritual world, through those prenatal experiences, into the whole man of destiny and temperament that we are.