Do We Really Understand Destiny?

Every event in our life has deep meaning. Whether an event creates joy or sadness, it is significant. The significance mostly goes unnoticed while we have no understanding of reincarnation and karma – even for those who accept the fact of reincarnation. It is not enough to accept reincarnation and karma as a fact; we need a working understanding of it to give our life its full meaning.

Rudolf Steiner wrote essays for the magazine Lucifer Gnosis in the early 1900s in which he tried to explain spiritual principles as they applied to our daily life. In one article, “How Karma Works” he sets out the idea of “the evolution of the eternal human spirit through many lives.” He compares this with the days of our lives saying what we did yesterday affects what we will do today, and so on. We act differently tomorrow according to our experiences today, we have the opportunity to rectify our mistakes and to be better people. In this way, our past is always present with us, always creating the future. In this way we create our destiny.

Activity that has become destiny is karma.

The way we respond to our destiny is the key. “The fact that our destiny, our karma, meets us in the form of absolute necessity is no obstacle to our freedom. For when we act we approach this destiny with the measure of independence we have achieved. It is not destiny that acts, but it is we who act in accordance with the laws of this destiny.”

If we apply these ideas to reincarnation we can consider another statement from Rudolf Steiner, “We cannot understand the human individual from ancestors […] (each of us) exist for a long time before the copulation of our parents. A kind of unaware love leads the child to these certain parents and causes them to begetting.”

If we understand that we are in control of our destiny, that we create all the circumstances in our lives from a higher perspective, even to the point of causing our parents to give birth to us, we will view life quite differently. This is an urgent task today as we deal with escalating levels of fear driven by world events.