424. However it has gradually emerged as a fact that by investigating the early stages of bodily development in other beings – what we call the "embryo state" – it has been seen that this in itself constitutes a series of minor stages in which each is an unconscious miniature reliving of previous periods of life in the spiral. In former periods of life in the spiral the being manifested in entirely different and far less devel-oped forms of life than that in which it now presents itself, so it is clear that in this "reliving" of experiences, the being can appear only as a characteristic expression of a particular condition during those periods of life. A terrestrial person at the embryonic stage, for example, is not a significant expression of the condition he will represent as a human being after birth, but rather, to a greater degree, he will exemplify the primitiveness and lower life conditions present in previous periods of existence. In this way, during the formation of his embryo, he repeats among other phases a kind of fish-like stage. Each repetition of previous conditions during embryo growth, however, will last only a very short while and must give way to a repetition of a still more advanced previous condition, and so on, again and again until that being reaches a state which will manifest as the one which is currently the norm. At this point the embryo is ready for that process which is known as "birth". And here begins the final formation, or creation, of the body which rightly belongs to the being in question.
      But even after this point, repetitions can be traced to former conditions. Childhood and youth are, in principle, really nothing else but the reliving of former savage or primitive peoples. It is a fact that in childhood or youth human beings are more brutal, rough and inconsiderate and much prefer to play "cops and robbers" at that age than in more mature years. But this does not mean that one cannot find many people who are so advanced in development that already in childhood they appear both loving and congenial, with a great aversion to all brutality and harshness. On the contrary, there are more than a few of such children. In short, they avoid any form of fighting or violence; to an advanced degree they are expressions of the principle "whomsoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also". But such beings are generally considered weaklings and "cowards" by their companions. The common attitude among children is actually still to admire the principle of "Might". The big strong boys who can easily take on all the others are usually the school "heroes". The small boy, on the other hand, who avoids brutality and who would prefer to remain silent and endure, rather than take part in a quarrel, is considered, if anything, a "fool". And if there is a strongly-built youth, who easily has the strength to be superior but does not take advantage of it and has the same attitude as that small boy, then he is thought of as an even greater "fool", if, indeed, he is not thought of as "cowardly" or at least "somewhat peculiar".
      At this point one might ask why all children do not repeat the primitive stages of the past. The answer must be that in fact it only seems that all children do not repeat such past stages. In reality all terrestrial children have to repeat the primitive stages of "nature people" as they approach their original civilized level. But there is a considerable difference in these repetitions. They are not nearly so violent or so drastic for all individuals alike. How drastic or how violent these repetitions will be in a child or young person will depend, as we shall see later, on what degree they express the genuine attitude of the individual in question, that is to say, the standard of development he will come to represent when he arrives at the "age of discretion" which, in this case, would mean about thirty years old. The kind of character a being exhibits at this age is his normal standard. It represents the level of development he reached in former lives. He cannot immediately represent this level at birth, but in his new life and body he must run through all the underlying stages in miniature in order to be fully day-conscious at the present – for him – truly normal level.
      From the age of thirty onwards this individual continues to develop further and for every life on Earth he will thus add a new field of experience or a new section of development to his eternal course of life. This new section will, in this way, be relived in his next life as a repetition before the individual reaches his thirtieth year. In the following life to that one, there will again be repetition but on a still smaller scale, and so it goes on continuously. For every life that passes, this repetition will be on an ever decreasing scale, until at last it is quite microscopic. But as with every new life there will be a new section to repeat, the preceding repetitions will be pushed further and further back towards childhood and the embryo stage. When, for instance, the last life's repetition for the terrestrial person in question comes about in his late twenties, the repetition of his penultimate life will come about slightly earlier, that is to say in his mid-twenties, that of his ante-penultimate life in his early twenties, while repetitions of his fourth, fifth and subsequent ante-penultimate lives must all come about before the age of twenty, and will reach the borders of the embryo stage from where all repetitions originate from immeasurably long past periods of time.
      In later sections, this principle of repetition will be more closely explained and we will show how it comes to form another fundamental principle, one which we will learn to know in "Livets Bog" under the definition of the "principle of perspective" upon which every form of sensing is firmly based.