750. Since every being's present, terrestrial life thus becomes visible as constituting a fragment of this eternal experience of life, every being's fate is justified. The being of course has wishes and longings that are so great that they cannot be satisfied in such a fragment but need several successive lives for their cycles to be fulfilled completely. It is also only natural that these beings' single local lives or "fragments" of their eternal existence cannot all be filled with one hundred per cent radiant well-being. This will depend exclusively on which phenomena of consciousness the being has been occupied with in previous lives, and of which the local life in question is a continuation. It can have had desires, wishes and longings in these previous lives, the fulfilment of which has not particularly promoted the health of its consciousness and soul. It can have acquired very bad habits and tendencies, the extremely difficult overcoming of which is a greater or lesser disturbance of its present life or turns it into a culmination of pure suffering. But it can also have cultivated in previous lives excellent habits and tendencies, phenomena that cannot in any way whatsoever avoid being an indication of an exceptionally healthy manifestation of mind and body in its present life, in fact one that is the very culmination of well-being.
      But if the fate of every being in its present life is therefore a reaction, an after-effect or result of its thoughts and willed behaviour in past lives, its thoughts and willed behaviour in its present life will be of equally decisive importance in the creation of its fate in future lives. This confirms that the being is the absolute creator of its own fate. Its immortal I together with its superconsciousness survives its physical, terrestrial lives and carries experiences and the unfulfilled wishes and longings over into succeeding lives. It is equally inevitable that these terrestrial lives will thereby appear as steps or degrees on a scale of perfection. The lives are bound to become more and more perfect for every life that passes, as long as the being's wishes and longings cause it to create, by exercising its will, things that can lead to a higher position of consciousness or even to the state of being a genius, which in this case is the same as one hundred per cent intellectuality.
      It is also a foregone conclusion that the being cannot avoid these steps, but that every single being must go through them in order to reach the state of being a genius or absolute perfection, because genius or perfection is nothing other than an expression of a degree of proficiency, and this in turn can exist only as a result of previous practice, training and experience. And as every normal terrestrial life constitutes just such a step or degree of perfection, it thereby becomes clear that this being has had a previous existence. How else could it have experienced the practice, training or experience of which its current step is a result and without which this step would not have been possible?
      Since all phenomena in daily life prove it to be a fact that the being is the absolute creator and originator of its own fate, and that this fate consists exclusively of reactions of the being's own manifestations of thought and will, the old saying, "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap", becomes a living, irrefutable fact. This reality is the eleventh basic answer to the mystery of life.