Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1878

1878. When human being H can enter into such drastic marital relationships – despite the fact that its ability to fall in love, because of its high standard of evolution and high intellectuality, constitutes only a few remaining very weak, thin threads that, given time, will break, the being no longer belonging to the animal kingdom but having become a real human being – it is due to the fact that human being H is so far advanced in evolution that the stage of marriage is actually only a repetition or a reliving of something that it has already outlived in previous lives. As we already know, the childhood and youth stages of the living being's terrestrial lives are only stages of repetition in which its manifestations are in the main only a reliving of the tendencies of consciousness that these beings have already mastered in previous terrestrial lives. When this period of repetition has come to an end, which for the terrestrial human being happens when it is thirty years of age, its adulthood begins. Then its consciousness in its present incarnation will have been completed and will appear with the standard that the being has been able to bring it up to during its evolution through previous lives. Subsequently the being's further evolution enters new fields of consciousness, the mastering and command of which the same being begins to acquire. Every such mastery of fields of consciousness or manifestation will once again in the next terrestrial life be a renewed struggle, but only a relatively easy repetition through which the being thereby becomes wakingly day-conscious of its position or superiority in relation to the given field of consciousness that is being repeated. In this way all talents, both physical and mental, are transferred from one incarnation to the next. Every mastery of the thought climates, matter or substance acquired during the stage of adulthood and old age is relived in its future incarnation's new youth stage and childhood stage respectively. This transfer of the experiences from the adult stage to the youth stage of the next life happens quite gradually. The last stages that were mastered in the previous life are repeated in the present incarnation immediately before the onset of adulthood, that is at the end of the being's twenties. Stages that were mastered in lives that lie even further back are repeated correspondingly earlier in the being's youth, that is to say in its mid-twenties, all according to the position in the row of previous incarnations that the life takes up in which these stages were to the fore as fate and were mastered.