“What has happened was necessary, but at the same time, it is a basis for learning, learning through observation, not useless criticism.”
– Rudolf Steiner
We live many lifetimes over thousands of years. Our time in the spiritual world between incarnations includes observing these lives, especially our most recent one, and preparing for our upcoming incarnation. We use the knowledge we have thus gained to form the next life we will enter through our heredity and our karma. Understanding that the causes for what happens in our current lifetime may have occurred hundreds of years ago helps us to accept that our past is unchangeable; it is a done deal; it is inevitable—a necessity. But from this moment right now and forward into our future we have opportunities for freedom.
Steiner says, “Where the deepest riddles of human existence are concerned the best way to avoid abstraction and to get close to reality is to give examples.” Below is one of three examples he gave in the excerpted lecture.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
The two concepts of freedom and necessity are extremely difficult to grasp and even more difficult to reconcile. It is not for nothing that philosophy for the most part fails when it comes to the problem of freedom and necessity…
When we look at human activities, the first thing we see everywhere is the thread of necessity. For it would be biased to say that every human action is a product of freedom. Let me give you a hypothetical example.
Imagine someone growing up. Through the way he is growing up, it can be shown that all the circumstances have gone in the direction of making him a country postman who has to go out into the country every morning with the mail and deliver letters. He does the same round every day. I expect you will all agree that a certain necessity can be found in this whole process.
If we look at all that happened to this lad in his childhood and take into account everything that had its effect on his life, we will certainly see that all these things combined to make him a mailman. So that as soon as there was a vacant position, he was pushed into it of necessity, at which point freedom certainly ceased to exist, for of course he cannot alter the addresses of the letters he gets. There is now an external necessity that dictates the doors at which he has to call. So, we certainly see a great deal of necessity in what he has to do.
But now let us imagine a younger person who, not out of idleness but just because he is still so young, makes up his mind to go with the mailman every morning and accompany him on his round. He gets up in good time every morning, joins the postman and takes part in all the details of the round for a considerable while.
Now it is obvious that we cannot talk of necessity in the case of the second fellow in the same sense as we can of the first. For everything the first fellow does must happen, whereas nothing the second fellow does has to be done. He could have stayed at home any day, and exactly the same things would have happened from an objective standpoint. This is obvious, isn’t it? So, we could say that the first man does everything out of necessity and the second everything out of freedom. We can very well say this, and yet in one sense they are both doing the same thing.
We might even imagine a morning comes when the second fellow does not want to get up. He could quite well have stayed in bed, but he gets up all the same because he is now used to doing so. He does with a certain necessity what he is doing out of freedom. We see freedom and necessity virtually overlapping…
If we study the way our actual soul nature—which will pass through the gate of death—lives in us, it could be compared with someone accompanying the outer human being in the physical world… What we are in life really consists of two parts that come together from two different directions for our external physical nature comes through the line of heredity, bringing not only physical characteristics with it … but also social status…
Our individual being originating in the spiritual world comes from a different direction bringing with it the causes that may have been laid down in us centuries before and unites them on a spiritual level with the causes residing in the stream of heredity. Two beings come together, and we can regard this second being coming from the spiritual world and uniting with the physical being as a kind of companion to the first. Our soul being in a certain sense joins us in the external events in a similar way.
The other person accompanying the postman did it all voluntarily. This cannot be denied. We could certainly look for causes but compared with the necessity that binds the first postman, the causes for the second man’s actions lie in the realm of freedom; he did it all voluntarily. You will not deny that if the second person accompanied the first person long enough, he would doubtlessly have become a good mailman. He would have easily been able to do what the man he accompanied did. He would even have been able to do it better because he would avoid certain mistakes.
But if the first fellow had not made these mistakes, the second man would not have become aware of them. We cannot possibly imagine that it would be of any use if the second fellow were to think about the first one’s mistakes. If we think in a living way, we will consider this to be an utterly futile endeavor. By specifically not thinking about the mistakes but joining in the work in a living way and just observing the proceedings as a whole, he will acquire them through life and will as a matter of course not make these mistakes.
This is just how it is with our soul nature that accompanies us within. If this being can rise to the perception that what we have done is necessary, that we have accompanied it and will furthermore take our soul nature into the future in so far as it has learned something, then we are looking at things the right way. But it must have learned those things in a really living way.
Excerpt from: Necessity and Freedom, Lecture 3, Berlin. January 30, 1916.
We need to “strengthen the companion part of ourselves”, strengthen our souls so that we aren’t just obsessing over or rationalizing the mistakes we’ve made. Self-reflection, even remorse, are of course, still important. But once we can see all our successes and failures objectively, can see that we cannot change what we have already done, felt or thought, we are free to shape our will to move on, to move from who were just a moment ago to who we will become.