283. We have mentioned before that the living being experiences life with the help of different alternating bodies, each of which allows the individual to meet with a corresponding specific sense horizon. As each of these bodies is subject to wear and tear and old age they have to be continually renewed. So we see that an individual does not meet with these sense horizons in a permanent state but the experience of each single horizon has to be constantly interrupted, or given a provisional break, as long as that body supporting the experience of the horizon in question has been destroyed and a new body for the same horizon is still not advanced enough in its existence and creation to support that part of the living being's consciousness. In this way we come to realize that the individual has the faculty in himself to form new bodies as the old ones gradually age and wear out. As we shall see later this very creative faculty is just such an eternal reality as the living being itself to whom it is connected, but, seen cosmically, the strongest releasing factor or regulator of this power is identical with all the experience material which has taken place for the individual in question; in other words, the individual's ability to build up a new body is promoted by all the experience material which he has acquired through his former body of the same category and whose span of existence will now be defined for him as synonymous with an earlier life.
      As it is the individual's experience material which is the basis for his present body, the qualities and appearance of that body will depend on the character of the experience material; this means the individual's present body stands or falls by his experiences in an earlier existence and thus determines the nature of his present fate as "happy" or "unhappy".
      In the same way the individual's present experiences and mode of life will naturally form the basis for his fate in lives to come.
      As we shall see later on it is not without interest for the human being to observe and discipline his daily actions so that they come into contact with the eternal laws of existence, otherwise he will lower the quality of his creative faculty in the coming life; indeed, even to such an extent as to be unable for a time to form a normal body. When individuals are born weak-minded, mentally retarded or with serious ill-health in their physical bodies, all these factors, seen cosmically, show the result of an extremely harmful way of living on the part of those persons in a previous existence. But just as the individual can harm and lower his mentality in a coming life through his behaviour in the present one, in the same way he can, of course, also raise the level of his consciousness in a future life by present behaviour in harmony with, and finely tuned to, the laws of existence.
      We shall not occupy ourselves further with these problems, for they will be explained later, but in connection with the subject of "Life's Road" it has been necessary to give some resumé of the supporting facts in the creation of living beings' bodily structures in order to provide the seeker of Truth with the necessary grounding for the possibility of understanding the following illustration of the realities which cause living beings on the same evolutionary step to be able to manifest themselves in the form of different species.