B1228 <=> B1230 [BTG XLVIII From the Author, p. 1229]

For the drops, there is not a separate predetermination of their personal fate – a predetermined fate is for the whole river only.

At the beginning of the flow of the river, the lives of drops are here one moment, there the next moment, and a moment later they might not at all be as they are, but splashed out of the river and evaporated.

And so when, on account of the unbecoming life of people, Great Nature was constrained to engender the corresponding in their common presences, then from that time on it was so established for the purposes of the common actualizing of everything existing that human life in general on the Earth should flow in two streams; and Great Nature foresaw and gradually fixed in the details of Her common actualization such a corresponding law-conformableness, that in the drops of the water of the initial flow of the river of life, which have corresponding inner subjective what are called “struggles of one’s own self-denial,” there might arise or not arise that “something,” thanks to which certain properties are acquired giving the possibility, at the place of the branching of the waters of the river of life, of entering one or the other stream.

This something, which in the common presence of a drop of water is a factor actualizing in it the property corresponding to one or another of the streams, is in the common presence of each man who attains responsible age that “I,” which was referred to in today’s lecture.

A man who has in his common presence his own “I” enters one of the streams of the river of life; and the man who has not, enters the other.

The subsequent fate of any drop in the general river of life is determined at the dividing of the waters, according to the stream the drop happens to enter.