There is the question of what is the soul's natural unfoldment towards spiritual attainment. Spirituality apart, at every stage in one's life - infancy, the time from infancy to childhood, from childhood to youth, from youth to middle age - at every further step there is a new consciousness. Childhood is quite a new consciousness compared with infancy. Youth is quite a different consciousness compared with childhood. In that way every soul, no matter what stage of life it is in and whether it knows it or not, has gone through many different unfoldments, each of which has given it a new consciousness. And there are experiences such as failure in business, or misfortune, or an illness, or some blow in life - it may be an affair of the heart or of money or a social matter: there are many blows which fall upon a person - and then a shell breaks and a new consciousness is produced. Very few will see it as an unfoldment, very few will interpret it as such, but it is so. Have we not all known among our acquaintances someone very uninteresting or with a disagreeable nature to whom we were never attracted, and then perhaps after a blow, a deep sorrow, or some other experience, he awakens to a new consciousness and suddenly attracts us because he has gone through some kind of process?