The spiritual individuality that goes through incarnation after incarnation has a purpose: something it seeks to see fulfilled, to contribute. It identifies itself, in the realms from which it descends into incarnation, with this purpose. In working to attain to the glory--to the state of perfect freedom from all worry--associated with the fulfillment of this purpose, the individuality encounters the work of opposition forces.

These forces impinge, with their own soul-forces--sometimes supersensibly, sometimes through others in an incarnated state whom they are able to use as vehicles--upon the individuality in question in such a way as to produce upset, turmoil, fear. If the individuality can muster the power to love the enemy, it eventually succeeds in overcoming this opposition; if not, it eventually succumbs--resigns itself--to the felt need or desire to become one with what has been opposing it, rather than continuing to work to transform the opposition into something that can, instead, become one with it. In doing so, the individuality loses contact with the essential substance of what characterizes the attitude of divine beings towards those that oppose them:

I will not become one with you, but will love you until you are worthy to become one with me.

Over the course of many such instances, whether in one or through many lifetimes, such an individuality gradually adopts, in order to be "social", purposes that conflict with its original purpose. The being loses its integrity, that is to say: the purity of will that characterized it in the beginning.

The condition described above can be referred to as maldestination.