2.7 Returning to Earthly Life
Preludes to the Return
Spirits can sense the time when they will have to reincarnate, much as a blind person senses the fire they are approaching. They know they must return to a body just as you know you must die someday, though without knowing when it will happen. Reincarnation is a necessity of spirit life, just as death is a necessity of corporeal life.
Not all spirits concern themselves with their approaching reincarnation. Some never give it a thought and do not even comprehend it. This depends on their degree of advancement. For some, uncertainty about their future life is itself a punishment.
Spirits may hasten the moment of reincarnation through strong desire. They may also delay it if they recoil from the upcoming trial, since among spirits there are cowardly and indifferent ones. However, they do not delay it with impunity; they suffer for it, like those who refuse the medicine that could restore them to health.
If a spirit felt content in an ordinary condition among discarnate spirits and had no ambition to evolve, it still could not prolong its errant state indefinitely. Advancement is a necessity, and spirits sense this sooner or later. All must evolve; it is their destiny.
The union of a soul with a particular body is always designated beforehand. In choosing the trial it wishes to undergo, the spirit asks to reincarnate, and God, who sees and knows everything, sees and knows beforehand that a particular soul will unite with a particular body.
A spirit may also choose its body because that body’s imperfections will provide the trials that may aid its advancement if it overcomes the obstacles it encounters. This choice is not always left to the spirit, but it may at least ask for it.
At the last moment, a spirit can refuse to enter the body it has chosen. But if it does refuse, it will suffer much more than one who had not undertaken a new trial in the first place.
There cannot be a case in which no spirit is willing to incarnate in a particular unborn child. God would provide for this. When a child is to be born alive, it is always predestined to have a soul; nothing is created without design.
The union of a spirit with a particular body may be imposed by God, just as other trials may be imposed, especially when the spirit is not yet able to make a conscious choice. As an expiation, a spirit may also be compelled to unite with the body of a particular child who, by birth and by the position it will occupy in the world, may become a means of punishment for that spirit.
If several spirits present themselves to occupy the same body, many may indeed request the same body. In such cases, God decides which one is best suited to fulfill the mission for which the child is destined. As already stated, the spirit is designated before the instant at which it is to join the body.
The moment of incarnation is accompanied by a state of confusion similar to that following discarnation, but much greater and much longer. At death, a spirit escapes slavery; at birth, it enters it.
The moment of incarnation is solemn for the spirit. It is like a traveler embarking on a dangerous voyage, not knowing whether death lies ahead on the waves.
Travelers who set out on a voyage know they will be exposed to dangers, but they do not know whether they will run aground. The same applies to a spirit. It knows the kind of trials to which it will be submitted, but not whether it will fail.
Just as the death of the body is a kind of rebirth for the spirit, reincarnation is a kind of death—or rather, a kind of exile and confinement. The spirit leaves the spirit world for the corporeal world just as, after having been human, it leaves the corporeal world for the world of spirits. A spirit knows it will reincarnate, just as a human being knows they will die. Like human beings, however, the spirit becomes fully aware of it only at the last moment, when the appointed time has arrived. Then, in that supreme moment, confusion takes hold of it, similar to someone in the throes of death. This confusion lasts until the new existence is firmly established. Thus, the commencement of reincarnation is a kind of death throes for the spirit.
A spirit’s uncertainty about whether it will successfully endure the trials it will experience in life is a cause of great anxiety before incarnation, because the trials of existence will either delay or hasten its evolution, depending on whether they are borne well or badly.
At the moment of reincarnation, the spirit may be accompanied by spirit friends who come to assist with its departure from the spirit world, just as they come to meet it when it returns. This depends on the sphere the spirit inhabits. If it belongs to a sphere in which affection reigns, spirits who love it accompany it to the last moment, encouraging it and often even following it during its lifetime.
The Return to Corporeal Life
The spirit friends who follow us throughout life are often the same ones we sometimes see in dreams, showing their affection for us even though we do not physically recognize them. They come to visit us as one would visit a prisoner in jail.
The Joining of the Soul with the Body; Abortion
The union begins at conception but is complete only at birth. From the moment of conception, the spirit designated to inhabit a given body is connected to it by a fluidic tie, which grows tighter and tighter until the child is born. The newborn’s cry announces that it has entered the number of the living and of the servants of God.
The union between spirit and body is definitive from the moment of conception in the sense that no other spirit can replace the one designated for that particular body. However, since the ties that bind it are still very tenuous and easy to break, they may be severed by the will of a spirit that recoils from the trial it has chosen. In that case, the child does not survive.
If the body a spirit has chosen dies before birth, the spirit chooses another. The imperfections of matter are frequently the cause of such deaths.
A spirit can derive little benefit from incarnating in a body that dies a few days after birth. Such a being does not yet have a sufficiently developed consciousness of its existence; the importance of its death is almost null. Such cases are often meant as a trial for the parents.
A spirit sometimes knows beforehand that the body it has chosen will have no chance of surviving. If it chooses it for that reason, it does so in order to avoid its upcoming trial.
When a particular incarnation fails for a spirit for any reason, another existence is not always furnished immediately. The spirit may require time to make another choice, unless an immediate reincarnation had previously been decided.
Once definitely united to the body of a child and no longer able to withdraw, a spirit may, as an incarnate spirit, complain about its life or wish to have another, but it does not regret the choice it made, because it no longer remembers having made it. Once incarnate, a spirit cannot regret a choice of which it has no awareness, but it may find the burden too heavy, and if it believes the burden exceeds its strength, it may resort to suicide.
In the interval between conception and birth, spirits enjoy their faculties more or less, depending on the stage of gestation, because during that time they are not yet fully incarnated; they are only attached to the body. At conception, confusion begins to envelop the spirit, warning it that the time has come to begin a new existence. This confusion increases until birth. Meanwhile, its state is more or less that of an incarnate spirit during sleep. As the moment of birth approaches, its ideas are erased, as is its memory of the past, of which it is no longer conscious once it returns to life on Earth. But this memory returns little by little when it reenters the spirit state.
At birth, spirits do not immediately recover the fullness of their faculties. The faculties develop gradually with the organs. Spirits find themselves in a new existence and must learn to use their bodily instruments. Their ideas return little by little, like those of people waking from sleep and finding themselves in a different situation from the one they were in the day before.
Since the union of a spirit with its body is not complete and definitively consummated until after birth, the fetus may be considered to have a soul only in the sense that the spirit who must animate it exists, so to speak, outside it. Strictly speaking, the fetus has no soul, since the current incarnation is only in the process of being accomplished. Nevertheless, the fetus is linked to the soul it will have.
Intrauterine life is like that of a germinating plant. The fetus lives a corporeal, animal-like life. As a fetus, the human being already has within itself a vegeto-animal life, which at birth is completed by spiritual life.
There are infants who, even in their mother’s womb, have no possibility of surviving. This is common, and God permits it as a trial either for the parents or for the spirit appointed to animate the child.
There are stillborn infants who were not meant for a spirit to incarnate in them in the first place. Some never had a spirit destined for their bodies; nothing would have been accomplished in them. In such cases, the child is delivered solely for the parents.
A being of this nature may sometimes be carried to term, but it does not survive. Every child that survives necessarily has a spirit incarnated in it. Without a spirit, it would not be a human being.
The consequences of abortion for a spirit are that its existence is nullified and must be begun again.
Artificial abortion is a crime regardless of the stage of conception. A crime is always committed when the law of God is transgressed. The mother, or any other person involved, commits a crime by taking the life of a child before birth because this prevents a soul from undergoing the trials for which the unborn child’s body was to have been the instrument.
In cases where the mother’s life would be endangered by the birth of the child, it is better to sacrifice the being who does not yet exist than the one who already exists.
It is reasonable to treat the fetus with the same respect as the body of a child who has already survived. The will of God and the divine handiwork should be seen in everything, and what ought to be respected should not be treated lightly. All the works of creation should be respected, even those that are sometimes incomplete by the will of the Creator. Everything unfolds according to God’s designs, and no one is called upon to judge them.
The Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Humankind
A person’s good or evil moral qualities reflect the qualities of the incarnate spirit. The purer the spirit, the more the person is inclined toward the good.
A moral person is the incarnation of a good spirit, and a cruel person that of an imperfect spirit. It is better to say an imperfect spirit; otherwise, one might suppose there are spirits who will remain evil forever, those called demons.
Individuals in whom frivolous and foolish spirits are incarnated are thoughtless, cunning, and sometimes malicious.
Spirits do not possess passions that do not belong to humankind; otherwise, they would have passed them on.
It is one and the same spirit that gives an individual both moral and intellectual qualities, and these qualities depend on the degree of the spirit’s evolution. Individuals do not have two spirits within them.
The most intelligent individuals, displaying a highly evolved spirit incarnated in them, may at times also be extremely cruel because the incarnate spirit is not sufficiently purified and because the person yields to the influence of other spirits who are even worse. A spirit progresses in an imperceptible ascending movement, but this progress is not accomplished simultaneously in every respect. During one period a spirit may advance in knowledge; during another, in morality.
The opinion that the various moral and intellectual qualities of humans are the product of many different spirits incarnated in them, each possessing a special aptitude, is absurd. A spirit must possess all aptitudes, and to progress it needs a unified will. If a person were a collection of spirits, this unified will would not exist. There would be no individuality, because at death all those spirits would be like a flock of birds escaping from a cage. People often complain that they do not understand certain things, yet they multiply their difficulties when a very simple and natural explanation lies close at hand. This notion is another example of taking the effect for the cause: it attributes to the human being what the pagans attributed to God. They believed in as many gods as there were phenomena in the universe. Yet even among them, sensible persons saw in those phenomena only effects whose cause was one God.
The physical and moral realms both offer many points of comparison in this respect. Humankind believed in the multiplicity of matter as long as examination was confined to the appearance of phenomena. Nowadays it is understood that such varied phenomena may be only modifications of a single elementary matter. The various qualities and faculties are manifestations of the same cause, which is the soul, or incarnate spirit, and not several souls, just as the different sounds of an organ result from the same kind of air, not from as many kinds of air as there are sounds. The theory in question would mean that when a person loses or acquires certain aptitudes or tendencies, certain spirits have left and others have arrived, making that person a multiple being without individuality and therefore without responsibility. Moreover, this theory is contradicted by the many manifestations in which spirits prove their personality and identity.
The Influence of the Organism
Upon joining the body, a spirit does not identify itself with matter. Matter is only the spirit’s envelope, just as clothing is the body’s envelope. Upon joining the body, a spirit preserves the attributes of its spirit nature.
A spirit does not exercise its faculties with full liberty after union with a body. The exercise of its faculties depends on the organs serving as instruments. They are weakened by the density of matter.
Accordingly, the material envelope is an obstacle to the free manifestation of the spirit’s faculties, like opaque glass obstructing the free emission of light.
One may further compare the action of the body’s matter upon a spirit to that of muddy water, which hinders the free movement of an object immersed in it.
The free exercise of the soul’s faculties is subordinate to the development of the bodily organs. The organs are the instruments for the manifestation of the soul’s faculties. This manifestation depends on the degree of development of the respective organs, just as the excellence of a piece of work depends on the excellence of the tool.
One must not infer from the influence of the organs that the development of cerebral structure itself produces moral and intellectual faculties. The organs do not give the faculties. One must not confuse effect with cause. The spirit always possesses the faculties proper to it. Thus, it is not the organs that give it its faculties, but rather the faculties that stimulate the development of the organs.
According to this view, the diversity of aptitudes among individuals does not stem solely from the condition of the spirit. More precisely, the qualities of the spirit, whether more advanced or less advanced, are the basis of this diversity; however, one must also take into account the influence of matter, which hinders the exercise of these faculties to a greater or lesser degree.
When the spirit incarnates, it brings certain predispositions with it, and if there is a corresponding area in the brain for each one, the development of these areas is an effect, not a cause. If the faculties originated in the organs themselves, human beings would be machines without free will and without responsibility for their actions. One would then have to accept that the greatest geniuses—scientists, poets, artists—owe their talents to chance, which has given them a special brain structure. Consequently, without this structure they would not be geniuses, and the simplest person could have been a Newton, a Virgil, or a Raphael if supplied with a certain brain structure. This assumption becomes even more absurd when applied to moral qualities. Thus, according to this theory, if Saint Vincent de Paul had been endowed by nature with a particular brain structure, he might have been a scoundrel, whereas the greatest scoundrel would only lack a certain brain structure to become someone like Saint Vincent de Paul. On the other hand, if such special structures, if they exist, are effects developed by the exercise of faculties, like muscles developed by movement, then nothing seems unreasonable. A simple comparison, though a true one, may be made: by certain facial traits one recognizes that a person is given to alcohol. These traits do not make the person an alcoholic; alcoholism produces the traits. Thus one may safely say that the organs receive the imprint of the faculties.
Mental Impairment and Insanity
There is no basis for the opinion that mentally impaired individuals have a soul of a less evolved nature. They have a human soul that is often more intelligent than one might think, and that suffers immensely from the insufficiency of its means of communication, just as a mute person suffers from being unable to speak.
The aim of Providence in creating unfortunate beings such as the mentally impaired is that the spirits dwelling in such bodies are expiating past wrongs. They suffer from their constraints and from the impossibility of expressing themselves because of undeveloped or defective brains.
It is inaccurate to say that organs do not exercise any influence on the faculties. Organs exercise a very great influence on the manifestation of the faculties, but they do not produce the faculties; that is the difference. A good musician will not make good music with a bad instrument, but that does not mean they are not a good musician.
It is necessary to distinguish between the normal state and the pathological state. In the normal state, mental ability may overcome material obstacles. However, there are cases in which matter offers so much resistance that manifestations are hindered or distorted, as in mental impairment and insanity. These are pathological cases, and in such states the soul is not in possession of its full reasoning ability. This is why human law exempts such persons from responsibility for their acts.
The existence of beings who, like the mentally impaired, can do neither good nor evil and therefore cannot progress, has the character of an expiation imposed for the abuse of certain faculties in a former life; it is a temporary pause.
The body of a mentally impaired person may confine a spirit that perhaps animated the body of a genius in a preceding existence. Genius sometimes becomes a curse when it is abused.
Moral superiority does not always imply intellectual superiority, and the greatest geniuses may have much to expiate. Consequently, they often live a present existence that is inferior to those they have already lived, and this is a source of great suffering. The impediments these spirits experience when they try to express themselves are for them like chains that fetter the movements of an active person. One may say that the mentally impaired are disabled in the brain, just as others are disabled in their limbs or eyes.
In the spirit state, the mentally impaired are often conscious of their condition. They understand that the chains hindering their development are a trial and an expiation.
The situation of the spirit in insanity is as follows: when freed from the body, the spirit receives impressions directly and acts directly upon matter. Once incarnated, however, it finds itself under entirely different conditions and needs to act with the help of special organs. If one part, or a group, of these organs is altered, the spirit’s action is interrupted: defective eyes cause blindness, defective ears cause deafness, and if the organ presiding over the manifestations of intelligence and will is partially or entirely damaged or modified, the use of such an incomplete or distorted organ results in an affliction of which the spirit is fully aware, but whose course it is powerless to stop.
It is always the body, not the spirit, that is disordered. But it must not be forgotten that just as a spirit acts upon matter, matter reacts upon the spirit to a certain degree. Thus, a spirit may find itself momentarily controlled by the alteration of the organs through which it manifests and receives impressions. It may happen that, with time, after insanity has lasted a long while, the repetition of the same acts ends up exerting on the spirit an influence from which it will not be freed until complete separation from every material effect.
Insanity sometimes leads to suicide because the spirit suffers immensely from its constraints and from the powerlessness to manifest itself freely. It then seeks in death a way to break its ties.
After death, the spirit of a mentally impaired person may continue to feel the derangement of its faculties for some time, until it is completely disconnected from matter, like a person who, upon awakening, still feels the confusion into which sleep had immersed them.
The impairment of the brain can react upon the spirit after death as a remembrance. A weight bears down upon the spirit, and since it was not aware of everything that took place during its insanity, it needs time to understand its current state. That is why the longer insanity lasts during life, the longer the affliction and constraint endure after death. Once disconnected from the body, the spirit continues for some time to feel the impression of its bonds.
Childhood
The spirit who animates the body of a child may be as developed as, or even more developed than, the spirit of an adult if it is more evolved. Only its imperfect organs keep it from fully manifesting itself. It must act according to the instrument that serves it.
In a very young child, despite the obstacle imposed by the imperfection of its organs, the spirit does not think as an adult. While it is a child, it is natural that the as-yet undeveloped organ of intelligence cannot provide all the intuition of an adult. Its intelligence is therefore quite limited until age matures its reason. The confusion accompanying incarnation does not cease suddenly at birth, but dissipates gradually with the development of the organs.
Observation supports this: a child’s dreams do not have the character of an adult’s dreams. Their content is almost always childish, which indicates the nature of the spirit’s preoccupations.
At the death of the child, the spirit should immediately regain its former vigor, since it has been freed from its physical envelope. Nevertheless, it does not regain its former lucidity until the separation is complete, that is, until there is no connection at all between spirit and body.
The incarnate spirit does not suffer from the constraint imposed by the imperfection of its organs during childhood. Childhood is a necessity. It is natural and corresponds to the designs of Providence. It is a time of repose for the spirit.
The usefulness of a spirit’s passing through childhood lies in this: a spirit incarnates in order to perfect itself, and during childhood it is more accessible to the impressions it receives, which may assist in its progress. Those charged with its education should contribute toward this goal.
A child’s first expressions are cries, intended to awaken the mother’s interest and ensure the care the child needs. If it expressed only joy while still unable to speak, few would be concerned about its needs. One should therefore admire the wisdom of Providence in everything.
The change that occurs in a child’s character at a certain age, particularly on leaving adolescence, happens because the spirit recaptures its true nature and reveals what it really was before the present incarnation. The secrets hidden behind children’s innocence are unknown. One does not know what they are, what they have been, or what they will be. Nevertheless, they are loved and cherished as though they were a part of those who care for them, to such a degree that a mother’s love for her child is reputed to be the greatest love one being can have for another. Even strangers feel a sweet affection and show tender benevolence toward a child.
Children are beings whom God has sent into a new existence. So that God may not be accused of excessive severity, God gives them all the appearance of innocence. Even in children of an evil nature, their misdeeds are covered because they are unaware of the quality of their acts.
However, this innocence does not truly reflect their degree of advancement in relation to what they previously were. In reality, it is an image of what they ought to be, and if they are not, the blame falls on them alone.
Nevertheless, it is not only for the children’s sake that God gives them this appearance; it is also, and especially, for their parents, whose love is necessary during their fragility. That love would be greatly weakened if parents were confronted with a quarrelsome and bad-tempered character. But because parents suppose their children to be good and gentle, they give them all their affection and surround them with the tenderest care. When children no longer need the protection and assistance given to them for fifteen or twenty years, however, their true and individual character emerges in full. Their character remains good if it was fundamentally good, but it will always display shades that were hidden during early childhood.
God’s ways are always the best, and to a pure heart they are easily understood.
The spirit of the child born among you may have come from a world in which it had acquired habits altogether different from yours. This new being could not remain in your midst with passions so different from yours, with inclinations and tastes entirely opposed to yours, except in the way God intended: after passing through the sieve of childhood. In this phase are mingled all the thoughts, characteristics, and varieties of beings generated by the multitude of worlds on which individuals develop. Upon dying, you yourselves will also be in a sort of childhood among new family members. In your new non-terrestrial existence, you will be ignorant of the habits, customs, and forms of relationship proper to that world, and you will have difficulty managing a language you are not accustomed to speaking, a language more alive than your thought is today.
Childhood serves yet another purpose: spirits enter corporeal life only to improve and purify themselves. The fragility of the early years renders them flexible and accessible to the counsels of experience and of those who should aid their progress. That is the time when one may best reform their character and curb their evil tendencies. Such is the duty that God entrusts to parents, a sacred mission for which they will have to answer.
Consequently, childhood is not only useful, necessary, and indispensable; it is also the natural result of the laws God has established to govern the universe.
Earthly Sympathies and Antipathies
Two individuals who have known and loved each other in another corporeal existence do not recognize one another, but they do feel drawn to one another. Often, intimate bonds founded on sincere affection arise from no other cause. Two people are drawn together by apparently fortuitous circumstances, but in reality this is the result of the attraction of two spirits who have been searching for each other amid the crowd.
They would not always find it beneficial to recognize one another. The memory of past lives might have greater disadvantages than one might suppose. After death, they will recognize each other and remember the time they spent together.
Sympathy is not always the result of spirits having known each other previously. Two spirits with natural affinities seek one another out even if they were not previously acquainted as incarnates.
The encounters that sometimes occur between certain persons, and that are attributed to chance, may be the effect of a kind of sympathetic relationship. Among thinking beings there are connections not yet known. Magnetism lies at the root of this science, which will later be better understood.
The instinctive repulsion that arises when certain individuals meet for the first time comes from their being antipathetic spirits who perceive and recognize each other without ever having spoken.
Instinctive antipathy is not always a sign of an evil nature. Two spirits are not necessarily evil simply because they are not sympathetic. Antipathy may arise from a dissimilarity in their ways of thinking. As they evolve, however, these differences are erased and the antipathy disappears.
The antipathy between two individuals arises in both, but the causes and effects differ. An evil spirit feels antipathy toward anyone who may be able to judge and unmask it. On seeing a person for the first time, it perceives that it will be disapproved of. Its dislike then turns into hatred and envy, inspiring the desire to do evil. The good spirit, on the other hand, is repulsed by the evil one because it knows it will not be understood by the other and that they do not share the same sentiments. However, conscious of its higher moral principles, it feels neither hatred nor jealousy: it is content simply to avoid and pity the other.
Forgetfulness of the Past
The incarnate spirit loses the memory of its past because human beings cannot and must not know everything. In divine wisdom, God wills it so. Without the veil that hides certain things, they would be dazzled, like someone passing suddenly from darkness into light. By forgetting the past, they are more fully themselves in the present.
Individuals remain responsible for their deeds and may redeem their wrongs even though they do not remember them. With each new existence, spirits gain more intelligence and can better distinguish good from evil. Their merit would be diminished if they remembered their whole past. When spirits enter their original life, spirit life, their previous life unfolds before them. They see the wrongs they committed, which are the cause of their suffering, as well as what would have kept them from committing them. They understand the justice of the position assigned to them, and they then desire a new existence capable of redeeming the one that has elapsed. They seek trials similar to those they have already experienced, or struggles they believe suitable for their advancement. They ask higher-order spirits to help them in the new task they are about to undertake, for they know that the spirit given to them as guide in that new existence will endeavor to help them repair the wrongs of the past by giving them a sort of intuition about them. This intuition is the thought, the wrongful desire, that often assails you and that you instinctively resist, most often attributing your resistance to the principles you received from your parents. Yet it is the voice of conscience speaking to you, and this voice is a memory of the past, a voice warning you not to fall again into the errors previously committed. In that new existence, if a spirit endures its trials with courage and resists them, it evolves and rises in the hierarchy of spirits when it returns among them.
During corporeal life, even without a precise memory of what we were or of the good and evil we did in previous lifetimes, we nevertheless have an intuition of them. Our instinctive tendencies are thus a reminiscence of our past, and our conscience—which represents the desire we formed not to commit the same wrongs again—warns us that we must resist them.
On worlds more advanced than ours, two different cases apply regarding whether their inhabitants know themselves to be happier than we are. There are worlds among those under discussion whose inhabitants have a clear and exact memory of their past lives. These can and do appreciate the happiness that God allows them to enjoy. But there are other worlds whose inhabitants, though placed in conditions better than ours, are nonetheless subject to great annoyances and even misfortunes. They do not appreciate their happiness because they do not remember an even unhappier state. Still, if they do not appreciate it as incarnates, they will do so as spirits.
In the forgetfulness of past existences, especially when they were painful, there is something providential in which divine wisdom is revealed. On more highly evolved worlds, when the memory of unhappy lives is nothing more than a bad dream, the memory of such lives resurfaces. On less evolved worlds, present misfortunes would be increased by the memory of everything endured in the past. Everything God has made is well made, and it is not for us to criticize the divine works or to say how God ought to have ordered the universe.
The remembrance of our former personalities would entail serious inconveniences. In some cases it could cause great humiliation; in others, it could exalt our pride and thus hinder our free will. God has given us only what is necessary and sufficient for improvement: the voice of conscience and the instinctive tendencies that keep us from what might harm us. If we remembered our former personal acts, we would also remember those of other people, and such knowledge could have the most unpleasant effects on social relationships. Since we do not always have good reason to be proud of our past, it is almost always a blessing that a veil has been cast over it. This agrees perfectly with the doctrine of spirits concerning worlds more evolved than ours. On those worlds, where only good reigns, there is nothing painful in remembering the past. That is why previous lifetimes are often remembered there as easily as we remember what we did yesterday. As for the sojourn one may have had on less evolved worlds, the memory of it is nothing more than a bad dream.
Revelations about former lives cannot always be obtained. Nevertheless, many know who they were and what they did. If they were allowed to speak openly, they would make curious revelations about the past.
Some people believe they have a vague memory of an unknown past. It appears as a fleeting image from a dream, which they try in vain to retain. Sometimes this is real, but much more often it is an illusion against which one should be on guard; it may simply be the effect of an overexcited imagination.
In corporeal existences of a more evolved nature than ours, the memory of previous lives is more precise. As the body becomes less material, previous lives are easier to remember. Memory of the past is clearer for those who inhabit worlds of a higher order.
Since people’s instinctive tendencies are a reminiscence of the past, by studying those tendencies they may know, to a certain extent, the wrongs they committed. However, one must take into account the improvement that may have taken place in the spirit and the resolutions it made in the errant state. Its present existence may in fact be much better than the preceding one.
It could also be worse. A person may commit wrongs in the present existence that were not committed in the preceding one. That depends on the spirit’s advancement. If it does not yet know how to resist trials, it may be drawn into new wrongs as a consequence of the position it has itself chosen. But such wrongs indicate a stationary state rather than a regressive one, because spirits may advance or remain stationary; they do not regress.
Since the tribulations of corporeal life are at once expiations for past wrongs and trials for the future, it often follows from their nature that the kind of preceding existence we lived may be inferred, because individuals are punished for particular faults. Nevertheless, this cannot be made an absolute rule. Instinctive tendencies are a more certain indication, because the trials a spirit undergoes refer as much to the future as to the past.
When the end marked by Providence for an errant life has arrived, spirits choose for themselves the trials to which they wish to submit, and which will hasten their advancement—that is, the kind of existence they believe most suitable for furnishing the means to evolve. Such trials are always related to the wrongs they must expiate.
If they triumph over them, they advance; if they succumb, they must begin again.
Spirits always retain their free will. By virtue of this freedom, in the spirit state they choose the trials of their forthcoming corporeal life, and in the incarnate state they deliberate over what they will or will not do, choosing between good and evil. To deny human beings free will would be to reduce them to the condition of a machine.
Once integrated into corporeal life, spirits momentarily lose the remembrance of former lives, as though a veil hid them. Nevertheless, they sometimes retain a vague awareness of them, and under certain circumstances they may even be revealed. But this does not happen except by the will of higher-order spirits, who may allow it spontaneously for some useful purpose, never to satisfy vain curiosity.
Future existences can never be revealed, since they depend both on the way the present existence is completed and on the later choice of the spirit.
Forgetfulness of wrongs committed is not an obstacle to improvement because, although spirits do not retain a precise memory of them, the knowledge they had during the errant state, together with the desire then conceived to repair them, guides them by intuition and inspires the thought of resisting evil. This thought is the voice of conscience, and it is seconded by the spirits who assist them if they heed good suggestions.
Even though people do not know the acts they committed in previous lives, they can always know the kinds of wrongs of which they were guilty and what their dominant characteristics were. They need only study themselves in the present, and they will be able to discern what they were in the past—not by what they are in themselves, but by their tendencies.
The tribulations of corporeal life are at the same time expiations for past wrongs and trials for the future. They purify and elevate us if we endure them with resignation and without complaint.
The nature of the trials and tribulations we undergo may also enlighten us about what we were and what we did, just as in this world we judge the acts of a criminal by the punishment inflicted by the law. Thus, the proud will be punished by the humiliation of a subordinate position; the self-indulgent and greedy, by poverty; those who were harsh toward others, by the harsh treatment they themselves will suffer; the tyrant, by slavery; the bad child, by the ingratitude of their own children; and the lazy, by forced labor.