2.7 Returning to Earthly Life
Preludes to the Return
Spirits generally sense that reincarnation is approaching, though they do not know the exact moment when it will occur. Their awareness resembles that of a blind person who feels the heat of a nearby fire: the approach is real and unmistakable, even if its precise instant remains hidden. In this way, reincarnation is as much a necessity of spirit life as death is a necessity of bodily life.
Not all spirits concern themselves equally with this return. Much depends on their degree of advancement. Some barely think about it and do not clearly understand it. For less advanced spirits, uncertainty about the life ahead can itself be a punishment.
A spirit may hasten reincarnation through a strong desire to advance. It may also try to delay the moment out of fear of the coming trial. Among spirits, as among human beings, there are those who recoil, hesitate, or remain indifferent. Yet delay carries consequences. Refusing a needed return is like refusing a remedy that could restore health: the postponement does not remove the need, but increases the suffering.
No spirit can remain indefinitely in the wandering state between incarnations. Even if a spirit is relatively content in that condition and feels little ambition to improve, progress remains unavoidable. Sooner or later, every spirit feels the necessity of moving forward. Advancement is not optional; it belongs to the destiny of all.
The connection between a spirit and a particular body is not improvised at the last instant. It is designated beforehand. When a spirit chooses the kind of trial it wishes to undergo, it thereby asks to reincarnate, and the union with a fitting body is foreseen within the universal order. In some cases, a spirit may also choose the body itself, because bodily limitations and imperfections can become part of the trial needed for growth. By overcoming the obstacles arising from such a body, the spirit advances.
This choice is not always fully in the spirit’s hands. It may ask, but it does not always decide freely. If, at the final moment, it refuses to enter the body it had accepted, the suffering that follows is even greater than that of a spirit that had not taken on a new trial at all.
No child destined to be born alive is left without a soul. If no spirit willingly presented itself for a given incarnation, divine providence would still provide. Nothing is without design. In some cases, union with a particular body may even be imposed. This may happen when a spirit is not advanced enough to choose consciously, or as a form of expiation, when the conditions of that birth and the future position of the child in the world become a means of correction and just consequence.
If several spirits desired the same body, the decision would not rest with them alone. Many may request the same incarnation, but the final determination belongs to God, who knows which spirit is best suited to fulfill the mission linked to that life.
The moment of incarnation is accompanied by a confusion greater and longer than the confusion following death. At death, the spirit leaves bondage; at birth, it enters it. Reincarnation is therefore a grave moment. It resembles the departure of a traveler embarking on a dangerous voyage, aware of the risks ahead but unable to know with certainty whether it will endure them well.
A spirit knows the general kind of trials that await, but not whether it will succeed or fail. This uncertainty naturally produces deep anxiety, because the trials of earthly existence may either delay or hasten progress according to how they are borne.
There is a profound parallel between death and reincarnation. The death of the body is a rebirth for the spirit, while reincarnation is, for the spirit, a kind of death—more precisely, a kind of exile and confinement. It leaves the spirit world for the corporeal world just as, after earthly life, it leaves the corporeal world for the life of spirits. The spirit knows that it must return, just as a human being knows that death will come, but the full reality of the event is only felt at the appointed time. Then confusion overtakes it, similar to the final agony of death, and this state lasts until the new existence is firmly established. The beginning of reincarnation is thus like a death struggle for the spirit.
For spirits belonging to more elevated spheres, this departure is often softened by affection. Spirits who love them may accompany them to the last moment, encouraging them as they prepare for incarnation. Some even continue to follow them during earthly life.
The Return to Corporeal Life
The spirit friends who accompany a person through life are often the very ones who appear in dreams with signs of affection, even when they are not physically recognized. They visit those they love much as one would visit a prisoner in confinement.
Corporeal life is indeed a confinement for the incarnate spirit. Though necessary for progress, it places the spirit under limits it did not have in freedom. The presence of faithful spirit companions helps ease that condition. Their nearness is one of the consolations granted during earthly existence, and their affection may still be felt in sleep, when the soul is less tightly bound to the body.
The Joining of the Soul with the Body
The union of the soul with the body begins at conception and is completed at birth.
From conception onward, the spirit destined for a given body is linked to it by a fluidic bond that gradually tightens until the moment of birth. The newborn’s first cry marks its entrance into the world of the living.
This union is definitive in one sense: no other spirit can take the place of the one designated for that body. Yet in the earliest stage, the bond is still very delicate. Because of that fragility, it may be broken if the spirit withdraws from the trial it had accepted. When this happens, the child does not survive.
If the body chosen by a spirit dies before birth, the spirit chooses another. Such premature deaths often result from the imperfections of matter. In some cases, the spirit attached to a body that lives only a few days after birth derives almost no personal consequence from that brief incarnation, because its consciousness of earthly existence is not yet sufficiently developed. These events are often allowed as a trial for the parents.
A spirit may sometimes know in advance that the body it has chosen will not survive. If it chooses such a body for that reason, it may be seeking to avoid the trial that awaited it.
When an incarnation fails, another earthly existence is not always given immediately. The spirit may need time before making a new choice, unless an immediate reincarnation had already been determined.
Once a spirit is firmly united to a child’s body and can no longer withdraw, it does not regret the choice it made before incarnation, because it no longer remembers having made that choice. As an incarnate being, however, it may find life’s burden too heavy and may complain of its condition. In extreme weakness, it may even attempt to escape through suicide.
The Spirit Between Conception and Birth
Between conception and birth, the spirit does not enjoy the full exercise of its faculties. Its condition varies according to the stage of gestation.
At conception, confusion begins to envelop the spirit, warning it that a new existence is about to start. This confusion increases as birth approaches. During that interval, its condition resembles that of an incarnate spirit during sleep: attached, present, but not yet fully engaged in bodily life.
As birth nears, its ideas become obscured, and the memory of the past is erased from conscious awareness. Once earthly life has resumed, that memory is no longer available to it. It returns little by little only after the spirit reenters the spirit state.
At birth, the spirit does not instantly recover the full use of its faculties. These unfold gradually as the bodily organs develop. Entering a new existence, it must learn to use its new instruments. Its ideas reawaken progressively, like those of someone rising from sleep and finding himself in circumstances entirely different from those of the day before.
The Soul of the Fetus
Because the union between spirit and body is not fully completed until birth, the fetus cannot, in the strictest sense, be said to possess a soul in the same way as a child already born. The spirit meant to animate it exists, as it were, outside it while the incarnation is still being accomplished.
Even so, the fetus is linked to the soul that will belong to it.
Intrauterine life may be understood by comparison with a germinating plant. The fetus lives an animal-like corporeal life. Before birth, the human being possesses vegetative and animal life, and at birth this is completed by spiritual life.
Infants Who Cannot Survive
Some infants, even in the womb, have no possibility of surviving. Such cases are common and are permitted as a trial either for the parents or for the spirit appointed to animate the child.
There are also stillborn infants for whom no spirit was ever destined to incarnate. In such cases, nothing would have been accomplished through that body. Their birth occurs solely as a trial for the parents. Such a body may sometimes be carried to term, but it does not survive.
Every child that survives has an incarnated spirit within it. Without a spirit, it would not be a human being.
Abortion
For the spirit, abortion nullifies the existence that was being prepared, and that existence must be begun again.
Artificial abortion is a moral wrong whenever it deliberately violates divine law. To take the life of a child before birth is to prevent a spirit from undergoing the trials for which that body was meant to serve as the instrument.
There is, however, an exception in the case where the mother’s life is endangered by the birth. In that circumstance, it is better to sacrifice the being who does not yet fully exist than the one who already exists.
Respect for the Fetus
It is reasonable to treat the fetus with reverence, just as one would honor the body of a child already born.
The work of God deserves respect in all its stages. No part of creation should be treated lightly, even when it appears incomplete. What is unfinished may still exist according to a divine purpose. Everything unfolds according to a higher order, and human judgment is not the measure of the value of life in formation.
The Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Humankind
A person’s moral qualities come from the qualities of the incarnate spirit.
The more purified the spirit, the stronger the inclination toward the good. When the spirit is still imperfect, moral weakness appears more easily in human character. Goodness, cruelty, generosity, selfishness, gentleness, and harshness are not accidental traits detached from the inner being. They reflect the degree of advancement of the spirit embodied in the person.
For that reason, it is more accurate to speak of imperfect spirits than of spirits that are evil in an absolute and permanent sense. No spirit is destined to remain forever in wrongdoing. Imperfection is a condition of incompleteness, not an eternal nature.
When frivolous and foolish spirits are incarnated, the resulting character is often marked by thoughtlessness, cunning, and at times malice. Such persons may act without seriousness or moral depth, and their behavior may show instability and poor judgment.
Spirits do not possess passions foreign to humankind. The passions seen in human life are the same tendencies carried by spirits themselves. If spirits had passions entirely unlike those of people, those passions would have been communicated in human existence as well. Human moral life and spirit life are therefore continuous, not separate realms governed by different emotional laws.
One Spirit, One Individuality
The same spirit gives a person both moral and intellectual qualities.
Human beings do not contain one spirit for intelligence and another for morality. Knowledge, feeling, character, will, and aptitude all belong to a single center of being: the soul, or incarnate spirit. These qualities vary according to the spirit’s degree of evolution.
This unity is necessary. Progress requires a unified will. If a person were made up of several spirits, each with its own special aptitude, there would be no true individuality. Personal identity would dissolve into a collection of partial influences, and moral responsibility would become impossible.
At death, such a theory would imply that the supposed component spirits would separate like birds escaping from a cage. In that case, the person would never have been a real person at all, but only a temporary grouping. That idea conflicts with the permanence of identity shown by spirits in their manifestations, where they reveal themselves as distinct and continuous beings.
Uneven Development of the Faculties
A highly intelligent person may still be deeply cruel.
This does not mean that intelligence and morality come from different spirits. It means that the incarnate spirit has advanced more in one direction than in another. A spirit may make progress in knowledge without having achieved the same progress in moral purification. Intellectual development and moral development do not always proceed together.
At the same time, a person may yield to the influence of spirits who are even more imperfect. Such influence can strengthen harmful tendencies already present, though it does not create a second self within the individual. The incarnate spirit remains one, but it may be more or less receptive to outside influences according to its own condition.
Progress takes place through a gradual and almost imperceptible ascent. It is not accomplished simultaneously in every faculty. During one period, a spirit may advance especially in understanding; during another, especially in morality. This explains the mixed characters often found in human life: brilliance joined to pride, refinement joined to coldness, or kindness joined to limited understanding.
The Error of Multiple Spirits in One Person
The opinion that different moral and intellectual qualities come from many spirits incarnated in one person does not withstand reflection.
It confuses effects with causes. Diversity of faculties does not require a plurality of souls any more than diversity of sounds requires a plurality of kinds of air. Just as many tones can come from the same current passing through an organ, many faculties can proceed from the same spirit expressing itself in different ways.
A useful comparison may be drawn from the study of matter. For a long time, people imagined a multiplicity of distinct substances because they judged only by outward appearances. Later, it became possible to understand that many varied phenomena could be produced by modifications of a single elementary matter. In the same way, the many qualities and faculties seen in a human being are manifestations of one and the same cause: the soul, or incarnate spirit.
If a person’s abilities and tendencies came from separate spirits, then gaining or losing an aptitude would mean that one spirit had departed and another had arrived. The human being would become a multiple entity without stable individuality, and therefore without true responsibility. Such a view makes the problem more complicated when a simpler and more natural explanation is already present.
The unity of the person rests on the unity of the spirit. From that unity come both moral accountability and the possibility of steady progress. A single being learns, errs, struggles, improves, and preserves identity through all its stages of development.
The Influence of the Organism
When a spirit joins a body, it does not become matter.
Matter is only an envelope, just as clothing is an envelope for the body. In union with the body, the spirit retains the attributes of its spiritual nature.
Its essential faculties remain its own. Incarnation does not create them, replace them, or reduce the spirit to something purely material. What changes is the way those faculties are manifested during bodily life.
The Body as Instrument and Obstacle
Once united with a body, a spirit cannot exercise its faculties with complete freedom.
The organs of the body are the instruments through which those faculties are expressed. Because matter is dense, it weakens their manifestation. The body may be compared to opaque glass that obstructs light, or to muddy water that hinders the movement of something immersed in it. In the same way, the material organism limits the spirit’s freedom of action.
This helps explain why spiritual capacities do not appear with equal clarity in embodied existence. A spirit may possess far more than the body can outwardly express. What becomes visible depends partly on the condition and development of the organs through which the inner faculties operate.
The Development of the Organs
The free exercise of the soul’s faculties is connected with the development of the bodily organs, because those organs are the tools of manifestation.
The quality of what is expressed depends on the quality of the instrument, just as the excellence of a work depends on the excellence of the tool used to produce it. An organ that is poorly adapted or insufficiently developed can restrict expression without altering the true nature of the spirit.
This must be understood carefully. The organs do not produce the faculties. They only make their expression possible under the conditions of bodily life.
Cause and Effect
Cause must not be mistaken for effect.
The spirit always possesses the faculties that belong to its degree of advancement. The organs do not generate intelligence, moral sense, or aptitude. On the contrary, the faculties of the spirit stimulate the development of the organs needed for their expression.
Differences of aptitude among individuals are rooted chiefly in the qualities of the spirit itself, whether more or less advanced. Matter also plays a part, however, because it can hinder the exercise of those faculties to a greater or lesser extent.
A spirit enters bodily life with its own predispositions. If certain parts of the brain correspond to particular aptitudes, their development should be understood as an effect of the spirit’s faculties in action, not as the source of those faculties.
Why Faculties Cannot Originate in the Organs
If faculties originated in the organs alone, the human being would be nothing more than a machine.
Free will would disappear, and moral responsibility with it. Genius would become a mere accident of physical structure. Scientists, poets, and artists would owe their gifts solely to the arrangement of the brain. Without a certain bodily organization, a great mind could not exist; with it, anyone might become a Newton, a Virgil, or a Raphael.
The same difficulty appears even more clearly in moral life. If virtue or vice came only from bodily structure, then a saint would be saintly by anatomy alone, and a criminal would be criminal only because of a physical defect. One person would have been noble had the brain been formed differently, while another would have become depraved for the same reason. Such a view destroys the meaning of moral effort and removes true accountability from human conduct.
A more coherent understanding is that the organs bear the imprint of the faculties they serve. The activity of the spirit shapes the bodily instrument, just as repeated exercise develops the muscles.
The Imprint of Habit and Faculty
Certain features of the face may reveal habitual drunkenness. Yet those features do not cause the addiction; the addiction produces the features. In the same way, bodily organs may reflect the exercise of the spirit’s faculties without being their source.
The organism receives the mark of the spirit’s tendencies and powers. It is shaped for expression, not for origination.
The body is therefore both a vehicle and a restraint: a necessary means of manifestation in earthly life, yet never the true source of intelligence, character, or moral worth.
Mental Impairment and Insanity
Mental impairment does not mean that a person has a lesser soul.
A human being in such a condition still possesses a human soul, and that soul may be far more intelligent than outward appearances suggest. Its suffering can be profound, because it may be unable to communicate through the bodily means available to it, much as a mute person suffers from being unable to speak.
Such conditions are understood as trials and expiations. The spirit inhabiting a body affected by severe limitation may be enduring the consequences of past misuse of its faculties. The suffering comes not only from the bodily condition itself, but from the inability to express thought and will through an undeveloped or damaged brain.
This does not mean that the organs create the faculties of the soul. The faculties belong to the spirit. But the organs strongly influence how those faculties are manifested in bodily life. A skilled musician does not cease to be skilled because the instrument is poor; yet with a damaged instrument, the music cannot be properly expressed. In the same way, a soul may possess intelligence and capacity that the body cannot adequately transmit.
It is important to distinguish the normal state from the pathological state. Under ordinary conditions, the soul can often overcome material obstacles to some degree. But in certain cases matter resists so strongly that expression becomes hindered, distorted, or nearly blocked. Mental impairment and insanity belong to this pathological order. In such conditions, the soul is not in full possession of its reasoning power as expressed through the body. For that reason, human law rightly recognizes diminished responsibility for acts committed in such states.
A life marked by mental impairment is not spiritually useless. Even where a person seems unable to do either good or evil in the ordinary sense, the embodied state may still serve as an expiation and as a temporary interruption in active progress. It can be a pause imposed after the abuse of particular faculties in an earlier life.
For this reason, a spirit confined in the body of a mentally impaired person may once have animated the body of someone brilliant. Genius itself can become a source of suffering when misused. Intellectual greatness is not the same as moral superiority, and the most gifted minds may still carry grave debts to resolve. A present life that appears diminished may follow earlier lives of remarkable intellectual distinction.
The resulting suffering can be intense. For such spirits, the inability to express themselves is like being bound in chains. Their condition may be compared to bodily disability: as some are limited in movement, sight, or hearing, others are limited in the brain through which thought and will are manifested.
Consciousness of Their Condition
In the spirit state, those who lived with mental impairment are often fully aware of what their condition meant. They understand that the restraints which hindered their development were part of a trial and an expiation.
This awareness helps explain why the outward appearance of diminished intelligence can be misleading. The interior life of the spirit may remain active, lucid, and painfully conscious, even when the body provides little or no means of expression.
The State of the Spirit in Insanity
Insanity is understood primarily as an affliction connected with the bodily organs through which the spirit acts.
Freed from the body, the spirit receives impressions directly and acts directly upon matter. In bodily life, however, it must operate through specialized organs. If one of these organs is altered or damaged, the corresponding manifestation is interrupted. Damaged eyes produce blindness; damaged ears produce deafness. In the same way, when the organs involved in the expression of intelligence and will are disturbed, the spirit can no longer use them properly. The result is a condition of confusion or derangement that the spirit experiences clearly, even though it is powerless to stop its course while embodied.
In this sense, the disorder lies in the body rather than in the spirit itself. Yet the relationship is not one-sided. Just as the spirit acts upon matter, matter also reacts upon the spirit to a certain extent. A prolonged alteration in the bodily organs may temporarily dominate the spirit’s expression and impressions. When insanity lasts a long time, the repeated disorder can leave a strong effect on the spirit, and that effect is not entirely removed until the spirit is fully separated from material influence.
Suicide and the Suffering of Constraint
Insanity sometimes leads to suicide because the spirit suffers deeply under its confinement.
Unable to manifest itself freely, and overwhelmed by the constraint imposed by the body, it may seek in death a way to break those bonds. The act is linked to intense suffering and powerlessness rather than to freedom.
After Death
After death, the spirit of a mentally impaired or insane person does not always recover immediately from the effects of its former condition.
It may continue for some time to feel the derangement of its faculties, much as a person waking from sleep may still experience lingering confusion. The spirit carries a remembrance of the affliction. That memory weighs upon it, especially because it did not fully understand everything that occurred during the disordered state.
The longer insanity lasted during earthly life, the longer the distress and constraint may continue after death. Even when separated from the body, the spirit can still feel, for a time, the impression of the bonds that held it. Full release comes gradually, as the connection with matter is completely dissolved and the spirit becomes fully aware of its new condition.
Childhood
The spirit animating a child’s body is not necessarily less developed than that of an adult. It may even be more advanced. What limits its expression is not the spirit itself, but the imperfection and immaturity of the bodily organs through which it must act. The spirit can only manifest itself according to the instrument available to it.
In very early life, the spirit does not think with the full clarity of adult intelligence while joined to a child’s body. Since the organs of intelligence are still undeveloped, they cannot provide the same range of expression or intuition available later. For that reason, intelligence is restricted until age matures reason. The confusion that accompanies incarnation does not end abruptly at birth. It gradually clears as the organs develop.
A child’s dreams reflect this condition. They usually do not have the character of adult dreams, but are almost always childlike in their objects and concerns. This indicates the limited mode in which the spirit’s preoccupations are then expressed.
When a child dies, the spirit should regain its former vigor once freed from the physical envelope. Even so, full lucidity does not return immediately. It is only restored completely when separation is complete and every connection between spirit and body has ceased.
Childhood is not a punishment for the incarnate spirit, nor does the spirit suffer merely because its manifestation is constrained by immature organs. Childhood is a necessity. It is natural, in harmony with Providence, and serves as a period of repose for the spirit.
The Usefulness of Childhood
A spirit incarnates in order to perfect itself, and childhood serves that purpose in a special way. During this stage, the spirit is more open to the impressions it receives. It is more pliable, more accessible to guidance, and therefore more capable of benefiting from influences that may aid its progress. For that reason, those entrusted with a child’s education bear a serious responsibility. They are meant to help the spirit advance.
A child’s first expressions are cries because crying secures the attention and care necessary for survival. If infants expressed only contentment before they could speak, many of their needs would go unnoticed. Even this simple fact reveals an underlying wisdom in the ordering of life.
Why Character Changes with Age
The change often seen in character at a certain age, especially after adolescence, does not mean that a new spirit has replaced the former one. Rather, the spirit is recovering more fully its true nature and gradually revealing what it really was before the present incarnation.
The innocence of childhood does not necessarily reflect the spirit’s actual degree of advancement. It is, instead, an image of what the spirit ought to be. If the spirit has not truly reached that state, the fault lies in its own imperfections, not in the law that grants the appearance.
Children are sent into a new existence under a merciful veil. Even when a spirit has harmful tendencies, its faults are covered during the early years because it does not yet fully understand the moral quality of its acts. This apparent innocence softens the beginning of earthly life.
That veil is given not only for the child’s sake, but also for the parents. A child’s fragility requires loving protection, and that love might be greatly weakened if parents were immediately confronted with a difficult and fully exposed character. Believing their children gentle and good, they surround them with care and tenderness. This affection is necessary. It sustains the child during the period of dependence.
Later, when protection and assistance are no longer needed in the same way, the spirit’s individual character emerges more openly. If its underlying nature is good, it remains good, though with traits that were once hidden. If it carries serious imperfections, these too become more visible as the restraint of childhood falls away.
Childhood as Adaptation to a New Existence
A spirit may come from a world where it acquired habits, inclinations, and ways of feeling very different from those of its new earthly environment. Childhood serves as a kind of transition. Through it, the spirit is gradually adapted to the setting into which it has been reborn.
Without this period of softening and adjustment, a newly incarnated being might appear among others with passions, tastes, and tendencies too foreign to harmonize with family and society. Childhood acts as a sieve through which these diverse elements are moderated, allowing the spirit to integrate into its new surroundings.
Something similar occurs after bodily death. Entering a new mode of existence among unfamiliar beings, the spirit passes through a kind of beginning in which it must learn new conditions, new forms of relation, and new ways of expression. This helps explain why childhood is part of a broader law of transition and adaptation.
The Duty of Parents and Educators
One of the deepest purposes of childhood is moral improvement. Spirits enter bodily life in order to become better and purer. In the early years, their weakness makes them more flexible and more open to the counsel of experience and to the influence of those who should guide them.
That is the time when character can be most effectively corrected and harmful tendencies restrained. Parents therefore receive a sacred trust. Their mission is not only to preserve the child’s body, but to assist the progress of the spirit. They are accountable for how they fulfill this responsibility.
Childhood is therefore useful, necessary, and indispensable. It is the natural result of the laws that govern life and express divine wisdom throughout the universe.
Earthly Sympathies and Antipathies
People who have known and loved one another in a previous life may meet again in a new bodily existence without outwardly recognizing each other. Recognition in the ordinary sense is not the rule, but attraction often remains.
A sincere and intimate bond may arise between two people for reasons that seem accidental, while in reality it expresses the attraction of two spirits that have long sought one another amid the multitude of human lives.
The inability to consciously recognize a former companion is not necessarily a loss. Clear memory of past lives could bring more difficulties than benefits. Full recognition belongs more naturally to life after death, where spirits know one another again and remember the time they shared.
Sympathy does not always come only from a previous earthly relationship. Two spirits may be naturally akin and drawn to one another even if they have never before been acquainted while incarnated. Their harmony comes from affinity of nature, feeling, and tendency.
Many encounters that seem to happen by chance are connected with laws still imperfectly understood. Among thinking beings there are subtle relationships that escape ordinary perception. Magnetism belongs to this order of phenomena and points to a deeper science of invisible attraction.
Antipathy follows a similar principle. Certain people feel an instinctive repulsion on first meeting because their spirits perceive one another and recognize a lack of harmony even before any words are exchanged. This does not mean that both are necessarily evil. Antipathy may arise simply from a difference in their ways of thinking and feeling. As spirits advance, these contrasts become less sharp, and the antipathy fades.
When one spirit is morally inferior and the other more elevated, the same antipathy appears in both, though not in the same way.
The imperfect spirit feels aversion toward anyone capable of judging it clearly and exposing what it is. At the first meeting, it senses disapproval and reacts with resentment. That resentment may deepen into hatred and envy, and from there comes the impulse to harm.
The good spirit also feels repelled by the evil one, but for a different reason. It understands that no true sympathy is possible and that its sentiments will not be shared. Yet because it is guided by higher moral principles, it does not respond with hatred or jealousy. It simply keeps its distance and regards the other with pity.
Forgetfulness of the Past
Incarnated spirits ordinarily lose the precise memory of their former lives. This forgetfulness is not an accident, but part of a wise order.
Human beings cannot, and should not, know everything at once. If the hidden things of their past were suddenly exposed, they would be overwhelmed, like someone passing abruptly from darkness into full light. The veil over previous existences allows a person to live the present life more fully and to act within it freely.
Yet the loss of explicit memory does not mean that the past has disappeared without effect. A spirit carries forward what it has become. With each new existence, it gains greater intelligence and a clearer ability to distinguish good from evil. During life in the spirit state, the whole of its previous conduct becomes known to it. It sees the wrongs it committed, understands the suffering that follows from them, and recognizes what could have prevented those errors. From that clearer vision, it accepts the justice of its condition and desires a new existence in which it may repair the past.
For that reason, spirits choose trials suited to their needs and ask higher spirits to assist them in the work ahead. The guide assigned to them does not restore literal memory, but helps awaken an inner moral awareness. What appears in earthly life as a troubling impulse, a wrongful desire, or a spontaneous temptation may be linked to former faults. The resistance that rises against such impulses is not merely habit or education, though these may help; it is also the voice of conscience. Conscience preserves a living memory of the past in moral form. It warns the spirit not to fall again into the same errors.
If a spirit bears its trials courageously and resists harmful tendencies, it progresses and rises when it returns to spirit life.
Why Forgetfulness Does Not Cancel Responsibility
At first glance, it may seem unjust to hold a person responsible for faults no longer remembered. But responsibility does not depend on retaining a detailed recollection of every previous act. What matters is the moral state the spirit has formed, the tendencies it still carries, and the freedom with which it responds to present choices.
Each existence is not a meaningless new beginning. The spirit does not start from nothing. It returns with a broader intelligence, with lessons already absorbed, and with an inward sense of what it must overcome. Its instinctive tendencies are remnants of the past, and conscience urges resistance to what would harm it. In this way, forgotten experience still bears fruit.
Merit would also be diminished if all former lives were fully remembered. The spirit would often act under the pressure of obvious recollection rather than through freely awakened moral conviction. Growth depends on choosing the good in the present, not merely on remembering old punishments.
Intuition, Instinct, and Conscience
Although precise remembrance is absent during bodily life, there is often an intuition of what has gone before. Instinctive tendencies are a kind of reminiscence. They reveal inclinations already formed, whether toward good or toward error.
Conscience stands beside these tendencies as a corrective light. It represents the resolve made in the spirit state not to repeat former wrongs. When a person feels inwardly warned against pride, selfishness, harshness, or some other fault, that warning may arise from this deeper memory. The past is veiled as history, but remains active as moral direction.
By studying present tendencies, individuals can learn something about the faults that burdened them before. This discernment is real, though limited. It must be tempered by the recognition that the spirit may already have improved and that present conduct may be much better than what came before.
A present life may even include faults not committed in an earlier one. If the spirit has not yet learned to withstand certain trials, it may still be drawn into new errors. Such failures do not mean a true backward movement in the essential life of the spirit. Spirits advance or remain stationary; they do not regress in the sense of losing the development already acquired.
More Evolved Worlds and the Memory of the Past
On worlds more advanced than Earth, memory of previous lives is often clearer. As the body becomes less material, remembrance becomes easier. The inhabitants of higher-order worlds may recall former existences with considerable precision.
Two situations must be distinguished. On some such worlds, beings retain a clear and exact memory of their past lives and therefore appreciate more fully the happiness they now enjoy. They know by comparison what has been left behind.
On other worlds, though life is better than ours, the inhabitants may still undergo serious troubles and do not necessarily remember an even less happy state. In that condition, they may not fully appreciate their relative happiness while incarnated, though they will understand it later in the spirit state.
Where good predominates and painful memories no longer wound, the past may be remembered as easily as one remembers yesterday. Lives spent on less advanced worlds are then like a bad dream. But on inferior worlds, where suffering and imperfection are still strong, a full remembrance of all former trials would often increase present distress rather than help.
The Providence in Forgetfulness
The concealment of former lives is a mercy.
If people clearly remembered previous personalities and actions, the consequences could be severe. Some would be crushed by humiliation. Others would become inflated with pride. In either case, freedom would be hindered. God has given what is necessary for progress and withheld what would often obstruct it.
There is also a social reason for this veil. If each person remembered not only personal actions but also the deeds of others from former lives, human relationships could become unbearably burdened. Resentments, shame, superiority, and distrust would poison ordinary life.
For that reason, the concealment of the past is usually a blessing. What is needed for self-improvement remains accessible through conscience and through the tendencies that must be disciplined. What would nourish vanity, despair, or social conflict is ordinarily hidden.
Everything in this arrangement points to wise design. Present misfortunes are not made lighter by complete historical knowledge; often they would be made heavier. The order of forgetfulness is suited to the condition of less advanced worlds.
Partial Memories and Exceptional Revelations
It is possible, in some cases, to receive a glimpse of a former life. Certain persons have a vague and passing impression of an unknown past, like an image from a dream that fades when they try to hold it. Sometimes such impressions are genuine; far more often, however, they are illusions produced by an overexcited imagination. Caution is therefore necessary.
There are also cases in which some people truly know something of who they were and what they did. But such revelations are not regular, and they are not granted to satisfy curiosity. If the past is disclosed, it is only by permission of higher spirits and only for a useful purpose.
Future lives, however, cannot be revealed. They depend both on how the present life is completed and on the later choice made by the spirit.
Free Will and the Choice of Trials
Spirits always retain free will.
In the spirit state, before a new bodily existence, they choose the kinds of trials most suited to their advancement and expiation. In earthly life, they remain free to decide what they will do, choosing between good and evil at each step. Without freedom, a human being would be reduced to a machine.
The trials chosen are related to the wrongs that must be repaired. They are also suited to the growth still needed for the future. If the spirit overcomes them, it advances. If it fails, the work must be taken up again.
For this reason, the tribulations of bodily life have a double character: they are expiations for the past and tests for the future. Endured with resignation and without complaint, they purify and elevate.
What Present Trials Can Reveal About the Past
The nature of a person’s tribulations may often suggest the general type of faults that preceded them, though no rigid rule can be made from this. Punishment is frequently connected to the fault, but outward suffering alone does not provide certain judgment. Instinctive tendencies are usually a safer indication, because trials concern future development as well as past repair.
Even so, there is often a moral correspondence between fault and consequence. Pride may be corrected through humiliation and subordination. Self-indulgence and greed may be met by poverty. Harshness toward others may return as harsh treatment endured. Tyranny may lead to slavery. A bad child may later suffer the ingratitude of children. Laziness may be corrected by forced labor.
These correspondences should not be used to judge others with certainty. They are better understood as illustrations of moral justice than as tools for accusation. Their real value lies in self-examination.
How to Read the Past in the Present
Even without knowing the exact acts of former lives, individuals can still discover much about what they have been. They need only study themselves carefully.
Not everything in present character reveals the past in a simple way, because improvement may already have taken place. But dominant tendencies, recurring weaknesses, spontaneous attractions, and habitual inner struggles often disclose the direction from which the spirit has come.
The important thing is not to recover old names, places, and outward circumstances. What matters is to recognize what must be corrected now. The past survives most usefully in the form of moral work still to be done.
Forgetfulness, then, is not a loss of guidance. It is a safeguard. The spirit does not remember everything, but it remembers enough in the form that matters most: conscience, inclination, trial, and the freedom to choose differently.