The passage of spirits (we are spirits in a perishable body) through bodily life is necessary so that we can fulfill, through material action, the designs whose execution God entrusts to us. It is necessary for our good, since the activity we are obliged to exercise helps us in the development of intelligence.
Being sovereignly just, God must distribute everything equally to all his children; so he established the same starting point for everyone, the same aptitude, the same obligations to fulfill and the same freedom to proceed. Any privilege would be a preference, an injustice. But incarnation, for all spirits, is only a transitory state. It is a task that God imposes on us, when we begin life, as our first experience of the use we will make of our free will.
Those who zealously carry out this task pass quickly and less painfully through the first stages of initiation and sooner enjoy the fruit of their labors. Those who, on the other hand, misuse the freedom that God grants them, delay their progress and, whatever the obstinacy they show, can prolong the need for reincarnation indefinitely, and that is when it becomes a punishment. St. Louis. (Paris, 1859)
A vulgar comparison will make this difference better understood. The student does not reach the higher studies of science until after having gone through the series of classes that will lead him there. These classes, whatever work they require, are a means to the student's end and not a punishment inflicted upon him. If he is industrious, he shortens the way, in which, then, he will find fewer thorns. The same is not true of those whom negligence and laziness force to pass through certain classes twice. It is not class work that constitutes punishment; the latter is obliged to start the same work again. So it is with man on Earth. For the spirit of the savage, who is only at the beginning of his spiritual life, incarnation is a means for him to develop his intelligence; However, for the enlightened man, in whom the moral sense is largely developed and who is forced to go through the stages of a corporeal life full of anguish, when he could already have reached the end, it is a punishment, for the necessity in which he sees himself prolonging his permanence in inferior and wretched worlds.
He who, on the contrary, works actively for his moral progress, in addition to shortening the time of material incarnation, can also cross at once the intermediate steps that separate him from the higher worlds. Question: could not spirits incarnate once on a given globe and fulfill their different existences in different spheres? Such a view would only be admissible if, on Earth, all men were on exactly the same intellectual and moral level. The differences between them, from the savage to the civilized man, show what steps they have to climb. Incarnation, moreover, must have a useful end.
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- Know what reincarnation is and how it happens
- Understand how parallel lives can exist in a single incarnation
- Reflect on spiritism and see how it ranks
Let us always remember that we are spirits in a temporary carnal body, which will decompose right there.
