What is reincarnation?

With the answer revealed, it must be understood. Why return to matter, if the soul could evolve in the spiritual world? What sense does forgetting the past make? Tom answers Roger's objections one by one.

— So we have already lived before? And we will live again when these bodies die?

— Yes, precisely. Reincarnation is the pedagogy of God. It is the great choice of God.

— Wait a moment, this is incredible, and it explains all those things we had been talking about. Yes, of course. Now I can connect all the dots. The good child was the soul that had already progressed in other existences, and the bad, rebellious child is the soul that has not yet managed to improve itself. And that example you gave about the child who is born into a good family and another into a bad family — I think the bad soul that is born into a good family may be a soul that is making every effort to become good. And the good child that is born into a bad family has the task of improving that family through good examples. I now also understand that case of children who die at a tender age or shortly after being born. Through the soul's multiple existences, it passes through every kind of experience in order to become better. All right, all right. But tell me, after the death of this body, will the soul take another body immediately?

— No, Roger. The soul remains in the universe, or you may call it the spiritual reality. Outside matter as we know it here.

Roger frowns and says:

— If the soul remains in the spiritual reality between lives, why does it not remain there forever? And I am not talking about remaining idle — that, I know, would be a punishment. I am talking about remaining there active: evolving, learning, helping other spirits. Why return to a body through reincarnation?

Tom smiles, pleased with the question, and says:

— There are lessons that only matter provides. In the body, the soul has the possibility of experiencing temptations that it does not have in the spiritual reality. On reincarnating, the soul receives the gift of the partial forgetting of the past, which is the veil that allows it to begin anew, to face each life without the weight of all the previous ones, to undergo trials and expiations that would otherwise be impossible in the spiritual reality. The soul lives each existence as an entirely new experience, with challenges it would never face if it remained forever in the spiritual reality, with its memory intact. It is the endless variety of these experiences, always begun afresh, that makes the soul evolve.

Roger falls silent for a long moment and then says: — I understand now, Tom. The soul evolves on both sides — in the spiritual world and in bodily life. But there are lessons that only the body teaches, trials that only matter offers, fresh starts that only forgetting makes possible. That is why the soul does not remain eternally on one side alone: it needs both in order to grow completely.

Tom nods slowly: — Now we have closed the last door, Roger. There is no other hypothesis left standing.

— And does the soul only link itself to human bodies, or can it link itself to the bodies of animals?

— Roger, what would be the evolutionary use of linking ourselves, in a future existence, to the body of an animal? No, the multiple existences serve for the soul to improve itself. The soul needs equipment — bodies — that can help it become better. The soul may remain stationary for a time, but it never regresses in its evolution. And beyond the question of usefulness, there is the question of logic: an animal's body does not possess the instruments that a human soul already has — reason, language, the moral sense, self-awareness. To place a human soul in an animal's body would be to deprive it of everything it has already conquered, it would be to make it go backwards. And going backwards is precisely what the law of evolution does not permit. It would be like asking an adult to unlearn how to speak and to think. That is why, once the human degree has been reached, the soul always incarnates in bodies equal to what it already is, or that make it grow still further — never below that.

Excerpt from the work The Great Discovery, by César Manuel Malainho de Oliveira.
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