Allan Kardec-THE Spirit's Book_ The Principles of Spiritist Doctrine (1989)

200
ALLAN KARDEC
with fortitude, and resists its temptations to wrong-doing, rises in the hierarchy of spirits, and
takes a higher place when he returns into the normal life."
If we have not an exact remembrance, during our corporeal life, of what we have been, and of the good or
evil we have done, in our preceding existences, we have the intuition of our past, of which we have a
reminiscence in the instinctive tendencies that our conscience, which is the desire we have conceived to
avoid committing our past faults in the future, warns us to resist.
394. In worlds more advanced than ours, where the human race is not a prey to our physical
wants and infirmities, do men understand that they are better off than we are? Happiness is
usually relative; it is felt to be such by comparison with a state that is less happy. As some of
those worlds, though better than ours, have not reached perfection, the men by whom they
are inhabited must have their own troubles and annoyances. Among us, the rich man,
although he has not to endure the physical privations that torture the poor, is none the less a
prey to tribulations of other kinds that embitter his life. What I ask is, whether the inhabitants
of those worlds do not consider themselves to be just as unhappy, according to their standard
of happiness, as we consider ourselves to be according to ours; and whether they do not, like
us, complain of their fate, not having the remembrance of an inferior existence to serve them
as a standard of comparison ?
"To this question two different answers must be given. Three are some worlds among those
of which you speak the inhabitants of which have a very clear and exact remembrance of their
past existences, and therefore can and do appreciate the happiness which God permits them to
enjoy. But there are others, of which the inhabitants, though placed, as you say, in better
conditions than yours, are, nevertheless, subject to great annoyances, and even to much
unhappiness, and who do not appreciate the more favourable conditions of their life, because
they have no remembrance of a state still more unhappy. But if they do not rightly appreciate
those conditions as men, they appreciate them more justly on their return to the spirit-world."
Is there not, in the forgetfulness of our past existences, and especially when they have been painful, a
striking proof of the wisdom and beneficence of Providential arrangements? It is only in worlds of higher
advancement, and when the remembrance of our painful existences in the past Is nothing more to us than
the shadowy remembrance of an unpleasant dream, that those existences are allowed to present
themselves to our memory. Would not the painfulness of present suffering, in worlds of low degree, be
greatly aggravated by the remembrance of all the miseries we may have had to undergo in the past?
These considerations should lead us to conclude that whatever has been appointed by God is for the