- 23 - • Spirits that have not progressed are reincarnated in the same stage as often as may be necessary to make them fit for reincarnation in a higher one. Each stage of advance required a special act of God for the planned physical shaping of the spirits. To this end He embodied the odic figures of pairs of spirits in the form peculiar to that stage and endowed them with the power to reproduce the bodies of this stage. The spirits themselves, however, are incorporated into the bodies thus procreated according to fixed laws of the spirit world. You mortals indeed cannot understand the ‘how’ of all these processes, any more than you really understand the processes of nature that go on all around you, although you witness them daily with your own eyes. Human science addresses itself to the question of descent, particularly with that of the descent of man from the apes. • There is no such thing as physical descent of a higher form from a lower one. Plants do not produce animals, nor do the lower animals produce the higher forms. Every form of life breeds true to kind, although within each species there are many races, the individuals belonging to races of the same species being capable of reproduction with one other. Man belongs to the order of the apes. He is the highest race of this order, and you are correct in saying that the ape is the lowest form of man and that man is the highest of the apes. Man is, therefore, the highest animal on earth. Nevertheless, he has not descended physically from the ape, in spite of the fact that in point of physical development, the ape most closely resembles him. Before its first incarnation in a human body, the spirit of a human being inhabited the body of an animal. It is therefore the same spirit rising through the different stages of evolution and coming ever closer to perfection. These stages themselves undergo no physical changes. They are the same today as they were millenniums ago. Only in the course of the ages, certain species died out because spirits were no longer incarnated in them. God created other, higher forms, in which those spirits are incorporated for which the extinct species had previously been designed. The extinct species had served as intermediate stages in their evolution upward. When these disappeared and the higher forms took their place, the spirits in question were compelled to wait longer before they could be born into the higher species that had replaced the extinct ones. So it is that you find to this day the physical remains of extinct species of plants and animals that lived in former ages. • There is no regression of a spirit from one stage of progress to a lower one, although a spirit may remain at the same stage for a long time. As I have already told you, a spirit that has at its earthly death not progressed during that stage of its incarnation must be reincarnated in the same stage again and again until it is fit to enter the next higher stage. That is true also of humans. If, during its life on earth, a spirit has not made sufficient progress on the road leading to God, it must go through life again as a human being. • Every life is an examination: whoever fails to pass, must try again until he succeeds.
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