iscipline of sympathy, toleration, patience,
energy, fortitude, foresight, gratitude, pity, benevolence, and love in
all of its phases. This, it is urged, is possible only through repeated
incarnations, as the span of one life is too small and its limit too
narrow to embrace but a small fraction of the necessary experiences of
the soul on its journey toward development and attainment. One must feel
the sorrows and joys of all forms of life before "understanding" may
come. Narrowness, lack of tolerance, prejudice, and similar forms of
undeveloped consciousness must be wiped out by the broad understanding
and sympathy that come only from experience.

It is argued that only by repeated incarnations the soul is able to
realize the futility of the search for happiness and satisfaction in
material things. One, while dissatisfied and disappointed at his own
condition, is apt to imagine that in some other earthly condition he
would find satisfaction and happiness now denied him, and dying carries
with him the subsconcious desire to enjoy those conditions, which desire
attracts him back to earth-life in search of those conditions. So long
as the soul desires anything that earth can offer, it is earth-bound and
drawn back into the vortex. But after repeated incarnations the soul
learns well its lesson that only in itself may be found happiness--and
that only when it learns its real nature, source, and destiny--and then
it passes on to higher planes. As an authority says: "In time, the soul
sees that a spiritual being cannot be nourished on inferior food, and
that any joy short of union with the Divine must be illusionary."

It is also argued that but few people, as we see them in earth-life,
have realized the existence of a higher part of their being, and still
fewer have asserted the supremacy of the higher, and subordinated the
lower part of the self to that higher. Were they to pass on to a final
state of being after death, they would carry with them all of their
lower propensities and attributes, and would be utterly incapable of
manifesting the spiritual part of their nature which alone would be
satisfied and happy in the spiritual realms. Therefore, it needs
repeated lives in order to evolve from the lower conditions and to
develop and unfold the higher.

Touching upon the question of unextinguished desire, mentioned a moment
ago, the following quotation from a writer on the subject, gives clearly
and briefly the Reincarn