DIFFERENT DEGREES OF INTUITIVE WISDOM

 
The fret and fury of immediate responses to the changing situations of earthly life is replaced in life after death by a more leisurely mood, freed from the urgency of immediately needed actions. All the experiences of the earthly career are now available for reflection in a form more vivid than is possible through memory in earthly life. The shots of earthly life have all been taken on the cinematic film of the mind, and it is now time to study the original earthly life through the magnified projections of the filmed record on the screen of subjectivized consciousness.

Thus the hell state and the heaven state become instrumental in the assimilation of experiences acquired in the earthly phase; and the individualized soul can start its next incarnation in a physical body with all the advantages of digested experience. The lessons learned by the soul through such stocktaking and reflection are confirmed in the mental body by the power of their magnified suffering or happiness. They become, for the next incarnation, an integral part of the intuitive makeup of active consciousness, without in any way involving detailed revival of the individual events of the previous incarnation.

The truths absorbed by the mind in the life after death become in the next incarnation a part of inborn wisdom. Developed intuition is consolidated and compressed understanding, distilled through a multitude of diverse experiences gathered in previous lives.

Different souls start with different degrees of intuitive wisdom as their initial capital for the experiments and adventures of their earthly careers. This intuition may seem to have been the product of past experiences, thus adding to the equipment of the psyche; but it is more truly an unfoldment of what was already latent in the individualized soul.

From this deeper point of view, the experiences of earthly life — as well as the reflective and consolidating processes they are subjected to in life after death — are merely instrumental in gradually releasing to the surface the intuitive wisdom already latent in the soul from the very beginning of creation.

As is true of the earthly career and its experiences, the states of hell and heaven in the life after death are also integral parts of and incidents in that journey of the individualized soul, which is ultimately meant to reach the Source of all things.