still harvesting the fruit of the vanity stage, and they do not understand
what is happening. It seems that the world has turned against them
and their will to improve, to love and to be loved. If they succumb to
emotional depression, egoism will once again take control of their
minds. In order to avoid their recently discovered feelings being hurt,
they will cover up their interior with a layer. They will become distrustful,
shy, solitary, because they will see in isolation a way to avoid suffering.
Also to avoid suffering they can take the path of resignation. They will
mould themselves to whatever others expect from them, in order to
avoid aggression from more egoistic spirits. The worse spiritual disease
that exists and which is the cause of a good part of serious physical
diseases begins to develop: self-annulment of the will, of free will, until it
reaches the point that spirits neither act nor live as they really are, but
rather are perfect spiritual slaves of their surroundings, ending up even
believing that they want what in fact has been imposed on them. But
in this way, they suffer through not wanting to suffer, this being a sterile
suffering which leads to no spiritual progress. Almost one quarter of
humanity can be found in this pride stage. The transition between the
vanity stage and the pride stage does not take place abruptly but
rather the process will be gradual, manifestations of both defects
coexisting for a long time.
And how does this story continue? How is this stage overcome?
Loving, always loving. Only love will break the armour-plating of pride.
As I have already said, the proud have a greater capacity to
understand and to know how to cope with the ingratitude of those
who hurt them than the vain. A proud spirit can understand that those
who act egoistically and with a lack of love do so simply because they
are still young spirits, in the process of evolution, and that in time they
will learn, even though they need many lives, because the learning
about feeling and the detachment from egoism are processes which
need a long time to be appreciable. The fact that we do not see
remarkable changes in a single life does not mean that the spirit is not
going to advance. A man or woman who is a good person in this life, is
so because he or she was already born good, with all the baggage of
knowledge of other lives, and although we can advance a lot in one
incarnation, we cannot demand that somebody converts from being
a pirate to a saint overnight. If you do not despair because a child
does not learn to speak in one day, because you understand that
learning to speak takes several years in the physical life of a child,
neither should you become impatient because a spiritual child takes
several spiritual years, in other words, several incarnations, to learn to
love. For this reason, spirits that are more advanced in the knowledge