484- Do spirits affectionately prefer certain persons?
“Good spirits sympathize with moral individuals or those who are susceptible to improving themselves; low order spirits, with wicked individuals or those who may become such. Hence, their affection is the result of a similarity of sentiment.”
485- Is the affection of spirits for certain persons exclusively moral?
“True affection has nothing carnal about it, but when a spirit attaches itself to a particular person, it is not always out of affection. A remembrance of human passions can have a hand in it.”
486- Do spirits take an interest in our misfortunes and prosperity? Are those who wish us well concerned about the afflictions we experience in life?
“Good spirits do all the good they can and they feel happy for your joys. They are concerned about your afflictions when you do not bear them with resignation, because then they produce no good results for you; you carry on like patients who reject the bitter medicine meant to heal them.”
487- What kind of afflictions cause spirits to be concerned about us most: physically-caused afflictions or morally-caused ones?
“Your selfishness and his insensitivity: everything else derives from these. They smile at all your imaginary ills born from pride and ambition, but they rejoice in those that will shorten the length of your trial.”
Knowing that corporeal life is only transitory and that the tribulations accompanying it are the means leading to a better state, spirits are more concerned about the moral causes that keep us from that state than about physical ills, which are only temporary.
Spirits care little about misfortunes that only affect our mundane ideas, as we care little about the puerile afflictions of childhood.
Spirits who see in the afflictions of life a means for our advancement consider them as a momentary crisis that will restore us to health. They commiserate in our sufferings just as we commiserate in the sufferings of a friend; but seeing things from a more correct point of view, they regard them differently. While good spirits rebuild our courage for the sake of our future, others incite us to desperation and try to jeopardize us.
488- Do our relatives and friends who have preceded us into the other life have more sympathy for us than spirits who are strangers?
“Of course, and as spirits they frequently protect you according to their power.”
– Are they sensitive to our affections for them?
“Very sensitive, but they forget those who forget them.”
Site Espírita 