10. In the intervals between its successive incarnations, a spirit returns, for a longer or shorter time, into the spirit-world, where it is happy, or unhappy, according to the good or the evil it has done in its previous lives. The life of the spirit-world is the normal state of the spirit, the definitive state towards which it is tending; for it is its spirit that is undying, while the state of incarnation is one of transition and of passage. It is especially in the spirit-state that the spirit reaps the fruit of the progress accomplished during incarnation; it is also in that state that it prepares for a new struggle with ignorance and evil, and forms the resolutions which it will strive to put into practice in its next return to the discipline of human life.
The spirit progresses also in erraticity,5 in which state it acquires special knowledge that it could not acquire upon the Earth, and modifies the ideas acquired by the spirit through its subjection to the actions of matter. The state of incarnation and the spirit-state are for the spirit the source of two kinds of progress, interdependent one of the other; this is why it passes alternatingly between these two modes of existence.
