Reward and Punishment and Rebirth

Note that the idea of rebirth and the circumstances of the new life as a reward or punishment...is a crude human idea of “justice” which is quite unphilosophical and unspiritual and distorts the true intention of life. Life here is an evolution and the soul grows by experience, working out by it this or that in the nature, and if there is suffering, it is for the purpose of that working out, not as a judgement inflicted by God or Cosmic Law on the errors or stumblings which are inevitable in the Ignorance.

[Letters on Yoga, p. 441]

Retrogression to lower form of life

We have to ask whether the soul, having once arrived at humanity, can go back to the animal life and body, a retrogression which the old popular theories of transmigration have supposed to be an ordinary movement. It seems impossible that it should so go back with any entirety, and for this reason that the transit from the animal to the human life means a decisive conversion of the vital consciousness, quite as decisive as the conversion of the vital consciousness of the plant into the mental consciousness of the animal. It is surely impossible that a conversion so decisive made by Nature should be reversed by the soul and the decision of the spirit within her come, as it were, to naught.

[The Life Divine, p. 762)

The Soul

*The soul in man is greater than his fate.
[Savitri –691]

*The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature.
[Letters on Yoga-267]