“Paramhansa Yogananda said: ‘Why is a baby born crippled? Only reincarnation can explain this fact satisfactorily. People behold it as a ‘sweet, innocent’ baby, but in some past life that personality must have transgressed against God’s law. This transgression deprived him of the consciousness of having good legs. Thus – and because the mind controls the body – when that person came back again into a physical body he wasn’t able to create a perfect pair of legs, and was born crippled.
‘Why is one person born a moron and another, intelligent? God would be very unjust, wouldn’t He, if He allowed such things to happen without a cause. But there is a cause. For what we are now is the result of our own actions at various times in the past.
‘In our souls we are immortal, but in our personalities we cannot reclaim the consciousness of that immortality until our human imperfections have all been rubbed away. Working on ourselves is like chipping and polishing away the extraneous stone on a statue, until the image that was hidden is revealed in all its perfection.’ ”
The Essence Of Self-Realization, The Wisdom OF Paramhansa Yogananda, Recorded and compiled by hsi disciple Kriyananda (J. Donald Walters), Pgs. 71 -72.