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Special Portuguese Spanish    

Year 4 - N° 187 – December 5, 2010

ROGÉRIO COELHO
rcoelho47@yahoo.com.br 
Muriaé, Minas Gerais (Brasil)

Translation
Renata Rinaldini - renatarinaldini@hotmail.com

 

Moral embellishment 

 

Second and final part

Each incarnation of the Spirit entails an
intellectual and moral progression


 “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” – Jesus (Luke 15:7)

 

With our reasoning we shall follow the oportune lessons of Allan Kardec’s fellow and follower, Léon Denis, which are registered in the second part of the singular work: “ The problem of the Being, of destiny and of pain”:

“... To be reborn is no more extraordinary that to be born; the Soul returns to the flesh in order that whilst in the flesh, it is submitted to the laws of necessity. The needs and the struggles of material life are many others incentives that obligate the soul to work, increasing its energy, invigorating its character. Such results could not be obtained from free life in Space by juvenile Spirits, whose will is vacillating. In order to advance, the stimulus of need and numerous incarnations become precious, during which the Soul will encounter itself, retract into itself, acquire elasticity, the indispensable impulse to later depict its immense journey in the Heavens. The objective of incarnations is therefore, with some luck, the revelation of the Soul to itself or, before, its own worthiness through the constant development of its strengths, of its knowledge, of its conscience, of its will.

(...) Before getting in touch with matter and starting new route, the Spirit has to choose the environment where it is going to be reborn for earthly life; but, this choice is limited, circumscribed, determined by multiple causes. The antecedent of the being, its moral debts, its merits and demerits, the role which it is capable of playing, all these elements are taken into consideration in the orientation of the life in preparation. Hence the preference for a race, a nation, a family and so on... The earthly Souls that we have loved attract us; the ties from the past become reconnected in the designation of the parents, of alliances and of new friendships. The places themselves exert a mysterious seduction upon ourselves and it is rare when destiny does not re-conduct us many times to the regions where we already lived, loved and suffered. Feelings of hate are also forces that approximate us to our past enemies in order that we erase old hostilities, with better relationships. So, we return to re-find in our path the largest part of those who were part of our happiness or carried out our miseries.

The same happens with the adoption of a social class, with environmental and education conditions, with the privileges of fortune or health, with the miseries of poverty. All these causes which are so varied and complex, will combine themselves to secure for the new incarnated the satisfactions, advantages or tests which are suitable to his degree of evolution, to his merits or to his shortcomings and debts incurred by him.

However, the interested part has always the freedom to accept or postpone the time for the ineluctable repairs.   At the very moment of getting connected with a human embryo, when the Soul still has all its lucidity, its Spiritual Guide unfolds before the Soul the prospect of the existence that waits for it, shows it the obstacles and the ills that will be bristled, it makes it understand the value of these obstacles and of these ills so as to develop virtues in itself or to eradicate itself from its vices.

... At the time of the supreme resolutions, before the Soul starts descending to the flesh, the Spirit perceives, realises the general meaning of the life that is about to start. Life appears to it in its main lines, in its culminating facts, always modifiable, though, by its own personal action and by the use of its own free will because the Soul is master of its actions, but, soon after the Soul has decided and from the moment the tie between the Soul and the body takes place, that is, the incorporation is delineated, the memory of everything is dissipated. The existence is going to unfold with all its foreseen, accepted, desired consequences without any kind of intuition about the future surviving in the regular conscience of the incarnated being. Premature knowledge of the ills and catastrophes which await us would paralyse our efforts, halting our march forward. 

Our future is in our own hands 

Architect of its own destiny, the Soul has to subject itself to the estate of things that it had prepared, that it had chosen... Nevertheless, after having made a dark cave and a liar of evil out of its consciousness, the Soul will have to transform its destiny in a temple of Light. The accumulated faults will cause more live suffering to be born. The incarnations which happen will be hasher and more painful, the circles of iron will tighten themselves up until the Soul, triturated by the gearing that causes and effects have created, will understand the need to react against its tendencies, to overcome its negative passions and change path. From this moment, just as repentance sensitizes the Soul, it will feel strength and new impulses will be born within itself. These new impulses and strengths will lead it towards more adequate means for its work of reparation, of renovation, and step by step the Soul will make much progress.  

Rays and rarefied fluids will permeate the repented and moved Soul, and the need of useful action and dedication will awake within it. However, it is not without cost that the Soul will raise itself, as ascension will not continue without difficulties. The committed faults and mistakes reverberate as causes of obstacles in future lives and the effort will have to be as much energetic and prolonged as the responsibilities will be heavy and as extensive as the period of resistance and obstinacy in evil had been. In the rough and steep ascent, the past will dominate the present for a long period of time, and its weight will cause the shoulders of the walker to sag more than once; but from High Above, pious hands will be extended to him and help him to transpose the most craggy stretches.

Recognising the immense difficulty with which spiritual emancipation is overloaded and the superlative efforts that the Spirits must employ in the eagerness to gain this spiritual emancipation, Jesus1 affirmed: “There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”

Our future is in our hands and our facilities towards the greater good increase in direct proportion to the effort of practicing it; hence Jesus2 also affirmed, that “whoever has will be given more, and they will have abundance”

Every noble and pure life, every higher mission, is a culmination of a past of bitter struggles, of suffered defeats, of endless beginnings, of victories won against ourselves; it is a culmination of long and patient works, an accumulation of the fruits of science and charity gathered, one by one, during the Ages.   Each brilliant ability, each solid virtue, reclaimed  many existences of obscure work, of violent combats between the Spirit and the flesh, the passion and the duty...         To get to the talent, to the genius, the thought had to ripen slowly throughout centuries”.        

According to one of Léon Denis’s3 teaching, each time the Spirit discarnates, returning to the Spiritual World, ... it proceeds to the balance of profits and losses;  progresses are evaluated and consolidatedThe being examines and judges itself; it  thoroughly investigates  its recent history , written in its own self,  looks at the fruits of experience and of wisdom  that was proportioned by its last life, in order to  mark  more deeply the substance in them.  Life in Space is, for the Spirit that evolved, a period of review, of self-communion, in which abilities, after having wasted them in the exterior, reflect themselves, are applied to the study of inner self, to the examination of conscience, to an accurate inventory of beauty or ugliness which exist in the Soul. Life in Space is a necessary and symmetrical form of earthly life, life of balance, in which the forces are reconstituted, in which the energies are refreshed, in which enthusiasms are revivified and in which the being prepares itself for future tasks; it is the rest after the work, the calm after the storm, the quiet and serene concentration after active expansion or intense conflict.” 

Socrates viewed incarnation as a means of evolution 

Through  memory regression experiments with several individuals, coronel A. De Rochars concluded that rebirth favours the evolutionary process of Spirits. As he carried out regression to several previous incarnations, he observed, according to Denis3, the spectacle of “...a series of individualities each time less morally evolved as he went back through the course of the ages. In each existence one atoned, by a type of “penalty of retaliation”, the mistakes from a previous existence and the time which separated the two incarnations was spent in a more or less enlightening environment, according to the state of progress of the individual”.

We must note that these experiences end up endorsing and ratifying spiritist teaching about the need for reincarnation for moral embellishment of creatures, giving emphasis to the historic process of progress of the Spirit which is only admissible in this way, since in only one incarnation, the Spirit does not reach the level of perfection that exempts it from cycles of rebirth.

Two thousand years ago, before spiritist codification, Socrates already had a notion of the principle of reincarnation as a means of evolution for the Spirits 4: The soul in its impure state finds itself oppressed, and is once again attracted to the visible world by the fear of that which is invisible and immaterial. It is a mistake then, to say that the gloomy ghosts seen round tombs and monuments most be the soul of those who have left their bodies without being absolutely pure, and so still conserve part of their material form, which makes them visible to the human eye. In fact they are not good but bad souls, dragging with them the penalties of their first life, who find themselves forced to wander in such places, where they will continue to wander till their appetites, inherent to the material form with which they are clad, recalls them to another body. Then, beyond doubt, they will return to the same habits which were the object of their preferences during their first life.*

Allan Kardec adds the following commentary: “Not only the principle of reincarnation is found clearly expressed there, but also the state of the Souls that are kept under the subjection of matter is described as Spiritism shows in evocations. Furthermore: the topic above says that reincarnation in a material body is consequence of the soul’s impurity, whilst purified Souls are found exempted from reincarnations. Spiritism affirms the same, only adding that the Soul, that the good resolution taken whilst in the spiritual world and that it has acquired knowledge, which is brought with it at rebirth, less shortcomings, more virtues and intuitive ideas about what had in its previous existence. So, each existence marks in it a intellectual and moral progress.”

In items 6 and 7 of his profession of faith of 20th century, Leon Denis affirms: “The objective of the Soul, in its evolution, is to reach and to realise in itself as around itself, through times and ascending levels of the Universe and through the blossoming of the potencies it has in bud state, this eternal notion of the Beautiful and of the Good, which reflects the idea of God, the very idea of perfection.

The explanation for all the problems of the being derives from the well understood  law of ascension: the evolution of the Soul which first receives all its ancestral qualities through atavistic transmission and afterwards it returns them through its own action, in order to add new qualities to itself– the relative freedom of the relative being within the Absolute Being; the slow formation of human conscience throughout centuries and its successive developments of what it is to come in the infinites; the unity of the essence and the eternal solidarity of the Souls, marching towards the conquest of the High Peaks”.  

Jesus warned us: You are the Light of the World! 

Dr. Alexander Papaderos, theologian and educator, tells: “I was still a child when the war broke out.” One day while in the middle of the road, I found pieces of a broken mirror and I kept the largest one with me. I started to play with it and became fascinated on discovering that I could make light reflect into dark places where the Sun had never shone such as deep holes, crevices.

I kept the small piece of mirror with me forever and, on becoming an adult I realised that it was not only a child’s play, but also a metaphor of what would become the motto for a whole life: I am a fragment of a mirror, which I know nothing about. With what I have I can reflect light, truth, comprehension, knowledge, towards the dark places of a man’s heart and modify certain things in determined people. Perhaps other individuals can see this and do as I do.”

A Friend Spirit calls 5 : With repentance and desire to be industrious, the son should put himself to work courageously to reclaim the soil by sheer will-power, digging deeply with the help of repentance and hope. Then confidently sow the good seed, which he has separated from the bad, and water it with love and charity. Then God, the God of love and charity, will give to him who has already received. He will see his efforts crowned with success and one grain will produce a hundred and another a thousand. Courage, workers! Take up your harrows and your ploughs; work with your hearts; tear out the weeds; sow the good seed that the Lord has given and the dew of love will cause the fruits of charity to grow. *1

We should also pay heed to the call of the illustrious son of Foug 6:  “We should raise our eyes towards the Future Without Limits; we should remind ourselves that this Future belong to us, our task is to conquer it”.

Paul taught to the Thessalonians 7: “...Because you are all children of the light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness”.

And Jesus8 completes  : “You are the Light of the World! In the same way, let your light shine before others!” 

 

1 - Luke 15:7.

2 - Mattew 13:12 

3 - DENIS, Léon. The problem of the Being, of Destiny and of Pain. Rio de Janiero: FEB, 2008, chapter 13 XIII, part 2

4 - KARDEC, Allan. O Evangelho segundo o Espiritismo. 12th edition. Rio: FEB, 2006, Introduction, paragraph 4  

5 - KARDEC, Allan. The Gospel according to Spiritism. 125th edition, Rio de Janeiro: FEB, 2006, chapter 18, item 15.

6 - DENIS, Léon. The problem of the Being, of Destiny and of Pain. Rio de Janeiro, FEB, 20008, chapter 27, 3rd part.

7 - 1 Tessalonians 5:5.

8 - Mattew 5:14 and 5:16. 


*
1
Translator’s note: passage extracted from the book “The Gospel according to Spiritism” – translation from 3rd edition by Janet Duncan, Introduction, volume 4.

*1 Translator’s note: passage extracted from the book “The Gospel according to Spiritism” – translation from 3rd edition by Janet Duncan, Chapter 18, item 15 .



 


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