There is an increasing effort to make science within Spiritism: studies about mediumship, communications methods with the afterlife, fact checking on information provided through mediums and many other possibilities. But how can we study and analyze the invisible world from a scientific perspective?

Doctor Arismar Léon (photo), member of the Medical-Spiritist Society of the Federal District in Brazil, speaks in the following interview about the Spiritist science codified by Allan Kardec, how it began and what we can expect from it in our times. 

What kind of Spiritist science did Allan Kardec propose? 

To answer to this question we need to understand the historic context in which Spiritism emerged in the XIX Century, a time of important changes in human paradigms. Science and its technological results were given unprecedented importance then, overcoming dogmatic faith, which ruled until then. Kardec studied with Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who was the disciple of one of the most preeminent Illuminists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kardec was a member of several scientific societies at the time. He applied the scientific research methodology used at the time to try, initially, to explain the phenomena at the time. After discarding the possibility of fraud as an explanation, he tried to explain the turning tables phenomena through natural laws, such as electricity and gravity. But when he observed that the turning tables were giving rational, logical and knowledgeable answers, he gave up attempts to explain the phenomena through known laws and reasoned that intelligent effects must be the result of intelligent causes. His explanation was that the phenomena were produced by an intelligent cause. That hypothesis was confirmed through the phenomena, when the Spirits revealed that they were living beings on an extra physical level. In science, we normally make the experiments, collect the data, analyze them and come to our conclusions, generalizing them as laws. In Spiritism, the phenomena, who were intelligent beings, explained themselves. 

Can we say now that we have Spiritist science? 

Absolutely. Every authentic mediunimic message or communication, liking the extra physical plane with the material world, with the first explaining its conditions, laws and connections with the latter, is in actual fact Spiritist science’s experiment. As Kardec says: “Mediumship is for Spiritist science what the microscope is for the biologist and the telescope for the astronomer.”  

Mediumship is the Spiritist science’s tool. Whenever communication between the two levels of existence takes place, we have Spiritist science in action. We can say, therefore, that Spiritist science is one of the world’s most active the scientific fields.  

What tools can you use for analysis in that science, which is not palpable or visual for many? 

One of the main challenges in understanding Spiritist science is the difference in its theories, methods and goals as compared with traditional, so-called academic, sciences. Spiritism studies the spiritual element and its relations with the material world. And the big difference is that the spiritual element is intelligent and has its own will, which does not depend on the will of the researcher. Kardec said that science made a mistake when it tried to make experiments with the Spirits in the same way it made experiments with voltaic batteries. We cannot control the phenomena in Spiritist science, as they are caused by intelligent causes, out of our control.  

Is there anything else you would like to add, concerning Spiritist science? 

For those who study Spiritism in a systematic and serious manner, the debate on whether Spiritism is a form of science or not is an old one. Spiritism is a scientific discipline, the first and only until now to demonstrate that conscience stays alive after death. It studies the nature of those consciences, known as Spirits, and their world, the Spiritual world, as well as their interactions with the earthly physical world. 

Those who remain restricted to the study of the experimental processes of the Teachings, including mediumsip, will be able to satisfy their curiosity, but they will miss out on its most important aspect, which is the study of the comprehensive proposals and assumptions provided by the Spirits the most diverse fields of knowledge, such as philosophy, metaphysics, sociology, theology, biology, physics and others. Spiritism provides real understanding of the origin and destiny of human immortal nature and its interaction with the Cosmos and the Creator, giving us guidelines to conduct our destinies in the face of immortality and guiding us through moral laws whose consequences are irrevocable.