Special

por Rogério Coelho

Prophylactic & healing effect of the religious feeling

"(...) In profound psychic disorders, schizophrenia stands out frightening, in view of the alienation it imposes on the patient". - Joanna de Angelis[1]


In our days, when the Spiritist movement in Brazil and in the world is attacked by the antireligious “spiritualist” currents, generated by the arrogance mingled with the mental limitation of these promoters, we hereby want to prove, based on irrefutable statements of Allan Kardec, Andre Luiz and Joanna de Angelis, how much religion - when expressing its religious feeling, in partnership with medical science - is of vital importance for our physical and mental health…

The religious feeling rises – noble and outstanding - in the social context, as the Encoder himself stated[2]: "the first effect caused by Spiritism - and more generally – consists in developing the religious feeling even in the one, who not being materialistic, looks with absolute indifference to the spiritual matters”.

How can we then omit the religious aspect of Spiritism without offending the frankly transparent position of the Encoder in this step?!... If such an absurd were feasible, as is the desire of the shadows of the Umbral (lower zone) infiltrated in the Spiritist movement, Mankind would suffer more than the damage caused by the class of the priests, who changed Christianity with its crystalized medieval dogmas and its ceremonies of emptiness, mixed with the rituals that make one sleep and are of a torturing sameness. With Spiritism this will not happen!

The Spiritist Doctrine, rich in noble contents, opens new horizons to the understanding of the spiritual Being in its holistic aspect. Anchored in its postulates, Mankind will achieve its spiritual freedom from the slave regime of ancestral religious institutions, now weaken and outdated...

After this explanation, let us analyze the prophylactic action of the religious feeling promoting physical and mental health before the physio-psychic disorders.

The great Encoder of Spiritism shows us[3]  the dramatic saga of Antoine Bell that poisoned his rival... Such a crime, although not punished by human justice, triggered a process of schizophrenia in the murderer, a process that came out in his next reincarnation, in which he was employed in a banking institution in Canada. His situation aggravated increasingly and ended in his suicide. This crime attached to his psyche and probably pursued by his victim – now as his obsessor – his conscience made him feel guilty... Although he was a competent professional, performing his function efficiently and zealously, outside his work environment he was overcome by terrible hallucinations: he could not sleep, he used to beat his own chest with his fists… this happened every day from 4 in the afternoon to 9 in the morning, when he went to work at the bank. A pharmacist who had known him for twenty years was often approached by Mr. Bell, who imagined having bought there the poison he used to kill his victim".

According to Joanna de Angelis82, among other factors, "(...) one should include in the psychogenesis of schizophrenic disorder, the guilty conscience of actions experienced in previous lives, when delinquency signaled the development of the hedonistic and exploratory "Self", who only used friends and acquaintances to exploit them, betraying their trust or cowardly destroying their bodies in horrible crimes that were not enforced, because they passed unknown or the legal circumstances did not reach them ... Having not been released by the reparation through the duties imposed by the Vigilant Law, they inserted in the delicate vibrational weaves of the perispiritual body the unhappy responsibility, which now reappears as a charging, a need for reparation, an imposition of rebalancing, a social, familial, human recomposition...

Here, as in other psychopathological occurrences, the interference of disincarnated beings, imposing their will to dominate over the one who made him unhappy in a previous life, produces dystonia equivalent to those that come from internal and external psychogenesis. Such frequent and insidious psychic imposition affects the neurotransmitters, enabling molecules, the neuropeptides, responsible for the balance of communications, to disconnect producing alienation. The mind, which is not physical, emits special waves that are picked up by other equivalent waves that synchronize with the emissions that are directed to them.

And as far as psychic affinities are concerned, vibrational tuning allows the mental messages to be decoded by other brains that pick them up, according to the fantastic parapsychological phenomena of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, retro-cognition, and these experiences in labs scientifically proved that they do exist and are real.

It is natural, therefore, that without the destruction of the Self when death or disincarnating of the human being occurs, the mind continues to send its messages according to the emotional constructions of love or anger, happiness or misery, which are captured by mental stations or "psi" fields, giving inspiration, ennobling or disturbing insights, giving rise to the harmful obsessions of calamitous effects. The field of these spiritual intercurrences is much wider than can be imagined, and it so often happens that it would be surprising not to find them in neurotic or psychotic disorders of any kind.

Mental health is only possible when the Self structured in noble ethical values ​​understands the primary purpose of human existence, directing its feelings and knowledge in favor of order, progress and welfare of the whole society. The liberation of the arbitrary ego, undressed from the implements of the appearance that is externalized by the persona, allows the integration of the being in life in fullness. All academic therapies are valuable and timely, considering the immense variety of preponderant and predisposing factors for schizophrenia care. Also, fluid therapy is not to be disregarded, as well as the clarification of the disturbing agent and the consequent socialization of the patient through support groups, spiritual activities in their own nuclei where he will find understanding, fraternity and human respect that will lead him to meet the deep "Si" in a climate of peace.

The spiritual activities in their own nuclei, referred to by the Lady Friend Mentor, can unfold in the Spiritist Houses and there enters the religious aspect as therapy. Such an aspect is so important that the Highest One already made it available at the time of Moses, as we can observe in the following teachings of Andre Luiz[4]:

"Mission of Moses - Moses is reincarnated as a missionary of renewal, to give to the people the conception of the One Only God, transferring it from the initial closed areas to the public square. Meanwhile, because the evolution of religious principles always implies a lifting of customs, with the elevation of the soul, the pathfinder faces terrible battles of thought adapted to the circuits of tradition in which the classes exploit each other, thus aggravating their own commitments, to finally receive the foundations of the Law, at Sinai. Since then, religious knowledge, based on Cosmic Justice, has become widespread in the heart of the nations, since through the message of Moses the common man is informed that, before God, the Lord of the Universe and Life, he is obliged to respect the right of the like so that he is equally respected, recognizing that he and the next are brothers among themselves, children of a Single Father. Thus, in this way, religion acts in the spiritual body for the Greater Life, through the education of human habits to purify themselves in the crucible of the centuries, preparing the arrival of the Christ, the Spiritual Governor of the Earth.

The Ten Commandments - The Ten Commandments, received psychically by the Prophet, still shine today as a foundation of Light in the construction of Law, within the social order. The Upper Sphere, using its word, engraved the Law of Cause and Effect for man, and solemnly warned him: Consecrate supreme love to the Father of Eternal Kindness, in Him recognizing His divine origin; be cautious against the mistakes of anthropomorphism, because to standardize the absolute divine attributes by the narrow human attributes is to fall into dangerous traps of vanity and pride; abstain from engaging Divine Judgment in the narrowness of your judgments; recall the imposition of meditation on your behalf and for the benefit of those who serve you in the professional area, so that you can safely assimilate the values ​​of experience; remember that the debt to your earthly parents is always unsolvable by its sublime nature; you will be responsible for the lives that you deliberately extinguish; run away from darkening or upsetting the feeling of others, because the criminal calculation emits waves of a confused force that will come back to you; avoid misappropriation so that you do not aggravate your own debts; keep every wicked word far from your lips so that one day it does not change into a tumbling block for your feet; beware of envy and spite, discontent and jealousy, learning to gain joy and peace, at the price of self-effort, because your thoughts precede you in the footsteps, shaping today the path of your tomorrow.

Jesus and Religion – Meanwhile, with Jesus, religion, as an educational system, reaches unimaginable eminence: neither temples of stone nor rituals; nor ephemeral hierarchies, nor advance to human power...  The Master unlocks the trunks of ennobled knowledge and distributes the treasures. He addresses Himself to the simple men of the heart, bowed to the ground of suffering, and lifts their shaking heads towards Heaven. He approaches those who are unaware of the sublimity of their destiny and blows them the Truth, poured out in love, so that the sun of hope reborn in the being.  Embrace the denied ones and tell them of Infinite Providence. It gathers around its glory that humility hid, the old and the sick, the tired and the sad, the poor and the oppressed, the suffering mothers and the abandoned children, and gives them the heavenly beatitudes. It teaches that happiness cannot be born from the ephemeral possessions that are transferred from hand to hand, but from charity and understanding, modesty and work, tolerance and forgiveness.

He tells them that the House of God is made up of many abodes, in the worlds that exist in the firmament, and that man must be born again to progress in the direction of the Divine Wisdom. He proclaims that death does not exist and that Creation is beauty and security, joy and victory in full immortality. By the revelations that overcome superstition and crime, violence and perversity, He pays on the cross the tax of extreme sacrifice to human prejudices that do not forgive Him for His sovereignty, but reappearing again, to the same Humanity that had mocked and crucified Him, He reveals to it, in a new song of humility, the grandiosity of Eternal Life.

Reviving of Christianity - Since then, the Gospel has been established as a code of harmony, inspiring devotion to the good of all, until voluntary sacrifice, living fraternity, indefatigable service to others and unlimited forgiveness. There are immense alterations all over the world: methodical cruelty gives way to compassion; the bloody trophies of the war leave the sanctuaries; the slavery of free men is shaken in the grounds to be annulled once and for all; the woman rises from the condition of animal to human dignity; philosophy and science admit charity in the government of peoples; the ideal of pure solidarity begins to shine on the brow of the world...

Moses had installed the principle of justice, coordinating life and influencing it from the outside. Jesus inaugurated the principle of love on the Earth, to open it from the heart, from the inside out, tracing the route to God.

And this is how Christianity, simple and magnificent, now re-emerges in Spiritism, inducing us to the sublimation of intimate life, so that our soul may be freed from the shadow that encloses it, moving, renewed, to the highest Light".

It is in the religious feeling that we will find the immaterial and true existential meaning, with which we will overcome the harmful internal pressures of the Self and the varied adverse external injunctions.

According to Mentor Joanna de Angelis[5], "the discovery of the meaning of life is of great magnitude because it gives meaning to the struggle and the challenges that often arise, inviting the individual to advance and grow inwardly.

This existential sense is a form of religiosity that must possess a high motivating meaning so that the individual does not fail in the evolutionary enterprises.

(...) Anyone who does not cultivate a religious ideal is outside the Generating Fulcrum of Life, and thus falls more easily. (...) The effort to find the existential meaning must be continuous, because its lack, its non-knowledge, can produce internal disorders that give rise to psychoneurotic processes.

Intelligent people, lucid, stoic, well-placed financially, loved, when they lose their sense of life and fall into this existential emptiness, which religion always fulfills by offering transpersonal goals, feeling useless, develop neurotic disorders that need to be overcome, rediscovering reason to be of life, the usefulness of living, the immense possibilities that are within reach to become happy and full.

They are, therefore, subjective values, such as prayer, meditation, reflection, calmness and work for personal renewal, which they can fill emotionally, restructure the individual in relation to human existence.

This silent journey is timeless, and cannot be accomplished in a certain period of time, through immediate goals, but through psychic and emotional experiences that transcend current consciousness, offering it a safe goal later.

The necessity of religion stands out for its profound significance, offering compensation and balance after the carnal rest. Then the existential meaning is incorporated into the present consciousness and stimulates the functions of thought, which will go to work for the quality of life and not only for the conquest of things that could presume the external totality of the acquisitions.

(...) A religious identification of the individual will work in favor of the change of the unmeasured ambitions to the conquest of the necessary, that which produces power and pleasure, but which does not become neurotizing enjoyment of dire consequences.

The human being must learn to be happy according to the circumstances, introducing and living the understanding of his physical transience and his spiritual Eternity".

It is likely that - because he reached the highest illuminated peace, because he lived religiously in accordance with healthy Christian habits, and based on the information passed by Joanna de Angelis - Sanson[6], after only two days after he disembodied, stated: “live wisely, holy, practicing charity and love, and you will have earned the impressions and delights that the greatest poet could not describe".

 


 

[1]- FRANCO, Divaldo. Personal Triumph. Salvador: LEAL, 2002, Chapter 6.

[2]- KARDEC, Allan. The Book of Spirits. 83th ed. Rio [de Janeiro]: FEB, 2002, Conclusion – Volume VII.

[3] - KARDEC,Allan. Heaven and Hell. 51st ed. Rio [de Janeiro]:FEB, 2003, 2nd Part, Chapter V.

[4] - XAVIER, F. Candido. Evolution in Two Worlds. 7th ed. Rio de Janeiro: FEB, 1983, Chapter XX.

[5] - FRANCO, Divaldo. Personal Triumph. Salvador: LEAL, 2002, Chapter 9.

[6] - KARDEC,Allan. Heaven and Hell. 51st ed. Rio [de Janeiro]:FEB, 2003, 2nd part, Chapter I, item 8.

 

Translation:

Eleni Frangatos
eleni.moreira@uol.com.br

 

     
     

O Consolador
 Revista Semanal de Divulgação Espírita