Special

por Eurípedes Kühl

Spiritism and “shortcuts”
Thinking historically of the not so distant year of 1857, more precisely on April 18 of that year... That is how my imagination took me to Kardec and I saw him with a copy of "The Book of Spirits" (O Livro dos Espíritos- the L.E.), to be released worldwide that day. A historic day yes, because that was the Birth Certificate of Spiritism!
The Codification of Spiritism was completed, Kardec disincarnated in 1869.
Several currents of religious thought have since appeared, almost all of them, in general, using at first similarity with some Spiritist premises. Next, they founded a new way of seeing the themes of events originating from the Spiritual Plane and became independent.
In this article I will mention some of these currents - true paths, or shortcuts of Spiritism - and the people who created them, without any criticism. It is a fact that scholars became acquainted with the Doctrine of the Spirits, and then followed a different course. About each of them there are hundreds of books and articles, hence there will only be a brief mentioning (with no need for more). My purpose: to show that they are not part of Spiritism.
Theosophy
With Kardec’s death, Pierre-Gaëtan Leymarie (1827-1901), the publisher of the Codification Books, soon began - without consent of Amelie-Boudet (widow of Kardec) – to publish in the Spiritist Magazine, founded by Kardec, texts not necessarily of Spiritist content. The majority of these texts were based on articles by Helena Petrovina Blavatsky (1831-1891), a Russian medium, who in 1871 founded the Société Spírite(Spiritist Society) in Cairo, in the capital of Egypt, which did not succeed. Going to Paris, Blavatsky met Leymarie, who offered her the opportunity to publish her texts in the Spiritist Magazine.
Thus in the Revue (Spiritist Magazine)publications of theosophical subjects were made during incredible 38 years, that is, from 1876 to 1914, totalizing more than 52 articles (direct and indirect) on Theosophism[1].
The contents of the Theosophical publications - many strange to the records of Kardec - caused a great stir in the Spiritist environment of the French Spiritists, causing criticism and dissent.
After many arguments, setbacks and publications putting such publications on a philosophical route opposed to Spiritism on many points, the split was unavoidable.
Blavatsky's texts, attributed to Spirits wholly alien to Codification, were filled with quotations of Egyptian, Hindu, Himalayan Masters, Mahatmas, with a vast list of names of entities, always in the language of those countries.
In 1875 Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, based in India.
Separating from Spiritism, Theosophy followed its course.
NOTE: I copy below a short text from the interview of the consecrated Spiritist scholar Jose Herculano Pires (1914-1979), from the book "J. Herculano Pires - the Apostle of Kardec", also of the longing, Spiritist and writer Jorge Rizzini (1924-2008):
It was reasoning that led me to Spiritism. The desire to understand what the religion to which I belonged, the Catholic religion, could never explain to me. This need naturally impelled me to seek, to inquire. In these inquiries I went through several phases. I did not go directly from Catholicism to Spiritism. Before, under the influence of a cousin of my father, Francisco Correia de Melo, resident in Santos, I became a Theosophist. I have read several Theosophy works, I have tried to delve deeper into the study, and I have found there many answers which I had in vain sought in the religion of the family. Then I also became disappointed with Theosophy. Because it gave me some explanations that also seemed absurd to me. I wanted something that was more positive, that was more in connection with the possibility of concrete evidence. And, it was then, in a phase of uncertainty, when I was already accepting, practically, the materialism, that "The Book of Spirits" (O Livro dos Espíritos) fell into my hands. And in this book I really found what I was looking for.
Metapsychic
Known as the founder of Metapsychics, Charles Robert Richet (1850-1935), a French physician and physiologist, played a key role in the process of unraveling the unknown world of psychic phenomena. In 1905, then as president of the Society of Psychical Investigations (London) he proposed the name of Metapsychica to this set of knowledge. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1913.
His most famous work, Treatise on Metapsychics (1922), is a true framework of facts and detailed descriptions of psychic experiences, historical and classificatory descriptions that greatly contributed to its development. His greatest contribution, undoubtedly, was the study of ectoplasm, the substance responsible for the viability of the phenomena said objectives.
Richet's Metapsychic was composed of the following phenomena: cryptesthesia (psychometry); telekinesis (movement of objects without contact); ectoplasm(ectoplasm science).
Metapsychic is not Spiritism: it is purely an investigative science, in search for specific laws that explain the (paranormal) facts that it analyzes, so that they are reproduced physically, since the same atmosphere is created in which they originally happened. It is a term used in Latin countries.
Parapsychology
Parapsychology is a pseudoscience dedicated to the investigation of supposed paranormal and psychic phenomena. Its purpose is the scientific research of telepathy, precognition, retro cognition, clairvoyance, and telekinesis, projection of the consciousness, near-death experiences, reincarnation, mediumship and other paranormal and supernatural claims.
The term "Parapsychology" was created in 1889 by the German physician, philosopher and psychologist Max Dessoir (1867-1947) and was adopted in the 1930s by the American botanist Joseph Banks Rhine (1895-1980) as a substitute for the terms Metapsychics and Psychic Research.
In the US, in 1930, Rhine began the studies that led to the structuring of a new branch of science concerned with studying the so-called "unusual" phenomena (Parapsychology).
NOTE: Metapsychics and Parapsychology acted like the other sciences, that is, they tried to define by the experimental method laws of events that they observed in nature. They ceased to be exponential because the scientist only accepts a phenomenon as true if he can explain and reproduce it, provided that they offer the same environmental conditions in which it occurred. And then they were confronted with an impassible barrier: the events researched have their origin in the Spirit and not in matter; and the Spirit is something that Science cannot handle in a test tube...
NOTE - I quote another comment from Professor Jose Herculano Pires' above mentioned interview, in the book "J. Herculano Pires - the Apostle of Kardec":
Once (says Herculano Pires) at the end of a course at the Faculty of Medical Sciences of the Hospitals of the Holy House of Mercy of São Paulo, one of the assistants asked me, in the middle of the debates, how I managed between Spiritism and Parapsychology .
I answered that I did not find any difficulty, since the object of the Spiritist Science and Parapsychology is the same, and regarding the conclusion of the researches, there was no contradiction so far... The contradictions with Spiritism are fruit only of theories or hypotheses prefabricated and with a known address.
Umbanda
The word Umbanda derives from m'banda, which in the Kimbundo language (national language of Angola) means "priest" or "healer"
In spite of the development in the humbler classes, the Umbanda has a historical record of its birth that is merged with the one of Zelio Fernandino de Moraes (1891-1975), native of Niteroi, capital of the then state of Rio de Janeiro. At seventeen, stricken with a strange paralysis that defied doctors, he sometimes had the posture of an old man who said incomprehensible things.
Examined by a physician, he advised the family to take him to a priest, but was taken to a Spiritist Center (Centro Espirita - C.E.) in Niteroi. There, Zelio was invited to sit at the table of the mediumship session, being immediately taken by a supernatural force, and says:
-"There's a flower missing here!"
Then he gets up, goes to the garden of the Spiritist Center, picks a flower from the garden and puts it on the table. Stunned, other mediums participating in the session began to incorporate Spirits who called themselves black slaves and Indians. In that Spiritist Center, until then, only "evolved" Spirits, of physicians, intellectuals, thinkers, and so on, had been incorporated; Spirits such as these were considered to be backward and should be avoided.
A discussion was established between communicating "entities" about what is really a backward Spirit or not. Finally, the Spirit that incorporated into Zelio revealed himself as the Caboclo de Sete Flechas (Caboclo of the Seven Arrows)* - the Lord of the Paths - who, stunned by the prevailing racial and cultural prejudice there, announced that he would create a new religion where blacks and Indians considered backward Spirits, could manifest themselves and share their knowledge with Humanity.
*Translator’s note: Caboclo is a Brazilian Indian of mixed white or black ancestry.
No sooner said than done, at 8pm of November 16, 1908, the Caboclo manifested in Zelio, announcing the creation of the new religion. In the name of this Spirit, Zelio was cured, and with the help of a small believing group, he began to perform cures and soon founded the first space dedicated to the cult, the Tenda de Umbanda Nossa Senhora da Piedade (The Umbanda Tent of Our Lady of Compassion) officially registered in 1908 and still functioning.
The Umbanda combines elements of the Kardecist Spiritist philosophy, the various Afro-Brazilian cults, indigenous traditions, Catholic Christianity and lately knowledge coming from esoteric cults.
Projectiology
"Freeing oneself from the human body with lucidity is the most precious and practical source of clarification and priority information about the most important problems of life, clarifying us about who we are, where we came from and where we are going". (Waldo Vieira, Our Evolution, 1997).
Projectiology is a subfield or specialty of the Consciousness Science, which studies the actions of consciousness (ego, self or human personality) in non-physical dimensions, free from the constraint of the biological body.
Projectiology (from the Latin projectiomeans projection and logos in the Greek means treatise) is the most practical branch of Conscientiology, this, a pseudoscience founded in 1979 by the physician and Brazilian medium Waldo Vieira (1932-2015). Vieira proposed the study of "the consciousness integrally", related to supposed energetic projections of consciousness and the projections of consciousness itself out of the human body, i.e., the actions of consciousness operating out of the state of physical restraint of the brain and all biological body.
Projectiology also investigates other projectiological phenomena, such as: bilocation, clairvoyance, near-death experience (NDE), intuition, precognition, retro cognition, telepathy, among others.
Due to the lack of scientific evidence and experiments under controlled conditions, within the parameters of science, even with all the efforts of parapsychology, projectiology is considered a pseudoscience.
Apometry
Apometry: from the Greek apó= out of = metron = measure, is a mediumistic work method, by which specialized mediums lend themselves to assisting people with serious obsessive problems.
This practice, developed a few years ago by the physician Dr. Jose Lacerda de Azevedo (1919-1997), then residing in Porto Alegre/RS, consists generally of the spiritual unfoldment of a medium, who in this state has the opportunity to see scenes in the astral plane and the conditions of the perispirit of the patient (this also unfolded, or, projected).
Guided by spiritual protectors (disembodied physicians), the medium describes what he sees, facilitating the diagnosis of the most complex spiritual syndromes, or eventually narrating the processing of surgeries in the perispirit of the patient.
NOTES:
a. On earthly and spiritual therapies I recall that Kardec, referring to the "Medicine of the future", brilliantly anticipates, he almost prophesies:
Being one of the constitutive elements of man, the perispirit plays an important role in all psychological phenomena and, to a certain extent, in physiological and pathological phenomena. When the medical sciences take due account of the spiritual element in the economy of the being, they will have taken a great step and entirely new horizons will be shown to them. The causes of many diseases will at this time be discovered and found powerful means of fighting them;
B. (In "Posthumous Works", Allan Kardec, 1st Part, I, The Perispirit as Principle of Manifestations, Item 12, p.45-46, 21st ed. 1985, FEB, RJ / RJ).
In the book "Between Heaven and Earth", chapter XIII - "Mental Analysis", p. 82 and 83, 13th ed., 1990, FEB, RJ / RJ, of the Spirit Andre Luiz, psychographics of Francisco Candido Xavier, Instructor Minister Clarencio states:
"The mind, as well as the physical body, can and should undergo interventions to rebalance it. Later, human science will develop gradually into psychic surgery, as much as the surgery technique is advancing today, in view of the needs of the vehicle of carnal matter. In the great future, the land doctor will remove a mental labyrinth, just as easily as he now removes a condemned appendix". (Emphasis added).
The first edition of this work is dated 1954. Almost 64 years have gone by. Has the "future" mentioned by Instructor Clarence already arrived, through Apometry?
And the "great future", when would it be? We are in 2018...
And finally, for the sole purpose of pacification, I mention a group that does not exist officially, but in fact:
"Roustaing’s teachings"
It is a set of interpretations of Jesus, his body, teachings and passages of the Gospel, all recorded in the book "The Four Gospels: Revelation of Revelation", written by Jean-Baptiste Roustaing (1805-1879), a French lawyer. This work, since its publication in 1866, caused and causes dissensions among the Spiritists.
In fact, few Spiritists accept Roustaing, and also few Spiritists reject him. And most Spiritists never heard of him…
About twenty years ago, I wrote to the FEB, in writing, care of the then president, the late and respected Dr. Juvanir Borges (1916-2010), mentioning divergences from the work of Roustaing and the Encoding of Spiritism. I requested publication of the text in the magazine Reformador, aiming analysis and discussion, tending to pacify the groups of Spiritists in favor and against Roustaing. Dr. Juvanir replied that although my text was levelheaded, it would be filed, because the FEB does not incense contentions.
After a few more years I resubmitted the same text to Geraldo Campetti Sobrinho (1966- ) current vice president of FEB – with my same argument, and his same answer...
Since then I have been praying to the Protective Friends of the Greater Plan, so that peace can be reached and dilute this uncomfortable Spiritist climate.
Now, with my thoughts in Jesus, I summon the Spiritists who adopt, agree and accept the premises of Roustaing, to unite and form an independent group, dissociating it completely from the FEB.
There will be countless consequences that can come from such an attitude:
1. With no doubt, peace between the Spiritists would be settled, since nothing would change between the opposites and those in favor of Roustaing, since both have, with Kardec, an inseparable doctrinal link: the Codification of Spiritism;
2. With this, we would have Spiritists united, with no objection that some, in parallel, admit and approve Roustaing; as an example, I mention the case of Spiritists who are simultaneously Freemasons, with nothing to contradict or disprove such participation - each group with its norms;
3. Simple suggestion: the name of this possible new group could be "Roustainguism", "Revelation of the Revelation", or other;
4. With the formation and official registration of this group, there is no objection that the current directors of FEB, Federations, Spiritist Centers and other Spiritist groups, roustainguists, remain in these same functions, provided that they accept, when in activities, only dealing with the Codification.
It is with deep sincerity and an open heart that I make this proposal.



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[1] Data from the book “Em nome de Kardec” (In Kardec’s name), Adriano Calsone, 2015, pg. 62, Vivaluz Editora, Atibaia/SP

  
Translation:
Eleni Frangatos - eleni.moreira@uol.com.br

 

     
     

O Consolador
 Revista Semanal de Divulgação Espírita