In this issue we continue the study of the book Posthumous Works, published after Allan Kardec disembodied and containing texts written by him. The present work is based on the translation made by Dr. Guillon Ribeiro, published by the Brazilian Spiritist Federation.
Questions for discussion
117. What do we learn by the Spiritist Doctrine or Spiritism?
118. If the soul is immortal, why did some Spirits talk about spiritual death?
119. What happens when the body dies?
120. What happens in the reincarnation process?
121. During physical childhood, does the Spirit act and think like a child?
Answers to the proposed questions
117. What do we learn by the Spiritist Doctrine or Spiritism?
The intelligent principle is independent of matter. The individual soul pre-exists and survives the body. It is the same starting point for all souls, without any exception; all are created simple and ignorant, and are subject to indefinite progress. No creature is preferred or favored, more than the others; angels are beings, who arrived to perfection after they passed, like other creatures, through all the lower levels of inferiority. The souls, or Spirits, progress more or less quickly because of their free will, their work and their good will. Spiritual life is a normal life; its physical life is a temporary phase during which the Spirit briefly wears a material wrap that it leaves behind when the body dies. The Spirit progresses both in the corporeal and in the spiritual state. The body state is necessary for the Spirit until it reaches a certain degree of perfection; it accomplishes the work necessary to provide its own needs, and acquires special practical knowledge. Since only one life in a body is not enough to allow the Spirit to reach perfection, it takes a body as many times as needed and each time it progresses according to its prior lives and spiritual life.
When the Spirit acquires in this world every possible thing, it leaves the body to go to other more advanced worlds, intellectually and morally, and, therefore, in a constant manner it finally reaches perfection. Happy or unhappy states of the Spirits is inherent to their moral advancement; the Spirit’s punishment is the result of its hardening in evil, and by persevering in evil, they punish themselves; but the door of repentance is never closed to them, and they can reach progress in time, whenever they want to return to the path of goodness.
Children, who die at an early age, may be more or less advanced, because they have lived in previous lives, where they could practice goodness or do evil. Death does not free them from the tests they must go through, and they begin again, in time, a new life on Earth or in the higher worlds, according to their degree of development.
The cretins and idiots’ souls is of the same nature as that of any incarnate; and often their intelligence is superior; they suffer because of the insufficient means they have to be able to maintain a relationship with their life companions, in the same way as the dumb suffer because they cannot speak. They abused their intelligence in their previous lives, and agreed to voluntarily be reduced to the impossibility to expiate the evil they have committed. (Posthumous Works - The five alternatives of Humanity.)
118. If the soul is immortal, why did some Spirits talk about spiritual death?
In the sense of disorganization, of disintegration of the parts, of the scattering of the elements, there is no death except for the material wrap and the fluidic casing, but the soul, or Spirit, cannot die to progress; otherwise it would lose its individuality, which would amount to nothing. In the sense of transformation, regeneration, it can be said that the Spirit dies every incarnation to rise with new attributes, without ceasing to be itself. In the same way as a peasant, for example, who becomes rich and a great lord, leaves his hut for a palace and wears embroidered clothes; everything changes regarding his habits, his likings, his language, even his character; in a word, the peasant is dead, he buried his rough clothes, to be born again as a man of the world, and, however, he is always the same person; he only changed.
Therefore, for the Spirit, each corporeal life is an occasion for a more or less responsive progress. Reentering the world of the Spirits, brings new ideas; its moral horizon widens; its perceptions are more accurate, more delicate; it sees and understands what it saw and did not understand before; its vision that, in the beginning, did not reach beyond its last life, now reaches successively its past lives, in the same manner as the man, who by standing up can see beyond the fog and sees in succession a wider horizon.
At every new stage in erraticity, new wonders of the invisible world unfold before its eyes, because a veil is torn to disclose each wonder. At the same time, its fluidic wrap purges; it becomes lighter, brighter; and later it will be resplendent. It is an almost new Spirit; it is the peasant polished and changed; the old Spirit is dead, and yet it is always the same Spirit. This is how we must understand the Spiritual death. (Posthumous Works - The Spiritual Death)
119. What happens when the body dies?
The Spirit becomes disturbed, and loses consciousness of its own self, so that it never witnesses the last breath of its own body. Gradually, however, the disturbance disappears and the Spirit recognizes itself as the man coming out of a deep sleep; what it feels first is the release of its carnal burden; then it is surprised with the vision of the new environment in which it is. The Spirit is like a man, who was sedated for a surgery, and then is taken to another place before he wakes up. When the Spirit wakes up, it looks for its body and sees it beside it. It knows that the body is his, but is very much surprised that it is separated from it. It is when the Spirit gradually begins to understand the new situation. In this phenomenon there is only a change in material circumstances; however, regarding the moral part, the Spirit is exactly what it was a few hours before; it suffers no significant change; its faculties, ideas, tastes, tendencies, and character are the same; the changes it may suffer only operate gradually by the influence of its surrounding. (Posthumous Works - Spiritual Death)
120. What happens in the reincarnation process?
At the time of the conception of the body designed for the Spirit, the Spirit is bonded by a fluidic current, which, like a loop, attracts it and brings it closer to its new home. From then onwards, it belongs to the body, as the body belongs to it until the moment of its corporeal death; however, the complete union, the total and real possession only occurs at the time of birth.
From the moment of conception, the Spirit becomes disturbed; its ideas are confused, its faculties are annulled; its disturbance increases and the ideas become confused as the loop tightens, and it is full at the time of late pregnancy, in such a way that the Spirit never witnesses the birth of its body, or its death, because it has no conscience at all of these two experiences.
From the moment the baby starts breathing, the disturbance disappears little by little, and the ideas return gradually, but in other conditions different to those of the body’s death.
At the time of reincarnation, the powers of the Spirit are not simply numbed by a kind of momentary sleep, as what happens during its return to spiritual life; all without exception, go to the latent state.
The bodily life aims to develop them through practice, but not all can be produced simultaneously, because the exercise of one might hinder the development of the other, whereas, due to the successive development, they rely on one another. It is therefore necessary that some remain resting, while others develop; this is why, in its new existence, the Spirit can present itself in a very different aspect, especially if it is more advanced than it was in its previous existence.
In one, for example, the gift for music may be very developed; it will conceive, understand, and as a consequence accomplish everything necessary for the development of that gift. In another life it might be the gift of painting, exact systems, or poetry and so on. While these new faculties develop, music shall be dormant, however maintaining the progress already acquired. This results that the one, who was an artist in one life, can be a wise man, a statesman, a strategist in another life, while it will be null under the artistic aspect and vice versa.
The latency of the faculties, in the process of reincarnation, explains why it cannot remember all previous lives. However, when the death of the body occurs, the faculties are only in a state of a short duration sleep, and thus the memory of that life is fully recalled when awakening. (Posthumous Works - Spiritual Death).
121. During physical childhood, does the Spirit act and think like a child?
Yes, until birth. All faculties are in latency and the Spirit has no self-awareness. At the time of birth, the ones that are to be exercised do not do it suddenly; their development accompanies the organs through which they will manifest. Due their intimate activity, they lead to the development of the corresponding organ.
It follows that, in early childhood, the Spirit does not have the joy of fulfillment of any of its powers, not only as incarnate, but even as a Spirit; but even as a Spirit, it is truly a child, as the body to which it is attached. It is not painfully compressed in the imperfect body, because if so God would have made the incarnation a burden for all Spirits, good or bad.
With the idiot and the cretin it occurs in a different way; since the organs do not develop in parallel with the faculties, the Spirit ends up in the position of a man tightly tied by knots that do not let him move freely. This is why one can evoke the Spirit of a fool and obtain sensible answers, while a small child or unborn, is unable to answer. All the faculties, all the skills, are a germ in the Spirit, since its creation; they are there in the rudimentary state, like all other organs in the first thread of the formless fetus, like all parts of the tree in the seed. (Posthumous Works - Spiritual death)
