The challenges of moral transformation

"It recognizes the true spirit by his moral transformation and by the efforts he employs to dominate his evil inclinations." (The Gospel According to Spiritism, Chap. XVII, item 4)

This phrase so well known, but often misunderstood, it contains two clear and essential characteristics to identify the true spirit. It is like two axes, one vertical, the other horizontal.

The vertical can characterize the moral transformation as a simple symbol. So the moral transformation indicates the level of progress made. The higher, the greater the development of the Spirit. Because of this, perhaps, many people find themselves excluded from the category of true spirit, imagining that this "moral transformation" is something extraordinary. But it's not like that. It happens as a mother who watches her son and says: "My son is more patient after he began attending church" This "be more patient" is moral transformation.

The horizontal axis indicates the progress made according to the time. A gradual process, constant, every day. It is in this axis where it is the assertion "by the efforts he employs to tame his evil inclinations." Here again, a mistake that is evident when many people say, instead of "tame", "win." Taming a bad inclination is very different from winning it. The key of understanding this sentence is the verb tame.

Emmanuel tells us it is "essential to renounce our little desires we are peculiar to achieve the capacity for sacrifice that it will structure our evolution at higher levels." Tame/abdecate, win/sacrifice.

The unconscious is what we really are and generally unknown. To know ourselves we need to pay attention to our actions. Common acts, speech acts and acts in particular situations. It would be like a wild horse that need to be tamed. On the contrary, it would be causing harm to ourselves and others, especially in close relationships. As good riders, after checking the problems to be solved, we put ourselves in the work to tame. It's not as easy as it may seem, because our unconscious wants to speak out, always seeking the fulfillment of desires or morbidities. When we finally managed to tame it, yet it is it which leads us, but obeying our command and direction that we indicate it. We realized then that desires remain the same, but we renounce its manifestation, and take the energy of these desires to build superior acts.

Allan Kardec, thirty years before psychoanalysis, understood very well this nuance between tame and win. In fact, we are not yet able to overcome our evil tendencies, but we can give up their demonstration.

What it was translated by almost all as the source of our temptations with the term "concupiscence" should be translated "cravings", because it comes from concupisco Latin verb (hanker), where it would come, in late Latin, the term concupiscentia.

Renunciation, as Emmanuel says, is a kind of training that it will allow us in the future, sacrifice bad desires.