Ricardo Baesso de Oliveira

Compliance with the Law

 
Allan Kardec states that many events that take place in our lives were previously foreseen, although it is possible to a certain extent to change their route, as well as reincarnation commitments. Events such as place of birth, marriage, children, profession, major sufferings, such as congenital and other diseases, besides the type of death, and the approximate date to disembody, have often been previously chosen, known, expected or anticipated by the earthly evolution Protectors. We find in Kardec’s works clarifying quotes:

The Spirits - with the same tastes, same moral progress and affection – come together and form families. (The Gospel according to Spiritism, Chapter XIV, item 09)
 

Why are there certain tendencies in some people and why do they have the wish of following a determined career instead of another? I believe you can answer this question for yourselves. Is this not a consequence of all we have said about the choice of evidence and the progress made in an earlier life? (The Book of Spirits, item 270)

Do not reject the son who fights off his mother by force, or the one who repays you with ingratitude: it was not chance that made him like this and sent him to you. (The Gospel according to Spiritism, Chapter XIV, item 09)

Birth in such or such a family is not an effect of the case, but it often depends on the choice made by the Spirit (What is Spiritism, Chapter III, item 122).

Only great pains, and events that are important and capable of influencing your moral evolution are foreseen (The Book of the Spirits, item 859-a)

It is in death that man is totally subject to the mortal law of fatality, because he cannot escape the decree that determines the end of his life, nor the kind of death that will interrupt it. (The Book of Spirits, item 872)

The situations of a karmic nature related previously, and many others, will occur as a result of the evolutionary needs of the reincarnating entity, related to the nature of faults he committed, imperfections that need to be debugged, or with affections that need to be reworked, or with knowledge that he wishes to acquire. In short: living a certain experience for spiritual growth. We checked with Kardec:

The Spirit may want to be born among people with an evil life to have the opportunity to fight against the instinct of banditry (The Book of Spirits, item 260).

Some chose to live a life of misery and deprivation, to try to bear it with courage; others experience the temptations of fortune and power (The Book of Spirits, item 264).

To be reborn in the same environment in which he lived, and to have a relationship with the same people, in order to repair the evil that he has done to them (The Gospel according to Spiritism, Chapter V, item 11).

To live among backward peoples to help they advance faster (The Book of Spirits, item 273).

Live the experience

Kardec establishes, in a precise way, the fundamental objective of reincarnation in item 634 of The Book of Spirits:

...If there were no mountains, man would not understand that he could go up and down; if there were no rocks, ne would not understand that there are hard bodies. The Spirit needs to gain experience. It is necessary, therefore, to be aware of good and evil. That is why it joins the body.

To progress is, in a way, like learning how to ride a bicycle. Who wants to do it, does he enroll in a course or buy the manual "How to ride a bike"? No! The apprentice climbs on the bike and tries to ride. He will stumble a few times, until his brain, "taming" the balance-related circuits, automates the process and learns to ride without falling.
 

One only progresses by living the experience! We may feel sorry for someone who loses a loved one; we can even try to put ourselves in his place, but to live the reality of a loss is possible only to the one who truly loses a loved one. Imagining the pain of a herniated disc is something that our mind can try, but only those who have had it know what it means.
 

Reincarnation, then, allows us to live different experiences, which are always experiences of growth. 
 

The experience of scarcity and the experience of abundance, the professional challenge and perseverance, the frustration with love, chronic illness and the limitation of one of the senses; there are many experiences where the reincarnating individual is inserted: solitude, beauty, ugliness, unemployment, financial disaster, unfavorable genetics of social vices and chemical addiction, pernicious environment, bad example of parents, and so on.

How do facts happen?

The news reports:
 

A famous actor dies drowned.

The plane crashes and dozens of athletes die.

The pregnant woman is contaminated by "zica" and the baby is born with serious intellectual deficiency.

The teenager "catches" dengue and dies of generalized hemorrhage.

The rural worker is bitten by a rattlesnake and dies of kidney failure

To understand how karmic events happen is often extremely difficult, but we can think about this issue and try, at least in part, to understand the mechanism responsible for enforcing the Law of Cause and Effect. Leon Denis, in After Death, states that the inflexible Laws of Nature, or rather, the resulting effects of the past, decide on reincarnation. The Lower Spirit, ignorant of these laws, little cautious of his future, mechanically suffers his fate and comes to take his place on Earth under the impulse of a force that he does not even try to know. Andre Luiz, on the other hand, also clarifies when he states, in the book Between the Earth and Heaven, Chapter 28, that the Law of Cause and Effect is performed without need of supervision on our part.  Andre Luiz adds, in Workers of Eternal Life, Chapter XI:

[...] reincarnations and disincarnating, in general, obey simply the law. There are biogenetic principles guiding the world of living forms to the occasion of physical rebirth [...]

From the above, we can say that we are all inserted in a physical-psychic automatism governed by the natural order, which registers, evaluates and responds to all our acts. Healthy, useful and noble attitudes put us in a causal reaction that promotes well-being. On the contrary, unhealthy, and individual attitudes that interfere negatively with the well-being of others attract situations of anguish and suffering as an educational resource of the law. But how does this happen? We present as hypothesis three possible mechanisms.

Mechanism I: the zone of remorse

According to John 8:34, when Jesus stated: he who commits sin is the slave of sin, He wanted to show that our errors walk with us, imprinted in our minds, until we are freed from them. Andre Luiz in the book Evolution in two worlds, part II, Chapter XIX, made use of the expression "zone of remorse". Andre comments that, in general, the etiologies, the study of the causes of chronic diseases, which afflict the physical body and tear it down, keeps its root causes in the spiritual body. The record of this or that serious fault creates in the mind an anomalous state which he classifies as a "zone of remorse," around which the continuous and lively wave of thought is confused in a closed circuit on itself, with permanent reflection in the part of the physical body linked to the remembrance of the persons and circumstances associated with the error of our authorship. Having established the fixed idea about this "lump of unbalanced mental forces", it is fundamental that reparative events fight our sick way of being, so that we feel discharged from that, or that inner bundle, or exactly redeemed before the Law. This kind of formation of cysts of deep energies, in the “imo” of our soul, express the so-called karmic debts, because they are affiliated with unfortunate causes that we ourselves shape in the path of destiny, and which are perfectly transferable from one life to another. Thus, the author continues, remorse provokes diverse dystonia in our hidden forces, disarticulating the synergies of the spiritual body, creating morbid predispositions for this or that illness.
 

Some karmic events can be explained by the mentioned mechanism. Let's look at an example: a certain Spirit has committed himself, in past existences, to the abuse of alcoholic beverages and has committed moral failings due to this vice, harming many people. He can then reincarnate with marks in the areas of the perispirit that are responsible for the vitalization of the digestive system. These marks will be creating a predisposition to the onset of diseases, such as chronic gastritis or liver dysfunctions. Thus, the Spirit reincarnates with "weaknesses" in his perispirit, which determine the organs that are most predisposed to become ill. If the Spirit is going to get sick, or not, that can depend, of course, on the lifestyle and moral conduct that he adopts.
 

An equivalent concept can be applied to the genesis of certain mental disorders, because the brain is an organ like any other. Thus, if in the past the Spirit has acquired debts by virtue of the misuse of its moral intellect attributes, it can create karmic marks in its perispirit in the region corresponding to the brain. By reincarnating, it will bring with it tendencies to chemical imbalances in his brain neurotransmitters. If this neurochemical imbalance occurs, the reincarnated individual may suffer from so-called "mental" diseases (which are actually cerebral), such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorders, phobias, schizophrenia, etc. Obviously, in addition to karmic factors, current factors must be considered, often as or even more important than past factors. 

Mechanism II: post-hypnotic suggestion

In the Spiritist Magazine of March 1858, Kardec reports on a letter he received from one of his readers, which states:

“In the last September, a light vessel, crossing from Dunkirk to Ostend, was surprised at night by a storm; the boat turned over, and out of a total of eight, four perished; the other four, in the number of which I found myself, were able to remain hanging to the keel. We stayed the whole night in this horrible position, with no other perspective but to wait for death, which seemed inevitable and from which we experienced all the anguish. At dawn, the winds pushed us and we were able to swim to the shore. Why was it that in this dangerous situation, only four people died? You see, for me, it is the sixth or seventh time I have escaped a danger so imminent and more or less under the same circumstances. I am really led to believe that the invisible hand protects me. What did I do to deserve this? I do not know; I am an unimportant and useless person in this world, and I do not boast of being worth more than the others; far from it: among the victims of the accident was a worthy ecclesiastic, model of evangelical virtues, and a venerable sister of St. Vincent de Paul, who were to perform a holy mission of Christian charity. Fate seems to play a great part in my destiny. Were the Spirits not there for something? Could an explanation be obtained from them, asking them, for example, if they are the ones that cause or drive away the dangers that threaten us? "

According to the wishes of his correspondent, Kardec addressed some questions to the Spirit St. Louis. We highlight some of them:

When an imminent danger threatens someone, is it a Spirit that drives the danger on to him, and when he escapes, is it another Spirit that drives it away?
 

A: When a Spirit incarnates, it chooses a trial; when choosing it, it establishes a kind of fate that it can no longer conjure, once it is submitted to it; I speak of physical evidence. By retaining his free will on good and evil, the Spirit can always bear or repel the test.

Is fatality that seems to preside over the material destinies of our life also result from our free will?
 

A: You yourself have chosen your test. The harder it is and the better you will bear it, the more you will progress. Those who spend their lives in abundance and human happiness are fainthearted Spirits, who remain stationary. Thus the number of the unfortunate is far superior to that of the happy in this world, mindful that Spirits, for the most part, seek the most fruitful tests. They see perfectly well the futility of your greatness and joys. Moreover, the most blissful existence is always agitated, always disturbed, even when there is absence of pain.

We fully understand this doctrine, but this does not explain to us whether certain Spirits exercise a direct action on the material cause of the accident. Suppose a bridge collapses the moment a man passes over it. Who impelled the man to go through this bridge?

A: When a man passes over a bridge that must fall, it is not a Spirit that leads him to pass there; it is the instinct of his destiny that leads him to it.

Can the Spirits warn us directly of danger? Here is one fact that seems to confirm it: A woman left the house and headed down the boulevard. An intimate voice says to her: Go away; return to your home. She hesitates. The same voice is heard several times; then she comes back; but, thinking better, she says to herself: “What am I going to do in my house? I just left it; no doubt it is my imagination. So she goes on her way. A few steps later, a beam that they pulled from a house hits her on the head and knocks her down, unconscious. What voice was that? Was not that a hint of what was going to happen to this woman?

A: The voice of instinct; no presentiment, in fact, has such characters: they are always vague.

What do you mean by instinct?
 

A: I understand that, before incarnating, the Spirit has knowledge of all phases of its life; when these phases have a fundamental character, it preserves a kind of impression in its intimate forum and such impression, awakening as the moment approaches, becomes a foreboding.

This voice of destiny, that is, something that awakens when the moment approaches and which Saint Louis uses to explain the forebodings, can also be used to explain certain facts that occur in our life, and that do not have a logical explanation. That's how Ernesto Bozzano thinks. Bozzano believes that these facts can be explained through the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion. Let's look at an example of the post-hypnotic suggestion: An operator addressed the hypnotized patient as follows:
 

"Ten minutes after waking, you will feel a burning desire to open your umbrella, regardless of the time (whether sun or rain) and then close it. You will not know that I have determined this. You will do it simply, without any logical reason". The patient is awake and in due time does exactly what he was told to do, without realizing why he did what he did. According to this hypothesis, Bozzano believes that the reincarnated Spirit unconsciously looks for the experiences necessary for its improvement, from self-constructed suggestions in his mind and related to the proofs and atonements that he must experience. Let's look at a practical situation: An entity was negatively committed through the use of hands. The wrong attitude imprints on his mind the misconduct. The need to pacify his guilty conscience functions as the post-hypnotic suggestion. The mentioned entity reincarnates, and temporarily forgets the past, but carries with it the suggestion previously inscribed in itself. One day, he goes and visits carpentry and distracted, without realizing it, he puts one hand on a sharp cutting blade, suffering a serious injury, with the loss of some fingers or the whole hand. Thus, the Law of Cause and Effect was fulfilled through a physical-psychic automatism governed by the natural order. Bozzano wrote in Premonitory Phenomena:

If the terrestrial existence represents only a ring of an indefinite chain of successive lives, and if the Spirit, in the hour of its reincarnation, pre-establishes itself - for the purpose of atonement, proof, spiritual perfection – to which he must submit to his new incarnate existence; if these events are extinguished from his physiological memory at his entrance into life, they remain, however, recorded in his sub-consciousness, from which they emerge one day, they are carried out by a process analogous to that by which post-hypnotic suggestions stand out.

Mechanism III: intervention of the beyond

Facts happen in our lives where it seems obvious the performance of disembodied entities, for good as well as for evil. Kardec admitted this in several items in The Book of Spirits:

A man must perish; then he climbs a ladder, it breaks and he dies. Were the Spirits who broke the ladder to fulfill the fate of this man? - In the example you mention, the ladder breaks because it's cracked or not strong enough to support the man's weight; if it were in this man's fate to die in this way, they would inspire him the thought of climbing the ladder that was to break with his weight. (Item 526)
 

A man must die through lightning; he hides under a tree, the lightning flashes and he dies. Could the Spirits have caused the thunderbolt by driving it on to him? The thunderbolt exploded on that tree, and at that moment, because the fact was in the Laws of Nature. It was not directed to the tree because the man was there, but the man was given the inspiration to take refuge in a tree, on which he was to explode. (Item 527)
 

An evil man shoots another man, but the projectile only causes a scratch without reaching the man. Could a Benevolent Spirit have deflected the shot? - If the individual is not to be reached, the beneficent Spirit will inspire the thought of him to deviate, or even be able to overshadow his enemy, so as to disturb his aim... (Item 528)

The matter is complex and open to new ideas. We hope that others will be willing to examine it.