Special
por Nubor Orlando Facure

Year 11 - N° 523 - July 2, 2017

Is mediumship a hereditary behavior?

It is easy to perceive certain stages of our evolutionary history - walking through the savannas, communicating by gestures, crying for help, the first tools, creating adornments, establishing affective bonds, forming social groups organizing strategies of domination and rituals of coexistence.
We gradually conquered the bipedal human gait, the spoken language, artistic ability, formed ethnic groups, and accumulated a culture, affection and religiosity.

Today's child repeats this phylogenetic process in part - this evolutionary trajectory is present in its first steps, in babbling, in the first words, in the handling of toys, in the family attachment and in the socialization of the school group.
Was mediumship an achievement of human evolution?
Can we identify an evolution and a hereditary transmission in mediumship?

Being an organic property that takes place in the brain of the medium, this possibility deserves to be studied - otherwise it would be a "metaphysical talent," a divine gift obtained by grace, merit, privilege, punishment, commitment, or need.

Mediumship is a process of communication between two intelligences: Man, an incarnate being; and Spirit, a disincarnated being.
Intelligence is a cerebral aptitude and as such is a good example to identify the weight of genetic inheritance and the performance of an environment rich in stimulation enhancing its capacity. We will see this later.

Let us see what Philosophy and Science teach us

Hippocrates:
"The brain, and only the brain, is the source of our pleasures, joys, smiles and enchantments, as well as of our sorrows, pains, mourning and tears. It is the organ we particularly use to think and learn, to see and to hear, to distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the good from the bad, and the pleasurable from the unpleasant. The brain is also the abode of madness and delusions, fears and terrors that assault us during the night or day, of the insomnia and sleepwalking, embarrassing errors and thoughts that will not come to us, of the forgotten duties and of eccentricities
".

Let us understand very well what Hippocrates says: he assigns exclusively to the brain and only to the brain all our mental activity and, above all, our behavior. Today's neurosciences do not relinquish these claims of Hippocrates - they rely exclusively on this materialist view.

Rene Descartes, Espinoza and Damasio:

There is no question regarding the existence of the brain and the mind, but there has always been the dilemma: dualism or monism - brain and Mind or body and Soul are different entities or one single thing?

Descartes was the philosopher of dualism, separating the physical thing in the brain and the spiritual thing in the mind. This French philosopher perceived that the headquarters of the Soul would be in the pineal gland, which would reconcile mental phenomena with the brain.

Espinoza proposed that body and Soul would be one; what happens in one happens in the other.
And today the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio teaches that the brain processes always have a psychological repercussion and every psychological phenomenon has a representation in the brain.

Darwin:
Evolution occurs when a characteristic appears in a particular organism that favors a better adaptation to the environment increasing its chance of survival - it is the process of natural selection, by which the fittest survives and procreates.

In this theory the great difficulty is to justify the birth of organisms with such modifications and bearers of advantageous characteristics - a certain variation, which would happen by chance, will only remain throughout reproduction if this characteristic is more adaptive and advantageous for survival. There are infinite examples: we can stick to the different shapes of the beak of the birds, the feathers in the birds, the position of opposition of the thumb, the binocular vision.

Mendel:
Studying the crossbreeding of the peas, Mendel realized that certain characteristics, such as the color of the seeds, had a higher frequency of offspring and some less. He called one of dominant characteristics and others of recessive, when only in certain pairings they appear. We can easily see this phenomenon at human crossings when observing the color of the skin or eyes, the height of the offspring or the tendency towards obesity.

Mendel was unaware that biological factors were being transferred from one organism to another, marking their characteristics. Neither he nor Darwin knew of the existence of chromosomes and genes, which came to explain in detail the mechanism of transmission of heredity.
Mendel in Denmark, Darwin in England and Kardec in France - contemporaries who did not know each other's work but under the guidance of greater spirituality - introduced into Humanity the first notions of our evolutionary responsibility and our commitments to heredity.

Today, genetic mapping allows the identification of the gene linked to certain physical, psychological and pathological characteristics of the human organism; many of these situations are polygenic, as is the case with intelligence, which is attributed to at least 52 genes.

Piaget:
The French biologist and psychologist Jean Piaget has done a longitudinal study of his 2 children analyzing the development of intelligence. He realized that there are steps to take in acquiring specific skills in the development of intelligence. His theory is accepted today with certain restrictions, but its universality is clear - that is, there is in the brain of the child a biological programming that allows him to develop a competence that we denominate of intelligence.
And Kardec, what does he teach us?

The Spiritist paradigm - There are several religious currents that speak of the afterlife. One of them teaches that the Soul will enjoy peace and happiness if its life was sinless or, it will live eternal torments if it disobeyed to the Laws of God. Another says that after death the Souls will sleep a sleep without awakening, awaiting the resurrection of Jesus. In neither case do the souls, after death, return to a new contact with the relatives or friends they have left on Earth.

Spiritism understands that after death, Spirits are placed on another plane of life, and they accomplish tasks that attract them both by interest and by necessity, and millions of them remain by our side, keeping in tune with our thoughts, interfering in our lives, suggesting both good and bad behavior in our decisions. Most of the time our contact with them is subtle and unsuspected, but through the mediums it is ostentatious, vibrant and touching.

The Brain and the Mediumship - Kardec teaches that the mediumistic phenomenon takes place through the medium's brain: it is in the medium's brain that the communicating Spirit is going to seek elements to produce its work. In all intelligent communication there is a contribution of the knowledge of the medium itself.

The intelligence and all mental capacity of an individual are properties of the Spirit, the brain being only an instrument that allows him to manifest in this world. But the organic predisposition of the medium's brain must have the proper conditions for the manifestation of the Spirit.

Inherited brain programs - Every child at birth shows a set of reflexive and instinctive activities that are easy to perceive in a routine evaluation. Their little hands hold anything they touch, the dummy or the mother's nipple quickly triggers the suction mechanism. Following is the march and the language.

Between 5 and 7 years of age children are taken to school where they are encouraged to learn to read. At that age they already know how to give meaning to what they see and what they hear - it is a kitten, it is a bird or it is the voice of the mother that the child identifies as different from a stranger.

For reading, the brain does not create a new area, a new region, it builds only a new function by taking advantage of the areas where the child already speaks and spells, hears and understands the phonemes, and sees the symbols that represent the letters.
This program is biological, organic, and they are connections of genetically determined neurons.
Learning, exercising, and training develop this ability to read.

In mediumship, seeing, hearing, speaking, or writing under the intelligent domain of a discarnate Spirit should not create a new phenomenon in the brain - it would be the same connections set in motion in partnership and complicity between incarnate and disincarnate.
 
 

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

 

 

     
     

O Consolador
 Revista Semanal de Divulgação Espírita