Editorial 

 
Obsession: evil of easy remedy, but difficult cure

 
The obsession is one of the causes that have led most people to seek help in Spirit centres. Outstanding personalities in the spirit pursuance, such as Benedita Fernandes, the Lady of Charity, came to Spiritism through the path of pain motivated by obsession.

It is a phenomenon frequently mentioned in the pages of the Gospel, Jesus having acted in innumerable cases, always emphasizing, in the end, the importance of the change of behaviour by the people he healed. "Go and sin no more, lest a worse thing happen to you," it is a phrase repeated by the Master countless times throughout his messianate.

In Allan Kardec's work, especially in the editions of the Spirit Magazine, there are many reported cases.

In the Spirit Magazine of 1863, which has been studied sequentially in this periodical, Allan Kardec tells us, among others, the case of the wife of a sailor living in Boulogne-Sur-Mer (France), who was in the last fifteen years under the domination of a sad subjugation. Almost every night, awakened around midnight, the woman was thrown out of bed, sometimes half-naked, and forced to leave the house and run across the field. After marching for two or three hours, only when she stopped she became aware of her act, and even pray she could not do it, since in trying to do so her ideas mixed with bizarre and even dirty things.

Commenting on the fact, Kardec reminds us that in certain cases of disturbance the cause may be purely material, but there are others in which the intervention of a hidden intelligence is evident, since, by combating this intelligence, the evil is stopped, once that attacking only the supposed material cause nothing is achieved.

Some people, says the Codifier, attribute this to demons. Spiritism attributes it to Spirits, who are sometimes as evil as the supposed demons, but to whom the future is not closed and they will be better as the moral sense develops in them, in the succession of corporeal existences.

In a certain region of our country, a fact almost identical to that reported by Kardec was observed years ago. A young woman in her last year of law school went through a similar disturbance. At dawn she was awakened and obliged by an uncontrollable force to leave the house, under the conditions in which she found herself, often half-naked. Thus guided, she was led to the meretricious zone of the city, when then she awoke and faced vexatious situations.

Spiritism offers us precise guidelines that can help us overcome the obsession. The means and resources it tells us, if effectively taken, are quite effective. But, as in the case in our country, such means and resources are often, out of sheer prejudice, rejected, making it impossible to cure, a fact that led J. Herculano Pires to write in one of his works:

"Obsession is a difficult healing cure, but easy remedy. If patients accepted the remedy, healing would proceed more quickly. In general cases of obsession require long and patient treatment, because patients do not take the medicine." (Dialogue of the Living, chapter 31)

 

Translation:
Francine Prado
francine.cassia@hotmail.com

 

 

 

     
     

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 Revista Semanal de Divulgação Espírita