Spiritual Illnesses

(Part 1)
 

Correcting spiritual problems involves re-educating the Spirit; symptomatic treatments may bring immediate aid or
an important but transient relief

The Spiritist Objective

Spiritism is a doctrine which introduces to the level of medical knowledge a vast field of study expanding diagnosis and introducing a new understanding to justify the reason for the suffering that disease brings. However, Spiritism came not to compete with any medical specialty and its main role is not to produce cures. Very often its followers use it for these purposes suggesting, in their pursuit, the comfort and cure of diseases. Its primary role is to illuminate and clarify, so that each creature may promote their spiritual re-education. Without inner reform neither progress nor healing will occur. In this sense, diseases are understood as lessons with great potential for change and provide opportunities for renewal and spiritual growth.

Anamnesis facing Spirituality

Most of our patients very well accept a dialogue with their doctor about their spirituality. In general people, due to superstition or even wisdom, recognize that many diseases have something to do with spirituality, either as a cause or as a beneficial process towards its healing. One can explore the medical examination so that the patient realizes that talking about spirituality does not mean committing to a religion and that one and the other can be perfectly separated.

Assessment Method

We have learned to adopt an arbitrary criterion on which the spirituality of the patient is assessed in three areas ^(1):

The domain of belief: Here, the patient reveals his beliefs or not in God's existence, in the existence and immortality of the soul, the invisible world inhabited by spirits, the possibility of communication with his God, in reincarnation, in the communication of spirits with us.

This relationship with the spirituality to which patients often refer is almost always very specific and individual, being sometimes very difficult to be expressed in words, since it is linked to a belief that is not transferable, sacred to each one of those who accept and entail, as maximum demand, the respect one expects to have towards his own conviction.

The domain of practice: It refers to the behaviour that each person develops in relation to his beliefs or religion he says he follows. Thus, we will identify the occasional and the frequent goers, the participative and the indifferent, the curious and the investigative, all with greater or lesser commitment to implement the lessons they hear that their religion would teach.

The domain of transcendent experience: It is the participation often "traumatic," episodic, occasional or persistent and controlled that certain people enjoy with spirituality. There are examples of people who are surprised by the sight of a spiritual entity, something that could have happened only once in their lifetime but that deeply marked them. Others, in a moment of severe stress, such as an automobile accident or a plane crash, when they were the only survivors, felt, thereafter, touched by a prime intervention of the deities who protect them. This group also includes those cases of out of body experiences, which reflect an unfolding of the spiritual body, with a more or less lengthy displacement through the spiritual world. In these cases, there may or may not be an awareness of contacts with entities that protect them during these "out of body" displacements. Among many other examples that the Spiritist Doctrine is privileged to make clear in its details, the whole mediumistic phenomenology needs to be highlighted, as well as, emphasised, revealing the mysterious ways of mediumship whose channels of communication puts us in contact with the spiritual world. In the transcendent experience of mediumship, moral discipline plays a productive role in the degree of spiritual elevation of the phenomenon.

The Physiopathogeny

The possibility of a spiritual illness can only be accepted with the belief in a new paradigm introduced by the Spiritist doctrine in its principles ^(2).

Spiritism teaches that God is the "Supreme Intelligence of the Universe" and all that exists is part of His creation. Each of us is an incarnated Spirit in the learning process that necessarily takes us to perfection after an unimaginable number of reincarnations in this and other worlds where there is also life.

When the body perishes, the soul that animates it starts to live in the spiritual world where all the other Spirits who have gone before us are. The spiritual world is in close connection with the material world we inhabit, and the Spirits who live there constantly exert a strong interference in our lives. Beyond the physical body, each one of us makes use of another body intermediate in nature of our physical reality and the spiritual world. This spiritual body or perispirit is consolidated by the "cosmic fluid" available in each of the inhabited worlds.

Thought is the creative force from the Spirit which drives him. Even knowing very little of their properties, we know that the mental energy externalized by thought exerts thorough influence in the spiritual body, changing its shape, appearance and consistency. It is so that Allan Kardec asserted that in the perispirit lies the true cause of many diseases and medicine would benefit if better understood its nature^(3). Each of us lives in tune with the spiritual environment that, through our attitudes and desires, we build for ourselves.

Diagnosis of Illness or Spiritual Manifestation

It seems that there are two interpretation vices among Spiritists on the manifestations of spirituality. Very often everyone who goes to a Spiritist Center seeking advice for their problems will listen that his case is "obsession" or at least "mediumship" and that he "needs to develop it."

We must recognize that, as human creatures following through with one more incarnation on this planet we belong to a vast group of Spirits who, without exception, is still heavily in debt and committed to their atonement, to dare to say that he has no spiritual problem.

In medical circles, the Germans often say that "only that one who has not been examined yet is healthy.” From the spiritual point of view such a statement, far from being an exaggeration of the detailed German exigencies, is a truth which only one who did not stop to examine his conscience can deny.

Classification

Considering the Physiopathogeny of the spiritual illnesses, we usually adopt the following set of diagnoses ^(4):

1 - Self-induced Spiritual Illnesses:

·        Vibratory imbalance

·        Self-obsession

2 - Shared Spiritual Illnesses:

·        Vampirism

·        Obsession

3 - Mediumism

4 - Karmic Illnesses.

Vibratory Imbalance

The perispirit is an intermediary body that allows the incarnated Spirit to exert its actions on the physical body. Its connection is done cell by cell, reaching the deepest intimacy of the atoms that constitute the organic matter in the physical body. This connection takes place at the expense of vibrations that each of the two bodies, the physical and spiritual, have ^(5). It is understood that this "adjustment" requires a certain vibratory harmony. The Perispirit is not a prisoner of the physical dimensions of the flesh and can manifest its actions beyond the limits of the physical body through the projection of its fluids. Tuning and irradiation of the perispirit are dependent solely on the mental projections elaborated by the spirit. Thus, the appearance and the relationship between the physical and spiritual body are dependent exclusively on the flow of ideas one builds.

We must recognize that, in general, human beings still spend much of their days engaged in criticism of the other, hatred, slander, unreasonable demands, idleness, anger and bitterness among many other frivolous complaints against life and against all. The Watch and Pray is still far from our routine and the temptation to list the faults of others is still very big.

These are the reasons that disturb the harmony between the physical body and perispirit. It is this disharmony that triggers the usual feelings of malaise, of disproportionate "burnout", systemic fatigue, sighing dyspnea when the air always seems to be lacking, the muscles that hurt and do not seem to hold the body ^(6), the migraine the doctor can not heal, the digestion that never sleeps and so many other events that are taken as "psychosomatic illnesses.” There are so many seeking the doctors, but few engaging in a reflection on the damage caused by their petty attitudes.

Self-obsession

Thought is energy that builds images that are consolidated around us drawing a "field of representations" of our ideas.  At the expense of the absorbed elements of the "universal cosmic fluid," the ideas take shape, supported by the intensity in which we think such ideas stand for us. The mental matter ⁽⁷⁾ builds around us a "psychological atmosphere" - the psychosphere - that is represented by our desires. In this setting lie the characters that trap our thought up through love or hatred, envy or greed, indifference or through the protection we project towards the ones we care.

Likewise, the fears, anxieties and unresolved grievances, fixed ideas, the desire for revenge, crystallized opinions, and the objects of seduction, power or the coveted titles are also structured into "Idea-shapes.” Thenceforth, we will be prisoners of our own fear, the ghosts of our distress, the images of our adversaries, the delusion of earthly pleasures or illusory brightness of human conceits. The mental matter produces illusory "image" that enslaves us. Due to our whim, we are therefore "obsessed" by our own desires.

Shared Spiritual Illnesses

Included here are vampirism and obsession. We say shared because they are produced by the combination of the disturbing association of a disembodied spirit and his victim, both suffering the same psychopathological process. Participation as a victim or malefactor is often swapped between them. (Continued in the next issue of this magazine.)

References:

1 - See William Miller: Integrating Spirituality into Treatment: Resource for Practitioners

2 - See “Paradigmas Espíritas na Prática Médica” (Spiritist Paradigm in Medical Practice) in my book “Muito Além dos Neurônios” (Far beyond the Neurons).

3 - The Spirits' Book. Allan Kardec.

4 - The classification here adopted is arbitrary. We have reported it on several occasions every time we talk about "Spiritual Illnesses". The book Missionários da Luz (Missionaries of Light), André Luiz / Chico Xavier was the inspiration for the description of the framework presented here.

5 - Mecanismos da Mediunidade (Mechanisms of Mediumship). André Luiz / Chico Xavier.

6 - The Spirits' Book, question 471.

7 - Mecanismos da Mediunidade (Mechanisms of Mediumship). André Luiz / Chico Xavier.