The Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1860

Allan Kardec

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Spontaneous Essays and Spiritist Dissertations

Development of the Ideas
Regarding the evocation of Thilorier (medium Mrs. Costel)

I will talk about the need for gathering several elements of the spirit to form a whole. It is a common illusion that the development of a special skill requires a special study. No. Human spirit, like a river, enlarges with all its tributaries. Human beings must not be isolated in their work, that is, they must sprout the force of the ideas in contact with every opposition. Originality is the contrast of the mother-idea; it is one of the rarest superiorities. It is muffled since childhood by an absurd rule that reduces every spirit to the same level. I will explain this idea. Thilorier, that you have just evoked, was a passionate inventor, an active intelligence, but he had shut himself in the sphere of his invention, that is, in a fixed idea. He would never allow himself the fresh air of other peoples’ ideas. Hence, he was imprisoned by his own mind. The genius floated around him. Because he closed all openings, he allowed madness, the sister of genius, to penetrate and invade such a well-guarded place. Thilorier, who would have left an immortal name, now lives only in the memories of a few scientists. Georges (a familiar spirit)

Human Masquerades (Medium Mrs. Costel)

I will speak about the singular need of the best spirits to always meddle into things that are not of their concern. For example: an excellent business man will have no doubt about his political skills and the greatest diplomats will place self-esteem before making any decision about the most frivolous issues. Such a fault, which is common to everyone, has no other cause but vanity and vanity has only artificial needs. Vanity seeks falsehood, before anything else, for ablution, for spirit or for the heart itself; it destroys the instinct of beauty and truth; it leads women to misrepresent their beauty; it persuades people to seek precisely what is more harmful. If French men and women did not have that defect, the men would be one of the most intelligent of the world and the ladies the most charming of Eves known; thus, let us not feed on such absurd weakness; let us have the courage of being ourselves; of wearing the color of our spirits, like that of our hair.

However, thrones shall ruin and republics shall be established before a frivolous French man renounces his pretensions to seriousness and a French lady to her airs of solidity. It is a continual hypocrisy where each one wears the clothes of other times or dresses like their neighbor. Political hypocrisy, religious masks, through which everybody seeks one another, dragged by the vertigo and not finding the starting point or their objective in all that turmoil. Delphine de Girardin

Knowledge of the Spirits (Medium Ms. Huet)

There is in the study of Spiritism a serious mistake that propagates every day and that becomes almost the focus of attraction of people towards us; it is the fact that they see us as infallible in the answers. They think that we must know everything, see everything, and foresee everything. What a mistake! Huge mistake! Certainly, since our soul is no longer imprisoned by a material body like a bird in a cage, it soars up into space; the senses of the soul become more subtle, more developed; we see and hear better, but we cannot know everything; we cannot be everywhere since we don’t have the gift of ubiquity.

What would then be the difference between God and us if we were allowed to get to know the future and to promptly announce it? That is impossible. We do know more than human beings do, that is correct; we can sometimes read the minds and the heart of those who come to us but our Spiritist Science stops there. Make no mistake then and stop questioning us exclusively to know what happens here and there in your planet, or relatively to a material or commercial discovery or to be informed about what is supposed to happen tomorrow, in politics or business. We shall always inform you about our condition, about our extracorporeal life, about God’s greatness and benevolence, about everything that can be useful to your enlightenment to your present as well as future happiness, but do not ask us about what we cannot and must not tell you. Channing

Origins (Medium Mrs. Costel)

In the beginning it was the word and the word was God. That is how it is announced in St. John’s Gospel. That is, in the beginning there was the principle and the principle was God, the Creator of everything, who gave no hesitation to the formation of the human being of this globe. He created human beings as they are today, giving them free will and the ability to advance. God told the oceans: you shall not go further. He showed human beings the universe and contrarily said: That is all yours; work, develop the treasures which are spread all over, in the air, in the waves, in the heart of Earth. Do work and love. Never doubt your straight divine origin. You are not the fruit of a slow progression; you have not gone through the animal ranks; you are positively the children of God.

Where does sin come from then? Sin was created by your own faculties; it is the other side and exaggeration of those faculties. There was no first man, father of human kind, as there was not a unique sun to illuminate the universe. God opened his great hand and spread the human race with the same profusion as the stars in the skies. Spirits animated by God’s breath soon revealed God’s existence to human beings, well before the prophets that you know. Other unknown envoys had clarified the ignorant souls. Simultaneously to human beings, God created the animals. The latter endowed by the instinct but not by a progressive intelligence. Hence, they kept their primitive form and except those with individual training, they are the same as those from the times of our forefathers. The cataclysms of the floods – since there was not a single one but several – extinguished entire races of animals and human beings. These are the geological transformations that still threaten you. Human beings discover but do not invent. Thus, the mythological beliefs were not mere fictions, but revelations from inferior spirits. The satyrs and fauns were secondary spirits that inhabited the forests and fields, as they do today. In those days they were allowed to manifest more frequently to human beings, because materialism had not yet been depurated by Christianity and by the knowledge of an only God. Christ destroyed the empire of the inferior spirits in order to establish the empire of the spirit upon Earth. That is the truth that I attest in the name of the All-Mighty God. Lazarus

The Future (Medium Mr. Col…)

Spiritism is the science of total light. Happy is the society that practices it! It is only then that the golden age, or even better, the time of celestial thought shall reign among you. Don’t you think that you shall have less earthly satisfaction because of that! Much to the contrary, everything shall be happiness to you, because in those days light will allow you to see truth in a more pleasant way. Human beings shall no longer teach this insidious science that makes you see through the deceiving mask of the common wealth or a future good that the teachers themselves frequently do not trust. It will not be the time of lie and greed; the wish to have everything to the benefit of a sect or sometimes to the benefit of a single person. Human beings certainly shall not be perfect but mistakes shall be more restricted and the evil ones will have a limited influence that human beings will be happy in their minorities. In those days human beings will understand work and all shall reach wealth because no one will desire the superfluous but to do great things to the benefit of everyone. Love, that divine word, will no longer have the impure connotation borrowed from you. Every personal feeling shall disappear before this education gently contained in the words of Christ: Love your neighbor as yourself.

Coming to that belief you shall all be mediums. All vices that degrade your society shall disappear. It shall all become light and truth. Selfishness, that rodent worm and straggler of progress, that muffles every fraternal feeling, it shall no longer dominate your souls. Your actions shall no longer be driven by greed and lust. You shall love your wife because she has a good soul and because she shall care for you; because she will see in you the man chosen by God to protect her weakness and because both shall help one another to withstand the earthly trials and you will be the instruments devoted to the propagation of the creatures destined to improve, advance, so to achieve better worlds, where you shall elevate even further towards our supreme Benefactor, through an even more intelligent work. Go, spiritists! Persevere. Do good for the common good. Kindly neglect the scoffers. Remember that everything in nature is harmony; that harmony is also in the superior worlds and that despite certain strong spirits you will also have your relative harmony. St. Louis

Spiritual Electricity (Medium Mr. Didier Jr.)

The human being is at the same time a very singular and a very weak being. He is singular in the sense that even in the middle of the phenomena that surround him he still keeps his routine, spiritually speaking. He is weak in the sense, after having seen, after having been convinced, he smiles because his neighbor smiled and he no longer thinks about what happened. And notice that I don’t speak here about vulgar, inexperienced creatures that don’t think. No, I speak of intelligent people, and in its majority, enlightened people. Where does such a phenomenon come from? Because giving a lot of thought to something is a moral phenomenon. The spirit started to act upon matter through magnetism and electricity; then it got into man’s heart and man was not aware of that. Strange blindness! A blindness not produced by a strange cause but created voluntarily, coming from the spirit. Then came Spiritism, producing a commotion in the world, and man published very serious books saying: it is a natural cause; it is simply electricity, a physical law, etc.; and men was then satisfied; but make no mistake, man still has many books to write before understanding what is written in the book of nature, in God’s book. Electricity, that nuance between time and what is no longer time, between finite and infinite, man has not been able to yet define. Why? Know this: You cannot define it unless through magnetism, that material manifestation of the spirit. You only know material electricity. Later you will also know spiritual electricity, which is nothing more that the eternal kingdom of thought. Lamennais

Comments about the Preceding Message (To Lamennais)

1. Could you kindly make some clarifications about certain passages of your last essay that seem somewhat obscure to us? – A. I will do what is possible at this point in time.

2. You say: “Electricity, that nuance between time and what is no longer time, between finite and infinite”. This phrase does not seem very clear to us. Can you please develop it? – A. I explain it like that, in the simplest way I can. For you time does exist, right? For us, it does not. Hence I defined electricity as: “that nuance between time and what is no longer time, between finite and infinite” because that part of time that you formerly had to use to communicate from one end to the other of the world, that part of time, I was saying, that no longer exists. Later on that electricity will come, which will be nothing more than man’s thought, covering the space. In fact, isn’t that the most remarkable image about finite and infinite, about the tiny and the very large? In a word I meant to say that electricity suppresses time.

3. Further down you say: “You only know material electricity. Later you will also know spiritual electricity”. Do you mean by that the means of communication from man to man through the mediumistic channel? – A. Yes, as average advancements; something else will come in the future; give man aspirations; he guesses in the beginning; later he sees it.

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