Spiritist Review - Journal of Psychological Studies - 1866

Instructions to Mr. Allan Kardec

Paris, April 23^rd, 1866 – Medium Mr. Desliens

Considering the daily weaking of Mr. Allan Kardec’s health, as a consequence of the excessive works that he cannot bear, I see the need to repeat to him, once again, what I have already said many times: you need to rest; the human strength has limits that you, led by the desire to see the progress of the science, many times breach; you are wrong, for acting like that you will not see the march of the doctrine, but you ruin your health and place yourself in a position that is impossible to finish the task that you came to accomplish down here. Your current illness is not but the result of a continuous wear of your vital forces, that do not allow the body the necessary recovery, and a blood pressure resulting from the absolute lack of resting. We support you, no doubt, but with the condition that you do not undo what we do. Why hurry? Haven’t you been told, many times, that it would come at the right time, and that the Spirits in charge of the movement of the ideas would know how to create favorable circumstances, when the time to act is right?

When each Spiritist keeps their forces for the fight, do you believe that it is your duty to exhaust yours? No. You must give the example in everything, and your place will be in the fight, at the time of danger. What would you do if your weakened body no longer allowed your Spirit to utilize the weapons that were placed in your hands by experience and revelation? Believe me, allow to the future the great works destined to complete the one that was sketched in your first publications; your current work, and a few small urgent brochures must absorb your time, and must be the only object of your current concerns.

I do not speak in my name only, for I am here a delegate of all these Spirits that have powerfully contributed to the propagation of the teachings through your wise instructions. They tell you, through me, that the delay that you believe to be harmful to the future of the doctrine, is a necessary measure on more than one aspect, be it for the fact that certain issues are not yet clarified, be it to prepare the Spirits to better understand them. It is necessary that other have prepared the terrain; that certain theories have proved their insufficiency, digging a deeper hole. In short, it is not appropriate at this time; thus, you must spare yourself, because all the vigor of your body and mind will be necessary when the time is right. Up until now Spiritism was the object of many diatribes; it raised many storms! Do you believe that the whole movement is soothed, and all the hatred appeased and reduced to impotence? Make no mistake for the depurating crucible has not expelled all impurities yet; future waits for you with new trials and the last crises will not be less difficult to withstand. I know that your position entails many secondary works, that absorbs the better part of your time. Questions of all kinds are tiresome, and you consider a duty to respond as much as possible. I will do here what you, undoubtedly, would not dare doing yourself.



Addressing the generality of the Spiritists, I will ask, in the interest of Spiritism itself, to spare you from any overload of work, that can absorb time that you must almost exclusively dedicate to the conclusion of the doctrine. If your correspondence suffers a little with this, the teaching will gain. Sometimes we must scarify personal satisfactions to the general interest. It is an urgent measure that every sincere follower must understand and approve.

The immense correspondence that you receive is a precious source of documents and information; it enlightens you abut the true development and real progresses of the doctrine; it is an impartial thermometer; on another hand, you get personal satisfaction there too, that have sustained your courage more than once, when you see the adhesion that your ideas find all over the world. From that point of view, the superabundance is positive, instead of an inconvenience, but with the condition that is should second your works and not preclude them, creating excessive work.

Dr. Demeure

God Dr. Demeure, I thank you for the wise advices. Thanks to my resolution to find help, except in special cases, the ordinary correspondence hardly suffers now and will not suffer in the future. But what to do with the delay in responding to more than five hundred letters that, despite my good will, I cannot have in good standing?

Answer – As they say in commercial language, it is necessary to write them off to the account of profit and loss. Once this is announced in the Spiritist Review, your correspondents will know what to do; they will understand the need and will find it justified by the preceding advices. I repeat that it would be impossible to keep things as they are, any longer. Everything would suffer with this, including your health and the doctrine. One must make sacrifice, when necessary. Getting over with this subject, from now on, and you will be able to freely dedicate to your compulsory work. That is the advice of the one who will always be your devoted friend.

Demeure

Following this wise advice, we beg our correspondents, with whom we are late for a long time, to receive our apologies and our sorrow for not have been able to respond to their kind letters, as we wished. You will all receive here, collectively, the demonstration of our fraternal feelings.

You almost always believe that what you ask in prayer must be carried out by a kind of miracle. This mistaken belief is the source of several superstitious practices and many deceptions. It also leads to the denial of the efficacy of prayer. Considering that your request is not attended to as you wish, you conclude that it is useless, and then, sometimes, you whisper against God’s justice. Others believe that having God established eternal laws, to which every being is submitted, it is not possible to breach them to satisfy the wishes that are addressed to God. And to prevent against such a mistake, or better saying, against the exaggeration of these two points, I propose to give you a few explanations about the acquiescence to prayer.

There is an incontestable truth, that God does not alter or suspends the course of laws that rule the universe to nobody. Without that, the order of nature would be incessantly disturbed by the caprice of the first one to show up. It is therefore true that every prayer than could only be attended by the breach of those laws would remain ineffective. That would be the case, for example, the one whose objective was the return to life of a truly dead man, or the reestablishment of health if the disorder in the physical organization were irremediable.

It is not less true that no attention is given to futile or inconsiderate requests. But rest assured that every pure and selfless prayer is heard, and that the intention is always considered, even when God, in His wisdom, believed not to be proper to have it attended. That is when you must give proof of your humility and submission to His will, saying that God, better than yourself, knows what is best for you.

There are, certainly, general laws to which man is fatally submitted to, but it is a mistake to believe that the smallest circumstances in life are predetermined in an irrevocable way. If that were the case, man would be a machine, without initiative, and consequently, without responsibility. Free-will is one of man’s prerogative. From the moment when man is free to move right or left, acting according to the circumstances, his movements are not regulated like those of a machine. According to the way something is done, or not done, according to one way or another, the events that depend on that follow a different course. Since they are subordinate to the decision of man, they are not inevitable. Fatal are those that do not depend on his will. But every time that man can act, because of his free-will, there is no inevitability.

Man has, therefore, a circle, within which he can move freely. Such freedom of action has the limits of the natural laws that nobody can transpose; or, better said, that freedom, in the sphere of action, is part of those laws. It is necessary, and it is through that freedom that man is called to concur to the general march of things. Since he does it freely, he has the merit for the good that is done, and the demerit for the bad things, for his careless, for his negligence and inactivity. The fluctuations that his will may cause to the events of life, in no way disturb the universal harmony, because those fluctuations are part of the trials assigned to man on Earth. In the limit of things that depend on the will of man, God may therefore, and without breaching His laws, yield to a prayer, when it is fair, and whose realization may be useful; but it frequently happens that God judge its utility and opportunity differently from us, and that is the reason why there isn’t always acquiescence. If God believe to be proper to attend it, it is not by modifying His sovereign designs that it is done, but through means that do not revoke the general order if we can say so. The Spirits, executioners of His will, are then assigned to provoke the circumstances that must lead to the desired result. Such a result almost always requires the help of an incarnate. It is, therefore, that help that the Spirits prepare, inspiring the thought of an action in those that must cooperate; inciting them to go to a point, and not to another; provoking convenient meetings that seem to be to serendipitous. Chance, therefore, no longer exists, not in the assistance that is received, nor in the disgraces that are experienced.

In suffering, prayer is not only a proof of trust and submission to the will of God, that hears it if it is pure and selfless, but still has the effect, as you know, of establishing a fluidic current that carries far away in space the thought of the afflicted one, like the air carries the sound of his voice. That thought reverberates in the sympathetic hearts and these, through an unconscious movement and attracted by a magnetic power, go to the place where their presence may be useful. God, that wishes to help the one that implores, could do it instantaneously on His own, no doubt, but as I have already said, He makes no miracle and things must follow their natural course. God wants men to practice charity and help one another. Through His messengers, He takes the complaint where it can find echo, and good Spirits breathe a good thought there. Although solicited, man has all the freedom, by the simple fact that the source of the thought is unknown. There is no embarrassment. Man, therefore, has all the merit of spontaneity if he yields to the voice that intimately appeals to his sense of duty, and all the demerit if he resists, dominated by an egoistic indifference.

Q – There are cases, like in an imminent danger, in which assistance must be immediate. How can it arrive in time, if one must wait for the good will of a man, and if that good will is absent, given the free-will?

A – You must not forget that the guardian angels, the protecting Spirits, whose mission is to take care of those that are assigned to them, follow them step by step, in a way of speaking. They cannot avoid the apprehension of danger that is part of their trials, but if the consequences of the danger may be avoided, and since they foresaw everything in anticipation, they did not wait for the last minute to prepare the help. If they sometimes reach out to men of bad will it is to try to awake the good feelings in them, but they do not count on them. When, in a critical situation, a person shows up to help, as if it should be, and you say: “It is the Providence that sends her”, you are stating a greater truth than you sometimes realize. If there are pressing cases, others which are less so require a certain time to bring about a combination of favorable circumstances, especially when it is necessary that the Spirits triumph, by inspiration, over the apathy of people whose cooperation is necessary for the result to be obtained. These delays in the fulfillment of desire are tests of patience and resignation; then, when the realization of what one wished arrives, it is almost always by a chain of circumstances so natural, that absolutely nothing detects an occult intervention, nothing accuses the slightest appearance of supernatural; things seem to work out on their own. This must be so for the double reason that the means for the action do not deviate from general laws, and, second, that, if the assistance of the Spirits were too obvious, man would rely on them and as such, would get used to not counting on oneself. This assistance must be understood by thought, in a moral sense, and not in the material senses; man’s belief must be the result of his faith and trust in the goodness of God. Unfortunately, because he has not seen the finger of God performing a miracle for him, he too often forgets the One to whom he owes his salvation, and then glorifies chance; it is ingratitude which, sooner or later, receives its atonement.

A protector Spirit

Those obligations are of two kinds:

Spiritism is an essentially moral science; therefore, those who claim to be its followers cannot, without committing a serious inconsistency, avoid the obligations it imposes. These obligations are of two kinds:

The first concerns the individual who, helped by the intellectual clarity that the doctrine spreads, can better understand the value of each of his acts, better probe all the folds of his conscience, better appreciate the infinite goodness of God, who does not want the death of the sinner, but that he be converted and live, and to allow him the possibility of recovering from his falls, gave him the long series of successive existences, bearing the penalty of his past faults in each one, where he can acquire new knowledge and new strength, making him avoid evil and practice what is in accordance with justice and charity.

What to say about the one that enlightened about his duties to God and his brothers, remains proud, greedy, and selfish? Doesn’t it look like that light has blinded him, because he was not prepared to receive it? Since then he marches in darkness, although he is amidst light. He only holds the Spiritist name. The fraternal charity of those that truly see must endeavor to cure him from that intellectual blindness. But, to many that are like that, it will be necessary the light that the tomb brings, because their heart is too attached to material pleasures, and their Spirit is not mature enough to receive light. In a new incarnation they will understand that inferior planets, like Earth, are just a school where the soul begins to develop its faculties and aptitudes, to then apply them to the study of the great principles of the order, justice, love and harmony that rule the relationships between the souls, and the functions that they perform in the direction of the universe.

They will feel that called to such a honorable task, as to become a messenger from the Almighty, human soul must not shame and degrade itself to the contact of the filthy pleasures of voluptuousness; to the dishonorable temptations of greed, that subtracts from some children of God the enjoyment of the goods that were given to all; they will understand that egotism, born out of pride, blinds the soul and makes it violate the rights of justice and humanity, so that it engineers all the evils that turn Earth into a place of pain and atonement. Instructed by the tough lessons of adversity, their Spirit will mature through thoughts, their heart, after being crushed by pain, will become good and charitable. That is how something that seems bad to us, is sometimes necessary to reconduct the hardened ones. These unfortunate latecomers, regenerated by suffering, enlightened by this interior light that we may call the baptism of the Spirit, will carefully watch over themselves, that is, over the movement of their hearts and the use of their skills, to guide them according to the laws of justice and fraternity.

They will understand that they are not only obliged to improve themselves, a selfish thought that precludes the achievement of the objective defined by God, but that the second kind of obligations of the Spiritist, that necessarily results from the first, and the complete, is that of the example, that is the best means of propagation and renovation.

In fact, the one that is convinced about the excellence of the principles that are taught, and that must provide a lasting happiness, if they conform their conduct, that one can only wish to have those principles understood by the whole mankind, if he is truly animated by this fraternal charity that is in the essence of Spiritism. That results in the obligation of modifying one’s conduct according to the belief, and be a living example, as Jesus Christ was for humanity.

Weak sparks coming from the eternal focus of divine love, you will not certainly pretend such a vast radiation as the Verb of God incarnate on Earth, but each one in their sphere of action can spread the benefits of good example. You may have virtue loved, surrounding it by the enchantment of that constant benevolence that attracts, captivate and finally shows that the practice of good is something easy; that generates the intimate happiness of the conscience that is submitted to its rule, for it is the accomplishment of the Divine will that made us say, through the intermediary of your Christ: Be perfect as your father that is in heaven is perfect.

Well, Spiritist is not but the true application of the moral principles taught by Jesus, with the only objective of making it understood by all, so that all can progress more rapidly, so much so that God allows the universal manifestation of the Spirit, coming to explain to you what seemed obscure, teaching you the whole truth. It comes, like the well understood Christianity, to show man the absolute need for interior renovation, by the very consequences of each one of his actions, each one of his thoughts, for not a single fluidic emanation, good or bad, escapes one’s heart or brain without leaving an impression somewhere. The invisible world that surrounds you is that Book of Life where everything is inscribed, with an incredible fidelity, and the Scale of Justice is not but a figure that reveals each one of your actions, each one of your feelings. It is, in a way, the weight that overloads your soul, precluding it from elevating, or that brings the equilibrium between good and evil. Happy is the one whose feelings come out of a pure heart. It spreads around a smooth atmosphere in which virtue is loved and attracts the good Spirits; the humbler the person the greater the power of radiation, and consequently, the more detached from the material influences that attract the soul and prevent it from progressing.

The obligations imposed by Spiritism are then of an essentially moral nature, because they are the consequence of the belief; each one is the judge and the defendant in their own cause; but the intellectual clarities that it brings to the one that truly wants to know thyself and work in one’s advancement are such that they scare the feeble away, and that is why it is rejected by so many people. Others promptly conciliate the reformation that their reason demonstrates to be a necessity with the demands of present society. It results in an a heterogeneous mixture, a lack of unity that makes the present time a transient state. It is very difficult to your poor corporeal nature to eliminate its imperfections to then cover the new man, that is, the man that lives according to the principles of justice and harmony, desired by God. With persevering efforts, nevertheless, you will get there, because the obligations imposed to the conscience, when sufficiently enlightened, has more power than human laws will have, laws that are based on the embarrassment of a religious obscurantism that cannot withstand examination. But if you are more educated and understand better, thanks to the lights from above, you must also be more tolerant and only employ reasoning, as a means of propagation, because any sincere belief is respectable. If your life is a beautiful model in which each one may find good examples and solid virtues, where dignity is allied to a gracious amenity, rejoice because you have understood, at least partially, what Spiritism obliges.