What is the meaning of Spiritist Philosophy? 1st. Part

“To know how to 'philosophise' we need to learn the science of going deep into ourselves.”(J.H.Pires)

There is a great importance in the practical meaning of philosophy and Spiritist Philosophy as they stimulate serious and careful thoughts that bring us self-knowledge and open great perspectives to understand the most important human and spiritualists questions. If we just think of philosophy as a disposition to think, we are minimasing its importance in the context of human history. With philosophy, we learn to consider the elements that make up the existence of being-in-the-world, as there is a congenital existential anxiety inside us. The Spiritist Philosophy expands this quest and reveals the existence of the interbeing living in infinite dimensions, temporal and evolutive ones, where he expresses its lights or shadows in the forms concerning to its level of consciousness.
Philosophy seeks answers, rises, develops, reflects, and reconsider the previous answers. It does not conclude, just leads you to do so. During this journey we discover to be in a constant and infinite search of ourselves. Hamlet, Shakespeare’s character, in front of the mirror, and with his court jester’s remains in hands, opens the perspective of the nothing, a distressing, confusing and overwhelming emptiness that takes us by surprise before the silence of the death. The answer is this ? Are these remains the great answer?
Existentialism - or the anguish to exist – has urged man to be fully “here” and “now” to accept his intense “human reality” of present moment – the future is nothing but visions and illusions to give to our present direction and purpose. "One hundred years after Kardec, the philosophy in France almost fell apart in the sophism of nothing, with Jean Paul Sartre and his school. But Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's companion and disciple, confirms and illustrates Kardec’ s considerations, writing: '... I hate to think of my annihilation. I think about the books I read, places I visited, and the accumulated knowledge that no longer will exist (in La Force des Choses).’ The approaching of death, under the idea of nothing, brings to the most cultured creatures a bitter hopelessness. (Pires, JH)."

What is the meaning of Spiritist Philosophy? 2nd. Part

It is under this distressing perspective that human intelligence has tried to minimize the undeniable and irrefutable reality of death. The Thinker (Le Penseur) is one of the most famous bronze sculptures of French sculptor Auguste Rodin. It shows a man into deep meditation, in a gesture of one who is fighting with a powerful internal struggle. He became the archetype of philosophical inquiry as a quest for himself.
All those who have managed to overcome the surface of existence, even because it carries a sign of their inherent fragility, has been identified themselves with that figure. The Thinker brings an anguish of the form lacerated by suffering; he seems to carry a deformed, disproportionate, personal and tragic drama. His face looks upside down.
He does not look for the anwers in the sky above his thought, but upside down his feet. He does not show a peaceful thinking, he shows a facial expression of torment due to lack of responses.
He is naked. He is abandoned or deprived of illusions that could hide his own reality, he exposes himself. And leaves one of the most eloquent messages to the human being now: the true reality of being does not lie here, in the perishable temporality, but the immortality of the one who thinks: the Spirit.

What is the meaning of Spiritist Philosophy? 3rd. Part

(BABEL)

The "predictions" of great tragedies to happen, through movies and television have shown, metaphorically, this current drama: human being, lost in his inner dramas wants to destroy himself, destroying the source of his own existence - the planet he lives on.Other authors whose works are on the screens, have shown human senses (Babel, Essay on blindness), to dive deep into their emotions, throught the sensitive world, seeking to bring out their personal tragedies and throwing them, as they were projections of himself, in a cathartic movement in search of identification.
In 25 centuries of philosophy, we have innumerable contradictory doctrines. None of the western thinkers have agreed among themselves with their proposals. There is a deep dissatisfaction generated by the lack of agreement. The ultimate goal should be to accomplish at least with some aspects of philosophy, but who could get it until now? We praise those who tried. Their efforts have immortalized the history of the human spirit in its infinite journey through self-knowledge. Even those, who got lost in the emptiness of themselves. So they did, because of the absolute necessity of identifying with each other, and everyone with God.

What is the meaning of Spiritist Philosophy? 4th. Part

(Photo: Nietzsche and his mother)

"God is dead," Nietzsche said once. The god presented by the religions is dead. He died for lack of mercy and love to the human being. He died asphyxiated after falling into the millions of coins generated from the criminal money raising from the naivety and lack of knowledge. He died in each ritual of empty answers, which perpetuates the belief that the crucifixion is our freedom (!?).
He died in each mutilated or killed being by lost bullets or bombs strapped to the heart of those who have sought Him in despair. He died in each fallen tree, in every polluted river in the super-heating of the air we breathe. He died yet by the lack of kindness, cordiality and mutual respect among those who call themselves his followers.Prof. Herculano Pires used the phrase "agony of religions" (Pires, JH), to better define the process of transmutation of ostentation for internalization. Pageantry of faith to affirm himself. To perpetuate the olympic representation of human god on Earth, in the figure of those who insist on represent Him.

What is the meaning of Spiritist Philosophy? 5th. Part

(Jesus says: FOLLOW ME !)

God has no representatives. He has children and the biggest one was disfigured by the archetypal human psyche, making of his actions and projections of a mythological hero, the son of a god with a mortal woman, and therefore bearer of miraculous virtues, a mix of hero-martyr-warrior who came to let us free from Evil, the archetypal figure of the fallen angel who insists on tormenting human beings with diseases and plagues, which arises between us, one of the most serious moments of our evolution. Jesus reborn in the Spiritist Doctrine, just as simple as he came in person in the manger of light. Jesus became a complete Being, He is one with the Father because He identifies Himself with His laws, in His own dilated consciousness by accepting Love because it is fully understood.
In the format of Philosophy, Spiritism synthesizes the human efforts in searching the Self, illustrated by the image of The Thinker. As Philosophy, it analyses the elements that accomplish the existence of the human being in the world, however, adding a great journey that awaits him on the timeline, out of this world too.
The human being is – he/she could never “not to be”. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre’s existentialism, served as a pulsing red light, as if to say: wake up! The beauvoirian anguish in the face of potential losses of her intellectual treasures as a clear demand of death, remains in the hearts of mothers and fathers who have lost their teens because of drugs, alcohol, crime, or sexuality in pathological derangement.
The hopelessness generated by the "scandal" has been mitigated by the Philosophy of the High Spirits; Socrates came first, with his loving experience with ethics-moral founded on the logic and undeniable truth. Plato, with the reality of the world of the ideas that lay covered up at the bottom of the cave. Aristotle, with the the world of forms immediacy to sketch out the persona and his/her achievements.
The Spiritist Philosophy is not a mere instrument for lucubration. Not even the ostentation before the human and worldly trophies. It is rather an alternative, an invitation (for now) to change the current system of thinking. The Spiritist Philosophy provides an universe of self-discovery, however, this process requires the recognition of God's presence in us through His laws, which guide our logic, our development, our evolution, our lovingness. The Moral Laws didactically determined by the Spirits to Kardec, represent part of the process of awareness and recognition of the divine into ourselves.
Non-being is the raving mentioned above, non-being composes the nasty feelings that isolate us from each other: jealousy, pride, arrogance. These feelings are destructive forces which makes the being to stagnate in his/her existence and show the need to suffer in order to awake. Such journey is not over. Jesus’ example remains as a subliminal image-message to permeate our existential moment. His appeal is still beating in the human hearts. The reading of this call has been wrongly decoded. But he is still there. And when the being gets saturated for not being, he will open his/her heart and mind for the banquet - not a platonic one, as a representation of the sensitive, but the intelligible, since it is full of joy, hope and identification with God.

SPIRITISM – PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Just a few people know the articles and chronicles written by dr. Bezerra de Menezes, signed Max (pseudonym,) to “O Paiz” (The Country), a newspaper widely read in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, with Quintino Bocaiúva as editor. By 1977, Freitas Nobre, founder of “Folha Espírita”, in São Paulo, Brazil, and known for his role in the political circles in São Paulo, researches, organizes and launches this work in the form of published books in three volumes.
Freitas Nobre explains that the first edition came out in books published in Portugal, and he focused on making his work more didactic, giving titles to the chapters according to the contents. Without pretensions of philosophical depth, as in another of his books "The Spiritist Doctrine", better known as "Bezerra’s Letter to his brother", since the target was focused to the population of Rio de Janeiro, Bezerra de Menezes, however, moves through the vast universe of philosophical knowledge to find aspects connected with the Spiritist Philosophy.
Since pre-Socratic period, going to Hellenism with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Bezerra moves on the neo-Platonic, for Origen, to bring us the ideas about reincarnation, mediumship, cause and effect law, the situation of the Spirit after death, God, Spirit and matter, intellect and moral conditions that determine happiness or the conscious self-flagellation of humans. Ideas that permeated the thinking of ancient scholars, however, some covered in the mythological time in which they lived, are revisited by the doctrine of Spirits, bringing them stripped of Isis’ veils, that covered up the reality with the magic of mystery.
A great admirer of Léon Denis, and vice versa, they both exchanged mails, and on many occasions he was the eminent French thinker Brazil's representative, in the most important events to the process of strengthening of Spiritism in Europe. Honorary President of Brazilian Spiritist Federation, Léon Denis had a special affection for the Brazilian spiritists and in his work “After Death” refers to the development of Spiritism in Brazil, highlighting the efforts of its pioneers, with emphasis on Bezerra, expressing his feelings after his death saying: "When such a man disappears, it is a loss not only for Brazil but for the spiritists of the whole world."

Léon Denis and Bezerra de Menezes are Spiritist Philosophy legitimate thinkers. This philosophy unfolds naturally in Science and Religion, because this is the correct way the knowledge has been constructed: the phenomenon, its study and research that result in a philosophy and their ethical and moral ramifications are natural conductors to lead the spiritist knowledge which, sometime later, had had its natural sequence with the mission with Emmanuel, leader of the phalanx of Spirits dedicated to the development of the three aspects of doctrinal approach going by the romancing literature and poetry.
Absolute consistency; total harmony of purposes and selflessness in the cause of Jesus, which was re-established after almost 2000 years of wandering the world, after being dead in the temples that men has risen to their own and ephemeral purposes.
The alliance - mentioned in the Bible - between God and man, has been transformed, transfigured and demystified with Spiritism, which appears, brilliant, as a natural result of the achievements made by the noble Spirits of "heaven" and earth.
To guide the beginners of Spiritism, we mention the following authors and their approaches, although the ones who has been mentioned here also developed their studies on other aspects, but all under the legitimate foundations of the Spiritist Doctrine:
• Philosophy: Léon Denis, Bezerra de Menezes, Deolindo Amorim, José Herculano Pires.
• Science (here we mention researchers on mediumship, spiritist anthropology, cosmology, physics, medicine, reincarnation, etc.): Gabriel Dellane, Ernesto Bozzano, Cesar Lombroso, William Crookes, Alexander Aksakoff, Camille Flammarion, Albert de Rochas, Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Russel Wallace, Hernani Guimarães Andrade, André Luiz (Spirit).
• Ethical and moral principles: Emmanuel (Spirit), Cairbar Schutel, Euripedes Barsanulfo, Herminio C. Miranda.
Based on the above authors, the knowledge is firmly structured on critical sense where accuracy and faithfulness to the legitimacy of the High Spirits’ teaching is the keynote.
Certainly today there are serious writers who follow the same paths of their predecessors, and therefore will be easily identifiable by the seriousness of their work and behaviour that guide their spiritist researches.
According to Gabriel Dellane in his message psychographed in 2004 in Paris: "If the knowledge we have had nowadays has not able to release us from the generalized shadow of reason, of feelings and moral, something has been misunderstood. Either that knowledge is not an expression of the truth, or we are not properly assimilating their contents. It is time to wake up (...). We are facing the overflow of madness without dimensions; (...) explosions of selfishness (...) serious fights caused by countless stunned souls. (...) Above all, however, the sun shines wonderfully in Spiritism, which shall heat our hearts and light up us to victory, for our spiritual freedom."
PS: THE SPIRITIST PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES PROJECT WAS INSPIRED BY DR. BEZERRA DE MENEZES.
Bibliography: Menezes, Bezerra, Philosophical Studies - Vols.,I II, III; ________, Spiritism; MACHADO, DJ, ed., org., Leon Denis and International Spiritist Congress, Paris 1925; Delanne, Gabriel (Spirit), TEIXEIRA, Raul (medium), Freedom to Spiritism - psychographed message on the occasion of the closing of the Fourth World Spiritist Congress on 10/05/2004 in Paris, France.

SPRINGTIME IS COMING IN BRAZIL!

We say hello to all our friends in France, England, Japan and all the countries who have studied with us through these blogs of the Spiritist Philosophy Project


The picture "Water Lily Pound" by Claude Monet above, give us an idea of rebirth: our lives should be as a flowered garden, like Monet's; we are entering springtime in Brazil, so you may also renew hopes, plans and all the good things that life can give to you; enjoy it with us!

Sex and Evolution

The educator José Herculano Pires thus define the Spirit’s experiences in the process of evolution: “Every experience represents an acquisition to the Spirit, which will become integrated on its cognitive functions in the form of intuition categories. While the unconscious residue does not disappear, the overcome experience can be reactivated by the imprudence and abuse”. (PIRES, J.H. Pesquisa sobre o amor, Paidéia, 1983). The lucid Kardec’s follower recognizes that the mistakes and crimes committed in previous existences can resurge in the form of obsessive or even aggres-sive behavior if they are not systematically and constantly worked throughout an entire existence, in order to develop latent values and virtues. “Sexuality”, he continues, “is a form of manifestation of love. In the human being, however, the love’s manifestation covers all its vital, existential and psycho-affective structure”. On the vital level it is sensation, bringing peripheral expressions, displacing them to the passion, which is not the exaltation of love but of sensuality. The crimes of love have nothing to do with Love; they are fed by these expres-sions and end up animalizing the human being in the vile expression of its deepest indignity.
Sexuality, as a manifestation of affection when accompanied by Love, fulfills the human being. Without love, sexuality is a mere animal impulse, degradation of the generative functions, whose ultimate goal is the incarnation of the Being. “In the evolved couples the sexual act is not merely sensorial pleasure. The sensorial pleasure is only a spark of the vital fire which triggers the whole process of human creation. (…) Only the meanness of the rabble, of the populace incapable of un-derstanding the greatness of a creative act could have made of sexuality a matter of scandal, malice and sin”.
We are living the evolutionary moment of sensorial unruliness, activated by the allegedly libertarian of woman world movements. The woman, subjugated to man’s violence during centuries and animated by the inferiority feeling brought by religions, has shifted to the other end of the rope. The woman does not recognizes herself as a Being that brings with it the possibility to love and to generate lives, but as that who should dispute the same baseline of excesses practiced by man. A media tool to sell male products, the woman continues to be a slave of her own image, deluded by the advertising exposure.
When Jesus freed the adulterous woman and Magdalene, He recognized their immense latent power of Love but out of focus and unbalanced. The first woman may have remade her paths. Mag-dalene, the divine sinner, found herself and loved Humanity to whom she dedicated the rest of her days, leaving an eloquent message of redemption through Love.
Men and women of the twenty-first century. We were created for the development of the divine potentialities that silently lie in the depths of our being. It is time to make them flourish. It is time to place them on top of the bushel, as Jesus has done.Published on The Journal of Psychological Studies, September, October 2011 of The Spiritist Psychological Society, London, England. See this article also in André Luiz Spiritist Foundation: http://www.feal.com.br/artigo.php?car_id=60&col_id=22&t=Evolucao-e-Sexo