Milton Medran Moreira
Opinião Editorial. Periodical publication that expresses the ideological position and guidelines of the Spiritist Cultural Center of Porto Alegre, Brazil. April 2020
There is a fundamental distinction between mystical and rational spiritualism. The former is linked to magical thinking, inasmuch as the latter has its solid supports in reason.
Matured fruit of the Enlightenment that preceded it, spiritualism illuminated with the brilliance of reason issues that religious mysticism had imprisoned in the dark room of mystery.
Magical thought and action thrive on and survive through mystery. You can, if you wish, interpret matters such as the existence of God, of the spirit, of its survival after death and its communicability with the material world, from the callings of mystery. Religions chose to wrap each of these questions in dogmas that do not depend on rational interpretation or are not susceptible to their analysis.
Spiritism, historical extension and doctrinal condensation of modern rational spiritualism, already found in reason itself and in the human sciences, elements of experimental demonstration and consequent philosophical conviction.
All of us who declare ourselves spiritists are urged, in each episode of our individual or social life, to certify whether the values held by us as spiritists are effectively linked to the realm of reason or if we still tend, through atavistic religious influences, to interpret them through magical thinking.
We are currently experiencing a serious worldwide episode in the field of public health that can, like many other phenomena in life, be interpreted and combated from both magical and rational thought.
We will be linking it to magical thinking, for example, if we attribute its origin to the initiative and action of an angelic being, agent of the corrective justice of a repressive god, who is tired of human evils, but, at the same time, merciful for safeguarding humanity from a drastic and painful destruction. We will also be giving possibilities to magical atavism if we seek the solution of physical ills caused by a virus, which is a product of nature, resorting to superhuman healing processes and excluded from science and the natural world.
There is, in the rational and free-thinking spiritists interpretation, no contempt for spiritual causes of human ills or for the possibility of the intervention of spirits in the therapeutic field. In the meantime, we cannot lose sight of the fact that:
a) Man is a biological / spiritual / social composite in whose intimacy all these components must be harmonized, which always need to be observed and managed together;
b) The most efficient expression of the communicability between the material and spiritual dimensions does not take place by processes impregnated with mysticism and mysteries, but tends to be perfected through the fine harmony between the incarnated and the disincarnated, holders in their respective planes, of knowledge capable of alleviating or ending human suffering.
However, if, in the spiritual world, a disembodied entity and, indeed, possessor of knowledge capable of bringing about the cure of some pathology still incurable here, its preferential effort must be directed precisely to the embodied minds applied to that same objective. It is from this process, mind to mind, between incarnate and disembodied humanity, that great discoveries, scientific advances and advances in human thought are produced.
In this order of ideas, it is always the duty of the spirits to search in human nature itself — in which error, success, successful or mistaken experiences coexist — the path to the physical, intellectual and moral improvement of humanity. At that point science assumes capital importance for the correct and rational resolution of great human problems.
Science is understood as all areas of knowledge, from biology to law, from chemistry to pedagogy, from medicine to psychology, instances all subject to an ethic of universal validity. The spiritual exchange, a specific area developed by Spiritism, must have as its objective the search for a synthesis of all this knowledge, in a perspective centered on the reality of the existence of the spirit and on the communicability between incarnate and disembodied humanity, in actions where love and rationality are present, distanced from mysticisms and superstitions.
Science, seen from an immortalist and progressive perspective, must be the center for which the efforts of the spiritists converge, thus discouraging beliefs, mythological visions about God and the universe, miraculous cures, replacing thought and magical acts for the incentive to rational knowledge, built by the natural and healthy exchange between the material and spiritual dimensions.
TRANSLATOR: Iraida E. Albino