by Antonio Leite.
To all different races of humankind, at all great epochs of history, God has revealed, through his missionaries or superior spirits, the relative truth that we all need in order to move forward in spiritual progress and achieve peace and happiness. These revelations had always reached us through the means of humane interventions, that is, conveyed by prophets, seers, mediums, whatever name you choose. However, the characteristic traits that they bear, allow us to envision them clearly as something imparted from an extra-humane source. They are indeed meaningful guidelines from the spiritual world. The messengers behind these reliable truths are superior spirits, who find themselves in such a high and advanced level of spiritual progress, which enable them not to be entangled with our petty interests nor our vanities.
It would be unreasonable to believe that the Creator would bestow us with these messages without requiring anything from us. Not at all, this is not definitely the case. Since our creation we were endowed with intelligence and gifted with freewill in order to work hard and build our own future. Therefore, the effectiveness of these messages as true guidelines in helping us throughout our earthly journey, is something that will greatly require our involvement. This is the attitude we all should have towards these matters, and the work starts with the careful examination we ought to submit these spiritual guidelines before accepting them as relative truths, in accordance with the advice for example, given to us by the spirit Erastus, in the message below [Dissertations of a Spirit on Moral Influence of the Medium].
Emphasizing this aspect of the matter, Allan Kardec delivered an assertion of this in Genesis: The Miracles and the Predictions [translation by W. J. Colville, Colby & Rich, Publishers, Boston, 1883, p. 25], by saying:
“In a word, that which characterizes the spiritual revelation is the divine source from which it proceeds, – that the initiative belongs to the spirits, and that the elaboration is the work of man.”
It is an undeniable reality that many of these messengers who lived among us, at different epochs of mankind history, bore these characteristic of true emissaries of God, who lived in accordance to the messages they preached and conveyed to humanity. Their teachings are clear, simple, devoid from all kind of formality, ritual or dogmatism, and touch the hearts of all, despite the rank or society one was in. They were many, but we would like to mention here solely two; Buddha and Jesus.
It is also another unquestionable truth, and that is the fact that we live in a world of a very low level of spiritual progress [despite the idea that some yet bear that we are the center of the universe] where evil yet prevails over goodness. This state of affairs in our world will eventually change, but let us not fool ourselves by imagining that it will come in an easy way. No, this is not the case at all. Due to the reason aforementioned, that is the prevalence of evil over goodness, it has been and will continue to be a difficult batle, one that each and everyone of us must individually to undergo. Now, the difference is that the weapons we ought to use in this war, rather than the usual ones, are charity, compassion, refraining from judging our fellowmen, LOVE after all.
We need to educate ourselves and surrender to a persevering study [not only the study to pursue a career] of these matters, for this is the only way in which we will acquire the knowledge that will eventually free ourselves from deceptiveness and fraud. We need to embrace knowledge in order to reach the relative Truth, that which will liberate us from ignorance and make us free, in conformity with the maxim that says, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free“.
Regardless the purity, the greatness and the goodness that the messages carried on by many great teachers such as the two mentioned above, it is an easy task to realize how they were mishandled, disfigured and despised, especially by the religious orthodoxy, which consider themselves as the safeguard of the moral values of the human race. This is an easy conclusion to reach upon, and one needs not to be a scholar on theology or philosophy to discern.
In regard to Buddhism, we hear from H. G. Wells, on his acclaimed work The Outline of History, in the topic The Rise and Spread of Buddhism, the following:
“There seems to be no limit to the lies that honest but stupid disciples will tell for the glory of their master and for what they regard as the success of their propaganda. Men who would scorn to tell a lie in everyday life will become unscrupulous cheats and liars when they have given themselves up to propagandist work; it is one of the perplexing absurdities of our human nature. Such honest souls – for most of them were indubitably honest – were presently telling their hearers of the miracles that attended the Buddha’s birth – they no longer called him Gautama, because that was too familiar a name – of his youthful feats of strength, of the marvels of his everyday life, winding up with a sort of illumination of his body at the moment of death.
Of course it was impossible to believe that Buddha was the son of a mortal father. He was miraculously conceived through his mother dreaming of a beautiful white elephant! Previously he had himself been a marvelous elephant possessing six tusks; he had generously given them all to a needy hunter – and even helped him to saw them off. And so on.
Moreover, a theology grew up about the Buddha. He was discovered to be a god. He was one of a series of divine beings, the Buddhas. There was an undying ‘spirit of all the Buddhas’; there was a great series of Buddhas past and Buddhas (or Buddhisatvas) yet to come. Under the overpowering influence of these sickly imaginations the moral teachings of Gautama have been almost hid from view. The theories grew and flourished; each new step, each new hypothesis, demanded another; until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were smothered beneath the glittering mass of metaphysical subtleties.” (…) [Volume I, Chapter XXIV – Item 4, p. 319]
“This faith of Buddha, which in the days of Asoka, and even so late as Kanishka, was still pure enough to be a noble inspiration, we now discover absolutely lost in a wilderness of preposterous rubbish, a philosophy of endless Buddhas, tales of manifestations and marvels like a Christmas pantomime, miraculous conceptions by six-tusked elephants, charitable princes giving themselves up to be eaten by starving tigresses, temples build over a sacred nailparing, and the like.” [Volume I, Chapter XXIX – Item 10, p. 473]
With Christianity, its entanglement with worldly power through Constantine the Great and the dominant priesthood of the time and the first official gathering of the Roman Church via the councils, especially the Nicaean one in 325 A.D., the aforementioned author is not less adamant.
“It is necessary that we should recall the reader’s attention to the profound differences between this fully developed Christianity of Nicaea and and the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. All Christians hold that the latter is completely contained in the former, but that is a question outside our province. What is clearly apparent is that the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth was a prophetic teaching of the new type that began with the Hebrew prophets. It was not priestly, it had no consecrated temple, and no altar. It had no rites and ceremonies. Its sacrifice was “a broken and a contrite heart”. Its only organization was an organization of preachers, and its chief function was the sermon. But the fully fledged Christianity of the fourth century, though it preserved as its nucleus the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels, was mainly a priestly religion, of a type already familiar to the world for thousands of years. The centre of its elaborate ritual was an altar, and the essential act of worship the sacrifice, by a consecrated priest, of the Mass. And it had a rapidly developing organization of deacons, priests, and bishops.” [Same work, Chapter XVII – The Rise of Christianity and the Fall of the Western Empire, Item 8, pp. 438-439].
In the same line of thought and talking about the same matter, the classic spiritist author Léon Denis in his fine book Christianity and Spiritualism, Chapter VI – The Alteration of Christian Dogmas, warns us about the seriousness of this persistent and problematic deceitfulness.
“At one time it almost seemed as if the doctrine of Jesus, allied to the profound views of the Alexandrian philosophers, would prevail over the mystical tendencies of the Judeo-Christianity and lead man into the broad ways of progress, towards high spiritual inspiration. But disinterested men, loving truth for its own sake, were not numerous in the Councils. Doctrines better adapted to the earthly interests of the Church, were elaborated by these assemblies, and checked and materialized religion. It was by then and under the influence of the Roman Pontiffs, that during the centuries there was gradually erected that scaffolding of curious dogmas which have nothing in common with the Gospels and are of much later date, and which form a sombre edifice in which human thought, like a captive eagle, powerless to unfold his wings and able to see only one small corner of the sky, was imprisoned as in a tomb.”
This is indeed the harsh reality in which we find ourselves in this world, in matters of faith and belief. But one has no need to give up on hope, for the messages that have been lately imparted from the superior spirits through the teachings of Spiritism, and through others, make it crystal clear that there is no need for intermediaries between one and his Creator. Anyhow, it is simply wise to admit the idea that the teachings of Spiritism, although brought to us in an era of progress and scientific development, yet can also be mishandled and exposed to distortion. In this sense, it is advisable that we pay attention to the counsels of the good spirits as well as to the wisdom of these words from the pen of Léon Denis, in the same work mentioned above.
“Times have changed, intelligence has been developed, customs have become more gentle; but priestly oppression is still with us. It is evident in those rites in which the spirit of God is veiled and hidden, in the ceremonial the luxury of which captivates the senses, and turns men’s thoughts away from the high object they should pursue. It is necessary, it is urgent, that the worship of God should become once more simple, austere in its principles as in its manifestations.” (…) What mankind needs now is no more a belief, a faith drawn from some particular system of religion, and inspired by texts which though worthy of respect, are of very doubtful authenticity, and in which truth and error are inextricable mixed. What is needed is a belief founded on proofs, on facts, a certitude based on study and experience, from which will come an ideal of justice, a true understanding of destiny, an incentive to perfection, which will regenerate the nations and link together men of all races and all religions.” [pp. 97 & 116-117]
Antonio Leite
Editor GEAE
Source: The Spiritist Messenger, 16th Year, Number 88, October 2007
