Life and Values Animism and mystification In the teachings of the Good News, there is a moment when Christ proposes: “Shine your light, while it is day”. This is a beautiful lesson, among so many beautiful lessons that the Master brought us. This one is fundamental, because “Shine your light” is an instigation, is an insufflation to our will to grow, to develop our strength, to transform our power into activities.
“Shine your light” is very beautiful. Because Christ is saying that we are light, we all carry this inner flame which often flickers, which often fades gradually. It’s like if the mists of the world were smothering our brightness, our inner light.
And it’s because of this that Christ’s proposal is full of value for us. Shine your light. This work of developing our powers, our own reality, is a work of developing our soul capacity, our animism, our soul.
The resourcefulness of the soul, the progress of the being is one of the objectifications of our life on Earth. We are here, incarnated, to develop our powers. Earth is a great school where we work for ourselves, for our growth.
Here is a laboratory in which in the day-to-day of our efforts, we manage to bring out this glow that is inside us. Well then, curiously, when we refer to animism, there are other considerations related to it, to this reference. Because when Aristotle spoke of animism, he was thinking of something else, he was thinking in a different way.
Animism for Aristotle, for example, was this fact of someone taking a rabbit’s foot, the already dead animal, turning it into a pendant, a key chain, or any kind of piece, for luck. So Aristotle imagined that every time we take a dead thing and give it the characteristics of a living thing, giving luck, for example, it’s an act of animism. We give soul to a thing that doesn’t have it.
When we pick up a stone and think that this stone will give us happiness, that it will bring us inner happiness, light, harmony etc, we are, according to Aristotle, creating a picture of animism, giving a dynamic value to something that is inert. But in the field of the Spirit, of things of the soul, animism is the externalization of the individual, of each one of us. When it comes to a phenomenon of a mediumistic nature, for example, in which someone claims to be giving passivity to a spiritual being, or to be manifesting a spiritual being, the great concern of scholars on this issue is to verify if it is, in fact, the deceased who speaks, through the sensitive, through the person, through the medium, or if it is the person’s own mind, if it’s the medium that externalizes itself.
It’s true: we carry within us many rooted values, stored in our unconscious. Values of this life, values of past lives, which are in our unconscious. These are richness or poverties but they are achievements that are inside us, in our black box, and in certain circumstances, this material comes to the surface.
Let’s imagine that we smell a perfume and this perfume takes us back to childhood, and we remember that our grandmother used this perfume. And then we remember some party that we went to, and grandma used this perfume. And then I remembered that at this party that we went to, I had a certain friend, I ate a certain thing… See how the perfume reminded me, made me go backwards.
This would be called animism. When our memory unconsciously brought up from within the things that are stored in us. So animism means this projection of the sensitive’s own soul, the manifestation of our own reality, internalized, covered, which, in some moments, comes to light, at given moments, comes to the surface and emerges as if it were another entity speaking for us.
We’re presenting Life and Values We present again Life and Values It’s understandable that we are all individuals who have a lot of material in our intimacy and sometimes, we don’t realize how many times this material comes to the surface and manifests itself, and we can assume that sometimes it’s a spiritual entity that is manifesting through us. This wall between what is mediumistic and what an animism is a very tenuous wall, very thin, because, after all, we do not have much ability to perceive at what moment we stop being ourselves and are filtering someone else’s thoughts. We are not very precise about this.
There must be a lot of expertise, a lot of care, a lot of skills for us to realize this. But whenever we talk about animism, we take into account that the sensitive individuals don’t know that they are sensitive. Nobody knows that they are pushing this stuff out of their pasts, this material out of their black box, out of their psychic files.
When the individual comes to know and uses this in a thoughtful way, then the phenomenon ceases to be animistic, typically speaking, and we enter the territory of mystification. The mystification always characterizes a deception, a mistake, which I want to make someone go through. Whenever we lie, we are mystifying and then, in the case of spiritual manifestations, it may be that the Spirits who manifest themselves, the Spirits who communicate themselves, they say they are people they are not.
The sensitive is draining correctly, the sensitive is missing that manifestation correctly, but the manifesting is the one who lies. the Spirit claims to be Rui Barbosa, the Spirit claims to be Jesus Christ or any other figure in history, but it’s not true. In this case, we have the animism of the communicating Spirit claiming to be who the Spirit is not.
But we find other cases in which the sensitive, the medium pretends to be giving passivity to a Spirit, pretends to be receiving a Spirit to deceive others, to obtain profits or for any other shady objective. So in this case, the mystification is no longer of the Spirit, is of the medium. A lot of people look for mediums in society, a lot of people look for Umbanda, Spiritistic centers, fortune tellers, that are almost always mediums, almost always sensitives.
But people don’t have the skill, don’t have the knowledge to identify these things. So they almost always enter this world of credulity, they simply believe. And the number of unscrupulous people who take advantage of people’s ignorance is enormous.
And because of that, it’s always very important to be cautious with the phenomena of mystification. How will I know if there is or there is not mystification? Let’s check where the information will take us.
Will the information lead us to some dependence of something or someone? Let’s not believe it. Will information charge us money, resources to solve spiritual cases, love problems, family problems?
Let’s not believe it. Are the revelations that come to us crazy irrational? Let’s not believe it.
Let us not be afraid to disbelieve things that seem absurd to us because we must not believe in what is absurd. There is no crime in rejecting nefarious information, the big problem is when we accept false information. In the pages of The Mediums’ Book, by Allan Kardec, there is a very interesting orientation, when the Spirit Erasto recommends that it’s better to reject ten truths than to accept a single lie.
And that’s logical. The truth always appears, if I reject it today, it will appear tomorrow, and it will appear the day after tomorrow, if I deny it tomorrow. Because the truth is the Law of Life, it will always appear.
But the lie wants to immediately impose itself because if it takes too long, it will be discovered. That’s why every liar wants to take as many people as quickly as possible because if they take time, if the lie takes time, people end up finding out. Therefore, let us not mix animism, which is this unconsciously leaked voice of our inner being with mystification, which is the deception of others on a deliberate basis.
