In one of the last weekly studies of Revista Espirita in 1859, we studied this communication attributed to Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Want to know more about this famous painter? Click here). He lived in Holland in the 17th century.

Here is the communication:

External communications, read in the Company

The goodness of the Lord is eternal. He does not want the death of his beloved children. But, O men! Think that it depends on you to hasten the Kingdom of God on Earth, as well as to push it away; that you are responsible for one another; that, by improving yourselves, you work for the regeneration of Humanity. The task is great; responsibility weighs on each person and no one can excuse themselves. Embrace with fervor the glorious task that the Lord imposes on you, but ask him to send workers to his fields, because, as Christ told you, the harvest is great and the workers are few.

But behold, we are sent as laborers of your hearts. In it we sow good grain. Be careful not to stifle it. Water him with the tears of repentance and joy. Of repentance, for having lived for so long in a land cursed by the sins of the human race, away from the only true God, worshiping the false pleasures of the world, which leave nothing but heartbreak and sadness at the bottom of the cup. Joy because the Lord has given you grace; because he wants to hasten the arrival of his beloved children to the paternal bosom; because he wants you all to be clothed with the innocence of angels, as if you had never been separated from him.

The only one who showed you the path by which you will return to this primitive glory; the only one you cannot blame, because he was never mistaken in his teaching; the only righteous before God; The only one, finally, that you should follow in order to be pleasing to God, is Christ. Yes, the Christ, your divine master, whom you forgot and despised for centuries. Love him, because he constantly asks for you. He wants to come to your rescue. As? Unbelief still persists! The wonders of Christ cannot overcome it! The wonders of all Creation are powerless before these mocking Spirits; on this dust that cannot prolong its miserable existence for a single minute! These wise men who think they are the only ones to possess all the secrets of Creation do not know where they come from; They don't know where they will go and yet they deny everything and defy everything. Because they know some of the most common laws of the material world, they think they can judge the immaterial world, or rather, they say that there is nothing immaterial; that everything must obey the same material laws that they discovered.

But you Christians! you know that you cannot deny our intervention without, at the same time, denying Christ; without denying the entire Bible, as there is not a single page in which you do not find traces of the visible world in relation to the invisible world. Then! Say it! Are you Christians or not?

REMBRAND

Obtida pelo Sr. Péc…

Like many of the communications in Revista Espírita, the communication is simple, short and full of constructive instructions for our learning.
We cannot say that it is really by Rembrant, as we do not have enough elements to know. However, what interests us most is its content, which corresponds to the teachings of Spiritist morality.

Recently, an alleged psychographed letter from the director of Chapecoense appeared. The subject is tiresomely repetitive: whenever a tragedy occurs, whether individual or in a group, which draws the attention of society, a supposed psychographic appears that, due to the lack of care of the Spiritist Movement, no accident come repeat the false ideas linked to the dogmas of falling into sin and paying debts, karma, punishment, law of return, etc., already far surpassed by the spiritist science developed by the studies of Allan Kardec.

See an excerpt from supposed psychography:

“What appears to be injustice, when seen from above, all ideas and concepts about the divine are rethought, redone, put to the test, in remaking. First, I want you to know that nothing happens by chance. There are no victims in the Universe. We reap what we sow. I learn here that this is the universal and unalterable law, (…) the law of action and reaction […] We were together in other lives and we caused several air disasters during the wars. And divine good justice called us to right!”.

We never tire of highlighting how false this idea is, as we have already covered in length more than once ((refer to the articles “Law of action and reaction, law of return, karma: why do we suffer, according to Spiritism?“, “Karma (or karma), punishment, sin and punishment: how Kardec approached all this in A Genesis“, “Spiritism in the face of wars“)).

We will not repeat what we have already said in the cited articles. We will just remember: be careful, spiritists, because the spirits deceive the unsuspecting, the majority of mediums and workers who do not study the Spiritist Doctrine. To these, they reproduce communications full of false concepts, with a single objective: to keep the minds that blindly accept them away from true spiritist morality, which is autonomous and which is guided by the principle of successive progress.

São ideias repetidas por “professores” do Espiritismo, com canais e grupos repletos de centenas de milhares de pessoas, e que poderiam fazer um bem enorme a si mesmos e à sociedade, mas que choose to blindfold their eyes and cover their ears to the necessary study, por crerem já saber de tudo, posto que estão até mesmo “ensinando” os outros.

They are, in fact, individuals who do not think about the great harm they do to Spiritism and the disrespect to these families, judging deceased loved ones, when they are told “criminals of the past“.

Divine Justice is not guided by collecting debts, but by allowing all spirits to reach their destination, which is relative perfection, by self effort, conscious and autonomous. Therefore, supposed psychographics like this supposed psychographed letter from the Chapecoense director can only be one of three things:

• Fruits of an obsessive Spirit to which the medium surrenders;
• Fruits of an inferior Spirit, with almost no ability to understand the spiritist world and attached to old religious ideas;
• Fruits of the medium's own opinion.

In any case, the supposed psychographics must be ever analyzed by other people, knowledgeable about Spiritism, and only made public when verified as important and rational for the general interest.

O Study Group The Legacy of Allan Kardec repudiates this type of inconsequential act, which increasingly distances Spiritism from those who, judging by what they see reproduced by the Spiritist Movement, absent from studies, do not conform with such nonsense and with the absence of reason and charity in the Doctrine that says to excel in these two fundamental principles.

The study of the Revista Espírita of July 1858 gave us space for an important aside, regarding Psychography. We talked about the following topics at our meeting, as you can see below.

In The Mediums' Book    

178. Of all the media, handwriting is the simplest, most comfortable and, above all, most complete. All efforts must be directed towards it, as it allows for the establishment, with the spirits, of relationships as continuous and regular as those that exist between us.. It should be used all the more diligently, as it is through it that spirits better reveal their nature and the degree of their improvement, or their inferiority. Because of the ease they find in expressing themselves in this way, they reveal their innermost thoughts to us and allow us to judge them and appreciate their value. For the medium, the faculty of writing is, moreover, the one most susceptible to being developed through the exercise of the medium..

Mechanical Mediums

They are those whose movement of a pencil, pen or even hands on a keyboard takes place independently at will. The movement is uninterrupted and the medium is not aware of what he writes.    

179. […] When absolute unconsciousness occurs, there are so-called passive or mechanical mediums. This faculty is precious, as it does not allow any doubt about the independence of the writer's thought.

Intuitive Mediums    

They are those who write under the influence of the Spirit, being aware of what they write.    

180. […] it is possible to recognize the suggested thought, as it is never preconceived; it is born as the writing is being traced and, often, it is contrary to the idea that was formed in advance. It may even be outside the limits of the medium's knowledge and abilities.

Semimechanical Mediums

181. In the purely mechanical medium, the movement of the hand is independent of the will; in the intuitive medium, the movement is voluntary and optional. The semi-mechanical medium participates in both these genres. He feels that his hand is given an impulse, despite his own will, but, at the same time, he is aware of what he is writing, as the words are formed. In the first, thought comes after the act of writing; in the second, it precedes it; in the third, it accompanies him. These latter mediums are the most numerous.

Inspired Mediums    

They are those who write consciously, but whose content origin is from contact with other Spirits. They are like intuitives, with the difference that the intervention of an occult force is much less sensitive there. In this case, it is much more difficult to distinguish one's own thought than the one suggested to it.    

182. […] It can be said that all are mediums, because there is no one who does not have their protective and family spirits, who strive to suggest healthy ideas to the protected ones.

If everyone were well aware of this truth, no one would fail to frequently resort to the inspiration of their guardian angel, in moments when they don't know what to say or do. Let each one, therefore, invoke it with fervor and confidence, in case of need, and very often he will be astonished at the ideas that come to him as if by magic, whether it be a matter of a resolution to be made or something to compose. If no idea comes up, it's just that you have to wait.

Foreboding Mediums

184. Foreboding is a vague intuition of things to come. Some people have this faculty more or less developed. It may be due to a kind of double vision, which allows them to glimpse the consequences of current things and the filiation of events. But it is often also the result of occult communications, and above all in this case those who are endowed with it can be called psychic mediums, which constitute a variety of inspired mediums.

Spirits communicate in many ways. The first of them took place through the phenomena of typology and gives sematology which are, respectively, communications through knocks (for example, 1 knock for yes and 2 for no) and those through the movement of objects (for example: the Spirit moves a table or a pencil in the direction of the letter or word that want to communicate).

These, however, were very rudimentary and even extremely tiring methods for both sides. Furthermore, much more attention was paid to the fact of spiritual intelligences acting behind the phenomena than to the transmission of superior teachings, since only inferior spirits are given to such phenomena - although they may be "at the service" of others. other higher spirits.

The use of the pencil tied to the basket was also a form of sematology, but, more properly, it is called by Kardec, at least at this moment, as indirect writing. Very quickly, however, and on the advice of the spirits themselves, this method was replaced by psychography, where the medium himself holds the pencil or pen and gives control of his hand to the communicant spirit.

The capacity and depth of this writing, obtained by psychography, depends a lot on the capacity of the medium himself and the communicant Spirit - in other words, the synergy between them. Some get long manuscripts of a higher order; others obtain writings that are impossible to read except by the mediums themselves, as if a kind of intuition guided them.

It is also important to remember that psychography can be more intuitive or more mechanical. When it is more mechanical, the medium's hands can be shaken, controlled, without the medium even knowing what he is writing. It is the opposite of what happens in the first case, where communication comes through intuition.

Another genre of communication is that of the word – what we now know as psychophony. The Spirit takes control of the Incarnate's vocal cords and transmits their communication. Sometimes these communications, however, happen without corporeal intermediation, which are the cases of voices we hear in the air or in our thoughts, as we will explain below.

It is interesting to note that the Spiritist Magazine was born before of The Mediums' Book, having some very well defined and important purposes: the first one was to propagate Spiritism as much as possible among the masses; the second would be to be able to obtain reports from all sources, verifying the contents methodologically and seeking the much-needed universal agreement. Many contents treated in the Journal, in a serious way and under this methodology, were later reproduced and deepened in other works, such as the one cited.

In this context and at that moment, Kardec uses a term that he has never used again – hence the importance of the above understanding: spiritualology, there being, then, two types of this phenomenon – that of the direct spiritualology and the one mediate spiritualology. They would be, respectively, the cases of direct verbal communications, where the spirits appear in a waking state, and the cases of communications where words and phrases sound in our thoughts or even in our ears.

This is, in short, one of the first steps, perhaps a sketch, of something much more grandiose and profound that, in a short time, would take shape in The Mediums' Book or Mediums and Evocators' Guide. We will return to this subject in the future, but you, dear reader, can delve into it, like so many others, in the study of this much-needed and recommended work.