We invite you to understand a little more about the pillars of Spiritism. Continue reading and check it out!
1. Existence of God
Firstly, Spiritism believes and bases its faith on the existence of a single, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God . He is the supreme intelligence and primary cause of all things, beings and events. Thus, all beings, animate and inanimate, rational and irrational, material and immaterial, are under the power of God and subject to the law of progress. Jesus Christ, equally created by God, is a model and guide for all humanity, being an ethical and moral compass for all.
2. Existence and immortality of the soul
According to Spiritism, all human beings have a body and a soul. The body is material, serving the needs of that specific incarnation. However, the soul does not die. It survives several incarnations and bodies, but it is essentially the same. Communication with spirits is understood as one of the ways to demonstrate the immortality of the soul. Thus, when someone dies, it is only said that the body has died, since the soul continues its life on another plane.
3. Communication with spirits
The Spiritist doctrine defines mediumship as the ability people have to receive messages from disembodied spirits. According to the doctrine, all people have this property, but it is stronger in some individuals, known as mediums.
These individuals, in so-called “spiritual sessions”, are able to receive and transmit these messages, either through voice or through written messages (psychography). Spiritual guidance can be received in this way.
4. Law of cause and effect (or law of action and reaction)
Like physics states every action has a reaction. So also spiritualism states that every thought, word, or action we make will have its effects either in this incarnations or in the next one. Maybe those things we are undergoing nowadays are due to our actions in the past lives. We shall be rewarded with evil actions committed, but we would also be rewarded with fruits for the good we are doing.
5. Determinism and responsibility
We are God’s creatures, but we are not “machines” built to act in this or that manner. It is up to them to choose the path wanted for each incarnation that each human being must take, even though some challenges are bound to arise so they can move ahead. Still, as we pointed out, as every action calls for a reaction, we cannot avoid the consequences of our actions.
6. Reincarnation
This brings us to the most well-known concept of the Spiritist doctrine, which is precisely that of reincarnation. According to Spiritism, the spirit must go through successive incarnations, where it can diversify its life experiences and, in this way, develop different qualities that contribute to its spiritual progress.
In completely different bodies and lives, but always with the same soul, we can learn, teach and repair past mistakes. However, when incarnated, we do not remember previous lives.
7. Continuous spiritual progress
Spiritism argues that spirits are created in the simplest way possible. They are then incarnated in the successive lives we have already mentioned, so that they can develop different qualities to evolve spiritually.
Every spirit is necessarily evolving or stationary (stuck at the same evolutionary stage), but never regresses. With each incarnation, intellectual and moral knowledge and skills are developed, until, much later, there is no longer any need for reincarnation.
8. Divine plan
All of these dynamics are part of the so-called “Divine Plan”, that is, God’s will for us. This plan guides the spiritual evolution of the universe and all beings. Even though many of the experiences of incarnations involve suffering, they are essential for us to evolve towards perfection.
At that moment, which takes countless lives to reach, the spirit no longer needs to reincarnate and remains on the spiritual plane, where all suffering ceases and all evolution has already been achieved.
9. Plurality of inhabited worlds
The doctrine explains that during this evolutionary process, composed of successive incarnations, we inhabit different worlds or planes of incarnation. These worlds are divided into 5 categories: primitive worlds, worlds of expiation and trials, worlds of regeneration, happy worlds and celestial or divine worlds.
We reincarnate several times in worlds of all these categories, following the evolutionary order, until we are ready for the next one. The Earth, where we are in the current incarnation, is in the second (expiation and trials), which indicates that we still have a long way to go.
10. Charity and love for others
Spiritism adopts as one of its main mottos the phrase “Without charity there is no salvation”. By charity, we do not understand only material donations and favors we provide to others, but every situation of love, advice, forgiveness of offenses and flexibility in the face of others’ mistakes. These moral principles, when converted into practical actions, are ways of faithfully following the example of Jesus Christ and, consequently, of evolving spiritually.