Human Nature

Before answering what human nature is, it is worth agreeing on what we are asking. The word "nature" carries more than it seems.

It comes from the Latin natura, from natus: born. The nature of something is what comes with it — what was not chosen, learned, won or built. It is what the thing is before it does anything at all.

When, in everyday life, we talk about human nature, we let slip sentences that have nothing to do with the real definition of nature.

We have all heard sentences like these:

"It is human nature to be selfish."

"To err is human."

"Nobody is perfect."

Although it may seem so, sentences like these do not describe our nature. They describe our behavior.

These sentences are a summary of what people usually do, mistakenly presented as a verdict on what people are.

What you do is different from what you are.

What you do changes. You were once someone who did things you would not do today, and twenty years from now you will look back on today and realize that you stopped doing things you are doing now. Behavior is the most changeable thing in you. If your nature were your behavior, you would have changed nature several times — and a nature that changes is not a nature, it is a phase.

So let us go the opposite way. Instead of asking what the human being does, let us ask what is left when we take away everything that could have been different.

Your body could have been another. Your name, your family, your country, your language, your religion, your era — all of that could have been different without your ceasing to be you. Your personality was formed by what happened to you, and would have formed differently if other things had happened. Your memories are the record of a path; they are not the walker.

Keep taking away. What cannot be taken away is your nature.

This is the question that opened this book, and that I asked you to answer before reading on.

And here is the point: you have no choice about having an answer. Everyone has one, put into words or not. It lies beneath how you treat yourself when you make a mistake, what you think you deserve, what you believe you are capable of and what you do not even try. You do not need to have thought about the subject to live according to your conclusion about it.

You already do.

That is why the answer matters so much. If what you are, deep down, is defective, your whole life is a work of repair. If it is perfect, your whole life is a work of discovery. The effort is the same. The direction is opposite.

Do you think you have a defective nature or a perfect one?

Let us think about this together, step by step. First, what can be concluded about the Creation from the created. Then, what our true nature is.

Created Perfect#

God, omnipotent — all-powerful; omniscient — supreme wisdom; omnipresent — everywhere; omnibenevolent — supremely good and sovereignly just. And also one, indivisible, the first cause of all things. Perfect.

This is the view of God used as the premise for the conclusions we are going to reach. Following the content of this book certainly presupposes belief in God. For atheists, we would need to understand what definition of God it is that they do not believe in, so that we could reason from the truth that God does not exist. That would be a possible path; this book follows another.

This God, as defined above, creates. An act of creation unknown to us. We do not know how, but we can deduce it by observing the Creation.

The Creation, coming from God, who is absolutely perfect, could only be perfect. That is the only possibility.

Imperfect means something that has defects, is incomplete or has not been fully finished.

How can God, who is perfect, create something imperfect?

That possibility does not exist. Starting from that premise, we assume that all of God's Creation is perfect.

Everything is perfect. The Universe is perfect. Nature is perfect. All of God's creation is perfect.

God, pure perfection, would not create anything "incomplete", "defective" or "flawed".

There is only one possibility: all His creation is perfect.

So now we humans enter the story. We are part of nature. Being part of the perfect nature created by God, why then would we have been created imperfect?

Only one conclusion remains: we were created perfect.

So your essence, your consciousness or the innermost part of your being, is perfect.

Why does this matter?

Because it changes the way you see yourself, feel yourself and know yourself.

Notice that the argument did not ask your opinion of yourself. It started from God and came down to you. It is not a kindness someone is doing you, nor self-help optimism: it is what remains after accepting that the perfect can only create the perfect. You do not need to feel perfect for this to be true.

And if your essence is perfect, then everything you cannot stand in yourself is somewhere else. Not in the essence — in what has built up around it. The difficult temper, the habit you cannot overcome, the reaction you feel ashamed of afterwards: all of this is real, and none of it is you at the deepest layer.

Look at the sky on a sunny summer day. What do you see? A clear sky, without clouds, and the Sun shining.

Look at the sky on a rainy winter day. What do you see? Many clouds, lightning and rain.

Does that mean the Sun has disappeared on this dark day? No!

Behind the clouds, the lightning, the rain and the gloomy view, the sky is clear and the Sun is there just the same, shining strongly.

That is you. Behind the self you perceive right now, there is your essence, perfect, waiting for you and shining as always.

Notice what this conclusion does and what it does not do.

It does not make you someone with nothing to correct. The behavior is still yours, and so is the responsibility.

It makes correction stop being an accusation. You stop repairing a manufacturing defect and start cleaning a window.

And it brings an immediate consequence, which may be the most practical one in this entire book: you can stop waiting to deserve.

Whoever judges themselves defective lives postponing. They postpone peace until they are better, postpone joy until they have sorted things out, postpone themselves to a future version that never arrives — because the standard rises along with the one who rises. If perfection is at the end of the line, no one reaches it.

If it is at the origin, you already have it. It stops being a prize and becomes a starting point.

From here comes the sentence that holds up the rest of the book:

Your essence is perfect. Your manifestation is perfectible.

Perfect because it came from God. Perfectible because it is still on its way, and the way is yours.

What remains is to understand what this essence is made of.

Made of God#

Psalm 82 is a psalm of Asaph, and the one who speaks in it is God. He addresses those who judged in His name and judged badly, and in verse 6 He says:

• "I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High."

Centuries later, Jesus quotes this verse. And the moment he chooses to quote it is what matters most here.

It is in John 10. It is winter, the feast of the dedication, and he is walking in Solomon's porch, in the temple at Jerusalem. Those around him take up stones to kill him, and they say why: "for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God".

Accused of exactly this, Jesus answers with Asaph's psalm:

"Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?"

— John 10:34-36. The Bible quotations in this chapter follow the King James Version.

Notice what he does. Faced with the accusation of making himself equal to God, he does not back down, does not correct himself and does not explain that it was a figure of speech. He does the opposite: he widens it. He goes looking, in his accusers' own law, for the place where human beings are called gods — and he observes that Scripture called by that name all those "unto whom the word of God came".

Not one. All.

The traditional reading understands that the psalm speaks figuratively, referring to the authority to judge that came from God. It is a legitimate reading, and this book has no need to deny it.

The question that remains is a different one. Of all the passages he could have invoked to defend himself against a charge of blasphemy, why did Jesus choose precisely the one in which God calls men gods?

Following the reasoning of the previous section, let us take a step back and understand our creation from another angle.

Before we were created, nothing existed but God. Space and time did not exist, nothing existed, we can say there was only God. The nothing was God. The whole was God.

If only God existed and God creates something, then that created something is essentially God. There would be nothing besides God that God could use as material for His creation: it is made from Himself.

The Creation, taken piece by piece, cannot be the Creator, but the Creation is made of the Creator. So the Creation is the Creator.

The whole of Creation is the Creator.

Figuratively, imagine that God is a great block of ice. A sledgehammer strikes it, and it breaks into countless chips.

Put very simply, that is what Creation is like: God is the block, and we, creatures, are the chips.

Notice what the image says. However small the chip, it is ice — not something resembling ice, nor something made of another material.

All creation is an expression of God.

Everything that exists is created by God and is part of God. This is how God is omnipresent. God's omnipresence is nothing more than the presence of God in all of Creation and in all creatures.

Following the reasoning: we exist. If we exist, we were created by God and, consequently, we are essentially God. In other words, our essence is also God.

Now close the book and look at the cover. See the wave on the sea. It rises, moves forward, and as it sees the shore drawing near it understands that it is going to end. The wave feels like one thing among others, for it has a size, it has a shape, it has a beginning and it will have an end.

But the wave is not a thing. The wave is a way the water has of moving. And the water is the ocean.

When it breaks up in the surf, nothing is lost and nothing returns — because nothing had left. The ocean simply stops having, at that point, that shape.

The wave does not go back to the ocean.

The wave discovers that it was always the ocean.

At some point we, human beings, will discover that we were always God, just as the wave was always the ocean.

We are an expression of God. Recognizing this Divine nature in us is transforming. It is Divine!

The main characteristic of the Divine nature is the idea of perfection. See how this concept is connected to the previous one. Recognizing the Divine nature in us is recognizing the perfection within us.

If we are essentially God, we can do all things, we have all strength, all peace is present and all happiness is already with us.

Why then do we suffer as human beings? We have only temporarily forgotten this reality. On the day we truly remember, we will be transformed.

A fulfilled human being — one who lives fully, develops their utmost potential and finds meaning in everything — is one who recognizes themselves in God, in other words, who identifies with God.

How does this concept stand in relation to the ideas that we are "imperfect spirits" and that we were created simple and ignorant? Let us now look at that.

Simple and Ignorant#

For Spiritism, the human being is an incarnate spirit, created simple and ignorant, who evolves over successive existences until reaching perfection — the state the Spiritist Doctrine calls pure spirit.

So the human being would be:

• perfectible: imperfect, but destined for perfection.
• a spirit, and not God.

There is no way to soften the shock. What the two previous chapters deduced — that we were created perfect, and that our essence is God — contradicts, word for word, the two lines above. If the Doctrine is right in the sense in which it is usually read, the revelation of this book is wrong.

And the objection is not a hasty reading. It has an argument, and the argument is in The Spirits' Book, in the voice of the Spirits themselves:

"If they had been created perfect, they would not have merited the enjoyment of the benefits of that perfection. Where would be the merit without the struggle?" — The Spirits' Book, question 119

Without struggle, there is no merit. It is this idea that underpins the sentence heard in Spiritist centers, and which perhaps you repeat too: "we are not perfect, we are perfectible".

And I am going to answer that in the coming chapters.

The answer depends on a careful reading of the codification itself, and I want to do that reading with you after you have seen the same idea appear in four places that have nothing to do with Kardec — nor with one another. Before that, any reconciliation I offered would sound like the convenience of someone making an argument.

So keep the objection whole, exactly as it stands. Let us go and find other sources, and we will come back to this point.