Introduction

For thousands of years, philosophies and religions have tried to explain two things, always the same two: what the world is and what we are. Of all the questions they have asked in that time, one is at once recurring and profound:

What is the true nature of the human being?

This is the question that will guide the whole content of this book.

I kindly ask you to stop now for five minutes before reading on, and to work out your own answer to that question. And to write it down — on a sheet of paper, on your phone, in the margin of this page. Keep what you wrote: at the end of the book, we will come back to it. This exercise will change the way you read everything that comes after it.

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What is your answer to this question? Reflect for a moment and write it down before going on.

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Now that you have your opinion, I will ask a new question: was your answer based on some religion, philosophy or doctrine?

Probably yes, since that is where we form our opinions on this subject.

But was it based on just one religion, philosophy or doctrine?

This is where the main question lies.

Could any one person, or any single line of thought, be capable of revealing this truth?

If your answer to the first question was yes, and to the second was the Spiritist Doctrine, this book was written for you.

The aim of this book is to answer that question in the light of several sources of knowledge, and to work it through from the standpoint of the Spiritist Doctrine, bringing a revelation about our true nature.

And if your answer did not come from Spiritism, this book was written for you too. The idea that something is lacking in us is not only Spiritist. It is in original sin, which a good part of Christianity places at the origin of every human being. It is in the culture of merit, which teaches that our worth has to be earned. And it is in that sentence almost everyone has said to themselves at some point, with a religion or with none: I am not good enough yet.

Spiritism is the case we will examine in depth, because it is the house I come from. But wherever it says Kardec, you can read your own tradition. For some, the ideas presented here will be familiar; for others, they will be a revelation, with the potential to bring great leaps of understanding and evolution.

This book is not a Spiritist work: it starts from outside the foundations of Spiritism and sets out to add new points of view, rather than to expand the premises of the Spiritist Doctrine. It can be welcomed as a good reference for forming new opinions and points of view that add to the current vision.

A word about the route, before we begin.

First we will build an answer from scratch. It starts from a single statement about God — one of those almost nobody disputes — and follows its consequences as far as they lead. It is a short, steep stretch, and the whole rest of the book rests on it.

Then the book leaves home.

We will go to a room in Louisville, Kentucky, on a January afternoon in 1981, where three people — a physics professor, a librarian and a man who had built his own house with his own hands — hear a voice say something none of them had ever heard before.

We will go to Los Angeles, where a film special-effects technician saw, twice within a single week, the same thing in the sky — and took ten years to find out what to do with it.

We will go to a dusty village in southern India, where a thirteen-year-old boy announced to his family who he was, left school that same year and spent the next seven decades doing exactly what he had said he would do.

And we will go to a place no one can name, almost two thousand years ago, where someone — perhaps one person, perhaps several — wrote one hundred and ninety-six short sentences on the workings of the human mind, and no one has managed to exhaust them since.

Four eras, four continents. None of these people knew the others existed.

After that, we come back home. To Kardec, to the questions of The Spirits' Book, and to a word he wrote in 1864 and corrected in the same line.

Notice that I have not said what any of them answered. That is on purpose. The meeting of these sources is the argument of this book, and an argument is something we follow — not something we receive ready-made.

I ask only one thing until then, and there is a whole chapter about it ahead: read with an open mind.

May this journey be fruitful, enjoyable and transforming.

Peace!