Revelation

To reveal comes from the Latin revelare: to draw back the veil. Not to create, not to invent, not to bring in from outside — only to remove what lay over something that was already there.

Keep this in mind, because it changes what one can expect from a revelation. It adds nothing to the world. It shows.

And so each revelation brings a part of the Truth. The veil that is lifted is never the only veil.

The Spiritist Doctrine is a revelation. It unveiled the immortality of the soul, the nature of spirits, the relationship between the material and the spiritual worlds, the plurality of inhabited worlds. That is no small thing: because of it, countless people came to live better, to bear what this world brings them and to grow morally.

But notice what Spiritism did, exactly.

It created none of these facts. The soul was already immortal before Kardec, and the inhabited worlds were already many. What the codification did was turn on the light over a dynamic that had always existed. That is what a revelation is.

This book does the same, on a much smaller scale. It organizes information that has already been made public, and in a sense already revealed before, by other hands — rather than creating something essentially new.

There is a second thing to say about revelations, and it is the most curious: they are relative.

A revelation only happens when the information is new to the one who receives it. The same text reveals something to one person and says nothing to another: the difference is not in the text. It is in the reader. So the content of this book will be a revelation to those who have not yet met these ideas — and, for many Spiritist readers, it will be the first time they arrive from outside the codification.

And there is a third thing, which is in the title.

This book is called "A Revelation of Being", and not "The Revelation of Being". The article is not carelessness. There is no such thing as the revelation: not this one, not the first, not the second, not the third. There are more veils to lift than we can imagine, and each of them will seem, at the time, to be the last.

May this "a" and humble revelation be of use in your life.