The (Im)perfection of Spiritism

The time has come to reopen the objection we set aside. It had two parts: that we are imperfect, though destined for perfection, and that we are spirits, and not God. Let us take both, beginning with what the codification itself says.

What the Codification Says#

Where does the idea that we are imperfect spirits come from?

About our origin, the codification always uses the same formula, and repeats it from work to work:

"God has created all spirits in a state of simplicity and ignorance; that is to say, without knowledge." — The Spirits' Book, question 115

"God has not created any spirits bad; He has created them simple and ignorant, that is to say, possessing an equal aptitude for good and for evil." — The Spirits' Book, question 121

"All are created simple and ignorant; they gain instruction in the struggles and tribulations of corporeal life." — The Spirits' Book, question 133

"We have already told you that spirits are created simple and ignorant." — The Spirits' Book, question 634

"Souls, or spirits, are created simple and ignorant, that is to say, without knowledge and without the consciousness of good and evil, but with the aptitude of acquiring, in knowledge and in morality, all that they lack." — Heaven and Hell

"All are created simple and ignorant, with an equal aptitude to progress by their individual activity; all will attain the degree of perfection compatible with the creature by their personal efforts." — Genesis

Now notice what this formula says, and above all what it does not say.

It is always the same: simple and ignorant. Never imperfect.

I searched the five works of the codification — The Spirits' Book, The Mediums' Book, The Gospel According to Spiritism, Heaven and Hell and Genesis. The literal concept of "created imperfect" does not appear a single time.

What is said is that we were created without knowledge, and that knowledge is won. That is different from having been created defective.

It would be dishonest, however, to stop here, because there is the other side — and it has to be faced.

The codification states, in eight passages, that we were not created perfect.

You already know the first. It is question 119, the one behind the objection we set aside: "Where would be the merit without the struggle?"

Genesis goes further. Kardec raises the objection and, in answering it, ties perfection to the very existence of evil:

"If he had made man perfect, evil would not exist. If man had been created perfect, he would be carried by fate in the way of goodness." — Genesis, chapter III, item 9

The most direct of all comes in the form of a question. Question 130 of The Spirits' Book begins like this:

"If the opinion which admits that some beings have been created perfect and superior to all others be erroneous…".

The question does not discuss whether the opinion is erroneous. It takes it as given.

The other five say the same thing with a word you will recognize:

"God having created the soul, not perfect — but susceptible of becoming such, in order that it may possess the merits of its labors — the soul may err. Its lapses from the right road are the consequence of its natural weakness." — Heaven and Hell

"God has created them perfectible; He has given them an aim, viz., the attainment of perfection and of the happiness that is the consequence of perfection; but He has not given them perfection; He has willed that they should owe it to their own personal efforts, so that they might have all the merit of its acquisition." — Heaven and Hell, first part, chapter IX, item 20

"God has not made him a machine, acting and obeying, blindly, a foreign impulsion. This liberty, it is true, renders him fallible; but it also renders him perfectible…" — Heaven and Hell, second part, chapter V, message to the Spirit Félicien

"…the spirit which animates the being essentially perfectible — man; this king of the creation. (…) Well, understand, then, that no individual of the other races living on the earth can be compared with man, alone perfectible in himself, and in his works." — The Mediums' Book, chapter XXII, dissertation by the Spirit Erastus

"…into the bosom of Him who created you weak to make you perfectible, and who wants you to shape your soft clay yourselves, so as to be the artisans of your immortality." — The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter VI, item 6, message from the Spirit of Truth, Paris, 1861

This is where the sentence so many Spiritists repeat is born. "God having created the soul, not perfect — but susceptible of becoming such" and "God has created them perfectible" are, point for point, the "we are not perfect, we are perfectible" heard in the centers.

A Word Corrected#

We are left, then, with two findings that have to live together.

The codification never says that we were created imperfect.

And the codification says, eight times, that we were not created perfect.

The key to reconciling the two lies in a single word, which Kardec himself wrote and corrected straight away.

In the Spiritist Review of March 1864, in an article called — with no irony whatsoever — "On the Perfection of Created Beings", Kardec writes:

"Created simple and ignorant, and for that very reason imperfect, or rather incomplete, they must acquire by themselves and through their own activity the knowledge and the experience that they cannot have at the outset."

Read the sentence again. Kardec writes "imperfect" and, in the same line, corrects himself:

"and for that very reason imperfect, or rather incomplete"

He used the word and immediately exchanged it. Because "imperfect" carries the idea of a flaw, and that was not what he meant. What he meant is that the created being begins incomplete — with latent capacities to develop, not with defects to repair.

And the scale in The Spirits' Book confirms the correction, if read carefully. Those who reach the top are not called perfect. Question 97 says:

"We may place in the first or highest rank those who have reached the degree of relative perfection which constitutes what may be called 'pure spirits'."

Pure. And the way there, in question 985, is described as purification: spirits reincarnate "in worlds of progressively higher degrees, until, having divested themselves of all materiality and washed themselves clean of all stains". Divesting, washing clean. The codification's word for evolution is not adding. It is taking away.

A century later, Spiritist literature said the same thing in so many words. In the book Segurança Mediúnica (Mediumistic Safety), Miramez writes:

"The Spirit, in the deep spiritual philosophy, learns nothing. Everything we hear from others and everything we see in books, including other methods of learning, aims only to wake us up, to awaken what exists within the consciousness, because God, being the supreme perfection, would make nothing imperfect*. We do not have only six or seven senses. Our gifts are many. The others still escape human progress.*

Once developed or awakened, in the dawn of time and in the blessings of God, we shall begin to enter what we may call 'the whole of awareness, of wisdom and of love', in view of what our world holds on its evolutionary scale."

The part in bold says it all.

Where Would Be the Merit?#

Now question 119 can be answered, without dodging it.

The Spirits say that, had we been created perfect, there would be no merit. But the merit they speak of is that of someone who works, and there is work in all four witnesses. Ra calls it the Choice. Bashar, acting to the best of your ability. Sai Baba, sadhana. Patanjali, practice and non-attachment. All of them ask for effort.

What changes is the object of the effort. If the essence were defective, the work would be to repair it. If it is perfect, and what is incomplete is the manifestation — as Kardec corrected —, the work is to complete the manifestation: to remove what covers, to awaken what is latent. The merit remains whole. It only changes place. It leaves the essence and goes to the choice of each day.

And where, then, does what needs to be removed come from?

When we were created, simple and ignorant, at the moment of creation we were in a state of happiness. It could not be otherwise: God creates every creature destined for happiness. Kardec records it in The Spirits' Book, in the comment to question 148: "Religion also teaches that we shall be happy, or unhappy, according to the good or the evil we have done." Considering God as infinite goodness, the only option is that we were created happy, and so we remained until our first choices.

We could have chosen only the path of good and had attitudes 100% aligned with the laws of God. Had we done so, we would have remained eternally happy, evolving until we became complex beings, knowers of all, wise and pure. Pure Spirits, as Spiritism defines them.

Since we made choices far from the laws of God, we moved away from full happiness while we evolved our bodies and our wisdom.

It is these mistaken choices and their effects that need to be transformed, eliminated and removed from the path, so that only the essential remains: our perfect and good consciousness.

It is as if today we were a compound of the perfect and good essence, added to the aggregated energies that stray from the law of God through the mistaken choices of the past. As we manage to free ourselves from these energies and remain in the essence, we will be fully happy once again.

This also answers Genesis, for which a man created perfect would make evil impossible.

Within the perfection of God's creation, there is the possibility of evil existing, of pain, of suffering and of all the ills we feel in our lives. And this was not a mistake on God's part: He being perfect, any mistake is out of the question. Within God's perfection, there is the option for us, intelligent beings, to make choices that stray from His laws. That is the origin of our unhappiness.

Closer to God than to Spirit#

The objection had a second part, and it goes deeper than the first: for Spiritism, we are spirits, and not God.

Kardec organizes everything that exists into three principles. It is in question 27:

27. There are, then, two general elements of the universe — matter and spirit?

– Yes; and above them both is God, the Creator, Parent of all things. These three elements are the principle of all that exists — the universal trinity…

God, spirit and matter. The universal trinity.

And the Spirits themselves admit that the middle one is hard to explain:

23. a) What is the essential nature of spirit?

– It is not possible to explain the nature of spirit in your language. For you it is not a thing, because it is not palpable; but for us it is a thing. Know this well: nothing is nothingness, and nothingness does not exist.

Faced with this triad, the Spiritist usually places themselves in the middle. Matter is the body, which is left behind. God is above, distant, at the top of a very long ladder. And we are the Spirit: an individual being, evolving, trying to climb.

This book proposes looking from another place. Go back to Made of God: before Creation, only God existed, and everything that was created was made of Him. If that is so, what exists at the bottom of you is closer to the first principle of the triad than to the second. Spirit and matter are the way this essence manifests itself — spirit to learn, matter to experience. The essence itself is of God.

The codification leaves a sign of this. Ask where the law of God is written, and the answer does not point upward:

621. Where is the law of God inscribed?

– In the conscience.

621. a Since man carries the law of God in his conscience, where was the need of revealing it to him?

– He had forgotten and misunderstood it; God willed that it should be recalled to his memory.

In the conscience. Not in a book, not in a distant heaven: within. And if the law of God has been written in us forever, and was only forgotten, the work is not to go and fetch it from outside. It is to remember.

Changing this outlook opens a portal of possibilities. Whoever sees themselves as an imperfect spirit climbing a ladder spends their life measuring the distance to the top. Whoever sees themselves as the substance of God learning to express itself stops measuring distances. The peace, the love, the wisdom you seek stop being conquests far ahead and become possibilities here, in the now, already available, waiting for a way through. What seemed impossible for an imperfect spirit becomes natural for one who is made of God.

Those who see themselves only as a body live the illusion of being something that is born, falls ill, grows old and ends, that can be imperfect and that, for that reason, suffers. Spiritism sees this illusion clearly and gives it a name: ignorance.

And we Spiritists can live the same illusion one step higher: that of being the spirit — something immortal, but always changing, subject to the pain of each trial. We exchange the body for the spirit, and go on taking for ourselves what changes and evolves.

Whoever understands that we are essentially God, neither matter nor spirit, goes on living impermanence — the body grows old, the days go by, the incarnations follow one another. But they live all of this from another place, where the mind grows quiet and realization happens: a presence that does not begin or end, that nothing disturbs and that lacks nothing.

There, there is no effort to be happy, because happiness is the very nature of that. The Indian tradition calls it sat-chit-ananda — being, consciousness, bliss. Patanjali speaks of the Seer in its own essential nature. It is a peace that depends on nothing in order to exist, and for that reason nothing can take it away.

The waves go on rising and falling. But whoever sees them already knows that they are the ocean.

Kardec did not codify this. It is the proposal of this book, read from the trinity he himself described. But notice that it erases none of the three principles. It only changes the place from which you look at them.

You are still spirit, just as you are still matter while you are incarnate. These are the forms through which you manifest and perceive yourself: the body, in this life; the spirit, through all of them. None of this ceases to exist. The spirit remains immortal, goes on learning, goes on reincarnating, exactly as the Doctrine teaches.

What this book proposes is that you are spirit, and that you are more than that. Beneath the spirit that evolves and the body that grows old, there is what does not change — and it is there, and not in the middle of the triad, that your essence dwells.

Four Witnesses, a Single Word#

Kardec called it incomplete. The four witnesses had other names for the same thing.

Ra calls it distortion: light passing through the prism, without ceasing to be light.

Bashar calls it belief: what you believe yourself to be and that no longer matches who you are.

Sai Baba speaks of the Atma covered over: the Atma does not change, and what suffers and learns is everything that has built up on top of it.

Patanjali calls it avidya: taking the not-self for the self.

And when the question is about what we are at bottom, all four answer from the same side of the triad. Ra: "You are". Bashar: the One is the All. Sai Baba: the Atma is Brahman. Patanjali: the Seer, in its own essential nature.