(Benjamin Teixeira) – Eugênia, could you talk about what you meant when you said that marriage should be open and partners should communicate the suspension of their affectionate commitment to each other, when in doubt about their feelings, in order to have other experiences, informing the spouse?
(Spirit Eugenia) – Yes. I expressed exactly what any sensible couple does, before resorting to the extreme measure of divorce: first, they privately suspend the affectionate commitment to see if the marital crisis is really permanent or temporary, in order to give the relationship a chance to be rebuilt. In fact, when we try to keep distance from extremist postures, we often avoid serious slips and diversion from the programmatic of life planned before reincarnation. Acting thoughtfully and cautiously, one often realizes that the crisis was temporary and that their great love and true affectionate commitment is still the spouse of the momentary downturned marriage. It is wrong both being against the necessity of divorce (this wouldn’t be a spiritist proposition, since it is an undeniable necessity that even the eminent codifier affixed in the “Gospel according to Spiritism”), or, on the other hand, the frivolous and irresponsible attitude of those who end their marriage as if they change clothes. Thereby, we proposed a middle term that fits the real needs of those who go through difficulties in marriage.
(BT) – Eugênia, some people, after reading our dialogue about marriage, assumed that you suggested a suspension of the need to be faithful in marriage and that parallel relationships should be seen naturally, with the spouse’s consent. Probably, I must have been unhappy when expressing your thoughts, for them to have understood something to that effect. Could you clarify your opinion about it?
(SE) – To assume that a spiritist medium would say something like that already shows a strong ill-will. No one stops believing that the Christian God is Love, by the fact that there are passages in the Old Testament that show Yahweh moved by sacred “furies”, because those who read them give a strong discount to the writer, who’s human, and on the other hand, seeks to make a symbolic interpretation of the text, taking the seemingly sacrilegious passages as metaphors. Obviously, we would never say something like that, nor we believe that the medium would say it either. What we proposed was exactly the opposite: a brake for those who find themselves amidst a marital crisis and have already decided to split up. In this manner, we suggested that they remain living under the same roof for a while, despite having already broken up, until there is no more doubt that, in fact, the relationship came to an end.
(BT) – What about virginity? We recently proposed in public that to get married virgin, would be an irresponsible attitude. Do you agree?
(SE) – Yes, at all levels: physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, when considering virginity as lack of knowledge of the other, in any layer of yourself. Not by chance, a classic way to talk about losing virginity was precisely the use of the verb “to know”: “and, then, the bride knew her husband”. In the past and in certain cultures, when marriages were previously agreed by couple’s parents, usually for material interests, the bride and groom would only meet at the wedding. At that very serious moment of their lives, where they would engage forever, during a whole life time, they saw each other for the first time. This would be considered today, almost everywhere, as a nonsense. The same can be said for all other levels of being, all interconnected, all of them revealing new layers of the individual’s spiritual intimacy. Those with a minimum of psychological maturity and experience in life know that one cannot know the future partner totally, until they start having sex. A series of the individual’s emotional layers manifest themselves only after sexual intercourse. Getting married without knowing each other’s ideas and values, how they see the world, how they behave, think and feel, their aims… would be a complete debacle.
Furthermore, it is known today among more lucid people, that a sexual relationship is not only essential, for a greater understanding between partners, as also an indispensable phase of experimentation for the couple’s life, in the intimacy of their daily lives, living together, so that they are more secure of the viability of the relationship. Only then, common sense states that the couple moves forward with the very serious step to be bound by the sacred bonds of marriage. Not doing so would be folly and disregard with the importance of the initiative of marriage or being very naive and misinformed about the complexity of practical interpersonal relationships. Obviously, many may find this a scandalous approach, but any averagely informed and educated person, honest and mature, will acknowledge that what we present here is an unequivocal truism.
(BT) – But doesn’t this seem an incentive so that young people throw themselves into licentious situations?
(SE) – Young people should be guided realistically or, ironically and contrarily, they will be cast into the abyss of excesses by moralist reprimands. Denying them to have sexual experiences, in a liberal culture that is generalised in this way, is the equivalent to ban the use of condoms so that they remain chaste, as proposed today by the Catholic church: both a crime against life, because, while condoms protect people from STDs and unwanted pregnancy, liberal orientation provides a greater capacity for conscious choice, rather than rushed or anxious, by the desire to soon begin a sexual life that is completely secondary in the great decision to marry, when confronted with much deeper and serious issues, such as affinity of ethical and moral values and interpretative paradigms of reality, goals and projects of life between those who are willing to marry.
(BT) – Anything else you find important to say about this matter?
(SE) – That people focus less on the sex issue and think more about love. The errors committed in the course of successive centuries, due to the strong relevance given to this subject, has led millions of people to lose entire reincarnations in sterile discussions or counterproductive guilt, whereas essential subjects are overwhelmingly neglected, such as the practice of good, self-improvement, moralization of the soul, the expansion of the consciousness to broader perspectives, the widening of one’s own level of knowledge. May this serious diversion of focus, criminally committed for millennia, has no continuity in today’s time, so that no kind of abuse is committed, while “the sex of angels” is discussed – an expression that became popular precisely because of a screamingly obvious and serious error of judgment in moral, ethics and fairness, that the exaggerated preoccupation with the issues of sex represents.
(BT) – Finally, I would like that you enlightened us on a final topic: what should we do when we see contradictions or even distortions of the good moral or good principles of common sense, in a mediumistic message?
(SE) – 1. Remember what Kardec said: “contradiction, in most cases, is apparent”. One must look for the depth rather than the form, the essence rather than appearance. The Bible, for example, is a great quilt of contradictions if read literally. When we look more for its content than the sentences used, we can then reach its essence, leaving behind the appearance of the statements.
2. Consult the medium about what the spirit had intended to say. Often, an unfortunate situation happens in the way the message is expressed or, as an incarnate author (*) has already called, “mediumistic naps”, when a thought “comes down” fragmented or incomplete by the translating and interpreting mind of the medium.
3. Make the comparison between the text considered “strange” with assertions already present in other books, either Kardec’s or supplementary ones. Sometimes, a controversial assertion is already inserted in classical works, but it is so discrete or subtle that goes unnoticed.
4. If it is concluded that the medium, in fact, made a mistake, call on him/her for the fraternal warning, in order to find out:
a) if there was a failure in the mediumistic filter, i.e.: a conceptual distortion at the moment of mental reception of the observed text.
b) if, eventually, the entity manifested was an obsessor, mistaken by the unwary interpreter as a mentor.
c) if the communicating entity was always malicious, but, as classified by Kardec of “mystifying spirits” or “pseudo-wise”, disguised itself under the conceptual dress of an apparent wisdom.
d) if unconscious content of the medium himself did not improperly leaked to the message “stemmed” from the Higher Plane.
5. Finally, consider the possibility that the medium is being the channel of a revealing-laboratory, allow me the neologism. What we mean by this is that certain orders of revelation are so polemic, complex and difficult to communicate and be assimilated by the world, that spiritual guides make gradual experiments of transmission of their content, until the moment comes where consensus is achieved and all mediums can, without major impact, ratify the assertion. So, it is not always that we can apply the universal principle of mediumistic communication, because sometimes, almost the majority of all mediums may not be able to assimilate the revolutionary content that one or another medium can. We had some example of this, when our brother Chico Xavier, a great missionary of Spiritism in lands of Minas Gerais, brought to light the idea of Astral Cities, as well as Yvonne Pereira, when she announced to the Brazilian Spiritist Federation, a message from Bezerra de Menezes, in which the disincarnate doctor predicted that, in the future, Spiritual Beings would interact with the world through electronic devices, the so famous today, Instrumental Transcommunication.
Both published this information back in the 40′s, in last century, and each one, in different levels, was said to be obsessed and mystified, by the great leaders of the spiritist movement. In the moral plane, we can see an impressive number of times where sensitive issues were treated with lucidity and an extraordinary foresight by the same unique Chico Xavier, like his mediumistic approach on homosexuality, for example, in the books: “Sexo e Destino” (Sex and Destiny – 1963) and “Vida e Sexo” (Life and Sex – 1968), from the spiritual authors Andre Luiz and Emmanuel, respectively.
In short, we need a lot of criteria before reaching the conclusions about the mediums, their mediumship or the quality of the communicating spirits, because, often, as very intelligently the Americans affirm, we throw or want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or, on the other hand, don’t allow the vices of the past to renew the fires of Inquisition and start the ill-fated witch hunt, almost always inside ourselves, in our resistant moral limitations.
(BT) – Anything else to say about this topic or any of the previous ones?
(SE) – Just to remind that dialogue, serenity, indulgence and prayer must guide the relations in these places really called Christians and Spiritists, and that only through a good understand of the differences (often not so different) and focus on similarities (usually greater than we think of), we can join together in great web of fraternity and love, spreading all over the world, incontestable examples of a new civilization, a new era, a new humanity to Earth, a mission that led to the coming of Spiritism to our orb.
(Mediumistic dialogue held on June 03, 2003.)