Autonomous morality and heteronomous morality

We live in a world hitherto dominated by the concepts of heteronomy. To understand this concept well, we need to analyze the etymology of the word: heteronomy is formed from the Greek radical “hetero” which means “different”, and “nomos” which means “law”, therefore, it is the acceptance of norms that are not ours, but that we recognize as valid to guide our conscience that will discern the moral value of our actions. This understanding is fundamental, because understanding autonomous morality makes a total difference in understanding Spiritism.

the heteronomous world

In the heteronomous world, we attribute everything to something external: the fault lies with the devil or the obsessor, the effect lies with divine wrath, and reparation lies with the imposition. karma. Everything, absolutely everything in the heteronomous world comes as an external imposition, through laws that we respect out of obligation and not out of understanding. And in the absence of her or her actors, we find ourselves without limits and even without self-love.

Heteronomy is something inherent and perhaps even necessary to a condition of little spiritual advancement, when, without a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of life and evolution, we are forced to attend, out of fear, to the impositions of divine laws, humanized, or even human laws, divinized. Unfortunately, as we already know, it is also widely used by religions to maintain control over their faithful. But this is something that, as we can see, changes as the human spirit advances, both in science and in morality.

A big problem with the concept of heteronomy, or, rather, with the belief in it, is that for a certain time the evolution of the Spirit was involved: well, if the individual believes that his difficulties in life are a punishment imposed by God, he only accepts his submissively (which, yes, is important), but without doing anything to change it. He just waits for the end of his trials. Not even charity can really be understood and practiced in a heteronomous context, as the individual practices charity expecting a return, without understanding that it is a moral and natural obligation of the thinking being.

Another very problematic point is that when the individual believes in divine punishment - and, even worse, in eternal punishment - it is very common for him to lose any limit after making a mistake. Surely, the reader has heard the statement countless times: “I'm already going to hell, so one more sin, whatever”.

But we are wrong if we think that the heteronomous concept is found only in religions. Unfortunately, even in the spiritist milieu, this concept has also infiltrated, especially with the adulteration of the works O Céu e o Inferno and A Genesis, by Allan Kardec. If today we constantly hear, from the mouths of spiritists, the words “karma”, “law of action and reaction”, “rescue”, this is largely due to these adulterations, passed from generation to generation and that today make many of us , spiritists, we still believe that “karma” makes me reborn in this life to “rescue” a past mistake.

Let's see: it is precisely one of the most serious adulterations in O Céu e o Inferno that instilled this heteronomous thought, which delays the advance of the Spirit, in the heart of a Doctrine that was totally focused on the autonomy of being. In chapter VII, item 9 of the cited work, we read: “Every fault committed, every wrong done is a debt that must be paid; if not in one lifetime, it will be in the next one or more.” This item did not exist until Kardec's death, and only appeared in new editions made more than two years after the Professor's death.

No — I insist on saying: in Spiritism there is no karma, nor "law of action and reaction” and, much less, “rescue”. These are concepts that, deep down, have the same effect as belief in divine punishment and the fall through sin, which were both ideas overcome by Spiritism.

Autonomous Morality

Opposed to the concept of heteronomy, autonomy (self — of oneself) places the individual at the center of its evolution. It depends on your will, solely and exclusively, both your actions and your thoughts and the spirits attracted or repelled by them.

In the concept of autonomy, which was not born with Spiritism, but which was expanded by this Doctrine — and demonstrated — the Spirit is master of itself and of its choices from the moment it develops consciousness and, with that, comes to have the free will. Thus, he chooses between good and bad, or rather, he chooses ways to act in the face of situations and whether or not he congratulates himself on its effects. However, when the effect is negative, it does not mean that you are being effectively punished by a punishing God, but that you are suffering the moral consequences of your actions. And these moral consequences only exist for the Spirit who is already aware of their existence, which is why animals, for example, do not have them.

This is how, evaluating the consequences of our actions and, when more conscious, the moral imperfections that lead us to make mistakes, we impose on ourselves lives full of evidence and atonements, in order to try to get rid of these imperfections, by learning:

“Some, therefore, impose upon themselves a life of miseries and privations, aiming to bear them with courage”, when they wish to acquire patience, resignation or know how to act with few resources. Others wish to test whether they have already overcome inferior passions and then “prefer to experience the temptations of wealth and power, which are far more dangerous, through the abuses and misapplications to which they can give rise”. Those who struggle with the abuse they have committed, “decide to test their strength in the struggles they will have to sustain in contact with addiction” (The Book of Spirits, p.220).

It is clear: when doing evil against Inferior Spirits, we will have an almost guaranteed chance of receiving, in return, revenge; but this revenge, if any, is the effect of choice of the other Spirit, and not of a “karmatic” reaction of a supposed “law of action and reaction” — which, by the way, is a law of Newtonian Physics, and not a divine one. When practicing revenge, the other Spirit also errs, as it gives rise to the habit of its imperfections and, therefore, it can enter a circle of error and revenge with the other that can last centuries. When this does not occur - and this is the key point - the effect is only the Spirit who errs to remain longer away from the happiness of good Spirits, due to his own imperfections.

There is no “law of action and reaction” in Spiritism

Many people, attached to old concepts of the past, feel perplexed by such a statement, but anyone who has dedicated themselves to studying Spiritism can perceive that autonomous morality, in everything, is made very clear to our eyes, through the agreement universal teachings of the Spirits. What do we gain by doing good? We will move faster. And what will we suffer for doing evil? We will be longer held back by spiritual inferiority and around successive incarnations in lower worlds.

Spiritism shows us that, when we enter the circle of consciousness, we start to talk about our own destinies, and the trials and atonements that we face in the current incarnation are due to our own choices, made before incarnating, although very difficult, since, in a state of wandering spirit (freed from the body), we evaluate our imperfections much more clearly and, thus, choose opportunities, even if suffered, to learn and rise. Spiritism, by the way, when well understood, favors us to make better choices, because we stop only wishing for atonement past mistakes, in a mechanics of sin and punishment, and we start to choose opportunities that take us deeper to learn and develop better habits, hiding the imperfections that we have turned into habits.

We have already addressed a very typical case, extracted from the Spiritist Magazine, which deals with the question of the Spirit's choices regarding its tests, treated by Kardec in Evocation of the assassin Lemaire, in the March 1858 issue.

Another very interesting case is that of Antonio B, who, having walled up his wife alive in the previous life, not knowing how to deal with this guilt, planned an incarnation where he ended up buried alive, after being thought dead. He woke up in his coffin and inside he suffered horribly until his death, as if he had “paid” that debt with his own conscience. What really matters in this case is that, effectively, in life, he was a worthy and good man, and he wouldn't need this tragic end to “require” anything.

A rational proof that there is no such “law”: if an inferior Spirit does evil against a superior Spirit, what will he receive in return? Nothing but understanding and love. The example of the murderer Lemaire demonstrates this. So where would the return be? In another Spirit that God would designate for his "vengeance", to "collect a debt", thus making him also a Spirit in debt to the Law?

No, dear brother: there is no return except in the realization, sooner or later, on the part of the Spirit itself, that he is not happy as long as he is imperfect. Of course, we also need to remember: the Spirit is in the environment where it likes, and it attracts Spirits of the same vibration to itself. Therefore, he may even feel happy, but the Spirit will never be happy, which, due to its predispositions, only attracts inferior Spirits to itself. In this also consists a kind of punishment.

Reason explains, guides and comforts

The greatest characteristic of Spiritism is to be a rational scientific Doctrine, whose theory was born from the logical observation of the facts and the teachings of the Spirits. Now, when it comes to God, what would be the reason for him to punish us with punishments, since he created us and knows that our mistakes are born of our imperfections? There is no rationality in that. It's as if we punish our children for getting math wrong or putting their finger in the socket: in either case, the pain or feeling of being left behind is the punishment itself, and by adding an additional punishment to that, we are only conditioning the being not to think and only to be afraid of making mistakes - and therefore, to be afraid to try.

We were talking about reason: because it is mainly through reason that Spiritism leads us to better evolutionary choices. By deeply understanding the Doctrine, we stop making choices because of impositions or external expectations, either because “God wants”, because “Jesus waits”, or because “the devil haunts”. We start to make better choices, with a more active will, when we understand that the more time we allow for our imperfections or our materiality, the longer it will take to get out of this painful and brutish “wheel of incarnations”.

This understanding is also great remedy against suicide: we no longer see it with the concepts of sin and punishment - which are still disseminated and defended even in the spiritist environment - but, with a rational understanding: if I am an inferior Spirit, full of imperfections, it means that life is a rich opportunity for apprenticeship. Shortening it by my choice, in addition to being a huge missed opportunity, will just be a waste of time, because I will see myself, in Spirit, imperfect as I am, maybe even more wide open, and I will have to go back and start a new existence to be able to learn and get rid of imperfections that make it impossible for me to become happier.

The atonement explained in the light of the Spiritist Doctrine

Kardec defines it like this, in Practical Instructions on Spiritist Manifestations, from 1858:

ATONEMENT — penalty suffered by Spirits in punishment of faults committed during corporeal life. As moral suffering, the atonement it is found in the errant state; as physical suffering, in the incarnate state. The vicissitudes and torments of bodily life are, at the same time, tests for the future and atonement to the past.

It seems, from this text, that Kardec then defended that, yes, we pay in the present life for past mistakes? Not exactly. We cannot forget that, for the Spiritist Doctrine, autonomy, or the Spirit as the central actor of everything, is the key piece of everything. Therefore, even in the case of atonement, is something that consists in the choice of the Spirit itself, in order to seek to overcome an acquired imperfection:

The duration of the punishment is subject to the improvement of the guilty spirit. No condemnation for a fixed time is pronounced against him. What God requires to put an end to suffering is the repentance, expiation and reparation – in short: a serious, effective improvement, as well as a sincere return to the good.

KARDEC, Allan. Heaven and hell. Translation by Emanuel G. Dutra, Paulo Henrique de Figueiredo and Lucas Sampaio. FEAL Publisher, 2021.

And, to better understand the use of the terms punishment and punishment, by Allan Kardec, it is necessary to understand the philosophical context of Rational Spiritualism, in which it was inserted. We already talked about this in the article “Punishment and reward: you need to study Paul Janet to understand Allan Kardec“.

However, we are well aware that “the times have come” and that the planet Earth will slowly cease to be a planet of trials and atonements to be a world of regeneration, where there should be incarnations a little happier than the current ones. Let us use, for a moment, reason to evaluate all that we have exposed so far:

If the Spiritist Doctrine, teaching us autonomous morality, outlines better paths and better choices, let's think: what does it teach the individual more? A suffering of the same kind and degree, as in the case of Antônio B, above, or, understanding the imperfections that led us to do evil, in the first place, a life full of opportunities, often quite challenging and laborious, to exercise learning and doing good?

Do you understand where we are going? everything, absolutely everything, depends on our choices in face of our ability to consciously understand ourselves, and, in this, the study of Spiritism leverages us in several steps.

This is why the world will cease to be a world of trials and expiations: because the Spirits who incarnate here will begin to choose their incarnations better, ceasing to apply the law of talion (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth) to themselves in order to then take care to develop healthier moral habits. Even in this we contact that everything comes from the individual to the outside, and not the other way around.

Conclusion

Therefore, brothers, onward: let us study Spiritism in depth and, today knowing the adulterations in O Céu e o Inferno and A Genesis, let us study the original versions (already made available by FEAL) so that we no longer waste time with heteronomous concepts and, above all, so that we no longer repeat, in the Spiritist environment, the pitiful statements like those who say that “so and so was born with mental problems because he is paying for a mistake in his past life”. This, in addition to being an absurd mistake, keeps people away from Spiritism.

See an example:

Let's be amazed: this sentence is not from Kardec. Nor does it appear to be yours, nor can it be found in ANY of your works. This is one more proof of how much Spiritism was invaded by false ideas, almost always anti-doctrinal.

Our tests are rich opportunities, almost always chosen by ourselves, being imposed only in cases in which we do not have consciential conditions for such choices and, even so, they are given by action of benevolence of superior Spirits, and not as divine punishment.

The soul or Spirit suffers in the spiritual life the consequences of all the imperfections that it has not been able to correct in the corporeal life. Your state, happy or unhappy, is inherent in your degree of purity or impurity. (Heaven and hell).

The greatest punishment is that we continue for countless ages dragging ourselves in the mud of our imperfections. That's enough.

Note: the name of the article comes from the text of the same title, which served as inspiration for this one, from the book Autonomia: a história sem contada do Espiritismo, by Paulo Henrique de Figueiredo.

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