On envy in mediums

By himself and through his own intelligence, the vain man is as contemptible as he is worthy of commiseration. He pushes the truth away from before him, in order to replace it with personal arguments and convictions, which he deems infallible and irrevocable, because they belong to him. The vain man is always selfish, and selfishness is the scourge of Humanity. And yet, by despising the rest of the world, he clearly shows his own smallness; by repelling truths that are novelties to him, he likewise shows the limitation of his own intelligence, perverted by his obstinacy, which only increases his vanity and his selfishness.

Woe to the man who lets himself be dominated by these two enemies of himself! When he awakens in that state in which truth and light will pour over him from all sides, he will see in himself only a miserable being, who madly exalted himself above Humanity during his earthly life, and who will be far below certain more modest and more simple beings, upon whom he thought to impose himself here on Earth.

Be humble of heart, you to whom God has permitted to partake of His spiritual gifts. Attribute no merit to yourselves, just as it is not attributed to the work and the tools, but to the workman. Remember well that you are nothing but instruments which God uses to manifest to the world His omnipotent Spirit, and that you have no reason to glorify yourselves. There are so many mediums, ah! who become vain, instead of humble, as their gifts develop! This is a setback to progress, for instead of being humble and passive, the medium often repels, out of vanity and pride, important communications brought to light through others more deserving. God does not consider the material position of a person in order to confer upon him the spirit of holiness; far from it, since He often exalts the humblest among the humble, in order to endow them with the greatest faculties, so that the world may clearly see that it is not man, but the Spirit of God through man, that works miracles. As I have said, the medium is a mere instrument of the great Creator of all things, and it is to this latter that he must render glory, it is to Him that he must give thanks for His inexhaustible goodness.

I should also like to say a word about the envy and jealousy that often reign among mediums and which, like a weed, must be uprooted as soon as it begins to appear, for fear that it may smother the good seeds nearby.

In the medium, envy is as fearsome as pride; it proves the same need for humility. I would even say that it denotes a lack of common sense. It is not by showing envy of your neighbor's gifts that you will receive similar gifts, for, if God gives much to some and little to others, be assured that, in acting thus, He has a well-founded reason. Envy exasperates the heart; it even smothers the best sentiments. It is, therefore, an enemy that one could only avoid with much care, for it grants no truce once it has taken hold of us. This applies to all the cases of earthly life. But I wished to speak principally of envy among mediums, as ridiculous as it is contemptible and unfounded, and which proves how weak man is when he lets himself be enslaved by the passions.

Luos.

Note. – During the reading of this last communication before the Society, a discussion arose about the envy of mediums, compared with that of somnambulists. One of the members, Mr. D…, said that envy, in his opinion, is the same in both cases and that, if it appears more frequently among somnambulists, it is because, in that state, they do not know how to dissimulate it.

Mr. Allan Kardec refutes this opinion: “Envy,” he says, “seems inherent to the somnambulic state, owing to a cause that is difficult to understand and which the somnambulists themselves cannot explain. Such a sentiment exists among somnambulists who, while awake, act toward one another only with benevolence. In mediums it is far from being habitual, evidently being bound up with the moral nature of the individual. One medium envies another medium because it is in his nature to be envious. This flaw, a consequence of pride and selfishness, is essentially prejudicial to the good quality of the communications, whereas the most envious somnambulist may be very lucid, which is easily conceived. The somnambulist sees by himself; it is his own Spirit that detaches itself and acts: he has need of no one. The medium, on the contrary, is nothing but an intermediary: he receives everything from spirits foreign to him, and his personality is far less in play than that of the somnambulist. The Spirits sympathize with him by reason of his qualities or his defects. Now, the defects most antipathetic to good Spirits are pride, selfishness, and envy. Experience teaches us that the mediumistic faculty, as a faculty, is independent of moral qualities; it may, just like the somnambulic faculty, exist in the highest degree in the most perverse of men. This is absolutely not the case with regard to the sympathies of good Spirits, who naturally communicate all the more readily, the purer and more sincere the intermediary charged with transmitting their thought, and the more the medium departs from the nature of evil Spirits. In this respect they do what we ourselves do when we take someone as a confidant. Especially as concerns envy, since this imperfection exists in almost all somnambulists, being much rarer in mediums, it seems that in the former it is a rule and in the latter the exception, whence it follows that the cause should not be the same in the two cases.” Allan Kardec.

Paris. — Typ. H. CARION, rue Bonaparte, 64.