The Meaning of Life

1 WHAT IS OBSESSION?

ORIENTATION FOR THE TREATMENT OF

OBSESSION

Why do we live and for what reason? The reply to this question is of great importance in order for us to understand the problem of obsession. According to Spiritism, we live to develop the psychic potentialities with which we are all

endowed. Our earthly existence has as its aim the transcendence, that is to say, the constant overcoming of our human condition. From birth until our last day on Earth, we go through experiences that develop our innate aptitudes, in all senses. The newborn child grows day by day, develops his organism, and learns to

communicate with others, to speak and to reason, to want and to act in order to obtain what he wants. He exceeds the condition in which he was born and passes on to the superior phases of childhood, later entering into adolescence and youth, maturity and old age. When going through all of this, he develops his organic and psychic forces, his affectivity, his capacity to understand what evolves around him and his power to control the circumstances. This is to transcend, to raise himself above the condition in which he was born. It is for this reason that we live, and this demonstrates to us that the meaning of life is transcendence.

Today, the Existential Philosophy supports this exact principle in the philosophical field. The existentialists consider man as a projecto, that is to say, a being projected into the existence, as an arrow in the direction of a target: that is

the transcendence. However, in Spiritism the existences are many and successive; therefore through each earthly existence we attain a new degree of transcendence. The current parapsychological research on reincarnation confirms this principle. The fact of living through many lives on Earth, and not only one, demonstrates that we have in our subconscious, a storage of remembrances and knowledge,

aspirations, frustrations and traumas much greater than the one discovered by Freud.

It is good to bear in mind this important fact: when Kardec discovered the manifestations of the subconscious, through his research on the psychic phenomena, Freud was only one year of age. This does not undermine Freud, who did not know about Kardec’s research, but attests the security of the Spiritist research of the human psyche. The spiritist conception of human life on Earth is not imaginary; it is real, based on scientific research. Those who consider Spiritism as a superstitious doctrine, created by ignorance, demonstrate being more ignorant than they imagine. The Spiritist Doctrine has been proven scientifically by the

most renowned scientists. We say this to show the readers that the meaning of life that we refer to is not a hypothesis, but rather a reality. If we do not understand that life is transcendence, a growth, an elevation and a constant and proven development of the spiritual being whom we are, we will not be able to face with naturalness the problem of obsession and to strive to resolve it.

From The book "Obsession" by Jose Herculano Pires -  Translated by Jussara Korngold & Marie Levinson