book
-report from AND LIFE GOES
ON
Extracts from the book;
IN THE GREATER WORLD
video about the author/receiver:
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Chico Xavier was born on April
2nd, 1910, in the small interior town of Pedro Leopoldo in the central
state of Minas Gerais. He was one of a family of nine children, whose
mother died when he was only five, after which he was brought up by a
godmother. By all accounts, she treated him very harshly, resorting to
physical violence on occasions, which may have had something to do with
the onset of his mediumship.
The earliest recoiled instance of Chico's abilities, according to his
later recollections, was at age four, when he overheard his parents
discussing why a neighbour had had an abortion. Chico prompdy piped up:
'The problem was inadequate nesting of the egg which led to the foetus
adopting an ectopic position: His parents had no idea what he was taking
about, and as he later recalled, neither did he.
Shortly after his mother's death, Chico saw her materialized in front of
him, and by the time he went to primary school three years later he was
quite accustomed to hearing voices and feeling the presence of spirits,
and doing what they said he should do.
One day the pupils were told to write an essay on the history of Brazil
for a competition being run by the state government. Chico was about to
begin writing and wondering what to put down, when he saw a man beside him
who seemed to be dictating all to him. Chico wrote what he heard, and won
an honourable mention in the contest, much to the surprise of his teacher
and classmates. These were even more surprised when he claimed to have
received the essay complete from a spirit.
Chico left school at thirteen after completing primary level, which in the
Brazil of 1923 was scarcely adequate training for a boy who was to become
the country's most prolific author. While still at school, he began to
work for his living, first at the age of eleven in a textile plant where
he stayed four years, later working as a kitchen hand and counter
salesman, and finally at a very modest job in a branch office of the
Ministry of Agriculture, where he remained from 1933 until his retirement
in 1961.
He began his work as a practising medium in 1927. One of his sisters
appeared to have gone insane and was seriously ill. She was visited by a
local healing medium, who decided it was a case of possession and prompdy
cured her, which so impressed the entire Xavier family that they renounced
Catholicism on the spot and became Spiritists. The healing medium's wife,
Mrs Carmen Pera'ao, was so pleased with the recovery of Chico's sister
that she decided to found a small evangelical Spiritist centre. Chico,
also deeply impressed by what had happened to his sister, was eager to
attend.
On July 8th of that year, Mrs Pera'cio heard a voice telling her to give
Chico a pencil and some paper, and when she did so there followed a
seventeen-page message of spiritual guidance on themes from the gospels,
signed A Friendly Spirit'. At another session shortly afterwards, Mrs
Pera'ao saw a vision of a man dressed in priest's robes and surrounded by
a brilliant aura, who again told her to give Chico pencil and paper, upon
which seventeen-year-old Chico wrote down detailed instructions for the
treatment of his sister lately cured of apparent madness. The spirit
introduced himself to Mrs Pera'ao as 'Emmanuel', saying he was Chico's
spiritual friend, although it was only in 1931 that Chico himself was to
become aware of the chief spirit guide who was to remain with him for the
rest of his life.
At another early session at the Pedro Leopoldo centre, Mrs Pera'ao saw a
vision of what she later described as a rainstorm of books falling about
Chico's head. If ever a writer had his career literally thrust upon him,
it was surely Chico Xavier.
Since 1927, he had spent, on his own reckoning, an average of five hours'
every day in direct contact with his spirit guides. His lifelong friend,
author-doctor Dias Barbosa, has calculated that Chico spent a total of
73,000 working hours as a medium, equivalent to more than eight years,in
his first forty years of activity, all of this outside the working hours
of his regular government job.
Chico soon proved to be an amazingly prolific automatic writer, and before
long he began to produce a series of poems that made a profound impression
on his friends and members of the centre run by Mrs Pera'ao. The poems
kept coming, signed by the names of most of Brazil's greatest deceased
poets, and in 1932 a 421-page selection of them was published by the
Brazilian Spiritist Federation. Entitled Parnassus From Beyond the Tomb,
it became a best-seller at once and started a controversy that had not
died out forty years later. To many Brazilians, it offered the most
convincing evidence ever published for the fact that human beings, or some
component of them, really do survive physical death.
He was a popular hero to millions throughout Brazil, rich and poor, his
name being a household word along with f x the football-star Pele'. He had
been awarded the freedom of most leading Brazilian cities, and his two
television appearances in 1971 were watched by more than two million
viewers, an all-time record for Brazil with the exception of the 1970
world football cup final.
Yet despite his enormous popularity and record-breaking sales, Francisco
Candido Xavier was a poor man who never sought nor received a single
payment for anything he wrote. For Chico Xavier; as everybody knew him,
was a Spiritist medium whose speciality was that of automatic writing, or
psychography as Brazilians prefer to call it.
By 1973 he had received the work of almost 500 different discarnate
authors. His entire literary output had been produced in a state of
trance, much of it in public at Spiritist centres in the towns of Pedro
Leopoldo, where he lived until 1958, and Uberaba; where he lived in a
sparsely furnished house on his government pension of about 100 dollars a
month.
Guy L.Playfair:
“I watched Chico at work for four hours. His right hand, which over the
years had drafted something like five million words, was kept busy without
a break, alternating between signing books and shaking the hands of the
public that was helping push his sales even higher. About 2,000 books were
sold on that day alone, from the temporary bookstall set up at the
entrance to the club. Normally, this would bring the author a sizeable sum
in royalty payments, but like all the rest of the money Chico's books had
been making for forty years, this would soon be spent on food, clothing
and medical assistance for the poor.
* **
After the fuss over the Humberto de Campos affair had died down (that
Chico so continued the work of his, and many gone authors else), Chico
went on quietly working both at his full-time government job and at the
Pedro Leopoldo Spiritist Centre, producing books with the regularity of a
factory production line at an average of about three a year. Campos,
incidentally, wrote a further seven books through Chico's mediumship after
the court case, but prudently signed them 'Brother X' to avoid further
problems.
In 1958 there came a turning point in Chico's life, when he suddenly
walked out of his house and went to live in Uberaba, some 250 miles away
though still in the huge state of Minas Gerais, which is larger than
France.
Before he left for Uberaba, however, Chico was to produce one of his most
impressive books, which seems to have been deliberately planned to
confound critics, both as regards its subject matter and the extraordinary
way it was put together.
This was Evolution in Two Worlds (Chico's sixtieth book), and it marked a
departure in his routine in that it was the first of a total of seventeen
to be automatically written in collaboration with another medium. The
second writer was a young doctor and Spiritist named Waldo Vieira, a
member of the staff of Uberabas dentistry and pharmacy faculty who also
ran a free clinic at the centre Chico was to join.
The interesting feature of this collaboration was that Chico, still in
Pedro Leopoldo, would receive one chapter while Dr Vieira would receive
the next one three days later and 250 miles away. In this way they
produced the books forty chapters at alternate sessions between January
15th and June 29th, 1958. Only upon completion of his half did Chico get
instructions from his guide Emmanuel to contact Dr Vieira and put the book
together.
The book, which we shall examine in some detail later on, was totally
unlike anything Chico had produced previously. It is a somewhat dry and
didactic work written in the style of notes for a series of lectures on
the history of evolution on both the physical and spiritual planes. It
reveals an immense knowledge of several sciences that no ordinary writer,
even a qualified scientist, could have assembled without copious research
and note-taking, and despite the wide education gap between the two
writers, the unity of style is total. One chapter frequently begins
exactly where the previous one leaves off!
part 2
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