Other passages can only be explained when we know more about the workings of mental currents in the fourth dimension:
   "The boy's glands were transformed into luminous nuclei, like perfect electric generating plants. Yet it was his brain that continued to hold my attention. The medullary conductors formed an extensive wick, sustaining the mental light, like the generous flame of a candle of enormous proportions."
   Tantalizing as such scraps of parascientific information from the other side may be, they are nothing compared to what is to be found in the last two books in the Our Home series. These are Evolution in Two Worlds (1959) and Mechanisms of Mediumship (1960), and they contain a mass of technical information on the functioning of both physical and spiritual worlds the like of which has never been received from any source, normal or otherwise, in the history of literature.
   In his brief introduction to the first of these books, spirit author Andre Luiz says he is merely writing "a simple book on the evolution of the soul on the two planes". The book, which few Chico fans, or anyone else for that matter, find anything like simple, is divided into two parts. The first consists of 20 chapters on subjects ranging from cosmic fluid, the spiritual body, the effects of evolution on heredity, sex, metabolism and the brain, to the workings of reincarnation, the mechanisms of the mind and the general condition of the discarnate, throwing in a brief survey of ancient religions for good measure.
   The second part provides the answers to 20 questions, covering the feeding habits, language, morphology, social life and behaviour of discarnate beings (including relations between the sexes), and dealing with such problems as abortion, premature death, mental defectiveness and the spiritual causes of invasion by microbes.

The book is purely didactic in style, with no trace of the sentimentality of the Our Home novels. It is written in a language the average intelligent layman can understand, if at times only just. Chico himself has said he cannot understand a word of it, and to give some idea of the style, here is a brief extract from a discourse on evolution and sex, taken down by Chico on February 2nd, 1958:
   "Biologists of recent times have often asked, without receiving a reply, if the green algae, proprietors of their own structure, descend from primitive cyanophycenes of more simple texture, in which the bluish pigment of their fundamental composition is phycocyanin, associated with chlorophyll. The existent hiatus, as noted by Hugo de Vries, in the development of mutationism, was bridged by the activities of the Servants of Earthly Organogenesis, who submitted the Leptothrix family to profound alterations in the field of the spirit, transmuting its more complete individuals, which reappeared metamorphosed into the above-mentioned algae, to invade the waters in a luxuriant manner and install a new cycle of progress and renovation ..."
   One does not often find names such as that of Hugo de Vries, the Dutch botanist who rediscovered the laws of Mendel, dropped in this casual way in works by barely-educated Spiritist mediums. Nor do we find such passages as this, indicating knowledge denied to even most intelligent laymen:
   "So we have light and heat, which we theoretically classify among the radiations born from atoms supplied with energy. It is these that, excited in their intimate structure, emit electromagnetic waves."

In another chapter, on the evolution of the spiritual body (parapsychologists may read this as the psi component if it makes them feel better), author Andre Luiz mentions in a passing footnote that "in the Spiritual sphere, where we are apprenticed, the electron is also a dissociable particle". (Although the electron was generally considered elementary by scientists at the time, Chico had written as early as 1948 that "the electrons and protons that form your physical clothing also integrate our vehicles of manifestation, in other vibratory characteristics".
   "There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body," St Paul wrote in his usual plain language to the Corinthians. Evolution in Two Worlds seems to have been written with the aim of stripping the latter of all its mystical connotations. It is presented as something just as real as the physical body, with a structure of its own parallel to it. Chico's chapter on this spiritual body is of special interest.
   There may still be controversy as to whether the chicken came before the egg or vice versa, but Andre Luiz makes it quite clear that the spirit body came before the physical one, always has and always will.
   "All this richness of modelling on the lines of Creation is raised on the basis of corpuscles under irradiations from the mind; corpuscles and irradiations that we cannot define in all their multiplicity and configuration with our present level of knowledge, although we are no longer on the physical plane." It is good to know that even the spirits are not omniscient!
   Andre Luiz frequently complains of the difficulty of finding words that we can understand with which to describe the spirit world. "Death merely dilates our concepts," he explains, "and clarifies our introspection, illuminating our moral sense. But in no way does it solve the problems which the Universe poses at every step with its displays of grandeur."

One intriguing idea that recurs throughout the book is that of a model behind all creation of life. "Under the orientation of Superior Intelligences, the atoms are grouped in immense hives; and under the spiritually directed pressure of electromagnetic waves, the spatial interatomic areas are reduced in a controlled manner, without loss of movement, so as to be transformed into condensed nuclear mass from which the planets are sculpted, and in whose bosom the celestial monads are to find an adequate cradle for development." It is literally a case of mind over matter on a cosmic scale.
   The spiritual body, which the author often calls the psychosoma, is subject to similar control from spirit. "The body that evolves and perfects itself through experience of action and reaction on the earth plane and in the spiritual regions that border it, is susceptible to numerous alterations based on the adynamia arising from our mental fall into remorse, or the hyperdynamia imposed by the deliria of the imagination, as these become responsible for numerous dysfunctions of the soul, born in the state of hypo- or hypertension in the circulatory movement of the forces that keep its organism subtle; it (the psychosoma) may be worn out in the sphere next to the physical one, to be remade there through rebirth along the lines of the pre-existent mental mould, or it may be restricted in order to be reconstituted once more in the uterine vessel, for the recapitulation of the teachings and experiences for which it shows a need, in accordance with the failings of conscience before the Law." (My italics [i.e. Guy Lyon Playfair's]). Reincarnation is clearly not quite as simple as some of us may have thought.
   Over and over again, the idea of a biological "organizing model" crops up. The author insists that it is the spiritual body that moulds or models the physical one, and the latter that represents the former. Just as bricks are put into place according to the architect's instructions, so the cells of our bodies are subjected to the discipline of the "orienting idea" that rules them.

Creation was a slow business. Andre Luiz goes a good deal further than either the Book of Genesis or Allan Kardec in attempting to describe it. (This is one area in which Kardec himself admits his sources of information were way off the mark.)
   Andre Luiz puts the origin of intelligent life at 1.5 billion BC and the first civilizations at 200,000 BC, not bad guesses for 1958, and he makes it clear that each stage of evolution was spread over as many centuries of millennia as were necessary for the spiritual model to act upon the material form.
   One final quotation from this baffling masterpiece must suffice to give an idea of the thorough way spirit author Andre Luiz treats his subject. It may also give an idea of why the book has not yet been translated into any other language (I practically wore out my dictionary to produce this sample):
   "From the atomic crystallizations and from the minerals, from virus to protoplasm, from bacteria and amoebas, algae and vegetables of the pre-Cambrian period to the fetuses and the Lycopodiaceae, the trilobites and cystidia, the Cephalopoda, Foraminifora and radiolarians of the Silurian terrains, the spiritual principle reached the Porifera (sponges) and coelenterates of the Paleozoic era, sketching out the skeletal structure ..." And so on, for 219 pages.
   Evolution in Two Worlds was written in 40 days (20 each by Chico Xavier and Waldo Vieira) in 1958 and published in 1959. While it was still being written, Hernani Guimaraes Andrade published his first book, The Corpuscular Spirit Theory, which had taken him (a qualified engineer) three years to write after more than 20 years of study and reflection. The main idea behind each book is exactly the same; that the spirit or psychosomatic body is real, and corpuscular in nature.
   After Chico's book had been published, an excited admirer went along to see him, taking a copy of Andrade's book with him and asking for his opinion of it.
   "How would I know?" Chico replied helplessly. "I couldn't even understand my own!"
   Asked how he managed to write it in the first place, Chico explained that although in his normal state he was unable to understand a word of Evolution, during the actual writing he had been raised to the level of his superconscious mind, and had taken down, as dictated to him, the notes for a lecture course being given in the next world. This is certainly what the book reads like, and I can find no other feasible explanation for its origin.
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