Spirit World Secrets: Brazil’s Hidden Knowledge (Ep.6)

What I'm about to talk about today is information that's practically not available in English, but it's very well known in Brazil, where I've spent many years of my life, so I'll share that with you today. 

Welcome to The Meditate More Podcast, where it's all about helping you to meditate more consistently, so you can reap all the incredible magical benefits that meditation can bring to your life today. And here is your host, Manny Mandala.

Hey, and welcome to another episode of The Meditate More Podcast. And if you’re here for the first time, make sure to subscribe because we have a great show for you today. We have some power packed content. 

Today, we’ll talk about spirits, entities and channeling. A big topic in the spiritual community. A lot of people are talking about automatic writing, a lot of spiritual teachers channel. What’s that all about, really? Next, we’ll also talk about how meditation can help you, how can it help you have a better life. And specifically, we'll talk about how to use meditation to balance your life. 

I'm sure you know the feeling, there just aren't enough hours in the day. Hey, if we only had to take care of our health, there would be plenty of time to work out, to shop for healthy foods, to cook healthy meals. If we only had to take care of our career, everything would be fine, but there are so many balls to juggle, so how do we balance them properly? And you know, meditation is all about the Buddha's teaching of the golden middle path, the way of balance. So meditation is all about balance, we'll talk about that today. 

Third, we'll also talk about the nuts and bolts of meditation, the practical how-to stuff. And of course, we'll go in depth on the spirit world. What I'm about to talk about today is information that's practically not available in English, but it's very well known in Brazil, where I've spent many years of my life, so I'll share that with you today. 

Remember, I talked about how in 2004, I started really studying spirituality in great depth. I looked at all the religions, all their sub-religions, I looked at all kinds of other spiritual teachings like tarot, astrology, magic. And of all the stuff I looked at, spiritism was probably the most interesting. So is that stuff real? Is it true? And on that note, don't believe anything I say just because I say it. Find the truth for yourself, as per Episode 2 and 5. Very important stuff. 

So we'll talk about all that, it should be a pretty awesome show. Before we do, I want to recommend that you listen to this podcast at 1x speed, because all the fast listening accelerates our mind and hence works counter to meditation. And if you haven't listened to the previous episodes yet, I highly recommend you do that first, because these episodes build on each other like a TV show. 

And final point before we get started, the best way to follow the podcast is on my website, mannymandala.com. That's where you can find everything else. All episodes in audio and video format, including download links and transcripts, links to all my social media and to all the podcast and video platforms I'm on, including tons of clips and my complete meditation course, The Meditate More Challenge, for free. So go to mannymandala.com to check that out. That's M-A-N-N-Y, Manny Mandala, not Mandela. It's Mandala, mannymandala.com. 

All right, with housekeeping out of the way, we'll get started. And I noticed something interesting this week. I searched for meditation music on YouTube and I found it's almost all relaxation music. And that came as a bit of a shock, although I probably shouldn't be shocked. I know that easy stuff is what sells best, but meditation isn't about relaxation. 

I would never meditate on a break, for example, because it requires focus. Or as the Buddha said, effort, right? It's not about chilling out and blissing out. That's me-ditation. As we talked about in Episode 1, real meditation is about cleaning up the garbage in our minds and even in our subconscious minds. So the light can shine through again, a.k.a. enlightenment.
Anyway, let's get into the heart of the episode, into the meditation content. And in The Meditate More Challenge, I have another Shakespeare quote, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And that's from Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5. 

And let me tell you something. I've seen many of these things Shakespeare talks about because meditation can get you there. And you can too, because your true self is divine consciousness. We all are that divine consciousness, but it's been buried. It's been covered up with a lot of crud and dirt and meditation is what cleans that out to unearth it again. And that's what we have to do. And that's why we meditate, right? And it's so worth it because your life will just magically transform for the better. The more you meditate, the more you make progress on this path. 

And I'll just give you another example of that. You know, one of my mentors once asked me which part of life I find the hardest. Is it running my business? Is it hiring people? Is it advertising? Is it eating healthy? Is it working out? Is it family obligations? What's really the hardest part? And my response was balance. Because any of these would be pretty easy if we had all the time in the world to do them, right? But how are you supposed to fit them all into 24 hours? 

And I think most people struggle with this, especially in today's society. That's the hard part. And that's something that almost nobody seems to have figured out, right? Very few people can claim to really have financial abundance and abundant health and vitality and energy and great relationships with their families, their significant others, their friends and a great spiritual life and the balance to still have some free time for themselves to rejuvenate, to rest and recover. 

And if we just look at those areas of life, health, wealth, relationships, spirituality, even just balancing those four is such a struggle that most people can't do it. Most people find themselves deficient in one area or another. And I do too. I'm not perfect at this. But I'll tell you what made the biggest difference in balancing my life a lot better than ever before. 

And it came to me during a shamanic ceremony I did. I had a vision and it just came to me. I saw all these different areas of life as metal blocks bouncing around a metal rail with many joints. And that's kind of difficult to put in words as shamanic ceremonies tend to be. But these blocks kept bouncing around and it was impossible to get them to stay balanced and in line on the rail. And I realized that all these blocks symbolize the different areas of life. One block symbolized health, one block symbolized relationships, one block symbolized wealth, business or career. 

And then in the ceremony, in the vision, I saw that you have to put the meditation block on the rail first. And that block will then straighten the rail and then all the other blocks will fall in line automatically as well. Because the meditation block kept the rail straight. And I think it's pretty clear what the vision was trying to tell me. Put meditation in your life first. Start your day with that. Do it before you do anything else. I wake up and I meditate before I do anything else. And then the meditation will balance your mind. 

That’s the rail in the vision—symbolizes the mind. And once the mind is balanced then the balanced mind will then be able to balance your life. Once the mind is balanced, it can balance all the other areas of life. But as long as the mind is not balanced, how could you possibly balance the rest of your life since the mind is what controls all the other aspects of your life. 

So, again, I'm not perfect at this by any stretch but I will say that I'm 80% to 90% better at keeping my life in balance properly than I used to be. So I can confirm this works and I highly recommend you try it. Meditate first thing in the morning. Wake up and just go straight to the pillow and spend however much time you spend so you can keep your life in balance so it all fits into 24 hours, right? Which of course it never seems to do. 

And if you want to know all the nuts and bolts of meditation, all the practical how-to meditate more, I can definitely help you with that. I created The Meditate More Challenge for you and it's still free for now and it's basically the meditation course I wish I had 20 years ago. 

And this week, I received a few comments on my YouTube videos about the challenge. Let me just read one of them real quick. One listener writes, “Crazy stuff. I'm already shocked about my results after 15 days of daily meditation. All at once, there are memories out of my childhood I would not have thought are still accessible. They are so clear as if no time has passed since then.”

So that's the same result that I talked about in Episode 5. And congratulations to that listener because it took me a lot longer to get that result. I didn't get that so quickly. But then again, I didn't know what I was doing. It's good to know exactly how to meditate for real, right? 

And the rest of the comment, “I simply can't wrap my head around that. Never had any meditation results before your challenge at all.” By the way, she commented previously that she used to meditate a lot just without results and that's why she stopped. And I think that's the story of most people, right? Most people get into meditation and they never really get past the dabbling stage because it seems like nothing's happening. There's just not any results that seem to justify all the time we spend on it. 

Because if you do it every day even if it's just 20 minutes, it adds up. It's a significant time commitment. But that's because most people aren't really meditating and I explained on Day 3 of the challenge what I mean by that. What real meditation really is and what it's not. I'll just give you a hint. The most popular technique these days isn't real meditation. It's a controversial statement, but I think if you read Day 3 of the challenge, you'll agree. So if that sounds interesting, go to meditatemorechallenge.com and sign up for free. I think you're going to really like that one. 

But I want to move on. I want to get to the most important part of the podcast, the Dhamma Discourse. And today we'll talk about the spirit world. And that's a topic that crossed my path in a very synchronistic way. Two friends of mine who don't know each other both said, “You have to read this book,” within one day of each other. And it was a book I'd never heard of. It was The Spirits Book by Allan Kardec. Not a terribly well-known book but two friends of mine recommended it so close to each other so I paid attention.

Because synchronicities are often a way of the universe calling our attention to something important. That can happen in dreams. It can happen with synchronicities. It can happen with intuition. So I bought the book, and a few weeks later, I had a long bus ride so I pulled it out and I started reading. And I realized this book is literally about spirits. But I don't believe in ghosts. So I put the book away after the first, I don't know, 20 pages. I said, “Well, this is not for me. Maybe the synchronicity wasn't that meaningful.” 

And a few months later, I was back in the same city where those two friends of mine live and I asked one of them about it, Tiago. I asked him, “So what's this book about? Did you believe in ghosts?” And he started telling me some of his own experiences with this topic. Because he had many supernatural experiences himself. 

Just one example. He was in college with a girl who could see the dead like the boy in the movie The Sixth Sense. And my friend even had proof of that. Because there were some things the girl knew that she couldn't have known otherwise. And things that were later confirmed to be true. Sometimes even six months later. And my friend had many stories like that. And he was really shook up about some of these stories. It wasn't like he was trying to be a dramatic storyteller. He was clearly emotionally affected by some of the stuff that he'd seen and experienced. 

That alone wasn't enough to convince me. But it was enough for me to go deeper. And one thing I realized is that in Brazil, this topic is completely normal. In the West for the most part people will say, “What? You believe in spirits?” Whereas in Brazil, it's the other way around. And most people will be like, “What? You don't believe in spirits? People in the West don't believe in spirits?”

There's a reason why Brazilians have this awareness of the spirit realm. It's because of the Brazilian religions. You know, hundreds of years ago when the African slaves were brought to Brazil they brought their tribal religions with them. And they all had communication with spirits as part of their traditions. So this was always very normal in Brazil for hundreds of years. 

And I'll say more. I've traveled the world up and down now for 24 years nonstop. I've been to 57 countries and all other cultures are aware of this. It's only the West that has developed this left-brain imbalance called materialism, that belief that there is no such thing as spirituality. There is not even consciousness outside of the brain, right? This idea that consciousness is actually just a side, an epiphenomenon of matter. It's just biochemical processes in the brain that give us the illusion that we're conscious. Well, then who is it giving the illusion to? 

Anyway, people know about spirits in all countries in Asia, in Africa, all the indigenous cultures know about it. Latin America knows about it. And all spiritual traditions talk about them too. Christians call them angels and demons. Muslims call them the jinn. Buddhists even have lots of categories of spirits. They have the peta, the deva, the yakkhas. 

By the way, this is a very important side note that I'll make an entire episode about soon. Many people encounter the yakkhas when they work with psilocybin. But topic for another episode. Stay tuned to the podcast and we'll get in depth about that one as well. 

So, anyway, in the next few months, I investigated and I went after the topic. I wanted to find out, is this real? What is it? What does it mean? What's this all about, right? And I got invited to some spiritist centers. I went to séances and voodoo temples in Brazil. By the way, there is both black and white magic in those. They call it mesa preta and mesa branca. Just like Freemasonry has. There's dark masonry and there's light masonry, right? So I went to spiritist meetings. I went to tarot readings by mediums and even a woman who channeled spirit with a water glass. It was fascinating. 

She was looking at this big water glass and she was seeing something in the glass and that was maybe the most interesting part because she had never met me before. She didn't even know anyone I know and this was before social media so she couldn't have looked me up online. That was not even my space yet. And she talked about me and my life for 30 minutes straight and every single word was on point. 

And I know what some of you are thinking, it's illusionism, it's cold reading, it's sleight of hand. I know about cold reading and all that stuff. What she said was way too specific and way too detailed and way too precise. I'll tell the whole story some other day. 

One thing that's interesting is that this same woman, one who read in the glass, told me that Allan Kardec is my spiritual path. That's the book that crossed my path with this synchronicity, that two friends of mine recommended all at once. And I can't even say I was totally convinced but I decided to keep going deeper and research more. 

So here's the story. The author of that book was Allan Kardec. He was born in 1804, more than 200 years ago in France. And he was a student of the famous Pestalozzi. And he became a respected scientist in Paris. And specifically, he was a scientist studying mesmerism and magnetism. 

And in those days, in France where he lived, séances became very popular. A lot of people were into them. It was en vogue, right? It was fashionable to do séances and to call on the dead and to call on the spirits. But the early séances were very simple. It was something that was called table turning. Meaning, people would get together and sit around a table and then they would close their eyes and invoke the spirits. And the tables would turn or bounce or jump or dance. 

And Allan Kardec as a scientist he was very skeptical of this phenomenon. And he said there's got to be a scientific explanation here. Maybe it's something to do with some form of magnetism that we don't know about yet. So he started attending the meetings and he applied the scientific method to what he found. And he realized that there are actually intelligent communications taking place. So it couldn't just be a magnetic force moving objects. 

And then he said, “If this is real, then it's the most important discovery that has ever been made.” Because it can answer so many of the big philosophical questions that humanity has been wrestling with for thousands of years, right? And he said, “Stop asking the spirits about trivialities.” Stop asking, ‘Where did grandma hide her jewelry before she died?’ Stop asking, ‘Is my husband cheating on me?’ Ask about the things that really matter. About the meaning of life, the afterlife, the big philosophical questions. Because the spirits are on the other side of the veal. They can see things we can't see. 

So he founded the Society of Spiritist Studies and worked with a lot of other people to get to the bottom of this. And he worked with over 100 spiritist groups in many different cities and he had correspondents with all of them. So he received a ton of channeled information. And mostly at the time that was automatic writing. 

There wasn't a lot of channeling going on yet like we know today. And so he started applying the truth discovery method that we talked about in Episode 5, the Trivium, to all the communications he received. Because he realized pretty quickly just because an information is channeled or received via automatic writing or in a séance or from a spirit doesn't mean it's automatically true. That information still has to be vetted and filtered just like any other information we look at. 

But he started asking all the big questions. Like, what is God? What's the meaning of life? What happens to us after we die? Why are we here on earth? Do we choose our lives before we're born? Is suffering a punishment or a lesson? Are some people born evil? Is there such a thing as a soulmate? Why do bad things happen to good people? 

So he started sifting and sorting all the information he received and he put over 1,000 of the questions he asked the spirits and all their answers in one book. That's The Spirits Book. That's the book my two friends recommended basically at the same time. 

So very, very much worth your time. Not to be taken as absolute truth just because it's from beyond. But as always the lessons from Episode 2 and 5 apply the lessons about how to find truth. But very very much worth your time. Check it out. It's Allan Kardec. A-L-L-A-N is his first name. Kardec, the last name, is spelled K-A-R-D-E-C. The Spirits Book. 

And that raises the question, why have you never heard of this? And the answer is it was censored by all the dominant institutions. But they couldn't censor it in Brazil. In Brazil, that information fell on fertile ground precisely because Brazilians already had all these African religions that already dealt with spiritism and spirit communications. So right now, there are tens of millions of spiritists in Brazil and it's basically as common as the church. 

The interesting thing is that even most gringos in Brazil don't know. And I have never come across this stuff in English. And it's probably because most people even if they go to Brazil, they don't get exposed to this stuff because all the information is in Brazilian Portuguese. And even most gringos who lived in Brazil for many years have never heard about it. 

A big part of that's probably because most people don't speak Portuguese even if they live in Brazil. It's not a super easy language. And I think partially it's because most gringos aren't really interested in this stuff, right? We come from a very materialistic culture. Most gringos are either atheists or they belong to a church or they're more into the New Age meditation stuff. 

So, anyway, what are the spirits saying? And I'll leave that for another episode but the core teaching is Natural Law. There's an entire chapter in The Spirits Book from almost 200 years ago that's called Natural Law. And the spirits all boil it down to, can you guess? The Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's what I started this podcast series with in Episode 1. 

So now what do you do with this information? I would recommend you find out for yourself if this is real. Because if it's real, it's important, right? It's a big deal. Do spirits exist and do they really interact with our domain? And I can tell you as surely as the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening but I'm speaking from a lot of personal experience. And that doesn't do you any good, does it? That's not knowledge. 

Even if you believe me, that wouldn't be knowledge. That wouldn't be truth discovery. Whether you believe me or disbelieve me, it's not knowledge. And even reading The Spirits Book wouldn't help you because the book isn't supposed to convince you that spirits exist. That's not the point of the book. 

So here's what I recommend you do. If this topic is new to you, ask 20 people you really trust, 20 people you know wouldn't BS you and ask them, “Hey, have you ever had any kind of supernatural experience? Do you believe in ghosts or spirits? Have you ever had any kind of apparition or any experience with that kind of stuff? Have you ever participated in a séance? What have you experienced?”

And I can pretty much assure you that if you ask enough people, you will find someone who has personal experience with this. So that's going to be your gateway and then you're going to have to make your own experience with it if you really want to go deep. In Brazil, that's extremely easy because it's extremely common but you have to speak Portuguese for most of it. In Brazil, there's Candomblé, there's Umbanda, there's Macumba. Of course, there's Kardecism. That's the spiritism based on Allan Kardec's work, The Spirits Book. 

I would just recommend you don't experiment on your own because it's not to be trifled with. You want to have someone experienced guiding you in this endeavor and then study it. Then go after the information and apply everything we talked about in Episode 5 to discover the truth about it. 

Allan Kardec wrote seven books and tons of magazines. The most important one is, of course, The Spirits Book but he also wrote The Mediums Book. And I've already had people ask me this question, “I get communications from beyond the veil. I get downloads. What do I do here?” Read The Mediums Book. 

He has a book called The Gospel According to Spiritism. That one goes way deep into the Golden Rule and into all the Natural Law teachings. And he has a book called Heaven and Hell. That book is about the question: what happens after death? Even most occultists don't know the answer to this question but we can ask the dead because they are there. So that's the book Heaven and Hell. 

And once more, I can stress this often enough, use discernment with all this information. Because when I started communicating with the spirit realm, at first I was like, “Wow, these are such amazing insights.” And after a couple of months, I realized that some of the downloads I got contradicted other downloads I got. So I was like, “Okay, I gotta go back to Brazil and talk to people who have a lot of experience with this topic.” 

And I spent maybe seven or eight months, and eventually, I just came back to The Mediums Book by Allan Kardec that has a great explanation on how to filter these kinds of communications. And it's basically the Trivium method we talked about in Episode 5.
And that's the big mistake the New Age movement makes when it comes to channeled communications. A lot of people take anything as truth and pure insight just because it's channeled and we have to be very discerning with all this information. 

Because, yes, they're on the other side of the veal but they're still just human. Look, a spirit is basically a human without a body and a human is basically a spirit with a body. So some of us are incarnate and some are not but we're all just souls. We're all just spirits. Some of us have a body and some of us don't. That's a bit of an oversimplification because there are all kinds of different spirits and different degrees of spirits. 

Let me quote from The Spirits Book about that real quick. “Spirits belong to different classes and are not equal to one another either in power, in intelligence, in knowledge or in morality. Those of the highest order are distinguished from those below them by their superior purity and knowledge, their nearness to God and their love of goodness. They are angels or pure spirits. The other classes are more and more distant from this perfection. Those of the lower ranks are inclined to most of our passions, hatred, envy, jealousy, pride, etc. They take pleasure in evil. Among them are some who are neither very good nor very bad but are teasing and troublesome rather than malicious. They're often mischievous and unreasonable and may be classed as giddy and foolish spirits.”

So see this is why channeled communication is a mixed bag and you can never accept something as truth just because it was channeled or just because it was an insight you had while working with plant medicines or entheogens. And I'll leave you with a quote from Barbossa from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, “You best start believing in ghost stories, you're in one.”

All right. Now I have a few more very important points. Make sure you stick around for these because we have some absolutely life-changing killer content coming up next week and I'll tell you all about that in a second. 

First, if you like this episode, you'll probably love The Meditate More Challenge. That's my complete meditation course and it's absolutely free for now. Go check that out at meditatemorechallenge.com. 

And I'd like to ask you a quick favor. If you know someone else who's interested in these topics in spirituality, in meditation, in the spirit realm, send them to mannymandala.com. That's M-A-N-N-Y, mannymandala.com. And if you want to share specific episodes, I just set up links to make that easy. Episode 1 is mannymandala.com/1. Episode 2 is mannymandala.com/2 and so forth. 

And if you haven't listened to the other episodes yet, I recommend you go over the archives. Start with Episode 1 and go in order. I honestly think it's going to change your life. And subscribe to the podcast, of course. Because next week we'll talk about meditation and productivity. How meditation can make you more productive and reduce your stress at the same time? And with that of course comes success in career, in studies, in business, and financial abundance. 

We'll also talk about why is there so much suffering in the world, if there is a higher spiritual order, if there's divine justice and karma, given the common assumption that most people are basically fundamentally good. I mean, of course there are some criminals and psychopaths. But most people aren't out there stealing and killing. Then how are things going so wrong? Why is there so much suffering in people's lives and in the world at large? How can we explain that? 

I read the answer to this question in one of Allan Kardec's books more than 20 years ago and it was one of two answers I did not like. And it shocked me and I kept thinking about it for days. But it took me honestly almost two decades to really wrap my head around it. So I'll demystify that for you next time. And we'll also look at one question from Allan Kardec's writings. The question: what is God? 

All that and more in the next episode of The Meditate More Podcast. Subscribe if you want to be notified right away when the episode drops. And the best way to subscribe is to hit the giant yellow button on my website mannymandala.com. So thanks so much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. So make sure to subscribe to the podcast now.
And special thanks to Mariano Roguin and Lex Van Someren for providing some of their music for the podcast. Thank you for the music, guys. I really appreciate it. And remember to meditate more, meditate more, meditate more because it is so, so worth it.