Conversations with entity A.

Entity Andrea and medium Piancastelli

For over 50 years, a single entity – which conventionally called itself Andrea, or entity A – communicated through incorporation trance of the medium Corrado Piancastelli (1930-2014) during séances held at the Italian Center of Parapsychology (CIP) in Naples. The communications and information provided by entity A in this vast span of time concern various aspects of the life of the spirit – both as a disincarnate entity and in relation to its human incarnation – and its evolutionary path, in addition to the various psychic and social aspects of human life. Not infrequently the speeches of entity A took the form of conversations, and sometimes debates, for the active participation of the human interlocutors who – usually gifted with a good cultural level – did not abstain from asking questions and requiring clarifications and deepening on the covered topics. Anyone interested in having more information on CIP, Piancastelli and what occurred  during the séances, can consult the Sentieri dello spirito website. On this page I will limit myself to an evaluation of information relating to the spirit and its relationship with the conscious Ego of us humans, comparing them with those provided by theosophy and by the entities of Cerchio Firenze 77.

As for the documentation relating to the communications of entity A, I refer above all to the books by Giorgio di Simone (1925-2018), who did an excellent work collecting and classifying the material according to a logical criterion, in particular in his first volume, Rapporto dalla dimensione X (Report from the X Dimension – Edizioni Mediterranee, 1st edition 1973), followed by anthological collections Dialoghi con la dimensione X (Dialogues with the X Dimension – Mediterranee, 1981) and Colloqui con A. (Conversations with A. – Mediterranee, 1986). Another conspicuous source of material transmitted by entity A consists of the quarterly booklet CDA (Communications of Entity A), drafted and published by the CIP for several decades, containing most of the entity's interventions on the most diverse topics, but not chronologically ordered. Finally, the numerous publications by the medium Corrado Piancastelli should not be overlooked: although in a state of complete unconsciousness during his trance, Piancastelli then actively and critically participated in the elaboration of the material recorded during the sittings. From the point of view of the relationship between Piancastelli and the entity Andrea the aforementioned autobiographical book Il sorriso di Giano (Janus' Smile – Mediterranee, 1991) is particularly interesting, about which I refer to the page of this site on the Alien spirit.

The spirit and incarnation

The explanations offered by the entity A, concerning the life of the spirit and its incarnation (or reincarnation) in the human dimension, although showing some affinities with those proposed by theosophy (and re-proposed in a simplified form, as we have seen, by the entities of the Cerchio Firenze 77), differ from them in some substantial aspects. First of all, the Absolute (that is, what humans call God) is unknowable and unattainable, even by the spirit, whose evolutionary path is therefore infinite: the spirit will never be reabsorbed into the Absolute. What the spirit acquires through its own experiences, including the human one, is an ever deeper knowledge of the divine laws that rule the universe. Moreover, the evolutionary path of the spirit, with respect to its own condition, always constitutes a progress: in other words, the spirit can never regress, nor be demoted, therefore the doctrines relating to metempsychosis in lower forms, as a consequence of the actions performed during a human incarnation, are denied.

The idea of the spirit evolution presented by Andrea is more understandable than that proposed by other entities: it is not clear why the troubled process of individualization, acquiring and enhancing consciousness, in which the spirit is involved, must necessarily end with a resorption in the Absolute which appears like mechanical, if it does not correspond to a deliberate choice by the spirit. As it laboriously builds up its own personality through the knowledge of the laws that rule the universes, both material and spiritual, the spirit becomes aware of the universal reality, and therefore also brings to light the idea and (relative) knowledge of the Absolute, that were already present in it at the potential state. Quoting di Simone's words: «Therefore, according to the orientation of thought common to the plurality of spirits, the most committed among them in the careful observation of cosmic phenomena, can easily push their gaze into the endless depth of universal realities, thus reaching a perception of the substance of things that has an almost infinite probability of being authentic. In spirit's memory... spiritual evolution has always had a positive sign». 

Regarding the origin of the plurality of spirits, whether it is called emanation, or continuous flow in time (and in non-time), or projection, it is anyway a process of autonomous radiation from the divine matrix of individual energy nuclei undifferentiated, as they are not personalized: each of them, identical to any other, is a tabula rasa devoid of consciousness, which «sets sail to the conquest of itself, through the enormous travail of evolution, while self-awareness dawns, gradually becoming wider and wider, and therefore also consciousness of the rest of Reality. Thus the spirit laboriously constructs the fundamental characteristics of its own personality, on the basis of an existential dignity which is the supreme sign of the divine in it, whatever it can do for good or for ill...».

Incarnation is part of the evolutionary experiences of the spirit, both in this earthly human dimension and – possibly – in other worlds. However incarnation is not unavoidable: in this Andrea takes its distance from the statements of other mediumistic entities, given that «...the freedom of choice of the spirit is preserved. In fact it can theoretically do without this specific cognitive, and relatively direct, relationship with the world of matter. It indeed has this possibility that automatically excludes any discourse about the inevitability of its imprisonment in the flesh». But then, why does the spirit incarnate? The reasons are essentially two: the first is that acquiring the experiences that an incarnation can offer, without incarnating, is extremely difficult and requires a much longer time (even if the time available to the spirit is infinite), and therefore the spirit feels inside itself an inclination that leads it to experiment in the most direct and complete way possible; the second is that the spirit, when it is incarnated, remains distinct from the conscious Ego and – by its nature – is not involved in human suffering and psychic conflicts.

To the precise observation by an interlocutor (CDA 1991, issue 6, page 257): «...I do not understand why our spirit should choose situations that, from our point of view, involve suffering, when it could be done without it...», Andrea answers unequivocally: «But the spirit does not suffer at all, with or without a body». And later the entity further clarifies the meaning of incarnation: «...the incarnation is a passage in a condition alien to the spirit. By structure, by quality, by orientation, by aims, the spirit obviously does not tend to the matter; however (it feels the need to) recognize the usefulness of passing through this level of the universe that is foreign to him... it is not a mandatory step, but only a useful step, there are ample reasons to ease – so say – a part of this crossing».

It seems important to me to highlight at once the substantial differences between the interpretation of the human experience by the spirit communicated by the entity Andrea and that shared by Theosophy and the entities of the Cerchio Firenze: according to Andrea the spirit incarnates to satisfy a need to know by direct experience the world of matter and the laws that regulate it, in its many aspects, but retains its own consciousness and its own intent, very distinct from the will and consciousness of the human Ego. Moreover, the choices regarding the times and the ways of incarnations are left to his freedom of maneuver, so to say, always respecting the eternal laws that rule the universe, which can be discovered and known but not violated, and the same experience of materiality does not necessarily imply the need to incarnate. In summary, the human parenthesis has a cognitive and experimental value for the spirit, and in any case enriches its consciousness and its knowledge.

Instead according to Theosophy the incarnations, which follow one another by the law of karma starting from the animal level, have the purpose of enriching consciousness, but only in function of an obligatory evolutionary path aimed at purifying the spirit, freeing it from the call of the inferior and raw forms of matter, to bring it to merge in the consciousness of the Absolute. Moreover, the incarnated spirit identifies itself with the conscious Ego, participating in the pathos, sufferings and emotions of human life, experienced through the astral and the mental body: a reality that is still considered apparent and illusory. In all this process the freedom of the spirit is not taken into consideration, if not limited to that strange faculty of being able to use its free will to deviate, so to speak, from the right evolutionary path towards the good, except then having to correct itself through pain and suffering, always according to the karmic law. We therefore have the impression of being faced with two different conceptions of the world, one – that of Andrea – founded on knowledge and freedom, the other – that of Theosophy – aimed at the (sentimental) goal of universal Love.

The human experience of the spirit and the conscious Ego

Let us now see how – according to the entity Andrea – the spirit prepares for the earthly experience, and what are the relations between the conscious Ego and the spirit that is associated with it during human life. The spirit is associated with a fetus growing in the womb around the third month of pregnancy, and apparently (CDA 1991, issue 2, page 49) the number of spirits who wish to incarnate is very high, so there may be a real waiting list to catch a fetus! This seems to me to be in contrast with the affirmation – not only theosophical, but also by the same entity A – according to which the spirit can choose the conditions (hereditary, environmental and cultural) of its next incarnation, unless it is willing to do long queues. Probably, in certain geographical areas there should be more available opportunities than in others. In any case, the spirit must arrange an instrument of connection to the physical body, and above all to the brain, of the human being with whom it will be associated.

Those that Theosophy identified as the astral and mental body, more or less coincide with a structure that Andrea calls soul or soul complex, destined to act as an intermediary between the spirit and the human brain. On page 61 of the Report from dimension X there is also a drawing that shows how the structures that connect the spirit (which lives in the spiritual reality) to the brain of the human being (which lives in the physical reality) should function. The scheme is interesting, but it does not explain much, because the soul complex connected to the spirit seems to generate the psyche through a structure that is referred to as the unconscious, without any of these terms being better defined. On this site it has always been reiterated that our human adventure is based on the conscious Ego (see the Definitions page), which is involved in various psychic experiences, and a clear distinction was made between two conditions: the first and more common, in which the conscious Ego is ensnared and controlled by the psychic tunings that involve it, so much so that it fully identifies with them; the second (much less widespread), in which the conscious Ego, while continuing to experience the psyche, takes its distance, and is able to exercise a certain degree of control over the psychic tunings that it wants (or does not want) to experience. The process that leads from the first to the second condition has been called path of liberation of the conscious Ego.

Psychic experiences are tuned through the brain, whose functioning we are not directly conscious of, nor have we acquired, at least until now, a satisfactory degree of understanding. In this respect, to define the process that gives rise to the psyche as unconscious can not be considered incorrect, although it is banal, given that everything we are not – or will not become – conscious of, remains unconscious to us. All this has been explained in detail in the section on the human psyche, and in particular in the pages of the same devoted to the unconscious. It remains to be clarified which are the channels through which our brain is programmed, and why – as a consequence of these conditionings – certain psychic attunements take over one or the other human being, creating all those differences (commonly called character traits) that distinguish us. Usually, only a small part of these psychic tunings comes the spirit, while in the diagram it seems that the whole psyche (in its instinctive and creative aspects) originates from the soul complex through the unconscious.

A good part of the psychic instances that humans experience are connected to the animal needs of the body, and therefore derive from natural laws. Why then nature must work according to certain laws, and not others, we cannot know, but in fact the body needs to feed itself, to defend itself, to reproduce itself, and so on: all of this results in psychic instances (associated with enjoyable or unpleasant emotions and sensations) that the conscious Ego experiences. Another substantial part of psychic events derives from the fact that our living occurs within a social system, which offers us nourishment, protection and opportunities for work, culture and leisure, transmitting all sorts of conditionings and operative programs of all kinds, which exert their effects through an almost continuous flow of psychic events, often in the form of commands or desires. Finally, another part of the psychism that involves the Ego derives from our own inner, mental, elaboration of the various psychic experiences in which we have been involved, an elaboration that happens through our intellectual and creative faculties, along an intentionally established path, or determined by sudden and unexpected events. Only some of the psychic tunings that fall into the latter group can be traced, in some way, to the intent of the spirit seeking to influence the conscious Ego.

These processes are implicitly recognized and confirmed by entity A, but in a confused and sometimes inconsistent way. Di Simone, for example, writes: «...the spirit determines the gradual approach to the Earth, through the formation of the soul, a temporary, complex structure, vaguely electromagnetic and, subsequently, through the organization of the psychic complex which characterizes his earthly personality, that is the psycho-mental personality of the resulting man: that earthly personality (which we could also call social) which, together with the brain and nervous system, drives the physical body, imprinting our historic manifestation in the chosen environment». It is not so, and if the spirit decides to incarnate to implement a certain program, in 90% of the cases it is destined to fail – as Andrea himself must then recognize – due to the characteristics of the human psyche dominant in the course of our lives.

«In the relative, in which the spirit-matter dualism seems to establish itself, the same matter tends to assume dominance, coherently with its presuppositions, contrary to those which characterize the spirit... and while our human, psychic personality is overwhelmed by the intense clamor of events of an exclusively earthly type and by the strength of the biological and physiological laws, our spirit remains far away, more and more detached from our present consciousness, to the point of not being able to make its voice, its command or its advice heard». Here, in di Simone's interpretation, the picture of the normal relations between the spirit and the conscious Ego described by Andrea. In its first part, it would be appropriate to replace the word matter with the term human psyche, but otherwise the description is appropriate. «In this way a sort of qualitative fracture is determined in the organic complex that links body and spirit, and the program that it elaborated before bodily birth, dilutes itself over time, loses strength, in a word is forgotten by man, or accomplished only in part...». If reference is made to an organic complex that connects body and spirit, this can only be the brain, and the spirit can react to this condition of contrast between the needs of the body and the program of experiences that it had set for itself «often causing crises of various kinds on a psycho-physical level».

The condition in which the Ego consciously collaborates with the spirit to implement the latter's experience program is very rare. Usually the conscious Ego, ensnared in the ordinary psychic tunings of human life, pays no attention to the signals coming from the spirit, which reacts through psychic instances that come into conflict with the usual ones, sometimes associated with significant psychosomatic effects. Why do things go this way? «The difficulties that it can face (and that it generally meets) in the earthly realization of its program, are usually in direct proportion to its degree of evolution, that is, in conclusion, with its current level of consciousness and knowledge of laws that contribute to the cosmic equilibrium... up to come, in the case of the least trained among spirits, to a pure and simple contact with the most elementary aspects of the Earth, or to obligatory material itineraries, due to the need to balance (assimilate) wrong actions committed in a previous life». Curious condition this, for which so many spirits of very different evolution are mixed together, so to speak, in the same class: our planet. Nor it is taken into account the fact that the programs of the spirits can be very different from one another: for example, one spirit could have a program centered on the social progress of humanity while another could aim at liberation from social conditioning and experimentation with alternative psychic tunings.

Although during earthly life the spirit is not at the best of its lucidity – so much so that Andrea states that after the death of the physical body it is as if the spirit awakened from a drunkenness – yet the attempt to establish a relationship with the conscious Ego is put into effect: that then the conscious Ego realizes it or not, is another question. The figure of the guide spirit is also recalled: «...during its earthly labor, the spirit receives a certain help from the so-called guide entity... (whose function) is much less important than what it was intended to make believe, as it represents only a minor aspect of the great principle of solidarity that unites the spirits... (founded on) who knows more helps those who know less... in a spontaneous chain of solidarity and love... (however) no one is allowed to interfere with the spirit's free will, not even to avoid making mistakes and helping it in the most serious or difficult cases of life». And here it is not clear in what sense the guiding entity should help the spirit, since who find itself in difficulty in life, and who can ask for help, is always the conscious Ego.

It is true that humans are «guided for the most part in the earthly journey only by the psychism imbued with the culture of the time... but one must deny and reject the idea of a matter so sordid and useless as to have to be abandoned as soon as possible....». In fact, the spirit is interested in the concrete experience of matter: «The spirit is an individual being, it knows it is... it knows that it is an individual distinct from others, distinct from God and the universal Reality. It knows that it lives in this universal Reality, but it also knows that it cannot be confused with it. it knows it is in the Law, but it also knows that this Law is a different element from itself... it must live in the way this Principle manifests itself in the universe, and that in this specific case it is materiality as an element of contrast with spirituality, meant as concept of freedom». It is clear, in any case, that the spirit distils from the experience of human life a juice, a quintessence, which is worked out and assimilated once the incarnation has ended, while the Ego must live life day after day, in all its aspects and with all the difficulties it entails.

Moreover, as in all theories that involve reincarnation, the spirit is conscious of its previous life experiences, while the conscious Ego is normally not. As we know, there are some cases – mainly studied by Ian Stevenson and his collaborators – in which some children showed clear signs of their knowledge of people and facts related to the life of another deceased person, and of their identification with that personality, but this could be due to an extraordinary and anomalous connection of the child's mind with the astral psychic remnants of the deceased: in short, a sort of possession by a not particularly evolved spirit. The fact that in the course of a life the previous lives are forgotten is explained in this way: «...not the spirit, but the brain, the mind of the human being that it animates, are the elements suitable to remember and this, in the case in question, is obviously impossible. The brain of this life will only remember facts recorded during this life... In conclusion it is therefore the brain of the man that does not remember, because it cannot remember, while the spirit has always everything present, even if in its human manifestation this memory, which is not indispensable, becomes blurred...».

It is then affirmed that «...the spirit, as such, has present to itself all the filtered heritage of its experiences, both earthly and proper to its spiritual, metaphysical environment... and consequently acts from the depths of the unconscious», and therefore the spirit exerts, or attempts to exert, an influence on the conscious Ego and on the latter's behavior: «Each of us has in him/herself a criterion of behavior, which guides him/her from the depths of the unconscious, that constantly tends to be realized in the course of our lives, and our reactions to the facts of this life, our most true response to the events we encounter or that affect us, are consistent with our most authentic spiritual nature...». The fact remains that the dichotomy between the spirit and the conscious Ego that Andrea recognizes and highlights – unlike other mediumistic entities – is not resolved in a positive way: the conscious Ego, conditioned as it is by the human psyche, is relegated to a subordinate role, at most useful for some experiences by the spirit, which shows no interest in a more determined intervention towards the physical world, leaving the difficulty for the Ego to have to deal with the psychic instances of the body, linked to its animal and social nature, and those of a spiritual origin.

Vicissitudes of the spirit after death

Andrea does not offer particular information on the ways in which the Ego's consciousness transforms or merges with that of the spirit after the body's death, however from its description of the event it seems that, at least at an early stage, the consciousness of the Ego undergoes some important changes: «...When a man dies, passes away, leaves the body, he/she suddenly feels like a great separation, as if something had been shaken off him/her... His/her condition is essentially a condition of mental confusion. He/she feels the lightness of his present existence, feels the detachment from decaying things; above all, perceives how everything was before object of his direct observations, becomes distance, transparency, and everything appears to him so, light, distant, almost strange... He feels the intimate reality of an essence that surpasses the materiality of ideas and that rises beyond the stimulus of a flesh that no longer exists and hovers free, light, beyond the limits of his own Ego... This being, left the body, realizes immediately the enormous difference that exists between its current condition and that of a few moments before... all that is of the Earth becomes relative...».

In his book di Simone reports how the different ways in which the event of death occurs (by accident, by illness, by murder, at a young or advanced age, etc.) can condition the post-mortem state of consciousness, influencing the soul complex, not the spirit itself. Furthermore, although no explicit reference is made to the astral and mental planes, and to the more or less prolonged stay of the conscious Ego in each of them (as asserted by the theosophical system), even according to Andrea some psychic aspects linked to the earthly experience can continue to exert their influence for a certain period after death: «We could say that each of us will be forced, after death, to struggle more or less long and painfully against our own mental images, capable of projecting themselves apparently outside, before establishing the real contact with the new environment of existence... this justifies ... the sometimes serious differences shown between them by certain tales of alleged communicating entities not yet freed from the illusory veils of earthly origin. Entities that insist on describing a world as they subjectively still see and perceive it... amazement, anxiety, terror, serenity and even joy, can characterize the first phase of post-mortem existence...».

From this point of view it seems to me that the process indicated by Theosophy is more coherent than the picture presented by Andrea, as it identifies a progressive path through which the consciousness of the Ego transforms into that of the spirit, passing through the phases of emotion and desire (astral plane) and then intelligence and thought (mental plane). According to Andrea, instead, the dichotomy between the conscious Ego and the spirit remains, as for the spirit this phase «...generally represents a period of dreamy bewilderment that culminates in the so-called lethargy. During this period of uncertainty about one's real existential position, in this state of semi-unconsciousness, the retrospective film of one's past life occurs, the so-called panoramic view that quickly retraces all the stages of one's life as an incarnate». This lethargy «...invariably manifests itself as a state of drowsiness or, rather, as an absorption of the spirit in itself, in a condition of larval consciousness, and as for a first, slow filtering of the cognitive material assimilated during its incarnation. This constant phenomenon is favored by the guide-entity... The lethargy can also be considered as the birth on the spiritual plane... (and) it lasts on average some of our months...».

Upon his awakening «...the spirit slowly regains the consciousness of its true being, to the point of making another operation, that is, that which concerns the true spiritual balance of its last life, a kind of self-judgment which, irresistibly rising from the depths of its own spiritual substance, enables it to become fully aware of how far it has deviated from the pre-incarnational program and the real weight of its positive acquisitions». For what we are allowed to understand, this state of hibernation of the spirit begins after the body's death, and lasts for a certain time, while in the course of the earthly life, at least from the age of about nine years onwards, the spirit is rather awake and has its own consciousness, well distinct from that of the Ego. Apparently, the spirit develops a program of experiences before incarnating, assuming that it will be able to control the conditions of earthly life, the psychophysical system of reference, and therefore the conscious Ego, so as to achieve its program at the best; however, in most cases, its resources are not sufficient and it manages to bring home only a small part of what it had planned.

The process of emancipation of the spirit from the waste of earthly experience is not so simple: «...most of men, having turned into spirits after their detachment from the Earth, fail to recognize themselves as such, that is, as spirits, clean, cleansed of every echo of the complex and often labored travail of their earthly existence, an often distressing labor that permeated and crystallized ideas and sensations, feelings, emotions and passions in every layer of their personality». In other words, the experience of the conscious Ego is transferred to the spirit that must assimilate it. The spirit then elaborates these experiences in its own dimension and – according to Andrea – this process helps it mature: «The gear in which it is becomes more and more oiled, smooth; it is something that comes closer to an ever greater perfection, because it approaches a greater, mysterious simplicity... Brotherhood, love, charity, are things that are gradually achieved, of course, but then they are overcome, they are left. The experience of these things remains in the spirit, but it goes further and deeper and deeper into the essence of the Universe and there it captures the high meaning of the divinity and there it becomes more and more aware of a power which, transcendent and immanent, has everything under its control. The spirit will never see God, as you know, and none of us will ever see it. But who among us craves to see God? Nobody...».

Not only the spirit explores the human dimension through a cycle of incarnations, but also experiences other worlds and other dimensions of the universe in the course of its timeless existence. The soul complex, with part of the psychic elements connected to it, is generally used by the spirit, with some adaptation, for a whole cycle of incarnative experiences. In the spirit world a level selection is established, consciously and voluntarily operated by each spirit. Andrea says: «I, a disembodied spirit, do not feel like going there where there are entities of higher evolution, because I know that my presence would be useless, because I know that the permanence among those entities would not interest me, because I like to remain around those spirits which have the same evolution as me and I feel at ease with them...».

The spirit world described by Andrea does not seem, to us humans, particularly fascinating: «You sometimes imagine the world of the disincarnate as a large garden where souls can walk, talking to each other, stopping perhaps near a fountain to rest, or playing some magnificent instruments... No, none of this! The world of souls, from a poetic point of view, so to speak, from an aesthetic point of view, is arid... Our world is arid precisely because it is simple, and simplicity is pushed to the maximum, until it becomes absolute simplicity». In the spirit dimension there are only the spirits: perhaps this is the reason why the spirit feels the need to incarnate and explore other dimensions. Finally, Andrea thus summarizes the condition of the purified spirit, so to speak, from its soul superstructures: «The spirit is never a static spirit. The character of intelligence is always preserved, without ever merging with the divinity... The spirit is never destroyed in divinity, nor does it ever live in divinity, for divinity and with divinity! It lives with the Universe, in the Universe and for the Universe; it always lives for the Law and in the Law, and at most it can reach such heights that it begins to represent the Law in a part of the Universe. As the enlargement of spiritual strength increases, it leads to an ever wider dominion and to a very great wisdom, but the spirit always maintains its personality so that it can always affirm to be someone, never to be everything...».

Other communications by entity Andrea

Over the course of half a century, Andrea has spoken of all kinds of things relating to both the otherworldly dimensions and human questions, with references to the psyche, social organization, human relationships and various problems of our life. Sometimes he was asked for advice or directions and directives regarding the complexity of human experiences and the orientation of the conscious Ego to navigate the turbulent sea of the psyche. Andrea's considerations are often sharable, reasonable and sometimes even creatively elegant. Sometimes they are smoky, obscure or unnecessarily complex, consisting of expressions and concepts that screw on themselves, without adding anything to our knowledge. However, on the whole, Andrea is more understandable than, for example, the messages of some entities of Cerchio Firenze 77. Nonetheless, in some cases Andrea too makes decidedly rash and absurd statements about some aspects of physical reality.

For example, when speaking of the solar system (CDA 1995, issue 1, page 53), here is what he says: «The Sun, the Earth and the Moon initially formed a single aggregate; subsequently – always in the primordial era – the detachment of the Sun from the Earth-Moon group occurred, which in turn separated at a later time. So the Sun is composed of the same elements of Earth, for the simple reason that this was initially part of the Sun. Undoubtedly, in millions of years or centuries even the Moon, which was once like the Earth, will eventually disappear and, similarly, the Sun will become what the Earth is today...». And so on with similar nonsense!

Conclusions

The reason why I devoted part of my life and my energies to the examination of mediumistic phenomena is to be found in the facts, that is, in those events that occur in the physical world – such as apports, materializations, levitations, direct voice, etc. – which are inexplicable based on our current ordinary knowledge. On the other hand, human life is also a fact, based on the reality of the physical environment in which it takes place, and of the biological and physiological processes through which our bodies are formed, transformed and ultimately deteriorate and decay. Associated to these facts there is a phenomenon of a completely different order that consists of a plurality of experimental subjects (each associated with a body), a complex system of production of events destined to be internally experienced by those subjects (the psyche, and in particular the human psyche), and an instrument of connection between the psychic events and the experiencing subjects (consciousness). I have always used the expression conscious Ego to indicate the ensemble of the experimenting subject and the instrument by which it experiences psychic effects of all kinds during life. I have instead separated the conscious Ego from the psychic experience, though well aware that very often the conscious Ego is involved by psychic effects to the point of identifying with them.

Consciousness is not the same for all individuals, but differs from one individual to another – and also changes in the same person throughout life – in terms of intensity, extension and ability to tune different psychic tunings. We will better examine these faculties of consciousness in the future. The conscious Ego can count on two other faculties available to it in varying degrees: intelligence and will. Also memory is fundamental to give continuity to the experiences of the Ego, preserving them as the basis of its personality. Whenever the Ego wants to increase its knowledge about some aspects of life, it activates an inner creative process or seeks information outside, but even in the latter case the information is provided to it by other conscious subjects, contemporaries or lived in the past, who transmit them through shared communication systems. Ultimately, every cognitive process has an inner origin or, as we use to say, mental. The cognitive activity carried out by a conscious Ego is based on the concentration of its attention, on the collection of available material – both produced by its own mind and that of other subjects – and on the evaluation of this material by its own intelligence.

Every cognitive intuition that manifests itself in form of thought and can be communicated through language originates from the psyche and, before becoming conscious, is processed by the psyche itself through a process that remains unconscious to the Ego. This is an obvious and banal observation, as I have repeatedly emphasized: the unconscious, as long as it remains unconscious, is also unknowable, so it is useless to theorize its functioning. The case of a person's unconscious brain and body activity, whose effects can be consciously observed by other people, is different. It is also true that psychic activity can give to the Ego, through consciousness, false cognitive elements about the causes that determine some forms of behavior and also the mental patterns and orientations of a person. In light of all this, what can we learn – in terms of knowledge – from the mediumistic communications of these entities that show up as beings endowed with autonomous intelligence, and how can we evaluate what they tell us?

What clearly emerges is that we are dealing with a purely psychic dimension, within which no objective validation is possible, at least in the sense in which this can be done in the physical dimension. It may be that even in the dimension of the spirit there is something similar to a mental geography, for which a group of entities shares the same psychic tunings – which are perceived as absolutely real – while another group shares different tunings, also perceived as real. A good example of how psychic realities can involve the Ego is represented, in the human dimension, by religious faiths, which can cause violent conflicts between groups of humans dominated by different psychic realities (which cannot therefore be considered objectively real). When certain information or explanations about what is not known reach the conscious Ego of a human being from another communicating being (a living or living person, or, as in our case, an alien entity) to which a form of authority is attributed, this information is assimilated and exerts an effective power over the conscious Ego. For most humans, this power is proportional to the amount of people who share the same psychic truths.

In these conditions the Ego is not free at all, but it is conditioned by suggestion. Conditioning is the most common way of functioning among humans, and involves the identification of the Ego with the psychic instances that dominate it. What may be the value of such a human experience for the spirit is not clear: it seems to me that in such cases the spirit undergoes the experience of life, without having the resources to influence it, which does not mean that the conscious Ego must necessarily be unhappy. A conditioned life can also be rewarding and successful, based on the prevailing collective evaluation criteria: at most, some anxiety about death can be felt. In most cases, however, the lives in which the conscious Ego is at the mercy of psychic experiences that it cannot control and from which it cannot defend itself, are unsatisfactory.

Entity Andrea introduces a dichotomy between the conscious Ego and the spirit that presents some interesting aspects, even if culturally it had already been anticipated for over a century, in Western culture, by the elaboration of the concept of unconscious. The originality of Andrea consists in attributing to the spirit a stimulating function that can reach the Ego through consciousness: even in this case there would be nothing really new, because already Socrates' daimon, as described by Plutarch, did more or less the same thing. However, in Andrea's conception, the spirit and the conscious Ego are not two separate entities, but represent two sides of the same coin, since the consciousness and the conscious subject are destined to meet together and merge after the death of the human being.

It remains to consider the inexhaustible activity of the psyche, which – as long as it is not consciously processed – constitutes what can rightly be called the unconscious, something that cannot even be spoken of because it is not known, and in part unknowable. Obviously, due to our human condition, even the psyche to which we refer is essentially the human one. But wherever there is an entity endowed with consciousness, the conscious subject will be able to experience psychic tunings of all kinds – in relation to the quality of the consciousness which it is endowed of – by elaborating them according to its own intelligence. There is, in this journey of the conscious subject – be it the Ego or the spirit – an orientation given by the search for a harmony between the experienced psychic tunings and an element of inner nature that enters, so to speak, in resonance with the right psychic tunings, determining that particular state generally called happiness. However, the degrees of happiness are many, and differ not only in intensity, but also in quality: therefore, once a certain level is reached, the path to the next level can begin.

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