50. HOW TO SAFE MATERIALISTIC SOULS
[1] HOWEVER, if the soul, who received the pure teaching, who also understands the truth and thinks within himself: ‘Aha, now I know what I rightly should do for my salvation. But before I will completely work on it, I still want to enjoy for a while the charms and sweet things of this world, for they are offered to me, because now that I precisely know the ways to spiritual completion, it really will not matter as to when I earnestly will walk on it. And when I will go that way, I surely will also make progress.’ Look, friend, then the soul begins to taste of the charms and sweet things of the world, and also to fully enjoy it. By that, he will give a great overweight to the matter of his flesh that can hardly or not at all be completely conquered anymore with his clear understanding in the things of the spirit. [2] Since such a soul acted in the beginning against his better judgment, he slowly sinks ever deeper into matter. And also the original pure spiritual enlightenment becomes ever more opaque. The soul comes into all kinds of doubts, and in his material laziness it is for him really not that worthy anymore to stand up and to – at least for the short time of a few days or weeks – make a serious attempt, by denying himself, to convince himself whether there is still something true of the teaching that was revealed from the Heavens in order to receive the inner, true life. [3] Yes friend, once such a soul became lazy against his very own judgment, and sees people around him who have attained to the inner life’s completion because they did their best since the beginning, then this will still have no strong influence on him, and it will not bring about any activity in him. If he is in a good mood, he will let the wonders of the spiritual in man be told to him by the awakened fellowmen. And now and then, also the wish will be awakened in him to be like those completed men. But immediately after that, the enticements of this world, which he enjoyed and still wants to enjoy, act so mightily upon him that he cannot resist them, and he will think by that: ‘Well yes, I do not do anything wrong if I do not fully repent immediately. First I still want to see and try out this and that in the world, and then I still will have largely the time to walk in the footsteps of the completed ones.’ [4] And look, in this manner will the descendants of those people, who have become lukewarm and lazy, think, decide, simulate and calculate even more in themselves. And they become completely dark and evil in their spirit if they only are being remembered what they should do as men to attain to the inner life’s completion. [5] And so will grow and become rampant the weeds of the night of the souls as a result of their ever awakened worldly lust for pleasure and increasing laziness of one generation of people after another. So much so that I have no choice than to let such people personally experience the futility and evilness of their worldly strivings by visiting them with all kinds of plagues and judgments.
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96. THE REQUIREMENTS OF MAN AND ITS DANGERS
[1] (The Lord) “Haven’t you read about the former Eden of the Earth where the first human was created? This Eden was a large garden and was planted with the best fruits of the whole Earth; and yet the hand of a person could not possibly have worked it before this! Thus the first people had no houses or towns; they had only extremely few needs which were easy to satisfy, but they remained healthy with it, always reached a ripe old age and therefore had a lot of time to devote themselves to their inner education of the soul and remained almost always in a visible conjunction with the powers of heaven. [2] But through the inspiration of Satan a certain Cain built his son Hanoch a city of the same name; and thereby laid the foundation stone for all the evil things on Earth. [3] I tell you: Man needs very little for life on this Earth; but the haughtiness, the lethargy, the arrogance, the greed and domineeringness of man need indescribably much and nonetheless can never be satisfied! [4] The worries of man are mostly fed on this, and people then quite naturally have no more time to concern themselves with what they should concern themselves because God placed them on this world for that reason only. [5] From Adam until Noah the children of the mountains never waged a war, because they had only very few needs and no one wanted to be anything more than his brother, and the parents asserted themselves in the most respectable way before their children, because they always remained their children’s teachers and advisors. [6] Flee from nothing more than from the riches of this world and its worshippers; for no man is worse on this whole Earth than he who envies and longs for earthly treasures; for he curses in his actions the love and all the truth of the heart which comes from God.
[7] If such people come to you, show them the door and show them that God’s word and its power should never be thrown to the unruly pigs of the Earth as casual food! Indeed you should not curse them for it and also not wish them harm, for all anger and all rage is of the Spirit of God, but they will be punished enough through this if they are seriously sent away from your doors and your friendship! [8] If such people come to you in misfortune, do not listen to them; for help will not make their heart better – on the contrary: they will be even more careful afterwards and will act more cleverly for the sake of their sacks of gold; but they will laugh at you and mock you and declare your help to be empty wind bags and will call you lazy braggarts und deceivers! Let that be far from you; for God’s power in you should only be of benefit in words and in actions to those alone who have made themselves worthy of it in all the humility of their hearts! (GGJ Book 11, chap.61) 65. SATAN AND MATTER [1] I said: “You will find an explanation of all that is still incomprehensible to you in the book handed to you by the youth through Ruban. Moreover, opposites such as spirit and matter, life and death, love and hate, truth and falsehood should serve you as a little hint that there must be a reason for their coming into existence, as otherwise they could never manifest perceptibly. [2] How could evil enter into man’s thinking unless there was some reason for its coming into existence? You with your trained intellect should be able to perceive that for all this – such as truth and falsehood and other opposites – the supreme and most benevolent Deity cannot be blamed. [3] Or can you presume that God, being Himself the supreme and most profound truth, should have laid a deceitful tendency into man’s heart which would make him sin against God’s order and render him filthy in all his speech and actions? Oh, far from it! God did create man in His spiritual image, thus pure, truthful and good. [4] Since the future existence of the spiritual man implied the way through the flesh, he had to take the flesh from the earth’s matter according to the decree of the supreme Spirit of God; and a counterweight is laid into the flesh for the probing of man’s spirit, which is called temptation. [5] However, this rests not only in man’s flesh but in all matter; and matter, which is not what it appears to be, is to the man probing himself falsehood and deceit, thus a phantom spirit which is there and is not there. It is there, because the tempting matter is there for the flesh of man; but since matter is not what it appears to be, the phantom spirit can also be said not to be there. [6] Behold and understand this correctly. This spirit of deceit, which in itself is falsehood through and through, is the spirit of all the world of matter and precisely that which is called ‘Satan’ or ‘the principal of all devils’. What is called `devils' are the specific evil spirits out of the universal evil spirit just shown you. [7] Therefore, a man who seizes with love all sorts of matter and becomes actively anchored in it, commits a sin against God’s order which exposed him for a time to matter for the sole purpose that he combat it and, by using his completely free will, strengthen himself for immortality. And the consequence of sin is death, or the annihilation of all that man’s soul has appropriated out of matter, because matter, as I have shown you, is not what it appears to be. [8] Therefore, if you love the world and its hustle and bustle and want to gain its treasures, you are like a fool who has been introduced to a well-adorned bride whom he does not want and for whom he does not long. He nevertheless throws himself with the ardor of a blind fanatic onto the shadow of the bride caressing it beyond measure. When the bride leaves the fool, surely her shadow will go with her. And what will remain for the fool? Evidently nothing. [9] How the fool will lament having lost what he loved so much! But he will then be told: ‘Blind fool, why did you not seize the full truth instead of its shadow which was evidently nothing?’ What else can the shadow be but a lack of light on that side of a dense form which is opposite the light, because the light-ray cannot penetrate the firm and dense body. [10] What your shadow is to you while you are standing or walking in the light, which is all matter, together with its treasures, to the spirit. It is of necessity a delusion and in itself a falsehood, because it is not what it appears to be to the senses of the body. [11] This is the very judgment of falsehood and deceit, namely that it has to reveal itself before the eyes of the spirit as something transient and merely as an outer, corresponding shadowy image of an inner, profound truth, whereas in the blind worldly love of the soul it would prefer to remain in reality what it seems to be. (GGJ Book 11, chap. 65) 66. WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO A MATERIALISTIC SOUL IN THE BEYOND [1] (The Lord): “If that is so, of what use is it to the soul to win for the physical man all material treasures of the earth and unite with the flesh and its base animal desires, whilst at the same time suffering damage in its spiritual sphere and losing the reality of true life? From where in the beyond will it then take something with which to form a true entity, since it has itself become a nonentity along with the nothingness of matter? [2] Yes, friend, he who has gains with every gift, so that he has even more. But it is a different matter with that which really is nothing and has nothing. How could one give anything to that which has first allowed itself to be caught and annihilated by falsehood? [3] Or can you pour liquid into a vessel which exists merely in your imagination and nowhere else, or – should there be a vessel – with so many holes on all sides that one could hardly count them? Will it retain even one drop? [4] Oh, if matter as such, and as it is, were a permanent and immutable reality – which, however, is impossible – it would be a truth as what it is, and he who won and owned it would be the owner of a truth; and if then the soul united with the matter, it would become a true and permanent reality. [5] However, since matter is merely a judgment of the spiritual, which can – and must – remain only until the spiritual primal element concentrates in the same, recognizes itself and, once it has gained sufficient strength, dissolves the matter surrounding it, turning it into the corresponding spiritual, then a worldly soul that has become all matter must in the end share the fate of matter. [6] When matter is dissolved, this also happens to the soul. It is dissolved, at least for the greatest part, into the substantial psycho-etheric primal-energy-atoms, and all that remains to the soul proper after the shedding of the flesh is one or the other archetype of an animal skeleton shape, without light and often without life, which bears not the slightest resemblance to a human being. [7] Such a soul is found then in a condition which the ancient patriarchs who were endowed with a spiritual vision called ‘She oul a’ (hell = thirst for life) a very true and correct description. [8] But accordingly the whole Earth and everything that you are ever capable of perceiving with your material senses is a true Sheoula. That is the death of the soul, which is or, rather, is destined to become a spirit; for whoever has ceased to exist as that which he had been, is also completely dead as that which he had been. [9] A soul who for the above reasons has almost lost its human nature, so that, at the most, an animal skeleton is left of it, is dead after the shedding of the body. For you unthinkable eons will have to pass until such a soul buried in matter will again become a near-human being, and it will take much longer until such a soul becomes fully human. [10] You certainly think now that all these things must be possible for God in an instant. And I tell you that all things are indeed possible with God. If God wants puppets and robots, an instant will be sufficient to fill the whole visible space with them. [11] But all these beings cannot have their own and free will, nor their own existing, independent life. They will stir and move only according to the will of God that comes to them. Their eye will be the eye of God and their thoughts will be the thoughts of God. Such creatures will be just like the individual limbs of a body that cannot move or be active in themselves without your recognition and desire. [12] Is it not a totally different matter with your children, who have issued from your flesh and blood? They no longer depend on your will; they have a life, cognition and volition fully their own. To be sure, they will obey you and accept precepts and commandments from you, yet not according to your will but invariably according to their very own will, without which you could not teach them any more than some carved image or a stone. [13] And behold, beings endowed with free cognition and free will, who have to perfect themselves voluntarily so that they will forever be free beings retaining their self-determination, must be created by God in a manner that makes possible such an achievement. [14] God can only, so to speak, create the seed enclosed as in a husk and endowed with every possible viability; the future free development and cultivation of life must be left to the seed itself. It must begin to attract the life out of God, which surrounds it without, and form from it an independent life of its own. [15] And behold, it does not happen as quickly as you think, because the embryonic life cannot be as powerful and capable of actions as the most perfected life in God that has existed since eternity! [16] And because every soul, however depraved, has always the same destiny, it cannot possibly, even in the beyond, be helped in any other way toward its salvation than that it helps itself with the few means still at its disposal as in accordance with the eternal order of God it also has to help itself. [17] I hope to have made it sufficiently clear to you what is actually meant by Satan, hell and eternal death, and you should hardly have to ask another question on this matter.” (GGJ Book 11, chap. 66) I HAVE been telling you many a thing concerning life, have shown it to you in various phases, how it manifests and what it actually is. However, there is always something left to be said about it, namely, that this life, as a seeming efflux of a spiritual potency, is actually nothing else but the power of My will, which manifests in millions of different ways.
In order to introduce you to this spiritual life and point out to you even more clearly the difference between spirit and matter, this word entitled “Cosmic Life shall elucidate for you more fully the spiritual life generally and also individually. In other words, that it is always the same principle, the same motive, which, beginning with the smallest ether atom and ending with the highest angel spirit, is only My divine Being. Manifesting on various levels and in various forms, struggling for development and perfection, it inspires and implies the spiritual progress and visibly manifests in everything as life. When I say “cosmic life”, I take the concept in the way this word, derived from classical Greek, denotes it, namely, as a “universal life comprising the whole universe. For all that exists must be based on an idea, why it was created, what its purpose was and what its ultimate destiny will be. In conformity with your scientific research and its regular investigations, also your scientists endeavor to trace back everything down to the bottom, to the ultimate and simplest original forces moving everything and leading it to its conclusion. And so I will reveal to you this ultimate motor, which is the reason, or the basis, of everything existing, and which gradually prepares everything for its further development. If you view the entire universe with a spiritual eye, crossing the realm of the infinite ether-space with the power of thought, all you will be able to (discover in it will be “ether atoms”, or the most subtle constituents of material substances. However, your instruments, such as microscopes, electrometers, etc., would never be capable of rendering them visible to your physical eyes. All of these finest ether particles have in their center an offshoot of spiritual content of Me, of My Being, which thereby imprints on them the eternal permanence and the everlasting urge for development, preservation and progress. THESE three words denote things of which people hold very erroneous concepts. The first two in particular give much trouble to the materialists because they believe to have found in them the whole universe, the reason for its coming into being, its existence and passing away, with which explanation God, or a Spiritual Being ruling everything, has been completely negated. Since it is precisely the materialists, or the present “very learned professors” of geography, animal science and mineralogy, who cast around with these words, establish them as the first principle and believe thereby to have said all in all, we must still, if we want to tell these clever professors something which clearly proves their ignorance, begin with the concepts these words represent. For first of all one has to know what one needs as tool before one set to work, whereupon only the right use of one or the other tool proves the dexterity of the master.
So, what really is or is called “energy”? Look, you men of learning who fancy to be so wise, who, after all the exploring and investigating, arrive at the very spot from which you began, who want to determine energy as a factor in the whole visible and invisible world; look, I have to tell you that energy, this highly-praised word on the title-pages of your books, is not something that exists independently or alone, but denotes only the product of another, invisible factor, which you do not wish to admit exists, by straight away declaring: “Energy is a natural law which is equal to movement or life.” But now we ask these scientists: If your whole world consists only of substance and the expression of energy, who gives the impulse to this energy so that it can, and must, express itself thus and not otherwise, always influencing through the application of its force the second article of faith of your science, namely, substance? "A general desire is arising for light, for spiritual life, for love, for genuine spiritual teaching that has warmth. And so a move towards the spirit is coming about in spite of all opposition." (Lord’ Sermons 24)
"Now, as before, the adherents are falling away from these leaders and seek the light, seek the Word - in expression of their search for God - something their own leaders are unable to give them." "The desire for freedom of thought is arising, for spiritual freedom." (Lord’ Sermons 24) "Men are meant to have everything and arrange their life on earth with as many comforts as possible. They may protect their hands from hard labor so as to gain all the more time for the refinement of their hearts and souls. But if with people's increasing skill also their selfishness, greed and lust for power will keep growing and as a result their spiritual darkness, the worst consequences may be expected." (GGJ V,108, 6.) "The worlds industries will be pursued with diligence so as to deaden the spirit more quickly and possibly also destroy completely the anyway scanty seed for the attainment of eternal life. And thus men's hearts, God's sole dwelling place on earth, are becoming stunted." (G. fr. H. 11, p. 367) "Inertia is also expressed in the second name that we could give it, namely, in substance. And the life-activity influencing it, which sustains and quickens everything, is the spirit, which is the stimulator of energy and holds substance together, and is thus the principal factor of life in its entirety.
“Substance” is nothing at all. “Substance” is too generalized a term, which, by classing everything equally, does not allow for any variation. If one wanted to define all there is in the visible world as substance, it would finally be impossible to find a single definition for combinations of dense and light, solid and volatile masses. Thus “substance” is at best represented by the great ether space beyond the earth’s atmosphere, where all the ingredients are present in solution that go into making of the world globes and the various kinds of atmosphere surrounding them. Only there “substance” is present, namely, the great supply depot for the building of the universe. However, in, on and around the earth, substance is no longer “substance”. For there are, according to the respective purpose, bound and combined elements which then, exposed to other, higher potencies, such as life, motion or force, are coerced into modification and change of form, transform themselves and appear in a new form as something different, after their activity in their former form has ceased. "[1] Let us take a look now at a real illicit lover, just like a female illicit lover. What is such flesh-lusty person continuously thinking about? If it were possible, and nature would permit it, he would like to continuously have sex with the most beautiful and lavish girls in all possible ways. When such person sees a somehow attractive female being, anyone can read from his eyes that he would like to use her on the spot for his pleasure without taking into account for what reason the sexual act was established and created by God. If civil laws would not hinder him, a female being would not even be safe in public places against his lust.
[2] But this does not change anything because he still sinned out of his lust. Let us assume that such sensual person would have a fortune that would be sufficient to provide him with almost every pleasure he wants. What does he do? He travels to all countries in order to provide himself with several, special pleasures, because despite his great fortune his own place could not offer him anymore enough pleasure for which he stills feels a so-called passion, since he tasted of everything that was in his reach. [3] When our sensualist enjoyed everything, and his nature begins to refuse him its vile service, he uses artificial means to breathe some new life into his dull nature. When these do also not work anymore, he provides himself with shameful sex of healthy boys and young men. By this his nature is again a little activated. Secrets of life, chap 33. THE DARK SIDE OF NATURE RELATIVE TO HUMAN LIFE
21 February 1877 "In My last (preceding) word I defended Myself against the criticism raised by some, or actually by many people, concerning the contradictions they believe to find My visible nature, when they compare them with My everywhere proclaimed words of love, of meekness and of the promised joys. As far as was possible, I have elucidated this dark side for you, explaining also that "it could be otherwise, but it must still be as it really is." Now I still have to carry out an important scrutiny of your own life, where many a person says: "Just look at human life, from birth to grave it is nothing but conflict, suffering, disappointment, with very little love, joy and other promised things, unless man knows how to procure them himself. "What else is life on this earth but a vale of tears where one - not knowing any better - is referred to religious dogmas and other revelations always speaking of another life after death, of reward and recompense for sustained suffering while letting man battle here on earth with every misfortune. Why should I bother about another world beyond, of which I actually know nothing certain and in which I am expected to believe blindly! "Since I see this world surrounding me as so miserable, who guarantees that the future world is not just as contradictory as the real one here where, instead of joys, only physical or spiritual sufferings follow each other and even what is attained with effort does not afford the enjoyment some expected!" "[1] John: “After our disciples are well trained in patience and return from their duty in this outer world, usually after the decease of one of their entrusted persons they protected, they must stay near them as long as the natural spiritual condition of a person’s deceased soul lasts here. At the moment of the unmasking or emptying by which each spirit is simply left on his own, they return to the spiritual sun. Only from there they go to a new destiny. But where? This is very easy to guess when one considers that our disciples had sufficient opportunity up till now to practically observe and recognize the breaking of the law, first as disciples spiritually, scientifically and then as spirit protectors.
[2] The fact that after this understanding there is still a third, and after the third a fourth understanding, should be clear to everyone who knows that the goal, that is reached with each evil, brings along certain consequences, and it is only with this goal that the basis or main cause of the evil is recognized. For if one is still not aware of the consequences of sin and completely realizes the cause of sin, then he is still not so free and firm to sufficiently abhor sin. But once he realized that the consequence is the result of an unchangeable law and if he recognized the cause that is behind it, only after that, by his free insight and his fee will, he will entirely become a firm adversary of all the evil. [3] But where must our disciple go to realize this? They must travel through the Hells escorted by mighty and very experienced spirits, and this from the first up to the last or lowest one. In the first and second one we can see the consequences of evil and it is especially in the second one that the cause of evil becomes more and more obvious within the still very visible consequences. Only in the third, lowest Hell they come to know the basis or main cause of all evil. |
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