4. HEAVEN AND HELL
[1] Says hereupon Philopold: “Lord, I and certainly we all thank You from the bottom of our hearts for this fantastic and most superb clarification about the teaching of the old sages. Yes, now the matter it is evident and clear after sounding like total nonsense before. Sure enough I shall understand and perceive all this only fully when I shall be free of all elements of matter.
[2] But for now it is enough to see how one can be according to the fullest truth totally outside the notions of time and space while at the same time being within time and space. There is only one more thing I would like to learn from You, namely, the whereabouts of both heaven and the loathsome hell, of which I have also heard and read much. It says: These will ascend to heaven, and those will be cast down into hell. Where and what is the ‘above’, and where and what the extremely deplorable ‘below’?”
[3] Says the Lord: “Look, on this chair on which you are sitting, heaven and hell can be firmly side by side here on earth. Yet in the realm of spirit they are separated by an immense chasm. –
And furthermore:
[4] Here, where I am now with you, is the uppermost heaven, meaning ‘above’, and here also the deepest and worst hell, meaning ‘below’.
[5] The material whereabouts do not matter, but only the spiritual which, as you have seen, have nothing at all in common with the material whereabouts, for in the realm of spirit only the inner state of life determines the true and genuine distance. There the material-spatial cannot ever be of any significance. To make this even more comprehensible for you, I will give you a few examples.
[6] Imagine two people sitting here on one and the same chair. One is a pious sage whose bright spirit, full of light, is initiated into very many secrets about the effects of the divine forces in nature. The other is a hardened criminal who rests his limbs on the same chair or on the same bench and let’s himself be served, like an honest man, with wine and bread to restore his strength, so that he can all the more easily perpetrate some evil deed once he is again outdoors. How closely together the two men are in a material-spatial sense and how infinitely far apart in spirit!
[7] On the other hand, assuming that our sage were sitting with us here on this bench and at the same time, somewhere a thousand leagues from here, another, these two like sages would be very far apart materially-spatially, yet in the realm of spirit they would nevertheless be very close together, as is literally the case in My Kingdom.