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)