The Great Gospel of John
Volume 2
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the Vicinity of Caesara Philippi (Matthew 16)
- Chapter 217 -
Man's spiritual development.
1
(The Lord:) "But as it is with plants, so it is also with animals, and especially with people.
2
Consider a tender, precocious maiden just physically. Badly twelve years of age, she is in every physical part so developed as to give her a marriageable look. Such maiden arouses men of a sensual nature more than a hundred ever-so beautiful lasses of ripe years. Such precocious maiden is then exposed to a hundred dangers, requiring exceptional parental care to protect such pre-ripened maiden against the adversarial suitors for all her sumptuous attractions. If she is given away too early to a lustful man, then she is easily spoilt in her fertility; if sheltered too much and kept away from all polluting air, her flesh becomes, as they say, spotty. She turns pale, becomes consumptive, sapping away and rarely reaching a notable age. If she takes in little and inferior food, she becomes sad and wastes away early. If well-nourished she fattens even more, getting awkward and therewith indolent, her blood getting stale and she soon resembles a corpse, which obviously brings her body premature death.
3
Such is also the case with a precocious psychological development. Where children of few talents are forced into exaggerated gathering of education, as if the whole world depends on it, such souls suffer fatigue, since they lacked the time to develop the body for usefulness under all circumstances.
4
Hence everything takes its time within God's order, and so-called grandiose leaps shall not suffice.
5
During birth of the body from the womb of the mother, the eternal life-germ as a little spark of the purest spirit of God, is placed into the heart of the soul, similar like the fruit of a plant if it has cast off the flower and begins to consolidate and strengthen itself. Once the body has been developed, the development of the spirit in the heart of the soul begins. Here the soul must do everything possible so that the spirit in her starts to germinate, and must lend it progressively a hand.
6
The soul is here the root and the stalk, and the body the soil; it must not give the spirit coarse water as nourishment.
7
The rings which the spirit draws, are the humiliations of the soul. Once the last one has been drawn, the spirit finally starts to develop by itself and absorbs everything from the soul which is akin to it, consolidates itself and finally assimilates the whole soul and what was related in the body with the soul, and is then forever completely indestructible, a process which we can clearly observe nearly in every plant more or less.
8
When the fruit has attained near-ripeness within the proper sequence, life-germ sparks are laid in the grains, residing in most tender shell readied in advance; after which the kernel closes off from the rest of the fruit for a time, consolidating as if on its own, yet to half -way from the life-ether of the surrounding fruit.
9
With time, the outer fruit undergoes shrinking and drying out. Why so? Because its soul goes completely over into the life of the germ-spirit in the kernel. And once the fruit's life-force has gone over completely into the life-germ spirit, the previously, throughout living stalk dries and dies in all its parts. On the other hand, all the life of the plant has united with the homogeneous germ-life and can no longer be destroyed as such, regardless of whether it is fused to the material of the kernel or not.
10
And thus you see a uniform order everywhere and in all things, with similar sequences."