THE GREAT GOSPEL OF JOHN
VOLUME 5
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus in the region of Caesarea Philippi. (cont.) Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 16
- Chapter 32 -
Roklus' philosophy of nature.
1
(Roklus), "The raw and yet most powerful forces of nature cannot work in another way than only extremely raw, and their thus created work is a necessary one; because their uproarious work brings to life the small forces, and these develop into something only when they are brought to life by the most powerful work of the great raw forces. Only by mutual pulling and pushing do the small forces become moldable and start developing the adopted forms, thus stepping into felt existence, which they maintain for as long as they are able to resist in their apartness another, more powerful force acting on them. If this one overpowers the small force, the small separate force is completely done with. The form disintegrates with it immediately and everything is once more engulfed by the great force, as such is shown rather appropriately by the picture of Cronos, who as genitor of the gods devours his children, which was certainly contrived by a wise man of primordial times. Time and the forces acting in it is just the named mythical god Cronos. Time produces everything; perpetually it generates laughing farmlands and at the same time dry stubble fields. Becoming and decaying, life and death, existence and nonexistence always stroll along simultaneously. No peace, no rest; a wave calls into existence a neighboring wave, - but between them soon walk along the furrow, the grave! What carries the mark of life also carries the mark of death on the other side.
2
However, all this is for the careful observer of things, as they come and go, a necessary result of the continual interaction of the different single forces and special forces in great nature. These awake each other continuously and destroy themselves once more struggling as they have struggling called themselves into existence. Everywhere I see a perpetual game of waves, and the often splendid shapes of the clouds floating in the air deliver quite palpable proof of what highly distinct forms the two-way acting forces squeeze into. Soon a lion appears, soon a dragon, soon a bird, a fish, a dog, very often even a human head, sometimes even a windswept whole person! But how long do these often rather nicely shaped forms last? For as long as a stronger force acting upon them does not first rob them of their nice form and finally even their existence!
3
Is it a lot different with our form and our existence? Not at all! How much does that change in man from birth on until his old age, if he reaches it! And where is the proud man who a thousand years ago planned to conquer the entire world? There where the snowflake lingers, which with its millions of siblings strived to turn the whole world into ice! Where is the hurricane, to which just yesterday the strongest cedars stood in the way and which threatened to put an end to their existence? A more powerful opposing force devoured it, like Cronos devoured his children! It survives very faintly only in our temporary memory; in reality, however, it has stopped raging for the whole eternity!
4
When I traveled through Persia, I witnessed an extremely strange natural phenomenon. It was a blazing hot day, so that our caravan had to look for protection from the scorching sunrays under big, shady trees. Roughly a few hours before sunset we noticed in the east a massive, coal-black cloud rise and start moving towards us. Our leaders predicted a mighty storm and advised us not to leave the forest before the storm will have sped pass. We did that, and in half an hour the storm was above us with lightning and thunder. It crashed and raged quite dreadfully in the trees, and some strong branches lost their existence, and the poor foliage of the trees suffered immensely. It started raining, but not too heavily; however, it got darker and darker. After a few moments of rain, among the ever more heavily falling raindrops fully developed toads started falling by the millions down on earth from the clouds. The ones who fell in water swam around quite well, while only a few of the ones that fell on the hard surface of the earth got away with their life for a few moments. The strange thing was that few moments after this odd storm, which lasted a good quarter of an hour, when the almost setting sun sent its hot rays on the surface of the earth again, our toads disappeared and nothing was left of them but a slimy mould, and that only here and there.
5
Now I ask, where did those countless many toads come from, and who created them? Who other than the natural forces which have met by chance in such a way that from their mutual striving, toads had to emerge! Those which got into water probably found food acceptable to them in their element, and many may have been saved; but the ones that fell on the scorching hot surface of the earth, met an element hostile to their nature and forces striving against them, and the result was the complete decomposition of their insufficiently solid existence for the shortness of their being. Nature always works blindly without some economical calculation, as one can clearly infer from many phenomena; it generates things of one kind or the other always in such an immense number from which in general hardly the hundredth part reaches a solid and durable existence. One should only look at a tree that gets its blossoms in the spring! Who would want to or could count thousand times thousand blossoms? However, if one walks around under the tree only eight days after the blossom period, one will find on the ground a large amount of already fallen blossoms together with the stems; thereupon the falling of the too numerous blossom onset continues until the full maturation of the ones remaining on the tree."