The Natural Sun
Announcements about our sun and its natural conditions
- Chapter 42 -
Religion upon the fourth equatorial belt
Regarding religion, this is nowhere simpler than here.
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It consists of no more than a living faith that God is a most perfect Man and that this most perfect Man created heaven, their earth, all things and beings, out of His free will and man in His image, setting him down into the world as its lord, to rule the outer as well as his own world, which is the natural world during everyone's temporal life. This is taught as the fundamental principle of their religion making up, as it were, the first part of their religious instruction.
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In the second half it is shown that man is a perfect vessel for the reception of God's will and furthermore, how man only through the taking up of this will can become a mighty lord over all creatures of the world as well as over the world itself.
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It is further shown in this part how man can gain full possession of God's will through fulfilling it. For it says there: He, who fulfils God's will completely within himself, must have first fully taken it unto himself. But no man can take up God's will until he lets go of his own, apparent will. But how can man let go of his own will? He can let go of it by using it for the purpose that his Creator has poured it into him.
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And what is this purpose? It reads thus: Man should strive to fulfil God's will with his own and for that purpose strive to recognize it. He who earnestly does so, God will soon recognize in the right measure. To the extent that someone recognizes and then does God's will with his own, to the extent of understanding it, this then unites his own will with the divine by which alone he truly re-establishes the connection between God and man, which amounts to actual religion.
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The more man strives to recognize the state of religion from within and live in accordance with it, the more he is also united with the power of the divine will. And when someone has made the divine will his own to the extent of having no more will of his own (not even to fulfil God's will), to the point where all will within him has become purely godly, then man has not only joined up with God but has become one with Him.
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And that is the purpose of religion, that man should become one with God i.e. his action should not be motivated by any will other than God's.
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Whoever has all his actions controlled solely through God's will acts with ease and great effect. Because the omnipotence of God's will comes to the fore everywhere in every man when this will is the sole, pure motivating force asserting itself in one or other of his actions.
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Behold, in this short presentation consists the second part of the religion of the inhabitants of this belt.
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And therewith is the third part, in which only the inner life it presented and that too in the briefest and simplest summary, which you shall discern from the doctrine that like the previous one, I shall present to you literally.
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The third stage sounds as follows: God is Himself the actual primordial life. Wherefore, within God there actually reigns the greatest enmity towards death, inexorably and eternally, for life cannot fraternize with death. How should God, as arch-eternal most actual basic life, ever seek commonality and friendship with death -the crassest opposite of all life?
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This enmity, grounded in God's eternal order is called "the wrath of God." If however God, as foundation of all life has created the world and all things out of Himself, then He is bound to not have created these out of His wrath but out of endless good naturedness. This affability or love is the actual basic life of God from which we and all things, have gone forth.
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If however we, as thinking and willing beings have obviously gone forth from the life of God within which death is unthinkable, then we are certain to have gone forth not for death but life. That this is so however, we can clearly conclude from the fact that we are here as living beings.
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Because death, this absurdity without existence and only a symbol of the opposite of life surely cannot ever bring forth something; were it able to do so then it would have to exist first. But how and where could it exist, since the living Being of God fills out its infinity, outside which no second infinity is thinkable, since God's one infinity is eternally without restriction.
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Since we are alive however, and thinking and self-conscious, we obtained our existence out of God's primordial life and are located in the centre of His primordially eternal, supremely perfect life. Nothing can separate us from this other than temporary self-will, which he gave us for a short time.
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Once we have reunited this with His will, we have re-entered upon arch-primordial life and nothing further separates us from it - except for our feeble skin by appearance only. When this is taken from us in accordance with God's will we are then completely one life with God again, which shall then recognize itself in its divine perfection forever with the highest degree of clarity.
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But how do we perceive this primordially divine life in us? This we identify through love. He who has love therefore also already has life in him. But he who has no love would have to endure further tests until love began to manifest in him.
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Love towards our brother and sister is the beginning of inner life. He who has gone over from this love to love for God however, has also from the beginning of his life gone over to the fullness of God's own life.
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For he who loves his brothers and sisters already lives in their hearts and they in his, whoever then loves God lives in God, and God in him!
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Nobody can love God of his own love, as God is the fullness of life. But he who has, in a living way through love, taken up his brother and sisters within himself, has therewith broadened his own life sphere to only then take up the fullness of divine life into the same.
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Because one's own life, out of one's own love, is far too feeble for carrying the fullness of God's love. But through a united brother and sister, life in a man's heart can gradually be fortified as to make it capable of taking up the fullness of God's life.
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Although every man is in himself a living being, this individual person's life would seem like sheerest death compared to the fullness of god's love, and no man could bear the latter if it came to him in his life- sparse isolation. Spread therefore the arms of your hearts out widely to embrace all brothers and sisters with innermost love in action, wherewith you shall transform your hearts into sufficiently roomy dwelling places in which the fullness of God's life shall be able to move in and take up everlasting residence. For God is great and endless is the fullness of His life.
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We know however, that no great power can manifest at just one point. When these points unite however a power shall also indwell, proportionate to the size of the merger; is not our big world made up of many points? If however we take up one point therefrom to test its force, then how negligible it shall seem compared to our own, in that we can annihilate it between our fingers. Are we able to do this also with our world? Oh, not in the remotest degree! For the world's power is a fullness corresponding to the endless multiplicity of its aggregate points. This power nonetheless is also nothing other than the perpetual mighty action of God's life in our world.
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Self-love within a man is similar to a point capable of destruction even by us; how shall it fare within the fingers of our godly life force? When we expand our heart through brotherly and sisterly love however, we enlarge our own inner world through consolidation of the living, individual points, effected by love for brother and sister and therewith creating a powerful organ capable of the taking up of progressively greater powers. Once this organ is fully developed in accordance with God's will, like the external world that carries us, only then shall it become capable of taking up the fullness of higher powers going forth from the primordially eternal endless fullness of divine life-power.
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Hence love your brothers and sisters, in order to love God. For without love towards brother and sister no man can love God.
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Behold, in this consists the third basic principle of life through true religion.
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Marriage also is tied to this basic principle; therefore marriage is nowhere so warmly kept as here.
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That this without any exception is the case upon the two belts corresponding to Jupiter, you can gather from the fact that at the presentation of the northern equator I never particularly mentioned the southern one. And so we are finished with the fourth equators also and shall presently move to the fifth.