Secrets of Life
Disclosures about important questions of life
- Chapter 22 -
THE ESSENCE OF LIFE
12 August 1872
LOOK, this word again encompasses so much that is enigmatic, full of misapprehension and poorly proven by your scholars, natural scientists and medical men, that I am feeling inclined to again give you a light which shall shine forever for you and for all future generations.
"What is Life?" Well, if I would discuss this question in the manner it was given you by your learned men, I too, like they, would have to come to wrong conclusions. For all of them without exception regard the effect as the cause, consider the product to be the factors, by judging only by that which is visible or tangible to them.
Would I render to you the concept "Life" according to an earlier word in its original context, where it says: "Where there is light, there is warmth, where there is warmth, life", I would again explain the visible effect or the appearance of life as the product of light and warmth. However, with today's word I want to tell you neither the one nor the other, but I want to show you life from a more profound and more exalted spiritual aspect. This will convince many a doubter and atheist of his unbelief so that also he, converted by the sound reasoning, can in the end only believe, or surmise, what until now he has so stubbornly denied.
Now let us come to the point; the question is: "What is life?"
Look, if I take the matter as it presents itself to your senses, "life" exists wherever a transformation, a change, a movement manifest. You say: The plant, this animal, this person is alive. Where life is not visible, not perceptible to your senses, as in the mineral kingdom, you no longer assume a life, but at most a combustion in accordance with certain laws according to which also the rock, though slowly or imperceptibly, experiences a transformation. However, according to your belief, one that is spontaneously caused by the influences of other elements on it.
This is how you view life. Your botanists prove to you by their diligent studies the circulation of the juices in the plants, tell you as far as their microscopes and other chemical analyses go, how and of what the tree, the leaf, the blossom and the fruit consist, explain to you the fibers and canals and the core of the trees and plants. However, with all this they explain to you merely the media and conductors of life, but not life itself.
Your anatomists dissect living and dead animals, look amid the torture of the former or the inanimate state of the latter, in the wrong manner, of course, when life has departed, for the effects of the same. They explain to you the nerves, the white and the gray mass, as factors of sensation and motion. They explain to you the organic and the animal life in man and find also sometimes the center from where all life issues. Finally, they explain to you also the brain with its convolutions and ramifications, its correspondence with, and dependence on, the other nervous system by means of voluntary and involuntary nerves, and explain to you the structure of the nerves as the directors of the will and the life force; however, life itself they fail to fathom out. They do not know why the nerve, like a telegraph wire, transmits to the human limbs the will of the soul or of the life indwelling it. They merely say: The nerve is thus built and created to serve as a conductor. But the fluid enlivening this telegraph, the life potency as such, is unknown to them and will remain so as long as they investigate merely with their intellect. For the thought, which in the convolutions of the brain is transmitted as far as the tongue or the writing pen; this imponderable factor they will not ever be able to fathom with the brain, although it is transmitted through it!
The thought is a spiritual product, and this, and how and why it comes into being, is only seen and understood by the more profoundly seeing spiritual man.
For this reason this life, which is above the organic and animal life, is even less explainable. For neither the mass of the brain nor the nerves originating in it will ever be able to tell him as to who or what enabled them to inform the outer world of the inner, or to receive the impressions from the outer world inwardly and use them for the further spiritual development of the psychic man.
In vain do some materialists toil to trace back all the movements and phenomena in the human as well as in the animal or plant life to the laws of chemical assimilation; it is and remains forever a wrong conclusion. For, when your scientists cite to you all the elements forming your body or that of an animal or a plant; when they prove that this or that consists of phosphorus, limestone, salt, etc., I will only tell them: Take all these primitive elements and mix them, and see whether an artery, a vein, a nerve fiber or even a pulsating heart will ever form from them.
Look, you weak blind scientists, surely you can see that in organic life certain basic elements combine into compounds, producing other substances of a higher order. However, the whole chemical laboratory will not succeed in producing a single blade of grass out of all these substances, much less a living being endowed with organic life!
To achieve this, a different kind of energy is required, which possesses the raw materials of the world of rocks and minerals according to laws other than those of attraction or repulsion and forms from them organs as supports of organic life. This requires a different law, a different life, and this very life is a mystery for you and so many others, and the purpose of the words I am speaking today.
This life, which in the rock presses towards its transformation, which makes it come into being, cease or dissolve into other elements; this life, which in the plant builds the organs, in the living animals makes their leading instinct and in man, combining all the former life of the rock and the plant, develops from the very same the Spiritual for another, eternal world; this life cannot be found and classified through chemical analysis nor with the microscope or the dissecting knife. This life is of a higher order than you weak investigators believe, for it is not a product of matter, but "an offshoot of My own, eternal, never-ending life!"
How do you finite, weak beings propose to measure out the life of the infinite God? You see His action visibly in everything surrounding you, you can surmise it if only you ponder on your own Self, which is, and will remain, for so many enigmas.
Everywhere you will find that there is still another potency apart from all kinds of air, from magnetism and electricity. For all of these exist only so as to propagate life and to build and sustain the entire visible world, thus leading it towards a spiritual, higher goal.
All the absurdities on the part of the materialistic gentlemen will one day be regretted and cursed by them personally, once the moment arrives where the coffin-lid opens and the much celebrated clumsy piece of work, the body, nolens volens (means: whether willing or not) put into the coffin, is returned to the earth to again become that, from which it has gone forth.
There at this bridge to eternity they will shudder in view of the desolate prospect, which they have tried to make appear nonexistent to themselves and others and which nevertheless is finally also catching up with them!
However, then it will be "too late"; they will be entering a miserable beyond, a "void", just as they have imagined it. There they will be given time until, having discarded their materialistic concept of creation, they will be able to gradually bear a little spiritual light.
This will be their fate, a fate which not I, but they have prepared for themselves. Did not the apostle Paul once say: "As the tree falls, so it remains lying!"
Without faith they fell, and without faith they will again awaken there. They were compelled to surrender to the earth the life of their brain and intellect, together with the mechanism serving it, and the spiritual life, which during their earthly sojourn they disavowed, has reached zero. You, My children, do not, and cannot, grasp the miserable conditions awaiting them there!
However, let us allow them to continue working with their wisdom-pride and return to our word "Life", for I do not wish to describe the fate of the unbelievers, but that of the believers. You have this in prospect; as for the former, it is up to every individual to prepare it for himself according to his liking.
Now do realize that it is life alone, as I have shown it to you, as an "efflux of My eternal, imperishable Life", which, weaving through the entire creation, penetrates in the light to the farthest distances where it produces warmth through vibration. This life then, according to My irrevocable laws, first urges the primal elements to combine with one another and, from step to step attaining higher levels of inorganic life, finally slowly makes the transition into organic life. There, by means of the organs, all the former elements, transformed for other purposes and through other processes from the solid into the liquid state, can only be of service to the newly formed life.
In this manner the hitherto apparently "inner substance" becomes alive, in animals turning into soul-substance and finally, in man, into Spiritual.
The pleasant inhalation of the spring air is not a product of oxygen and carbon, as you call them, but it is the spiritual life newly awakening from its hibernation, which comes over one hemisphere of the earth, while the other moves or rushes towards its point of rest lasting several months.
It is not merely a material feeling of well-being or a material influence which the mountains exert on the wanderer when, hiking among them, he sees roaring mountain torrents tumble down from steep rock cliffs or weathered rock masses and snow drifts look down on him from inaccessible heights. It is a far more exalted, spiritual pull of spiritual life which takes hold of him, giving him a foreknowledge that, high above the mute matter in nature, another spirit is wafting, which speaks to him in a friendly manner these words: "Look, small tiny wanderer! That which you are seeing and feeling near me is God's voice speaking to you, which here for your benefit through its eternal rule with few expedients wants to spread among you contentment, tranquility and blissfulness and tell you:
Do not, o men, lose yourselves in material interests which only concern this brief period of earthly life! Pay more heed to your spiritual development! We ancient witnesses of a pristine nature, who existed before your feet touched this earth, always testify to you of God's greatness, His omnipotence, His love! Close ranks with us! Be simple and always in tune with nature, and your physical as well as your spiritual life will not, like our waters, roaring and fuming have to find its path between rocks and crevices, but will slowly and gently, among flowering meadows and shady forests, meander towards its goal!"
"Consider life an efflux from your Creator's Spirit, through whose most mighty will also we were raised up, to again sink decaying into the depth in the distant future. As hard rock we stand here, defying wind and weather, until such time when also our elements, our life, having matured for a higher level, can pass into another, higher one!"
Thus speak the mountains to you, thus speaks the spiritual life in them to your spirit, which can read in the tumbling water not water, in the snowy summit of a mountain not cold snow, but spiritual correspondences, which are food for its soul and nutriment for its spirit.
Do cultivate this life, and thus look upon life, which, conducted through vessels and nerves, proclaims to you that there exists something more exalted, something greater than merely attraction and repulsion or the assimilation of related chemical elements. Then you will more easily grasp that your brain with its convolutions must of course be there so as to impart your life and sustain it; that all of these are only conductors, vessels and disseminators of a higher life, which impart to the animal as well as to the organic and inorganic life the impulse towards manifestation, but are not life itself.
Pity all those who consider the manifestations of the vegetative life its quintessence and refuse to recognize a higher Spiritual, which is above all the calamities of life! Poor created beings! They worry about matter, which can give them nothing, replace nothing. They are forced to miss out on a great many blissful impressions and hours that are enjoyed by the one who, recognizing the existence of a higher life, can find solace in it when earthly, material situations try to pull him into the dust from which he was born!
Yes, My children! There is a higher life, a life that reaches far beyond all that is transient and even in the rock is infinite. For also the rock changes only its form and chemical structure, but it too does not become nothing, and whatsoever is infinite in the rock, owing to its origin from Me, which in the plant and animal kingdom and in the human race is even more distinctly expressed, this imperishable something is the bond uniting the material with the spiritual world, and both with Me!
The more the feeling prevails that that which activates the pulsating heart, that which urges the soul to think, is not a mechanical effort, as a product of material factors, the more the awareness of a higher, spiritual life is raised, which goes even further beyond these transient manifestations of energy of the animal and organic life and even continues where all matter comes to an end.
Thus understand life, this urge to go forward, and you will discover even in the tiniest monads or infusorian a superior life independent of the parts constituting this minute creature. Understand that all the organs of this animalcule, though invisible to your eyes, as well as the greatest worlds, are animated and permeated by the very same energy that urges these animalcules to perfection.
This spiritual life naturally manifests through the vegetative, organic life, since it is not possible otherwise. However, it is not the same; it is superior and has more permanence than anything else.
The organic life manifests merely as long as organs are there which are capable of fulfilling their functions. Once the organs are no longer active, life in them apparently ceases. However, the driving force that urged them to activity has not ceased but is only invisible on account of the inability of the organs to take it up.
My spiritual life has not ceased; for, when it can no longer progress in this way, it leads matter, through the dissolution of the same, into new combinations where on higher levels and in different circumstances life begins anew, so as to come closer to its goal, the ultimate return to Me.
Thus life, as a spirit-spark everlastingly flowing out from Me, is that which imparted to the first atoms in the great ether the energy to solidify, made from them worlds and suns, endowing them with all the wonders of creation and populating them. And it will ultimately lead them back on the same road, so as to build from the remnants again other spiritual and superior dwellings for freer, greater spirits.
The life out of Me is infinite; likewise the effect it produces. He who fails to understand his own life or the life of the world surrounding him in this sense, fails to understand the meaning of the concept of God, of the Creator. He is unable to grasp the idea of a loving Father, who is, and has been, doing everything to be loved, revered and also recognized by His created beings. Nor does he understand why I now, more than at any other time, am sending down to you message upon message, light upon light, so that you may not walk in darkness, battling with prejudice and misapprehension, but may thoroughly recognize the proper light of true life. It is calling out to you with every heartbeat that every beat of your pulse is grace, an efflux of that divine life that is without beginning or end.
Take these words to heart. There, keep them and digest them. For there is the place where spiritual life, supported by organic life, streams into your body, where it can bestow on you health, blessing and peace.
Thus all My words shall gradually fill in all gaps, remove all doubts and give you more and more the certainty that you are not Living in a material, but already in a spirit-world, where matter is merely the rough encasement, which is subject to change, whereas the actual Spiritual, Sublime, manifesting as life, is always and forever permanent.
There is no abstract matter, but only imprisoned Spiritual, and it is this that urges on towards the transformation of the former, manifesting in forms, first inorganic and then organic, from where it passes to its original source, the Spiritual.
Thus in the visible world everything confronting your senses is only a means to an end. The cause lies deeper and can only, as spiritual life, be surmised and partly understood with spiritual senses.
There lies the hearth of a never-failing source of life. There is the great electrical battery, which through its telegraphic wires beams its impulses to all the worlds, urging everything towards progress, towards perfection. There lies life, the spiritual basic element which, eternal as I Myself, has only a spiritual goal, strives only for the Spiritual, though it must make use of material means depending on the organs.
This spiritual life will make use of these means as long as it requires them. Once everything is spiritualized, its activity will become more intense and mightier and that which now must occur on the slow material road will then be carried out spontaneously and with all might, in the way I can create or destroy worlds spontaneously whenever My great plan requires it and I do not wish to adhere to the slow road of development.
You do not know the force of this spirit-life though you may have an inkling of it. These words shall serve to lead you to it, so that you may always be aware that you "children of a spirit-world" do possess Spiritual for the development of which you shall do more than for the earthly, transient material, which is only for a short duration, whereas the other will remain forever with you eternal created beings.
Thus your earthly sojourn has a purpose and your ultimate transition to another life a certain goal, namely, by utilizing the time to exploit your life's capital given you in such a way that it may yield you the proper interest and fruits in the beyond! Amen.