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 184 -
The pre-existence and post-existence of the human soul.
Hiram says, "My endlessly respected friend, to understand you I need truly more than the eminent and very limited common sense of a cynic! You all are putting beautiful flees in our ears with your strange, never expected appearance and I am almost beginning to perceive that there must obviously be a higher being in humans than just what we as humans imagine with much limitation. And now it seems to me as if I must almost think that this higher being in a human must have both a pre- as well as a post-body existence; for behold, when I was in Egypt, you can hardly have been in the world!
2
But your inner spirit must nonetheless have existed a long time in advance, so that it as an invisible witness of all my reasons perhaps unknown to me could attend closer continuing deals. In this way alone I can sense a little your all-knowledge and all-insight in all my circumstances of life! Certainly you also knew the circumstances of Aziona's life just as well as about mine. However, that does not make a large difference; for you as a still pure original spirit have certainly turned your all-seeing spiritual eyes onto him, just as onto me! A pre-existence of your inner spirit therefore cannot easily be denied, neither your physical co-existence; but how are things with the post-existence? All gates and doors seemed to have been closed until now!"
3
John says, "Much less than for the pre-existence! There is something about this, but not as individual and free as for the post-existence. For in order for the spiritual being to avoid remaining continuously bound to and within the original spirit of the eternal and endless divinity, the divinity itself has placed matter between itself and the spirit that should become human. The aim is that the original divine human spirit, if it wants to achieve a god-like independence, creates for itself from the more etheric and mental elements a being similar to itself, animates it with a substantial, but nonetheless also spiritually intelligent soul and then educates the same without being noticed in the greatest possible freedom of will. And if this soul has thus greatly increased in all good awareness and the resulting activity, so that it has become similar to its original divine spirit "mainly through the true recognition of the only true eternal God, in love towards Him as well as towards his neighbors "and at the same time full of humility, patience and modesty, then an inseparable union of the soul with the original eternal spirit for all eternity takes place.
4
But because of that then the following happens: The soul originating from matter then becomes spirit itself; but the spirit then becomes soul in the soul and is thus an eternally free, independent and very god-like free self-active being, equipped with all those characteristics which are of the original eternal divinity.
5
It then very easily goes without saying that the body has nothing more to do nor can it without any further explanations! For the food which a person consumes daily makes up a periodic part of nourishment for the human body for a certain time, from which the already solid body, and through it then also the soul, takes its substantial and specific nourishment and replenishment. But if the periodic body of food has done what it must, it is then removed from the more solid body, which is still closely connected to the soul, as unusable for the future. If it remains as a very coarsely material part of the body in the more solid and already more related body with the soul, it would obviously lead to the unavoidable death of the more solid body.
6
But once the soul has been appropriately formed in the body, that is in its shape of being as well as in free however natured recognition, loving, willing and acting, then two cases can occur: Either the soul is then already quite mature for its divine spirit, that is it is already very spiritual, or the soul is indeed formed as a spiritual being and more or less consistent, but the inner, spiritual element still stands very much in question, and it shows as a consequence of its great and necessarily quite free determination much more inclination, again to fully transfer over into matter, than to freely swing over into its spiritual element; so it is freed in both cases from the body.
7
In the first and naturally luckiest case the divine human spirit has already reached its goal and then eternally needs indeed no material means any longer, because it has already once reached its goal through the same also for eternity. Or the all-seeing and all-feeling spirit notices that the soul formed from the matter called out with time begins to tend again towards the element from which it was actually taken "then its original divine spirit it tears away from the body, even if under the greatest pains, and then forms it only on the other side that is in the kingdom of souls, for itself, but constantly as unnoticed as possible; for every restricted and directed formation of the soul would be worse than none at all.
8
But this remark has to be mentioned here and stressed that an education of the soul only in the beyond takes a much longer time and nonetheless never can reach that very highest level as opposed to a formation of the soul that happened on this side, still in the body; for in that way also the more noble part of the body is healed as well, and almost all the flesh achieves with the soul and with it with the spirit united with it a type of enlightenment and simultaneous resurrection and then forms for eternity a being fully united with the soul and spirit. But only very few people ever achieve that on Earth "but very many shortly after the death of the body. And behold, you have now got the post-existence of every person before you just as the straightest line of exactly the deepest truth!
9
If this is still somewhat foreign and difficult to understand, you can easily ask me new questions. Therefore you now have to speak again or even friend Aziona. Think and speak and I will give you another correct answer!"