The Great Gospel of John
Volume 4
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
Jesus near Caesarea Philippi (cont.)
- Chapter 244 -
The self of the individual as the master of his own destiny.
1
(The Lord:) "If one carefully looks at the life of man even under the most favourable conditions, one easily recognizes, that nothing is given for granted. From the king to the beggar, each one has to fight the battle with the summer flies of life, which are full of stings, and which does not contain a lot to look forward to. During childhood man is plagued by weakness, as a man with all kinds of troubles and as an old man with both, and the last hour of life nobody has viewed as the best time of his life.
2
As such the earthly life creeps along mostly between thorns and thistles, and who doesn't like it, will at the end of the earthly flesh life not be able to talk a lot about pleasant and beatific things; and the more self-loving someone was, the more insults he had to deal with. Who, however, as in the least self-loving, does not make much of all the occurring summer-sting-flies of life and also of all the denigrating and offending thorns and thistles, and to whom also all kinds of bodily suffering, poverty, often hunger and thirst, cold, bad clothes and also a bad dwelling and alongside this still all kinds of other misery, have not made him unsteady, will still be able to talk at the end of his life about some good times, while even a king despite all the incense strewn for him, will at the end of his earthly life career complain about nothing else than all kind of discontents over discontents.
3
Since where does the king lives, who conducted everything successfully, what he intended to do at the beginning of his reign?! Since this was impossible and he finally had to discover some rough calculation errors at himself, he is totally unhappy, and it is an old, familiar fact, that kings mostly die as a result of a secret inner disappointment.
4
As such the self-determining and educating person stays throughout the time of his earthly life in his completely determined consciousness of himself, in and under which he completed this earth's life trial. If in or outside My order, we want to regard in this case as all the same; since in every respect the earthly life had little pleasantries for him, but instead all kind of bitterness to show for. Therefore also the great world-wise of the heathens, did not wanted to praise anyone on this world as fortunate, and praised only those as fortunate, who returned to the lap of the earth.
5
What would then the reward be for a soul for all the endured troubles, if she, after leaving her body, would loose her consciousness as the indestructible primordial I, and either ceases to be or became divided into thousand other I's?! Would anyone of you be content with such an arrangement of My order? Surely no one! Therefore it is My opinion, that it will still be better, to keep the old order and above all see to it, that any nevertheless how bad soul, does forever not suffer any harm to her identity!
6
That an I can and must only then become perfectly happy, when it, determining itself, has entered My order, that you know by now perfectly well; since therefore I have preached to you for seven days uninterruptedly and have guided you back to the primordial root of all creation of the spiritual- and physical world. However, that to the contrary a soul cannot enter permanent blessedness for as long she is not, determining herself freely, returns to My order, I have shown to you manifold through words, deeds and many examples and again explained them by words. How can thus any coldness, mercilessness, hardness and injustice be in Me? Or can you, what is necessary for a person to be, call hardness in Me? Yes, with one grain less patience and equally less lenience, I would be hard and unjust; but not at all like I am now!"