The Great Gospel of John
Volume 6
Jesus' Precepts and Deeds through His Three Years of Teaching
The Lord and the Priests of the Temple (John 5)
- Chapter 32 -
The spiritual in the natural.
1
(The Lord:) "Behold, here is a grain of wheat in all its oneness and simplicity. Its destination is obviously twofold. Firstly, it serves man as food and, secondly, being a grain of seed, it serves its own purpose, namely, its own propagation and reproduction. As food it imparts its many specific elements to the human body and through it also to the formal-substantial body of the soul, in which form it vegetates into a higher and freer existence. How this is and takes place you will only discover in detail in your spiritual rebirth, even if not fully here - because nothing completely perfect can exist under this sun and all knowledge and perception will remain more or less like patchwork - but all the more perfect in the beyond. There you too in your spirit will exist outside of space and time and your perceiving, recognizing and knowledge will not be patchwork anymore.
2
Let us examine this grain of wheat here only as a seed and therefrom see that the divine-spiritual, although it seems as it were subjective, is yet fundamentally present in this very same grain objectively and outside of time and space.
3
Behold, this is a grain of wheat usually producing on one stalk 3 ears with some 30 grains each! If you place this grain into good soil, it must at the next harvest yield you 100 grains of the same kind and species as a reward for your effort. If you take these newly harvested 100 grains and again place them into a good soil, at the following harvest you will obviously obtain already 10,000 grains of the same kind. And again in a following year you will harvest 100 times 10,000 grains, meaning 1,000 times 1,000 grains which is already a respectable quantity of this cereal.
4
To plant this many grains in a future year you will need a sizeable field. At the harvest you will get apparently a 100 times the quantity of the year before. And for planting that huge amount again a following year your field has to be a hundred times longer and you will harvest 10 billion grains; if you continue that for ten years you will reap such an immense amount of grains that for planting them you would need a field the size of almost half the earth.
5
You can extend this endless grain multiplication yourself for another hundred thousand and more years and you will find that after only a few hundred years more than a thousand times thousand earths would by far not be enough to provide space for the immense quantity of grains. And see, this reproduction can be continued ad infinitum. Could that be possible unless in this one grain, as well as in all the other grains, there were already present this endless number through the indwelling divine-spiritual that is outside of time and space? Certainly not!
6
Yet what is present in this grain of wheat is likewise present in all seeds and plants, in all animals and particularly in man where it approaches godlikeness. Therefore, he can be endowed with reason and intellect, has a language and can initially anticipate his creator in God and later recognize Him more and more purely, love Him and completely subordinate his own will to the recognized divine will.
7
This, then, as the pure spiritual in man and as godlikeness, is also outside of time and space; for if it were something temporal and spatial, man could never recognize himself or God and would be completely incapable of any development, never attain to reason and intellect, never get an ever so hazy notion about God and, besides, could never recognize and love Him and subordinate his will to Him. He would then be merely the outer, dead shell of an egg, without a life within and, least of all, an eternal life outside of time and space.
8
I think I have now made this for you so troublesome matter sufficiently clear to you, insofar as it can be explained to the mere intellect. Now it depends on your verdict whether you think you have understood all this or if there is still something unclear. If there is still something rather dark, then speak; However, if you understood everything, we can put any further discussions about this aside and drink wine and eat some bread with it."