Secrets of Life
Disclosures about important questions of life
- Chapter 21 -
ABOUT THE VARIOUS FORMS AND KINDS OF ANIMALS
9 August 1872
SOME of you, as well as many others, have racked their brains as to why there are so many different kinds of animals whose usefulness you, being human, understand and whose outer
This is how you judge, how many people and natural scientists judge, who everywhere expect to find things according to their imagination, but not as I wanted them to be in accordance with My wisdom.
Well, as your saying goes: "Every bird sings according to the shape of its beak." And as one must forgive these learned gentlemen and many another over-subtle reasoner and faultfinder if in his blindness he talks of things which he does not, and never will, understand.
So as to still give you proof that I am forbearing, as I have always been towards My immature children, and forgive them also these ridiculous and clumsy views, I nevertheless want, at least among the small number of My adherents, a better opinion to prevail. And so I will yet again - as on other occasions - let you look behind the veil of Isis, proving to My adherents and worshipers that not all that presents itself in the world to your eyes as clumsily made is actually so; and that "the old God" certainly knew long ago what He was doing, long before the idea existed as to whether a human heart should beat or not! So let us come to the point.
You see so many animals, the reason for whose existence you cannot grasp, while you have to assume - because I created them - that there must be a reason why.
Look, if you really understand your arithmetic as I practice it and had not merely a vague little idea of the deeper meaning of your mathematics, you would find it easier to grasp many a thing.
It is true, mathematics or arithmetic teaches you to conclude from the known to the unknown quantity. It teaches you to always think logically, always conclude from one to the other. However, this thinking and concluding again and again implies the difference between a finite created human being and God. He, while observing the same manner of concluding as the one you have discovered in mathematics, calculates, concludes and thinks also in a totally different manner from you weak and immature children of a mighty Lord and God.
From this it follows that, when you apply your standard of thinking and concluding to My words, there always appear gaps where human thinking is insufficient, because a divine thought lies in between.
You know for instance a great number of insects whose usefulness you fail to understand, while daily feeling the tormentors unless you protect yourselves against them with all the means at your disposal. You know a great number of other animals that only live to consume other animals below them and, therefore, only live for the sake of preying.
You know a great many other animals which only become familiar to your eyes through the microscope and which have been endowed with a productive energy, a longevity compared to which that of higher animals, and even of man, is left far behind.
Thus you see in the animal kingdom many contradictions for which you have no explanations, but if you thoroughly observe one of these animals individually, it turns out to have been created with such a wonderful form and is sustained with such great care so that its species cannot be lost. This of necessity leads to the conclusion that, considering such an animal's form, its life and its immense power of reproduction, there must be a great reason for the Creator, or Me, to endow such a tiny animal with attributes, which I Myself have refused you intelligent human beings, My children.
So you are being plagued by doubts, not knowing what to think of the created or the Creator.
Look, in order to elucidate this anomaly a little more closely for you, I must lead you onto a field completely different from the material one. For we must begin with the Spiritual, for which matter serves only as envelopment.
Only with spiritual eyes can then be seen what will forever remain hidden to the physical eye and also to the eye of the intellect.
The idea of God, as a spiritual Being, implies as a matter of course that His creations must be spiritual products.
However, if God wants to create a world, or a visible expression of His divinity, He too must establish a certain gamut as to the created, which gamut corresponds to regular thinking and must exist as basis for the existence and permanence of the created world. Only then is there a life, a striving and a moving upward from the lowest to the highest possible, which finds its proper purpose expressed in the words or concepts "coming into being, existing and perfecting."
Therefore, everything created has as its foundation a more or less spiritual principle; in everything existing, something of My divinity is hidden!
As this divinity can, and must, be spread onto further levels, it was also allotted an analogous body, an analogous inner arrangement and an analogous duration of life.
There are no leaps in nature, but always transitions from one animal to the other. These transitions then necessitated many creations, which, being links made these preparations possible for the transition from one level to the next. And these intermediate species, understood in the spiritual sense, are the very same animals that often trouble you so much because you do not know why they are actually there.
When you draw your conclusions you completely forget that for a progress in a spiritual sense, in accordance with the thinking of a Creator of a universe, other levels of logic totally different from yours are necessary.
However, with many of these animals there was still another reason for their form and their life, namely, not only to serve as intermediate and transitional beings, but also to exert a mutual effect for the stimulation of the spiritual progress of the beings far superior to them.
Look, the bugs, lice and fleas, and all the other insects tormenting you in particular, are for you spiritual stimulators to look after your body and your dwelling in such a way that the former may be worthy of the intelligent spirit and the latter, by the observance of the principle of cleanliness, also further your health so that you do not, like pigs, go down in the filth and dirt, instead of rising upwards.
These animals and still other tormentors of man have by far a higher purpose of life than you think. In them is realized the mediating level between a low and a somewhat higher intelligence, clothed in a body, something you cannot grasp. In strength and endurance far surpassing you, they could well demonstrate to you (if you could view the spiritual levels with spiritual eyes) how much it takes to render a lowly divine spark receptive to even a millionth part of higher intelligence.
For thousands upon thousands of the lowest animals an upward development is impossible and they can begin their ascent only by serving as food for higher animals and then combining by the thousands into a single higher animal.
The smallest infusorian and monads as you call them, as well as the worms of the corals and other crustaceans, are only there to help build up your earth's crust with their bodies, thereby rendering it solid, and also to produce a considerable quantity of minerals and stones from the waters of the oceans, which they use to solidify their own bodies and which are then turned into solid mountains or rock (chalk).
Since often millions of such animalcules can live in a single drop of water, you must realize that there the productive capacity must be extraordinary, to build within the time ordained by Me an earth crust, including its mountains, which carries everything on it with ease and is capable of resisting the expanding force of the vaporized elements within its interior.
Look, your soldier must pay for his clothing, his keep, even for all he requires, with the pay allotted him. There is in your country not a highway whose travelers did not have to pay for the road and its maintenance through a self-imposed toll. Indeed, the whole complex of your empire lives and exists only inasmuch as all its inhabitants have to pay for the needs of the whole state with its officials and kings, making the state, which as such has no money, only the steward of the money entrusted to it.
As you proceed in a state, I do in the worlds. For every world must develop, maintain and perfect itself, so that it has prepared within itself for the future transition the forms then required under the changed conditions.
The smallest animals, barely visible to your naked eye, build the crust of your earth, support the life of millions of other animals and help to beautify and solidify the surface of the earth. The somewhat higher animals, in which My divine spark, as an almost developed sense, can already assimilate other things, have to be the carriers and sustainers of again higher animals, and so forth in stages up to man. Where there are great productive forces, consumers of these forces are at hand, which curb this reproduction so that it remains within the lawful limit.
Thus exists the harmony of the whole. From the spirit imprisoned in solid rock up to the free man, a quiet bond of assimilation winds through whereby one can exist through the other, one can perfect itself through the other and can thus, through man, again return to the spiritrealm from where it once came.
Years would not suffice to explain to you the cause and the "why", beginning with the smallest infusorian up to the elephant, to dearly demonstrate to you even one class of the lowest mollusk and the reason why
Therefore, you must first recognize these arrangements and their "why", before raising the question why the whole animal is there, for what purpose, and on what part of the gamut?
Where is your science, which could explain this!
Just look at a small nerve center in a living body, what is it? Is it the director; is it the propagator of organic and animal life? Is it alive, or does it merely propagate life?
All these questions must first be discussed if you want to understand the whole animal. Where are the books that would suffice to give you the thread through this labyrinth of "Whys"?
Here man, as a finite being, has reached the limits of his knowledge, the limits of his intellectual capacity. Here begins God, the Creator, who can only say to man: "Immature child! What do you want with your limited grasp of that which God, an infinite Being, has created? A nerve fiber is, and remains, for you an eternal riddle. How can you criticize and judge a created being consisting of millions of parts which, under different forms, still express only one thing, namely, the present level of a spirit-particle, a minute particle of the great Creator? A Creator who deemed all these arrangements necessary lest such a tiny spark should forever be deprived of the capacity for progress? Where is your wisdom, and where is Mine? I permitted you only one thing, and that is, by watching with spiritually open eyes throughout My creation to learn to surmise and love the great Creator, as your spiritual Father! However, to understand Him is beyond the limits of even the whole spirit-realm. For I alone am completely infinite, was never created, and you, however close to Me, are nevertheless as created beings forever finite and imperfect!"
This, My children, do understand! Grasp it and you will then be able to easily grasp that, just as with the slow progress of the spiritparticles in individual beings and species, also the outer form of these animals must be adapted to the requirements of the spirit, as well as of the body belonging to it!
Just as in you human beings the face and the whole form partly express the spiritual interior and man can be partly recognized from his features, which give expression to either a noble or a common human soul, also the form of even the lowest animals up to those close to man, namely the ape, is the expression of its inherent spark. This is why, with still undeveloped senses and faculties, the forms cannot correspond to the aesthetic concept of a highest human spirit-form. For this spirit in its immaturity has still other requirements, needs other arrangements to fulfill its purpose. There the spirit itself in its spiritual form is still an embryo on the lowest developmental level and, therefore, simple as it is, also the envelopment surrounding it can only be simple.
The only factor determining the form of the animals is the region in which they must live, multiply and reproduce. This requires in one case a thousand, and in another no feet at all; in one, a single eye, in others, many. But everywhere the outer form is the physical expression of the level occupied by the enclosed spirit-spark.
This is the reason why you often find animals which, judging condescendingly, you declare ugly. However, if you could spiritually see the species and levels, beginning at the bottom, through which such a spirit must pass before he can come to a greater self-awareness, you would consider the form given it in its isolation the most suitable, which can correspond to its spiritual and material requirements only thus and not otherwise.
You have deduced all your concepts as to aesthetic form from the human form, having taken the human form as basis, as basic type, because also I formed you once in My image. But the forms of the animals cannot be judged according to the human form, simply because in the animals the inner spiritual form is not perfected, not quite clearly expressed and still in need of many additions until it can approach the human form spiritually and physically. And even where it comes closest to man, as is the case with the ape, the animal is lacking in the sole, but highest, attribute that makes man human. It is the freeing from the leading-string of nature (instinct) and, as the keystone of creation, the higher spiritual gift of the free will, emancipated from the instinct, as a free being to be also free from all the shackles and bonds of a nature subordinate to him, a lord over himself, and a spiritual lord of creation!
There the hidden spiritual form is wanting in beauty, and so also its envelopment must be wanting in beauty. But you may be assured of this: A chain of ideas goes through the entire organic world, which slowly prepares one form out of another, introducing one into the other. It is always adding, always perfecting, until in the human form the keystone of all striving has been reached. Beginning with the hard rock up to man, the latter has developed the logical or mathematical idea of a highest Being, of God, who in man wanted to create His spiritual (and physical) image to whom every other animal would look up in reverence, surmising if not recognizing in him not only its lord, but also its friend and highest goal.
However, do not consider man as he is now, but think of man as I created him, when, pure and unsullied, he went forth from My hand, an image of Me, and an ultimate product of spiritual ability and the most beautiful material form.
Thus, the human form was once the true expression of his spirit out of Me; thus he must again become!
Once he has ennobled himself thus, also the animal world surrounding him will participate in this ennoblement. It will not lag behind so that man, though more ennobled, will stay in the same relationship to the animal world surrounding him as when he was once created.
Once upon a time, man understood the animal world better than now; the latter obeyed man more and was not his enemy. However, man distanced himself from his primal form. The became different, whereas the animal world remained the same. Therefore, since man has become known to most animals only through his hostile intentions, the animal world regards the present man with more awe and fear as its enemy. The gentle relationship existing between both from the beginning is ruined, the place of the friend having been taken by the inexorable selfish ruler.
Now man is often compelled to protect his own life against the attacks of animals that in the earliest times lay tranquilly at his feet, only obeying his orders.
Thus man has misused his freedom and turned the peaceful world into a den of murderers and thieves where, of course, only fear and hate, but no longer any love or trust can prevail.
To you few who still believe in Me, in My teaching, I am sending these lines for you to see new proof of My endeavor, without touching your freedom given you by Me, to again make you such human beings as the one once going forth from My hand and, in line with him, this earth shall again become a Paradise, a Garden of Eden for its inhabitants!
To you these lines, so that you may read from them the infinite love and goodness I have for you and no soul-or spirit-particle which I once had sent forth into the vast spaces of My creation may be lost, but be duly respected. Furthermore, whenever possible adding to their perfection, so that all the simple or complex infusorian, monads, animals and human beings once m the future on the long road of perfection, purified and matured, may again enter the spirit-realm from where I once sent them out to pass their trial-life on all the levels of My spiritual and material realm and, united with the highest and most intelligent spirit of the worlds and earths, be able to form in man a whole pleasing Me.
What is the summary of the aforesaid? That Love alone is the deciding factor which, although at first it separates the spirits, only serves one purpose, namely, to see them finally all the more intimately (because perfected) united.
However, in order to value this unification, as befits spirits, offspring of Mine, the same must be fought for, deserved; for only "accomplishment deserves the crown!"
The awareness of accomplishment results in the blissfulness of possession. Therefore, you too should strive to attain what I have shown you so that you, as My images, may be worthy and deserving of the name: "My Children"!
All these lights of grace which I send you from time to time serve to achieve this, namely, that you shall more and more realize that in the smallest monad, as well as in your fellowman, the same God keeps preaching you the same thing which nature during every walk, and every pulse-beat as a time unit calls out to you:
"Do not ever forget to what end you were created! Use every minute and every word from Me to fulfill this purpose!", for soon the time will come when the grain and the chaff will be separated. Happy they who have used time and word in such a way that they, raised as corn for a fertile, invigorating bread for the heavens, can confidently continue on the road to perfection, when I shall come, as the sole Shepherd, to gather My sheep under My protection, which will certainly happen soon! Amen.