Secrets of Life
Disclosures about important questions of life
- Chapter 27 -
SUGAR, SALT AND VINEGAR
June 1875
YOU see, My children, here I am giving you three words which denote things you all well know, although you fail to know the role which the above mentioned substances play in the material nature and even less what they correspondingly represent in the spiritual sense.
Another new field among the natural objects of your visible earth shall be given or unlocked to you. You will then, as so often before, see and learn anew about the important qualities often concealed in things, which, because you see them every day and use them for various daily needs, do not strike you as being important. And so with these three things, namely sugar, salt and vinegar, new proof shall be given as to how much the Spiritual is linked with matter, is expressed by and contained in it. And you may even more realize the extent to which man should endeavor to recognize the spiritual structure of the entire world, which cognition can then often lead him to a proper evaluation of Myself.
Look, sugar and its juice are found everywhere in the plant kingdom and are present also in the animal kingdom and even in the human organism.
The juice of sugar, or the sweet juice which usually arouses a pleasant sensation when it is enjoyed, is so widely distributed in nature that there is almost no living being which would be unaware of its comforts.
The many plants, which in their structure possess the ability to draw the sugary substance out of the soil in which they grow, are in turn the main supporters of many animals which collect, consume and process the so prepared sugary substance in flowers or fruits for their own sustenance.
In the fruits, and in former times even in the few medicines known to mankind, the sugary foodstuff played the predominant role whereas nowadays, with the decline of the human race, it has been replaced by poisons.
Syrup or sugary substances were the equalizers in illnesses, the alleviating remedies which, as it were, sweetened the material life of most living beings, including man, of course as long as they used them in moderation or according to certain rules. For neither man nor animal can live exclusively on sugary substances.
Since you now see that the syrup, industrially extracted from the plant substances and in crystallized form, mixed with your foodstuffs, has gained such extraordinary importance, the question easily arises, namely: "Why is it precisely the sweet juice, called sugar, which causes such pleasant enjoyment while eating or drinking? For there are surely plenty of other substances which, taken from all kingdoms of nature, are used for our nourishment and which could perhaps be dispensed with, whereas the absence of sugar juice would render many foods quite unpalatable."
Well I answer with another question: "What is sugar, seen in a spiritual sense?" and through the answer to it you will also find the above question answered, for once you know the foundation on which all these material experiences, desires and appetites are based, you will easily realize why foods and drinks sweetened with sugar are so enjoyable for you.
You see, sugar in its spiritual correspondence represents in the material creation - love!
Where love is merely the endeavor to arouse, sustain and propagate pleasant sensations, sugar, as an additive to other things, is the main mediator in making many substances palatable.
Love in every form can, and must, sweeten their position for human beings, and this is correspondingly done also by sugar.
Love mitigates all harsh feelings and pours balm onto open wounds. It comforts, calms, equalizes and renders many a thing bearable, which otherwise would seem unbearable.
Love is, and was, the fundamental thought of creation, the fundamental pillar of My own self, the main factor in rendering man truly human.
Without love, the world would be a chaos, a lawless conglomerate of substances and elements, in constant war with, and destroying, one another.
Therefore, love, being the highest spiritual potency, is also the mightiest factor in a material sense. Man and, to a certain degree even the animal, in their soul-life were endowed with faculties enabling them to feel and grasp love and always look for it. In the same way all over the world sugar, or the sweet pleasant feeling given to the living being with the enjoyment of products of the earth, is the main factor in sweetening and rendering pleasant the material vegetative life. And this pleasant awareness imparted to your palate corresponds to love, which likewise only with sweetness or lovingly adjusts all that is wrong and bitter. This you see in sugar, be it as a natural juice or artificially manufactured and crystallized, the factor which metaphorically corresponds to love and the sphere of which no one can escape. For its gentle effect seeks out all that is alive, and its enjoyment, as it is sipped, lets one easily forget everything else, just as during the sensation of love.
And who prepares this delicious sugary substance for you? Who coaxes it from the dark earth? Who urges the plants and animals to seek and collect it?
It is the sunbeam, the light, as an efflux of My divine love, which I let pour forth into the infinite world for the delight, enjoyment and life of all that I have created. Thereby everything living may see My creation in the light and recognize love as the carrier of this light. A light which through distances of eons of miles imparts its power, quickening, creating, sustaining everything and forcing it to transformation, to spiritual progress.
What light, as love, is spiritually, sugar is metaphorically in the material sphere. The gentle words of infinite love or the gently warming rays of the light, or the pleasantly sweet taste in the fruits, they all mean the same thing. "Love" this great word is called, love, as a Creator had it when He created all this; love, infused into the created and love, extracted by sunlight or love-light as juicy sugar even from the rigid earth. It is meant to impart to the one who enjoys the products of the earth the same pleasure, the same taste which a loving word, a warming sunbeam arouses in the emotion, as one or the other meets animals or human beings.
Thus, My children, let the sweet sugar teach you that you, made from love-elements, first of all look instinctively for the lovely things in nature. And that, secondly, when you eat sweet fruits or use the sugar mixed with drinks for the quenching of your thirst, it is always only love. Love, which in thousandfold form demands, effects and endeavors to carry out the very same thing contained in the word, when I emphasized as the fundamental basis of My creation, apart from the "Let there be", the word "light", because light means love. And through the many words I am giving you I want to kindle light in your hearts so that they may recognize their own light-world. Then they will learn to understand that the great Creator can be found even in the most insignificant, most commonplace, and that a heart capable of love and wanting to seek the Father, personified Love, can find Him, if light, an open eye and an understanding of the entire creation go hand in hand.
Now you have the spiritual significance of sugar, what it is, how you shall regard it if you want to understand Me. Now we will proceed to the second item, salt, which in taste is exactly the opposite to sugar, and also here try to find out what is behind it spiritually and how best to exploit its effect and existence correspondingly. Then you shall again recognize Me as your Father and the great Creator of the great nature also in this mineral.
To begin with this matter logically, let us consider salt simply as what it shows us to be, where it is found and why it is essential.
You see, there are various salts, and just as sugar is diligently sought after, salt is sought after especially by animals and human beings, for without it, many things would be unpalatable, particularly when in the preparation of food in your kitchens you remove, through cooking, the salts contained in the raw substances by exposing the latter to chemical processes. These salts must of course be replaced with other salts, that means with your cooking salt.
Salt is contained in almost all parts of matter. Salt exists as mineral, and also fruits and plants contain it. Even sugar contains salt, and it is contained in the blood and in the stomach of many living beings, where salt is a principal element.
Thus the question arises as before: "From where this desire, this inescapable craving for salt?" Look, also here, as with sugar, the spiritual explanation elucidates the presence of salt in matter.
"Salts" are correspondingly what "life" is in the universe. They are stimulators, that means catalysts in the process of creating, sustaining, perfecting. Thus salt is the corresponding element that gives birth to life, develops it and gradually leads it to higher levels.
Therefore, salt is sought after as a stimulant by both animal and man. It is found in the tunnels of the earth, where these deposits represent the storehouse for the existing surplus. This surplus in the interior of the earth can then serve to satisfy the need of the outer world.
Just as My love is the all-harmonizing might, life is the allanimating power, which stimulates into life what was created out of love, forcing it to perfection, so as to bring it back after repeated transformation to the place from where it had gone forth.
Therefore, in the sea, salt as the foremost stimulant is plentiful still today. For the element of water (as condensed air) has been, and will always be, the mother of everything solid.
My mighty word "Let there be", denoting life, created this everlasting urge, which urges both matter and the living beings to complete their mission, their developmental cycle.
What salt is as a stimulant, as a stomachic, salt is in a spiritual sense in human life, in the conflict with the world and with man's own passions. The adversities, the calamities are the salt of life, which is necessary and without which life would have no fascination, just as food would be devoid of taste without salt.
That which incites or stimulates the organs in an organism to more easily fulfill their functions, is the spiritual salt of adversity, which strengthens the spirits and souls and enables them to perform greater things and to more easily achieve their ordained perfection.
And this inciting, this stimulating is life.
Love cannot manifest without life, for love wants to see the effect of its energy, does not want to have applied all its means without a result. Love demands counter-love, and to achieve this, motion or action or vital force is required so that the demands of the creating love can be fulfilled.
This is the purpose of the salts in matter. They effect life, help the inert matter to progress, having in view the fundamental type of the entire creation, where life is the main purpose and love its fundamental basis.
Thus you see, My children, how an insignificant element, well known to you all and used daily, elucidated in its spiritual correspondence, can become an important factor in the entire elementary creation and achieve an importance which you were unable to imagine.
Salt as a remedy is equally salutary when used in the right measure. It sustains the vital movement in the organs of human and animal bodies, just as the "salt of life", or the worldly circumstances, enhance the activity and vital force of the souls.
Thus both factors, that means love as sugar and life as salt, assisted most in that the world, once created by Me, had already in its first fundamental principles the germs of eternity. For everything comes into being, exists and transforms itself through selfdevelopment.
And so, what is still missing is the last of the above mentioned words, namely "vinegar", its significance in material life, its use and spiritual correspondence.
Now let us also here begin, as with the preceding ones, to define its qualities as "vinegar", and we shall then automatically find out its purpose and further use.
Well, what is vinegar or, as the chemists call it, "Oxos", from which is derived "oxidation". For you must not only consider the vinegar or the acidic substance which you use in the kitchen and in drinks. You must extend this word to be the general expression for the acidic substance in all matter. There, in "oxidation" etc., you also come upon these substances that, by combining with other substances, have an oxidizing, transforming effect.
"Acidification", or oxidation, is actually nothing else but the process by which a stuff or substance reaches a turning-point where it passes into other forms or structures owing to the influence of the salt.
In this manner begins the breaking up into other elements which then, free of their former association, enter into other mutual combination.
Even your table vinegar is nothing but a broken up, formerly differently arranged thing. And so oxidation is that form in which transformation is effected where all chemical parts can, and must, enter into other compounds.
This process, which is going on incessantly in the whole of nature, is correspondingly what in nature is called oxidation and in its spiritual form is considered progress, which it really is. For the breaking up of one means the beginning of another, and in the whole of the universe nothing is permanent and even the formation or development into a form can only result from the breaking up of the former one.
Progress, or perfection, is the great word without which My creation could not exist. Also the passing of nine denotes progress. The hours, minutes and seconds fly and millions of deceased products of the worlds pass away with them. And from their passing, from their death a new crop sprouts forth, a new fruit where everything presses on from the maternal to the Spiritual, to its final destination, first to My spirit realm and then to Me Myself.
You see. Love created the world, life sustains it and progress, always purifying tie created, again leads back to Love what it once sent out fettered and now sees come back in freedom.
This applies to both the inorganic and the organic world. Sweet and gentle are the first beginnings, which as salt, or life, have to stimulate in the latter so that it may not lose its energy. And the continuous oxidation, the result of the stimulating salt, through the breaking up transports the elemental substances from level to level, to higher, purer, more important compounds. Finally, the material, ever more spiritualized, achieving a more subtle envelopment, amalgamates more and more with the spiritual, until the collective matter of the entire universe, spiritualized, enters into new combinations, where love as bliss or sweetness becomes ever stronger. Then life, or salt, ever more intensified and progress, or oxidation, ever easier, will give rise to the transformation. And this, gently, without making a stimulus felt, establishes an eternal happiness where the coming into being is bliss, life is rapture and progress a state that a human being living in a physical envelopment cannot imagine. For even the highest spirits have foreknowledge and understand that beyond them there is a vast sphere extending from them to Me. There, countless creations will take place forevermore. And they, in continuous progress increasing the enjoyment and enlarging the perspective of the spiritual eyes, will give more than adequate proof to every sensitive spirit-soul as to what infinity, what the highest love, what the most profound life and what eternal progress really are. Where also, as in the coarse material, something spiritual, and out of the Spiritual something divine can emerge, which, again going through the same phases, finds with every step in infinity the imprint of the infinite God in His infinite love!
Therefore, you too, My beloved children, who on your small world are already surrounded by millions of wonders, where every minute, every second could testify to you: Do endeavor to understand this love of your Father, the divine life which every minute manifests in all beings. Understand the progress, the eternal oxidation process, as out of the first love-act through light and warmth, through salts and oxides, even in the seemingly dead nature, the eternal course of the law is fulfilled. A law that inexorably propels the worlds in the empty space, where the great process of love, life and oxidation through the onward movement and the rotation around their own axis affects the same thing. How in the bowels of your earth the metals and kinds of soil, all the different chemical elements, placed there by love, prepared by the salt, as life, for oxidation or for progress, take the same course decreed by law. How in the spiritually fully aware human life, love is at work and life stimulates. And finally, how the separation or the subordination of the material to the Spiritual effects the same developmental process, which one day will bring forth from man a great spirit. How salts and oxidation produce from a clumsy stone a plant, from the plant the animal, and from the animal the ultimate creational product of this earth, namely man. Where this last member of the material creation, as a denizen of two worlds, having gone through the processes of the material and spiritual order on this world, then enters a spirit-realm. And where, although his refined senses will behold things which his heart cannot imagine at present, he will also be confronted with situations and demands which expect him to solve quite different tasks from the ones he had been accustomed to.
There too, "sugar, salt and vinegar" exist. However, the sugar, though sweeter than anything earthly, can only be won when through the acetic or acidic fermentation (or oxidation), life as a stimulant or "salt" has enhanced the activity. This enables the pure soul to live in those spheres where finer oxidation processes are possible. These also impart a more sublime, more intensive love to the one who, stimulated by the salt of the spiritual life, has endured his own "oxidation" and returns, purified for love and exalted, in keeping with the reward allotted by love, so that the victor can be given the crown.
Oh, if you knew what awaits you, if you knew how it can be achieved and what bliss, what rapture can always be experienced there, but not, like here, only in fleeting moments; you would do everything possible to make sure you arrive there well prepared, at the borderstone between matter and spirit, from where progress is easy, gentle, only guided by love!
You see, it would be a vain effort to describe to you vast spaces of creation, great creational thoughts, great creational laws and processes or worlds for you to understand Me through the same. You would at most fall down before Me in amazement, for the world is too vast for you small human beings to grasp its distances, its vastness. However, for the sake of the attainment of the goal it is much easier to make perceptible to you My greatness, My love, My patience and meekness in nearby, to you often insignificant things. For first you have to see that I have arranged beside the great cosmic and solar complexes also the most insignificant things in such a way that they reflect the same divine thought that also amazes you in the starry heaven. Only then do you realize that God must be something different, sublime, greater, because for Him, everything is equally important, and the smallest worm is equal to the greatest solar world. And everywhere there is His love, His life implanted into everything and His urge towards progress is implied in the first act of creation. It urges on ever thing from level to level. Finally, in the spirit-realm the great Beyond will prove to man through other laws of love and of life, other laws of progress, that sugar, salt and vinegar, or love, life and progress will not ever end, as long as God with His love, with His light, illumines and warms creation and stimulates it to draw near Him.
Accept this great teaching from these three little words as proof of My love, a love which, in contrast to yours, knows only forgetting, forgiving and rewarding.
So see to it that I have little to forget, to forgive, but much to reward you, and once these three words quoted in the heading have fulfilled their meaning during the course of your life, you will enjoy beatitude in abundance. Amen.