Secrets of Life
Disclosures about important questions of life
- Chapter 33 -
WORDS TO A RATIONALIST 1
22 September 1870
YOUR brother M. asked you for an answer on behalf of one of his friends who, only endowed with the light of reason, tries to explain the entire creation, including its "Why" and "What". Having repudiated the life of emotions or of the heart, or the inner spiritual life, he is thus unable to arrive at some satisfactory answer to all his searching and musing.
Well. I will try to offer the suitable foods and palliatives to a soul that, though hungry and thirsty, does not know as yet which food or which drink could really appease its hunger and thirst. Whether this soul will accept them and how it will spiritually digest them, we shall see in the following.
Your brother M. perceives quite well that human suppositions are inadequate to bring true solace and peace to his friend. For it could only be a system pieced together from rational arguments and opposed to another one where after all, seen from My viewpoint, one has as little solidity and firmness as the other. Therefore, he turned to Me with the most loving request that also this friend might be given the tranquility and peace he himself enjoys in such rich measure through reading and complying with My (new) Word.
So I will try, like the mother who offers her breast to her newly born child. to offer also to him, an erring but not evil soul, the first spiritual food. Newly born children also often refuse the mother's breast. Now we will see how your friend will like this new food which, moreover, comes from hands quite unknown to him.
In the beginning it will not fit into the way of thinking of this friend of your brother's that a God, a Creator and Father of all created beings, should reveal Himself through another man to a human being, trying to spiritually educate and better him. For he will probably answer: "This is impossible! How can or will a God, provided there is one, in His infinite greatness bother with us worms? How should He, the Almighty, be concerned as to how one or the other man thinks and whether he has a spiritual future or is lost forever? The entire creation and everything visible proves at every moment that the destruction of a single life, indeed of thousands, does not matter to Him!
And this God, whom you foolish and credulous people revere, should condescend to teach on this tiny grain of sand, the earth, a thousand times thousand even smaller vegetating little worm - man! No, this borders on idly or dreadful nonsense!"
Thus, dear child, your friend is sure to think, and look, from his present standpoint he is right. He can and must think thus, in accordance with what he has imbibed partly from his experiences and from his view of the entire creation and partly from the books that have come into his hands and in which alone he fully believed.
Therefore, before I can deal with even one of his doubts, I must try to make him understand that such extraordinary revelations are possible. They have occurred since the earliest times, can still occur, and are now more than ever before bestowed upon mankind.
Your brother's friend divides his life into an emotional and a rational life, making a great distinction between the two. Now I merely want to ask him: Has he ever wanted to come to a clear understanding as to what an emotional life and what a rational life really is and where the one and the other originates? On closer scrutiny he will hardly be able to give a satisfying answer refuting any objection. Well then, so I will first ask questions and then answer these questions Myself. For it matters to Me that I explain My opinions not accepting his, which I have long since known.
"What really does emotion, or emotional life, mean? Where does it originate and where does it lead? And where does it differ from the rational life?"
All questions weighty enough to warrant explanations, if one wants to build in the least on such questions and their respective answers, even the structure of the whole of infinity, solidly and permanently, so that no gust of wind coming from newly emerging ideas of a so-called scientist can topple it. Now let us come to the point.
What does it mean: emotion? This was the first question. And so I answer: "Emotion is something that one feels." But what does it mean: to feel? Here is the difficulty, for thinking and feeling are vastly different.
With his outer senses man feels all the impressions coming from the nature surrounding him. With his inner feeling capacity he perceives the influences of a spiritual nature, which, no matter how much he may deny them, are nevertheless there.
To this category belongs the voice of conscience which, according to your language (German) is something certain. Something which, despite all philosophical and scientific dispute among scientists and laymen, with its own reasoning (conclusions) pursues an idea which often does not fit in with what the scientists try to impose upon others while they themselves cannot agree upon it.
This emotion, or emotional life, is therefore not of material but of spiritual origin. That is, it leads up to the assumption that, apart from all the visible and invisible natural elements, there exists also a higher level of spiritual things, which are invisible and imponderable to our senses as well as impossible to analyze chemically. On the whole they are there and can be felt, but neither seen nor heard, or even thought, as for instance the feeling which takes hold of everyone listening to sublime music. What can you human beings do then; can you think one chord, or even feel the impression of the same on your soul?
Having established the fact that a feeling and an emotional life exist, the thought must naturally arise: Where does this stream of the most blissful emotions of which a human heart is capable come from? Where is its beginning and where its ultimate goal or culmination point? The just evinced spiritual realm, which is above all elemental matter, must naturally more or less be present in all matter so as to secure its permanence.
When people fell a tree or pull out a plant, do they know whether the tree or plant feels something during this violent act? They do not know! But their lack of awareness is no proof that the tree or the plant does not physically feel pain and, spiritually, death. For what your senses momentarily fail to perceive does not prove its non-existence.
This emotional life is thus probably more or less present in everything created, in keeping with its individuality (nature). Now it surely is natural to ask: If, according to certain laws, the feeling is there, who established these laws, who showed them their established limits beyond which they cannot go?
Where there are laws, there must also be a lawgiver, for elements and natural forces do not evolve spontaneously. Therefore, since the laws naturally imply a lawgiver, it goes without saying that with the wisest laws there must also be a most wise lawgiver who is the quintessence of all wisdom.
No matter how much you people have so far learnt in nature, everywhere, on a large and on a small scale, you have been able to recognize the same perfection. Nowhere have you observed a shabby treatment; a central sun is as perfect as a grass mote.
What follows from these discoveries? The great fundamental law emerges that to the lawgiver and Sustainer of the universe, beginning with the remotest stellar constellation down to the tiniest infusorian on your earth, not a single one is more important than another, but that everything is on its level arranged, sustained, and further developed with the same care for the sake of its progress.
Since you have to deduce this merely from your investigations, it naturally follows that, if a mote is important to the Creator, also the human spirit with all its qualities must be and that, since the Creator does not let a single atom perish or vanish, He will even less regard a human soul or whole nations as lost.
Now that people with their good and bad qualities and their completely free will have so far deviated from the actual goal for which the Creator made them, should it be impossible for this very same God or Creator to adopt special measures and through His influx into the heart of an individual prophet or medium (as you now say) chosen by Him, try to bring back to the right road the other lost spirits and souls? Here we have finally arrived at a point where our friend could perhaps convince himself of the possibility (though only in extraordinary cases) of such an influx.
However, this influx can only occur in the organ corresponding to the spiritual Giver, and this organ is the understanding of the heart, or the heart, or the emotion. It alone, being the most important, most precious organ, is suitable for the most sublime soaring up, the divine spiritual ecstasy.
The intellect belongs to the world, to its requirements and its material interests. The emotion is the organ of the spiritual life, which in this world an only be fleetingly tasted, is not lasting here and at most leaves behind a faint foreknowledge of a spiritual, higher world.
I had to go that far back so as to give at least a little to this friend, but also to let him have some idea as to what grace it means for someone like him to be taught by Me, the Lord of everything created.
I love him, like all My children, like everything created. I want to lose nothing, and this applies also to him, who is by no means among the most ignoble souls who were placed on this earth for their short trial-life.
Your friend in his letter to your brother complains about the various discrepancies which he observes in creation, in human life, indeed wherever he turns his eves, mentioning quotations by scientists who judge Me and speak of My arrangements like the blind of color. My dear friend, I have already told you before: The intellect is for the judging of worldly things, to invent machines and make discoveries so as to render your life more comfortable or to give one or the other more power to rule, etc. But whatever you may plot with the intellect, you cannot thereby fathom My creation, its "why so and not otherwise". However, with the emotions you can surmise it, without understanding it. Not until I intercede and allow you a glance into My operations will you have a little light. But then you will also find rather the loving Father than the implacable God in Me, who does not ever want to destroy, but always to build up and save!
Your friend said further in his letter that very much was expended on the education of the understanding of the heart, indeed more than on the development of the intellect.
To this I must remark that I am exactly of the opposite opinion. In almost all educational establishments the understanding of the heart, the heart with its noble attributes, is almost totally neglected and the worldly intellect alone educated. This is why there is so much evil among human beings because they have merely a brain and no heart. For that very reason I allow misery and misfortune in human society, so as to awaken the inner feeling, neglected or led astray in early life, and make the inner voice heard again, so that man may again learn to prefer spiritual well-being and advantage to worldly success.
Through misery and ills I awaken the dormant hearts; in their misery they then seek Me, whom in their life of pleasure they had quite forgotten and often even totally disavowed.
From this standpoint your friend must view the earthly life merely as a period of transition and in the same sense regard all the sufferings which often arouse his pity, and he will (like My angels and pure spirits) give blessing where now he wants to curse.
What would man be, had he not in the end his own heart, his inner life, as an ultimate refuge against all misfortune?
The intellect with all its knowledge is cold; and where there is cold, there is no life!
The inner feeling warms. Where spiritual sunbeams, emblems of eternal love, flash through the martyred heart, the flame of enthusiasm is kindled. There man then enjoys the higher initiation into the foreknowledge of a light of a more sublime and beautiful world far beyond this earthly life, dimly visible as through a coffin-lid.
Who has never lived through such hours which the contemplation of nature or the works of true poets and composers offered him?
And where do all these sublime sensations really lead? Certainly not to a destructive, severely judging God, but to a loving Father and sustainer of all his created beings.
Also in nature, appearances are deceptive, if the human eye judges the destruction of one animal by another only with human reason, this slaughter and murder with worldly rational notions.
You human beings here or there judge with a compassionate heart the destruction in nature that you see and which for wise reasons were decreed by Me thus and not otherwise. However, where your entertainment is concerned, or the killing of time that you cannot spend with anything better (or at least you imagine so), you fail to consider that when hunting you deprive out of boredom innocent animals of their lives in order to satisfy your lust to kill.
You condemn the bird that mercilessly consumes the insects, which it does only for the preservation of its own life; there you see an unjust God. As for your voracity however, where everything exists only for your stomach and you kill by far more than many animals, not out of necessity but out of wantonness and boredom, you weak creatures consider your actions justified, even laudable, while you accuse a loving Creator of something which mar be more necessary for your existence than you could ever imagine.
Therefore, My dear friend, learn first how to love and honor Him, who with every pulse-beat showers you with thousands of graces. Learn to understand the language of nature, and you will no longer see so many dissonances in it as hitherto.
Rest assured, the world is always the same; a loving heart sees only love, where an embittered one finds hatred and discord, in your heart you do not see the world, but only its reflection; clean the mirror and the reflection of My nature, which is always the same, will soon show itself to you in greater purity.
Read My old and My new words; they contain peace and tranquility, which you will seek in vain in the books of scholars.
The majority of scholars write their books so as to gain the tranquility they themselves lack, or they try to convey to others the clear conviction about the world that they have lacked in all spheres.
Use your intellect for your worldly career, but also here combine your intellect with love. Then you will gain more peace, you will learn to know and love God, the Creator and Father, more and will no longer have to pity or envy others.
Follow My advice and you will soon hear this voice, which is now speaking to you through another man, in yourself and it will give you peace, solace and a true picture of the world and its life process.
This you are given for your solace. I value you because I know your heart; it only needs the right guide who will bring it onto the right path. For the time being I Myself will be this Guide. And so follow My advice and you will certainly never regret it. All this I, your most gracious Father, ant telling you. Amen.