Secrets of Life
Disclosures about important questions of life
- Chapter 34 -
WORDS TO A RATIONALIST 2
8 December 1870
YOU have again been approached to beg Me on behalf of your brother's friend for words of solace and explanations in reply to his last letter.
You are both concerned out of brotherly love to elucidate as much as possible to this friend his doubts and his concepts imbibed from worldly scholars and help him who, though longing for enlightenment, refuses to discard what he learnt earlier, to regain his tranquility and the desired solace And so let us see whether we can kindle for this soul instead of its presumed "scientific" light another, spiritual one which compares to the former like sunlight does to a burning candle.
Of course, your friend became upset through My words sent him by you. This food is new to him, not hard to digest, but unusual, for it is a food for the heart, not one for the head.
As I have told you before, your worldly scholars do not believe in everything they write down and often recant on their deathbed everything they have written. These scholars, as they erroneously call themselves, whose whole system is often, indeed mostly, built on a hypothesis which, wrong or not, is at least provable to them, know how to erect with clever words and seemingly logical conclusions an edifice on this hypothesis. And he who accepts the first sentence of the hypothesis as true is of course compelled to believe everything else.
However, what is the usual conclusion at the end of any "cleverly" written book? It is: "This is how far the material and rational research goes. It cannot be backed by historical facts nor experimentally proven; the present level of knowledge as well as the instruments available being inadequate to follow up this clever assumption."
How much have your scientists written about the origin of the earth, about its structure, its age, etc., and what is the final result? That they know nothing! For the creation of this earth, its gradual development, its inhabitants beginning with the lowest crustaceans and ending with man, comprise such spaces of time that no matter how much the geologists may dig around in the lowest strata of the earth's crust, they will find nothing of import of that which I alone know.
What have the astronomers discovered on the laborious roads of mathematics about the great starry firmament, which every night displays above their heads an ocean of wonders for the human spirit? Only a small number of planets orbiting around your sun; apart from that, they know nothing. Despite their best instruments, the nearest sun orbiting outside of .cur solar system remains for them a small star and a great mystery.
What do they know about the vast stellar or solar complexes that you call nebulae? Nothing! Your telescopes do not reach them and you have no data by which to express the distances to suns full of splendor and wonders with beings loving Me, still circling around each other singing a continual hymn of praise to Me, the Lord, whereas your friend accepts My existence only of necessity, and all this in your, to you, infinite shell globe. What are they supposed to know about that which lies beyond the envelopment o: cite same, compared to which this entire, to you infinite, shell globe is merely an atom in the universe?
What do the scientists of your world know of the animal kingdom or how the animals see the world and man? Look, an ox is for you a totally alien world. You do not know whether he sees you as gray, red or blue, short or tall. Its spiritual-intellectual life is for you and all scientists forever an enigma, and so is the life of every animal.
The scientists can only externally classify the animals according to their species, dissect them, prove their physical structure and its similarity to the animal nearest to them, and spy out certain peculiarities in their way of living. But despite all their research, they fail to know why the animal exists. And when they can no longer extricate themselves from the Labyrinth of riddles into which they have enmeshed themselves, they begin to accuse Me, believing that they, with their book learning, could have done everything better than I Myself.
What do your doctors and anatomists know, who incessantly dissect corpses (and even vivisect) and chemically analyze the elements of which the human body is corn posed?
To Me they all appear like a tailor who tries to determine from the garments he is expected to repair the character and the spiritual qualities of the one who has worn them. The material, indeed only the coarse material, is visible to them. The quiet energy, endowed with intelligence, which builds these receptacles to the last detail with equal perfection, animates them and from the moment of begetting builds them and sustains them until death, this intelligence they do not know, for it cannot be found through dissecting.
Look at a human brain; what is this tissue of diverse mass, segregated in its membrane, with its convolutions?
Why are these convolutions? Why not one single mass, why the gray and why the white mass? Some scientists believe to have discovered where this or that ability is Located. Yet what is ability or passion? Is it a fluid, or an electrical or magnetic current? What is the thinking process? What goes on in the brain mass during the same?
Look at all this; even if the brain was exposed and all this accessible for observation, these scientists would still see nothing, for a thought has no body.
It is exactly here in the hemispherical, whitish-gray mass of the brain that two worlds meet, which, despite all denials, still exist.
Many a materialist may still want to deny this with some sophisticated nonsense, but in his very denial, in his own person, it proves its existence.
You see, your dear friend has imbibed the sweet poison of human wisdom from these books. Following these scientists step by step. He has often in his life found their arguments seemingly proven and has thus fallen victim to pseudo-knowledge. This, however, neither satisfies nor consoles, but condemns hint to share with them the sad fate these scientists have allotted to man in creation. This is, to wait patiently until, after much misfortune and suffering of human life, finally also his hour comes which carries him off this vale of tears, turning him perhaps into a bit of water, or ether, or nitrogen (according to their idea). It is this horrible prospect that depresses him, and since no one has as yet come (to him) to enlighten him, he is sick and tired of his life and existence.
Yes, My dear child, you are certainly right to see the world as you do, as it were, wanting to curse the day when you were born and thinking with a shudder of the day when you will return to the unconscious void from which you believe to have come. This prospect is surely sad and hopeless after so many calamities, sufferings and illnesses accompanying man on his earthly path, finally to be without the prospect of a reward, not even knowing why one has lived!
It really does not redound in God's honor to have created human beings who torment each other all their lives only to finally cease to exist without, so to speak, having had a purpose for coming to this earth or leaving it. One would have to assume that there is a God, who wants to delight in the torment of human beings, whom He created merely for His pastime, since He had nothing else to do.
However, if you, My dear child, in hours of solitude will scrutinize this matter earnestly, I ask you this: Has it never struck you as strange that, despite all the calamities of human life, other sentiments, other emotions often asserted themselves within you, which did not always express disgust and despair, but which revealed more gentle, more consoling aspects of spiritual life to you?
Have you never felt compassion, never an urge to look upward? Have you never felt the gentle sentiment of love in your heart with which you, forgiving the whole of mankind, could still love them?
Have you never, when witnessing a great natural phenomenon or gazing in the stillness of the night up into the starry heaven, sensed a holy foreknowledge which, had you responded to it, would have lifted you up into higher spiritual spheres where the human bustle would have disappeared, making way for a more beautiful, gentler feeling, the feeling of forgiveness and love!
Did not in such moments your God appear to you in a better light than as the dead science taught you, saving He ruled as an implacable tyrant? I know only too well that there were many such moments that seized your heart; only you did not want to listen to them.
However, now that I want to lead you onto other more promising paths, I must remind you of them. You see, these moments were the solemn hours when My Spirit spoke to you, a lost child. They were moments of My spiritual proximity; I wanted to console you, heal the wounds your philosophical over-subtle reasoners and book authors had inflicted on you. I wanted to show you that, far beyond all the so-called scientific investigations, there lives and moves something else, which can dissolve even the worst disharmonies and cruelties of the humanearthly life into harmonious hymns of praise for Him, whom despite your seeking you have not found as yet, or whom you have at least not understood as He wants to be understood by you human beings.
Much still lies in the dark for you; you demand miracles, at the same time thinking there are no miracles.
Now I ask you, what does miracle really mean? You see, many inventions that now the smallest child among you understands, would have been termed a miracle some centuries ago. What actually were they?
They were natural laws or forces that people hitherto did not know or, if they did know them, did not understand how to use!
Do you think the land of discoveries is fully explored? Is not most of it shrouded in darkness, particularly the Spiritual? And if here and there I allow people to find access to the spiritual life so that they should come to know Me. the most pure Spirit, better, does it have to be a miracle, which would coerce them into believing?
As you write in your letter, if your steel pen were suddenly changed into a pencil, you would believe. However, if I allowed this, what would happen? Look, you would be forced to believe at least at the first moment in the possibility of such a transformation, but I do not know whether within a few hours you may not have denied this miracle, perhaps thinking the two objects must have been confused in your thoughts without your being aware of it.
My dear child, there are no miracles! For everything depends on the laws long ago decreed by Me.
Do you actually know what a miracle is or would be? Look, I will tell you: a miracle would be if, contrary to the immutable laws ordained from the beginning of creation, I were to allow or effect something diametrically opposed to these laws, thereby having to accuse Myself of a contradiction. For you must know - My laws are made so as to make an action contrary to them impossible, at least on My part.
Surely you often act contrary to My laws, but their transgression is always immediately followed by punishment.
However, it is a totally different matter where My laws begin and end, and how many there still are of which your researchers and philosophers have no idea and which they will not ever discover.
So you see, My child, you are reading here what I, as your God, am speaking to you. You fail to understand this event. It has never occurred to you in your life that God, who claims to exist, the Creator of all these immense worlds, should want to talk to you, and despite your astonished shaking of the head this is what I am doing. For I love you, My created being, too much to want to see you lost, a victim of materialism and unbelief!
Realize that you carry a divine spark of My divine self within you, which has been laid into you at birth. You have a totally different destiny from the one that so far you have considered your only one, one that is higher. So as not to lose you, I allowed your (seemingly) incidental contact with a man (My present scribe), who is already nearer to My heart and has often clearly heard My voice within him. You see, this man, who is on the road to become what all people should at some time become, has facilitated your road to Me through a more direct contact. In this way, words are reaching you from a region of the existence of which you have never had an idea.
Well then, try to spiritually digest this, to you, new food. Perhaps you will find there what you did not find in the philosophers and other authors, namely, a better philosophy and a better concept of Me, your Creator.
Compare My words with those of the book-worms! Which ones can one read more often without becoming bored? And you will gradually find that He, whom you imagined to be beyond all the stars, was often so close to you, with a compassionate look full of fatherly love, pitying you because of your spiritual aberration.
Every beginning is difficult. It is an effort for many a person to discard an old, comfortable garment in favor of a new one. Do try it too; perhaps the future will show you that you need not repent the change of garment. This, your Father tells you, who holds together everything in His creation not with the claws of a tyrant but with the bonds of love, and who wants not even one atom be lost, let alone a human soul such as yours. Amen.