NEUOFFENBARUNG18 February 1861
[JS.01_61.02.18,00] A person in the world beyond who had known Lorber during his lifetime was permitted to address Jakob Lorber directly and to tell him, for the first time on 18 February 1861, of his passage into the world beyond and his first stay in the sphere of the spiritual earth that surrounds our natural earth:
[JS.01_61.02.18,01] B: ‘God greet you, dear friend! In my still somewhat disagreeable seclusion I have indeed thought of you and all the other friends. I have often recalled those hours when we talked so comfortingly together about spiritual things. But the almighty will of the Lord called me away from the world, and I arrived here in circumstances that were truly far from pleasant, for which of course I alone was to blame. I wanted to put everything that had been thrown into disorder in my earthly life back into the best balance I could. I took a great deal of trouble over it, all in vain, and so, to speak in earthly terms, I could find no time at all to appear to any of you, though I knew I could have appeared to you or to someone else had I wished.
[JS.01_61.02.18,02] But I am freer now, all praise to the Lord, and at last I have begun to realise within myself that all my toil and labour here according to earthly standards was no more than real toil and labour in a dream. So I gave it up. For you see, to me the dying of the body was simply the sweet falling asleep of a day labourer tired from work. At once, as in a vivid dream, I found myself in quite a delightful region and immediately met several good old friends, mostly people from Trieste. They came to meet me kindly and courteously and talked with me, though mostly about quite unimportant things. I had no inkling it was a dream, as I had often had in my dreams during my earthly life.
[JS.01_61.02.18,03] Only one of these friends from Trieste struck me as remarkable. I knew at once that he had died of cholera on the very same day as my wife. I had often talked with him about spiritual matters over a small glass of Trieste wine at his beautifully situated country house. I asked him how he had come here. “For, my friend,” I said, “I know only too well that you died of that dreadful epidemic on the same day as my D., and that you were buried before my weeping eyes. Yet now you are alive as I am alive and, I hope, am not dreaming!”
[JS.01_61.02.18,04] My good old friend looked at me very gravely, yet kindly, and said, “Friend, let us be glad with all our hearts that we have come through it and have left the world with all its evils behind us. Look, you too have bidden farewell to this sorry earthly life for all eternity. Tomorrow your decayed shell will be given to the earth, and it really is no loss!” When I heard this, I grew a little anxious after all and said, “Well, in God's name then, if it is truly so! But my children, and my affairs! I am far from having put everything in proper order!” My friend said, “Oh, do not worry about it. Those who have stayed behind for a little while will see to it!”
[JS.01_61.02.18,05] I soon agreed. As if led by magic, I found myself quite naturally all at once at my friend's country house. I was so enraptured looking at the sea with its wonders that I said, “Friend, but all this is tangible nature, and are we supposed to be mere spirits?” He said to me, “Friend, when we still inhabited our poor flesh, it was as living souls that we saw tangible nature, not with our dead body! If we could do so then, when the burden and dark density of the body were a great hindrance, why not now in our freer state of life?”
[JS.01_61.02.18,06] I agreed completely and began to feel that I had been divested of the body, though I did not feel how or in what way it happened. But then I began to worry about where I might find my wife and whether I could set up again the bookshop I had left behind. This had caused me much sorrow and concern. All praise to God, that too is now behind me, and I have begun to concern myself exclusively with higher things. I shall visit you more often now and share more of my present experiences and what I have learnt from them, for the benefit of the faithful in your world. Farewell now in God the Lord.’ – – –
25 February 1861
[JS.01_61.02.25,07] B: ‘Good morning, good morning, dear friend! My warmest greetings to all the other good friends as well! I do not need to ask here how they are, for one knows very well how this or that dear friend is faring on the fixed earth. If we wish, we can perceive all of it very precisely from the sphere of each person's outward life of the soul. Yet it always gives me great joy when I perceive here on the spiritual and therefore better earth that everyone, with a few exceptions, is advancing in the light of the Lord from the heavens. For the Lord always visits those He loves with all sorts of little crosses. These crosses truly help to unite the Lord's spirit with the soul, which is always afflicted when left to itself and is a very poor thing without support. For this reason most souls lean on their decaying, frail flesh and must put up with all the sufferings that come with it, because they do not suspect, let alone recognise, the firm and everlasting support of the spirit from God. That is precisely why those little crosses of honour from the Lord's hand are so good and useful for the soul's true and everlasting welfare. They compel it to turn away from the support of the flesh and in faith to turn to that of the spirit.
[JS.01_61.02.25,08] Once a soul has begun to make this favourable turn, the Lord continues to provide it with all sorts of little crosses until it has begun to unite itself fully with the spirit. Once that has happened, and there is no further fear that the soul might or would wish to return complacently to the flesh, all the little crosses cease, and the whole person can enter true bliss even while in the world.
[JS.01_61.02.25,09] In earthly life I myself did not see this nearly as clearly as I see it now in this pure and completely painless life, which is life in the true sense. That was why I was constantly wavering between the decaying and passing support of the life of the soul and the everlasting, true and strongest support of the spirit. As I did so, I constantly had first one thing and then another to suffer and endure. Yet it was arranged so lovingly by the Lord, and only now do I feel more and more the great benefit of all the trials I endured, which often tasted very bitter indeed. Where and what would I be here now without them?
[JS.01_61.02.25,10] Ah, dear friend, when one has the opportunity here, as I now do, to see and recognise the misery and great want of certain worldly souls, one can never thank the Lord enough for continually sending such guardians and watchmen to keep one from becoming a thoroughly worldly person. Bear everything, therefore, out of love for the Lord, with patience and gratitude to Him, for only here will you find for ever the true California of life. Every faithful worker in the great vineyard of the Lord's life will find his most splendid reward here for ever!
[JS.01_61.02.25,11] It is known from the Lord's own mouth that those who profess Him on earth are in a manner crucified with Him in Him, that is, in His spirit, so that they may also rise with Him and in Him to eternal life.
[JS.01_61.02.25,12] My very dear friend, I know this is familiar to you. I tell you and the other dear friends only because the word of someone who has experienced it for himself carries greater and more effective weight than that of a prophet who still inhabits the flesh.
[JS.01_61.02.25,13] You would no doubt like to learn from me a good deal about how things exist and subsist in the spiritual world. I am truly glad to share it with you as far as I can in my present state. Look, I am still on this earth, chiefly in the coastal regions around Trieste, though I am often here in Graz too. I see this earth far better than anyone still walking in the flesh could ever see it. I also see the people still living here and can communicate with them quite well on my side. My words become in them like unexpected thoughts that arise suddenly, and the thoughts of their own that follow give me a distinct answer. Yet the earth I see so clearly is not the material earth itself. It is, as it were, the spiritual earth, without which the material earth could not exist at all, since everything material is in itself simply something spiritual held under judgement or fixed in place.
[JS.01_61.02.25,14] It is peculiar that for us the “spiritual earth” emerges, as it were, from the soul through the power of its spirit from God, which gives life to all and creates all. It is like a fully grown tree that has emerged from the spirit within the tiny germ in an inconspicuous seed, except that it appears in a more finished state than a tree does as it develops from a seed. Now you would no doubt think and say, “If that is so, there are as many spiritual earths in the realm of spirits as there are spirits.” Yet that is not the case. The wonder is that each spirit does indeed bring “its” spiritual earth into the world beyond within itself, but as soon as this earth develops out of it, it also unites instantly with the spiritual earth of all spirits. Thus there is only one spiritual earth, entirely like the material earth in every respect, but much nobler, more distinct and more perfect than the material earth is to the eye of the flesh, which cannot see the great wonders in the structure of atoms. So the “spiritual earth” presents a very different sight to us from the material one to you.
[JS.01_61.02.25,15] The way we move from place to place is naturally also different from yours, for we have nothing to do with material time and its spatial relations. Next time I will show you more closely how it happens with us, in a way that is easy to understand. And so farewell for now in the Lord.’
4 March 1861
[JS.01_61.03.04,16] B: ‘Good morning, and God greet you!
[JS.01_61.03.04,17] Spring is beginning again on this earth, and it will surely be a very good one. We can tell from the particular activity of the spirits of nature, which are now beginning to bustle about among one another in a colourful throng. It is truly strange to see the most varied and diverse forms in which they develop all at once in our ethereal air, as if by magic, group together and immediately become active. The highly diverse mixture of forms and groups presents a new form as a new whole. One sees the new form, but one also sees within it the individual forms in their wonderfully ordered union. This far surpasses anything that can be seen and discovered on earth even through the most perfect microscopes. What can be seen with the eyes of the flesh consists of forms already fixed, standing at least at the tenth degree of the progressive joining of forms and beings. It is already, as it were, something spiritual enclosed in a skin and a chrysalis. Only out of such a chrysalis does it enter into its corresponding visible appearance in the material world. But what an immense number of the most unusual preliminary forms and groupings precede this formation of a chrysalis in the spiritual world of nature!
[JS.01_61.03.04,18] This activity of the individual spirits of nature before they form a chrysalis is really the most wonderful thing that we spirits can observe here, if we have the inclination and love for it. But most things go here as they do among people on the material earth. Those who have brought over no faculty already awake to something higher have no other here than the one they had on earth. The man of gold and money remains a broker and speculator here, and so it is with the merchant, the craftsman, the farmer and so on, each after his kind. And here it is truly said: many are called, but few are chosen!
[JS.01_61.03.04,19] I know it from my own case, since at the beginning of my time here I too began to press my way back into worldly business. Only to good friends already well experienced here do I owe that I left it and recognised soon enough the real and true purpose of my being here. I am now at a higher level of purer understanding and perception. Oh, it is harder here to free oneself from false matter than in the actual material world. Atheism is represented a thousand times more here than in the material world. Once people are caught in it, my experience so far is that they are hard to extricate or, in my judgement, quite impossible to extricate. On occasion I began to talk to such spirits about what are called transcendental things, but at once received the answer, “Are we to play the fools for priests and rulers here as well? Let us be glad that we are at last in a world in which everyone is entirely free and master of his own place!” Only recently I asked one of them whether he did not sometimes think that the great teacher from Nazareth might after all be Lord and Creator of the entire world of spirits and the senses. Well, I soon had to leave off. He looked as though he would become coarse and rude and made remarks about the Lord that I would rather not repeat here. Nothing can be done with such spirits. It is best to avoid them whenever possible.
[JS.01_61.03.04,20] I have already caught sight of the Lord a couple of times, but only from a certain distance, and longed greatly to speak to Him. It has not come about so far. My friend told me that He would come again soon. Perhaps it will come about then?’ – – –