NEUOFFENBARUNG← Gifts of Heaven · Volume 2 · Contents
Read and do!
20th December 1843
With this announcement, which followed the conclusion of the great work "Spiritual Sun", a series of "side words" began, which are called "Remembering the Spiritual Sun". They are published in the "Explanations of Scripture".
[1] My dear children! With these following 'reminders' I want to give you an important and useful rule without which you cannot gain any benefit by reading whatever good spiritual books. You may read the Holy Scripture as well as this new word a thousand times in succession, but without this rule, you will always remain in the same old spot!
[2] You may well have filled your memory by reading it several times; but ask your mind what it has gained from it, and it's blunt answer will thus be:
[3] "I am chaotically surrounded by all kinds of building materials, and there beams and stones lie mountainously one upon the other; but out of all these building materials not even some bad chaste (Austrian expression for hut) has been built, in which I am able to freely live! The building materials are constantly piling up – all precious stones and the most beautiful cedar wood lie in clumsy heaps in front of me – and I am not able to arrange them. And if I have begun here and there to create a little order, I have already added a colossal quantity of new materials, so that I must necessarily tire in my activity and at the end shudder at the sight of the size of the material to be ordered and think with melancholy of when all this material will one day be possibly ordered into a dwelling!”
[4] Behold, this is a quite thorough answer of the spirit, which every man who has read anything much must find in himself in the clearest way!
[5] If such a person has read a few thousand books throughout his life, what chaos he has in his memory at the end! And if it goes well, after such a rich reading he will, with exact necessity, produce so much that he realizes only then that he knows nothing.
[6] But what is this confession? It is nothing other than one and the same melancholic lamentation of the spirit, which thereby wants to say that, with this enormous quantity of building material, not even the worst hut one ever built, compare to be a free dwelling!
[7] So are there people who know the Old and New Testaments by heart, word by word; but if they ask them about the inner meaning of only one verse, they will know just as much as those who do not know a single verse by heart, indeed often hardly know that there is a Holy Scripture! So what good is this wonderful material to them?
[8] The Spirit dwells only in the spiritual! If not even a bad hut can be built for him out of this material in the inner spirit of truth, where is he then to dwell, where can he do his thinking, and from what point should he begin to order the material?
[9] Is it not better, then, to have less material, but to immediately build from it a small respectable dwelling for the spirit, so that the spirit then gets a fixed and free place, from which it can make it's next plans and, then can use newly arriving material?
[10] What will a field look like, even though it is the best soil, if you sow a thousand seeds, mixed together simultaneously on the same field in the greatest disorder? The seeds will rise properly; but to what use for the sower? Indeed, the yield of this field will hardly be good for a bad feeding of the cattle! The stronger plants will suffocate the weaker ones, the weeds will proliferate, and the wheat grain will only appear here and there sparingly and very stunted and atrophied!
[11] But from this it follows that everywhere wherever a benefit is to be gained, order must be brought about, without which you would muddle up thorns, thistles, herbs and turnips, which can never be of any use to you.
[12] But what does such order consist of?
[13] If you have a purified wheat, sow it in a pure and good field, and you will have a pure and good harvest.
[14] Whoever has a good building site there and has the material for it, does not wait until he has gotten together an unnecessary amount of building material before he wants to start building his house; for he will finally completely fill up the whole building site with the large pile of building material!
[15] And when the master-builder comes and asks him, "Friend, in what place do you want the house built? Surely nothing other than: "There, friend, where the great heap of building material lies!
[16] And the master builder will say to him: "Why did you let this material pile up on the building site before we drew up the plan and dug the ground? If you now want to have the house there, you must put all the material aside and clear the place completely; only then will I come, measure the place, draw up the plan, have the ground dug for it, and only at the end will I test the material to see whether it is suitable for the building of your house!
[17] See, from this parable you can already quite clearly see of how little use much reading is to someone if he does not progress with it in the true order!
[18] But what is this true order? This true order consists quite simply in the fact that everyone begins to order each new load or delivery of material as if it were a residential building and does not reach for a second load until he has processed the first one. In this way, he will quickly advance with his construction and will always have enough free space around it, on which he can pile up enough new building material in good order.
[19] Said quite understandably in German [English – tr.], however, this order consists in the fact that everyone becomes active immediately after what he has read and arranges his life accordingly. In this way, will what he has read be of use to him, but will do him harm on the contrary; for everyone should not be only a pure hearer of the word, but a doer of it!
[20] More ‘reminders’ later!