Gifts of Heaven · Volume 3 · Chapter 512

Life-school of love

9th March 1864

[1] Without love there is no life, and without light there is no truth! Every effect that an attentive observer discovers in whatever sphere of existence and in whatever realm of nature comes from love and from light.

[2] The true love, which is called life, is that eternal warmth from the Divine center, which I, the Lord, call the "Father". From this "Father", as a result of the eternally same warmth of life, the light – which I Myself am (as "Son"), goes out into all infinity.

[3] Who therefore actively receives from Me the light that exists in My teaching, he also receives the love or the life of the Father. If he has received these, he has also awakened the Divine Spirit to eternal life in him – all the effect of true love and true light!

[4] But besides the only true light that springs from true love, especially on your material earth, there is an innumerable amount of love- and light-kinds that also produce products; but these products are just as transitory as these love- and light-kinds and always leave more or less evil consequences. Especially often then, when they degenerate into selfishness and self-love and their supposed light in spiritual relationship becomes the barest and thickest darkness, in that such people then sink down among the animal kingdom and not seldom get to the point where they consider some animals to be wiser than they themselves are.

[5] And they are not wrong in this respect! It is certainly no different with them, at least with the better part of them, than it is with the false prophet Balaam, who had to let himself be instructed by his ass as to the state of spiritual things. So such men have no love at all, and therefore no life and no light, and do not even know that they have a soul, and that this is immortal.

[6] Those many people, especially in this time, who in such world- and self-love and thus in the eclipse of life have made it only as far as always possible, will begin again on the other side of the point and, according to circumstances, become more and more angry and materialistic. And as true as I am the Lord who says this, they will again pass over into dead matter, and this through an unspeakably painful process, and through long, long times, until they themselves again become hard, rigid matter, finally divided into many parts and after long times again become people or creatures, either placed on this earth or on other world-bodies. For with Me a thousand earth-years are like a short day.

[7] Who by virtue of the inherent free will does not want to subordinate himself to My will revealed to all people, is not lost, but a great and lengthy "correction" has to be expected.

[8] At present people live on this earth already for the seventh time, and it is now seven times better with them. But they will still have to go through some world-bodies with a light bodily covering, until they are taken up into a purely spiritual sphere, which you can call the "lower paradise," from which there are still many steps up to the inner, true kingdom of heaven, in which the love of the Father, the light of the Son and the power of the eternal Spirit prevails and thoroughly enlivens every spirit as an angel.

[9] Therefore consider these My words well! Recognize and love Me as God, the Lord, above all through the fact that you love your neighbor possibly even more than yourself – so then you already have in you true love as true life and true light as the eternal truth for time and eternity, and so, according to the spirit, you are already here – where I am! For therefore I remain with you until the end of the world!

[10] This I tell you, whom you may well recognise from his language and it's sense. Amen.