NEUOFFENBARUNG[Gr.01_007,01] In yesterday’s communication you heard that release follows the eventual captivity. If the spirits brought to reflection and calm have entirely reformed, they are either admitted to the spirits of peace at the lower level or given a new period of freedom. Pay particular attention to where the spirits left to exercise their own freedom are sent.
[Gr.01_007,02] When the natural powers of the spirits dissolve again into flowing water, the freed spirits become, as it were, voluntarily bound to the water and must travel with it as far as the sea.
[Gr.01_007,03] You will wonder why that should be.
[Gr.01_007,04] For the same reason that earthly authorities impose a corrective penalty on someone who has caused damage or is caught as they are about to do so. They must make good the damage and also pay a fine or penalty for their evil intention.
[Gr.01_007,05] For that very reason, in a realm where matters are dealt with much more exactly than in the material world, these spirits must make good every injury they have done, or meant to do, to the last heller. They must also do penance entirely proportionate to their evil intention. Only when they have complied with all of this can they be admitted to the first stage of spiritual perfection.
[Gr.01_007,06] You will ask again, ‘How can these spirits at sea make good the harm they have done, or at least intended to do, to the earth in a land far from the sea?’
[Gr.01_007,07] Naturally they can scarcely make it good in the ocean. But since no one in spirit can do good without being good, this phenomenon shows that the spirits must humble themselves completely before they can repay harm with good. The sea and its floor are always the earth’s lowest parts. These high and mighty heroic spirits must therefore make the humbling journey so that in time they can rise from their humiliation as beings made new and born again, into spheres of useful activity.
[Gr.01_007,08] Do such spirits really reform by the time they have completed the journey?
[Gr.01_007,09] There are different degrees. Some reform on the way and may leave this watery road and return. There they are examined and accepted if nothing wicked is found in them. You can see this departure when white mists rise from brooks, rivers and streams in the morning. The sun draws them up with the help of natural powers. In the heights they soon emerge from these powers and become invisible to the natural eye.
[Gr.01_007,10] Another kind, moved by resentment secretly awakened again, steals away by night, as it were. At first visible as grey mists, they hide in the ravines, gorges and fissures of the mountains, ready to take a very active part in the next attack.
[Gr.01_007,11] A third kind does go all the way to the sea. Once there, they band together according to the kinds of wickedness in them and fall upon the sea. Woe to the sailor who falls into their airy hands! If he escapes with his natural life, he will have extraordinary tales to tell of the most devastating sea storms. When these wicked fellows intend such mischief, they first send up one or two loosely formed little clouds over the surface of the sea, as scouts. Experienced sailors know these clouds well. Their purpose is to see whether any spirits of peace are in sight. If there are any, the little clouds suddenly disappear, and a serious storm is then very unlikely.
[Gr.01_007,12] If the malicious scouts see no enemy troops, they rise higher and higher. In minutes the open space over the sea is covered by the densest storm clouds, from which violent gusts soon churn up the sea. Thousands upon thousands of flashes of lightning are hurled down upon the spirits who have taken the earnest path of reform. These rebels fare badly here as everywhere. At the speed of thought our chief guardians of the lands send out peaceful hosts of spirits. They fall upon the raging bands and usually cast them into the sea in hail or heavy rain, releasing the humble spirits from their voluntary confinement. The lesser participants in the mischief are sent just as quickly towards the North Pole. The heroes must make do with biting into the hard ice of the South Pole for a very long time.
[Gr.01_007,13] So ends this scene among the spirits. The wicked are sent to their place, and the good are accepted for useful work of many kinds.
[Gr.01_007,14] What does this work consist in?
[Gr.01_007,15] Their first task is to go to the various Alpine mountains, to places that end in bare rocky peaks. They must continually attend to the preservation of the rock and to its dissolution under the proper conditions. They distribute moisture through its pores so that it retains the same firmness and properties from within. They also take detached rock down into the depths, bringing it gradually nearer to its appointed release.
[Gr.01_007,16] If they neglect this duty, wicked spirits often play a trick behind their backs by loosening a whole block of rock and hurling it into the depths, although this happens chiefly during great uprisings. When such carelessness occurs, they must look after the detached block, finding it a safe resting place or taking it down to a brook or river. The unborn spirits enclosed within must not break out prematurely, for if that happened it would be nearly the end of the whole earth. A detached stone is therefore usually found in a ravine with a spring, buried more than halfway in the earth and surrounded by moss of all kinds, or whole or broken up in a sizeable brook or river.
[Gr.01_007,17] That is why boulders weighing hundreds or thousands of hundredweights are often found in rivers and brooks where there are no such rocky mountains or similar kinds of stone anywhere near.
[Gr.01_007,18] Naturalists will say, ‘What ridiculous nonsense! Water does all this by its weight, which increases the faster and more violently it falls.’
[Gr.01_007,19] In natural terms they are right, like someone who says two times two is four. But does the mathematician know all that underlies the result? Does he know the units from which he formed it? He knows the number of things that appear alike to his eye and understanding. Does he know what the things he counted are in their essence? Can he calculate the infinite multiplicity and variety of the parts and forces needed to form a thing?
[Gr.01_007,20] If he knew this fully, he would see clearly how shallow his calculation was when he counted four things together because they looked alike.
[Gr.01_007,21] Our naturalist fares even worse in his account than our mathematician. He sees the water flow. What it takes to make the water flow, to give it the proper degree of weight, and what weight itself consists in may be a little too invisible for our sharp-witted naturalist. Anyone, naturalist or otherwise, sees water moving down a sloping bed. But who carries the water to the heights of the mountains, gathers it there and sends it usefully into the depths? That is another question. Someone will bring up internal pressure and the law of mutual attraction. If I then ask who exerts the pressure and mutual attraction, there will surely be no further answer.
[Gr.01_007,22] I put this here so that the first task of the spirits just described will not seem so strange to you. Believe, then, that nothing exists or happens anywhere on earth that does not proceed from spirits of one kind or another, good or wicked.
[Gr.01_007,23] If you go up an Alpine mountain, which is always very beneficial to you, you will sometimes come to places that look thoroughly devastated. You will feel quite uneasy and think everything there buried in the stillness of death. It is there that life is all the busier, for useful spirits of the kind described have most to do, tend and watch over, to restore everything gradually to the finest order. Where on such a mountain you feel at ease and uplifted, for instance among fragrant herbs of many kinds, happier, peaceable spirits dwell. Their work is quieter and at the same time spiritually far greater than that of the others.
[Gr.01_007,24] When you reach heights covered in perpetual snow and ice, where the pure, fresh air becomes intolerable if you stay too long, the first blessed region of the perfected spirits begins. There, if you will accept it, heaven and earth visibly meet. Earthly cold signifies the complete absence of self-love and thus the highest degree of usefulness in natural terms, viewed in its passage from the spiritual to the natural.
[Gr.01_007,25] Whoever has seen such a mountain height has seen the lowest region of heaven with their bodily eyes.
[Gr.01_007,26] You will ask, ‘How so? How are we to understand this?’
[Gr.01_007,27] Whoever understands it will soon see why. The place on earth nearest heaven will surely be the one where human greed and self-love no longer set boundary stones or wage ruinous lawsuits over mine and thine. Try claiming a thousand yokes of ice field on any glacier. You can even settle on ice without asking anyone, and no one will dispute the ground with you, any more than you would dispute it with another who happened to fancy a piece of such chilling ground.
[Gr.01_007,28] From this short account you will readily understand why. If heaven were to touch the earth in a natural sense, the life and existence of the whole planet would end at once.
[Gr.01_007,29] Can heaven touch the earth where base greed has profaned it so thoroughly? Such points of contact are possible only where the earth is entirely free of human envy.
[Gr.01_007,30] This is why our Grossglockner is especially such a point of contact. If anyone built something on its highest pinnacles that might excite the greed of even one person, the pure spirits would at once see to it that such arrangements vanished, as it were, from existence within a short time. Such a place is kept pure by its own purity and that of its spirits.
[Gr.01_007,31] This is a kind of spiritual quality that reaches beyond the spirits of nature and still allows natural phenomena from time to time. One kind remains, which only very few people ever see. We shall consider it next time and then turn to the gospel. Let that be enough again for now.