NEUOFFENBARUNGThe lungs and respiration of the Earth (12 January 1847)
1. You know that for the physical life not only the heart and the stomach, but also a lung is necessary. Every animal has such a respiratory tool in itself; also trees and plants must have such organs of transpiration, through which they breathe in and out within 24 hours.
2. Everybody can easily feel the breathing of the earth-body at the shores of the sea, if he sees the sea regularly swell and sink back again. But once such an outer appearance is present, everyone can conclude with certainty that it can only come from an inner reason, but never from an outer one.
3. If you cannot fully grasp this, put a tub of water in front of you, as I have already shown you on another occasion; hang a significantly large sphere above the tub of water at a distance of about five fathoms, and this sphere should also be made of magnetic iron; then bring this sphere above the tub of water into a swing, and then observe the water in the tub to see if it will stir at all. You can be completely assured that therefore the water will remain in complete silence. Now, however, someone lies down in the water and breathes in it as usual, and every observer will convince himself that with every breath, the water in the tub will rise a little, and when expelling the breath, it will fall again. What we can see here on a small scale, happens to the earth-body on a large scale.
4. The earth draws the air into itself, then the softer belly area of the earth, which is generally covered by the sea, expands more, and the sea water above it rises higher on the solid banks; if the earth, or rather it's lungs, expels the breath again, then the belly sinks lower again, and the sea water also recedes from the firmer banks.
5. This therefore had to be mentioned before, so that you understand that the earth breathes, and that for this purpose it must also naturally have it's respiratory tools, which tools, like some others, as the bowels of the earth, make up the inner earth.
6. Now the question is, where is this earth lung, and where does it take it's breath, and where does it also expel it again? And finally: What does this lung look like?
7. This earth’s lung, which has a cubic content of about a thousand cubic miles, is located just under the hard and solid earth, and borders an area of a little more than 5000 square miles. This lung is a great cellular network, within which are a lot of hollow chambers, which are connected by smaller and larger tubes. These tubes have two properties: firstly, to lead the air into the chambers and to discharge it again, and secondly, these tubes, by virtue of their perceptible elasticity, can contract and expand again, like muscles or optic veins in animals, which contraction and expansion is caused by the constant changing of poles, or by the transformation of the positive pole into the negative pole, which transformation lies solely in the soul substance, without which transformation, no free movement in the bodies would be conceivable.
8. When these tubes expand, the chambers are constricted or, in a sense, compressed more; this causes the air to be expelled. When the tubes contract again, the chambers naturally expand further, which then causes inhalation.
9. The reversal of polarity is caused – as much as it can be explained only physically – by the fact that as soon as the soul has absorbed the vital substance from the inhaled air into it's vitalizing substance, only the nitrogenous air remains in the lungs, and this causes that the pole, which was formerly positive during the act of inhalation, is immediately transformed into the negative one, because it has no
correspondence with the nitrogenous air.
10. In this way, as soon as the contraction of the tubes occurs, new air is inhaled, where, of course, during inhalation, the negative pole becomes positive, and vice versa.
11. Now we know how the respiration business of the earth proceeds and where the lung is. But where does it breathe in and out? The earth does this in the same way as an animal, that is, the animal breathes through the mouth and nose, just as man does; likewise the earth. Through the same main mouth, through which it takes in the food, it also draws in breath; only halfway from this main mouth goes a side mouth, which, as in the animal, can open and close at will. This large side-mouth leads into the large lung; inhalation occurs every 6 hours, and exhalation after another 6 hours. During inhalation, the nutrient passage closes into the stomach; once a good portion of air has been inhaled, the lung tube closes as if through a larynx, but the nutrient passage opens again. If the air is expelled from the lungs again, then the nutrient gullet closes again, and so this matter is arranged in such a way that the earth is nourished continuously through the lungs in the above-mentioned periods, but through the actual nutrient gullet into the stomach every 12 hours, and takes in the food in the time in which the lungs chemically decompose the sucked-in air in a certain way, and divide the vital substance; and so one can assume this determination that the earth in 24 hours inhales twice and exhales twice, and takes up thereby food into the stomach only twice.
12. Now we would also know where and how the earth inhales and exhales, and therefore we only have to take a look how this lung looks like.
13. It will be somewhat difficult to present the figure to you so vividly, unless you could ever once get to see the lungs of an elephant; even clearer and more similar would be the lungs of a Mammoth, but to get to see these would be almost completely impossible in this time, since this animal is completely extinct. There is still a similar species in Central Asia's primeval forests, but it is very atrophied compared to the former gigantic species, and thus the most similar is the lung of an elephant, which is so large in a fully grown one, that it can easily hold over a hundred cubic feet of air. It's color is bluish- gray, and it's shape is close to that of a hollow coconut, inside of which, of course, there must still be the heart, stomach, liver, spleen and kidneys.
14. Now imagine this lung in the above described large dimension, so you will be able to sketch a rather similar picture. A more detailed description of it would be of little use to you, because you would never be able to imagine this great earth breathing tool clearly. The lungs of the earth are made of a material that is too large for you to see at once, and it would be useless to explain the elastic material of the lungs to you, since you cannot understand the material of an animal lung is made, and how much less would you understand the material of the lungs of the earth? That it has similarity with the substance of the animal lung, may be evident from the fact that every animal lung descends from this great earth- lung, admittedly on a very refined scale. But where would one get the material for all the animal-parts of the body if it were not available in the earth?
15. The earth must deliver all that is in it to the surface through the innumerable organs in a transpiring manner; this delivered blood is first taken up by the plants, and finally by the animals, and is transformed in them into what it originally was. From where should the animal take blood, if it was not previously present in the earth? Where should water come from, if it was not first in the earth? In short, the body of the earth must have everything that the beings living on it, have; just as a head louse has the same in itself, of course in a well modified and smaller scale, as the animal or also the human, who is also a world-body for this small animal.
16. I think this example should make the matter quite clear to you; and so we have now visited a second large place in the earth, and next we want to choose another one for inspection.