NEUOFFENBARUNG24 March 1842
[Fl.01_011,01] You may ask: “All this is well and true, but what drives the first kind of spirits, the ones still unperfected, out from the sun into the endless reaches of space?”
[Fl.01_011,02] I answer: nothing but My eternal order. By that order, the spirits travelling out from the sun are saturated with positive polarity but remain fundamentally negative in themselves.
[Fl.01_011,03] What happens when two like poles come close to one another? They repel each other until the pole that is only fed by the positive but remains fundamentally negative in itself has given up all that is positive.
[Fl.01_011,04] These atomic beings we know of are therefore fundamentally negative and can remain in the sun as long as they retain this character alone. But if they absorb the light of the positive domain of the solar spirits too greedily, so that in the nature of their light they differ little from the truly positive, already perfected spirits, they are at once driven out by the positive beings with a speed truly worthy of spirits.
[Fl.01_011,05] The spirits thus driven out are the actual light radiating from the sun. When it falls upon a heavenly body, it imparts its positive part to it. This is the light carried with them, or rather the continuing vibration of the perfected spirits in the joy of love.
[Fl.01_011,06] As for the negative part, these outgoing atomic beings, especially as they approach a heavenly body, soon lose their positive part and return to the sun as beings of opposite polarity. This is the reflection of the incident light from the sun. Since these beings always move in a straight line owing to their great speed, it is also clear why objects lit by sunlight can be seen so distinctly, especially when there are no disturbances in the air.
[Fl.01_011,07] We can see such an illuminated form in all its parts because all matter from which a form is made is itself, as you already know, a conflict of spiritual powers.
[Fl.01_011,08] When these swift carriers of light from the sun strike a form, it immediately takes up the parts that suit it according to its inner constitution and sends away what it cannot use in every direction at the greatest speed.
[Fl.01_011,09] The eye, then, is simply an organ for receiving the many differences in direct or reflected light. These differences naturally form the images of all the various things in an eye capable of receiving them.
[Fl.01_011,10] If you now know and understand this as far as the bodily senses allow, it must finally become clear that everything that appears material is fundamentally spiritual through and through. You cannot see the spiritual because you are not yet in spiritual polarity. Once you are there, the opposite will at once occur. You will see only the spiritual and will have to supply the material in thought, just as now you must add the spiritual to the material in thought. It should not surprise you, then, if you encounter points in this account that cannot become entirely clear to you. To understand all these relations perfectly already, you would have to pass entirely out of matter into the purely spiritual, and the time for that has not yet come.
[Fl.01_011,11] Yet as far as the spiritual can be grasped within the material, this account has already shown you how shallow a path is taken by those who see only matter before them, and how unintelligible, on the other hand, are those whose inquiries make leaps of wisdom far beyond matter everywhere.
[Fl.01_011,12] We have set out as briefly as possible the differences between one kind of light and another, and between one kind of shining and another, showing them as thoroughly and clearly as we could. In this way we have built the preliminary structure for our edifice of victory and can return to the little creature that has already been quite forgotten.
[Fl.01_011,13] But I see another question in you: “What is our poor fly suddenly to do between suns and worlds, among all these spirits that produce and carry light?”
[Fl.01_011,14] That question will soon be answered. You ask: “What is the fly to do among spirits that produce and carry light?”
[Fl.01_011,15] The fly, I say, is to act as an intermediary here and become a spirit that gathers light.
[Fl.01_011,16] This is the crux of the whole matter!
[Fl.01_011,17] Could you ever say, “Now we understand this being”, if you also had to admit in the clearest terms that you did not know the position it occupies? What would your understanding amount to?
[Fl.01_011,18] Truly, I tell you, there would be little difference between the way you see the fly or another thing and the way another animal sees this little creature. You could name it, say that it has six feet, two wings, a body and a head and belongs to the flying insects, and perhaps add two or three hypotheses about it.
[Fl.01_011,19] The position a thing occupies is therefore the foundation from which we must consider it before it appears in its full truth.
[Fl.01_011,20] But what is the truth of a thing?
[Fl.01_011,21] See and hear! The spiritual aspect of a thing is its truth. Until that is discovered, all is like a hollow, empty nut with nothing inside.
[Fl.01_011,22] Its position is the foundation. We have said so, and this must prove true. Look at our fly in this intermediate position.
[Fl.01_011,23] Is it entirely spiritual or entirely material?
[Fl.01_011,24] No, you must say, it is material in one part and, because it lives, spiritual in the other. Like countless other beings it stands between the two principal polarities: the positive, living polarity of the sun and the negative polarity of the planet opposite it.
[Fl.01_011,25] That is to say, it is neutral, neither wholly positive nor wholly negative. This is right, good and true. It is neither solely a producer of light nor solely a carrier of light, but a gatherer of light.
[Fl.01_011,26] But what is light?
[Fl.01_011,27] We know it manifests itself through the capacity of life for movement. Light and life are thus one and the same, and light is simply a manifestation of life.
[Fl.01_011,28] If our fly gathers light, what else does it gather? Is it not, rather, a gatherer of life?
[Fl.01_011,29] How does this life show itself in the fly? Does it also manifest itself in a show of brilliant light?
[Fl.01_011,30] You would have to be blind or have an eye given to fantasies to claim that you ever saw a fly flying about and shining with its own light like a glow-worm. The fly keeps life within itself in exemplary fashion. It no longer lets it radiate out and has put on a dark garment so that life may increase all the more within it.
[Fl.01_011,31] My dear ones, anyone who does not recognise the nature of humility in the fly must be more than three times blind!
[Fl.01_011,32] You know how useful it is in many ways, but the light of the world takes no notice of it. And so the diligent, busy fly, which does good with every movement, is given over to contempt. Why? Because the fly gathers life and prefers to increase it within itself rather than to display it and thereby destroy itself.
[Fl.01_011,33] Do you see now how rays go out in every direction from this standpoint, so that in their light you may see the victory this little creature is always fighting so bravely to win?
[Fl.01_011,34] But what is this victory?
[Fl.01_011,35] Let us return to our standpoint and attend to all the points we have heard so far. If we begin at the very origin of light and consider well everything told us about it, we must grasp with hands and feet that the hardest of all conceivable tasks is this:
[Fl.01_011,36] How can free life be bound, and how can the freely roaming life be gathered beforehand?
[Fl.01_011,37] When the planet formed, we heard that the fly inhabited it as its first visible creature. There we first saw the fly gather scattered life within itself. Now, after considering light, we again see the fly between suns and planets as a gatherer of life.
[Fl.01_011,38] What is the difference between now and that earliest age when the fly was the only inhabitant of a planetary body?
[Fl.01_011,39] In one respect there is no difference, for today, as then, it conforms fully to its nature and order. In another respect the difference is infinite. It now stands at the lowest point of the polarity that governs both the gathering of life and its turning back towards ever greater and more inward powers, and finally to the highest power of the original life itself.
[Fl.01_011,40] At that time an infinite gulf lay between it and the infinite power. Now that gulf is filled by the human being and by the almost endless succession of beings that came before humanity. Is that not an infinite difference between then and now?
[Fl.01_011,41] Then you were shown what this little creature was. Now you are shown the same thing, but in it you are also shown the victory. Hence there is an infinite difference between then and now. At that time no fly could yet have sung to you of victory. Now it can. So there is also an infinite difference between its song then and its song now.
[Fl.01_011,42] And what is this infinite difference itself?
[Fl.01_011,43] It is precisely the victory!
[Fl.01_011,44] And what is the victory?
[Fl.01_011,45] Open your hand and grasp the victory right before your own nose! If you still do not see it, I must tell you plainly: the victory is life preserved!
[Fl.01_011,46] But how did the fly keep its life?
[Fl.01_011,47] It kept it through its great activity, for life needs to be exercised. It also kept it through its great humility, for life needs to be gathered. It kept it through the most unquestioning submission to My governing will, for all life must be brought under that rule if it is one day to find itself, as it were, and know itself consciously.
[Fl.01_011,48] Consider these points and the laws I have given you for the eternal preservation of life. Compare them well with one another, always keeping before you what the victory is. Then you will at last understand what is meant in the opening stanzas of the fly where it says: the fly, the fly, it sings to you of victory!
[Fl.01_011,49] That little song of a few stanzas, given to you some time ago, may be regarded from beginning to end as a single opening stanza of this great song now given to you. You now recognise in this great song the fly’s true song of victory. Since we have recognised the victory, let each of us see it and attend to it within ourselves. In this way we shall become better able to draw ever nearer to one another and experience for ourselves the final and greatest victory, the reunion of each individual life with My life, eternal from the beginning.
[Fl.01_011,50] How this will happen without the least impairment, so that each life remains independent forever even while it stands in the closest union with the original life, is what the fly will sing to us in another little song in the next and final account.
Source: Jakob Lorber, Die Fliege, German text based on the sixth edition (1988). The English translation preserves the source’s paragraph identifiers. It presents the work as a nineteenth-century spiritual text, including its historical accounts of nature.