NEUOFFENBARUNG20 March 1842
[Fl.01_008,01] To understand thoroughly the important things that follow, you must look back briefly at what has already been said, specifically at the positive polarity of our fly and how it serves as a gathering point for life.
[Fl.01_008,02] Look closely at the sun. Which of you can measure how far its outermost rays reach? The distance is surely considerable. Suppose the sun is more than a hundred thousand decillion years old. Throughout this unimaginably long span it has continually sent its rays into infinite space. The first rays that left it are still speeding into vast infinity, while countless more rays have returned from the points where they were intercepted. This will help you understand more surely and thoroughly what has been said about points where life gathers. For the sun that shines every day declares aloud: “I have shed my rays into vast infinity for so long, yet my light is no weaker than it was ages ago, ages that to you seem endless!”
[Fl.01_008,03] You may ask: “How will the sun recover the rays that have been travelling outward into the infinite reaches of space ever since it first came into being?”
[Fl.01_008,04] I tell you that this makes practically no difference. Even if the rays travel decillions of times farther than they already have, they will surely find a point that bars their way and forces them to return.
[Fl.01_008,05] But you may say: “How is sunlight replenished, if the great distances it travels and the scarcity of visible points that can intercept it mean that very little of the light sent out returns?”
[Fl.01_008,06] That makes no difference either. Although the sun receives back few of its own rays, it is itself a gathering point. It receives rays from more than a billion suns, lets them intensify within itself and sends them out again in a dense mass.
[Fl.01_008,07] Consider this a little and it will be easy to see how I have arranged the circulation of light from infinity to infinity, and how not even the smallest atom floats aimlessly in the endless ether of infinity.
[Fl.01_008,08] A mind unaccustomed to thinking of great things may find this difficult to grasp. An example from creation will help you understand how rays return and are exchanged without waste.
[Fl.01_008,09] Where the rays of two suns meet in the spaces between them, which by your reckoning are indeed very wide, those outgoing rays gradually become points of reception for one another.
[Fl.01_008,10] You are already asking: “How does this happen?”
[Fl.01_008,11] The answer is simple if you consider that the outgoing ray, since it exists in time and space, must be something material, however subtle and impossible to weigh.
[Fl.01_008,12] When rays from two suns meet, they naturally have the same polarity, since both are rays of a sun. You know that like polarities never attract but always repel. If you understand this much, you can see plainly from what has been said that rays which meet and repel one another in this way serve, as you might put it, to drive one another home.
[Fl.01_008,13] But what happens when rays from several suns necessarily meet in a space at nearly the same distance from all of them, so that the rays meet from every conceivable direction?
[Fl.01_008,14] That is a somewhat different question. To keep you from the main matter no longer, I will say plainly what a little sound reflection would have shown you. A conflict of rays develops at that place, because some rays cut straight across the paths of others and meet them there. Picture several crosses laid one over another, so that many rays appear to go out from a single centre.
[Fl.01_008,15] The rays that cross through necessarily neutralise the polarity and prevent the other rays that run straight across them from immediately returning. Over time a tangle of rays forms there, or, to put it more clearly, a shimmering ball of light. As more and more rays collect, it takes on the density of a fine mist and becomes heavier and heavier.
[Fl.01_008,16] Suns, like planets, move around another central body. The question is which sun comes nearer this ball of light on its long journey. That sun then naturally draws the ball into its own domain and devours it.
[Fl.01_008,17] Now that you know this, I tell you that this is the actual way in which comets arise.
[Fl.01_008,18] But I already hear another question in you: “How is it, then, that these comets continue to exist instead of being entirely consumed by the sun that attracted them?”
[Fl.01_008,19] You could draw the answer from what has been said, but to spare you much thought I will tell you at once that it lies in the neutralisation of the rays. Through that neutralisation, or, to put it more clearly, the release of their tension, the rays that have collected assume a negative character. They form a point of polarity opposite to the sun. Under the eternal law of My order, that point can then continually receive the positively polarised rays that meet it, release their tension and use them for its own nourishment.
[Fl.01_008,20] You have sufficient evidence of this in the often very extensive envelope of mist surrounding a comet. It usually extends on the side away from the sun into what is called a tail. What is this tail?
[Fl.01_008,21] The tail is simply a slowing of the rays that stream out from the sun. The negative polarity checks the initial impetus with which they left the sun. When they turn back towards the body attracting them, they become visible as an exceedingly delicate mass of mist.
[Fl.01_008,22] The sun has thus acquired a new dependent, which will feed on many rays until it attains planetary density. Once it reaches that density, its own central gravity compels it to return countless rays to the sun without injury to its own substance. As a planet, it receives rays from the sun in whose domain it lies and draws in masses of rays from the countless suns around it. It then conveys them, as it were, to its mother.
[Fl.01_008,23] We know that now, but a question is already stirring in you: “What has our little fly to do with the formation of comets and the return of the sun’s rays?”
[Fl.01_008,24] I tell you: have just a little more patience, and we shall let it buzz along behind the great rushing of such a newly formed world.
[Fl.01_008,25] Before we can do so, we must first glance at the rays streaming from a sun and see what these imponderable particles of light are in themselves.
[Fl.01_008,26] You already know some of this, but it will do no harm to repeat it briefly. These outgoing atoms of light are, as you know, the first stage and the source of the little creatures of light that I have already described to you.
[Fl.01_008,27] The gathering of such atoms from the rays into a ball that will later become a planet is therefore also a gathering of animal life within that ball.
[Fl.01_008,28] How does this animal life first manifest itself on such a new planet?
[Fl.01_008,29] Animal life necessarily manifests itself in two ways, first as negative life, which is plant life. Once this has reached its proper saturation and can absorb no more of the life of that polarity, positively polarised life naturally and necessarily develops. The oversaturation of the negative life provides it with sufficient nourishment.
[Fl.01_008,30] In what form does this first positively polarised life appear?
[Fl.01_008,31] Take a microscope and look at a drop of water decaying because plant matter is mixed into it, or at the juice pressed from plants. To your considerable surprise you will see whole armies of tiny creatures. After this explanation you will readily see how the negative pole of life reverses and passes into positively polarised life.
[Fl.01_008,32] When animal life begins to form there, My dear little ones, it can no longer come to a standstill. It gradually begins its journey back towards the original centre of all life.
[Fl.01_008,33] In the eternal order, things everywhere proceed by degrees. This is simply life becoming ever more perfect and concentrated, just as returning rays naturally grow more intense the nearer they come to the point from which they first went out. Life cannot hasten back to its source in this scattered state. It gathers in ever denser forms and thus returns towards its eternal origin.
[Fl.01_008,34] What, then, is the next stage in which this first positively polarised life becomes consolidated?
[Fl.01_008,35] Now, My dear ones, let our fly appear! This is the first little animal to populate a newly formed planet of this kind. As you know, even today it takes in food through which the lives of trillions become one life within it. Now you will understand why I said earlier: have just a little patience, and we shall soon hear our fly buzzing after the mighty rushing of our new planetary mass.
[Fl.01_008,36] You will also grasp the higher point, how the fly becomes, and is, a gathering point for life.
[Fl.01_008,37] I tell you further that, viewed as a gathering point for life, a single fly counts for more than our whole planetary mass formed earlier. Consider this and you will see how high life in even its first spark stands above outward matter. You will also see how much higher the life of one human being stands than all the suns and planets of an entire shell globe, which you already know about.
[Fl.01_008,38] Once you understand this, it will be easy to grasp why I, the original life of all life, came to earth as Father and Redeemer, made the human being My child and prepared a way to My heart. You will then understand all the better why I said to you: the fly, the fly, it sings to you of victory!
[Fl.01_008,39] The victory is not yet complete, but what follows and what I shall tell you further will show clearly how much of that victory is already present here. Let that be enough again for today.
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.