NEUOFFENBARUNG22 March 1842
[Fl.01_009,01] In the preceding account we heard our fly buzzing along behind a newly formed planet as its first animal.
[Fl.01_009,02] This figure of speech hardly needs further explanation. For the sake of anyone who finds it difficult, however, it may be added that this is a sequence in time, not in space. Otherwise someone might imagine an enormous swarm of flies chasing such a planet like a comet’s tail. It simply means that a more developed and perfect period follows a preliminary one.
[Fl.01_009,03] We know this already, but now you will think: “What more lofty and truly victorious thing could we still discover about the poor fly?” We have seen it from its origin in this account, and despite all the wonderful circumstances have found in it nothing more or less than an ordinary fly. It conforms to the divine order, but is otherwise just like those we see in plenty in great swarms in summer.
[Fl.01_009,04] That is a sound observation, and a good foundation for a new, solid building.
[Fl.01_009,05] Before setting to work on the building itself, however, we must put up a stout preliminary defence against attack. Otherwise our poor creature may not come through alive, especially in an age with so many learned gnat catchers and profoundly scientific fly swatters.
[Fl.01_009,06] Where shall we raise our defences? That will not be hard to determine.
[Fl.01_009,07] The greatest number of misconceptions, commonly called hypotheses, always arise where the shortsighted human intellect can least see into the clear sphere of reality. There the most varied theories are put forward, and, as with French fashions, the latest always has the upper hand.
[Fl.01_009,08] What subject in this learned age has almost as many theories as there are scholars?
[Fl.01_009,09] It is light!
[Fl.01_009,10] Let us therefore look carefully at light itself. That will be our preliminary work. Only then shall we return to our fly.
[Fl.01_009,11] Let us ask the main question: what is light in itself, and how does it propagate?
[Fl.01_009,12] To show this, there is no need to name any existing erroneous theory. We shall set out our explanation, and it can serve you and anyone else as a touchstone to test how much noble or base metal is contained in all the other theories.
[Fl.01_009,13] What, then, is light?
[Fl.01_009,14] To understand thoroughly the light that appears in time and space, you must consider it as material and spiritual in union, neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual. Regard it as a polarity in which the spiritual part constitutes the positive pole and the material part the negative.
[Fl.01_009,15] This polarity is arranged like an inside and an outside rather than a front and a back. The inner is the positive pole and the outer the negative.
[Fl.01_009,16] How, then, do these two polarities appear as light?
[Fl.01_009,17] This difficulty will soon be resolved. Take a flint and strike it with hardened iron. You will see a spray of sparks fly from the place where the iron struck the stone. Those sparks were light. Where did they get their radiance, from the stone, from the iron, or from both at once?
[Fl.01_009,18] There is no need to explain at length that the sparks in this action come solely from the iron. The hard stone scrapes off exceedingly small particles, which ignite because the air enclosed in the pores of the iron cannot escape the pressure caused by the blow. The air ignites and immediately brings the detached particles of iron to white heat.
[Fl.01_009,19] We know that. But how is air compressed in this way set alight, and what shines in the act of ignition?
[Fl.01_009,20] This can only be explained by repeating what you have already been told more than once: half of the air is simply the material body of the intelligent spirits it contains. Physicists would prefer Me to speak of “free, unbound forces” instead of spirits. But we wish to go to the root of the matter, so we take the thing that has the property rather than the property itself. That means the spirit itself, or, since we are dealing with many, the spirits themselves.
[Fl.01_009,21] With this established, we can at once follow the surest track. Hear, then: because a spirit is a positively polarised force, it continually strives for the most unbounded freedom. When bound, it remains quiet as long as the surrounding negative polarity, or, more plainly, its shell, subjects it to no unusual interference. When pressure of any kind acts on the shell from outside, the spirit is immediately roused from its customary confinement. It makes its presence known by its expansive movement, which always shows itself in the familiar phenomenon of shining.
[Fl.01_009,22] Thus far we have come. Even so, anyone may say: “That may be right, but we still do not know what the shining itself actually is.”
[Fl.01_009,23] I say: a little patience. You all know that an old, broad oak does not fall at a single blow.
[Fl.01_009,24] We shall come to terms with the act of shining itself as well.
[Fl.01_009,25] What, then, is this shining in itself?
[Fl.01_009,26] An example will make this clear. What do you observe in a person whose heart is still full of pride when they receive a sharp, humiliating blow from some quarter? Do they not at once become exceedingly angry, so that their whole body trembles with fury, their eyes glow as though a forge stood behind them, and their hair bristles in every direction? If they are among like-minded people, do those companions not also grow angry at once to a greater or lesser degree, according to the closeness of their friendship, even if they do not reach the same pitch?
[Fl.01_009,27] I think this phenomenon needs no further explanation here. You have only to look at an army to see how this radiating anger, or “fever of fury”, seizes thousands upon thousands and sweeps them into bloody combat.
[Fl.01_009,28] If you consider this inwardly a little, we have all but explained shining in itself. A positively polarised spirit enclosed in negative polarity is also driven to anger by a blow. This anger is the awareness of its confinement. With that awareness a great desire awakens in it to expand or set itself free.
[Fl.01_009,29] The outer negative polarity surrounding it can expand to a degree but is otherwise indestructible, or rather cannot be torn. The spirit seeking freedom expands as far as it can within it. As it still cannot break through, it quickly contracts and then tries once more to tear its covering with what it mistakenly takes for renewed strength. Some spirits can repeat this act many thousands of times in a second. The act is called “fury” and is accompanied by continually increasing anger.
[Fl.01_009,30] What is the visible consequence of this act, which may properly be called the “fever of fury”?
[Fl.01_009,31] The other spirits near a spirit raging with anger, though still quiet themselves, sense its fever because their outer polarity is set into a similar sympathetic fever. That fever naturally propagates all the more quickly because the negative coverings of the spirits of which the air actually consists lie close against one another.
[Fl.01_009,32] Now we have the whole matter. The fever of such a spirit is perceived by the eyes of animals and especially by human eyes. This perception is what you call “shining”, for the eye is made to perceive these faintest vibrations. Every eye is itself more or less half spiritual and half material. It has the same polarity as that which is called “light”, and so it can take in and sense everything akin to itself.
[Fl.01_009,33] Whenever such a spiritual polarity catches fire within itself in the way described, illumination also occurs. Illumination is simply the effect of that fire on the spiritual polarities nearby. According to the size and intensity of the ignited spiritual polarity, the effect spreads across shorter or greater distances and produces a perceptible, though less violent, state of fever. Naturally the fever grows weaker the farther the other spiritual polarities lie from the principal polarity that is burning within itself.
[Fl.01_009,34] Now you will say: “We are clear about shining, but we still do not know why we see illuminated objects in their shapes, or what the various kinds of light are like, especially the light of the sun.”
[Fl.01_009,35] I will only say that this should no longer be very difficult, since we have already thoroughly overcome the greatest difficulty.
[Fl.01_009,36] Seeing objects is simply the interruption of the propagation already described, corresponding exactly to the solid material shape of the object. Or it is a doubled return from an object from which the propagation has received a secondary impulse, or, more plainly, a counter-impulse.
[Fl.01_009,37] As for sunlight, the sun’s shining is of the same kind as that of the little spark we know. The difference is that the white light of the sun springs from the trembling of love, in much the same way as the reddish light of fire springs from the trembling of anger. Because sunlight springs from the trembling of love, it propagates differently from light that springs from the trembling of anger.
[Fl.01_009,38] What this difference is, and how it will lead us to our victory in regard to our little creature, will be shown to you clearly next time.
[Fl.01_009,39] 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.