63. “I am the Resurrection and the Life, no Man Cometh to the Father but by Me.”

 
Jesus, coming from the Divine, rightly used these words, for only He could survey everything and truly explain it. His Message, inseparable from His very Being, reveals the clear path that leads upward to the Light amid the confusion of false views. For all human spirits, this means the possibility of rising, or the resurrection out of the World of Matter, into which they have been immersed for the sake of their further evolution. Such a resurrection is life for everyone!
 
Now listen attentively: everything base and everything evil, in other words, everything that is called darkness, exists only in the World of Matter, in both the coarse and ethereal forms of matter! Whoever truly grasps this correctly has already gained a great deal.
 
The moment humans think in a base or harmful way, they inflict immeasurable damage upon themselves. The core power of their will then streams outwards like a magnetic beam directed towards the lower realm, attracting the denser, and therefore darker, ethereal-material forms that gather there by virtue of their heaviness the ethereal substance there which, due to its heaviness, is denser and, because of that density, also darker, whereby the human spirits, from which the will emanates, become enveloped in this dense form of matter. Even when someone’s inner focus is turned predominantly to what is merely earthly – held fast by the spell of a passion, which need not be only sensuality, gambling, or drinking, but might also be an intense attachment to any earthly pursuit – a more or less dense ethereal-material covering forms around the spirit through the process just described.
 
This dense and therefore dark covering holds the spirit back from any possibility of ascent and remains in place as long as that spirit does not change the nature of its will.
 
Only earnest willing and a serious striving towards the higher spiritual can loosen such a covering and ultimately dissolve it completely, since, no longer receiving power from anything of like nature, it slowly loses its hold, sinks away, and dissolves, releasing the spirit to rise upwards.
 
By ‘ethereal matter’ is not meant a refined state of the visible coarse matter, but rather a realm of a different kind altogether, foreign in nature, though still to be classed as matter. It is a transition to the Realm of Essentiality, from which the animal soul originates.
 
If, however, humans remain bound within materiality, they must, in the natural course of things, one day be drawn into the disintegration of all that is material, to which it is subject, because, enclosed by material coverings, they cannot free themselves at the right time.
 
Spirits who, of their own wish, have descended into the World of Matter for their development remain fettered there if they do not keep to the true path! They cannot bring about a re‑emergence from it, a rising that would be resurrection toward the Light.
 
To explain more closely, every spiritual seed that strives for personal ego-consciousness requires a descent into the World of Matter. Only by experiencing life in the World of Matter can this seed unfold in this way, and no other path is open to it. Yet it is not forced; this descent occurs only once its own desire to do so has awakened within. That longing then propels it onto the necessary evolutionary path: out of the so‑called Paradise of the unconscious, and thus out of the state of non‑responsibility.

If, once in materiality, humans lose the true path through wrong desiring, the path that leads upward again, back to the Light, they remain wandering within the World of Matter.
 
Now try, for once, to contemplate what happens in the World of Coarse Matter. The coming into being and passing away in your immediate surroundings, which are visible to you.
 
In germination, growth, ripening, and decay, you witness the shaping, the joining together of basic substances, their maturing, and then their return into those basic substances through disintegration, that is, through the breaking apart of what has been formed in decay. You can observe this clearly in water, in stones through so-called weathering in plants, and in animal and human bodies. And just as it occurs here on a small scale, so it occurs on the great scale, and ultimately in the whole course of world events – not only in the coarse material realm visible to earthly humanity, but also in ethereal‑materiality, the so‑called “beyond,” which still is not Paradise.__
 
The entire World of Matter hangs like a great wreath, representing the lowest part of Creation, and moves in a gigantic circle whose orbit spans many millions of years. Thus, in the great events of Creation, it is not just individuals parts that revolves, but the whole moves inexorably, particularly within an immense cycle. Just as this great cycle unfolded from its initial merging together to its present-day completion, so it continues in the same way, unceasingly, until the onset and progression of disintegration back into the primordial substance. Nevertheless, the cycle continues undisturbed even with this primeval substance, so that, in the subsequent new merging of elements it may once again form new parts of the World, bringing with them virginal, unspent forces.
 
Thus, the grand cycle of evolution repeats itself eternally, in the smallest as in the vastest scale. And above this cycle stands firm the first, Pure Spiritual Creation, the so-called Paradise. Unlike formed matter, this is not subject to disintegration.
 
In this eternal, purely Spiritual Realm, high above the cycle, lies the origin of the human spiritual germ in its unconscious state. And this Spiritual Realm is likewise the ultimate goal for the human spirit that has become conscious in the World of Matter and thus personal. It sets out as an unconscious, irresponsible seed and returns as a self‑conscious, responsible personality – provided it does not lose its way on the necessary path through the World of Matter and thereby become ensnared within it, but instead celebrates its resurrection from it as a fully conscious human spirit. The joyful re-emergence from the World of Matter, towards this luminous, eternal part of Creation.
 
So long as the human spirit remains within the World of Matter, it takes part in the great eternal cycle alongside it, naturally without realizing it itself. Thus there comes a day when it also reaches that boundary where the part of the World it inhabits begins to drift slowly towards disintegration. Then it is high time for all human spirits still bound to matter to hasten, to become in such a way that they can ascend to the secure, luminous harbour of the Eternal Kingdom – to find the true, and above all the shortest, way out of the sphere of dangers now beginning in the World of Matter, before these can overtake them.
 
If the spirit does not succeed in this, the task becomes ever harder, and at ultimately impossible!

Then, together with everything else, it is dragged into slow disintegration, and in the process the personal “ego” it has acquired is torn apart. Under a thousand torments, the spirit becomes an unconscious spiritual seed-grain once more. This is the most horrific thing that can befall a spirit that has become personally consciousness.
 
These are those who have developed their personality in a false direction. They must therefore lose it again as something unusable and harmful. Disintegration, note well, is not synonymous with destruction. Nothing can be destroyed; it is merely a restoration to its primeval state. What is destroyed in those who are lost in this manner is the personal “ego” gained up to that point, which takes place under the greatest torments.
 
Such lost ones, such condemned spirits, cease thereby to be fully formed human spirits, whereas the others are permitted to enter, as self‑conscious spirits, into the Eternal Kingdom of joy and light, consciously enjoying all its splendour. –
 
Just as a field of grain yields increasingly poorer harvests after many years and regains vigour only through changing the crop, so it is throughout the entire World of Matter. It too becomes spent and must regain new force through disintegration and renewed formation. Such processes, however, span millions of years. Yet even within the unfolding of many millions of years, there comes one specific year as the decisive dividing line for the necessary separation of what is of value from what is worthless.
 
And that moment in the great cycle has now come for us. The human spirit in the World of Matter must finally decide for ascent, or else materiality will hold it in its embrace for the later coming disintegration, which is eternal damnation. From that state, a spiritually personal, self‑conscious resurrection and ascent to the luminous, eternal part of Creation, exalted above all disintegration, can never again be possible. –
 
In the natural development of the whole, the possibility of spiritual germs incarnating on this over-ripe earthly plane has long since been ruled out. They would require too much time to leave this World of Matter in time as self-conscious spirits. In the natural course of events, the path of spiritual seeds intersects only with World-Regions which in this respect share a similar developmental stage, such that the necessary time for evolution is exactly equal to the time required for the seed to reach completion, even in the longest case. Only sameness of developmental stage grants spirit-seeds open passage, while greater maturity in a region of the World creates impassable boundaries for unripe spirit-seeds. Here, too, any accusation of injustice or defect is invalid. Every human spirit can therefore stand at the same time at the highest level of maturity with the material environment in which it finds itself, at the boundary where the part of the World of Matter that they presently inhabit now stands.
 
There is not a single one who could not be mature! The inequality among humans is merely the necessary consequence of their own free will. Now, the World of Matter, having become overripe, enters into disintegration and thus simultaneously move towards its rebirth.
 
For the field of ears of grain of human spirits, however, comes the cutting – the harvest, and with it the separation. What is matured is lifted up to the Light through the operation of Natural Laws, which gradually strip away the ethereal coverings, so that the spirit, freed from them, consciously ascends into the realm of kindred nature, into the eternally spiritual.

What is unfit, however, is held back in World of Matter by the self‑willed density of its ethereal body. The fate of such is then that their ethereal body remains subject to the changes now taking place in the World of Matter, and must suffer in it under the most painful disintegration for a thousand years. The enormity of these pains at last weighs so heavily upon the spirit that it loses self-consciousness. Then the human form, the form of the image of God gained through consciousness, also disintegrates. After the complete disintegration of the material back into primeval substance, what has again become unconscious spirit is freed and rises according to its kind. Yet it does not return as a conscious human spirit, but as an unconscious seed that will one day begin its entire course anew in another world‑region when fresh desire awakens.

From this high vantage point, looking down from On High, Christ, as always, chose His Words so as to describe a completely natural process: the rising from materiality into which the seed of spirit once descended.

Try to imagine yourself standing above the World of Matter.
 
Below lies spread out before you, like a great field, the general World of Matter in its many forms. From above, the spiritual seeds dispersed into this materiality. And gradually, over long periods, fully formed human spirits emerge again at many intervals, having become self‑conscious through their experiences in matter. Urged by the longing to strive higher, they can strip off and leave behind everything material. In doing so, they celebrate their resurrection out of the World of Matter.

Yet not all seeds return to the surface matured spirits. Many remain behind and must perish there, serving no purpose. –
 
It is exactly the same as in a field of grain.
 
Just as with the grain of wheat, where all the mysterious, essential development takes place within the soil necessary for it, so too with a spiritual seed, the main development occurs within the general material world. –
 
In every one of His statements, Christ always presents in picture form a natural process in Creation. – –

Whether He said, “No one comes to the Father except through My Message,” or “through My Word,” or “through Me,” it makes no difference. All alike means: “No one finds the way except through what I bring and declare.” One expression signifies the same as the other. Likewise, whether He says, “In My Message I bring you the possibility of resurrection out of the World of Matter, and thus also life,” or “Through My Word I am for you the resurrection and the life.”
 
Humanity should grasp the inner meaning rather than continually entangle itself anew in disputes over words. – – –