64. Why so Many Souls are Kept Back From the Light
Darkest, densest transcendental matter has for a long time past been encasing the earth like a cloud as black as night. In the same way as a flame dwindles down and extinguishes for want of oxygen, this suffocating atmosphere smothers every thought or feeling striving to the Light. This ethereal darkness which just now has arrived at its climax is so terrible that, could you but see it for five seconds, you would despair of any possibility of escape.
This is all brought about by man himself, by his predilection for what is low and base. He has been his worst enemy. The great majority are hurrying to their doom, and the few remaining souls seriously striving upwards are in danger of being forcibly dragged along with them. It is as if a noisome swamp sent out deadly miasma rendering the victims helpless. Their lethargy blinds them to their peril and, without a cry, without a struggle they sink into the quagmire.
This is the state of things on earth at the present time. It is not a picture I am painting. I am telling the bare truth and describing life itself; for all ethereal matter is shaped and lives as men think and feel and this is exactly the existing condition in the world of ethereal matter; it is what awaits those souls who go over and are not uplifted to brighter and happier regions.
And Darkness is gathering ever denser and denser. The time is approaching when the powers of Darkness will have complete control over the earth for a span of time, for man has willed it to be so. No helping hand will be stretched out to him from the Light, It is the time of which Saint John tells us that God will hide His countenance.
When the terrors of the night are at their height and it seems as if the good and the bad souls must perish together, day will dawn. But this day-break will bring purgation. A thorough purification must first take place and is inevitable before those souls striving upwards can be saved. But no helping hand will be stretched out to those whose bent is towards evil. They will suffer torments in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and they can only hope to come to their senses through the disgust they will be forced to feel for themselves.
Scoffers who ridiculed those seeking the Light, and who were pleased to put hindrances in their way and seemed to go unpunished, will be silenced and put to shame, and in time will come begging and supplicating to be taught the truth.
This will not be made easy for them; they must first be ground between the millstones of God's just Laws, till bitter experience will have taught them to see their errors.
On my lecturing tours I had occasion to notice how indignation was aroused when I said that there was nothing Divine in man; for lately great efforts have been made to discover Divinity in man, which would justify him to hope eventually to become a god himself. My words, therefore, created great consternation, and violent opposition was offered, for the audience only wanted to hear what was comforting and soothing and pleasing to the ear.
Those who rebel thus are really cowards — they do not wish to be enlightened but prefer to spend their lives unenlightened, dreaming pleasant dreams of their own imaginings.
It is not every one who can bear to be exposed to the Light of Truth, for it unmercifully shows up their defects and the spots on their garments.
By sneering and scoffing or by open enmity they would try to prevent the day coming, on which every one will see the feet of clay on which their tottering idol Ego rests. To these masquerading fools Ash Wednesday will surely come. Their cult is self-worship; this entirely satisfies their wants and they look upon the man who would arouse them out of their faint- hearted lethargy as their enemy. However, when the time comes, they will rebel in vain.
Self-worship pretends that there is divinity in man; this impudent effrontery would attack the very sublimity and purity of God Himself, and defile that which should be looked up to in perfect trust.
You have an altar in your hearts; it is there you should worship your God; it is your heart's inmost feeling. If you keep this altar pure, it affords direct communication with the Spiritual Kingdom and thus with Paradise itself; then there will be moments when you really feel you are nearer to God — this happens especially in times of greatest trouble or greatest joy.
Then you feel God's presence in the same way as the pure spirits in Paradise always feel it, and at such moments you are in close contact with them. Transports of joy or the shock of grief will set such strong vibrations in motion that all base material thoughts will be entirely banished and the pure feelings of the heart free for some seconds. These pure feelings will immediately seek connection with the like purity which reigns in Paradise.
Man, the Almighty's crowning work in Creation, enjoys the climax of happiness at such moments, a joy that is habitual with the eternal spirits in Paradise. It is the blessed consciousness of being safely harboured near to their Great God, to be clothed with His Power. But at the same time they accept their position as being the highest, attainable step they can reach, quite as a matter of course, and never imagine that they are capable of becoming Divinities, of being able to see God face to face.
This does not deject them, for they recognize and understand that they can never attain to such a height and they exultingly praise and thank Him for the unspeakable mercy He always shows to presumptuous man.
Man on earth can enjoy this blessed sensation and can really feel God's presence in sublime moments, but it would be sacrilegious for man to claim to possess a particle of Divinity on account of this wonderful experience — it is derogatory to God's Love to do so.
At the same time, how can God's Love be measured by man's love, and indeed even accounted as less precious? Consider for a moment what man's idea of Divine Love is: Divine Love is all forbearance, all forgiveness. It suffers all manner of evil from base creatures without remonstrance, offences that the most miserable weaklings and cowards would be despised for allowing. What ignominious, outrageous conclusions are these!
Men would like to continue in their sin and then do God a favour by allowing Him to forgive them without their having in any way made atonement. How narrow-minded, how indolent they are who think thus, or is it that they recognize their utter incapacity for higher things? One reason is as despicable as the other.
Picture to yourselves Divine Love as it really is: clear as crystal, radiating out Purity and Force, and then compare it with the weak, ignobly indulgent love that man would have it be. To quiet their conscience men only pretend that the God they worship is mighty and powerful, but in reality their deity is weak and impotent. Thus they make themselves agents of the powers of Darkness. The Love of God is inseparable from strictest Justice. Love is identical with Justice and Justice is identical with Love, and in this alone lies Divine forgiveness.
The church is quite right in saying that the Almighty forgives all sin, and fully forgives, not like men do, who even condemn the culprit who has already atoned for some trifling misdeed, to be degraded for ever after, thereby making themselves doubly guilty, for such judgments are contrary to God's Holy Will. Here human love lacks all justice.
The Divine Will of the Almighty has ordained that, as soon as the human soul begins to strive upwards to the Light he shall be freed from all sin; this freedom may result from the experiences he goes through in his life on earth, or it may result from voluntary effort at improvement. However this may be, when he has passed through the mill-stones in the physical world, he can stand in clean garments in the Kingdom of his Creator, no matter what his guilt may have been.
The question is often asked: how could God have allowed these terrible years of misery? Where is His Divine Love and Justice? Men and nations, families and individuals, all ask: why did this happen? This clearly shows that His Love is very different from what men think.
The All-forgiving Love that man ascribes to the Almighty would, without any atonement being made, suffer the iniquities of all men to continue and then generously forgive them for the evil they have committed. What a pitiful picture! Does man consider himself so precious that God should suffer for his sake, thus even more precious than God Himself? To what lengths man's presumption goes!
If you try to think this question out, you will find countless obstacles to stumble over, and you will see you can only solve the contradictions by belittling the Creator and assuming Him to be inferior and imperfect. He, however, was, is, and always will be perfect, whatever man thinks. His forgiveness is just forgiveness, and in this justice he shows his love: so great and yet so misunderstood.
Desist, therefore, from judging by earthly standards. It is the human soul that God loves, and He deals out Justice spiritually. Here matter does not come into consideration, for has not the shape of man been moulded by the human spirit without which it has no life? Do not, therefore, let your conscience torment you because of some trivial, worldly offence you think yourself guilty of, but which is no offence in reality, for God's Laws only take into account what man's intention is in all his doings. This intention is not the product of his thinking faculty but comes from the inmost feelings of his heart. This alone has the force to set the spiritual laws in motion.
God's Love will not allow itself to be degraded by man, for the whole universe rests on his loving, inalterable laws. And these laws act on man according to the position he takes up towards them. It is in their power to connect him with the highest regions, close to the Almighty Himself, or they can build up a wall, an impassable barrier through which he can never pass unless indeed time works a change in him and he submits. Obedience alone can work out his salvation and bring him happiness. All is cast in one form wherein there is no fissure, no defect. He is a sorry fool who would rebel against the Almighty's Work, for that would be his certain destruction.
Divine Love grants to every man only what serves for his spiritual evolution and not what gives him pleasure or seems agreeable to him on earth.
There are many who think that if the time of tribulation is at hand and there will be great destruction to purify this corrupt world, God must in His justice send one beforehand to admonish to repentance. Man must be pre-warned. Where is John the Baptist who came to proclaim what was to come? Misguided fools, so wise in their own estimation, but in truth so short-sighted! Such a Messenger would be scourged and cast into prison!
Open your eyes and your ears! Is not the fact that the catastrophes in nature are ever increasing a serious warning? Look at the state of things in Russia and China, or think of all the Germans living behind the German frontiers! The oppressed cry out in their misery from all parts of the world, but their cries die away unheeded and the worldling continues leading a life of callous indifference. Those who live in affluence will neither see nor listen.
Two thousand years ago there came one crying in the wilderness who said: “Repent ye!” And Christ came: “The Word became flesh.” But men sought diligently to distort the meaning of the Word and to dim its purity, so that the rays of lights it sent forth were in time extinguished. And all those who seek to disentangle the Word from the brambles that would choke it, soon perceive how messengers from the dark Powers obstruct them in their work of enlightenment.
What happened then will not be repeated today. At that time The Word came. Man had his free will and most of them decided to reject Him. From that time man was subject to the laws set in motion by his resolution and met the results thereof on his self-chosen path.
Soon the ring will be closed. Iniquity is perpetually increasing. Although it may now be a tower of strength, it will soon crumble and fall on all indolent and lethargic sleepers. When the Time of the End comes, the will man will no longer be free; he will have no choice left. What he sowed in the olden times, added to all the evil he has since been guilty of, he must now reap.
All those who rejected the Word at that time, are incarnated again on earth today. They have no right to be pre-warned and to have time to decide again. They had time enough to reconsider in the two-thousand years gone by and change their minds by now. Also he who listens to and accepts misinterpretations and misrepresentations of God and His Creation, and does not endeavour to learn the Truth more fully, has not received it in his heart. A wrong faith is worse than none at all, for it stands in the way of the seeker after the Light. Woe unto him who in order to attract followers would falsify or pervert the Truth by making the teaching more agreeable to man. He not only would be guilty of perverting and misleading those who listen to him because of the easier conditions he makes for them, but he would also be responsible for them. He will find no help when his hour comes; it will be his fate to be cast into the abyss from which there is no return. Saint John saw the fate of such in his vision and warned man in the Book of Revelation. There will be no time for man to rebel or resist, when the great purification begins, for the Divine Laws which man persistently misconstrues, will relentlessly consign him to his doom.
When the great tribulation comes, of which we read that none such was since the beginning of the world, man will at last see that the Love of God is not weak and indulgent as they choose to believe. When the great tribulation comes, no time will be left for mankind to rebel against it. The Divine Laws, of which man has such false notions, will then work unrelentingly. The tribulation will be such as was none since the beginning of the world and then man will at last see, that the Love of God is not weak and indulgent as they choose to believe.
More than half of the present inhabitants of the earth do not belong here at all!
Deterioration of the human race has been going on for centuries and the dark Powers have got such a firm hold on this earth that a connection has been formed with spheres greatly inferior in development. The dark beings living there were formerly naturally precluded, by their greater density and consequent weight, from rising to this lighter region.
In this lay a protection both for the dwellers upon earth and for the dark beings afore-mentioned. They were separated by the Natural Law of Ethereal Gravitation, and there below they could indulge in their base passions among themselves without doing any mischief, for they only had intercourse with those on the same level as themselves. On the contrary, the continual rub of conflicting interests led to their improvement, for at last the suffering their selfishness caused each other showed up their nature in its true light, and filled them with loathing for themselves. This gain awakened the wish to leave these regions; the wish grew to be ardent longing and finally despair led to prayer and repentance and determination to better themselves.
This is how their development should have proceeded, but the perversity of man upset and changed the natural order of things. Man's evil intentions spanned a bridge over to the regions of Darkness. This was holding out a hand to the beings living there and enabling them by the attraction similar natures to their own had for them to come on to earth. Here they naturally found opportunity to re-incarnate, a step their development did not justify or sanction.
On the earth plane where they live together with better and lighter souls, they only do harm, thus burdening themselves with fresh guilt. In the dark regions among their like, their depravity is indeed useful, because in the course of time they perceive their own base characters mirrored in their fellow associates and learn to abhor themselves which leads to improvement.
This is the normal course of all development which man disturbed. He shamefully misused his free will in building bridges of ethereal matter over to the dark regions whereupon the beings sunk there crowded over and invaded the earth, the greater part of which is now populated by them.
As light souls must perforce retreat before dark ones, where Darkness has established a firm footing, it was comparatively easy for the intruders on the earth-plane to incarnate there where by rights a light spirit should have entered. If it has found anchorage in some person near the pregnant woman, the dark spirit can push aside the light spirit, even in cases where both father and mother are light souls. This solves the riddle of how it happens that there are black sheep in a family. But if the pregnant woman takes heed who comes near her, this cannot happen.
Hence it is but a proof of Divine Love if the law decrees that all those who have obtruded themselves on this earth should be swept away and banished to the dark regions to which they belong. There they can do no mischief, nor can they hinder lighter beings from advancing and there they have a chance to mature in their loathing for themselves.
The time will certainly come when every human heart will quake, and spiritual pride be thoroughly eradicated. Then all doubts will be cleared up and man will see clearly that there is no Divinity within him. Divinity is high above him. It can only be a sublime picture on the altar in his heart to which he can look up in a fervent prayer.
It is not an error but a sin for man to pretend to be divine. Such presumption must cause his fall, as it implies wishing to tear God's Sceptre from His hand and to draw Him down to the level of man: to a level that man fails even to appreciate the value of and the possibilities of which he does not even profit by as he could, because he aspires to heights he can never reach and which his understanding cannot conceive.
In heedlessly disregarding reality he becomes not only useless but a harmful, objectionable unit.
Indeed it will become painfully evident to him that in his present depraved condition, he does not even reflect the shadow of Divinity. The whole treasure of his laboriously acquired erudition, the work of centuries, will prove to be as nothing, and he will see that the fruits of his efforts were indeed but detrimental to him. When that time comes he may seek the Divinity he so prides himself upon, in vain, but he will hear a stern voice cry out: “Down on your knees, miserable creature, at the feet of your Lord and Master, and do not venture to uplift yourself to God Almighty!”
Such claims as these show that man's ego-centricity has reached its culminating point.
Not till he has grasped what position he holds, can he think of advancement. When that time comes, all that totters will fall. False prophets and the followers they have gathered around them will collapse, and their mistaken methods and teaching be exposed. Many who are now very confident and self-satisfied will be terrified to see that they are slipping down an incline leading to a precipice instead of rising to the Light as they fondly imagined. These are the fool-hardy who opened the protecting gates before they were armed and equipped to defend themselves from the danger to which they thus unnecessarily exposed themselves. Happy the man who can then extricate himself and find the right way in time.
This is all brought about by man himself, by his predilection for what is low and base. He has been his worst enemy. The great majority are hurrying to their doom, and the few remaining souls seriously striving upwards are in danger of being forcibly dragged along with them. It is as if a noisome swamp sent out deadly miasma rendering the victims helpless. Their lethargy blinds them to their peril and, without a cry, without a struggle they sink into the quagmire.
This is the state of things on earth at the present time. It is not a picture I am painting. I am telling the bare truth and describing life itself; for all ethereal matter is shaped and lives as men think and feel and this is exactly the existing condition in the world of ethereal matter; it is what awaits those souls who go over and are not uplifted to brighter and happier regions.
And Darkness is gathering ever denser and denser. The time is approaching when the powers of Darkness will have complete control over the earth for a span of time, for man has willed it to be so. No helping hand will be stretched out to him from the Light, It is the time of which Saint John tells us that God will hide His countenance.
When the terrors of the night are at their height and it seems as if the good and the bad souls must perish together, day will dawn. But this day-break will bring purgation. A thorough purification must first take place and is inevitable before those souls striving upwards can be saved. But no helping hand will be stretched out to those whose bent is towards evil. They will suffer torments in the place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth and they can only hope to come to their senses through the disgust they will be forced to feel for themselves.
Scoffers who ridiculed those seeking the Light, and who were pleased to put hindrances in their way and seemed to go unpunished, will be silenced and put to shame, and in time will come begging and supplicating to be taught the truth.
This will not be made easy for them; they must first be ground between the millstones of God's just Laws, till bitter experience will have taught them to see their errors.
On my lecturing tours I had occasion to notice how indignation was aroused when I said that there was nothing Divine in man; for lately great efforts have been made to discover Divinity in man, which would justify him to hope eventually to become a god himself. My words, therefore, created great consternation, and violent opposition was offered, for the audience only wanted to hear what was comforting and soothing and pleasing to the ear.
Those who rebel thus are really cowards — they do not wish to be enlightened but prefer to spend their lives unenlightened, dreaming pleasant dreams of their own imaginings.
It is not every one who can bear to be exposed to the Light of Truth, for it unmercifully shows up their defects and the spots on their garments.
By sneering and scoffing or by open enmity they would try to prevent the day coming, on which every one will see the feet of clay on which their tottering idol Ego rests. To these masquerading fools Ash Wednesday will surely come. Their cult is self-worship; this entirely satisfies their wants and they look upon the man who would arouse them out of their faint- hearted lethargy as their enemy. However, when the time comes, they will rebel in vain.
Self-worship pretends that there is divinity in man; this impudent effrontery would attack the very sublimity and purity of God Himself, and defile that which should be looked up to in perfect trust.
You have an altar in your hearts; it is there you should worship your God; it is your heart's inmost feeling. If you keep this altar pure, it affords direct communication with the Spiritual Kingdom and thus with Paradise itself; then there will be moments when you really feel you are nearer to God — this happens especially in times of greatest trouble or greatest joy.
Then you feel God's presence in the same way as the pure spirits in Paradise always feel it, and at such moments you are in close contact with them. Transports of joy or the shock of grief will set such strong vibrations in motion that all base material thoughts will be entirely banished and the pure feelings of the heart free for some seconds. These pure feelings will immediately seek connection with the like purity which reigns in Paradise.
Man, the Almighty's crowning work in Creation, enjoys the climax of happiness at such moments, a joy that is habitual with the eternal spirits in Paradise. It is the blessed consciousness of being safely harboured near to their Great God, to be clothed with His Power. But at the same time they accept their position as being the highest, attainable step they can reach, quite as a matter of course, and never imagine that they are capable of becoming Divinities, of being able to see God face to face.
This does not deject them, for they recognize and understand that they can never attain to such a height and they exultingly praise and thank Him for the unspeakable mercy He always shows to presumptuous man.
Man on earth can enjoy this blessed sensation and can really feel God's presence in sublime moments, but it would be sacrilegious for man to claim to possess a particle of Divinity on account of this wonderful experience — it is derogatory to God's Love to do so.
At the same time, how can God's Love be measured by man's love, and indeed even accounted as less precious? Consider for a moment what man's idea of Divine Love is: Divine Love is all forbearance, all forgiveness. It suffers all manner of evil from base creatures without remonstrance, offences that the most miserable weaklings and cowards would be despised for allowing. What ignominious, outrageous conclusions are these!
Men would like to continue in their sin and then do God a favour by allowing Him to forgive them without their having in any way made atonement. How narrow-minded, how indolent they are who think thus, or is it that they recognize their utter incapacity for higher things? One reason is as despicable as the other.
Picture to yourselves Divine Love as it really is: clear as crystal, radiating out Purity and Force, and then compare it with the weak, ignobly indulgent love that man would have it be. To quiet their conscience men only pretend that the God they worship is mighty and powerful, but in reality their deity is weak and impotent. Thus they make themselves agents of the powers of Darkness. The Love of God is inseparable from strictest Justice. Love is identical with Justice and Justice is identical with Love, and in this alone lies Divine forgiveness.
The church is quite right in saying that the Almighty forgives all sin, and fully forgives, not like men do, who even condemn the culprit who has already atoned for some trifling misdeed, to be degraded for ever after, thereby making themselves doubly guilty, for such judgments are contrary to God's Holy Will. Here human love lacks all justice.
The Divine Will of the Almighty has ordained that, as soon as the human soul begins to strive upwards to the Light he shall be freed from all sin; this freedom may result from the experiences he goes through in his life on earth, or it may result from voluntary effort at improvement. However this may be, when he has passed through the mill-stones in the physical world, he can stand in clean garments in the Kingdom of his Creator, no matter what his guilt may have been.
The question is often asked: how could God have allowed these terrible years of misery? Where is His Divine Love and Justice? Men and nations, families and individuals, all ask: why did this happen? This clearly shows that His Love is very different from what men think.
The All-forgiving Love that man ascribes to the Almighty would, without any atonement being made, suffer the iniquities of all men to continue and then generously forgive them for the evil they have committed. What a pitiful picture! Does man consider himself so precious that God should suffer for his sake, thus even more precious than God Himself? To what lengths man's presumption goes!
If you try to think this question out, you will find countless obstacles to stumble over, and you will see you can only solve the contradictions by belittling the Creator and assuming Him to be inferior and imperfect. He, however, was, is, and always will be perfect, whatever man thinks. His forgiveness is just forgiveness, and in this justice he shows his love: so great and yet so misunderstood.
Desist, therefore, from judging by earthly standards. It is the human soul that God loves, and He deals out Justice spiritually. Here matter does not come into consideration, for has not the shape of man been moulded by the human spirit without which it has no life? Do not, therefore, let your conscience torment you because of some trivial, worldly offence you think yourself guilty of, but which is no offence in reality, for God's Laws only take into account what man's intention is in all his doings. This intention is not the product of his thinking faculty but comes from the inmost feelings of his heart. This alone has the force to set the spiritual laws in motion.
God's Love will not allow itself to be degraded by man, for the whole universe rests on his loving, inalterable laws. And these laws act on man according to the position he takes up towards them. It is in their power to connect him with the highest regions, close to the Almighty Himself, or they can build up a wall, an impassable barrier through which he can never pass unless indeed time works a change in him and he submits. Obedience alone can work out his salvation and bring him happiness. All is cast in one form wherein there is no fissure, no defect. He is a sorry fool who would rebel against the Almighty's Work, for that would be his certain destruction.
Divine Love grants to every man only what serves for his spiritual evolution and not what gives him pleasure or seems agreeable to him on earth.
There are many who think that if the time of tribulation is at hand and there will be great destruction to purify this corrupt world, God must in His justice send one beforehand to admonish to repentance. Man must be pre-warned. Where is John the Baptist who came to proclaim what was to come? Misguided fools, so wise in their own estimation, but in truth so short-sighted! Such a Messenger would be scourged and cast into prison!
Open your eyes and your ears! Is not the fact that the catastrophes in nature are ever increasing a serious warning? Look at the state of things in Russia and China, or think of all the Germans living behind the German frontiers! The oppressed cry out in their misery from all parts of the world, but their cries die away unheeded and the worldling continues leading a life of callous indifference. Those who live in affluence will neither see nor listen.
Two thousand years ago there came one crying in the wilderness who said: “Repent ye!” And Christ came: “The Word became flesh.” But men sought diligently to distort the meaning of the Word and to dim its purity, so that the rays of lights it sent forth were in time extinguished. And all those who seek to disentangle the Word from the brambles that would choke it, soon perceive how messengers from the dark Powers obstruct them in their work of enlightenment.
What happened then will not be repeated today. At that time The Word came. Man had his free will and most of them decided to reject Him. From that time man was subject to the laws set in motion by his resolution and met the results thereof on his self-chosen path.
Soon the ring will be closed. Iniquity is perpetually increasing. Although it may now be a tower of strength, it will soon crumble and fall on all indolent and lethargic sleepers. When the Time of the End comes, the will man will no longer be free; he will have no choice left. What he sowed in the olden times, added to all the evil he has since been guilty of, he must now reap.
All those who rejected the Word at that time, are incarnated again on earth today. They have no right to be pre-warned and to have time to decide again. They had time enough to reconsider in the two-thousand years gone by and change their minds by now. Also he who listens to and accepts misinterpretations and misrepresentations of God and His Creation, and does not endeavour to learn the Truth more fully, has not received it in his heart. A wrong faith is worse than none at all, for it stands in the way of the seeker after the Light. Woe unto him who in order to attract followers would falsify or pervert the Truth by making the teaching more agreeable to man. He not only would be guilty of perverting and misleading those who listen to him because of the easier conditions he makes for them, but he would also be responsible for them. He will find no help when his hour comes; it will be his fate to be cast into the abyss from which there is no return. Saint John saw the fate of such in his vision and warned man in the Book of Revelation. There will be no time for man to rebel or resist, when the great purification begins, for the Divine Laws which man persistently misconstrues, will relentlessly consign him to his doom.
When the great tribulation comes, of which we read that none such was since the beginning of the world, man will at last see that the Love of God is not weak and indulgent as they choose to believe. When the great tribulation comes, no time will be left for mankind to rebel against it. The Divine Laws, of which man has such false notions, will then work unrelentingly. The tribulation will be such as was none since the beginning of the world and then man will at last see, that the Love of God is not weak and indulgent as they choose to believe.
More than half of the present inhabitants of the earth do not belong here at all!
Deterioration of the human race has been going on for centuries and the dark Powers have got such a firm hold on this earth that a connection has been formed with spheres greatly inferior in development. The dark beings living there were formerly naturally precluded, by their greater density and consequent weight, from rising to this lighter region.
In this lay a protection both for the dwellers upon earth and for the dark beings afore-mentioned. They were separated by the Natural Law of Ethereal Gravitation, and there below they could indulge in their base passions among themselves without doing any mischief, for they only had intercourse with those on the same level as themselves. On the contrary, the continual rub of conflicting interests led to their improvement, for at last the suffering their selfishness caused each other showed up their nature in its true light, and filled them with loathing for themselves. This gain awakened the wish to leave these regions; the wish grew to be ardent longing and finally despair led to prayer and repentance and determination to better themselves.
This is how their development should have proceeded, but the perversity of man upset and changed the natural order of things. Man's evil intentions spanned a bridge over to the regions of Darkness. This was holding out a hand to the beings living there and enabling them by the attraction similar natures to their own had for them to come on to earth. Here they naturally found opportunity to re-incarnate, a step their development did not justify or sanction.
On the earth plane where they live together with better and lighter souls, they only do harm, thus burdening themselves with fresh guilt. In the dark regions among their like, their depravity is indeed useful, because in the course of time they perceive their own base characters mirrored in their fellow associates and learn to abhor themselves which leads to improvement.
This is the normal course of all development which man disturbed. He shamefully misused his free will in building bridges of ethereal matter over to the dark regions whereupon the beings sunk there crowded over and invaded the earth, the greater part of which is now populated by them.
As light souls must perforce retreat before dark ones, where Darkness has established a firm footing, it was comparatively easy for the intruders on the earth-plane to incarnate there where by rights a light spirit should have entered. If it has found anchorage in some person near the pregnant woman, the dark spirit can push aside the light spirit, even in cases where both father and mother are light souls. This solves the riddle of how it happens that there are black sheep in a family. But if the pregnant woman takes heed who comes near her, this cannot happen.
Hence it is but a proof of Divine Love if the law decrees that all those who have obtruded themselves on this earth should be swept away and banished to the dark regions to which they belong. There they can do no mischief, nor can they hinder lighter beings from advancing and there they have a chance to mature in their loathing for themselves.
The time will certainly come when every human heart will quake, and spiritual pride be thoroughly eradicated. Then all doubts will be cleared up and man will see clearly that there is no Divinity within him. Divinity is high above him. It can only be a sublime picture on the altar in his heart to which he can look up in a fervent prayer.
It is not an error but a sin for man to pretend to be divine. Such presumption must cause his fall, as it implies wishing to tear God's Sceptre from His hand and to draw Him down to the level of man: to a level that man fails even to appreciate the value of and the possibilities of which he does not even profit by as he could, because he aspires to heights he can never reach and which his understanding cannot conceive.
In heedlessly disregarding reality he becomes not only useless but a harmful, objectionable unit.
Indeed it will become painfully evident to him that in his present depraved condition, he does not even reflect the shadow of Divinity. The whole treasure of his laboriously acquired erudition, the work of centuries, will prove to be as nothing, and he will see that the fruits of his efforts were indeed but detrimental to him. When that time comes he may seek the Divinity he so prides himself upon, in vain, but he will hear a stern voice cry out: “Down on your knees, miserable creature, at the feet of your Lord and Master, and do not venture to uplift yourself to God Almighty!”
Such claims as these show that man's ego-centricity has reached its culminating point.
Not till he has grasped what position he holds, can he think of advancement. When that time comes, all that totters will fall. False prophets and the followers they have gathered around them will collapse, and their mistaken methods and teaching be exposed. Many who are now very confident and self-satisfied will be terrified to see that they are slipping down an incline leading to a precipice instead of rising to the Light as they fondly imagined. These are the fool-hardy who opened the protecting gates before they were armed and equipped to defend themselves from the danger to which they thus unnecessarily exposed themselves. Happy the man who can then extricate himself and find the right way in time.
