God as Creator and person created the universe with all its laws and other beings. When it is said that God created His children in His image, it is meant that all divine aspects reoccur in lesser degree within these created beings. This divine substance/ether which God possesses to a maximum degree but to a degree greater than all other creatures, can best be described as a fluid substance of the most radiant matter. It is the life force. God, as well as all creatures in their highest form of development, can dissolve this fluid substance so that the compact personality becomes a flow, a principle, or a divine stream/wave.
God is love and love must share: this is the nature of love. Of course God realized that because He created beings with free will, they could so decide with this free will that misery could come into existence, either permanently or temporarily. Nevertheless, as an indication of His greatness, God created beings who could choose freely with the power given them. They either would have the wisdom of not abusing their power and thus living within the perfection of divine law in a state of eternal bliss or, if they decided otherwise, they would finally come to comprehend all the more the perfection of divine law, after having gone through the valley of death. Thus, they would be more godlike than ever before. The temporary misery for those who might decide wrongly is nothing compared to the bliss and happiness of eternity after the self-inflicted misery has been experienced. The scales show this so clearly that a spirit does not even have to be very high in development to recognize this fact.
Free will and free choice entails the possibility of directing free will contrary to divine law. In choosing freely and correctly and in abstaining from abuse of power lies divinity, love, wisdom, and a number of further divine attributes. God has also put into Creation an infinite number of laws. These laws provided beforehand for the possibility of a return to God if and when any of the created beings should misuse their power and freedom given to them by God. These laws work in cycles which have to close; whatever happens, these cycles follow their course and the laws work in such a way that ultimately everything having once turned away from God and divine law will eventually come back. The greater the distance from God, the more the misery, for only in God and with God lies happiness. But through this misery arises a stronger incentive to return to God. By the same token, the opposite of God and His laws must be the prohibition of free choice and the domination of the stronger over the weaker ones.
Long before the existence of the material world, some of the created beings who had been endowed not only with free will but also with a certain power, abused this power. The Fall of the Angels happened gradually as a slow process of degeneration, whereby everything divine very slowly and gradually turned into its opposite aspect. In this way a separation occurred between those who had abused their power and those who had not. Your attitudes, your opinions, your feelings, and your thoughts create the spiritual worlds, even though you may still live on earth. You each create the world which will be yours. In the same way, the spirits participating in the Fall created new worlds according to their changing attitudes, dark worlds often referred to as Hell. The attitudes of disharmony and hatred created such forms.
The spirit who was the first to succumb to the temptation of abusing this power, the one who is sometimes referred to as Lucifer who influenced others to follow him, would naturally have been the first one to inhabit the new world that came into existence. This spirit had complete power over all those who followed him, and, contrary to God, he used this power. God gives the freedom of choice and this has deeper significance than most of you realize. With that freedom necessarily comes the possibility to abuse the given power and to use it contrary to the divine laws. If no choice were available, there would be no freedom and no power. There can be no divine happiness, in fact, no divinity at all, if it cannot be attained or maintained by free choice. By the same token, the opposite of God and His laws must be the prohibition of free choice and the domination of the stronger over the weaker ones.
This state of affairs would seem to make the salvation of the fallen beings impossible; for even should they have come to the point of desiring to go back to God, they would not have had the power to do so since they were under the dominion and power of the one who reigns in the world of darkness. On the other hand, how could God not break his own laws and still save those beings who longed for him? If He were to use his infinite power by overruling the free will and the choice of those who decided to use the given power in their own way, He would actually be acting from the same principle as Lucifer. Here more than in anything else, maintaining the divine principle was of utmost importance, for only if God remained true to himself and his laws would there be a fundamental difference between the ways of God and the ways of Lucifer. Since it is God’s plan that every creature should recognize him and at one time come back to him out of free choice and reattain divinity, it was imperative that he not use the same means of force as his opponent, even though his purpose might be a good one. It is not the end alone that counts, but very much the means too! Only by remaining true to these principles would the most stubborn of the fallen beings one day see the vast difference between these two ways of being and understand the dignity that lies in the divine principles, even though it means a path of suffering for those who wish to get out of the self-created miserable circumstances.
Since life in spirit is in direct relationship to the inner harmony, enlightenment, and general attitude, spirits who have become disharmonious cannot be simply put into a world of harmony as you might travel into a beautiful country. In the world of spirit the country is both you and your product. Therefore, the once fallen spirits had and still have to attain a state where again they naturally produce harmonious worlds. That this can only be accomplished through the same slow process of development as the Fall with its degeneration is natural enough. You will readily understand now that this must happen in free choice, too, so that questions like, “Why has God not done away with evil?”, need not come up any more in your deliberations. On the other hand, means had to be found so that the creatures who desired to return to God and to keep his laws instead of Lucifer’s could do so within the framework of the laws of God. Thus the free will of no one would be broken, not even of Lucifer himself. This is the great Plan of Salvation.
The spheres of darkness first came into existence where the spirits lived under the dominion of Lucifer. In the beginning there was no longing for or sense of the light they had once possessed. Only after tasting the self-chosen medicine for a considerable time, that is, experiencing a state of desolation, did a vague longing for something else take hold of some of these beings. It goes without saying that the memory of God and his worlds was extinguished to the degree that disharmony had set in, but it was revived again as attitudes changed. The latter could only occur as an exceedingly slow process, however. Spiritual darkness annuls knowledge, which is spiritual light. Just as with human beings, if you have no spiritual enlightenment, you have to work spiritually to regain glimpses of this light. The vague longing that first some and later more creatures felt was sufficient to bring a glimmer of light into their world, as though a faraway dawn changed the contours of their world a little bit.
When enough spirits came into the state of longing and the longing increased, the time was ripe for the material world as you know it to come into existence. You may say that God created the material world, and this is true, for nothing can be created without the creative divine force. However, it is equally true that the material world was also created by the longing of enough spirits for something higher. The world in which we are now living is the product of the desire to strive higher. Here conditions exist in which spiritual development can proceed, and in which a free choice for God can be made which is impossible in the worlds of darkness. In other words, this earth sphere is a product of the longing of the fallen spirits. And it is equally a product of the longing of all those beings who remained with God and whose deepest desire was always, and is always, to bring their brothers and sisters back to God. Therefore, both the divine worlds and the worlds of darkness helped in the creation of this earth sphere. The influence of both worlds exists and will manifest itself according to the attitude of each individual being on this plane possessing the power of free choice. Conditions and circumstances on this earth sphere are different, of course, due to the new form of matter; but then, circumstances vary in all spheres.
Human beings produce their spiritual world. And on earth where the influence of God’s world also existed, for the first time since the Fall, they now had the opportunity to learn, to change, to turn to God and thus to create a better world for themselves in both matter and spirit. They would go to the spirit world after the death of the body and also during sleep when the body rested. From the spirit world they would receive inspirations and influences of all sorts. This is why development cannot proceed faster; for all the incarnated beings were at first so low in their development that they were constantly influenced by their own sphere. If God’s world had not acted on this earth too, there would not have been any difference between the earth sphere and a sphere in the world of darkness.
Pure spirits who remained in the divine worlds were incarnated at all times. To be sure, very few were incarnated at one time, but the influence of one such being outweighs by far the strength and influence of a hundred creatures of the world of darkness. The spirits who were incarnated from the world of God brought with them light, love, and wisdom. They fulfilled a great mission with their incarnation on earth, and their influence was much more far reaching than might have appeared at first sight. With this influence growing steadily through the ages, the fallen spirits during their incarnation on earth could freely choose what side to listen to: the side that reached their lower nature or the side that seemed to push them ever upward regardless of the difficulties encountered. By such free choice, God’s law concerning this aspect of life was not violated.
On the earth sphere you have the possibility with your free will to develop and to decide which side to follow. In your own nature, you can of course find both currents: the good current that once came from God in perfection and the evil current that was accumulated during and after the fall. Between these two currents the conscious self stands, able to decide either to take the line of least resistance, which is always man’s lower nature, or to follow his higher self, which is the difficult and narrow path. Salvation was not only accomplished on this earth sphere but in every sphere of existence.
People would produce and own several spheres, harmonious and disharmonious ones. Wherever there are faults, weaknesses and blindness, corresponding spheres come into existence. Wherever you are pure and purified, you create beautiful spheres. And you will not only own the best, but also the worst of that which you have built. Any relatively highly developed human being might thus inhabit a number of light spheres, but even these spheres were still under the dominion of Lucifer as long as the salvation work in this respect was not finished. By the way, what you call hell is not only one sphere of dire darkness and misery. As there are many gradations in the divine spheres, so there are similar gradations in the Luciferic ones.
In spirit everything is concrete, everything is form. On earth only material objects have form and the so-called abstract things do not have form, for they are invisible to you. This is not so in spirit. Love is a form. When you have a beautiful thought it will create one form. When you have a wicked thought, it will create another form, a concrete form.
Every living being has at all times guardian spirits from the world of God. But some people’s attitude may keep these spirits from coming too close. Nevertheless, they are there, even if only in the background, watching that nothing befalls their protege that is not according to God’s laws of justice or that the person may be too weak to endure. To be left alone without the support of God’s spirit world on this earth sphere, and in addition having to resist all attacks, challenges, hardships, and temptations that the powers of darkness could think of seemed indeed an impossible task to fulfill.
Human beings who are incarnated from the world of darkness first come with very low and coarse instincts. Only after many incarnations and worked off karmic debts will the attitude begin to change, slowly but surely. When the senses have begun to refine themselves a little bit, then the real work of self-finding and self-purification begins, and for this phase again, many incarnations, accompanied by changing conditions and circumstances, are necessary.
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