Blooming Roses

The key

Dusk flamed over the mountain slopes: shadow fields, gold-red and blue-dark. On the meadow hillsides beneath it lay the first glimmer of spring. Light yellow primroses and silvery wood anemones lifted their faces from the grasses trembling in the evening wind, and from the thorn-hedges at the edge of the meadows the scent of blooming mezereon blew. In bitter purity and bewitching sweetness, the mountain forest opened to the rising sun year.

Winfried, the doctor, returning from his sick rounds, walked up to his house at the hillside. He stopped at the fence, irresolutely. He cast a glance into his unattended garden, in which hyacinths and lilies wasted away between chickweed and dandelion; then he looked over the meadows and forest strips up to the mountain slope. A kind of restless longing fell on him.

‘To me, one day passes like another’, he thought. ‘I help with births, I write death certificates, I dress wounds and set broken bones and dislocations, I dedicate myself to curable and incurable illnesses, I help here and there as to my capacities. But what are we doctors actually capable of? We are glad not to make serious mistakes and must for the rest let things go the way they go, even when we may not gladly admit it. More and more I’m depressed by the notion that despite all knowledge of our science, we have become blind to the real causes, to the reasons for what happens that are beyond the mechanical and chemical surface.’

Half absent-mindedly, he shook at the locked garden gate and then searched in his pockets for the bunch of keys. He pulled it forth and weighed it thoughtfully in the hand. ‘If I would only find the other keys once as well, the keys more important to me. Locked gates everywhere if one wants more than the surface, that sensory tangible but deceptive blanket of life!’

Again he looked up the mountain slope. ‘One quarter of an hour in the forest, one quarter of an hour of freedom I will allow myself today, to look for the real keys.’

With long steps he climbed uphill. At one bend of the narrow steep track that climbed between the meadows upwards to the forest, he held back and looked down into the valley that already sank into shadowy darkness. Up here, where he stood in relief, the setting sun still lived. Then, all of a sudden, he felt like somebody’s gaze was resting on him. A pleasant drift of infinite kindliness, liberating and protecting at the same time, penetrated into his heart. He turned around. A blue-golden radiance filled his eyes, which had rested in the living shadows of the valley just a moment ago. Above him, a few steps off the track, a shape sat on a stone in the fading sun: a young girl in summery light-blue garment. The evening wind played with her hair that was gleaming like golden clouds, hanging low on her shoulders, and with the hem of her garment. During one long heartbeat, she looked into Winfried’s eyes with strange serenity; then she lowered her eyes. On her lap lay cowslips and gentians; in her hand she held some, arranged to a bouquet.

Winfried was completely confused. He felt his heart in his breast, hanging down like a heavy load and at the same time streaming into the wide like flooding light. Then, with a sudden shock, he realized that he had been looking at the girl for some time already - as long as an eternity, it seemed to him. Hesitantly, he turned around to continue his way. His look rested on her hand holding the bouquet. A narrow stream of blood seeped forth from between the fingers. ‘Are you injured?’ he asked. She looked up. ‘It is not very serious’, she said, ‘I was in a stone’s way that came rolling down from the mountain wall over there. Oh dear, it is bleeding again’. She put the bouquet beside her on the stone, and wanted to wind her handkerchief around her hand.

‘Please, let me take care of that’, he asked. As he looked at the injured hand, he shook his head. ‘This wound is not so harmless’, he said, ‘It penetrates down to the finger joints. Fortunately, you have held your hands over your head, as you heard the stone tumbling down, otherwise you would have been much worse. But this must be properly bandaged. It hurts a lot, I suppose?’ ‘At first it did’, she admitted, ‘but not so much now’. ‘You are very brave’, he nodded, ‘but please come with me. I am a doctor, my house is right there below; there I can do what is necessary for the wound.’

‘I live here on my own, and I suppose my receptionist and housekeeper has left already’, he said as he, beside her, unlocked the garden gate. ‘But you don’t need to... ‘. She smiled. ‘I know you better than you know yourself, and one day you will trust me as I trust you. Come.’

‘My name is Mary’, she said, after he had bandaged her hand and seemed to examine her face, as if to ask her for her name. He accompanied her outside until the garden gate. ‘Will I see you again?’, he asked, strangely anxious, and bowed over her right hand as a goodbye. She didn’t answer; in her eyes there was a mysterious radiance like from beyond Earth, a fluorescence like blue heaven over mountaintops. Around him, there was a rustling like streaming waters, a flaming like seas of fire as he heard her voice - not human any more, now: ‘Winfried, we have been one since immemorial times. I will come back to be yours forever’.

‘Now I have found the key’, Winfried said softly to himself, when he could think again. ‘The key to heaven, the golden key to the life, and all keys in one’. With his eyes he followed the shape that strode down there into the twilight like any human being, without looking back one single time.

He went back into his consulting room. A blue and golden radiance shone from a dish on the bandaging table: gentians and cowslips. She had left these for him without him noticing it, as a token of this moment, to which the blood drops beside the dish belonged as well. ‘Blood-red, velvet-blue and gold, the triad of the heart, the fundamental sound and basic center of Higher Life. As ‘YOU’ and at the same time as ‘I’, it lightens in me. How easy is it now to do the right thing, when I weigh all my feelings, thoughts and deeds against the radiance of this fundamental center, against the sound of this unspeakably pure and sublime rustle. I have found the key.’

Me and you

Winfried stood in his garden, in the early light of Easter Day. He had uprooted the weed in his little spare time during the last week. Now, he looked over the wretched remains of the full-blooming plants of former years. In the years of neglect, most flowers and shrubs had suffocated between sting nettles and wild-rampant, rapacious and parasitic weeds. ‘How could I become so blind for all the beauty of life, and have me ever deeper spun into dusty everyday life? Why have I internally wanted to live so isolated? Without people that are dear to me, without any sense for the glory of the living and ever renewing world, for sun and morning wind, for the maternal tenderness of meadows and forest, for the redemptive power of evening wind and starry nights! I should have opened my mind to it for at least some moments during the day or the night.’

A wave of the joy tore him from his thoughts. Mary stood at the open garden gate. He led her through the barren beds. ‘Look’, he said, ‘this is as far as I managed. But now, I wouldn’t know how to arrange it at its best again’.

‘You did the necessary thing; now leave the rest to me. In one year, you should tell me whether your changed garden, that is now hardly more than uprooted land and willing to bloom, fills you with joy. In me and through me, you shall find your earthly and eternal home at last.’

He held her hands in his. ‘Today is Easter Sunday’, he said after a while, ‘the day of the Resurrection. ‘

‘Yes. But don’t let it live by trivialities of rites and uses, let it live in your heart. And every day and every night of the year should in some way and at some time be Easter and Christmas to you: the rising of the Inner Light, the mystic rose of the heart, from winter cold, from solidification, from bitterness and selfishness, and from the grey dust of everyday life. The Infinite Love speaks through each human heart that wants to open up to her: ‘Every day is my day and every hour is my hour. To me, and to all who want to live with me, there are no Sundays and working days. Every day is a day of labour, every day a day of the sun, the Inner Sun, a day of swinging the heart up towards me.

Let the state regulate the change of days of outer work and outer breaks. This order belongs to the outer world. But celebrations of religious meaning should never again be forced upon society. My true friends don’t find such celebration days or ceremonies in any calendar. Some day, no human being knows when, they rise from the hearts. For the spirit blows, where and whenever it wants. But to society, Easter will be a feast of spring, and Christmas the feast of maternal love. Let the coming of May and the solstice, the joy of high summer and harvest give them reason to further parties in which everyone can take pleasure, to parties of the earthly world to which everyone will stamp his own mark.

Now come with me, since I want to tell you some more at the meadow hillsides up there.’

Up at the forest edge they held their step. ‘Look, Winfried, everything around is Morning Light, light of eternal youth. Take everything your outer senses show you as a parable completely into your heart. Also assimilate this spring day completely into yourself, and live it from now on every time and everywhere. Then, you will have grasped more of God’s nature than you ever could ferret out. Experience the voice, the soft breeze of your heart as your beloved You: as the You that at moments of inner union will ever again turn into your own Self. Then, you will have solved every question about the Self of the earthly human being.

The way towards ME leads through YOU, and you must start with it in your earthly environment. If you fail here, or in the area of your earthly work, your occupation, you will really fail on all higher levels. Be faithful in small things, in earthly everyday life, in your relationships to friendly and beloved people, and you will find the way towards the great, into the Infinite.

And now I speak to you completely as a human being, as your personal You, from within my restricted earthly cover, as a woman. All man and women who want to unite with me inwardly can in my name completely fulfill their beloved You in their own way just like me: I want to be yours forever. I want to be home and bliss to you, I want to be every fulfillment to you. I want to carry and lead you, as you should carry and lead me - each in his own field, as it is assigned to the man and the woman.

Now, don’t think much of outer forms. I don’t want a general feast. You and I will be alone in the silence of your house. Arrange two rings as the single outer signs of our being together, as a help to stay true in everyday life. Two narrow golden or silvery rings with an amethyst in them. It will be evening - to our hearts, it will be Christmas, the Sacred Evening of Christmas Eve. There will be one single candle burning on the table, and you may also put flowers to it. And your word and my word, my promise and your promise: everlasting love and loyalty. Nothing else. The state may then write our relationship into its books. The community is not entitled to more.

Let it now be morning and spring in you and around you, from the fullness of your heart, which knows no night, no summer weariness, no autumn decay, no rigidity of winter.’

Helping and healing

Winfried stood in his office with his wife. The office hour was just past, and today no more occupational work awaited him. Mary turned to him: ‘I know you are depressed and unsatisfied, and I also know why’. He was silently looking out of the window. Now, he turned to her, and pointed at his cupboard with drugs. ‘I call that the ‘Ut aliquid fiat’: the ‘may something happen’. If the sick persons don’t get their drops or pills or injections, they believe having come here for nothing. But from where this stupid faith in these remedies, which are in fact so seldom capable of helping truly? Every few years the medical science follows another fashion, and in each case the ruling one is supposed to be the only right and sanctifying.’

‘You would be able to heal quite differently, if people would not generally have the attitude of only trusting the evident, weighable and measurable, but mistrusting the imponderable, despising what is actually effective. No doctor, who lives and works from the heart, would meet any incurable illnesses, unrelievable pains or ailments of the physical or mental kind. People ask for the externally visible, the physically or chemically explicable that is therefore trustworthy to them. Almost all of them unconsciously ask for this, even if they seem to hold another attitude in their outer awareness. For the time being, the only thing that remains you is sticking to the prevailing rules of medical science, keeping your drug-cupboard filled-up, and keeping your surgical instruments sharp.

But in addition you should want to help from the heart, simply want to help and heal. The sick person who accepts this inwardly, who trusts you in his innermost heart, will be healed, even if a hundred professors would agree that his case is hopeless. There are no material bounds for God’s healing power, which everyone could let work from within his heart. There is only one limitation: the inner willingness of the sick person to let go his illness with its hidden pleasurable sensations, and to want to be healed - except when he carries this illness in favor of others. And the sick person can only summon this inner willingness if he fully trusts his doctor.’

‘When I succeeded with the cure of a sick person, I often had the strong impression, yes almost the conviction, that the cure was not to be attributed to the remedy I had applied, but that it originated from hidden sources. Maybe that carefully selecting the remedy merely strengthens the self-confidence of the doctor and the sick person’s trust in him, and promotes the actual cure through this strange detour. Therefore, as you said before, one must, according to the general attitude of people, also do justice to this possibility of healing help. But how do we, with such realizations that become clear to almost any doctor with some life experience, keep up some respect for our occupation, which is necessary if we should help at all? This is actually the reason I was depressed a moment ago.’

‘Only a healthy body can be a home to the soul. In your occupation, you are doing the greatest thing people can do for others. Helping and healing: rebuilding of a destroyed home, which is a parable of, and a bridge to the eternal home.

Spiritual developmental aid

One evening Ludolf, the teacher, sat in the living room of the doctor’s house. Until now, Winfried and Ludolf had been rather at a loss with each other. Now, both had carefully tried to probe each other’s soul. Mary sat beside them, seemingly not-involved. ‘Are you content with the change in your personnel?’, Ludolf turned at Winfried suddenly. He smiled: ‘My medical receptionist did her work quite unwillingly, and she was glad to find an occasion to resign. And my wife can do it incomparably better. Often, I am under the impression that she is actually the doctor and I am her helper.’

‘Your wife created herself a remarkably strong position down in the village. Ill and dying patients ask for her, and then everything becomes light for them. And in other fields as well: difficulties in education, in occupation, in marriage - people take it all to her. Don’t you become jealous sometimes?’

‘Her joys are my joys too’, Winfried said seriously, ‘and her loads are my loads. Anyway, at least in one point I have an advantage on her that she will never catch up with’. Mary smiled. Ludolf asked eagerly: ‘And that would be…?’ ‘I have a wonderful wife!’

‘I think it’s time’, Mary said, ‘that I give you some other thoughts. You, dear Ludolf, have been so unsatisfied until now, just like Winfried has been for that matter. In your occupation, you could - in all silence - achieve much more than you do now, and in spite of and because of that be more free and happy.’

‘Ah well’, Ludolf said, ‘with what enthusiasm I started at my occupation as a young man. But finally every uplift dies of disappointments. There are so few students who are worthwhile our efforts with them. And it dies of bitterness over some lack of respect in occupation and life, and in the treadmill of everyday life anyway.’

‘One should never be ambitious’, Mary said softly, ‘one should not inquire after people’s opinion too much - and one never should want to dominate or control. More than anything, this inevitably leads to disappointment and bitterness, and finally breaks one’s spirit. A teacher should be like a gardener who helps each flower and each tree to its free development into the sun of life, and only trims the malformation. Developmental aid for all young people who want to be helped, bringing them back to their Self, to their inner sun, through a relationship with the world of life, or with a friend, as preparation for sexual love and marriage.

With few words and through the own attitude to life, besides the work of the teacher, which alone the world considers important: besides the work for mental development, besides passing-on partly necessary, partly superfluous earthly knowledge. Everywhere sources flow that can keep you young and glad: from friendship and love, from the relationship with the entire life world: stars, plants and animals, from science, poetry and visual arts. You have books and radio, stars, forests and meadows. How does one nevertheless manage to become old and sullen, agitated or apathetic, embittered or cynical? Dear Ludolf, dear village-schoolteacher, like my husband, the country doctor, you have chosen a happy fate that will only leave the weak, ambitious or inert unsatisfied.’

‘I will take it to heart‘, said Ludolf, ‘and I mean it. However, I would have expected that you would speak more of religious things to me, in accordance with your attitude.’

Mary took his hands in hers. ‘Didn’t I constantly speak of it?’ she said seriously. ‘It is the fundamentals of higher life I asked you to heed. Whoever fails in earthly everyday life, in his occupation, and in relationships with his nearest friends and those who are entrusted to him, will absolutely fail on the higher levels of life. ‘Be trustworthy in little things’ and: ‘Work as long as it is daytime!’

The heart

Winfried and Mary sat in their garden, between blooming roses and jasmine. ‘You told me once’, he began after a while of the silence, ‘that I should feel my heart as the seat of my divine YOU, which turns into my own ME in moments of trance. Then, God Itself speaks Its ‘YOU ARE ME AND I AM YOU’. The contribution of the earthly human being to this infinite lucky fulfillment is a boundless trust in his divine You, which lives and works in his own heart. Through you, through my trust in you, I experience the truth of these words again and again. I used to think differently. To me, my head was the noblest and most important organ of my body. At that time, I looked for the keys to higher life in vain, of course, and I could not understand why, despite all, things remained dark in me and around me.’

‘Here the head, there the heart’ Mary said. ‘Almost all people still suffer from this conflict. I would like to give you an anatomical lecture, yes, in the middle of this blooming beauty. It will be quite different from what you expect.

To the scientist, who almost exclusively determines mankind’s appraisals today already, the head - or, more exactly: the brain - is the noblest organ, most of all worthy of observation and research. (Mouth and eyes are expressive organs of the heart; eyes and ears as receptive organs, just like the tactile sense, serve head and heart at the same time.

To him, the heart is nothing more than a hollow muscle, whose activity is controlled by the brain. This is right for the physical-bodily field. In the soul area, however, to which also the scientist owes his psychic life, after all - his ability to feel, to think, to speak, to act - the circumstances are opposite. The transcendent organ of the heart center - which has its seat in the physical heart and its vicinity, and whose physical expression therefore is the physical heart - surpasses in delicacy and variety endlessly far even the highest developed brain with its conscious soul area. But why is the physical correspondence of the heart center’s wonderful empire a simple hollow muscle - meaningfully built, it is true, but appearing rather poor compared to the brain?

If the physical heart were only approximately as precious in its physical design as the brain (even then, this would not be a full counterpart of the miraculous heart center), it would not be capable of serving the whole body - including the brain - for only five minutes long. For people push all that is unfavorable to their consciousness, all that is inimical to life, away from their brain area towards the heart. All thoughts and feelings they don’t want to have in their conscious area, because it disturbs their ease, their self-satisfaction, and their assertiveness, are driven into the heart area and thereby towards the transcendent levels, that is: towards God’s earthly part. After all, it is so simple to make others work for you, and by way of thanks charge them with all self-caused errors and misery.

The brain is nothing more than a converter and transformer, which passes a tiny excerpt from the infinite fullness of life on to the conscious thinking and experiencing. The brain or the mind (ratio, reason) is not entitled to the almost mystical worship that the folly of people dedicates to it. The heart bears the full load of physical and psychic life; it is also the source of the power to think and feel, the source of every joy and every bliss.

I give you another key to the higher areas of life: love your heart as your best friend, as your bearing mother and as your leading father, as the seat and voice of God Itself! This is the way the head, the conscious earthly Self of man, should be geared towards his own heart. You yourself are the head - in the earthly sense. You yourself could be the heart - on account of your unity with God. But this way towards the spiritual ME only leads through YOU, an earthly YOU that can turn into your spiritual YOU if you recognize it as an earthly parable of the infinite heart of God.

‘Lo, how a rose e’er blooming from tender stem hath sprung’: ever again and invincibly, the miraculous empire of the heart center, the flowering abundance of God, the roses of the king and the queen bloom in the middle of the frost of solidified and almost dead human hearts, in the middle of the winter night of their psychic life that has elected the brain as the leader and judge of the whole.’

Pure physical life

Winfried returned home with Mary from an evening walk through the autumn forest. Even now, he still was absorbed by the visions of the gold-red coatings of the beeches and oaks in the glorification of sunset, of the home-reminding shadows of the twilight, and the star-spangled sky above treetops and mountains - a parable of the eternal youth of the universe.

‘Mary’, he said softly, ‘only through you I am able to love everything alive again, and this love becomes ever more beautiful and deeper. Never before, the forest and the firmament were so unspeakably wide and auspicious. And you, the more I trust you, are becoming more and more light-blue morning sky and sun radiance and starry night in one.’

‘And yet, something still torments you, an earthly misunderstanding. You never wanted to tell me. But I know it beyond all words - just like everything else, of which I will speak to you later:

Why is earthly sex life not in all its aspects just as pure and incontestable as sunrise and the firmament? Why are the organs of generation and conception not just as beautiful as eye and mouth? They could be. The whole human body could shine with transfigured beauty, lucidly pure like a rose leaf. Mankind as a whole, however - in his subconscious nobody is free of it - has always feared the secrets of Life, particularly the field of developing new life. Their answer to this fear, to this lack of trust towards the Creator of the world was the indomitable inclination to debase the living things, to make them questionable and even ridiculous, in order to be able to thoughtlessly indulge and enjoy themselves, despite this fear.

In accordance with this attitude, the developed life world up to the human being largely re-shaped its physical-bodily appearance, particularly in the area of the excretory and genital organs. However, the divine Cosmic Guidance limited the effect of this will to debasing, to denigrating the material world. Already in the ether body that corresponds with the circulation of the living blood - that is: on the lowest transcendent level - the organs of the body shine without exception in untouchable purity. To the psychic experience, for which the ether body but not the material body is decisive, this should amply suffice to dissolve all thoughts about an inner unsightliness or impurity, particularly of the organs of generation and conception, as false.

Whoever wants to debase, denigrate, or depreciate, must limit his experiences, his thinking and acting to the outer, material world. He sees and recognizes nothing else any more. On the other hand, whoever approves of his body as a temple of his heart and the Eternal Light in him, will admittedly not deny the sensory delusion of the material, coarse-physical appearance. But he will recognize it as irrelevant compared to the lucidly pure inner life, which radiates towards the person of good will even from the outer physical appearance, as a notion of some untouchable beauty. He also keeps his material body clean, stout and pure. He recognizes everything else that is at present not within his power as irrelevant compared to the notion or certainty of higher Life in him, to which no distortion or degradation can get.

And one more thing: you, Winfried, have always lived it this way, from the insight of your heart. The sexual love with its physical experiences is only pure when the man in all the storm of the blood at the same time experiences the beloved woman as a harboring home, which gives itself away but does not want to be conquered in raw or lecherous greed. The woman - if she is a woman inwardly and has not become mannish-greedy and demanding - will approve only of such an attitude of the man and herself because of her inner nature, just as God blesses only this love. Whoever wants to be different, let him do as he pleases. He thereby moves away from the divine love. He can turn back anytime. Only a hypocrite is forever locked out of the inner area of Life, and lives, together with his material body, also his inner life to a definite end.

Harboring lap and home: when two lovers endorse this, then their love will grow from the lowest up to the highest level of Life, and the inner rose of their heart will not defoliate.’

Cowardice and mistrust

One evening, Winfried dejectedly returned home from visiting a sick person. ‘Mary, you said rightly: ‘Love your heart as your best friend’… This is a key to the Higher Life. And I have experienced more and more convincingly: heart, home, mystery, eternal spring, Inner Sun, and Eternal Light belong together. One must only find the courage to overcome the selfishness, the cold mistrust, and the addictive doubt about higher Life beyond the outer sensory experiences, and recognize the autocracy, the independence of the brain sphere as sham. Then, Life becomes ever wider, deeper and more radiant. And it turns into the inner certainty: in the centre of my chest, radiating a light inaccessible to anything low, lives and works my eternal YOU, you yourself, as infinity. You stand beside me as a human being, and live in me as the bearing and leading power of myself and the whole. All people could get a notion of this experience, if they would say to their lover: ‘You, my soul; you, my heart…’ Then, this You grows beyond human restrictions, and You yourself light up in them.

But I am depressed for another reason. I just visited a sick person with a badly damaged heart muscle. How shall I heal this sick person of her seemingly well-founded mistrust against her best friend, her heart?’

‘I never said ‘Love your heart muscle as your best friend’, did I? The physical heart is only the tool of the Big Friend, with whom He works in the body as long and as far as the person himself makes it possible. Through her fear, her agitation and sickly mistrust towards the sources of Life, this sick person constantly damages the physical basis of her earthly life, which she on the other hand estimates so high that she lives in continuous fear of it.

Very many people ceaselessly shock and undermine the bearing pillars of their earthly house. But then they are surprised and accuse God and the world, if the construction reels and is in danger of collapsing. It is not the sick heart, the sick heart muscle or even the transcendent heart center that creates the fear poison in order to ruin itself - every fear comes from the mental sphere - but it is the person himself who saddles his heart with the faulty attitudes and poisonous swaths of his conscious thinking and feeling. No wound heals if it is constantly opened and polluted again. Be it the heart muscle or the heart valves, the nerve fibers or something else that is damaged: all this will be restored exactly to the extent that the person will trust the Great YOU in his heart center. For God doesn’t urge upon man. God only works if the person agrees to it!’

Winfried pondered: ‘I perceive this ever more clearly. Very many people say to their doctor or to God in their inner life: heal me, but leave me all my bad habits. Let me go on thinking and feeling poison, devastating my soul and body through my way of life in thinking, feeling and acting, because I gain great pleasure from it. I only don’t want to be sick. As if a person would say: I want to murder, but my victim should nevertheless be able to enjoy his earthly life. Or: I want to tear down my house piece by piece, and nevertheless remain in this home, safe from storm and rain.’

‘Yes, it is literally so. Many would say: ‘The stupidity of people cannot be eradicated’, or: ‘Even the gods themselves fight stupidity in vain’. But the gods, God’s partial powers, don’t fight stupidity. If they did, it would be in vain, of course. For stupidity is not an enemy, it is only a mask, behind which the actual enemy hides: cowardice: deliberately not-wanting-to-see a truth. Every being was given sufficient insight to do the right thing on its own spot. If it chooses the wrong spot or on its proper spot does the improper thing, it should not hold its stupidity responsible but its cowardice, its deliberate being blind and deaf regarding the truth.

Again and again, it is shown to every being without exception in the outer world and also on the transcendent levels, what effect a starting point that it planned will have in the future. Only few will have themselves warned of faulty plans. Most of them say: ‘We understand it better than you, we won’t have you warn us’ - Or: ‘Why now, should this be wrong? We don’t believe you!’ And then, when their undertaking has failed, many dare to make the audacious reproach: ‘Lord, this is not what we wanted. All right, we wanted to tear the house down, but it was our will that it should nevertheless remain whole and intact. You should have warned us!’

This has repeated itself since the very outset of the world until today, in ever new forms. The inner attitude of a blinded person is always: both things together. Do the one thing, and do not refrain from the other. Sow hate, and harvest love. Drink poison, and remain healthy. Make oneself old, and yet remain young. Lie to and deceive oneself, and still live in truth. Degrade and dishonor life, and nevertheless remain friends with God. Torment God, Life, in Its earthly part to death, and nevertheless rise to the heights of divine life.

Continuous mistrust, never-ending reproaches, and nevertheless always new demands for advice and help in the smallest and biggest matters. Audacious pedantry, scorn, alternating with whimpering cowardice and parasitic clinging: this typifies the inner attitude of very many people. It is in this life atmosphere that God lives in the world and has the opportunity to prove Its Infinite Love each second. Because people only want to see imperative proof, and for this purpose constantly counter God’s love with their highest will - against which the power of the Infinite Love should prove itself as the force to be good, that is: ruling the will of others - God’s Infinite Love cannot have any effect in the world. For God doesn’t want to force anybody, God doesn’t want to make anybody unfree. Whoever wants to be bad may and should be so. The world will follow him as long as he seems strong. But when he becomes weak, because he trespasses against eternal life, the world will throw itself on him - after all, he only owns his earthly part, nothing psychic or even spiritual any more - and destroys him for ever.

It is through their attitude towards their own heart, in which The Life, or God Itself lives and suffers almost everywhere (it is imaginable that God also could be happy in them) that people decide. Shall the brain be an executing organ, or the leader and judge of the whole? Whoever lets his belief and faith in the divine truth depend on ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of his brain - his ‘intellect’, erroneously called ‘reason’ - will sink together with this brain. For at the threshold of Death, the brain, as man’s leader in earthly life, loses its ability to count, measure and weigh. Then it is too late to look for a better leader. To the idolaters of the brain, earthly death is not the golden bridge to the higher spheres of Life. To them, it is the abyss of total dissolution, the abyss of the nothingness they served in their earthly life.’

You

Twilight was coming down. It was Christmas Eve. Winfried sat at the window of his study. Before him stood a basket with white, red and violet-colored hyacinths, golden daffodils and apple-bloom-colored tulips, rising from the earth and moss into the mild twilight - a radiance of spring in the incipient winter night. In the garden outdoors, the snow weighed heavily on shrubs and trees. Winfried’s gaze went over the hidden life in the garden, and then it lowered again towards the flowers.

‘Everywhere the World Soul shines to greet me’, he pondered, ‘from all that is delicate and pure and somehow defenseless. Therefore, the real, true woman is probably the crown of Creation. However much I may enjoy now all outer appearance of life - the colors and shapes, the scent of flowers, the shine of earthly light, the waves, wind and thunderstorms, winter’s night and summer’s bliss - I am nevertheless double glad to know that the actual beauty, the really great, immortal things live only beyond the outer shapes; unapproachable, unattainable to humiliation and destruction. Eternity in time, the everlasting in the middle of the transient: only the soul who experiences and knows this, has found her eternal home.’

Mary came to him, as if inwardly called by him. He looked up to her. ‘Today, in this Holy Night, I must tell you again how much my life has changed through you. It was a basket with earth, a heavy load and yet poor in sense, empty. Now, a blooming fullness stands on it. You, my beloved wife and mother, you silent, sacred night, and you morning sky, you spring breeze. And, in all silence, the highest royal leading power. YOU!

If people would only comprehend what a heaven’s ladder this word ‘YOU’ could be! And even the most lonesome person on Earth could find it in his heart. For YOU refuse nobody. Together with your children and for them, in their place, you go through all hells; and, if they only wanted, you would carry them into all heavens. You mystery of the heart, to which nothing earthly is unfamiliar, to which no load is too heavy, no way too far, no time too long. You, heart of all living things, which reaches infinitely far beyond every human, all earthly restriction; who lives in the man, in the woman, in children, in animals, trees and flowers, in wave and wind and cloud, in dew and rain and in the stars, as the Soul of the infinite world.

Silent night, Holy Night - sacred notion of the Infinite turning into witnessing the immeasurable wideness, the infinite waves of an otherworldly morning light. All people and beings live in the midst of the roaring, the softly radiant fire flood of the Infinite Love, Mary’s heart. They see and hear nothing of it, of its otherworldly glory, because the strings of their souls are attuned too low. They only swing in the dust storms of the earthly world, they are afraid of the unfathomable mystery of the clearly singing and shining heavenly streams. They are afraid of the stormy longing that would let them fly out and rejoice in the otherworldly light, right out of the middle of earthly everyday life.’

Truth

Together with Mary, Winfried stood at the foot of the cliff above the wooded slope, and looked down into the valley. ‘Whoever recognizes the Living, the actual Truth behind the often deceptive appearance of the earthly world’, he said, ‘can never lapse into irritation or bitterness, into hate, fury or vindictiveness any more. All that becomes unreal to him, as it belongs to the miserable surface. But why is it that almost nobody gains this look into the depths of life, the conscious witnessing of the inner life sphere, of the ether world, any more? And of the thoughts and feelings of all beings, of the psychic and astral world, - or even of the spiritual world with its incomprehensible magnificence that is still shape-like but already extending towards the Eternal Fire? Even the lowest level beyond the material external world, the world of inner life, is an inexhaustible, ever new and greater miracle.’

‘You ask why?’ Mary said. ‘You have already answered the question. Because hatred, fury, revengefulness, ambition, lust for power, possessiveness, delight in pestering, deceit, and lie would become unreal then. All these swaths of hell, from the most primitive selfishness to diabolically calculating cruelty, would blow away and dissolve in the immeasurable joy of witnessing the inner miracles of Life, of all levels up to the highest. Whoever is capable of true second sight, second hearing, and second feeling, faces the Truth that is infinite beauty and infinite love at the same time. Anything untrue in him he has knocked together en holds about the inner nature of Creation, about the inner nature of soul, spirit and God, through his external sensory experiences and above all through his mind, would have to burn away in the face of Truth like a bundle of straw that falls into the white heat of a furnace.

Whoever could hinder man to see all, the whole truth, if it isn’t he himself? Why does he let himself be controlled by the wretched fear of losing the pleasure of his shallow amusements, of his plays of thought, of his small wickedness, lies and self-deception, if he wanted to see the truth, and thereby would win immeasurably greater things? Is it undeserved lack of insight, spiritual incapability, or stupidity? No. It is self-chosen lack of courage, laziness, sluggishness, and cowardice that lock him out from the infinity of Life, from surpassing beyond space and time, beyond the appearance of Maya, beyond death and transience.

No self-deception, no trick, no psychic powers lead to real clairvoyance, to witnessing the higher levels of the world. People would only have to alter their inner attitude towards the truth, then the gate into the immeasurable universe will open up without further effort. I have given them the key to it in their hands long ago: I want the truth, no matter how it may be! I want to see it without preconceived opinions, without wishing or expecting that the truth must correspond with my hitherto existing attitude, because otherwise I would not acknowledge it as the truth. I want to see the truth without the blinders of my previous denomination or philosophy, and without taking into account the worn out tracks of my hitherto accustomed way of thinking and feeling, of which I would have to admit honestly that I have internally outgrown them long ago. Until now, however, I have remained loyal to my denomination, my philosophy, my habitual thinking - out of ‘piety’, ‘love for the tradition’, and ‘respect for a great past’. If I would be honest, I would of course have to say: out of sluggish thinking, out of fear of people, out of the cowardice of not wanting to learn anything, of not being able to think otherwise any more, out of the unsuitable principle: whatever was valid a thousand or two thousand years or even some decades or years ago, must be valid today as well. What I learned in my youth, may not be knocked over at any price. I want to cling to what until now none too suitable was my rule of life, my life support, and by no means exchange it for something better.

People should be loyal to the Truth, not to its worn-out covers that - ever poorer in content - are offered to or forced upon the world as truth.

Habit, sluggish thinking, and cowardice: this three-star illuminates the way into the abyss. There are people who rather live in declining ruins than in decent houses, simply because they are accustomed to these ruins. There are animals that - after just having been freed - walk back into their burning stable and burn in it. For they have been accustomed to this stable for ages and cannot imagine another shelter.

In their inner life, whose expressions are religion or philosophy, by far the biggest part of people and beings act in exactly the same way. It is their principle to accept as little as possible from God. They don’t want to have anything given to them. Their arrogance, their vanity does not tolerate it. Earning these gifts of Higher Life for themselves is in some way only too hopeless with their inner attitude. So, they cling to all that is rejected by the leadership of the divine world because this is only worn out cover without content, without any real life value any more. And they don’t at any price want to have anything people cling to be taken from them, even if it were no more than a straw.

God offers life in boundless fullness, from earthly life values up to the highest spiritual forms. The very most people and beings choose nothingness, emptiness, the abandonment from God, that what has inwardly become lifeless, that what has become solidified, depraved, degenerated, the inner ageing, the lightless night - instead of eternal youth, eternal morning light…’

Management and possession

Mary went through their garden. Again, the first breeze of spring called the trees, shrubs and ground plants out of their winter rigidity. Then, Ludolf the teacher passed by. She invited him in. ‘For quite a long time, I have been carrying around a question in me’, he said. ‘A question that has stuck to me after my, I must admit it, superficial reading of the gospels. What is Mammon?’

‘Mammon is anything that means power and control in the eyes of the world. Money, any kind of earthly property, knowledge and proficiency, an official position, the position in an earthly or otherworldly spiritual hierarchy, managerial positions, any kind of power positions - any of these may become a ‘Mammon’, an idol of the lust for power. It is never the things or realities as such. They can be applied well or badly. Only clinging to them, elevating them to decisive life value, to which everything else - conscience, honesty, goodheartedness, and love - must subordinate, makes them the Mammon, the diabolical opponent of Life.

Whoever wants to be honest and would not like to waste his strength pointlessly should not fight money or gold, property or power as such. He should fight the wrong use, the misuse of earthly or earthly-spiritual goods. Poverty as such is not an advantage, not a support of spiritual life. But poverty of spirit is - it is the inner disengagement of all property, no longer clinging to earthly or earthly-spiritual goods, the inner freedom of being able to let go everything if the inner leadership demands it.

Managing, not possessing in the sense of unlimited power of disposal, responsible to nobody. What is managed can be loved, for one remains free internally, and only an inwardly free person is capable of loving. If someone thinks he possesses, he violates, for he doesn’t respect the inner laws of the life. Otherwise, he could not possibly want to ‘possess’. He doesn’t do justice to anything or anybody, neither to things nor to people, nor even to God. In the long run, the world mercilessly takes revenge at everyone who thinks to possess something, be it his body, be it entrusted people or goods. For by his possessive thinking he turns inevitably into an enemy of the world, an enemy of earthly life, an owner, a profiteer, a parasite.

In fact, you cannot possess anything. Life, the continuous experience of life, says no to that. The mania to consider something as your unrestricted property, being able to dispose of it after your own discretion, makes you supremely unhappy and weak to life in the long run. But it brings every disaster down on you. You cannot ‘possess’ any man, any woman, any child, any animal, any thing, any earthly or earthly-spiritual value. This possessive mania leads to the mania of security and power, to the source of all earthly and spiritual devastations.

Manage your earthly body without clinging to it, manage the life of people entrusted to you without violating them. Manage your apartment, your house, your yard, your garden, and your fields, manage millions and billions of earthly values. God says yes to that, if you employ the values entrusted to you for the good of all.

From your heart, all life possibilities flow towards you in overabundant fullness, everything that can make you happy in the earthly, psychic and spiritual fields. In order to realize these possibilities, be it in the outer earthly, in the psychic or in the spiritual world, you only need to trust unconditionally the wisdom and love of the divine world management, which sees and guides even the smallest thing. This trust is an inner attitude, not a test of God: ‘I will trust you, if this trust immediately and evidently proves to be as useful as I (‘in my folly and limitation’, such a person should add) expect it to be. That is no trust. That is a big ‘NO’ beforehand to God and to all possibilities of a greater life, be it earthly or spiritual.

If you wish property or power or both, or psychic and spiritual gifts the way you imagine them at this very moment: do you know whether managing them would make you happy, whether you could handle them already now? Are you - now or at all - capable of managing them meaningfully already, so that they become a blessing and not a curse to you and others? If you, however, would like to possess them, they would with deadly security turn into a doom for you. Whoever in his innermost self, in spite of all warnings, wants property or power as dominion, and sticks to that with untouchable stubbornness, gets this will invariably fulfilled. Of course, he would have to accuse himself because of the later consequences. Whoever wants to be sick and miserable, may do so. Whoever wants to destroy himself, may do so. Such a person or being considers the inner enmity towards God, towards Life, worth more - for in this way he can torment God in Its earthly part.

Whoever wants to help God in Its earthly work and through that all people and beings, should do one thing in the first place: let he dare to be happy. Let he create peace with his conscience. He should not want to do more than is presently and in his life field possible to him without restlessness, without rushing. For such restlessness, the motive is disguised ambition or wrong application of his strength. Let he first do justice to the demands of his environment, his occupation and earthly everyday life. Let he create joy for himself, even in the smallest things. He should give up the disastrous inclination to self-torture, to self-mockery, to disparagement of his body and his soul. With that, he strikes his heart, his life center, and thereby God in Its earthly part. To him as an earthly person, this ‘self-torture’, this self-mockery and disparagement are lust; otherwise he would not do it, even if he indulges in the illusion that he suffers misery. God bears this torment. But by doing so, the person destroys himself and, if he sticks to it, invariably finds his earthly and eternal fall.

Let man only take care of the day itself and plan no more than the really necessary things that must be thought of today and prepared for later. Let he not dig himself into grief and worry. Let he dare to assent to life and not deny it any more. If he has thus made a start - without this, he accepts nothing internally - more and ever greater things will be given to him. And at the right time his garden, the garden of his soul, will be full of flowers.’

Yes

The world was a colorful feast of golden green, sun-shone stony gray and light blue, from the valley over the hillsides, up to the slopes and towards heaven. ‘Whit Sunday morning’, Winfried said. ‘Descent of the Holy Spirit. But…’ Mary nodded to him. They stood in front of their home in the morning coolness, in the first sunshine of a flawless May day.

‘Yes, but!’ Mary said. ‘Would you know any feast among people that would be living reality, not a mere ‘remembrance of....’? Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, Annunciation Day and all other red calendar days: recollections of light gifts that have been more or less misunderstood or distorted by the recipients in their time already. Anytime and anywhere, the Holy Spirit of Truth and Life, the spirit of the Infinite Love, the outflow of God Itself is waiting for faithful, trusting souls who want to absorb It. From the innermost human heart, this fire of the Holy Spirit burns day and night, in order to give itself to their heads, as a descent of the Holy Spirit from his heart area into the earthly world. It can become reality any moment, as soon as the person gives his inner ‘yes’ to it.

A key, a heavenly key to this event: open your eyes and your souls to something pure and beautiful, to the smile of a child, a man or a woman, to the tender secret of a flower calyx or to the enraptured fullness of light of a sunrise or sunset. That is a start. Do not expect something special, do not demand, don’t be impatient, just be prepared. You cannot enforce this inner ‘yes’. It wants to be achieved through a gradual, step-by-step alteration of the inner attitude. And this is only your responsibility. You have at your disposal - from the transcendent levels, even if you don’t yet want to perceive it - every possible support, incessantly, every moment of your life. And since this doesn’t suffice you: it would be thinkable that you would take at least some of my words seriously, that meet you in hearing or sight in the earthly external world, and act after them.’

Freedom and dominion

One morning up in the forest, Mary met the forester. He was returning home from one of his territory rounds. ‘May I keep you company for a while?’ he asked. ‘I have been wanting to speak with you for a long time already.’

‘You reflect on life a lot’, said Mary, ‘and yet you don’t manage to get the essence.’

‘Is there a God at all? To me, the ‘dear Lord God’ of my childhood has since long been shattered. If one looks into Nature and especially into the human world, one must despair of a just and benign power above us.’

‘You say rightly: ‘Especially in the human world’. The riper the beings become, the more they withdraw from a just and benign guidance of their life. (Already the lower levels of nature do it now and then.)’

‘Yes, is God - if there is one - not capable of doing something about this gruesome hustle and bustle on Earth, or does He not want to do something? Is God powerless, or is He a devil?’

‘Just as meaningfully you could ask: Am I, the forester, not capable of preventing the falcon from seizing the singing bird, or do I not want to?

You could prevent it for your area, if you wiped out the falcons. Would you want to do that? The soul that lives in the falcon chose her life that way. She would never alter it voluntarily. Would you want to force this soul by exterminating her corporality?’

‘I admit that somehow I cannot bear the idea.’

‘God is the secret of freedom. God is the heart, the source of life, which gives away its power to the earthly area. The power it gives away can be used according to the will of the beings. It is from the powers of the earth, the water, the air and the sun that apples and belladonnas grow. Where does the poison come from? Is it the earth, the water, the air, or the sun that forces it upon the belladonna? Why, then, doesn’t the apple tree generate the same poisonous juices? Everyone can mould and use the powers that are given to him the way he wants it.’

‘Then God would be beyond good and evil - just power, a neutral power that can bring blessing or curse?’

‘God is infinitely good: Infinite Love that gives Itself away to all individuals, without demanding wages and thanks, without forcing Its own nature upon Its children. Should it not be self-evident to all Its children, to answer to this unlimited love with at least restricted love, with gratitude and trust?’

‘But if this Infinite Love is abused so much, as happens continually and everywhere, why doesn’t the God of Earth and man simply impose a law that prevents the abuse?’

‘Now please be quite honest: would you in every respect invariably follow God’s law, in your home and in your life, or would you rather be in control yourself, even if you don’t admit it frankly?’

‘It is difficult to admit it frankly, yes. But if I can choose, I’d rather be the one in charge and organize my life just to my liking.’

‘In fact, you have been able to choose so, because once you were completely free. God didn’t force upon you any limitation you didn’t want. You yourself did choose so, and all spirits did just like you, as far as they wanted to remain individuals. Not one of them wanted something else in his most inner being than: being in charge. Not one of them summoned so much trust that it could recognize the truth: whoever lets himself be led by God until his spiritual completion as Its child, in unconditional trust, achieves total freedom and independence in God - in the Infinite Freedom of Its being that would carry him, like the air carries the eagle in boundless freedom to all directions of space.

All individuals said: ‘No, not being born, that is too uncertain to us; You might drop us once. We want to stand on solid grounds. Create a firm ground for us that is therefore distant to your being. That is what we want to trust. We want to be able to imagine that this ground doesn’t bear us but that it is trodden by us. So, we keep the upper hand over You, the fundamental ground of life, be it only over the most distant covers of Your actual being.’

This is why all of the beings in their inner psychic and spiritual life cannot fly; they are not really free, they stick to the earth, to the earthly matters. They tread and trample, and are trodden and trampled upon. Because no ‘master’ wants to be considerate of others in his inner decisions that finally determine also his outer life as his fate. He wants to be unlimitedly master, and so one tramples upon the other.

In the outer awareness, this inner attitude is often masked, repressed from sight by thoughts of caution and self-esteem. All the more dangerously it works out - unverifiable by the outer awareness, which alone suffers from its self-created fate - in the subconscious, to which man leaves all important earthly and spiritual decisions because of his lack of decisiveness. The subconscious as such, which because of the daily awareness’s inclination to repress stands in hostile contrast to it instead of in complementary unity with it, falls prey to mass thinking and feeling. It is only in unity with the daily awareness that it could act personally, self-responsibly. According to the essence of the masses, which always lust after destruction, man decides in the earthly and in the spiritual field against life. In his subconscious areas, however, man enjoys his self-created ‘fate’ as lust, though in his daily awareness he experiences it as sorrow.

As long as people, and especially mankind’s spiritual leaders, don’t find the courage to make their earthly and spiritual decisions full-consciously and self-responsibly, things on Earth will never change. For in spite of the lust for power that is so rigidly attached to the inner being of people, many decisions would work out differently, if they were made with at least full daily awareness. People would not be able any more to cut themselves off from the outer consequences of their decisions like until now - and hold God, Who continually advises and warns them, responsible for their self-caused misfortune.’

‘How is it possible that people, when they feel their fate as pain and sorrow in their daily awareness, enjoy it as lust in their subconscious?’

‘Because they have fallen prey to the feeling of the masses, of ‘the ‘world’, of ‘the people’ in their own subconscious - exactly because of its hostile separation of their daily awareness - they enjoy the world’s lust and malicious pleasure in their own destruction as if it were their own. The malicious pleasure of the world jumps over on them. After all, they cannot separate their own feelings from those of the masses. Slavishly dependent on them as they are, their feelings must run parallel to the masses, even if they themselves become damaged or destroyed on that occasion.’

‘A moment ago you said: “Actually, you were free once”. Aren’t we free any more?’

‘Why do you ask? Do you experience yourself as free? Does not each individual and each people feel himself and itself driven by dark powers, by ‘forces of fate’, which they only too often cannot master? Are people in control of their lives, of their death, like they wanted to be? Being slaves of their own lust for mastery, they are slaves of all they wanted to control: slaves of their own body, slaves of the masses, of the impersonal ‘one’ (‘one shouldn’t think, feel, or act this way, one must...’). They are slaves of their ‘conscience’, which they falsified into an intimidating, life-adverse force and therefore incessantly seek to ridicule secretly, in order to escape its ‘pressure’. They are slaves of their science, their technology, which they created and develop ever further in order to master life. However, instead of blocking the access to higher life fields for mankind, they also could within the proper bounds further the life of community and individual.

Is man still free? Does he want to be free at all? Then, he should not want to dominate or control any more. He should not approach freedom - just like all spiritual matters - with the intellect, and prove or refute its possibility. For the mind inevitably looks for imperative proof, it seeks to enforce. This is allowable in the neutral material world, and in its accompanying science and technology. But if it ventures to approach the spiritual, in order to get ‘hold’ of it, according to its nature, to make it understandable and compelling for all, then it thereby breaks to pieces. And the human being, who entrusted himself to the mind as his leader, breaks to pieces together with it. Could man be free? YES. Is he free? NO. Does he want to be free? Here, the spirits diverge!’

‘And where will this end?’

‘People of good will - all who have retained the courage to make earthly and mental decisions in their daily awareness; all who want to give up wrong bonds and habits - will open themselves in their daily awareness to the truth. They will have themselves led by it and will give up their lust for power.

People of evil will (their ‘will’ is nothing more than the lust for enjoying themselves) - all who just let themselves be driven and postpone and suppress the necessary earthly and spiritual decisions again and again (although they should necessarily recognize that their former way of life asks for an alteration in the earthly or spiritual field) - will be lost for ever earthly and spiritually. Before they go on - relying on their earthly power, their earthly prestige, their seemingly solid position - deriding the truth internally (in the outer world, they are to cowardly for that), before they finally decide not to decide for or against God and let themselves drift, they may think of the word: God’s mills grind slowly, but they grind terribly fine!’

Mary

One summer evening, Winfried sat at the forest edge above the meadows, which the evening wind caressed in quiet waves, and looked down on his house where he knew Mary to be.

‘My beloved woman’, he thought. ‘In my deepest core I always call her ‘our dear Lady’, ‘Madonna’. It doesn’t confuse me any more that she is with me completely as a human being. After all, she says, too: any woman could be that. ‘It only becomes an abyss of immensity, in which I am most happily lost, if I let go her outer human shape and draw near her inner nature. Then, I sink into a roaring, immense breeze, into an inexpressible, infinite radiance. Mary: it is the infinitely streaming flood, the sea of eternal development and being. I can say ‘our dear Lady’ if this infinite faces me as a woman. But ‘mother of God’ remains foreign to me.’

The sun had set. The evening sky stood in light blue green over him. Then, suddenly, it lit up before his eyes like a lightning that wrapped valley and mountain into an infinite weaving of flames. It stood before him like a human shape, and yet it was infinity. A name burst out in his heart: Mary!

Then her voice reached him, quite distant and quite near at the same time: ‘You still see me as a shape, because otherwise you would not be able to recognize me. But you don’t see me as man and not as woman. For I am ‘It’. In my earthly shape, I have to be man or woman, just like those people, as one of them. For otherwise they would not want to tolerate me among them. Where I can act in secret, like here, my earthly shape is the woman’s shape. For a woman’s maternal shape is the more perfect form of expression of the Infinite Love. As the Eternal You of people I am in each and every man or woman. For no human being is capable of understanding me as an IT, and love me. Now come down, and talk further with me in my human shape.’

He met her in the living room. She expected him. In deep astonishment, he looked at her. ‘Now you should speak with my human shape, she said. Otherwise, the world cannot understand me, and I am here for all. What you experience and understand, radiates to all.’

She smiled. ‘I know what you would like to ask. I live on all levels exactly as consciously as I now speak to you. For my consciousness, I don’t need any human shape. I only need it because people would not accept another appearance - even in order to enable them to separate from me.

I am ‘Our dear Lady’, ‘Madonna’, or ‘Queen of Heaven’ as the World Soul, as the all-bearing home. You should not say ‘Mother of God’ any more. I am father and mother of all beings.

There have always been people, especially women, who have wanted to be an embodiment of myself on Earth, wanting to serve the whole this way. Their will has always been fulfilled. Not one of them fulfilled my will to serve all, not even the mother of my earthly shape as the Christ. Only her inner attitude towards the events of the outer world was loyal.

You also shouldn’t speak about me as ‘Lord’ or ‘Our Blessed Lord’ any more. Never have I, your eternal YOU, wanted to be anything else than your friend, your father, your mother, your lover, your leading and helping hand, bearing lap, heart and home’.

Michael

‘Many things from the Old Testament still cause confusion’, Winfried said to Mary one morning. ‘The Fall of man as reason for the misery in the world; the expulsion from the paradise; the cursing of mankind and with it of the whole creation of God; the strange, pitiful behavior of Adam, the progenitor of mankind, who after the Fall immediately sought to blame Eva (‘the woman has seduced me’). Furthermore the blasphemous story that God planted a tree with luring fruits for man in the middle of the paradise, and at the same time forbid them to eat these fruits under penalty of death.

Now I know: God doesn’t impose any tests, God leads nobody into temptation - in the Our Father it says: ‘Lead us in the temptation (by the world)’ - and above all: God doesn’t punish.

The shape and the name of Eva, ‘Mother of the living’, possesses something shining, a truth in itself. The shape and the name of Adam, I never could become friends with.’

‘Adam’s behavior - his mastership and pitiful breakdown - stands for the behavior of Lucifer, his co-offenders and all of their henchmen until today: greed for life and knowledge, for God-like dignity and power - and the pitiful breakdown when they face the consequences of their crimes against ‘Life’: pass the blame to the ‘Mother of the living’, to the World Soul, to myself. Eva is another name form for Mary.

In the middle of these misinterpreted visions stands the word of truth: ‘The woman - the World Soul, the bearing and enduring Love - will tread on the snake’s head’. The head of the luciferic powers, their mind that they turn as a weapon against Truth and Love, against the World Soul, will shatter under her lightward-stepping feet.

Man has always expelled himself from the paradises, from the higher levels of life. And always has man himself cursed his residence, Earth, and the work at the earthly level. It’s true, before Paradise, before the higher levels of life stands the ‘archangel with the flaming sword’: Michael, God’s fighting power as a partial power of the Infinite Love. However, he doesn’t stand here as an enemy, he stands here as a warner, as the guardian of the threshold.

Whoever does not want to live in the truth, should stay far away from these areas. He shouldn’t lust after the gold of the divine light. In his thinking and aspirations, he should remain on the earthly world - the only level on which even the apostate still can live and breathe. Whoever wants to lie, deceive, pretend, sponge, and be a coward, and nevertheless would like to creep into these areas, will shatter at the truth that inevitably reveals his nature; at the flaming sword, at the scorching otherworldly light of the Death Angel: diverging of the spirits.

Michael is the World Soul herself, God Itself as fighting shape, as the power of transformation, as the guardian of the threshold, as the bearing, enduring and fighting Love through all areas of Life upward. For in no other way than by fighting and enduring, the Infinite Love could carry the beings forth until their completion in the shaping Eternal Light or in spiritual death. It has always been - and still is - a fight for the self-chosen goal of all beings. God is no enemy of any being. Whoever wants to shatter, shatters at me. Whoever despite all warnings wants to become lost, becomes lost in me. Whoever wants the eternal life, will find my heart, be his blindness, his blame gigantic. The light seeks - and finds the light, the Primordial Light, its home!’

Winter rose

Lo, how a rose e’er blooming

from tender stem hath sprung!

Of Jesse’s lineage coming,

as men of old have sung.

It came, a floweret bright,

amid the cold of winter

when half spent was the night.