Bô Yin Râ
The Spirit's Radiant Substance

 

From The Book on the Living God, second edition, chapter 17 "On the Spirit's Radiant Substance," 2014. Translated from Das Buch vom Lebendigen Gott, second edition, published in German in 1927.

 

The Spirit of Eternity, which consciously exists in its own light, is not some nebulous mirage that only pious faith might fathom.

Eternal Spirit is not only quite as real” as is a tree, a stone, a mountain, or as a bolt of lightning that flashes from a cloud, but its reality is absolute within itself. It thus provides the justifying grounds for our mental concept of reality,” which has no true equivalent in the contingent realm of matter.

But given that not even objects of contingent, physical reality are altered in their nature by any thoughts about them held in human minds, how can one seriously presume that mental notions might affect events of absolute reality?

The mental image of a thing reflected in your thought will never even touch the smallest object in the world of matter in its real essence. Nor can the Spirit of Eternity be comprehended by anything you may call spirit” while you have not yet grasped its radiant substance in yourself.

Today, and at this moment, you well may think you sense the truth my words convey, but come tomorrow, you are likely once more spellbound by the spirit of the world.”

Today you may be willing to escape it, to seek the Spirit of Eternity, but I fear that by tomorrow you will again be blinded by the spirit” of the mind.

Today perhaps you feel that you have sensed a glimmer of the Spirit’s radiant light, but tomorrow you will likely be beset again by doubts and indecision, and thus give up the effort to pursue what you this day felt almost within reach.

That is what your kind has always done when someone spoke to you about the Spirit of Eternity, whose radiant light embraces all creation; someone who had leave to speak about that Spirit, because he lived in it awake and, therefore, could bear witness to its essence from personal experience.

Perhaps, however, there truly are a few among you determined to exert all energies, so that they may one day themselves experience the reality of which I speak in its ineffably majestic, uttermost simplicity.

To them I shall address myself, for they alone can profit from my words.