57. THE FIRST DAY OF CREATION
JESUS: ‘Is it not written: In the beginning God created the
Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form,
and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And
the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
[2] And God said, let there be light: and there was light. And God
saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the
darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He
called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
[3] See, these are Moses’ words. If you were to take these in their
natural sense you should have to at once see their ultimate
absurdity.
[4] What of a truth is the Heaven and Earth of which Moses says
all was created in the beginning? In man, Heaven is the spiritual
and Earth the natural. This still is void and without form – as in
your case. The waters are your deficient knowledge of all things,
above which the Spirit of God moves indeed, but not yet within
them.
[5] Since God at all times however sees the terrible darkness in
your material world-depth, God says to you, as manifestly even
now: “Let there be light.”
[6] It begins thereupon to dawn within your natures, and God
indeed sees how good is the light upon your darkness, but it is
yourselves who do not want to recognize it. For this reason
therefore a division takes place within you, day and night verily are
separated, and through the day within, you then recognize the
former night of your hearts.
[7] With man, his initial natural being is late evening and therefore
night. Since God gives him light however, such light is to him a
veritable sunrise, and out of man’s evening and sunrise verily come
man’s first day of life.
[8] Therefore see, if Moses, who most certainly had been an
initiate into all Egyptian science had intended in his scripture to
indicate the coming into being of the first terrestrial day, then he
would, with all his science and wisdom have noted that no day
could ever emerge from evening and morning. Night proper surely
always follows evening, and day comes only after the morning.
[9] What therefore lies between evening and morning is night.
Only what lies between morning and evening is day.
[10] Had Moses said: “…and therefore out of morning and
evening emerged the first day”, then you would have been entitled
to take this in its natural sense, but for good reasons of
correspondences he said exactly the reverse, and this signifies
man’s evening and night, which also is understandable since
nobody has seen the highest wisdom in a child yet.
[11] When a child is born, its soul finds itself in utter darkness and
therefore night. The child nevertheless grows, receiving all kinds
of instruction, gaining all sorts of insights with that. And see, this
is dusk comparable with evening.
[12] Indeed you say that it dawns also in the morning, and Moses
therefore might have said: “And from dawn and an actually bright
morning emerged the first day.”
[13] To this I say: indeed, had he availed himself of spiritual
correspondences to tell mankind the crassest nonsense. But Moses
knew that only evening corresponds to man’s terrestrial state.
He knew that it was with man’s worldly-intellectual education
exactly as it is with the gradually waning light of natural evening.
[14] The greater the pursuit of worldly things through men’s
intellect, the feebler the pure divine light of love and spiritual life
in their hearts. Therefore also Moses called such worldly light of
men the evening.
[15] Only when God through His mercy kindles a small light of
life in the heart, does man begin to understand the nothingness
of all that he had previously acquired through the intellect – his
spiritual evening, whereupon he starts to gradually see how the
treasures of his evening light are as transitory as this light itself.
[16] The right light out of God however, kindled in the hearts of
men is that morning which together with the preceding evening
brings about the first true day within man.
[17] From this My present explanation however you must see what
a vast difference there has to be between these two respective
lights or rather cognitions, because all cognition from the worldly
evening light is deceptive and transitory. Only Truth lasts forever
and deception has in the end to come to naught.
58. THE SECOND DAY OF CREATION
BUT it can nevertheless happen that the divine light is
poured out over the evening light in man’s heart and be so
consumed or blended that it would in the end be no longer
possible to know the natural light within man from the divine.
[2] God then made a divide between the two waters, which
bespeaks the two cognitions with which I have now adequately
acquainted you, and He thus divided the two waters.
[3] The division itself however is the actual Heaven within man’s
heart expressing itself in true and living faith and not ever in a
void, intellectual musing.
[4] For this reason also I call him who has the mightiest and most
undoubting faith a rock, which I place as a new divide between
Heaven and Hell, and this fortification, no powers of darkness
shall overcome forever.
[5] When this fortification is placed within man and his faith
waxes ever mightier, then through such faith the nothingness of
natural cognition becomes steadily more apparent. Natural
cognition then moves to subordinate itself to the dominance of
faith, and with that, out of man’s evening and the steadily
brightening morning, there arises the other and by far brighter day.
[6] In this second day condition man already recognizes that which
alone must maintain itself as ultimate truth forever, but proper
order nevertheless still is lacking within him. Man still continually
blends the natural with the purely spiritual, often spiritualizing
nature too much and therefore seeing the material also with the
spirit, therefore not yet being decidedly on the side of the
right deed.
[7] He resembles a world of water which indeed is surrounded on
all sides with lucent air – not being clear however about whether
his water-world came forth from the translucent air surrounding it
or the latter proceeding from the water world, i.e. he is not sure
within himself yet whether his spiritual cognition developed from
his natural one, or whether the latter secretly came out of a
possibly secretly pre-existent and secretly active spiritual cognition
in man. Or to put it more plainly still, he does not know whether
faith proceeds from knowledge or the latter from the former, and
what the difference is between them.
[8] In short, he cannot work out whether the chicken was before
the egg and the seed before the tree.
[9] God then comes once again to help man along, provided man
has done what he could from the strength loaned to him and
therefore his, on this second day of his spiritual education. And
this additional help consists in the provision of more abundant
light, which then like the sun in spring, not just by greater light
intensity but the warmth affected with this, starts to fertilize all the
seeds laid in man’s heart.
[10] This warmth however is called love, and spiritually
constitutes the soil within which the seed starts sprouting and
thrusting out its roots.
[11] And see, this is what is written in Moses, that God said:
“Let the waters be gathered together in certain separate places, so
that the dry and firm land can be seen, from which alone the seeds
can grow into living and enlivening fruit.”
[12] And it says: “…and God called the dry land Earth, and the
water, now gathered at certain places, the seas”.
[13] Then the question is: for whose benefit did God call it so?
For Himself verily He would not have needed it, since it surely
would sound somewhat divisive to attribute to the highest wisdom
in God His special pleasure in succeeding with the naming of the
dry land as ‘Earth’ and the gathered waters as ‘seas’.
[14] Yet God surely could not do the naming of the dry land and
the gathered waters for anyone’s benefit, since there was no being
besides Himself in this creation period to understand Him.
[15] Such saying of Moses therefore cannot possibly have a
material but only a spiritual sense, having only a potentially
retrospective spiritual sense in relation to the erstwhile creation of
the worlds – i.e. from the spiritual to the material – this being
capable of comprehension only by the wisdom of angels. But the
way it stands, it has a purely spiritual sense and indicates how
initially the individual and society at large develop in time and
periods from their necessary original natural state to the gradually
purer spiritual.
[16] Man therefore is being sorted out even in his natural state.
The cognitions have their place – that is man’s sea, and the love
emerging from the cognitions as a soil capable of carrying fruit,
washed all around by the totality of rightful cognitions, steadily
renewed in its strength for the bringing forth of all kinds of select
fruits ever more abundantly.’
