Excerpt from
Chapter Three
of the Book
Spiritual
Teachings and Universal Truths
Copyright © 1998 by Raphael. All
rights reserved.
If I teach truth, it is such only in the minds
of those who are prepared to receive it.
It is not the so-called "truth" of this world or of its "religions" or
rulers, who are far from being knowledgeable of the truth. They want only to control, manipulate,
exploit, and rule you. They are not
interested in truth. They are
interested only in wealth and power.
If they were interested in truth, they would surely have it because God
has promised that if anyone seeks the truth he or she will find it. You can judge them by their
actions. A good tree always brings
forth good fruit, and an evil tree always brings forth evil fruit.
Take a good look
at the world around you, is it not filled with atheism, false religious cults,
false teachings, corrupt governments, war, poverty, disease, pollution, crime,
immorality, liars and many other evils and evil-doers? There are so many evils in fact that it
would take an entire chapter of this book to list them all. All of this did not just happen by
chance, it is a direct result of the free will decisions of the people in power
and positions of authority who are under the influence of the Evil Spiritual
Powers that rule this world. Those
of you who fail to see this truth are deceived and you are on a path to
destruction and separation from God.
Those of you who love
truth, read, study and learn, because this is the truth that is the path to
salvation.
After the revolt
of a great part of the spirit world, God decided upon a plan for saving the
unfortunate spirits whom had fallen into the Abyss, and for bringing them back
into His Kingdom. His clemency
would be extended first of all to the less guilty, those countless spirits who
had deserted Him when they were subjected to trial in the sphere of
Paradise. Only after these had been
saved, would their corrupters, Lucifer and his lieutenants, be allowed to return
to God's Kingdom.
God is just. Those who had been misled were guilty of
weakness only, but those who had led them astray had sinned with premeditation,
and since their offenses had been fundamentally different, so too would be their
punishment, and so too would be their respective roads of escape from the
Abyss.
God's first step
toward salvation was the creation of levels of spiritual progress or amendment,
disposed in stages after laws incomprehensible to you and conceivable only to
the infinite wisdom of God. These
steps, by which spirits may ascend out of the darkness toward God, were provided
for one purpose, that all would once more be reunited with His Son. If you will use a logical and reasoning
mind you will easily understand what I am going to tell you of the levels of
amendment for the fallen spirits.
What you call
"Hell" is the lowest stage into which they sank, but even Hell has its levels of
progress through which a spirit may climb upward by a change of heart, until it
reaches the lowest of the terrestrial realms. These begin in the lower forms of animal
life and advance through the stages of rocks, plants, herbs, flowers, and the
higher beasts, arriving at last at the highest of animals known to you as
"mankind". Such terrestrial levels
exist not on Earth only, but also on the other heavenly bodies. There are many stages parallel to those
on Earth on other planets.
Moreover, the terrestrial stages exist not only in material shape as you
see them in animals, plants and minerals, but there is also a corresponding
spiritual shape, and in consequence, a spiritual animal, plant and mineral
kingdom embracing all orders and species of living beings, which in the
spiritual kingdom are clothed in spiritual physical bodies, the counterparts of
the material physical bodies which you see on Earth.
Again, spirits
parted from their material bodies by corporeal death enter into the respective
parallel spiritual realm where they remain until they are reincarnated on
Earth. Spirits that have not
progressed are reincarnated in the same stage as often as may be necessary to
fit them for reincarnation into a higher one.
Each stage of
advancement required a special act of God to permit the desired physical shaping
of the spirits, and to this end He created the spiritual shapes of pairs of
spirits corresponding to the shape in question and endowed them with the power
to reproduce the body peculiar to that stage. The spirits themselves are incorporated
in the bodies that are procreated, according to fixed laws that prevail in the
spirit world.
You cannot
understand how these processes came about, any more than you really understand
the processes of Nature which go on all around you, although you witness them
daily with your own eyes.
Earth scientists
concern themselves with the problem of descent, particularly with that of the
descent of mankind from the apes.
There is no such thing as physical descent of a higher form from a lower
one. Plants do not produce animals,
nor do the lower animals produce the higher forms. Every form of life breeds true to kind,
although within each species there are many races, the individual belonging to
races of the same order being mutually capable of reproduction among each
other.
Humans belong to
the order of the apes and are the highest race of this order. The ape is the lowest stage of humanity
and mankind is the highest of the apes.
Humans are therefore the highest animals on Earth. Nevertheless, humans have not descended
physically from the ape.
This is true in
spite of the fact that in point of physical development, the ape most closely
resembles humans.
The theory of "Evolution" is
just that, a theory. It will not,
and cannot, ever be proven. The fact that scientists have found
skeletons that have the appearance of creatures that are half human and half ape
proves only one thing, that these skeletons are skull and bones of the offspring
of a human and an ape. Regardless
of how many of these they find, how old they are, or where they find them, this
is the truth. You can shake your
head with disbelief and disgust at this statement; it will not change
anything.
Before the first
incarnation of the spirit of a person in a human body, that spirit inhabited the
body of an animal, and is the same spirit rising through the different stages of
Nature in constantly increasing perfection.
These stages
undergo no physical changes. They
are the same today that they were millenniums ago, even if, in the course of the
ages, certain orders died out because spirits were no longer incarnated in
them. For this reason God created
other and higher forms, incarnating in them those spirits which had previously
inhabited the extinct species, which had served as intermediate stages in the
progress upward. When they
disappeared and the higher forms took their places, the spirits in question were
compelled to wait until the replacement had been created.
This is why
scientists find to this day the remains of extinct species of plants and animals
that lived in former ages.
There is no
retrogression of the spirit from one stage of progress to a lower one even
though a spirit may remain at the same stage for a long time. A spirit which,
when its body dies, has not progressed during its incarnation, must be
reincarnated again and again until it is fit to enter the next higher
stage. If, during your present
lifetime on Earth you have made no advance on the road leading to God, you must
go through life again, always as a human being. Every life is an examination, whoever
fails to pass, must try again until you succeed. That is a divine law that applies with
equal force to all Creation; there is nothing capricious about the ways of
God.
A spirit does not
retrograde into a lower stage, because although he may have degenerated
spiritually in one respect he will have advanced in another, so that a balance
is struck.
Of the time that
elapsed from the days of the fall of the spirits to the time when the first
fallen spirit was fit to be incarnated in human shape, you can form no
conception.
Of all these
facts "Christendom" of today is ignorant, and they run counter to your own
previous ideas, but why conceal the truth from you even if you may find it
beyond belief and because it may be scoffed at by your fellow humans? You have the opportunity of inquiring
into these truths during the spiritual communications at spiritualistic
services, and if you do so, you will find my statements confirmed in every
particular.
Unfortunately,
the important facts that I have revealed to you have been deleted from the
Biblical account of the Creation, until scarcely any of them have been
retained. This account says nothing
of the creation of spirits by God, nothing of the revolt and secession of the
spirits, nothing of the levels of spiritual progress, nothing of the shaping of
the spiritual bodies of the fallen spirits into their various stages, and
nothing of the incarnation of those spiritual bodies into earthly
substance. The Biblical story of
the creation of the world describes an entirely independent creation, quite
unconnected with the creation of the spirits and their fall.
The original
Scriptures contained all of these facts, but when they were revised later, the
Powers of Darkness were at work to deprive mankind of the knowledge of the links
in the chain of God's Plan of Salvation and to withhold from them the
consolation of knowing that ultimately everything will return unto God. It was for the very purpose of leading
every spirit back to God, that the material Creation was created.
The Powers of
Darkness were, of course, much better served by the doctrine of hopelessness and
despair, and by the belief in an "eternal Hell" of which a poet has written the
dreadful words, "All hope abandon you who enter here". Such sentiments were far more acceptable
to the rulers of Hell than was the belief in a merciful God, Who may be angered,
and punish with just cause, but Who, at last, will forgive His children and call
them back to Him. The conception of
a Deity has been debased by the "doctrine" of "eternal damnation" designed only
to inspire terror. Furthermore,
that doctrine added to the difficulty of carrying out the Plan of Salvation
conceived by a God Who said, "Never will I forget you".
Many passages in
the Bible have shared the fate of the paintings by the old masters placed upon
the walls of some of the ancient churches.
In later times, so-called "church decorators" came and daubed their
commonplaces over the masterpieces, so that if today you remove the outer layer
of paint carefully from the walls, the ancient pictures are once more revealed,
leaving the beholder enraptured over the great painters' art.
In the same way
the truthful picture presented by the original Scriptures was defaced in later
times. Erring men of the religions
revised the historical accounts, omitting what they could not understand or
adding their own mistaken explanations.
Their successors "improved" further upon the previous work, supplementing
and abridging at will.
In this way not
only was the truth crowded aside, but many things crept into the Scriptures that
make a travesty of the word of God.
A poet once said,
"Books have their changes", and unfortunately this is true of the Bible
also. Much that it should contain
has been eliminated, and much of what it does contain should never have been
admitted, because it conflicts with the truth.
The various
"churches" which refuse to acknowledge this fact and persist in regarding their
version of the Scriptures as authentic are serving the cause of God very
poorly. In fact they are doing that
cause a thousand times more harm than good, because even the least intelligent
reader of the Bible, and of the account of the Creation in particular, must
realize that much of it must be inaccurate, to say the least.
The
falsifications introduced into the Old Testament called forth the protests of
God Himself, voiced through the prophets, who were stoned to death because of
this. The "religious" leaders
murdered them because they dared to tell the truth.
Elsewhere in the
Holy Writ the truth has suffered at the hands of translators who have rendered
certain words and phrases of the original text so inadequately as to distort
their real meaning beyond recognition.
From what I have
said you can see the reason for the great obscurity and the many misstatements
to be found in the story of the Creation as you have it today. Only occasional references retain a faint glimmer of the truth. It is true that some of the stages of
the progress of material Creation are indicated, but these are not consistent
with facts, in point of number or of sequence.
The same is true
of the Biblical version of the creation of the first human beings, a passage in
which the creation of their spirits is hopelessly confused with their first
incarnation in a human body.
In the first
chapter of the Bible you are told that God brought man into existence as the
last act of Creation, after the Earth, plants and beasts had already been
made. Then follows the statement,
"And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male
and female created them. And God
blessed them, and God said unto them, "be fruitful, and multiply . . . "
It is perfectly true that the two spirits which were the first to be incarnated
as human beings were named "Adam" and "Eve", and had been formed by God and in
God's image previous to their apostasy.
It is also true that He had created them male and female spirits, and had
blessed their union. This, however,
did not happen after the Earth with its plants and animals had been made, but at
the time of their creation as spirits.
Anything made by God in His image must be a spirit, because God is a
spirit, and a spirit only, and not material substance. Whatever He creates in His image must
likewise be purely ethereal, and not partly ethereal and partly material, as is
the case with humans.
The rest of the falsified
Scriptural account of the creation of mankind contains contradictions even more
flagrant, because a few lines further on you are told that God made man out of
clay, and moreover only the male, at a time when there was no other living thing
on Earth, and according to what is said before this, man is said to have been
made after all other life had been created. Yet, according to the second statement,
God placed man upon a barren Earth, and not until then did He create the Garden
of Eden into which He "put the man whom He had formed". Still later, it is said that God caused
this "Paradise" as you call it, to grow up with trees bearing luscious fruits of
all kinds, and that He put the man into the garden to, dress it and keep
it. Inasmuch as there was no living
thing on Earth to endanger the garden, it is impossible to understand the need
for such keeping. Every single
sentence contradicts the one that precedes it!
Compare this
picture with the facts, as I will relate them.
You now recognize
in Paradise that spiritual place into which God, after the revolt of the
spirits, sent the least guilty of the rebels, partly as a punishment, partly to
try them once more. Within this
Paradise grew the "spiritual tree" of the knowledge of good and evil. This was nothing more than God's
commandment to not eat the fruit of this tree that had been given for the
purpose of proving the spirits in this sphere, and the significance of which
they did not grasp. The observance
or the violation of this commandment or rather, of this prohibition, would show
whether the spirits in Paradise were prepared to take sides with God, or whether
they had fully determined to join Lucifer.
Should they respond to this test by obeying God, the commandment would
become for them the tree of life in God's glorious Kingdom, should they disobey,
it would become a tree of death.
They would be driven from Paradise into the realm of Lucifer, and on that
day, the day of their spiritual "death", their severance from God would be
complete. "For in the day that you
eat thereof you shall surely die."
End of Excerpt
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Spiritual Teachings and
Universal Truths
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Four
Reincarnation, Sins and
Forgiveness
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