Six Theosophic Points, and Other Writings

8. The Word is its centre or seat, and is in the midst as a heart ; and the spirit of the Word, which takes its origin in the primal eternal will, reveals the wonders of the essential life. There are, then, two mysteries : one in the spirit-life, and one in the essential life. The spirit-life is acknowledged as God, and is rightly so called; and the essential life is acknowledged as the Nature-life, which would have no understanding if the Spirit or the spirit-life were not desirous. In this desire the divine Being, as the eternal word or heart of God, is continually and from eternity generated ; from which the desiring will as Spirit eternally goes out into the Naturelife, and reveals therein the mystery in essences. So that there are two lives and also two beings.

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from and in a single, eternal, unfathomable origin. 9. And thus we apprehend what God and Nature is ; how the one and the other is from eternity without any ground or beginning. For it is an everlasting beginning. It begins itself perpetually and from eternity to eternity, where there is no number ; for it is the unground.

THE FIFTH TEXT

1. Seeing then there have been from eternity two beings, we cannot say that one exists beside the other, and is disposed so that the one comprehends the other; neither can it be said that one is outside of the other, and that there is a separation. No; but thus we apprehend it, that the spirit-Hfe faces inwards, and the nature-Hf e outwards and forwards.

2. Together, then, we compare them to a spherical orb which goeth on all sides, as the wheel in Ezekiel indicates.

3. The spirit-life is an entire fulness of the nature-life, and yet is not laid hold of by the naturelife. They are two principles in a single origin, each having its mystery and its operation. The nature-life works unto fire, and the spirit-Hfe unto the light of glory. By fire we understand the fierceness of the consuming of the essentiality of Nature ; and by hght the production of water, which deprives the fire of power, as is set forth in the Forty Questions on the soul.

4. And thus we are able to recognize an eternal substantiality of Nature, identical with water and fire, which are as it were mixed together ; where then this gives a light-blue colour, like the flash of fire; where it hath a form as a ruby mixed with crystal in one substance, or as yellow, white, red and blue

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mingled in a dark water; where it is as blue in green, yet each has its lustre, and shines. And the water checks the fire, so that there is no consuming there, but an eternal essence or substance in two mysteries united in one another, and yet the distinction of two principles as two kinds of Hfe.

5. And thus we understand here the essence of all beings, and that it is a magical essence, as a will can create itself in the essential hfe, and so enter into a birth, and in the great Mystery, in the origin of fire, awaken a source which before was not manifest, but lay hidden in mysteiy like a gleam in the multiplicity of colours; as we have a mirror of this in the devils and in all malignity. And we recognize also from whence all things, evil and good, take their origin, namely from the Imagination in the great Mystery, where a wonderful essential life generates itself.

6. As we have a sufficient knowledge thereof by the creatures of this world, as where the divine Life awakened once for all the Nature-life, when it brought forth such wonderful creatures from the essential mystery; whereby we understand that every essence is come to be a mysterium or a life, and also that in the great Mystery there is a magical craving, so that the craving of every essence makes in its turn a mirror, to see and to know itself in the mirror.