Divine Wisdom
Excerpts from the Rosicrucian Letters
English Version by Robert Kruseman
Do not try to study the highest of all the sciences, unless you have resolved in advance to enter the path of virtue, because those unable to feel the truth will not understand my words.
Only those who enter God's kingdom will understand the divine mysteries and will learn the truth and wisdom, in proportion to their capability to receive the divine light of the truth. For those whose life consists only of the mere light of their intelligence, the divine mysteries of Nature will not be comprehensible, because their souls do not hear the words that the light promulgates. Only those who abandon their personal ego can know the truth, because the truth is only possible to know in the region of the absolute good.
Everything that exists it is a product of the activity of the spirit. The highest of all the sciences is that one by which man learns to know the nexus that unites the spiritual intelligence and the corporeal forms. Between spirit and matter there are no defined lines of separation, since betwixt them all possible gradations are interpolated.
God is Fire that radiates the purest Light. This Light is life and, the gradations between the Light and the Darkness, transcend human comprehension. The closer we come to the center of Light, so much greater is the energy we receive and so much loftier the power and activity that result. Man's destiny is to ascend up to the spiritual center of Light. The primordial man was a son of the Light. He remained in a state of spiritual perfection by far greater than the present, in which he has descended to a more material state in a rude corporeal form. To re-ascend to his first height he has of retrace the path from which he has descended.
Each of the animated beings in this world receives his life and activity from the power of the spirit. The rude elements are governed for the subtler and, these, in turn by others who surpass them in subtlety, up to the purely spiritual and divine power and, thus, God influences everything and governs everything. Man possesses a germ of divine power that, developed, can turn into a tree of admirable fruits; but this germ can be developed only by the influence of the radiant heat of the fiery center from the great spiritual Sun and, in proportion to our nearness to the light, we receive that heat.
From the center or supreme and original Cause, they radiate constant active power that infuse themselves on the forms produced by his eternal activity and these forms radiate again towards the first Cause, constituting an uninterrupted chain in where everything is activity, light and life. Man having left the radiant sphere of light has been incapacitated to contemplate the thought, the will and the activity of the Infinite in its unity and, today, all he perceives is God's image in a multiplicity of varied images. This is the way that he contemplates God, in a number of aspects almost infinite in number; but God remains One. All these images must remind him of the exalted position that he at one time occupied and to re-conquer it he must rend all his efforts. Unless he strains to ascend to greater spiritual height, he will sink increasingly deeper in the sensuality and, he will find it then much more difficult, to recover his pristine state.
During our current terrestrial life, we are surrounded with dangers and, to defend ourselves from them, our power is very weak. The material body keeps us chained to sensuality and, every day a thousand temptations assail us. Without the reaction of the spirit, the animal nature of the man would rapidly would plunge it in the ooze of sensuality. Nevertheless, the contact with the sensuality is necessary for man, since it provides him the strength without which he could not progress. By the power his will man is perfected and, he who identifies his will with God's, can, during his life in the land, manage to become so spiritual, that he is able to contemplate and understand the unity of the kingdom of the mind and achieve all that wishes; for, when joined with the universal God, his are all the forces of the Nature, and in him the harmony and unity of All will evince completely. He then lives in the eternal and is not bound to the conditions of space and time as he takes part in God's power over the elements and forces of the worlds both visible and invisible, while being conscious of eternity.
Direct all your efforts to cultivating the tender plant of virtue that grows in the most intimate part of your being. To facilitate its development, purify your will and do not allow the illusions of the senses to blind you, and, at each step that you take in the path of eternal life, you shall find a purer air, a new life, a clearer light and, in proportion to your ascent your mental horizon shall be expanded.
Intelligence alone does not take us to wisdom. The spirit knows everything, yet nobody knows it. Intelligence without God drives us mad, it becomes enveloped in its own adulation and rejects the influence of the Holy Spirit. Ah! How disappointing and deceitful is intelligence without spirituality! How soon it will die! The spirit is the cause of everything and, how soon will the light go out from the most brilliant intelligence, without the nurturing of the the vital rays of the spiritual sun!