- 17 - have been there and prepared a place for you, I will come back and take you with me, so that you also may be where I am.’ Did Christ not also say: Mark 14: 25: ‘I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day on which I drink it anew in my Father’s kingdom.’ In the Old Testament did not the angel Raphael tell Tobias: Tobit 12: 19: ‘I partake of invisible food and a drink human eyes cannot see.’ Finally, does not the description of the fallen cherub given by the Prophet Ezekiel expressly mention the beautiful garments set with jewels and embroidered with gold, in which that spirit was clothed before its fall? Have I not told you, when speaking to you of od, that every spirit possesses an odic body as its spiritual body, and that your earthly bodies are merely condensations of the odic ones? The most perfect state of od is, therefore, not that in which it is condensed into matter, but the spiritual state. It is not the material body, but the spiritual body that is the more beautiful; not the material gem that is the most splendid, but the spiritual one; not material but spiritual gold that has the greater value. • Gold and jewels, in both material and spirit form, are nothing but wonderfully prepared od, which in one case is present in its condensed, and in the other in its uncondensed state. This may be hard for you to understand since you are accustomed to thinking in terms of the material world, having no true conception of a spiritual state, about which you were taught nothing in your youth. But clairvoyants, whose spiritual vision enables them to see the ethereal, can understand perfectly what I have told you. They can also comprehend the description of paradise with its trees, plants, fruits and rivers as applying to a spiritual sphere. • Also, what you experience, see, and hear in your dreams you do not perceive physically; all this appears to the dreamer in spiritual form and shape. Such was the spiritual sphere of paradise into which the rank and file of the rebels were sent, not only as punishment, but also to try them once more. It was an act of justice and kindness on the part of God to give these spirits one more opportunity to redeem the transgression of which they had been guilty through weakness. They were mere followers, who had sinned not out of malice, but because in a moment of weakness they had yielded to the tempter’s enticements. They had outwardly renounced their allegiance to Christ’s authority, but at heart they were still divided between Christ and Lucifer, as is the case even today with so many people. In a way, they were leaning in two directions. But God’s justice demanded that they choose one way or the other, even with regard to their convictions. By transporting them into the sphere of paradise, He therefore put them into a ‘neutral zone’ where they could make up their minds. The choice would have been easy enough, had they still retained their mental faculties to the extent to which they had possessed them while dwelling in God’s kingdom. This, however, was not the case. • For as I told you when speaking to you of od, every act of insubordination to God on the part of a spirit is attended by a change in its odic body, which becomes clouded, losing its purely
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