The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 4 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 1 (part 4)
Let them, therefore, again go out with their will from their wilful ignorance or malignity and enter again into the will of God." ( Menschwerdung , 3, 5.) All this goes to show that it is useless and vain to seek for divine wisdom, meaning a true realisation of eternal truth in outward things, in external observations, in the reading of books, or in the sayings of the sages, if we do not recognise the truth that exists within our own self.
All dependence placed upon external things and persons or gods outside of our own true self, is p.
41 merely idol-worship and deceptive if we do not recognise the God that exists within ourselves.
The words, "Thou shalt worship no strange gods or idols, but have only one God," mean, Thou shalt have faith and confidence and trust in no other God than in the one whose temple you are, and who resides within your own self.
"God," according to Boehme, is "the will of eternal wisdom." To become strong in God is to become strong in that will which renders one wise.
This is the true faith, of which Boehme says that "it is not merely a certain method of thinking, or a belief in certain historical occurrences, but the receiving of the spirit and the power of Christ within one's self." ( Letters , xlvi.
39.) "This light and this power of Christ arises in His children within their interior foundation, and illumines the whole of their life.
Within that foundation is the kingdom of God in man." ( Communion , v.
18.) But what is it that prevents man from recognising God within his own self?
What hinders him from seeing the light of the truth, and hearing the voice of the Divinity?
To this Jacob Boehme answers, "Thy own hearing, willing, and seeing prevents thee from seeing and hearing God.
By the exercise of your own will you separate yourself from the will of God, and by the exercise of your own seeing you see only within your own desires, while your desiring obstructs your sense of hearing by closing your ears with that which belongs to terrestrial and material things.
It overshadows you so that you cannot see that which is beyond your own human nature and supersensual.
But if you keep quiet, and desist from thinking and feeling with your own personal selfhood, then will the eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking become revealed to you, and God will see and hear and perceive through you."—( Supersensual Life , 1–5.) Here it may be asked by some, "Is it then necessary p.
42 for us, if we want to attain divine wisdom, that we should sit down, and think, and feel, and do nothing at all?" Those who ask such a question do not realise that, as there is a region below all feeling and thought, in which man resembles an animal, if not a corpse, there is also another state, beyond all speculative thought, a state of divine being.
Not a state in which man imagines himself to be divine, but a condition in which the will of man, having stripped off all that is earthly, becomes divine and absorbed in the self-consciousness of divinity.
"The only true way by which God may be perceived in His word, His essence, and His will, is that man arrives at the state of unity with himself, and that—not merely in his imagination, but in his will —he should leave everything that is his personal self, or that belongs to that self, money and goods, father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, body and life, and that his own self should become as nothing to him.
He must surrender everything and become poorer than a bird in the air that owns a nest.
Man must have no nest for his heart in this world.
Eckhart's signature doctrine that the Father eternally begets the Son in the ground of the soul; the human interior as the actual site of the divine generative act, distinct from inner_light's static indwelling.
The power of Christ arises within the interior foundation, suggesting a generative divine act inside the soul.
Eckhart's Abgeschiedenheit/Gelassenheit — radical letting-go of will, image, and grasping that opens the soul to God; distinct from inner_silence (quietness) and from material renunciation, and adjacent to Sufi tark and Buddhist non-grasping as a practice rather than a metaphysical claim.
[auto] The text calls for surrendering everything personal, including money, family, and selfhood, to become as nothing and have no nest for the heart in this world.
Sufi self-effacement in God — the via by which the lover is unmade as a separate ego and recovered as God's act; specifies the practice/event rather than mystical_union's resulting state.
The instruction to leave everything that is personal self and become as nothing aligns with the concept of self-effacement in God.
Salvation through direct experiential knowledge of the divine nature, not through faith, ritual, or moral works alone.
[auto] The passage emphasizes that divine wisdom is useless to seek externally without recognizing the truth within oneself, defining true faith as receiving the spirit and power of Christ internally.
Disciplined inward attention — sitting, focused, or open-awareness practice — as a stand-alone term that umbrellas active_contemplation, inner_silence, and dhyana-style sitting.
The text discusses the state of sitting down and doing nothing at all as a means to attain divine wisdom beyond speculative thought.
The human being as a small-scale image of the entire cosmos; the body, soul, and intellect mirroring the structure of the heavens and the divine — distinct from correspondence in that it makes the human the privileged mirror.
The human being is described as the temple of God where the kingdom resides, mirroring the divine structure within the self.
The merging of the individual soul or self with the divine, transcending personal identity.
[auto] The text describes a state where the will of man becomes divine and absorbed in the self-consciousness of divinity, with God perceiving through the individual.
Eckhart's radical reading of Matthew 5:3 — the saint as one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing, having emptied even the will and the self with which to receive God; distinct from renunciation_of_wealth (material poverty).
[auto] The text demands that man become poorer than a bird in the air and that his own self should become as nothing to him.
The felt condition of exile from one's divine origin — Rumi's reed flute torn from its bed, Plotinus's 'we have forgotten,' the Gnostic forgetfulness; the affective wound that complements return_to_source and gives the return its motive.
The text explains that exercising one's own will separates the individual from the will of God.
The doctrine — central to Eastern Orthodox and Maximian theology — that the human person is progressively transformed into a partaker of the divine nature by grace, not merely justified or united in passing ecstasy.
The passage describes a condition where the will of man becomes divine and absorbed in the self-consciousness of divinity.
Effortless action aligned with the spontaneous flow of the Dao; non-coercive, non-striving conduct that yields results without forcing — the sage acts without acting.
The instruction to desist from thinking and feeling with one's own selfhood aligns with non-striving conduct.