The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 63 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 7 (part 5)
13.) Man can attain real similarity to God and perfect beatitude only by decisively willing to put his will into the Son, as the Heart or Light of the Father.
"God has the eternal and unchangeable will to generate His Heart and his Son, and thus the soul should put her immutable will into the heart of God.
Then would she be in heaven and Paradise, and enjoy the inexpressible happiness of God the Father, which He enjoys in the Son, and she would hear the inexpressible words in the heart of God." 1 ( Three Principles , x.
14.) "Adam was conceived in the love of God and born into this world.
He was in possession of a divine substantiality, and his soul was of the will, the first principle, the quality of the Father.
This will should be directed, together with the imagination, into the heart of the Father, that is to say, into the Word and the Spirit of love and purity.
Then would man's soul retain the substance p.
149 of God in the Word of Life." ( Menschwerdung , i.
10, 2.) "The living soul, from the eternal will of the Father, was breathed into man, and this will has no other purpose than to give birth to His only Son.
1 Of this will God the Father infused into man, and this is the eternal soul of man.
The soul ought to put her regenerated will into the eternal will of the Father, in the heart of God.
Then will she receive the power of the heart of God and also His holy eternal light, wherein arises the Paradise and the celestial kingdom and eternal joy." ( Three Principles , xxvi.
16.) "If the soul sinks her will into the meekness, i.e.
, the obedience of God, she becomes a fountain of the heart of God, and receives divine power, and all her essences become angelic and joyful.
Then her harsh essences will also be useful to her, and appear to her more mild and useful, than if they had already originally been entirely sweet and mild." ( Three Principles , xiii.
31.) It was within his power to decide, and he was free to do so, because there was in him not only the principle of light, but also the fire-principle,—not only perception, but will.
"The light and the power of the light is a desire, and wants to come in possession of the noble image made after God's likeness, because it has been created for the world of light.
Likewise the dark world or the craving wrath desires the same, for man has all the worlds within himself, and there is a great battle taking place in man.
That principle with which he identifies himself with in his desire and his will, will rule in him." ( Tilk ., i.
381.) "As the soul is essential and her very substance is a p.
150 desire, it is clear that she is in two kinds of Fiat .
The first is her own soul-property; the other belongs to the second principle, issuing from the will of God in the soul.
The soul desiring for God for the purpose of forming herself in His image and likeness, this desire of God acts as a Fiat in her own centre; for the desire of God wants to possess the soul.
On the other hand, she herself desires to possess the centre in the power of the fire, wherein the life of the soul originates." ( Eye , vii.) "The will of the soul is free, and she can either sink into nothing within herself and conceive of herself as the nothing, when she will sprout like a branch out of the tree of divine life, and eat of the love of God; or she may in her own self-will rise up in the fire and desire to become a separate tree." 1 ( Forty Questions , ii.
The transformation of base substance — outer matter or the inner soul — into a purified, perfected, or 'gold' state; the magnum opus as both laboratory practice and spiritual allegory.
The transformation of 'harsh essences' into useful and mild ones mirrors spiritual alchemy.
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 text describes the Father's will to generate His Son and the soul putting its will into that generative heart.
The Hermetic axiom that the structure of the cosmos is reflected at every scale — 'as above, so below; as within, so without' — making each level a legible map of the others.
The statement that man has 'all the worlds within himself' reflects the correspondence of microcosm and macrocosm.
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.
The soul must sink into nothing and avoid rising up in 'self-will' to receive divine power.
A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.
God generates His Heart and Son, establishing a flow from the Father through the Son to the soul.
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 soul is instructed to 'sink her will into... nothing within herself' to sprout from the tree of divine life.
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 practice involves decisively willing to put one's will into the Son as a form of inward attention.
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.
[auto] The text explicitly states that 'man has all the worlds within himself,' positioning the human as a mirror of the cosmos.
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).
The instruction to 'sink into nothing within herself' aligns with the concept of spiritual poverty.
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.
Adam is described as born into this world from a state of divine substantiality, implying a separation requiring return.
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.
[auto] The text describes the soul's essences becoming 'angelic and joyful' and retaining the 'substance of God'.