The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme · 146 of 159 · tr. Franz Hartmann
Chapter 13 (part 14)
It would then be easy for us to grant our own desires, if in that divine state there could be room for personal desires of any kind.
268:1 True prayer is the bringing of will, thought, and word into one Δ by the power of the Spirit of God.
272:1 Here it may be useful to remark that if a person cannot perceive these dangers of the devil which are lurking in everything, it would be folly for him to imagine all sorts of dangers in his own fancy, whereby he would merely create for himself innumerable fears and perplexities, and become afraid of the world, instead of superior to it.
The main paint for the seeker of divine enlightenment is, and remains, to put his "point of gravitation" into the divine self-reliance, and remember that he who has found his true dignity and manhood in God is superior to the devil, and there is nothing in the universe which could give him just cause for fear.
274:1 See " Jehoshua, the Prophet of Nazareth ." 275:1 The human intellect, in its relation to the divine spirit, may be compared to the moon that receives her light from the sun.
In either case the former is merely a reflection, while in the latter rests the true light.
Thus there are many who mistake the reflection for the true light and their own fancies for the wisdom of God, and from this arises that self-conceit which is never more repulsive than if found among those who boast of being the servants of God.
277:1 There are many "Christians," "Buddhists," &c., who imagine that they could attain the apex of perfection if they were only getting rid of their physical body.
Some even go so far as to object to having a soul.
Surely the Divinity per se does require neither a physical body nor a soul to be self-existent and eternal; but man requires all this to enable the light of Divinity to become revealed in him.
Without that, man, even if he could continue to be, would be unconscious of his existence; a spirit without knowing or experiencing anything about it.
Immortality is not attained by merely fancying oneself to be immortal; neither can there be much satisfaction for man to believe that God is immortal as long as he is godless himself.
Gautama himself could not have become a " Buddha "— i.e.
, an enlightened soul—if he had not been in possession of a soul which could be enlightened.
This divine soul is the body of Christ.
278:1 The very same idea is expressed in the Bhagavad Gita , where man is advised to seek to realise that he is one with Krishna , and having realised it, he will be no longer a partaker, but merely a spectator, in the battle, which after all does not concern the Divinity in him, his own real self.
No man can, however, identify himself by his own human power with Krishna or Christ; this always requires the presence and the power of Christ or Krishna Himself.
In other words, it requires, as Boehme expresses it.
"the grace of God, which, however, can be found within every person who ceases to desire evil." ( Mysterium , lxi.
57.) Boehme says: "No man can make himself a child of God, but he must throw himself entirely into a state of complete obedience to God.
Then will God make him His child.
He must be dead (to all sense of self), then will God in the Christ live in him." ( Tilk .
i.
398.) "No man can by his own power raise himself into the light which is extinct within his will, but he may enter the ground that produces the light and wherein is hidden neither evil nor good, because he is himself that foundation (cause).
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.
God in the Christ is said to live in the person who is dead to self.
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] Complete obedience and being dead to the sense of self are central requirements for divine indwelling.
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.
Boehme is quoted saying one must be dead to all sense of self for God to live in him.
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.
Man is described as the vessel required to enable the light of Divinity to become revealed in him.
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).
One must be dead to all sense of self and cease to desire evil to receive 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.
[auto] The text describes man becoming a child of God and the divine soul being the body of Christ.