ARTICLES: BIBLE
The Ten Commandments of GodTHOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBOR!The Eighth Commandment If you assault one of your neighbors and beat him so that he suffers injury, perhaps robbing him as well, then you know that you have harmed him and will become subject to earthly punishment. Yet you give no thought to the fact that at the same time you are also entangled in the threads of a reciprocal action which is not subject to arbitrariness, but takes effect justly, down to those minute stirrings of your soul to which you pay no heed at all, and for which you lack any intuitive awareness. And this reciprocal action bears no relationship with the earthly punishment, but works wholly independently, silently by itself, yet so inescapably for the human spirit that in all Creation he no longer finds any place which can protect and hide him. When you hear of such a brutal assault and violent injury you are indignant. If people close to you are the victims, you are alarmed and horrified! Yet it disturbs you little if on occasion a person who is not present is being put in a bad light by another through clever, malicious words, or often just through very expressive gestures, which imply more than can be said in words. Bear in mind, however: a gross material attack is far easier to redress than an attack on the soul, which must suffer from having its reputation undermined. Therefore avoid all scandalmongers as you would gross material murderers! For they are just as guilty and very often even worse! Just as they take no pity on the souls they themselves harass, so no helping hand shall be offered to them in the beyond when they beg for it! Cold and merciless is the unwholesome inner urge to disparage others who are frequently even strangers to them; coldness and mercilessness a hundred times greater will therefore confront them in the place which awaits them when one day they must leave their physical bodies! In the beyond they will remain ostracized and deeply despised, even in the eyes of robbers and thieves; for all of their kind have a malicious and despicable feature in common, from the so-called gossip to the depraved creatures who do not shrink from bearing false witness under oath, at their own request, against a neighbor to whom they should have had plenty of reason to be grateful in many things! Treat them as you would poisonous vermin; for they do not deserve otherwise. Since all mankind completely lack the high, common goal of attaining to the Kingdom of God, they have nothing to say to each other at those times when two or three of them are together; therefore they cultivate the cherished habit of talking about others and are no longer able to perceive how disgraceful it is, because they have lost their perception of it completely through constantly indulging in it. In the beyond they shall continue to sit together and indulge in their favorite topic until the time granted for the last possibility of ascent, which might have brought them salvation, has passed, and they are drawn into the eternal disintegration, in which all gross material and ethereal kinds of matter come to be purified from every poison carried into them by human spirits who are not worthy to retain a name! |