ARTICLES: BIBLE
The Ten Commandments of GodTHOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOR'S HOUSE, NOR HIS FARM, NOR HIS CATTLE, NOR ANYTHING THAT IS HIS!The Tenth Commandment He who seeks to earn a living through honest work and honest business dealing can look forward calmly to the proclamation of this Commandment during the Great Reckoning, for it will pass him by without striking him a blow. Actually it is so easy to fulfil all the Commandments, and yet ... just look at all men in the right way, and soon you will come to recognise that even the keeping of this Commandment, which should really be quite natural for man, is not carried out, or only very seldom, and then not with joy, but only with much effort. It is as though an unquenchable craving rages over all men, whether white, yellow, brown, black or red, to begrudge his fellow-creatures what he himself does not possess. Still better expressed, however: To envy him everything! In this envy lies already the forbidden coveting! Transgression of the Commandment is thus already complete, and becomes the root of many evils that quickly cause man's downfall, from which he frequently never rises again. The average man, strange to say, rarely values what he calls his own, but always only that which he does not yet possess. The Darkness assiduously scattered greed, and the human souls, alas, yielded only too willingly, so as to prepare the most fertile soil for the woeful seed. So with the greater part of mankind, coveting the possessions of others became in time the basis of all their activities. Beginning with a simple wishing, becoming aggravated through cunning and the art of persuasion, to the boundless envy of continual discontent, and even to blind hatred. Any and every means of gratification was recognised as perfectly fair, provided it did not all too flagrantly conflict with earthly law. In the growing mania for acquisition God's Commandment remained unheeded! Each one considered himself really honourable as long as he was not called to account by an earthly court. To avoid this, however, cost him no great effort, for he applied the utmost circumspection and keenest intellectual cleverness when it was his intention ruthlessly to injure his fellow-men, as soon as it became necessary in order to obtain some cheap advantage for himself. It did not occur to him that in reality just this costs him far more dearly than all earthly resources can benefit him! So-called cleverness became everything! But cleverness according to present-day concepts is in itself nothing more than the blossom of cunning, or an intensification of it. It only remains strange that everyone meets the cunning person with distrust, but the clever one with respect! It is the general basic attitude which brings out the inconsistency! The cunning man is a bungler in the art of gratifying his desire, while intellectually clever people have become masters of it. The bungler cannot clothe his intentions in attractive forms, and reaps only pitying contempt for this. But the most envious admiration flows to the adept from souls who indulge in the same propensity! Envy also here, because on the soil of present-day humanity even admiration for the same kind cannot be without envy. Men do not know this powerful mainspring of the many evils; they no longer even realise that this envy in many different forms controls and guides all their thoughts and actions at the present time! It has its seat in the individual as in whole peoples; states are guided by it; it engenders wars as well as factions, and unending strife, even where only two persons have to confer about something! What has become of obedience to the Tenth Commandment of God, one would fain call out warningly to the states! In the most merciless greed each one of the earthly states strives only for what the other possesses! In so doing they shrink neither from individual murder nor from mass murder, nor from enslaving entire peoples, only in order to raise themselves to greatness thereby! The fine speeches about self-preservation or self-defence are only evasions, because they themselves feel distinctly that something must be said in order somewhat to mitigate, to excuse these monstrous crimes against the Commandments of God! But it avails them nothing; for inexorable is the stylus that engraves disobedience to the Commandments of God in the Book of the World Happening; unbreakable are the threads of karma which thereby attach themselves to each individual, so that not even the slightest stirring of his thinking and doing can be lost without being atoned for! He who is able to survey all these threads will see what a terrible judgment has now been evoked thereby! Confusion and the collapse of what has been built up until now are only the first mild consequences of this most shameful of the violations of the Tenth GodCommandment! As soon as the full effect now begins increasingly to overwhelm you, no one can show you any mercy. You have not deserved otherwise. With this comes only what you have forced upon yourselves! Tear the ignoble coveting completely out of your soul! Consider that a state, too, is only made up of individuals! Eschew all envy, the hatred towards those people who in your opinion possess much more than you yourselves! Indeed, there is a reason for it! But the full blame for your inability to recognise that reason is yours alone, in that you have voluntarily forced upon yourselves the enormous limitation of your ability to comprehend, which was not willed by God, and which is bound to appear as the consequence of your wretched adulation of the intellect! Whoever in the new Kingdom of God here on earth does not wish to be content with the position given to him, through the working out of his own threads of karma brought about by himself, is not worthy to live in it either! Not worthy of being given therewith the opportunity to atone with comparative ease for old burdens of guilt clinging to him, and at the same time also to mature spiritually, so as to find the way upwards to the home of all free spirits, there, where only light and joy reign! In future every malcontent will be relentlessly snatched away as a useless disturber of the ultimately-willed peace, as a hindrance to healthy ascent! But if there is still within him a germ of good, with a strong promise of an early turning-back, then he will come to recognise the absolute rightness of the wise Will of God; rightness also for him, who only out of the short-sightedness of his soul and out of self-willed stupidity could not recognise that the bed in which he now lies on earth was solely of his own making, as the absolute consequence of his entire existence hitherto, of several lives in the beyond and also on earth, but that it is not the blind arbitrary result of chance! Then he will at last recognise that he needs for himself precisely that and only that which he experiences and where he stands, also the circumstances into which he was born, and all that goes with them! If he works diligently on himself he will mount upwards spiritually, as well as in the earthly sense. However, if he defiantly wants to force a different path for himself, ruthlessly and to the detriment of his fellowmen, then this can never bring him any true benefit. It will be a hard struggle for the human souls before they are able to free themselves from the habitual transgressions of the Tenth God-Commandment, that is, change themselves in this respect, in order at last really to live in accordance with it in thought, word and in the deed! But suffering and destruction, here on earth and in the beyond, await all those who are unable to do so! |