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If the Word Did Not Exist,
No One Would Know about God, Heaven, Hell,
or Life after Death,
Still Less about the LordThere are people who put forward the idea (something they have become 273
inwardly adamant about) that without the Word people would still know
of the existence of God and of heaven and hell, as well as the other things
the Word teaches about. You cannot deal with such people on the basis
of the Word; you have to use the earthly light of reason, because they
believe in themselves, not the Word.
Investigate by using the light of your reason and you will find that
there are two faculties of life in us. They are called the intellect and the
will. The intellect is subject to the will, but the will is not subject to the
intellect. The intellect only teaches and points out what we should be
wanting and doing. As a result, many people have sharp minds and
understand life’s morality better than others, and yet do not live by it.
Things would be different if these people wanted to be moral. Investigate
further and you will find that we identify with our will. From the day we
are born, our will is evil, and that produces falsity in our intellect.
When you have found this out, you will see another thing: left on
our own, we do not want to understand anything that does not come
from the self that we experience in our own will. And if there were no
other source of knowledge, we would have no desire to understand any-
thing unrelated to ourselves or our world; everything beyond our world
would be in pitch darkness. For example, when we saw the sun, the
moon, and the stars, if we happened to think about their origin, we
could not help thinking they originated from us. This thinking is no
deeper than that of scholars in our world who acknowledge the existence
of nature alone even though they know from the Word that all things
were created by God. What would they be thinking if they had known
nothing from the Word?
Did the classical philosophers such as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and
the others, who wrote about God and the immortality of the soul, origi-
nally derive those concepts from their own intellects? No, they derived
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