Mysterium Magnum

4 Of the Word, or Heart of God. CHAPTER 2.

[Marginal notes]
ⁿ Or receive light from the Sun.

ᵒ Essence, substance, or body.

[Main text]
You, with your outward spirit and being, are the outward world. You are a little world out of the Great world. Your outward light is a chaos of the Sun and Stars; otherwise, you could not see ⁿ by the light of the Sun. The Stars give the essence of distinction in intellectual sight. Your body is fire, air, water, and earth. Within it also lies the metallic property. For whatever the Sun and Stars are as a spirit, the Earth and the other elements are a ᵒ being, a solidified power. What the superior being is, the inferior is also, and all the creatures of this world are the same.

6. When I take up a stone or clod of earth and look upon it, then I see that which is above and that which is below. Indeed, I see the whole world within it. The only difference is that in each thing, one property happens to be the chief and manifest one, and it is named according to that property. All the other properties are jointly within it, only in distinct degrees and centers. Yet all the degrees and centers are but one single center. There is only one root from which all things proceed. It only separates itself in its compaction, where it is solidified. Its origin is like a smoke or vaporous breath from the Great Mystery of the Expressed Word. This Word stands in all places in its re-expression, that is, in the re-breathing or echoing forth of a likeness of itself: an essence according to the Spirit.

7. But now we cannot say that the outward world is God, or the Speaking Word (which in itself is devoid of such material essence). Likewise, we cannot say that the outward man is God. Instead, everything is only the Expressed Word, which has solidified itself in its own re-conception into its own expression. It continually solidifies itself with the four elements through the spirit of desire (namely, of the Stars) and brings itself into such motion and life. It does this in the same way that the Eternal Speaking Word makes a mystery, which is spiritual, within itself. This mystery I call the center of the eternal nature. There, the Eternal Speaking Word brings itself into a generation and also makes a spiritual world within itself, just as we have a material world in the Expressed Word.

8. For I say that the inward world is the Heaven where God dwells, and the outward world is expressed out of the inward one. It has a different beginning than the inward world, yet it still comes from the inward. It is expressed from the inward through the motion of the Eternal Speaking Word and is enclosed within a beginning and an end.

9. The inward world stands in the Eternal Speaking Word. The Eternal Word has spoken it through wisdom out of its own powers, colors, and virtues into an essence, as a Great Mystery from eternity. This essence is also only like a breathing out from the Word in wisdom. it has its own re-conception for generation within itself. With this conception, it likewise solidifies itself and introduces itself into forms, following the manner of the generation of the Eternal Word. This is how the powers, colors, and virtues generate themselves in the Word through wisdom, or, as I might say, out of wisdom in the Word.

10. Therefore, nothing is near to or far away from God. One...