Of the Threefold Life Chapter 1.

16. Now, here we understand that outside the Light of God of the second principle: The realm of divine Light and Love. within eternal nature, there exists an anxious source-torment. For the bond of life stands in the fire. However, when that same Divine fire is original: "inficiret," meaning permeated or enkindled by. influenced and captured by holy Divine love, then life goes out from itself into another quality; for another Principle is opened up within it. Therein it lives, and this is the life in GOD, just as God dwells within himself. And yet, it is truly everything itself; everything has come forth from his nature.

But you must understand that not everything [comes] out of eternal nature—only the soul and the Angelic spirits—but rather from his created will, which has a beginning, as if from the outward. Therefore, all beings of this world are transitory. And herein we find the terrifying, great Fall of our first parents' souls: that the soul entered into the spirit of this world as if into a foreign lodging. It has abandoned the Divine light, wherein it was an angel and a child of God. Therefore, it must go out again, out of the The "stars and elements" refer to the astral and physical influences that Böhme believed governed the material body but should not rule the soul. stars and elements, into a new birth into the life of God.

17. Because, however, this was not possible for the soul, the life of God came to us in the flesh out of love and grace and took our human soul back into itself—into the Divine life, into the power of the light—so that we here, in that same life, can penetrate to GOD in a new birth.

For just as we are all, with Adam’s soul...