Revelations from God or angels are not one hundred percent pure and trustworthy. Why not? Because the wishes, anxieties and prejudices of the human person, who receives those revelations, can easily interfere with the heavenly content of the messages. It's this weakness in all revelations that causes so much confusion - I'm quite sure of that. I've studied the revelations of various prophets and mystics, and it's clear that they differ a lot. The explanations for those differences are various, but the most important is - to my opinion - that the person to whom heavenly things are revealed, also has his own viewpoints, prejudices and personal characteristics.
These differences can already be discerned when you compare the works of related mystics like Jakob Lorber, Emanuel Swedenborg, Gottfried Mayerhofer, Bertha Dudde and others who belong to the so-called 'New Revelation'. That's also the case when you compare the writers of this group with spiritual authors like Jozef Rulof and
Rudolf Steiner. I've studied them all. The differences are gigantic. And
yet they all claim they reveal the truth about the spiritual dimension. Why
should I prefer one of them and despise or reject the others? Who is right and
who is wrong?
The
fact that God or the spiritual world reveals something doesn´t mean that it´s
not permitted to criticize it and to investigate whether the stories and
descriptions such a revelation contains are true and reliable. Moreover, when a
book like `The natural Sun´, written by Jakob Lorber, explicitly
tells the reader that the descriptions are about the natural, physical world,
those data may be investigated by the science that is active in that field.
There´s nothing wrong about that. I think it's not fair to reject such an
investigation by pointing at the fact that it's not permitted to doubt the word of God, especially when
the outcome is negative for a spiritual book. That's the traditional
fundamentalist way of defending the own position.
In a couple of
articles I demonstrated that the mystic Jakob Lorber made many mistakes in his
descriptions of the structure of the universe, especially in his books “Earth
and Moon” and “The natural sun”. After reading them, some people reacted ferociously
and accused me of rejecting his revelations completely. Some defenders of these books even suggested that my eternal fate was at stake now and that I would go to hell when my worthless, sinful life had come to an end.
I think that part of that criticism on my point of view is based on the fact that the usual methods in astronomy to measure distances are not known to many people. But before raising doubts on those methods, it's important to know them. The most precise and reliable method is the parallax method, that is described here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax
Beyond reasonable
doubt that instrument is very reliable for distances up till 1000 light years
or so. The parallax method is based on trigonometry; since hundreds of years that
method is used for geographical purposes. The Hipparcos satellite used the
parallax method to measure the distance of thousands of nearby stars. The
distances from Earth to Sirius and Regulus were also measured. I think it's not
reasonable to remark - like some Lorber defendants did - that the Hipparcos way
of measuring was so unreliable that in a couple of hundred years the outcome
would be completely different. In the same way it's not reasonable to say that
the distance of a church tower, measured by trigonometry, will change
dramatically when the instruments improve: that method is exactly the same.
The distance from
Earth to Sirius is 8,6 light years. That's completely different from the data
in the "Natural Sun" of Lorber. In fact Lorber writes that Sirius is
bigger than 200 million stars (!) In reality Sirius is no more than 1.7 larger
than our Sun. It's a quite normal, main sequence star and certainly not a
giant.
Remember that Jakob Lorber spoke about the size and distance of celestial
bodies in a natural, physical sense. According to him 200 million stars
would circle around Sirius. That is simply not true: there's only one star - its companion Sirius-B - that encircles Sirius. It's not necessary to
travel to Sirius to confirm that, because the same method to measure distances
is used to schedule flights from NASA spacecraft to the planets of our own
solar system. If those measurements were completely unreliable, NASA and ESA
(European Space Agency) would not be able to plan a flight to other members of
our solar system like Pluto, Uranus, Neptune etc.
Lorber writes that Regulus is the largest star of the universe we can observe; its seize and brightness would almost be unmeasurable. However, Regulus turned out
to be a quite normal star, not the gigantic star at a tremendous distance that
is described by Lorber. That star is lying about 77,5 light years from Earth. It's approximately 288 times brighter than our sun. For a main sequence star, that's nothing special. Regulus is certainly not the supergiant with a seize of millions of light years that is described by Jakob Lorber. Rejecting those precise and reliable
measurements is much too easy, because there's no basis for that. Therefore I
think it's much more courageous to admit that Lorber made errors in his books.
I'm quite aware of
the fact that people always can say: "O, the stars and planets are so far
away, we can't touch them and investigate their surface; maybe our telescopes
and other instruments have to be improved to get a better picture of them, so
that we can better understand their structure and composition."
But how about the
errors Lorber made about the pyramids and the history of Egypt? There you will
find the same problems: the data Lorber gives are simply not correct. There has
never been one pharao who invented the method how to build pyramids. In fact
the skills to build pyramids have been developed during a period of a couple of
hundred years. The basic form of it was the 'mastaba', in which important
people of the pre-dynastic period were buried.
Later on a number
of mastaba's were placed on each other; the first pyramids were built in this
way. There has never been one pharao - 'the Shivinz', according to the Great
Gospel of John - who suddenly invented the technique to build them, like Lorber
writes.
I can almost go on
indefinitely to tell about other very strange stories in the Lorber books. But
in that case my story would become much too long.
Everybody is free
to believe what he or she wants. The only thing I wanted to do is to show that
not all passages in the books of Lorber are beyond doubt, and that there is reason
to believe that some descriptions, especially those about the universe, are
wrong. After reading the works of many spiritual authors, whose religious insights contradict each other, I didn't lose faith. My belief in God and Jesus is much
more important than the works of a single prophet. And I won't defend the undefendable.
So be it.
