© Kurt Eggenstein: 'The Prophet J. Lorber Predicts Coming Catastrophies and the True Christianity'


Lorber's Method of Recording the Inner Voice


   Lorber's biographer, von Leitner, reported his observations as follows:
    "Lorber started this business of writing, which from now on was to be the main purpose of his life, almost every day before breakfast, not infrequently leaving this untouched in his absorption in the task. He would sit at a small table, usually a cap on his head, very close to the stove in winter, and in a steady flow let his pen travel over the paper, wholly concentrating within himself, writing at moderate speed, never stopping to reflect or to correct anything he had written. On repeated occasions he said, when speaking of this, that on hearing the voice speaking to him he also had a visual image of the things he heard.    According to him, he found it even easier to impart the words he heard within him if he could pass them on to another person in spoken form. And he did indeed dictate occasional essays to his friends, and indeed whole books of several hundred pages. He would then sit beside the writer, calmly looking in front of him and never interrupting the flow of words, nor would he change any sentence construction or even a single phrase." 6
    "It is no doubt of interest to note that Lorber maintained that he heard the Inner Voice, which he called the Voice of the Lord, always in his heart, but those of other spirits from the back part of the head.
   Lorber did write thousands of pages like a medium, yet he cannot really be called a writing medium, for that is a medium whose hand is guided mechanically by another intelligence. Lorber, on the other hand, wrote down of his own accord what another intelligence whispered, so that he would hear it as though with his ears, as he put it." 7
   "In 1858, Lorber wrote to a friend about the spiritual source speaking within him, which he felt to be the voice of Jesus Christ, the Living Word: 'As to the Inner Word, how this is perceived, I can only say, speaking of myself, that I always perceive the most holy Word of the Lord in the region of my heart, like a thought of utmost clarity, pure and light, as spoken words. No one else, however close to me, can hear anything of a voice. Yet for me this Voice of Grace sounds forth more clearly than the loudest material sound. That, however, is really all I can tell you from my experience." 8
   Foreign words unknown to Lorber were not spelled out for him. His friends would explain them, or they had to consult a dictionary themselves.
    Jakob Lorber had the same experience as others had reported who had had their revelations to proclaim before him.
    Saint Catherine of Siena (1347 80) left no doubt that the message she had to give had been revealed to her by God. The title page of her Dialogue bears the words "Dictated by the Lord". 9

    Emanuel Swedenborg stated on his deathbed that all his revelations had been genuine, coming from the Lord.' 10
   Lorber found his mission a burden. He would at times ask the Lord to relieve him of it, as he did not feel up to the task. But the dictation continued, and Lorber may well at times have recalled the words of Jeremiah, who said that the highest of wills prevailed (Jer 20, 7 11).
    It is remarkable that both in Judaism and in the Christian faith, God only very rarely used the higher or lower ranks of the clergy as channels for His revelations, choosing lay people instead. According to Jakob Boehme, this "makes it all the more evident that they come from the hand of God". Jean Guitton, a Catholic theologian, remarked that "in our days, the 'office of prophet' seems to be more and more conferred upon lay persons." 11 Another Catholic theologian, Professor H. Fries, appears to have discerned one of the reasons for this when he said: "The Christian message has lost relevance for people, because it has been conveyed in a most inadequate fashion." 12    Another good reason why great revelations are in the present age only given to men and women who are not part of the establishment clearly is that many revelations the writings of St Hildegard of Bingen,13 St. John of the Cross 14" and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, for example have been shown to have been distorted by churchmen who changed or deleted parts of them. Anything that does not fit the system is dismissed. It is not the Spirit of the Lord that determines the truth, but human standards and the established system.    The New Revelation states explicitly that "many will take offence at the tremendous light of the New Revelation, for it will throw light upon their edifice that for long was kept in the dark. Nevertheless, light must come" (Pr 288). Assurance is also given that despite the "foxes scenting danger" and seeking to destroy, this Revelation will reach the world undistorted. (Pr 108 and 288)
    Jakob Lorber was no medium whose hand was guided in automatic writing. He never went into a trance, nor did he enter into ecstasy. For several hours every day, he would write down, his mind fully awake, what the Inner Voice told him.    The impulse from the spirit firt had to pass through the whole of Jakob Lorber's soul sphere before he was able to formulate what he had heard in his own words. This explains why the work was written in a style peculiar to the writer, using expressions current at the time. (Some of the expressions used by Lorber would no longer be understood by the present generation in Germany and synonyms had to be used instead.)
    Friedrich Christoph Oetinger made the following comment relating to the way verbal inspiration is always expressed in the current form of language: "Thus the grain of divine revelation will always grow on the stalk of man's conception." 16 Swedenborg put it like this: "When an angel breathes the Words of the Lord to a human being destined to utter or write down words of inspiration, this stimulates a thought process in that person that will usually find expression in human terms. The form of expression will be such as the person inspired normally uses; it will always be in accord with his particular interpretation and his individual life style." (Adversia III 6865 6966)
    Viktor Mohr, a man who understands these things very well, goes into the process in more detail in the journal 'Das Wort' (8/1972):
    "A particular form of medianistic function is the reception of the Inner Word, of inspiration from the highest sphere of the spirit, when God, the Eternal Word, speaks within and to a person. This voice of the divine within the heart of man is infinitely subtle, a spiritual pulse that cannot be interpreted in earthly terms, when receptive souls are penetrated by the immanent ray of Christ, the spark of the divine that is always one with God, the Father Spirit. This true, imperishable part proclaims himself as 'I'".
    "We must not, of course, believe that the Father Spirit uses the profane words that are spoken or written by the mediator. If this highest divine inspiration is to be appropriately expressed in words of human language, it must first pass through the soul sphere of the person to whom it is conveyed. This is why such divine messages are expressed in the language peculiar to the mediator. The standard by which such revelations is to be judged is therefore not the outer garb of the words used to express it, but their inner content, insofar as it is divine truth" (p. 296).
    Any attempts that may be made to interpret Lorber's prophetic inspiration as hallucinations would be wholly misguided. Psychiatrists have known for some time that perception of hallucinatory speech will after some time always be followed by disintegration of ego. 17 No one could have auditory hallucinations for years without showing signs of mental and physical breakdown. Yet to the day he died, Lorber was well balanced and perfectly sane in his mental outlook.
    Depth psychology also cannot help us to understand Jakob Lorber as a person. The scientific information given, often with highly accurate details relating to the life of elementary particles and other data in the field of astronomy that have only been established in recent years, completely rules out this kind of interpretation. The late writer and theologian, Hellmuth von Schweinitz, rather aptly commented as follows:
    "To settle the Lorber question by interpreting it through depth psychology does not carry conviction. What comes to the surface of his consciousness in his writings are things that cannot have come from the sphere of his limited human knowledge. A lifetime would not suffice to acquire it all, nor could any creative imagination encompass it."
    "Depth psychology is an inadequate approach to gain understanding of something that simply cannot be interpreted in psychoanalytical terms.
   Nor can Lorber's life work be explained by philosophical or theological speculation. Here, as with all phenomena involving prophesy, there remains a residue incapable of explanation, and this has to be denied or accepted." 18
    If the work is compared with the still existant letters that Jakob Lorber wrote to his friends, the similarity in style and idiom are quite obvious. His style is as simple and direct as his way of life.    There is nothing in it of the cold, abstract style one finds with theological works. There are no dialectical artifices, no complicated structures difficult to comprehend. What he has to say is full of warmth. Comparing Lorber's writings with the theological literature, one can see why the latter is not exactly popular reading. As Cardinal Newman said, it did not "please God to save his people with dialectics" 20
    Where Lorber makes prophetic statements relating to science and technology, his visions of the future are expressed in indirect terms, as has been a characteristic of prophetic statements through the ages. For instance, when Lorber says that in the twentieth century people would communicate across the seas with the aid of 'lightning', this refers to radio communications. When he speaks of huge 'artificial eyes' in relation to astronomy, we know that these are optical and radio telescopes.
    The work was not entirely completed when Jakob Lorber died. Some years later, Gottfried Mayerhofer (1807 - 1877) in Trieste also heard the Inner Word and wrote some additional volumes.
   Mayerhofer was a German officer. When Prince Otto of Bavria became King of Greece, Mayerhofer went with him as a member of his entourage. Mayerhofer also carries conviction as a chosen prophet because he refers to later scientific discoveries with surprising accuracy. He mentioned, for example, that light had both physical and wave energy character. He explained the reasons for white, violet and red light at a time when such knowledge still lay years and years ahead.


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© Text: Kurt Eggenstein; © EDV-Bearbtg.by Gerd Gutemann