God Almighty is closer to everything than anything else, but everything is infinitely distant from Him. For example, if the sun possessed consciousness and the power of speech, it would be able to converse with you by means of a mirror held in your hand. It would have power of disposal over you as it wished. Indeed, although it would be closer to you than the pupil of your eye, which is like a mirror, you would be approximately four thousand years’ distance from it and could in no way draw closer to it. If you progressed and rose to the position of the moon and came to the point of being face to face with it, you would still only be able to be a sort of mirror to it.
Similarly, although the All-Glorious One, Who is the Sun of Pre-Eternity and Post-Eternity, is closer to everything than anything else, everything is infinitely distant from Him. Only one who traverses all beings, rises above particularity and gradually passes through the thousands of veils in the degrees of universality till he approaches a Divine Name which encompasses all beings, and then traverses the many degrees beyond it, may be honoured by a sort of Divine proximity.
For example, a private is far inferior in rank to the commander-in-chief. He looks to his commander through the small sample of his commander’s rank he sees in his corporal, at a great distance and beyond many veils, as it were. To gain true proximity to his rank through his corporate personality, the private has to pass through many universal degrees or ranks, like that of lieutenant, captain, and major. Whereas the commander-in-chief can be present with the private and seeing, in person as well as in meaning, through his commands, regulations, view, decree, and knowledge. Since this truth has been proved decisively in the Sixteenth Word, we deem that sufficient and cut short the discussion here.
Again it comes to mind that you are thinking of asking: “I deny the existence of the heavens and I do not believe in the angels, so how can I believe in someone travelling in the heavens and meeting with the angels?”
Yes, of course, it is difficult to demonstrate something and convince someone like you over whose eyes a veil has been drawn and who sees only what is immediately apparent to them. But the truth is so brilliant that even the blind can see it, so we also say what is unanimously agreed, that the depths of space are full of matter called ‘ether’. Subtle energies like light, electricity, and heat point to the existence of some subtle matter which fills space. For just as fruits clearly demonstrate the existence of the tree that bore them, flowers their flower-bed, shoots their seed-bed, and fishes the sea, the stars also thrust before the mind’s eye the necessary existence of their source, seed-bed, sea, and flower-bed.
Since there are different formations in the world above us and different rules are seen to be in force under different conditions, the heavens, which