The article ‘from feeling to thought’ follows how we can be sure for ourselves of thoughts that originate from our own inner life, because our feeling is the result of all our experiences in this life and in our past lives.

What we experience ourselves, we know for sure, but that does not apply in the first instance to all the ‘thoughts from another person’ which we hear or read.

When we read in the books by Jozef Rulof that we have already experienced millions of lives as a soul, no one will be able to feel with certainty whether this is true.

No single person on earth has experienced consciously in this life or in his past lives that he has already experienced millions of past lives.

Some people do have memories of previous lives, but no one consciously remembers millions of past lives.

On the other hand, not a single reader can determine with certainty that this information is untrue.

No one has consciously experienced that he did not have millions of past lives.

We are not conscious of a great deal of past lives, but that does not mean that they could not have been.

Not being conscious of a phenomenon does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

It only means that we cannot confirm this information with certainty from our own inner life.

The conclusion is that no one on earth knows with certainty whether the thought that we have had millions of lives is true or untrue.

No one will lie awake from this uncertainty, but we can ask ourselves the question for how much other ‘knowledge’ does the same uncertainty apply.

And do we always remain conscious of all the thoughts which we are not sure of, or in the course of time do we start to believe that we are sure of them after all?

With most of the information that we get to deal with during our life, in the first instance we are not sure whether it is the truth.

When we start to follow what happens within ourselves with all those thoughts offered by another person, then many people appear to not to continue to distinguish that original uncertainty.

A great many people finally consider the thoughts offered and repeat them as their own thoughts, without still feeling whether those thoughts are substantiated by their own feeling.

In the course of years, they no longer know from whom those thoughts were originally or when they entered.

They consider these thoughts as their own thoughts, they think that they are thinking them themselves, and in the worst case they can also start to believe that these thoughts are true.

In this way, people can reach a conviction, a belief, a thinking that is separate from the own inner life, and is also no longer corrected by the own feeling.

In this way, thinking and feeling can become two different worlds which can contradict each other.

At that moment, the human being loses his certainty of what is true.

Then the door of false security is wide open.

The book ‘Through the Grebbe line to Eternal Life’ describes an example of a woman Annie for whom the thinking and feeling have become completely different worlds.

She believed the words of Christ ‘love each other’, but at the same time she hated her husband Theo because in her eyes he was an incredible heretic, because he read spiritualist books about life after death.

When Annie became very seriously ill, Theo was not sad, because he believed that she would live on in the hereafter when she would die on earth, and then in his opinion she would probably be better off than she had been on earth.

Annie’s parents did not understand that he did not share their fear for her life.

He told his parents-in-law that he was not sad despite his love for their daughter, but the parents were uncertain whether they could accept his words.

That uncertainty did not last long.

Soon the parents thought that Theo had never loved their daughter and was therefore not sad.

After all, he was a heretic!

They were sure of the thought that Theo loved their daughter was untrue, not because they had experienced that untruth concretely, but as a result of their belief that unbelievers can do little good.

During a contact evening, a man remarked that accepting the knowledge of Jozef Rulof is not the own knowledge.

Jozef confirmed that accepting can only grow to the own knowledge when the human being also actually experiences what is being told.

Jozef himself only accepted something from his masters, when he could also see it with his own spiritual eyes.

This is why master Alcar let him experience thousands of out-of-body experiences, so that Jozef could experience everything which he was presented with as knowledge.

In this way, that knowledge of another person also became his own knowledge.

The man then told what he thought about karma, the thought that people experience particular consequences of actions from past lives.

He explained how in his opinion the working of karma is exactly, as he had understood that from the books of a particular doctrine that he had read about this subject.

Jozef asks him how he can be sure of that interpretation, because the man did not experience the spiritual laws which he is talking about with spiritual eyes.

The man did not build up his knowledge by means of out-of-body experiences, but he gathered his knowledge by reading books.

The man then started to consider that knowledge as certain, it had become his truth, his thinking, because he had thought about it carefully.

However, in fact he repeated what they had taught him.

His reflecting was the mimicking of someone else’s thoughts, without own certainty by means of the own experience.

He thought that he was thinking himself, but they were only thoughts.

How can we gain certainty in thoughts which come from another person?

We cannot check most stories from other people for truth, but that is not necessary either, because they are not relevant to our own inner development.

Sometimes, a thought from another person can be relevant, even if this seems improbable when it is first felt.

In this way, at a given moment Jozef Rulof received the thought ‘love your enemy’.

It is a thought that most people will not think from themselves, it is usually not the ‘own feeling’ to love your enemy.

Most people will immediately label this thought as inaccessible.

However, Jozef was faced with the task of finding out whether he could use that thought to steer his own actions.

During the time that he began to give his knowledge about life and death to other people, a great many people could not do anything with his teachings.

Many people dismissed his thoughts, and discussed this with their friends and acquaintances.

They not only did that openly, but often also behind his back.

And usually it was not just a rejection, but something was added to justify that rejection, because ‘you know all the things Jozef has done...’

When Jozef heard all the things that people told about him which he knew were absolutely untrue, he was faced with the task of dealing with this gossip without thinking darkly himself about the gossipers.

His spiritual leader Alcar then brought forward the thought ‘love your enemy’.

He gave Jozef the consideration to never respond to the gossip of another person with the same feeling that he received, but the opposite - to love the human being behind that gossip as soul.

Jozef set to work with that consideration in order to see what that thinking could bring him.

Jozef translated it into his own words by ‘If you say something horrible about me, I will counteract with something nice and something good about you.’

In this way, step by step, he built up a positive feeling towards the people who gossiped about him.

The more strongly people tried to hurt him with their gossip, the more loving he became towards these souls.

After Jozef had applied this thought from master Alcar for years, he could feel the truth of this thought for himself as the own experience.

Because he gave that thought a great deal of feeling and inspiration, his inner life received more light.

For him, this thought from another person had become an own knowing for certain, due to his own experience.

What we know for sure -- sources