choices: "Whatsoever thou buildest and sowest here in thy spirit, be it words, works, or thought, that will be thy eternal house."[37] "The good or evil that men do, by acts of will, enters into and forms the soul and so moulds its permanent habitation."[38] Adam once, and every man after him also once, has belonged, in the centre of the soul, to God, and whether it be Adam or some far-off descendant of him, each is the creator of his own real world, and settles for himself the atmosphere in which he shall live and the inner "tincture" of his abiding nature. "Adam fell"--and any man's name can here be substituted for "Adam"--"because, though he was a spark of God's eternal essence, he broke himself off and sundered himself from the universal Will--by contraction--and withdrew into self-seeking, and centred himself in selfishness. He broke the perfect temperature--or harmonious balance of qualities--and turned his will toward the dark world and the light in him grew dim."[39] To follow the dark world is to be Lucifer or fallen Adam, to follow the light world completely is to be Christ[40]--and before every soul the two {186} gates stand open.[41] In a powerful and penetrating passage he says: "We should take heed and beget that which is good out of ourselves. If we make an angel of ourselves we are that; if we make a devil of ourselves, we are that."[42] This last sentence is a good introduction to Boehme's conception of "the next world"--"the great beyond." He was as completely free of the crude idea that heaven is a shining locality in the sky, and hell a yawning pit of fire below the earth, as the most exact scientific scholar of the modern world is likely to be. He had grasped the essential and enduring character of man's spiritual nature so firmly that he ceased to have any further interest in the mythological aspects in which vivid and pictorial imagination has invested the unseen world. "God's presence itself," he says, "is heaven, and if God did but put away the veiling shadows, which now curtain thy sight, thou wouldst see, even where thou now art, the Face of God and the heavenly gate. God is so near that at any moment a holy Birth [a Birth into the Life of God] may be accomplished in thy heart,"[43] and, again, in the same book he writes: "If man's eyes were opened he would see God everywhere, for heaven is everywhere for those who are in the innermost Birth. When Stephen saw heaven opened and Jesus at the right hand of God, his spirit did not swing itself aloft into some heaven in the sky, but it rather penetrated into the innermost Birth where heaven always is. Thou must not think that God is a Being who is off in an upper heaven, or that when the soul departs it goes many hundred thousands of miles aloft. It does not need to do that, for as soon as it has entered the innermost Birth it is in heaven already with God--_near and far in God is one thing_."[44]