88. Here the love destroyed death, and opened the fast seal, that the will might again enter into that which it was before [it was] the creature; and so we all must follow him upon the path which he has made open for us; none can see God, unless God become first man in him, which is brought to pass in faith's desire, and even then the corrupt will (which is apprehended in the death and anger of God, and which blooms in the earthly essence, and brings forth fruit unto death) be wholly mortified, and fall into the free resignation, into the will and mercy of God: And then the own will is with and in Christ at nature's end in the grand mystery of God, viz. in God's hands. God's hands are the eternal desire, or the eternal will, which is unchangeable; thus the creaturely self-will dies; it enters wholly into the nothing, that it might no more live to itself, but to God.
89. Thus it falls out also in the philosophic work; when the artist has first seen great wonders, which the creaturely and natural will has wrought in the power [of] Venus, insomuch that he supposes that he is nigh thereunto; even then nature does first die in his work, and becomes a dark night unto him; the property and power of all the forms must give forth themselves from their centre, and fall upon nature's end; all do freely yield over themselves as one dead essence, and there is no longer any effectual working therein, all is divided in the crown into the thousandth number, and then it is again in the mystery as nature's end as it was before it came into the creaturely being; understand, the essential desire, viz. the expressed Mercury, must again come unto the end of its selfishness, and resign itself into the speaking word.
90. The corporal essence remains in the centre of the four elements till the judgment of God, which now at death stands in the centre of Sol, viz. in the compaction of Venus and Mercury, which compaction at death falls wholly into one [thing], viz. into one power of Jupiter, that is, into the centre of the liberty; for here the desire to cold and heat goes out, all earthly will and desire of the properties dies, and there is no more any hunger after the earthly, or death's property.