139. Fifth section. Here we are in contact with a number of people whose faculty of feeling is even more primitive than that of those people in the fourth section. While the latter's intelligence and feeling are combined in such a way that the manifestations of their primitive mental tendencies, such as inconsideration, egoism, greed and so forth, are disguised so that they still find themselves basically "within the law", then those people in the fifth section reveal manifestations still less disguised and more primitive, although coming from the same coarse mental tendencies. Their faculty of feeling is still near the level of uncivilized nature-people, manifesting itself in open robbery and looting, and they do not even hesitate to commit murder in those cases where there is a need to satisfy egoistic tendencies. In this way they find themselves in conflict with the authorities for justice and morality whose laws they certainly do not keep voluntarily; therefore they appear in life as "criminals". Of course this does not include those individuals who, under the term "sex criminals", are wrongly included in the "criminal world". For in most cases these latter individuals belong to a much higher level of consciousness than the "criminals", and because they are ill and abnormal they should be treated quite differently; (this is dealt with in later sections of Livets Bog). The people whom we are going to deal with here, on the contrary, are fully normal individuals, but are the younger souls within our civilization. As is shown in Livets Bog, terrestrial mankind in its eternal existence is developing from the animal kingdom through the stages of uncivilized nature people up through civilization and further to the real human kingdom. Not all terrestrial people have advanced equally on this journey. Some of them are approaching, or have entered, the Great Birth's forecourt, others are just arriving from the regions of nature people and have only recently entered the field of civilization and this is really why we have so many stages of character and consciousness in varying degrees of development. Human beings who, in their recent incarnations, have belonged to the region of nature people but in their present birth have now entered civilization, will not find it as easy to adapt themselves to its circumstances and its laws as will those people who have been born into civilization through many lives. So it is quite natural that their innate, primitive state of nature is bound to make them overstep the discipline of the community in varying degrees; and it is here we have what is called "crime". So criminals are younger souls in evolution who have just started to come under the influence of civilization's "upbringing". As regards the nature of this upbringing, with its prisons and its death penalties, there will be a great deal to change and to harmonize with true physical and spiritual health; therefore we will come back to these problems later on in Livets Bog. Among these younger beings in evolution there will be some whose circumstances have been of such a kind that they have had a very forced development of their intelligence and at the same time such a slight development of their feelings that they are absolutely inaccessible to religious influence from the old world impulse. They are therefore quite impervious to any kind of "conversion" based on that moral preaching at present manifested in churches, temples, parish halls, on the roads and in the streets, out in the open air and through the numberless sects and religious communities of which the world is so full at this time, for this type of moral preaching can only be regarded as naïve by such people because of their highly developed faculty of intelligence and on account of this fact they are placed in Group A. The way to "conversion", or to a more elevated life, is definitely for them - just as for all other people within that group - only through the direct speech of life, and through the new world impulse with its analyses and its terminology more satisfying to their intelligence.
      As the nature of the direct speech of life is more or less rough or gentle, depending on how coarse or fine the sharpening and improving is meant to be in the consciousness of each individual, then all those people who still have coarse mental tendencies which need to be fined down, will sooner or later become subject to the rough side of this speech of life - that is, if they are not in the middle of it already. So one cannot advocate enough the development of love and understanding towards those young beings in the school of life. One should not interpret by this that they should be pampered or acclaimed as real heroes, as has happened to the big "gang leaders" who at various times have been admired by the ignorant masses when, in some cases, they have forced the police and custodians of the law to capitulate. This attitude means that people are actually taking part in holding these childish souls down in life's threatening and poisoned swamps of consciousness and participating in allowing them to remain unaware of the richer and happier forms of life. One's behaviour towards these people must be sound, natural and free of hatred, showing a resolute dissociation from all their lower tendencies, while one's own life sets them an irreproachably good example. And one must understand that underlying their outwardly hard mental shell - whether expressing itself in open robbery, manslaughter and murder or in "masked robbery" and ruthless exploitation - there, too, beats a human heart throbbing with joys and sorrows, and that within them there exists a small, divine spark of life, laboriously making its own way towards the light. With this attitude one has found a way in harmony with the future Kingdom of Peace, the only way which can lead to the elimination of all complicity in supporting the "criminal world" on Earth.