Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 3, sect. 904

904. The mental hunger within the being bears no appropriate relationship whatsoever to one single life on Earth. What we can see is that it is of such enormous dimensions that its satisfaction can be created only over many lives on Earth, and the same applies equally to the satiation that has already been achieved with the lower stages. As these stages have not been experienced in the present life the satiation that the individual already possesses regarding these stages cannot possibly have been acquired during the present life. That this satiation is nevertheless present becomes clear through the fact that we do not all want the same things. What is of enormous interest to one being can be correspondingly uninteresting to another. Some beings find their entire lust for life in being slaughterers, hunters or warriors, while others would lose their entire lust for life if they were forced to adopt such a way of living. Some human beings are immensely intellectual or gifted in art or literature, while others are very naive, credulous and with few talents, without as a result being abnormal. We therefore cannot deny the fact that the collective appearance of the beings represents the aforementioned scale, a scale that even in fact consists of the most beautifully harmonious sequence rising from imperfection to perfection without any gaps or missing links. If the beings did not grow from one step to another, how would this scale have come about or be able to exist?
If we, for example, take a section of the steps on this scale and number them from 1 to 10, there will be some beings that are born on step number 1, others on step number 2 and so on. But how can it be an expression of justice to allow some beings to be born on such a primitive step as number 1, while at the same time other beings can be born on a step so far above number 1 and as perfect as number 10? Since none of the beings concerned have lived before, they themselves cannot, as we have touched on in previous sections, be in the slightest way to blame for their position in the scale. So what is the purpose of this scale? If some beings can be born on such a perfect step as step 10, perfect, that is, when compared to step 1, without themselves having done anything whatsoever previously to have deserved it or caused it, why cannot all beings be born on the same step? And if the beings really can be born on their respective steps without any kind of previous entitlement or cause of their own making, their presence on the step in question must be treated as a miraculous dictate manifested by Providence. And in this case it will be just as easy for Providence to place the beings on step number 10 as on step number 1 on the mental scale. All underlying steps with suffering, pain and enrichment of experience and knowledge are thereby superfluous. But if they are superfluous, the picture we get of Providence is a less favourable one. For there would then be, as we have also touched on earlier, absolutely no other grounds for the beings' terrible injuries and sufferings, their involvement in wars, massacres and killing, "hell fire" or their lives with "weeping and gnashing of teeth", than a chance whim, a sadistic streak or a perverse tendency on the part of Providence.