Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1066

1066. With the above-mentioned acknowledgement as a fact it is easy to keep oneself free of muddled thinking. Thus it is obvious that the life of the living being is but a combination of "eternity" and the "now". "Eternity" is its "I", and the "now" is its experience of life. It is naturally a matter of course that "eternity" is the aspect of the living being that is unalterable and constitutes therefore stillness. Something that is alterable cannot possibly be eternal. It is likewise a matter of course that the "now" must constitute only the aspect of the living being that is alterable. Something that cannot be changed can have neither a past nor a future, for what then would define these two phenomena? And where no past or future can be defined, no experience of the "now" can exist either. The "now" can thus exist only as the shortest possible "temporary" reality. Any detail whatsoever in the experience of life will thus exist only as something "temporary", and must continuously disappear in order to make way for something "following", which is established as fact through "cause and effect" and the "cycle". Therefore when we say that a "living being" is "loving" or "unloving", "hateful" or "envious", "naive" or "highly developed", it will here be easy to see that we are expressing the alterable aspect of the "living being", the "temporary" aspect, the "now". We perceive or express a specific, temporary detail or a point in the changeability, the manifestation, which in turn is the same as the "experience of life". But since changeability is in turn the same as the cycle, we thus express a specific, temporary point in this cycle with each of the mentioned forms of manifestation. The name of the kind of movement (form of manifestation) that in a moment of experience constitutes the I's "now" is what is expressed by terms such as "loving", "unloving", "highly developed" or "naive" and so on. What we call "plants", "animals", "human beings", "races", "beasts of prey", "birds", "fish" and so on is an entire series of experiences of related forms of manifestation, which in turn means related forms of experiences of the "now".