Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1112

1112. The "kingdom of bliss" is based exclusively on the culmination of the above-mentioned form of experience. And from this kingdom the "effects" that become the "causes" of the incipient "outer" life and movement of a new spiral are thus released. And from this kingdom the "effects" that are the first "cause" of the fact that we can "sense" at all are released too. "Sensory perception" is merely the reaction of these effects to the being's contact with "outer" substances.
But how does it come about that a being living exclusively in the "kingdom of bliss" can make contact with "outer" substances? During its culmination in the "kingdom of bliss" it has, as will be remembered, no "outer day-consciousness" and thereby no "outer" perceptible, conscious, material organism or body. In this kingdom it lives "day-consciously" in its "inner world" alone, which means in its past experiences. It is not conscious of any "outer" passing detail or experience in its "now". "Outer time" as well as "outer space" exist in its consciousness merely as "memories", that is as its "past". But it does not feel the above-mentioned "outer time" and "outer space" in this way. On the contrary the "inner world" has also its specific special feeling of a "now", in which the being experiences and senses. There is, however, this difference between the "now" in the "kingdom of bliss" and the "now" in the "outer world" that while the "now" in the "kingdom of bliss" is merely a gateway for previous experiences or "memories", the "now" in the "outer world" is a gateway for entirely "new experiences". While the "now" in the "outer world" constitutes an unshakeable dividing line between "past" and "future" or already experienced details and future experiences of details and becomes "indicative of outer time" and "indicative of outer space", which in turn is the same as "indicative of age" and "indicative of place", the "now" in the "kingdom of bliss" is neither "indicative of age" nor "indicative of place" in the "outer world". The being here has consciously nothing to do with the year or date of the "outer world", just as little as it consciously has anything to do with "outer" material "space" or "place". Its daily experience here in the "kingdom of bliss" of "space" and "place" is merely what it once gathered when it was conscious in the "outer material world". Only these past circumstances are accessible to the being's sensory perception in the "kingdom of bliss". Since, during the experience, they pass through the individual's "now" in the same way as the experiences in the "outer world" passed through its "now" when it lived in it, there will thus, here in the "kingdom of bliss", be a kind of "past", "present" and "future" demarcated by the "now". But the experience of "time" becomes here something quite other than it is on the "outer material plane".
One can thus experience, as the realistic "present", points in time or details of years that occurred thousands, indeed up to millions of years before the year or the point in time that at the moment are the realistic "present" in the "outer world", just as there can exist a "future" ahead of the same "now" or "present" in the "kingdom of bliss" that, likewise millions of years ago, was already the "past" for the individual when it was in the "outer material world". In the same way in this being's "now" or "present" in the "kingdom of bliss" places, terrains, continents, species of animals and plants that in the "outer world" have long since ceased to exist will pass by as realistic experience. Indeed, many of its own terrestrial lives that have long since been completed in the "outer world" will exist here as an as-yet unexperienced "future" and are next in turn to gradually pass through the being's "now" and become the "present", in order thereafter to become the "past" in the being's consciousness for the second time. Thus we see here that what has been experienced realistically on the physical plane and thereby forms the "past" on this plane, can become the "future", the "present" and the "past" again on the "plane of bliss".