Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1116

1116. Since the being in the "outer world" can "experience" solely by being an "active creator", by being an "active participant" in the phenomena that react to the senses as "experiences", and therefore has to do without very great areas of "time" and "space" in order to create and maintain its "outer" sensory bodies, which means, for its "struggle for existence", "instinct of self-preservation", "copulatory urge" or the survival of the species and so on, the being in the "outer world" to a corresponding extent lacks these areas of "time" and "space" that would provide a real culmination or one-hundred-per-cent "enjoyment" of the remainder of its creation and experience of life. It is true that the experiences in the "outer world" to a great extent are a "pleasure" too, and they can even be a very great "pleasure", for example in the "divine world", which, as will be remembered, is the "outer world's" culmination as regards the experience of divine "pleasure", but this "pleasure" does not exist without the being's direct "activity". At the same time as enjoying the "pleasure", it must maintain the thing that is the object of the "pleasure". And this maintenance costs concentration and the expenditure of energy, which in turn takes "time" and "space". And in this area of "time" and "space", the "pleasure" cannot possibly be in its purest form. The maintenance of a thing is determined exclusively by the "surmounting" of other things. "Surmounting" a thing is a "struggle". Even though this "struggle" in the most perfect case also means "pleasure", it is, nevertheless, in itself "work", and "work" gives rise in turn to "fatigue". "Fatigue" is in turn the same as "disharmony"; it is "microscopic pain" in the nervous system due to the wear and tear on this system that it has cost in order to produce the thing, whose nature, when complete, is "pleasure". The "pleasure" of the "outer world" thus leaves an incontestable trail of "fatigue", regardless of how elevated a plane it may belong to, and regardless of how noble and unselfish it may be reckoned to be. That "fatigue" is thus connected to "pleasure", "fatigue" being a kind of "impediment" to "pleasure", will invariably give rise to the longing in the individual for a "pleasure" to which no "fatigue" is connected, that is a "pleasure" appearing in its one-hundred-per-cent pure state.