1117. The above-mentioned longing is not particularly well known to the terrestrial human being, since it is sometimes subjected to such great problems in its daily life, and it struggles with such tremendous suffering that simple, ordinary "fatigue" is, so to speak, an absolute "blessing" compared with the sufferings and difficulties that its senses are subject to in vast areas. "Fatigue" is thus merely a quite microscopic phenomenon beside the coarse phenomena shown here by the being's daily life. Indeed, it is of course not merely the experiences of suffering that are coarse, material phenomena; the same is also true to a great extent of the "pleasures" on the plane of the present terrestrial human being. These are sometimes of such a robust, material nature that such a fine and delicate phenomenon of consciousness as that evinced by natural fatigue is almost entirely ignored. Neither is this "fatigue" regarded as any particular "obstacle" to "pleasure", until it has been ignored for such long time that it has developed into an unnatural* suffering or damage to the organism and has thereby become catastrophic for sensory perception itself and thereby for the experience of life. But then it is not as a rule known as "fatigue". Then it has become an "illness", a "nervous breakdown", a "psychic disturbance", "mental illness" or in some other way an undermining factor for the mental and bodily wellbeing that the experience of life is otherwise intended to provide. Here the being's longing is not focused on such an insignificant thing as getting rid of ordinary, natural "fatigue", which, when compared with such difficulties as those mentioned above cannot be felt as an "obstacle". Here therefore in the main the being's demands concentrate only on the longing to get rid of the "illness" or the robust physical and mental difficulties that have arisen.
      The situation is quite different when the being has made its way through all these imperfect states and finds itself in the highest and most perfect part of the "outer world", where its "daily life" is such a trained and perfect automatic function fulfilling all the laws of love that it is liberated from all forms of unnatural suffering and difficulties and where the absolutely only phenomenon that still remains as a weak tinge or a faint reflection of an "obstacle" is natural "fatigue". In this magnificent superterrestrial existence, which life in the "divine world" is, "fatigue" constitutes thus the little "obstacle" that can make the individual imagine a similarly high form of existence as that in which it finds itself, but entirely liberated from the little "obstacle" that "fatigue" brings about, which in reality means liberated from the cause of "fatigue", that is "work" or "innovation". This imagination thus becomes the provoking factor for, or the germ of, the "longing" for such a form of existence.
 
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* Translator's note: "naturlig" (natural) in the first Danish edition corrected to "unaturlig" (unnatural) in the 2004 edition.