Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1171

1171. The largest of these cycles is, as the reader already knows, the "spiral cycle". This cycle, like all other cycles, consists of two contrasts: "light" and "darkness". If the beings are in this "light", this "light" will be a reality, while the part of the spiral cycle that constitutes the contrast to the "light" will constitute merely an "imagined opposite" to the "light" and thereby be perceived as "darkness". If the beings are in the "darkness", this "darkness" will be a reality and thereby a "fact" or "light", while the "light" will then constitute merely an "imagined opposite" to this reality and thus constitute nothing but "darkness". Each of these two main stages of the spiral reaches a culmination. There are thus two culmination stages in the spiral – one in its light region and one in its dark region. At each of these two stages the being is totally independent. Between these two culmination zones or stages there are two other stages. These each constitute a combination of "growth" and "degeneration". When the living being is in the culmination zone of "light", it becomes satiated by the details of the "light" and thereby experiences a growing desire for the opposite of the "light". This desire is the very first feeble embryonic state of the "Fall". Only "darkness" can satisfy this desire. And the being begins to "eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" and is thereby changed or transformed more and more in favour of "darkness". This change takes place until the being's consciousness reaches an absolute culmination in "darkness". But during this period of change, the being has been neither a being of "light" nor a being of "darkness" in its purest form. It has been something in between these two phenomena. But if it has been neither the one nor the other of these two phenomena in its purest form it will have been merely a subordinate being during these stages. In the sphere of "light" a being that is no longer culminating in the "light" must inevitably be subordinate to a being that is culminating in this "light", just as in the sphere of "darkness" a being that is no longer culminating in the "darkness" must be subordinate to a being that is culminating in the "darkness". Since the subordinate being must inevitably be dependent on the superior one, the being in the transition zones or stages between the culmination of "light" and the culmination of "darkness" has thus lost its "independence".