Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1327

1327. It would therefore be foolish and would reveal one's naivety personally to attack a rich man, a great "businessman", a "stock-exchange magnate" or a private person who observes the laws of the state and who is socially very much in favour or admired and honoured because of his large "bank account" or fortune. He cannot of course help the fact that in the cycle or in evolution there is such a transition stage from undisguised barbarity and the principle of brute force to a higher intellectual culture of neighbourly love, which absolutely all terrestrial human beings must go through in order to be formed in "God's image". One can just as well begin to blame him for not being an ape, an elephant, a bird or a fish. The "bank-account culture" is to all terrestrial human beings of today the same as water is to a fish. Without water a fish can neither breathe nor live. Without the effects of the "bank-account culture" neither the ordinary terrestrial human being nor the single nation of today could possibly assert itself. Without the "bank-account culture" terrestrial mankind would never be able to gain access to the experiences or the dark phenomena that provide those very experiences that one "should give rather than receive", that one "did not come to the world to be served" or to live at the expense of others, but in order "to serve" and contribute to creating happiness for all other living beings. This alone is the mission of Providence or "God's image". Without being at one with this image there would be no experience of immortality, no experience of one's own highest self, one's own exalted identity as a "son of God", the master of time and space, that is the ruler of eternity; there would be no real feeling of the highest bliss or absolute joy in existing. Our analysis here is therefore absolutely no more intended to provoke persecution of, attacks on or recriminations against the "holders of bank accounts" and the "bank-account culture" than it is intended to be an attack on the water or the ocean with its content of fish. Life must be lived and must therefore run its course. The object of our analysis here, as in all the other sections of Livets Bog, is to show the divinity and meaning of this life, in the darkness as well as in the light. And wherever this meaning is revealed, all attacks, all persecution, all intolerance, hatred and revenge will cease, and the understanding of one's neighbour, and thereby of life, will become the heritage of the living being. And the universally overwhelming warmth and light of love will emanate from all eyes, from every hand and mouth and become reciprocally a matter of course for all terrestrial human beings.