Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1369

1369. All human beings must therefore go through the same amount of suffering, but fortunately not at the same time. Some terrestrial human beings are, as previously mentioned, at the moment in the light or in a blissful state, which means, are discarnated. Another section find themselves amid mutilations and accidents, wandering around on mental and physical crutches, while others find themselves enjoying a certain form of physical happiness or a so-called "normality", and experience war only as the normal wear and tear of old age. The same is true too of the created things – the "green grass" and the "ships on the sea" and so on. Here there must also be things that are subject to physical death, things that are in a process of dissolution or destruction to make way for the creation of new things. If the created things, the works of Nature, as they gradually accomplished their mission, did not dissolve again and become matter, how could there be material for new works or creations? We will soon return to how many deaths or how great an amount of suffering must befall a terrestrial human being while incarnated in flesh during its existence from the ape stage to the "perfect human being". But we must first take a brief look at the capacity of war itself or of the killing principle. What has not been added to it to date in terms of refined methods of killing, instruments of war and destructive devices? Does war in its modern, present-day form not consist of an arrangement of the most ingenious technical and chemical phenomena? Are not phenomena such as plague bacteria, death rays and poisonous gas almost stillborn energies of war when compared with the "atom bomb", the latest major devastating refinement of war, in conjunction with all the other ingenious modern war equipment with which terrains have been depopulated and radiant cultural centres and cities transformed into heaps of rubble? What is one single victim of war beside the total number claimed by major war or the zone of the killing principle since "Adam" or the "ape-man"? Indeed, even if the number of victims killed and disabled by such a "war" was between fifty and a hundred million, of what significance would this be compared to the billions of victims killed and disabled in the sphere of darkness or the entire zone of war from "Adam" to "Christ"? If we bear in mind that all the people in the world during the long course of their evolution from "ape-man" to "civilised human being" must go through the same, and experience a series of lives in which they have been murdered, another series of lives in which they have been maimed and disabled, just as they have also experienced a series of lives with severe illnesses, we gain here for the first time a truer idea of the melting pot of God Himself or the "day of judgment".
If we put into concrete figures the attack and defence employed during the sphere of the day of judgment in the spiral cycle and the resulting numbers of killed, wounded, maimed, sick and suffering through the ages, plus the heaps of rubble produced by the war, we would get a rather telling picture of the specific principle and structure of the sphere of death. When we reckon that about two billion people are incarnated in flesh on the Earth at the present time, while a more or less corresponding number of the Earth's human beings are in a discarnated state, that is, on the spiritual plane, and that every single one of these four billion people of the Earth has gone through the zone of the killing principle and has lost his or her life there in unnatural ways in the course of say four incarnations, and we also reckon on four incarnations with disability as well as four incarnations with illnesses – these numbers in all cases being set extremely low – we will thus see from this that the "day of judgment" or the "war" (the zone of the killing principle) on the continents and seas of the Earth has caused sixteen billion murders, sixteen billion disabilities and sixteen billion lives with ill-health besides all the lives that have been lost in the so-called natural way through old age, which is of course the wear and tear caused by the struggle for life or the drive for self-preservation. The numbers mentioned here are far from final or adequate, but they are sufficient to provide a little insight into the extent of the true panorama of the ideologies or principle of dictatorship (the "right of the stronger") of "war" or the old world epoch. What is mankind's latest and greatest major war with its losses on the battlefield of today, and what is the number of fatalities and disabilities from the concentration camps and gas chambers and other methods of extermination – indeed, even taking into account the destructive capacity of the "atom bomb" – compared to the numbers affected by the zone of war or the killing principle with its billions upon billions of corpses, disabled, sick and helpless people, its billions of created things that have been reduced to ruins by war? Is it anything other than just one stroke of a clock in a long wave of time, a fleeting second in this great "day of judgment" or this domain of the old world epoch? In truth, it is a dark past that terrestrial mankind has left behind. It is gratifying that a new war-destroying world epoch is making its entry into the sphere of the Earth. And yet these billions of corpses and heaps of rubble are but shavings in God's workshop. They are the superfluous mass that has been hewn out of the block of marble in order that the work of art, the "human being in God's image", could emerge on Earth.