Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1476

1476. And the solution to this riddle now begins to become vitally important to terrestrial mankind, since, to a very great extent, this mankind is no longer in harmony with the moral precepts and doctrines handed down from the great leaders of the past. While agreement with these doctrines from the past brought the terrestrial human being great fundamental happiness through marriage – marriage being at that time the only fundamental and all-outshining thing of value in existence that could abundantly and copiously fill the individual's consciousness and daily life – marriage of today, as we have already seen in previous analyses, is such that, to an enormous extent, it makes life unhappy. Indeed, it can sometimes even become a stifling bond mentally tying and binding the spouse, so that this spouse cannot engage in any intellectual interest without meeting icy coldness and opposition from his or her marriage partner. Many spouses find themselves in the situation of having to comply with the demands of their marital partners, who are dissatisfied and hate their interests, and in complying in this way these spouses are thus compelled to stagnate spiritually or mentally. For such a being marriage is nothing but a mental prison cell. But when the nature of the individual's consciousness has gradually become such that marriage entered into during this individual's mature years can be experienced as happy only in the form of the "honeymoon period", which means, in the form of a very short repetition of a step in evolution from some point in the past, which therefore no longer really belongs to the being's present step in any other way, while its present step is characterised by a greater or lesser spectrum of quite different spheres of interest, it becomes apparent that the present-day individual is not the same primitive human being (from a marital point of view) as the human being of the past, for whom the traditional moral precepts were immediately suited and to whom they were directly given. That the being of today cannot therefore one hundred per cent comply with these moral precepts of the past is quite natural. It is evident from this that the man naturally cannot "leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife" to the extent that he did in the past.