Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 4, sect. 1574

1574. But the transformation of the organs continues unceasingly and determines that each and every kind of experience gives rise to "satiation" and a longing for its contrast. And this longing then in turn leads the heavenly being downwards towards darkness, away from the "Garden of Eden", to satiation with the experience of darkness, in order thereafter, through its longing for light, to lead it once again towards the heavenly world, and so on continuously. Eternal life is thus an eternally continuing principle in the form of an alternating experience of mental light and darkness. But is it not precisely this great general principle that we see recurring in a multitude of variations on the physical plane? Indeed, is not everything subject to this principle? Can we point to anything whatsoever that is not at one stage or another in a cycle? Are not the substances or materials in an eternally changing rhythm from solid to liquid, from liquid to gaseous, and from gaseous to ray-formed (spiritual) states, and from these states back to gaseous, liquid and solid states. There is thus nothing that is today what it was millions of years ago, just as the things of today will be quite different millions of years from now. Everything is thus in movement, everything is journeying onwards. And this journeying is thus rooted in the above-mentioned great principle of cycles. Is it not for this reason that it is written: "while the Earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease"? What is this other than a continuing cycle? And is not reincarnation in principle the same cycle? Is not life here, according to the cosmic analyses, an eternally alternating experience of physical and spiritual existence? Through the sexual principle or the "highest fire", life is thus experienced in the form of cycles. First we have the great cycle (the spiral cycle) that we experience in the form of involution and evolution. Then we have the many smaller cycles that we call "terrestrial lives", interspersed by their related spiritual existences, by means of which the individual passes through this cycle. And then we have the fact that our daily life or our actions are links in cycles that we call "fate". In fact, our fate is simply the cycle of our actions. These effects are simply new stages of the energies sent out by us though these actions. But just as terrestrial human beings know nothing of their spiritual existence between their physical lives, and therefore do not know that they are immortal, they know also nothing of the effects of their actions, which are bound by cycles, and therefore do not know that everything that they can experience is merely an effect of the energies previously sent out by their I, this I being the only "fixed point" upon which the cycles of its own emanated energies can be based. They thus do not know that they are each the only absolute originator of their fate.

Symbol no. 12

Life and Death