Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1661

1661. By virtue of their organic structure as "half-sex beings" they can day-consciously remember the act only as an all-outshining physical pleasure based solely on sexual contact with the opposite sex. For the beings concerned this act is thus in reality merely an instinctive experience, an "experience of purely physical pleasure" without cosmic details or analysis. It is true that this act is highly praised or celebrated by poets, writers and other artists as something divine or the most desirable thing in life, but here we must remember that real artists are no longer purely "half-sex beings", even if they can still perceive only the opposite sex as the object of their sexual interest. But their artistic abilities reveal that they are about to leave the culminating zone of the "sphere of death", because they are beginning to have "cosmic life". "Art" is in itself nothing less than "cosmic life". And it is by virtue of this life or this waking sensory state that these beings have been able to perceive and glorify the mating state of the "half-sex being" as something higher and more divine than a feeling of purely physical pleasure.
But the culminating "half-sex being" can, as already mentioned, experience the act of copulation only as a feeling of purely physical pleasure. It is confronted by the cosmic nature of the sexual act in the same way as the plant is confronted by its sensation of the physical world. The plant, in accordance with its as-yet undeveloped organic structure, can experience the effect of the outer physical world on its organism or sensory apparatus only as an inkling of pleasantness or unpleasantness. The plant cannot day-consciously experience the cause of this incipient feeling of pleasantness and unpleasantness. From a bodily point of view it is on the physical plane, but, as previously mentioned, it can sense the effects of this plane only as an undetailed inkling of pleasantness and unpleasantness. As previously mentioned in "Livets Bog", the plant's day-consciousness is in the kingdom of bliss. In the same way as the plant, from a bodily point of view, experiences inklings of pleasantness and unpleasantness or impressions from another plane without being day-conscious of the true causes of these experiences, so the "half-sex being" experiences in its sexual act the reactions of the superterrestrial or spiritual world as a "feeling of pleasure" without any knowledge whatsoever that this is due to its own organic or bodily rootedness in a world outside the one in which it is day-conscious. The "half-sex being" thus encounters the experience of the cosmic or spiritual world in the same mentally impoverished way that the plant in a mentally impoverished way encounters the physical world.