Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1675

1675. Mankind's sphere of sexual darkness has thus its specific mission, its specific purpose to fulfil. The entire problem, all darkness, is a question of suffering, and is thereby at the same time a question of feeling, a question of the experience of pleasantness and unpleasantness. But since all sensations of pleasantness or unpleasantness are a question of feeling, we must here return to the living being's sexual structure, which, as will be remembered, is the seat of feeling. We must thus examine the structure in the being that carries its feeling state, which in turn is to say all its sensory faculties without exception. All experiences – purely physical, bodily ones as well as mental or spiritual ones – are basically "feeling". Here we see increasingly clearly how extremely far-reaching the "highest fire" is in the being's structure. It is eternal life itself directly rooted in the I, with which it is ultimately identical. In its capacity of consciousness, it is the I's eternal halo, its warmth and light. Its luminous flame can never be put out, even though the appearance of the flame increases and decreases eternally and is an eternal rhythm or movement between two extremes from its minimum manifestation to its maximum and back again. The "highest fire" is the I's eternal cosmic breathing. From its minimum manifestation, where it emits only smoke and sparks, it grows to its maximum, where it is a sparkling, radiant, clear, all-illuminating fire, a sun that reveals the I in "God's image". From here the clear fire and warmth of its flame is reduced in order ultimately once again to become merely a tiny fluttering flame enveloped and obscured by clouds of smoke, cinders and ash. It is this rhythmic movement of the "highest fire" – its minimum and maximum manifestation – that makes the experience of life an eternal cycle. It is this rhythmic structure of the "highest fire", through the beings in the microcosmos, the mesocosmos and the macrocosmos, that underlies the creation of day and night, summer and winter, sowing and reaping, good and evil, childhood and maturity, in brief, all existing contrasts. And when mankind, as we have just seen, finds itself in the sphere of suffering or unhappiness, the sphere of killing and death, the pit of ignorance and primitivity, as is the case, it is due only to the fact that this mankind in its cosmic cycle is passing the "highest fire's" sphere of minimum manifestation. Where the minimum manifestation of the "highest fire" occurs, life becomes darkness, suffering and death, "doomsday" or "hell" for the living beings.