Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1768

1768. Thus the terrestrial human being differs from the animals in this struggle with itself. It is in fact a being in which an organic resistance to its animal state develops. That this situation is not an abnormality that holds true for only a very small percentage of the individuals that make up terrestrial mankind as a whole, but, on the contrary, is a situation that holds true for absolutely all terrestrial human beings without exception, is established as an unshakable fact through the circumstance that it is this situation that determines that the terrestrial human being is no longer an "animal" in its pure form but appears as a "terrestrial human being". This resistance to egoism is of course an attack on, or a slowly destructive sabotage of, the animal drive for self-preservation. Since this drive for self-preservation can exist only by virtue of egoism, this mental state is the animal's main principle of protection and is thereby a divine arrangement or virtue in the animal. But since egoism or selfishness, on the contrary, ultimately gets its originator into trouble everywhere, if its originator is a human being, and can therefore be only a curse or the root of all this being's bitter experiences and mental crises, as well as of terrestrial human society's devastation by war, its fragmentation and the destruction of its culture, this further establishes as an unshakable fact that the terrestrial human being is no longer an "animal" in its pure form, but, on the contrary, constitutes a being that is on its way to another form of existence, a being that is subject to a process of transformation through which its animal state gradually degenerates and a new being, the so-called "real", "perfect human being" arises.