Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1774

1774. This entire primitive, terrestrial experience of life is the night side of life itself. It constitutes the opposite of the experience of perfection, which necessarily or definitely must exist and be experienced if it is to be at all possible to experience absolutely true perfection. The living being must thus experience a certain form of ignorance or a kind of cosmic unconsciousness in order to be able to experience consciousness. One cannot possibly experience anything that one has not experienced the opposite of. Being able to experience something requires something with the help of which the object of the experience can be registered, for without this registering the object in question would be quite invisible or inaccessible to sensory perception or experience. Things can be experienced only by virtue of their opposite. If the cosmic spiral cycle were not divided into stages that differ from one another, which in turn concentrates itself in the two forms of contrasts, namely light and darkness, mental as well as physical, no experience of life whatsoever could take place. The cosmic spiral cycle can thus be divided into two great main zones, namely its night epoch and its day epoch, which, as already previously mentioned, are in principle the same as its "winter" and "summer", and the intermediary transitional stages of "spring" and "autumn". The living beings thus find themselves in a gigantic cycle, which in principle corresponds to the known cycles: the twenty-four hour cycle, the year cycle and the terrestrial life cycle, as well as the cycle of matter from the flowering stage to the manure stage, and back once again to the flowering stage and so on, or the cycle of water from muddy puddles to crystal-clear drinking water or pure air and back again to muddy puddles and so on continuously. Everywhere the maintenance of life is based solely on the principle of cycles and its "seasons". When we acknowledge this it becomes easy to understand that terrestrial life, from its beginning on the Earth right up through the plants and the animals to the highly evolved terrestrial human being, represents the spiral cycle's night side and the beginnings of a morning or spring stage in this night side. This is established as fact through the beings' complete ignorance of the real life in the cosmos, of their own immortality and identity with eternity itself and the resulting all-embracing infringement of all the laws of life or the culmination of the experience and manifestation of the killing principle with its resultant sorrow, screaming and torment. It goes without saying that one here fervently desires perfection or a land of happiness and that one in one's thoughts or visions looks for the complete opposite of the dark night side of the cycle of life that one finds oneself in. It is merely the "well slept" being's longing for dawn or daybreak that we have before us here.