Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1791

1791. Any sensation of life whatsoever, any form of experience, is thus more or less "coloured" or tinted by darkness or light, by unpleasantness or pleasantness, by antipathy or sympathy, and thereby by hatred and love. Without this structure and without this "colouring" of the sensed object, all experience of life would be completely impossible. Since the most perfect experience of pleasantness and the most perfect experience of unpleasantness are respectively the same as the most perfect sense of well-being and the most imperfect one, the sense of pleasantness is the object that attracts the I or individual, while the sense of unpleasantness is the object that repels the same I. Thus the highest fire creates these two currents of energy, which in turn are the prerequisites for all creation and its associated thinking and exercise of will, which are the main functions of the experience of life. The living being's entire daily life consists, as will be remembered, exclusively of the experience of attraction and repulsion. Of all the things it has around it, whether they be details of Nature or its fellow beings, it will feel attracted to some and repelled by others. Were this not so, what then could set thinking and the will, and the manifestation, creation or experience of life that results from them, in motion and continuously keep them in motion? It is thus a vital necessity that the being can feel both attracted to and repelled by details in its surroundings. But in order for a being to be able to feel this attraction and repulsion, it must be able to feel pleasantness and unpleasantness, to have a sense of well-being and ill-being, which are the two points of culmination that render all experience of life possible. And the living being has this feeling to an extraordinarily great extent. Wherever the individual has no feeling, whether it be in the various parts of its organism or in its mental phenomena, it is not normal or full of vitality. There it is an unconscious being. Lack of feeling is the same as a lack of sensory perception and the experience that results from it. And wherever the individual cannot experience within the domain that, according to its evolutionary step, it actually should be able to master with its senses, it is an abnormal, sick or temporarily dead being. There an outer lesion or injury exists and prevents the ordinary vital functioning or sensory experience from taking place in its area. It is thus absolutely essential that the individual or the living being has the ability to experience pleasantness or unpleasantness in order thereby to be able to sense the experience of life as well-being, indeed, in order to be able to experience life or being alive at all.