Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1811

1811. Since world peace, and the resulting liberation from the physical darkness that overshadows and controls the lives of terrestrial human beings, is solely a question of fellow-feeling or neighbourly love, this fellow-feeling or neighbourly love is worth more than gold. And yet terrestrial human beings fight desperately for gold because they believe that possessing it will bring them peace, happiness and well-being. This is why the various population groups or flocks that we call nations have standing armies and navies. This is why they create huge armament factories and huge fortifications, atomic bomb installations and so on. This is why they create huge laboratories with hundreds of researchers and workers whose sole purpose is to invent even better weapons of destruction with which to combat their "enemies", partly in order to keep the gold (the material worldly goods) that they have conquered, and partly in order to take possession of the gold that the "enemies" have been able to capture. But since the "enemies" are one's neighbour, and one's neighbour is one's fellow beings, and one's fellow beings are life, all unkindness, all fighting against one's fellow beings will be the same as a fight against life itself. But since no being can isolate itself from life, but is inseparably connected to it with its own life, it is thereby intrinsically and inseparably connected to, and dependent on, the lives of other beings, together with which it forms the element that is the domicile, experience and fate of the I. The single individual's mentality or psyche, their thoughts, will and expression of desire are each a drop in an ocean. This ocean is thus life. Whether this life is to be hell or the kingdom of heaven, a dark or light fate for the individual, will thus depend on its own dark and light efforts in this life. It can of course experience this life only through its own efforts. If it were isolated from this life, it could not possibly experience anything whatsoever, and would consequently be equally incapable of creating its fate. Fate is thus exclusively identical to its own efforts on behalf of, and interaction with, its fellow beings, its neighbour. As we see, one's daily way of being is a seed one sows, and whose harvest becomes a part of the experience of the future life that one cannot exist without. Whatever one does, however one lives, one's daily life is an interaction with one's surroundings and the various living beings placed there. These beings are thus a part of our own life; indeed, they are, as previously mentioned, drops of the same ocean, the same element. They cannot therefore avoid constituting a part of our experience. The well-being of these surroundings and fellow beings thereby becomes correspondingly a part of our own well-being or fate. The eternal words, "What a man sows, that he will also reap," are here established as fact.