Martinus: Livets Bog, vol. 5, sect. 1842

1842. It is here understandable that "wars and rumours of wars" must be common in the terrestrial human, materialistic or spiritual or cosmic sphere of death. It is simply a matter of course that such complete spiritual ignorance must lead from spirit to matter or in the first instance must create such a colossal involution in matter, such a colossal struggle and drive for self-preservation that cosmic consciousness or the mental state that is expressed in the Bible as the "holy spirit" – in this predominant belief in massacring, persecuting and oppressing other beings as the way to happiness and well-being – must lose ground, must degenerate and leave the waking day-consciousness. Matter must increasingly become the object of thought, finally becoming the individual's only sphere of interest. The being therefore became at one with this matter; it weighed, measured and perceived itself as being identical to matter and thereby came to believe that it itself was a thing created by chance. Its ability to sense and understand immortality, eternity and infinity – and thereby its ability to sense its own cosmic identity as the eternally existing, living, divine, highest something that is identical to the Godhead – thus degenerated or diminished right down to such a latent state that it could no longer penetrate the waking physical day-consciousness. This waking day-consciousness thus became the seat of the ignorance or cosmic death that was to be the result of the "Fall" mentioned in the Bible. Just think how the Bible's vision of the future for Adam and Eve's fate, which is of course the fate of terrestrial mankind, has to this very day been fulfilled! Adam came to "eat his bread in the sweat of his face", and Eve came to "bring forth her children in sorrow". How often did they not, in the form of terrestrial human beings, come to feel naked, that is, helpless, with no God, no paradise, no knowledge of immortality, but perceiving themselves and their fate as a result of chance, and, still at the mercy of this chance, surrounded by chance fellow beings, who have likewise come into existence by chance and are subject to chance. The beings at this stage thus see only chance and more chance above, below, inside and outside everything that exists. This is the height of the world view of the materialistic, scientific epoch. It is the death that had to be the consequence of the "creation of Eve", the emergence of the male and female beings and the "Fall" that followed on from this creation: the eating of the tree of knowledge, the beings' infiltration of and fusion with matter and the resulting death of cosmic consciousness or the holy spirit in the psyche of the beings.