Cosmic Consciousness
The article: Cosmic Consciousness
Chapter 14
What is it that transforms beings into humanitarians and creates "cosmic consciousness"
The history of humanity, which in a way is the youngest and latest in the great process of creation, shows that it began down in the barbarian and animal forms of life and grew through this primitive, animal stage of Nature to its present civilised stage.
It is true that this civilised stage still represents the killing principle, which by far surpasses everything that one has previously been able to see of the same principle; but it is also a fact that side by side with the use of this principle, that is, war, murder and mutilation, there has also grown in the human mentality an increasing interest for or understanding of the fact that without humanitarianism it would be impossible for culture, and thereby, peace and happiness, to exist for humanity.
We therefore see that barbarous laws, which formerly were the rule, have gradually been abolished.
Openly buying and selling human beings is no longer permitted.
And just as one has fought against slavery, so one tries today through the police and the judicial system to restrain theft, murder and violence; indeed, even war, the culmination of the worst evil for humanity, can exist nowadays only in the name of humanitarianism.
All beings fight in order to beat down the opponent's supposed cruelty.
Does not everyone fight in order to create justice and peace?
Who dares to confess that they make war for the opposite reason?
And the result of all this struggle, all this manifestation of suffering does not fail to appear.
This is humanity's own melting-pot.
Out of this process can come only the one ultimate result, that is, humanitarianism.
And the worse the war, mutilation and suffering that human beings commit against each other, the quicker the result will be.
Since all suffering is the absolute sign that one has manifested causes that are at variance with the world plan and that all true well-being is just as sure a sign that one has manifested causes that are in contact with this plan and are in harmony with the very Earth's transformation into the home for humanitarianism and perfection, no being can in the long run be ignorant of this.
The experiences of suffering accumulate gradually in the consciousness and form the previously mentioned "index" or "file" that determines how we understand or perceive any new experience.
No experience in daily life can be sensed without confronting this index.
Our understanding of what we see or experience depends on this index.
As I have already mentioned, we will be incapable of understanding any experience to which we do not have a counterpart in this index.
It will be quite incomprehensible for us.
And where we do not understand events, we must naturally act blindly.
And where this mental blindness exists as the basis for our will and action, we naturally, from a cosmic point of view, do not know what we are doing.
And as it is solely there that we can act against the world plan, against humanitarianism, then every inhumane action will thus in reality be exclusively a product of ignorance.
And it is the understanding of this that transforms us into humanitarian beings.
When we, like Christ, understand that our persecutor or all the beings that manifest cruelty, which means antipathy, anger, persecution, hatred and vengeance, towards us act entirely in mental blindness or ignorance, then it takes away the whole sting of their behaviour towards us.
One then understands how foolish all indignation, hatred and vengeance is towards such beings.
And one manifests as little anger towards such beings as towards a small, helpless child in a cradle or other mentally inept beings, the insane and mentally defective.
And it is thus from this state of consciousness that humanity's oldest and greatest wise men proclaim the precepts about "not judging", not avenging or in any other way causing suffering for other beings, but turning the right cheek when one is smitten on the left, and on the whole loving one's neighbour as oneself.
It is this step of consciousness from which these precepts are manifested that constitutes "the Holy Spirit" referred to in the Bible, and which in my main work "Livets Bog (The Book of Life)" is expressed as "cosmic consciousness".