The driving forces behind all experience of life are desires, wishes and longings. Without desire the form of existence that is characteristic of humankind today could never have come about, and similarly there would be no future for human beings if their consciousness were not filled with wishes and longings. Of course human beings do not believe that all normal, natural wishes are fulfilled, and the reason for this is that they are not familiar with the laws of life and do not know that every wish gives rise to a cycle that begins as a longing for something and does not stop until that longing has been satisfied. They do, however, know that in relation to food, they feel hungry and this desire for food is satisfied by having something to eat. They feel satiated, in fact sometimes perhaps oversatiated to the point where they feel a downright revulsion towards what they previously so strongly longed for. But hunger and satiation is not merely something to do with physical food. In principle, all forms of desire, wishing and longing are exactly the same. Hunger for food cannot cease before it is in one way or another satisfied, and the same applies to all the other forms of desire, longing and wishing in our consciousness.

Many people will disagree with this way of thinking on the grounds that they have many wishes and longings that have never been fulfilled. They feel disappointed and perhaps even cheated by life because they have grown old without their wishes having been fulfilled. The fact that human beings can grow old without their wishes and longings being fulfilled does not appear to fit with the thought that all wishes and longings will be fulfilled. But this is only how it seems. And the reason is that human beings still only see their life in a narrow, local perspective beginning with conception and birth and ending with death. They think that their life is like a straight line with a beginning and an end. But this "straight line" is, like all other straight lines, merely an illusion. In reality straight lines do not exist. Any line whatsoever is an expression of power or energy, and all energy in the universe goes in cycles. We experience a very small segment of a large circle as a straight line; the horizon of the sea, for example, is perceived by our physical eyes as a straight line even though our reason tells us that it is a part of a large circular arc. Our life is also a part of a cycle. There is something that exists before conception and there is something that exists after death, and this "something" or this expression of life before and after the physical existence is also based to an equal extent on the principle of hunger and satiation or on the living being's desires, wishes and longings. All these desires, wishes and longings are at certain stages in the cycle of hunger and satiation, and they continue often over several incarnations until they have run their course. The satiation or satisfaction that takes place gives rise to a longing for something that is in one way or another a contrast to what one is now satiated with, and this causes a new cycle or a new variation of the principle of hunger and satiation to begin for the living being.

One can ask why is it that human beings have harnessed the forces of Nature so that they can work for them? Why do we live in comfortable houses that provide protection from the wind and rain, and that we can heat in the winter and light up when it gets dark? Why can we fly through the air and sail both on and under the surface of the sea and in many other ways move at speed through space? For the very reason that we have wished for it; we have longed to gain mastery of the forces of Nature. But when was it that we were we able to nourish these longings and wishes? It was of course at a time when we did not have the technical and scientific experience that we have now. The first longings for a more independent existence, in which one did not so easily succumb to the stronger forces of Nature, came about at a time when we were primitive, stone-age human beings, forced to live in dark holes and to struggle desperately for survival.

Many incarnations of suffering and experience lie behind the whole of modern civilisation. But not sufficient suffering and experience, because if there was our present-day civilisation would be more humane and have as its basis neighbourly love and a division of resources in quite a different way than it does. Stone-age Man's animal-like mentality still rules even in our present-day civilisation. What are all the great wars with immense displays of refined, technical weaponry other than an extension of stone-age Man's primitive stone axes, spears, bows and arrows? Human beings today are living in an intellectualised Stone Age. Many of their longings and wishes have been fulfilled, and all these cycles of hunger and satiation have brought about an evolution from the state of being more of an animal to more of a human. But in order to become what they call human beings, terrestrial human beings are having to set new cycles of longing in motion, which can run their course towards fulfilment in the future, and this is exactly what many people over the whole of the Earth have already done. What they are longing for is peace on Earth.

The longing for peace is becoming steadily stronger in the consciousness of more and more human beings. But how has this longing come about? It is due entirely to the fact that terrestrial human beings are becoming satiated with the opposite of peace, that is to say, with war. To stone-age Man, the Vikings and other war-loving peoples of the past, war was an ideal; they fought with Nature and they fought with other human beings. According to their view of religion, dying on the battlefield was an act of heroism that led the warrior straight to Paradise. The men longed to be great heroes and warriors, and the women admired only those men who were. Such wishes and longings have set a great many cycles in motion, and these have enabled millions of men to be warrior heroes and to be both victorious and to suffer defeat as heroes, and millions of women have experienced that these heroes have fought for them and over them. But now a very large part of these former heroes and heroines are becoming satiated with that form of existence, satiated to such an extent that they refer to war as a "hell", and this marks the beginning of a completely new epoch in the history of humankind.

In contrast to the hell of war, one can call this new epoch "the kingdom of Heaven", that is to say a world of peace. The reason Christ said that "the kingdom of Heaven is within yourselves" is because with his cosmic consciousness he took in the whole of this developmental progression and saw how the human aspect in the human being was slowly growing, and it was his mission to nourish this tiny seed of peace that was growing as a longing in many people's minds. In the 2000 years or so that have elapsed since Christ lived on Earth, wars have raged among human beings, and these wars have steadily increased, becoming more extensive, even to the extent of encompassing the whole world. The Earth has become a hell where it is possible for human beings to experience things more terrible than the visions of hell conjured up in the minds of religious fanatics. But this is the only thing that can cause human beings to turn away from war. The killing principle has now reached such gigantic proportions that the vast majority of human beings today nourish an enormous longing for peace on Earth. This longing is also found among the soldiers who are at present fighting on the battlefields. They have no wish to become war heroes. They find themselves on the battlefields today because of wishes that they have had in the past. It is a cycle that they themselves have set in motion and of which they are now experiencing the final consequences. An old world civilisation built up of human beings' longings in the past is in the process of perishing, and a new civilisation is growing among its ruins. This new civilisation will in fact be created by the same beings who at one time lived in the Stone Age, and it will be radiant with beauty and spirit and be filled with brilliant artistic and technical activity, not as a luxury confined to just the upper class but as a natural way of giving expression to and experiencing life for all the people of the Earth.

I would like to conclude by talking about how the individual human being with his or her longings and wishes can influence this great transformation process that the whole of humankind in undergoing. One can often hear it said that it means so little what the individual human being thinks, says and does in everyday life, that it is in any case only the "great and the strong" that have any influence. But it is not so. It all depends on what one means by being "great and strong". Every single human being with their longings and wishes plays a significant role in the whole. On a previous occasion I have said that the Earth globe is a living being in whose physical organism humankind as a whole forms the organ that can be likened to the brain in our own organism. Each individual human being therefore constitutes a kind of brain cell in the Earth globe's physical organism and it is definitely not without consequence for the whole which energy vibrations are emitted from the individual parts of this whole. It is not without consequence what each individual human being longs for or what they do in order to enable their longings to be eventually fulfilled. The fact that human beings are now able theoretically to survey their lives as a whole, in relation to former and future lives, gives them the opportunity to see that it is they themselves that have created the conditions that they live under today, through the desires, wishes and longings that caused them to think and act as they did in the past. Thoughts and actions are forces and energy, and all energy in the universe goes in cycles, creating cause and effect, that is to say, fate. It is the longings, wishes and desires from the past that have created human beings' present fate. But human beings are constantly able to create fate, due to the fact that today they are creating their future, both in relation to what they will experience in life after death and in future physical incarnations. Whatever they long for they will experience, as soon as the pattern of their fate allows room for these experiences. No human being will in the great cosmic cycle experience more happiness or more suffering and unhappiness than any other. Providence does not have favourites, nor is there anyone who will act as the scapegoat. It is the living beings' own longings that drive them on in evolution, that drive them on through the many different thought climates that make it possible to gain experience, and on towards new longings and new experiences.

Behind all these longings and their fulfilment exists the living being's eternal I with its primal desire to create and experience in ever new variations of the eternal cycles of matter. When Christ said to human beings that "you are gods", it was an expression of cosmic clear-sightedness, because human beings contain within themselves divine possibilities, possibilities that are brought out when they learn to bring their longings and wishes into harmony with the eternal laws of the universe, that is to say with the love for all and everything that is eternally felt by the Godhead, and that we, through our I, our creative ability and the matter that we create in, are one with. Only when human beings, through their longings and the creative expression that is a result of these longings, no longer create war and hell around themselves, but, through everything that they say, think and do, radiate peace from within themselves, will they be in a position to experience day-consciously that they are one with the universe and the eternal Godhead. The longings that then arise in their cosmic consciousness will make them into cosmic artists and technicians of a calibre that is almost beyond terrestrial human imagination. And it is the case that all human beings on Earth will at some point nourish such longings.