Through the religions of the East we learn that meditation is the road to perfection. We learn that we should let go of all earthly ties, material desires and longings and live in solitude, concentrating our thoughts solely on God and the highest matters. The fact that this attitude has been of the highest priority in the eastern peoples' culture has totally formed these peoples' attitude to life and their way of being. But it has not brought them perfection. Millions of people in the East live a wretched existence, in danger of dying from lack of food, and millions more are dying of starvation with almost nothing being done to help them. The peoples of the East are extremely religious and spiritually minded, but are somewhat unintellectual. Among these peoples there have of course emerged a number of sages who have a certain degree of wisdom and who are greatly revered by the population at large, but even though these sages have in many ways certainly been divine tools for the people they have lived amongst, they have not been able to redeem their people or been able to create a secure and peaceful civilisation for them. With the exception of the world redeemers who have lived in the East, these sages did not have true cosmic consciousness; they had a certain proficiency in psychic and occult experimentation that now belong to former evolutionary steps.

The most important thing in the religious attitude of the eastern peoples has been to occupy themselves as little as possible with material things and to think only about spiritual matters, and even though such an attitude may in one way be beneficial, it may also, as has actually been the case, lead to the derailment in which human beings either stagnate or stray from the road that leads to the goal that is human beings' true destination. This unintellectual spiritual attitude has been a kind of pretext for doing nothing, a flight from this world. The primary thing in existence was excessive meditation on spiritual matters and too little advancement and practice in associating with one's neighbour.

This tendency to by-pass the true road – the road where we live in contact with other human beings and are as a result able to practise doing this to perfection – has also, albeit in a different way, manifested itself in the West in the Christian world religion. Here, despite the fact that Christ has certainly shown us an example of the perfected human being's way of being and behaving, we have created the pretext for doing nothing that we know as the "forgiveness of sins" and "redemption through the blood and mercy of Jesus". In this dogmatic view of Christianity it is certainly not the acts of goodness that are the goal of human beings' striving; here it is just a question of becoming a member of the flock for whom Christ allowed himself to be crucified. According to this dogmatic form of Christianity we are all born in sin and have original sin within us, and even before we were born, we were destined to eternal damnation, unless we implored God for mercy and redemption through the "blood of the lamb".

These extremely unintellectual eastern and western spiritual attitudes have shown clearly that they cannot lead humankind to any form of true world peace, or to a state in which the good things in life are shared out equally among human beings. The only way to achieve such world peace is through the development in human beings' consciousness of the true art of living, which means by developing an ability to live in perfect harmony with other beings in existence. The road of life is not a road on which human beings should flee from each other, living alone in isolated places. Neither is it a road on which one should elbow one's way forward at other people's expense, at the same time believing that one is saved merely by praying for mercy and that one's sins be forgiven.

If we think that redemption lies in separating ourselves from other human beings, we will lose our facility in getting to know other people. We will get out of the habit of training all the abilities in our consciousness that will be used in forgiving other people or serving and understanding them. By living in isolation, we are preventing all the bad and unfinished aspects of ourselves from being brought into relief. But no doubt some people will say that that is a good thing. But it is not. If we do not bring them into relief, we would certainly not be able to overcome and remove them. A person can quite easily give the appearance of being a good human being when he lives isolated from other human beings and he even has food and clothing brought to him and is honoured and respected as a holy man. It is good to sit and develop one's ability to think good thoughts; we all need to do that from time to time. But it is not enough that we think about good things, we have to carry them out in practice in order for them to have any real meaning. One wonders how certain hermits would manage if life were to suddenly place them among human beings who spoke ill of them, lied about them, persecuted them and caused them all the unpleasant experiences that one can be subjected to in daily life among human beings. One wonders how they would be able to maintain their atmosphere of holiness, being untrained in living in these circumstances. Would not the material aspect of their lives fall apart? But that is precisely what the peoples of the East have done. They have allowed an unintellectual spiritual attitude to lead them away from developing everyday, practical, material living, and the peoples of the West have on this basis made themselves into their oppressors for centuries. This has made it perfectly clear that meditation and isolation do not constitute the ideals that can lead humankind to perfection, peace and happiness.

But in the West "forgiveness of sins", "redemption through the blood of Jesus" and "mercy" have not managed to give the peoples of the West true protection or peace either. Innumerable wars have been fought in the name of Christ, priests have blessed the weapons and have prayed to God for victory, and the host of true believers has steadily become less and less as their intellectual faculty developed. Today the peoples of the West are equipped with practical, intellectual abilities that have developed as a result of the struggle for existence, but for this very reason the religious dogmas have also become less important to them, and the things that have most value in life have become mainly material things.

But love does not consist merely of living beings caressing and uniting their physical bodies resulting in the propagation of the species. Love is a power that permeates the universe, and which we also know as the "holy spirit". What the great world redeemers have talked about, and which Christ has shown human beings by his example, is that it is possible for individual human beings to connect with the divine or universal Love in such a way that, instead of fleeing from life here in the physical world, we let this love pour into this world, transforming it through our practical way of being and behaving.

But we have learnt that in order for us to be able to orientate ourselves intellectually in the physical world with its profusion of natural laws we need a science through which we can get to know these laws, in order that we can display in practice a way of living and creating that conforms to these laws. Due to human beings' constantly increasing ability to think, which is a spiritual power, these human beings live just as much in a spiritual world, namely the world of thought, as they do in the physical world. In order to orientate themselves in this spiritual world, which also has a profusion of laws, human beings also need a science through which they can get to know these laws so as to be able to conform to them. It is just such assistance that human beings have been given in the form of modern spiritual science, which when put into practice by a steadily increasing number of human beings in both the East and the West, will form the basis of a new global civilisation, the motto of which will be "everyone for his neighbour". The human beings of such a civilization will not take flight into solitude, even though from time to time they will enjoy being alone. Neither will they be attracted to being a member of a little group of "saved" or "chosen" people who think that everyone else is condemned to the "eternal fires of hell". They will know that "hell" is the world of war, revenge, hate, bitterness, misunderstanding and self-made suffering that human beings sow and reap life after life, as long as they do not live in conformity with the universal law that is the fulfilment of all the laws: the law of neighbourly love. Practising living in accordance with this law is the only true road to peace in a world in which the best of eastern and western cultures can be united. No one will then flee from this world's "vale of tears" into an excessively one-sided meditation on spiritual matters, neither will anyone forget the spiritual reality and its laws in preference to all that is taking place in the physical world.

Many followers of Christianity in the West have for a long time held the view that they should go forth as missionaries, thereby carrying out Christ's bidding to "go forth and make all people into my disciples". They have therefore sought to convert the peoples of the East to the dogmatic form of Christianity with the belief in the "forgiveness of sins", "mercy", and "redemption through the blood of Jesus". Undoubtedly, they have done much good, especially through their practical, intellectual abilities, when serving as doctors and teachers. But as long as Christianity among the peoples of the West is merely a dogmatic teaching that one must adopt in order to be redeemed, and is not a way of living in which one tries to live in accordance with Christ's commandments, the so-called Christian peoples of the West are not those disciples of Christ who can create a Christian civilization.

The peoples of the West can put the forces of Nature to work for them, but they employ these same forces to manufacture bombs and other instruments of destruction that they use against both each other and the peoples of the East. All possible variations of war and discord are laying waste the countries of the West, so that the peoples of these nations are just as much in need of becoming Christ's disciples as the peoples of the East.

The holy spirit, which is the same as cosmic science or spiritual science, will gradually become accepted and understood by the peoples of both the East and the West, not as a religious doctrine that has to be adopted if one is to be saved, but as a science that deals with the physical as well as the spiritual laws of Nature. Through spiritual science the human beings of the East will learn to combine their spiritual attitude with practical and logical activity and organisation of the physical world in a way that benefits the whole. And it will teach the people of the West that Christianity does not consist of dogmas, rituals and prayers for mercy; it consists of imitating Christ's way of being: serving. And that means, in the modern meaning of the word, to use the highly evolved creative ability that one has gradually acquired, to create a civilization that, on the large as well as on the small scale, is based on peace and co-operation between the Earth's human beings.