The Road of Life
The article: Mental Prisons
Chapter 2
From a cosmic point of view most people are still "dead souls"
No – thousands or rather tens of thousands, indeed, even millions, of people no longer know at all what they are experiencing with their senses, or are in the presence of. For them "summer" is merely a "season", due to the relationship of the earth to the sun, and so on. But millions of people today know nothing at all about the fact that there is a precise purpose in the relation of the earth to the sun; indeed, they cannot even learn to understand it. Here their movements fail them. In these fields they are, so to speak, "dead" souls. They do not understand that without seasons every form of thinking, and therefore every form of consciousness, would be impossible. But without consciousness each I would constitute, not a "living being", not any "son of God", but merely "something which is". It would thus not fulfil the three conditions which, according to my main work, "Livets Bog (The Book of Life)", are demanded in order that a "something" can appear as a "living being". Without the seasons, an eternal absolute death would rule the universe, so to speak, for the universe with its suns and clusters of stars, globes and planets and the life belonging to these would of course likewise be a total impossibility. All that today is life, beauty and joy, and all that constitutes the background or contrast to this, would never have existed to bring a brain into action or vibration, just as no form of brain-organ whatsoever would ever have come into existence.