The Road of Life
The article: Mental Prisons
Chapter 20
The only way out of the mental prisons of life
Since the highest or the most perfect form of happiness is to see in everything and everyone (which means everything that is accessible to sense perception) only "God's image", it is obvious that one is obliged to live unhappily when one, even if unconsciously, takes part in sabotaging this "image of God". When one is unhappy one is shut out from the real life, which is exclusively the very highest happiness; and where one is shut out from the real life or the true happiness one is mentally imprisoned. And as confinement in this mental prison is maintained exclusively through one's own desire to standardize the world and insist that everything and everyone should be otherwise than they are precisely at the moment, one cannot possibly be happy. In this insistence one is in total conflict with the Godhead. One wants the world in "one's own image". But the world can only be in "God's image". Life and the world will therefore be a mental imprisonment and misfortune with the ensuing physical suffering or unhappy fate until one understands that it is not "God's image" that should be turned into one's own image but, on the contrary, this image that should be transformed to be in "God's image". The key to coming out of the dark, mental prison of superstition and illusion lies exclusively in realizing that "everything is very good" and that our fellow beings cannot possibly manifest anything other than what is characteristic of their step in evolution, and that this manifestation consequently cannot possibly be a justifiable basis for intolerance, hatred or persecution of the being in question. And in the full understanding of this, one will, in harmony with the world redeemer, "turn the right cheek when one is smitten on the left" and cry to heaven: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do".