The Immortality of Living Beings
The article: The Necessity of Spiritual Science
Chapter 6
The true cause of mankind's present misfortune
It is thus not mankind's material world, its heaven and earth, bodies, eyes, ears, lung- and heart-function that there is something wrong with, but its "thought-world".
Mankind's ability to think has thus not acquired its science as has its material world.
It is this circumstance that is the cause of all war and bloodshed, quite apart from the fact that it is also in the thought-world that the cause of all mankind's other ills, sorrows and problems are rooted.
The true cause of mankind's present misfortune is the fact that it lives in two worlds but recognises only one of them, namely the physical.
Mankind is, as previously mentioned, highly scientifically conscious in this world, while denying, to an overwhelming extent, the other world, namely the spiritual, as a reality.
It is this denial for which, under all circumstances without exception, each of its sources will pay dearly and that makes every true happiness for a society of such sources impossible.
The "lasting peace" that mankind desires and waits for with such longing will thus never be able to exist in a world with the mental attitude towards, or the ignoring of, the plane of thought, the spiritual world, shown by terrestrial mankind.
The road towards peace goes exclusively through making the thought-world of the beings a science, so that they become just as much at home in this so-called "abstract" world as they are now at home in the concrete physical world.
Terrestrial human beings cannot continue recognising the real world directly surrounding their I as simply an abstract or imaginary world.
It must become just as concrete or realistic as the physical world.