For millennia upon millennia, in fact since the dawn of human history, terrestrial human beings have been tuned into the existence of a spiritual world with spiritual beings. They have believed in things that to them were "supernatural", and they have even gone so far as to think that the spiritual world and its inhabitants, its gods, spirits, angels, demons and devils, were the primary beings, that is to say the beings that ruled over life and death and consequently over human beings. We can trace this state of being in tune with a spiritual world right back to the animal kingdom, because the anguished cry that an animal lets out on being overcome is nothing other than an instinctive or unconscious turning to an unknown providence for help. The anguished cry is the tender beginnings of the first form of prayer, and of the living being turning its attention from the physical towards a spiritual world. This ability, which shows its first signs of growing in the psyche of the animal, will later in evolution become a strong psychic power and sensory talent that, because religion for long periods of time forms the foundation of successive cultures, will end up playing a very significant role in the development of terrestrial human culture.

Nowadays this is not the case, a fact which causes some people to think that religion and giving even the slightest attention to a spiritual world behind the physical has failed and will never again occupy a positive and active position in civilisation. People think that religious people's attitude towards life is just naive superstition. To them it is quite obvious that primitive tribal people merely have an extremely lively imagination that causes them to harbour all kinds of superstitions, and this imagination and superstition has been refined over the ages into the great world religions with all their various sects and groups that are still flourishing, despite the fact that they are degenerating. Only now that the scientific world picture is replacing the religious one are people, so they think, coming to their senses and beginning to acknowledge the reality that surrounds them that needs no help from gods or spirits.

But if it is the case that absolutely no Godhead, providence or spiritual world exists how can it be that living beings to such an overwhelming extent, first instinctively and later consciously, have counted on their existence? For a certain period human beings are still so strongly focused on it purely emotionally that all doubt is ruled out. How can "something that does not exist", something that is "absolutely nothing", give rise to such a far-reaching mental attitude and control over living beings? "Something" cannot become "nothing", just as "nothing" cannot become "something". Something has to exist that has evoked the religious sense. A conception of a thing cannot come into existence without "this thing" having had some sort of an effect on the living being's psyche. The conception that the being has of the "thing" is obviously dependent on the being's ability to sense and experience, and this ability can have developed to varying degrees, but "something" is the cause of the experience and the notion, even though the experiencer has only a limited ability to grasp and give expression to their conception. How could we have gained the ability to see were it not for light having made an impression not only on our physical eyes but also on our psyche? And of course the same thing applies to the origin of all our other senses. Were it not for the fact that there are energies streaming towards us from our surroundings, we would never have been able to see, hear, feel, taste or smell. Over the millennia, all these sensory abilities have developed through the influence of Nature on the living beings' organisms. Our physical body in actual fact consists of one single great combination of sensory abilities, which have gradually come about as a result of having been affected by the various types of energy coming from the outer world. It is not only our ability to see, hear, smell, taste and feel that are sensory reactions, our breathing, the circulation of our blood, the functioning of our glands, our ability to move, in fact all our physical functions are in the deepest sense sensory reactions, that is to say, interactions between an experiencing "something", or "I", and matter. If a being experiences the particular effects of a certain kind of energy from its surroundings, this gradually brings about an interaction between the individual and the special energy or field of matter in the outer world. Initially this interaction is unconscious or instinctive, but gradually it turns into awake day-consciousness by means of the organs that have emerged from this interaction, which in fact are the same as sensory faculties. All our organs and senses have emerged in this way. As a result of this interaction the living being's primal desire has been transformed into special desires to experience the outer world's energies in greater detail and to strengthen certain pleasant sensations and to weaken unpleasant ones.

The animal's cry of anguish is directed towards a universal power-centre that it can sense instinctively. It has been under the influence of this universal power-field since time immemorial and can now sense it so strongly that it instinctively concentrates all that is left of its physical energy in releasing what can be heard physically as the cry. But from the materialistic point of view one would say that the cry is not an interaction. And certainly the materialist sees death as the end of everything. But from a cosmic perspective it is not so. From this perspective, the physical organism that dies is merely the tool of the "I" and the consciousness, a tool that registers outer physical effects and that can affect other physical bodies. Through this interaction the "I" and the consciousness, which is electrical by nature, have gained an ability to build better and better organisms with increasingly sensitive organs or sensory tools. The whole evolutionary process from the mineral kingdom, through the plant and animal kingdoms, to terrestrial human beings is based on this principle, and this can only be because the living being is a spiritual being living in a spiritual world. Seen in this perspective, the physical plane is merely a plane of reactions where causes and effects find physical expression only through certain combinations of energy, but the ability to combine the energies, that is to say the abilities to create and experience, are purely spiritual. This ability, like the "I", existed before the creation of the organism and it continues to exist after the death of the organism. The animal that is overcome and killed certainly does not experience the effects of its cry of anguish through the sensory tools of its physical organism; they are put out of action at the moment of death. But the cry of anguish itself is not merely a physical form of expression; it is an effect in physical matter of the animal's mental or spiritual state, which continues independent of the physical tool or body. In the spiritual world, which is a purely electrical world made up of mental wavelengths, the animal experiences the effects of its cry of anguish. Can it be heard there? No, the cry itself consists of physical sound vibrations and can of course only be heard with physical sensory tools. But the power, in this case the anxiety, that sets the physical vibrations in motion is mental or spiritual in character and can therefore also be sensed by beings that are tuned into this wavelength even though they have no physical organism. In this particular case it will be the animal's guardian angel that through suggestion removes the anxiety, quickly helping it to be at ease in the state in which it now has to live for a while until it can once again build itself a new tool through which it can experience and evolve in the physical world.

What applies to animals of course also applies to terrestrial human beings, whose religious instinct is based on a further development of the forces or energies that were in evidence when terrestrial human beings were still purely animal. Even the most confirmed materialistic atheist can in his hour of need find himself praying to the God or the very providence that he perhaps a short time before scornfully swept aside as something only children and fools can believe in. So the organ works even though one is determined to deny its existence. So why is it that so many people in these times say that they do not believe in God or in the existence of a spiritual world and spiritual beings? For centuries human beings have been tuned into the spiritual reality, and it is as if all at once the thread has been cut and people have become atheists and materialists. There is also a natural explanation for this, much more natural than what materialists call natural. The spiritual world is definitely not more supernatural than the physical world, and the naturalness of the physical world would not be able to find expression at all were it not for a spiritual aspect behind it. The "supernatural" is only "supernatural" because it still lies beyond terrestrial human beings' ability to comprehend it with their day consciousness, in other words with their feeling, intelligence and intuition. Terrestrial human beings' relationship to the religions has been based on their instinct and feeling, and the development of the more advanced religions, in which ethics are playing an increasingly important role, have appealed more and more strongly to their emotions, whereas instinct has been more at work under the surface and has gradually degenerated. This is a perfectly natural process, and one that has much in common with what has taken place in physical evolution. In the course of development from mineral to human being, terrestrial human beings have quite naturally had organs that for a certain period of time were necessary, for example in the plant kingdom and in the transitional forms between the plant and the animal kingdom. These organs have degenerated as there was no longer any need for them, some have disappeared altogether, others exist in a rudimentary form, and new sensory tools and organs have very gradually emerged over successive incarnations in relation to the desires, wishes and longings that have arisen in the living beings' consciousness. The same thing applies to the spiritual organs and sensory tools with which human beings form their entire world picture. What has characterised evolution from the animal state right up to the state of being a civilised human being has been that the living beings have become more and more day-conscious in the physical reality that has unfolded around them. How they react to the way Nature affects them has become more and more conscious, and this has meant that they have gained control over Nature in an ever increasing number of areas. As a result of this interaction with the forces of Nature their sense of logic has grown, which they have become very proud about. What they do not know, owing to the fact that they are still not sufficiently intelligent, is that what has really happened is that they have learnt from the intelligence and logical creation that is manifested in Nature, and which is the result of the manifestation of consciousness of the living being in which they live, move and have their being, namely the eternal Godhead.

Terrestrial human beings' intelligence, this ability to think logically, of which they are so proud, is really an ability that is still at the stage of just beginning to grow like a tiny shoot in their consciousness. They have begun to be able to use this ability in connection with physical perception and physical creation. With the help of the intelligence they can orientate themselves in the physical world to an extent that they have never been able to do before in the same way, and the result is that human beings are using almost all their energy and creativity in concentrating on matter. Science, technology, politics, industry, advertising and similar materialistic thought climates are dominating our age, and will continue to dominate terrestrial human beings' existence for some time to come. It is quite natural for this to happen, but it is equally natural that this state will also degenerate as the individual human being's consciousness expands as a result of the gathering of experiences that are forming new organs and a new sensory faculty in their spiritual and physical bodies. This is exactly what is already happening in quite a number of human beings. They are satiated with materialism and atheism, but because their instinct has degenerated they cannot go back to old systems of belief with dogmas and rituals. There is only one way forward for these human beings and that is to learn to use their intelligence, not only in the physical field but also in the spiritual field. A new faculty, the faculty of intuition, is sitting latent in their consciousness and will be able to develop as feeling and intelligence come into a certain balance in the mentality. Once human beings possess this faculty they will no longer need to believe in God or a spiritual existence beyond the physical, neither will they need to have any doubts about them; they will be in a position to experience with day-conscious awareness both these parts as reality. They will see that it was true that human beings "by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would surely die", in the sense that for a period of time they would lose contact with the spiritual reality, which they themselves are a part of, and would believe that it was possible for them to die. But also that they would go further and "become like God, knowing good and evil", or be "resurrected from the dead", which is the state that all human beings are evolving towards. One day we will look back on the age of materialism just as we now look at the lives of primitive peoples, but we will at the same time be able to see that this epoch has been necessary to teach human beings how to think logically, initially in accordance with the physical laws and later in accordance with the spiritual laws, not as a being that is automatically guided by instinct and blind belief, but as a day-conscious, high-intellectual "human being in God's image" that in thought and action radiates divine love from its consciousness and has thereby become a co-worker of the Godhead.