Knowledge of life and its highest laws, a foundation for which it has become my mission to create, can in reality be expressed only as "spiritual science". The fact that people who do not understand this, that is people who have not yet acquainted themselves with this knowledge or the analyses that constitutes its unshakable foundation, may not accept it as such but on the contrary regard my work as a kind of religious sect, depends exclusively on their total lack of acquaintedness with the world picture that I have been destined to bring to the world. For me, this situation is quite natural, for throughout thousands of years the human being has experienced that everything of a religious nature, everything that pertained to the highest analysis of life or the living being was "mysticism", was a mystery into which only high priests, prophets or specially chosen people had insight. To the general public it was said that "the ways of the Lord are past finding out". The general public were therefore totally dependent on these mystics, priests or prophets in matters of the hidden phenomena of the mystery of life itself.

Did then these mystics, prophets or religious leaders not possess real knowledge about the hidden, spiritual aspect of existence? Let me answer this question in this way: these people possessed precisely the amount of insight and religious knowledge that enabled them, on the basis of this, to guide their contemporaries so as to keep them in contact with the laws of life itself in a way that was appropriate to their evolutionary step at that time. These laws were thus interpreted in such a way that they could justify or stimulate exactly the fulfilment of the ideals that lay precisely within the scope of these evolutionary steps. That this interpretation could not be a scientific revelation of the highest phenomena of the mystery of life is here evident. The ordinary human being of that time was not, of course, a representative of the evolutionary step where one's ability to contact life's energy of intelligence had reached the degree of development that is universal today. On the contrary, the human being on these evolutionary steps stood so close to the primitive human being that both materially and spiritually it had to live its life on "dogmas", which of course means on mere interpretations of the truths, whose existence one acknowledged but whose most profound analysis one was not yet mature enough to be able to grasp.

But does the same situation not hold true to a great extent today? Does the great majority of believers within so-called civilisation not live on dogmas that are adapted precisely to the evolutionary step on which the believer finds himself? Do these dogmas not say to the believer that he shall not kill, lie, steal, use violence and so on but that on the contrary he should love his neighbour, combat his anger and forgive and forgive again? And is it not so that the modern human being seeks increasingly to develop himself in the direction of a higher and more refined culture, which means only a more beautiful and more perfect mental appearance than that which existed in the past? And is it not just as great a fact that, in order to satisfy these demands, one must break habits inherited from the primitive human state or the past? Every developed human being must answer these questions in the affirmative. Today we see everywhere that the Christian interpretation of the mystery of life constitutes the truth in a form such that it can be an inspiring factor for those people who, through personal experience, have begun to feel antipathy towards the previously mentioned primitive tendencies in their own mind. These people thus seek a moral foundation or support in their struggle against the inherited, primitive tendencies from the past in their own minds, and it is therefore divine that these interpretations exist and can influence them in such a way that they can put their trust in them, believe in them, and, through this, experience the joy it always is to feel the contact on one's evolutionary step with the highest laws. It is this feeling of joy that underlies the believer's feeling of "salvation" or of being one of "God's chosen children".

So, this is how the believer of today is, but he has not always been like this. Our ancient Nordic ancestors could not possibly have perceived the Christian dogmas as a life-giving inspiration and source of morality for them. Their experiences had not yet produced the disgust for and antipathy towards the previously mentioned primitive tendencies, this disgust and antipathy being a prerequisite for combating them. For them it was natural to kill and use violence; indeed, it was so natural that they viewed death through illness and old age as downright degrading and as the way to the hell of that time. Only those who died in battle could expect to enter "Valhalla", the heaven of that time, and there experience happiness in the form of life in the company of Valkyries with access to banquets with the gods. Only he who perished by the sword could become the favourite of the Gods; only with this attitude to life could one be "saved" and avoid the dreaded "Helheim" of that time.

So, we see here two opposite interpretations of the mystery of life itself. In the one case the dogmas make it the highest ideal of life to avoid killing, using violence, hating and persecuting, slandering and altogether harming any living being, while in the other case they turn the very act of killing into a virtue and the greatest happiness-promoting ideal. How can two opposite forms of ideals be expressive of the same truth? Must not either the ancient Nordic ideals or the Christian ones be wrong? The answer to this is that both views are in reality equally correct. They each individually express the very highest truth of each step. The fact is that the absolute truth or reality is not expressive of any dictatorship or anyone's standardisation or regimentation of life. It does not constitute an order to be in one way or another. The highest answer is then not expressed by the words "Everything shall be very good", but on the contrary "Everything is very good"! And this is turn means that the absolute truth expresses that everything is the best, the most perfect and the most ingenious that it can be at the moment.

How can one then understand that even massacre, persecution and oppression are "very good"? That stealing, plundering and murder with intent to rob are ingenious factors in the collective manifestation of life itself? Here the initial answer is that life on our planet appears to be very much like this. No one can dispute that these tendencies and phenomena exist as solid facts, and that they contribute to shaping our existence. The truth is thus that they exist and are a part of life. And life is expressed in the Bible as being "very good". Now you may perhaps object that the Bible stamps these phenomena as "evil", as "the work of the devil", and warns people very seriously against displaying these tendencies in thought and behaviour, just as the established legislation is also to a high degree based on preventing people from displaying these so-called "criminal tendencies". These laws, with the Bible itself at the head, thus combat something that is described in the great answer as "very good". But when the Bible says that "everything is very good" at the same time as it stimulates persecution and defeat of part of the same life, are its words and commands, with all their apparent illogicality, not then worthless? For he who has not developed sufficiently to be able to see through this problem or to see the true connection, the answer is yes. For the human being in whose consciousness intelligence has reached such a high level of development that it is unable to believe in the established dogmas and assertions, the Bible becomes simply a fabrication and is thereby of no significance. Indeed, for this type of person all religiosity is something primitive, a kind of superstition that is of value to only simple and very naïve souls.

Who really doubts that the intellectual growth of the human being is the cause of the many empty church seats during services? But since this intellectual growth is a part of life and thereby belongs under the words "Everything is very good", it could seem as if the words of the Bible are inconsistent with real life. It here thus becomes established as fact that for the intellectually-minded human being the words of the Bible become increasingly hazy and meaningless. But since it is at the same time a fact that the Bible has had a colossal influence on the evolution of mankind and has taken this mankind away from the primitive human state towards a world where many of its narratives now constitute a direct cause of wonderful phenomena such as hospitals, social welfare, schools and universities, old age and invalidity pensions and so on, no one would be able to claim that, despite its apparent contradictions, it has been without significance. For everything in western culture and civilisation is to a great extent formed from its immortal sentences.

When the Bible all the same, despite these enormous benefits, is felt by the growing intellectuality to be meaningless or hazy, it becomes evident that it is not intended to be or constitute any final expression of the truth. When viewed from a cosmic plane it has had the sole task or purpose of leading the part of mankind that it has been able to influence through some specific, particular steps in the great process we call "evolution". As the human being gradually passes these steps, the mission of the Bible is accomplished. The Bible's mission was to stimulate people to get away from the animal talent, away from the bloody steps and tendencies of selfishness and thereby enable them to attain a form of existence that was more in contact with what they wished or longed for. As this gradually happens and the human being begins to think for itself, we see that it loses interest in the Bible. It thereby becomes a fact that the Bible was never intended to be an analysis of the absolute truth, a truth that life as a whole is intrinsically expressive of. The Bible expresses only a locality in this truth.

What then does mankind demand or need now? Is it a new prophet, a new messiah, a new world redeemer? No, not in the earlier sense of these words. Everyone who comes today and says that he is a new Christ or a new messiah belongs without exception to the category that Jesus regarded as the false prophets that would come. What a new world needs is not more religious dogmas. The greatest truths in the form of dogmas have of course been preached for thousands of years, so everyone who comes and is able to give people only the same dogmas can be merely a plagiarist of the real messiah or Christ. And if he then also demands that one should believe blindly in him and follow him, his identity as a false Christ is an evident fact for he who really has high-intellectual insight into the highest phenomena of life. Then he is not the fulfilment of the promise that Christ prophesied would come. For Christ had not prophesied a new leader or spiritual dictator, but a high-intellectual analysis of life's greatest problems or the solution to the mystery of life itself in such a way that every human being becomes its own Christ. The fact is that such an analysis is nothing other than the "holy spirit".

My analyses constitute a coherent series of thoughts that is evident to the intelligence. It not my mission to be a messiah, a new Christ, a new world redeemer in the ordinary sense. I have certainly no wish to be the source of such a situation, a situation in which people should be suggestionised into being dependent on or mentally bound by me, a situation in which I thus in a way should be a kind of spiritual or mental dictator that the blind should follow. No, I want freedom for all beings to think and reason for themselves and to become their own world redeemers, their own Christ. The difference between my task and that of the prophets is that while they were beings who used dogmas to suggestionise their fellow beings into believing in them and were thus beings one had to follow and lean on, because of one's own intellectual ineptitude, my work is of a nature such that it enables the individual to think freely and independently for itself. The solution to the mystery of life becomes a theoretical fact for the being. No belief and no suggestion are demanded. My work gives the being knowledge. The mission of the world redemption at present is thus to give the beings not belief but knowledge. And with independent knowledge one is not dependent on me, as one would have to be if it were merely belief.

People of today are hungering for this knowledge, not for the dogmas but for the scientific basis for the dogmas. And a knowledge that can motivate the scientific character or identity of the dogmas as reality and not mysticism must be something one can learn in schools, in colleges and universities. But before it can get to this point, it must of course be born. And it is this birth you see in my work. There is nothing in my work or in my cosmic analyses that does not show that everything is very good, and thereby also that the so-called evil is good. It makes it of course unutterably easier to be loving and understanding towards everyone and everything when a scientific basis for all the darkness in the world (which one cannot like) has been created, a scientific basis showing that no one can be a martyr and that we ourselves are the originator of our dark fate, and that this fate in reality is also good in that it inevitably leads the being to greater experiences, greater knowledge and thereby ennobles the being, indeed, transforms it entirely into a perfect being: the real human being. And with this understanding, war, sorrow and suffering, unnatural death and destruction will disappear from the continents of the Earth as the fiery glow of sunset over the mountains.

My work is not a new dogmatism or a new object of belief but is strictly a science. True enough, it does not have its professors and doctors, but that does not change the fact that it can never ever be invalidated, since it contains the absolute basis for the exact correspondence of everything with the great answer, "Everything is very good", the dark as well as the light, the evil as well as the good. A better analysis and thereby a better foundation for life cannot be created or cannot exist. A greater basis for neighbourly love cannot thus be given, and a greater basis for the creation of the being's own liberation could thus never be revealed either, since such a basis would be totally impossible. But since my work is an analysis of the truth, a scientific explanation of how it can be that everything is very good, and is thus the analysis of life itself, it is not something that I can be the originator of. It has no originator; it is the analysis of life itself and exists from eternity to eternity. It is not an analysis of the nature of the Godhead that is true of merely a little locality in the universe or of a single, short period of time. But an analysis that can never be out of date and shows that everything is very good can be nothing but the very greatest truth. And as such it cannot be anything other than "spiritual science" or the holy spirit.

The holy spirit, which thus constitutes the very highest science, cannot possibly be national; it cannot possibly be Danish or German; it cannot be American or English, just as little as it can be theosophical, anthroposophical, spiritualistic or Martinian. It is to the very highest degree international, indeed, interplanetary or in every imaginable way non-individual. It is the life in which we all live and move and have our being. It is the omnipresent "spirit of God that moves upon the face of the waters". When people call my work Martinism it expresses merely that they have not yet grasped what they are really dealing with. It reveals that the beings do not possess the intellectuality to realise that it is something that cannot be Martinian at all. But it is of course forgivable because such an insight into my work, or into such a series of analyses, whose capacity is the entire cosmos or the highest structure of life or the universe, cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures or by reading. Even if one has perhaps read my main work Livets Bog (The Book of Life) ten times or heard perhaps a hundred lectures, one will certainly not have gained the true, unshakable insight into the true identity of this work or analyses as absolute and unshakable truth. It is true that this insight can be arrived at theoretically through study, but not until one lives the analyses do they become real science in one's own heart and mind. Only then do they constitute the helper that the being was promised, the helper that shall replace the being's dependence on a messiah or Christ. Only then will the being be overshadowed by the holy spirit, thus enabling the being itself to become one with the truth, the way and the life. Since my work, my series of cosmic analyses, gives rise exclusively to these effects, it is thereby established as fact that it is one with life. And as such it can be described only by, or ultimately be given this single, practical term: "spiritual science".