I have long since received a letter from you dated … Please excuse me for not managing to answer you sooner.

I see from your letter that you are very dissatisfied with your life. You write, among other things, that you detest and loathe nothing more than the thought of being "employed" in an ordinary job with all that that entails: having a fixed plan for the day (and always the same plan at that), having to obey others, having to let yourself be pulled around like a puppet and do things that do not interest you at all. You hate any office or business "like the devil himself". You would rather cross the Atlantic on a raft with the danger of being swallowed up there than enter the office or business world to be swallowed up by it, if you got the choice.

You then write that P.P. cannot understand this, despite the fact that you think it is easy to understand.

Well, dear Anon… your condition is easy enough to understand. You have more than sufficiently revealed it in your letter. But the cause of it – that is what matters. And here I can well understand that P.P., who himself is an exceptionally hard worker ready to do any work whatsoever that in any given situation may be demanded of him, has difficulty in understanding your condition, which is one hundred per cent the opposite of his. But now you have asked me for help and I will try once more to enlighten you.

Your attitude to life is really hatred towards being "employed", hatred towards an ordinary job, hatred towards being subordinate to others, hatred towards being forced to do things that do not interest you. You mention here the office and business world and hate all this "like the devil". What all the people the world over have been brought up to since they were children, that is to be able to earn their food themselves and earn their living so that they will not become a burden on others, this absolutely healthy and vitally essential attitude to life you dismiss completely. You emphasise this by saying that you hate it "like the devil".

But have you thought about how much you yourself owe ordinary jobs? If all others hated ordinary jobs and like you had been able to avoid having a job or an occupation, how could you then have been able to enjoy all the good things that you daily, since you were born, have consumed as a matter of course? When you can wear nice, comfortable clothes and shoes, when you can live in a lovely house or a lovely flat, when you can go to hospital or the doctor if necessary, when there are factories, power stations and gasworks, schools and colleges, literature, art and science etc etc, it is exclusively due to people who to a greater or lesser extent have to disregard what they want and what they do not want. So you live, dear Anon., every day on the work of all these people and therefore owe society and ordinary jobs very much. Can you not see that it is a derailment to want to live and enjoy comforts and amenities at other people's expense? We all owe it to our neighbours in ordinary jobs to make our contribution to their maintenance. If we all, like you, cursed them and fled from them instead of understanding their importance, society would collapse. If everyone wanted to be a parasite on other people's work, how could the work be done? Why should you be an exception? Why should you not work in an office or have another position that you are capable of?

Maybe you want to work with things on a higher plane than the purely material, physical plane. But who among the many workers bound to factories, workshops, offices and the like, who take part in seeing to it that you can enjoy the good things of civilisation, does not want that? But a higher plane or stage of civilisation than that which the present, materialistic, atheistic civilisation represents is idealism. True idealism is neighbourly love. It means preferring to suffer oneself than to let others suffer, to bear the brunt of the work oneself rather than letting others do so. It means understanding that everything in one's fate is designed to transform oneself into a "human being in God's likeness". It means understanding everything and everyone. Only this understanding will give you the freedom for which you really hunger, but which you cannot possibly get because you are far from having this understanding and the idealism connected with this. As long as you, dear Anon., do not prepare yourself to be in touch with what you owe mankind on the material plane, everything about the ordinary jobs that you say you hate, you are not an idealist. You are not a good example for others. And without being a good example you cannot possibly belong to a higher plane than precisely that on which these others find themselves. So you are in reality today, from a cosmic point of view, in precisely the right place. You have a slightly too highly developed intelligence in relation to your talent for humaneness. This allows you vaguely to sense a higher stage of civilisation, to which you would very much like to belong. But your, as yet lacking, humane development means that you are not prepared to pay what it costs to belong to such a plane. You will not make the effort necessary in order to travel the road up to this stage or to this freedom for which you so strongly hunger. But other people cannot walk the road for you. You must do the work yourself. And this work is precisely what you say you "hate like the devil". You must therefore see to it that you combat this hatred and so be willing to be a washerwoman as well as a princess, a factory worker as well as an office worker, prepared to serve rather than let yourself be served, and so prepared without hatred or bitterness to carry out any work whatsoever that God in the form of your fate might demand of you. Get away from the idea that you are too good or too highly developed to do any honest job that fate in a given situation has called upon you to do.

As long as you have not learnt this, as long as you go on hating honest work you will meet it again and again and will finally be chained to it. It will in this way block the road to the freedom you so strongly invoke. On the contrary, when you have learnt to see that the work or ordinary job you today hate is in reality a vitally necessary phenomenon in God's transformation of you from "animal" to "human being", and that you in reality should bless it rather than curse it, then the sunlit epoch of freedom will rise above the horizon of your fate. Then you yourself will begin to shine forth for others.

You must not think that the greatest wise people are those who are afraid of carrying out simple work, and that this is why they have reached so far in spiritual development. On the contrary, they are all people who are ready to do any work whatsoever if they thereby can help people towards greater light and a better existence. They have come so far solely because they live in the belief that they have come to the world to serve and not to be served. It would also be worth you remembering that Christ was a carpenter's apprentice, just as his disciples were not without ordinary jobs. I myself have had ordinary jobs since I was 12 years old. I was a herdboy, a farmhand, a dairyman, a night watchman and finally an office clerk. Then into my life entered the spiritual state that gave rise to the freedom for me to work with life's highest problems. I had, however, once more, after I had begun my large main work "Livets Bog (The Book of Life)", to take a job as an unskilled worker in order to earn a living. But I have never in these situations felt bitter or hateful, though I of course did not feel that these were the fulfilment of my life's ideals or goals. I always felt in these situations that I worked for God and that it was something I had to go through. I felt that I to a great extent lived on the work of others. I too had therefore to contribute to carrying out the work others could live on, as long as I was not mature enough to be able to carry out the spiritual work for God with which I later to such a high degree was blessed.

Well, dear Anon.! I would have liked to have been able to write a different letter to you that would have been more pleasant, but then I would not have been honest with you. I have judged your condition from your letter, and I can feel perfectly well how painful it must be for you. I have tried therefore from the bottom of my heart to find the information that could unfailingly help you out of your purgatory and, as far as you yourself want, give you the great joy it is to live only to serve one's neighbour and thereby be a joy and a blessing for all living things.

With this I send you my most loving greetings,

Martinus