Nature is celebrating Whitsuntide. Everywhere life is sprouting. The long days of light and warmth, with colours and scents, with the hymns issuing from thousands of tiny throats rising heavenwards, with holidays, picnics, woodland walks, parties and merriment have returned to our northern latitudes and forced the cold and darkness away from the zone that we call "winter", and have thereby once again given us back summer. This gift or this return of life is the culmination of God's spirit in a material or physical form. For wherever God's spirit culminates, life or summer always emerges, whereas winter manifests wherever God's spirit appears in a latent form. This is not some kind of symbolic story, but direct absolute reality. God's spirit is in fact not a person, it is not something supernatural, incomprehensible or unreal, but a real fact in the form of the wonderful power, which is identical to "consciousness", that allows all living beings to sense existence, thereby making them identical to life.

God's spirit is the same as the sensation of life. This sensation enters into the living being in the form of "thoughts". In turn, thoughts multiply in these beings' creative faculties, thereby allowing new thoughts, new fields of consciousness, to appear before their wondering "selves" or "I's", thereby giving them the name "living beings". God's spirit is therefore identical to absolutely everything that exists in the form of thought, consciousness or life. But in order for life to be able to be experienced it has to appear in contrasts, and as a result light and darkness, summer and winter, cold and heat, pleasure and displeasure, prosperity and adversity etc. have been verifiable facts wherever God's spirit in the form of the experience of life makes a "something" into a "living being". One therefore has to understand that it is not possible for an object to be experienced in any other way than on the basis of its contrast. White can only be experienced if there is at the same time something that is not white, and black can only be experienced if there is at the same time something that is not black, and the same applies to any object whatsoever. It can only be experienced on the basis of the fact that there is at the same time something to which it is not identical. The divine spirit will then also, in its cosmic analysis, be expressed as one in an infinite number of degrees of energy appearing in various strengths. And it is these various degrees of strength that form the basis of all contrasts in existence. The sum total of these degrees of strength in the expression of the divine spirit represent a rising scale from a lesser to a greater manifestation of strength. The weaker manifestation forms the basis of what we call "imperfection", whereas the stronger manifestation forms the basis of what we call "perfection". Both these forms of manifestation are also referred to respectively as "darkness" and "light". The divine spirit will therefore in its cosmic analysis be divided into a "dark" and a "light" part.

According to "Livets Bog" all living beings are eternal realities and experience life in the form of gigantic evolutionary epochs or sections, which in "Livets Bog" have been given the name "evolutionary spirals" or "spiral steps". Every such step constitutes a section in which the living beings first experience the divine spirit in latent form or in the weaker manifestation, and then in full manifestation or culmination. As readers of this book also know, such a "spiral step" also appears in six lesser steps or sections. Of these, the first two are well known. They make up what we call the "plant kingdom" and the "animal kingdom". Next comes the "human kingdom" to which terrestrial human beings only partly belong, as they are to a large extent still subject to the requirements of life of the animal kingdom and to a certain extent have to kill in order to live. Here, as everywhere in my articles, killing is to be understood merely as the mutilating or destroying of a living being's body, since in the absolute sense nothing can kill and nothing can be killed. The living being's "self" or "I" is not "what is created" but the "creator", and as such is impervious to any kind of cessation, since only "what is created" can cease or perish.

As imperfection must always in the end result in "unpleasantness", whereas perfection must in the end definitely give rise to "pleasantness", the Earth's human beings have for a long time distinguished between the two forms of manifestation of the divine spirit, but of course to a large extent without having an inkling that they were manifestations of the same source. They have even to the same extent imagined a certain originator of the manifestation of unpleasantness and not thought of the Godhead as the true originator of it. They have therefore called the manifestation of unpleasantness the "evil" and the imagined originator of this the "devil". But this idea is due to an underdeveloped overview of the absolute facts that, as I have already said, show that "darkness" just as much as "light" are equally great essential requirements of all creation, of all experience of life, and therefore constitute exactly the same absolute blessing for all living beings, and that, in its cosmic analysis, existence is based on the highest degree of love.

Since "holy" is the opposite of everything that is impure, which in this case means everything that contains imperfections, and "spirit" is the same as "consciousness" or the "sensation of life", the "holy spirit" will therefore be the same as "the pure or perfect sensation of life". This is in turn the opposite of that form of experience of life that is full of mistakes or imperfections and that is otherwise commonplace in the terrestrial zones.

Terrestrial human beings have not come so far in their evolution that they have reached such a state of consciousness. They still have to struggle with many imperfections and lacks in their consciousness. Such a consciousness does not therefore constitute the "holy spirit", but on the contrary God's spirit at a primitive or latent stage. But through the religions, through beings that have been ahead of the great majority in evolution, the human beings on Earth have been made aware of, or have come into contact with, the first stages of the "holy spirit". When in the Bible we read about Moses who saw a "burning bush", or about the prophet Elijah being taken up into heaven in "a chariot of fire" drawn by "horses of fire", or Jesus' "transfiguration on the mountain", or Saint Paul who was enveloped in a "white light" etc. they were all phenomena that are connected to the penetration in these beings of "cosmic consciousness" or the "holy spirit". This penetration is in fact always accompanied by strange "light phenomena" that appear in varying degrees of strength. These phenomena are by nature most perfect when they show themselves to the individual as a fundamental "baptism of fire", which means an enveloping of the individual in a cloud of blinding mental light. The individual becomes so to speak transfigured and visible to the occult senses as being of blazing fire. This "fire" is an expression of the highest spiritual energy or matter and cannot pervade an individual without the individual in one way or another already in advance being receptive to this energy through moral purification. In relationship to this purification and to the evolutionary step the individual finds itself on, it is pervaded by the "holy spirit" or life's highest energy of consciousness.

As previously mentioned, the experience of the "holy spirit" does not occur to an equally strong degree in all beings, but is released in relation to the being's evolutionary step. In "Livets Bog" I therefore differentiate between the total experience, which in this book I call the "great birth", and the partial or unfinished forms of experience of this spirit that are considered to be merely the embryonic stages of the "great birth".

Since you will have the possibility of studying this elevated subject in greater depth in the forthcoming volumes of "Livets Bog", I cannot go into greater details here. But I have felt the urge to send to my readers, as a little Whitsuntide greeting, these rough outlines of this big subject, as this is particularly connected with Whitsuntide. Christianity celebrates Whitsuntide in memory of the "holy spirit's" outpouring over the apostles. The festival of Whitsuntide is the festival of the "holy spirit".