For the vast majority of mankind death, which means the separation of the I from the physical body, is the thing that is most feared. The fear of death is almost like a river that has its sources in many springs, streams and brooks. Probably nothing has more superstitious ideas attached to it than this really quite natural process of light. The fear of death is there in every uninitiated person's breast. Parents are afraid that death will strike down their sick child, and the child is afraid that death will strike down its sick parents. The fear of death casts its cold, damp shadow over the young marriage when one of the partners has a fever and is ill. It is a heavy burden of sorrow for every loving father and mother who has to send their son to war at the front, just as it creates terror and panic in many of the young soldiers at the front. Whether on land, at sea or in the air. In all aspects of everyday physical existence the fear of death is to a greater or lesser extent a solar eclipse of life. It is constantly fed from small and large sources that together for present day terrestrial mankind as a whole give rise to a poisonous river of sorrow, and thereby of worry and illness, that slowly and surely flows through the terrestrial human mental sphere and darkens or eclipses normal or natural joy in living.

But when joy in living is darkened or eclipsed it undermines the experience of life, which thus becomes cosmic unconsciousness and physical disability. Unconsciousness and disability like this rules mankind and is the reason why it hobbles around through time and space on the crutches of intelligence, a mental faculty that is morally quite neutral. By means of intelligence one murders and kills, desecrates and plunders, tortures and mutilates one's neighbour just as much as one with the same faculty creates light and joy, and blesses and caresses one's surroundings. This faculty as well is caught, controlled and directed by the fear of death, this basic cause of all kinds of fear. It is this that to a greater or lesser extent creates or forms the thoughts of the uninitiated human, guides its will and so decides its fate. It ought to be obvious that this fate is something quite different from that which befits the lord of life himself, the future human being in God's image. Will not people soon realize that this entire deadly river of fear is something quite unnatural? Why has the earth been transformed from a globe of red-hot, rumbling explosions of liquid fire or molten metals into a glorious globe bathed in sunlight and warmth, with its marvellous continents and oceans, its colourful mountains and valleys, forests and flowery meadows, its brilliantly coloured flowing Alps, the sunrise and sunset colours and the other sparkling nuances on the curved horizon of the blue sky? Is it any wonder that the birds sing to heaven in jubilation and the other forest animals dance, hop and jump around out of joy, amorousness and the desire to mate? What can be more beautiful than the daybreak or eventide of a summer's day? Where previously volcanos and explosions, columns of fire and solar prominences made all conscious life impossible, the most beautiful fertile terrains now lie with all the possible conditions for the glorious revealing or unfolding of all plant and animal life. Do you think that all this glory is created only for animals and plants? Do you not think that to quite a high degree it is more adapted to be the setting for a purely human existence, which means an existence based on neighbourly love, rather than on the killing, animal form of life? Do you think it has such overwhelmingly rich and beautiful possibilities for divine, joyous life just in order to be a setting for the culmination for the hostility of human beings towards others? Do you think that it will still go on being the setting for the most ingenious use of millions of Nature's horsepower in the service of the killing principle? Do you think that the human being has been only created in order to destroy civilisation, to poison the spirit, break the back of its neighbour and be its slave driver? Do you think that all the beautiful possibilities and conditions that the earth possesses for paradisiacal life, creation and experience should be restricted, stagnated or held down by a never-ending struggle for money, or the right to possess or monopolize Nature's gifts to all the people of the earth? It can never be the intention or purpose of life that the products of Nature, which are a gift from life to all living beings, should be monopolized and owned by some few people, to such an extent that these people are smothered by luxury, gluttony and excessive self-indulgence at the same time as other people are dying in poverty, hunger and misery because of this monopolization, or other people's excessive appropriation of assets by virtue of the principle of the right of the stronger or the principle of might or power camouflaged as "honest or lawful business".

It is obvious that both the rich and the poor with their own individual fates that undermine their lives - the excessive and stifling satisfaction of appetite of the rich and the stifling lack of satisfaction of vital needs of the poor - do not in the first instance create the time for or the interest in loving their neighbour. But a daily existence lacking in sympathy or love for one's surroundings, for one's neighbour, is a life of unkindness, war and persecution. But war, unkindness and persecution do not heal fear; they are the very source from which fear springs. Out of this foaming, deadly well-spring the undermining poisonous vapours issue forth that, like an invisible virus, poisons all minds taking away all joy in existing; at the same time it even sends its vapours into the thoughts about death and also here creates panic, fear and terror. Fearing life and at the same time living in terror of death is nothing more than hell in its purest form. What is this being to do? Are we not here at the culmination of the after-effects of the Fall of Adam and Eve? Is not this fear, this mental helplessness the same as the feeling of being "naked"? Who can help the distressed Adam and Eve, which means terrestrial uninitiated mankind, or the "prodigal son" of the Bible, out of this sphere of culminating fear of life and death, out of this hell? What can convince the downcast son of God of the cause of his fate and so lead him back to the light, good fortune or Paradise?

Indeed does not life, by virtue of its loving structure, help out here in the form of eternal salvation? Even in the deepest darkness the dream of a higher existence and a better world exists. The memory of the eternal Father and a life in heaven or in a sphere of light can never be completely wiped out or die. It can be lost from sight for shorter or longer periods at a time, but it can never ever completely cease. It is indeed located so deep in the materialistic being's inner mental structure that here it can only surface occasionally in the being's awake physical day-consciousness as a vague instinct or a presentiment, when there are no other means of escape and all hope has been dashed. This vague presentiment allows a little, weak flame or candle of hope to shine into the awake day-consciousness. All beings in a state of unhappiness normally hope, therefore, for happiness; all beings in hell hope for a kingdom of heaven. It is this instinct that, even in the animal, calls forth its cry of death when its life is in danger. It is the animal's unconscious beseeching of an unknown providence. And this cry in the believing human being turns into a conscious prayer to Providence or the Godhead. So behind this release of energy or power there lies within the being an inborn ability to more or less consciously and automatically summon the attention of a providence in any dangerous situation. So this instinct is something organic and therefore cannot be something invented by people. Only people's understanding and opinion about this instinct, which is found in the being, can be more or less untrue and characterized by a derailed imagination and is therefore to a corresponding degree unacceptable to intellectual people. But to deny the living being's manifestation of instinct towards Providence is thus the same as denying the fact, and is therefore against Nature. So deep inside the living being here is an organic connection with a providence. In animals and very primitive humans this connection can only show itself in their death cry. In the evolved or initiated human this organic function has become a day-conscious correspondence with Providence or the Godhead. But the majority of the people of the earth are not initiated beings. If they were, the earth's human sphere would sparkle and radiate in a flood of a high-intellectual light of neighbourly love, a light that for terrestrial mankind of today only exists celestially or as the kingdom that is not of this world. But as it is, the people of the earth make up an ocean of uninitiated beings, an ocean in which the number of initiated beings can be expressed as only a few single drops. However, through world redemption these initiates with their being have pervaded the terrestrial human mentality so much that lasting peace, a higher ethical and moral situation, a more beautiful form of existence or life together with fellow beings are the fundamental objects of all civilised human being's hopes and longings or dreams for the future.

Because terrestrial mankind has been led forward to a state in which the previously mentioned dreams of the future constitute the beginnings of a desire, the beginnings of a hunger that can no longer be ignored, why has it not long ago fulfilled the conditions for satisfying this hunger? The globe is completely evolved and has all the material conditions needed to create such a higher or perfect world civilisation which is common to all the people of the earth. Why then is it that people are now more at war and more involved in killing, murdering, mutilating and oppressing other fellow beings through their behaviour than ever before? The reason is precisely because they believe that in so doing they are able to fulfil their dream of the future of lasting peace and a higher ideal world. That is why they are concentrating on creating what they think are the best means of helping to attain the realisation in physical matter, in physical flesh and blood, of their dream of the future. And what the people of the earth consider to be the best means of abolishing war, with its deadly consequences is precisely the killing principle. That is why the people of the earth presume that the manufacture of the most ingenious machines of murder or means of killing is the greatest and most useful focus for its creative energy today. They do not understand at all that war and discord are psychic things and therefore have to be combatted psychically. One stands as little chance of abolishing the killing principle by killing as one does of getting rid of weeds by sowing them. But nevertheless we find materialistic, present-day terrestrial mankind steeped in this absurd superstition. It has led people right away from the real world, from the real experience of life. Terrestrial mankind has become ingenious at promoting death but miserably poor at promoting or giving life.

And that is where we find materialistic present day terrestrial mankind. It is in control of the atom and thus of the elements. It has reached the peak of its ability to let matter work for it. Using enormous engines it can produce useful things by the million, indeed it even has machines that make calculations. Mental tasks that would have taken many people an impossibly long time to complete can now, with the help of such machines, be calculated or worked out in a tiny fraction of the time the calculation would otherwise have taken without these machines. Modern materialistic mankind has acquired a knowledge and an intellectual capability which puts him in a position to weigh suns and stars and measure enormous distances in time and space, thousands and thousands of light years away in the immense universe, without, however, being able to see any solution to the mystery of life and also without being able to find that certain "something", with which it can make its existence completely safe and banish fear. So despite its ingenious material knowledge and capability or its ability to weigh and measure, it is quite helpless when faced with this death-inducing or life-undermining mental phenomenon. Mankind is therefore being smothered by its purely physical overall power or his physical mastery in analysing things that are time- and space-dimensional, which in turn means things that are created, things that have come about and that will again perish, things that thus have a beginning and an end. The removal of the fear of death and the ensuing creation of the feeling of security that constitutes completely the desired lasting, absolute peace is not a question of weights and measures. Knowledge of consistency, volume, porosity and density or the degrees of solid, liquid, gaseous and radiant matter cannot remove this fear. No knowledge at all of the physical or material measurements of these kinds of matter can be a really effective remedy against fear, no matter how competent one might be in being able to combine these kinds of matter either chemically or technically into so-called "weapon of defence" or tools of war, into machines of murder or hydrogen bombs. Real true fearlessness has never been and never ever will be a result of a cold materialistic science, no matter how enormous or ingenious this might be in its knowledge of the physical vibrations of matter, its wavelengths, its speeds and its reactivity.

The abolition of fear is not a question of directing physical things, because the object of fear can never in any circumstances be of a physical nature. It is true that in everyday speech one expresses the objects of one's fear as physical phenomena. We say that we are afraid of war, we are afraid of being killed, we are afraid of being ruined, we are afraid of illness and many other forms of material unpleasantness, but in reality these phenomena are not the true object of our fear. They are only outer or superficial material effects of a more or less invisible cause that precedes them. This cause is the true object of one's fear. If it did not exist there would be no unpleasant effects to be afraid of. A murder weapon does not think of persecuting or killing someone. It poses no danger in itself. It is the person behind the murder weapon that can pose the danger. A dagger, revolver, cannon or atom-bomb has no more made itself, than it can by itself persecute, murder, kill or destroy someone or something. It is the person behind these phenomena that is the deadly dangerous factor. This being is the life behind the aforementioned phenomena. The life behind the animated murder weapon is the true object of fear and that to the highest degree ought to be combat-ted. Life, which here means consciousness or thought, that animates the murder weapon and, through this mobilisation of its murderous efficiency, creates fear and terror constitutes the foundation upon which every Armageddon or Hell is based. Beings that, with their thought, consciousness or life, make matter into something that kills and make fear a living thing, thereby making peace impossible within their domain, are the executioners of the universe, the henchmen of darkness or the saboteurs of the true experience of life. No, it is not murder weaponry or dead matter that is the object or the cause of fear, but the living beings who, with their murderous way of thinking in their own life, turn matter into something that kills.

As long as one does not correctly understand the true cause of fear, one will mainly concentrate on its effects. One directs one's struggle or resistance more towards the effects than towards their cause. So one can go on living and creating new effects, no matter how much one struggles against these effects. And as long as there are effects that promote fear, fear will continue to flourish. And one must think of means of creating an even stronger "defence". So one has to create murder weapons that have an even greater capacity to kill and destroy. Life becomes one great competition in arming oneself, in creating more and more ingenious murder weapons and means of destruction, with which one can destroy or prevent the deadly impact of the opponent. This has become the most fundamental world philosophy within the politics and form of government of modern states. No wonder that the military arms-race has reached the dizzy heights that it has. Has this world philosophy with its military armament, which has nonchalantly ignored the great humane ideals and demands of neighbourly love of both Christianity and other world religions, succeeded in banishing fear from the domain of the human sphere? Has not precisely the opposite happened? Is not the fear of war greater today than at any other time? Has not the enormous burden that maintaining a military presence costs communities, created a new source of fear? Are not countries in grave economic crises that they cannot pull themselves out of without plain down-to-earth exploitation of the individual citizen through taxation? Is there, these days, any field at all in everyday economies that is not restricted by the burden of taxation? But the crippling burden of taxation restricts the initiative and joy in working of the employers just as much as the workers, quite apart from the increase in bankruptcy and liquidation that these burdens can also bring about. But bankruptcy and liquidation promote unemployment and so restrict access to the basic necessities of daily life and this restriction creates discontent, bitterness and unrest or revolution. But a life of revolution, unrest, hunger and misery does not lend itself to banishing fear thereby providing the favourable soil for peace or a perfectly happy experience of life and especially not in countries that have become a desert of ruins where previously there were large cities or centres of life. How much experience, destruction and murdering do you think is needed to make it a scientific fact that war and imposition of power is not the way to overcome fear? Is it not already a fact that fear leads to war and that war leads to fear, which in turn leads to war and so on? If this were not the case the much longed-for lasting peace would long ago have become a fact. Now on the contrary the lust for war is a fact that is predominant. Lasting peace is still a dream of the future, imagination or a Utopia. No, one cannot overcome fear by opposing or crushing its outer effects, that as mentioned before will always be dead things. Fear can only be overcome by overcoming the living "something" that is the true cause of fear. As this living "something" cannot be killed or wiped out, neither fear nor therefore the cause of fear can be banished either by murder or destruction. Murder and destruction can only affect time- and space-dimensional phenomena. But as these phenomena in themselves do not possess any life, but constitute only dead things, murder and destruction can only affect objects that represent the same lifelessness. The true cause of fear still lies beyond this process of murder and destruction and so will still continue to be a flowing source of fear. It is not the dead things, capable of being crushed or wiped out using processes of murder or destruction, that organise the phenomena that arouse fear. If this were the case the processes of murder and destruction of war would be the only certain means of banishing fear, and a lasting peace would already have become fact in the regions of the earth long before the time of Abraham, because there is nothing that terrestrial mankind is more ingenious at or more skilled in that in using means of destruction.

As we have seen, people's struggle against everything that they fear is in fact only a struggle against the effects of the feared objects, not against their causes. The various peoples or states are competing in the creation of military armament with more and more effective, ingenious murder weapons and methods of destruction and believe that in doing so they can combat war. In this way they manage in the most favourable circumstances to be able only to combat some of the effects of war - not its cause. As long as the cause of war exists untouched, it will go on creating effects that people of necessity must protect themselves against. They then try to combat these with effects of the same kind, consequently with a new war. And so in this way a permanent state of war is the only absolutely certain result. By doing this they stabilize in fact both the fear of death and the war that follows on from it that they want to combat. But it is not just in relation to the outward surroundings or their fellow humans that beings combat the effects regardless of their cause. The whole of their material struggle is in the vast majority of cases a struggle against sufferings without being a struggle against the cause of the sufferings. This also applies in many cases to illness. So it will be impossible for life to be peaceful wellbeing but it has to go on being a struggle against the sufferings and grievances whose cause one does not get rid of. These causes will then go on breeding sufferings that still have to be restricted or combatted. And as long as people have to struggle to restrict or impede sufferings from a spring whose flow they do not stop, this struggle cannot cease. It is inevitable that to a corresponding degree the being's daily experience of life has to be one of struggle and suffering instead of a natural wellbeing with peace and happiness or true human joy in being alive.

As terrestrial man's life is a struggle against the effects instead of the causes of many different evils, he has to go on being in battle, in combat or at war. Causes that are not combatted go on living. So long as the causes of the sufferings or the evils are not combatted, these sufferings and evils will go on existing. And as long as these exist the uninitiated human being will go on being afraid, shielding himself against those beings that he fears are more or less life threatening, using the weapons of defence and murdering techniques of war. So he struggles against all the people he thinks stand in the way of his happiness. He wages war on, murders and kills everything suspicious believing that in so doing he is able to open the way for peace and wellbeing. Is not this particularly what has become that kind of leadership or form of government that comes across as ice-cold dictatorship? "Iron curtains" are set up round the region of dictatorship and people thereby believe that they have shut out the cause of war or the presumed evil, whereas the fact is that the cause of war, the very source of discord, is in the very highest degree still flowing within the isolated region making an ever-increasing struggle against its effects necessary. Does one not need stronger and stronger control over what the people or inhabitants of the isolated region think, say and write? Does not every citizen in such a community literally have to spy and inform on every fellow citizen that dares to have a thought or opinion that is not in line with the orders of the dictator? When one dams a river the pressure on the dam becomes stronger and stronger. And so the "iron curtain", which is a damming up of the poisonous waters of the river of fear, also has to be made stronger and stronger. Along with the iron curtain's restriction on personal freedom, with all kinds of torture and executions backed up by an institution of murder, which is camouflaged as a normal legal system of justice, but which is used for liquidating or wiping out all the unwanted differently-thinking people or groups of people, fear will inevitably increase thereby gradually exerting a proportionately greater and greater pressure on the dictator's iron curtain or dam. Eventually the dam will burst, be broken to pieces and will crush everything in the tremendous flood that ensues. Did we not see how the enormous damming up of intellectual liberty and cultural creativity, known as "Nazism", caused half the world to quake in fear and terror and when it burst, left many of Europe's great cities in ruins after having liquidated, that is separated from their physical bodies, millions and millions of people? Does this combat fear? Does this bring a firm sense of security to its originator? Has there come about a thousand-year-long kingdom of peace behind this iron curtain, as people had been led to believe? Is not the source of fear still foaming and gushing over all the peoples of the earth? Are not people today shaking even more than ever before? Do they not have to put their energy into even more effective means of killing and destroying? Does this not mean that fear has become proportionately greater?

Why is there all this fear of war in the world? If it were the case that better and better murder weapons could abolish war or the evil in the world, then fear would have decreased to the same extent that the development of these murder weapons became more and more ingenious and successful. Is one unable now by using millions and millions of the elements' horsepower to trigger off the presumed death and ruin of the persons and states one considers are the cause of war? Why has fear not decreased to a corresponding degree? Of what use are these gigantic military and economic demands on society along with the top scientists' most ingenious thinking on how to control matter and power on a gigantic scale, when it to the same extent breeds the fear of war or death, and so paralyses the peace and wellbeing of people? Do you not think that it is due to the fact that one instinctively senses that with these enormous means one is not able to banish war or discord from the sphere of life of the terrestrial human, but only to paralyse here and there the effects of it, using even stronger murderous effects? Is it not precisely the case that one can usually only overcome weaker war or aggression forces with stronger ones? What in fact is a conqueror in war? Is he not a greater warrior than the one he has defeated? But is a greater warlord nearer to peace than a lesser warlord? It is certainly not the case that the greater the warrior one is, the greater one is a representative of peace. How can peace come about by means of war? Only a greater armed force can defeat a lesser one and this greater armed force can in turn only be defeated by an even greater one and so on. But it is not possible to abolish or reduce war like this. By virtue of this principle war will inevitably grow and become greater and greater, which the history of terrestrial mankind fully confirms or shows to be a fact.

With reference to the above it is not so surprising that the fear of war or the fear of death has not decreased along with material development. People's materialistic knowledge and ability has not in the least succeeded in reducing fear but has on the contrary caused it to double many times over. As fear undermines thought, and the energy of thought is the magnetism of the blood or its vital force, one has undermined, with this enormous increasing of fear in the mind, people's normal vital force and made them unhealthy and thereby sick, quite apart from the psychic confusion and restrictions and consequently the shattered nerves and mental breakdowns that torture beings. The situation is made no better by burdening these sick or defective organisms with all kind of stimulants, by filling the lungs with noxious kinds of fumes in the form of tobacco smoke, by filling the stomach with substances containing alcohol or other substances that destroy the normal experience of life, so that the beings on these grounds alone appear as abnormal beings. Beings that have made it a habit every day to breathe in noxious kinds of fumes and to eat and drink other substances that directly break down or destroy their faculty to experience life, can only be regarded as saboteurs of their own wellbeing. They therefore more or less come under the category of "suicides". But to murder oneself is not the intention of life. And what is not life's intention can only be abnormal. The fact that this abnormality is represented by a very large group of beings, in fact perhaps even here and there by a majority, does not change abnormality to normality. But a point of view represented by a majority has an extremely strong power of suggestion, no matter whether it is abnormal or normal. On this power of suggestion is based everything known as "fashion", "traditional customs", in fact even religion, politics and "public opinion" . The opinion of the crowd or this mass suggestion can even be so strong that it totally paralyses the sense of reason, so that beings are unable to perceive their own abnormality where it occurs. It is not unknown for the normal being in the midst of a group of abnormal beings to be treated by the crowd as an abnormal being, an "eccentric". Just think how much this abnormality of the majority undermines or threatens normal education, the creation of culture and the promotion of health and wellbeing. Even though people are so damaged in body and soul that almost no-one dies of old age and even though the construction of hospitals for both mind and body and the medical training that goes with them cannot anything like keep up with the spread of illness and suffering, these living incontrovertible facts have still not succeeded in bringing the crowd or the majority to use their sense of reason or to have the clarity of sight that enables them to see what is abnormal in their view of life. How will fear disappear and that safety come about that is the real foundation of a lasting peace, where a derailed view of life, derived from the suggestion of the majority, brings the crowd in their blind zeal to multiply and propagate causes whose effects for themselves constitute an insurmountable deadly destruction of that normal wellbeing that in their innermost soul they hunger for and cannot live without? Is this not a nightmare? But in every nightmare the fear of death exists in a state of pure cultivation. It is not surprising that terrestrial mankind is afraid. The prodigal son has left his father.

As we have seen in the foregoing chapters, all the evils that occur can so to speak be traced back to fear. It is this state that is the main cause of them all. It is this mental state that is the basis of all military armament and all war and discord between people and the murdering, mutilation and forms of need and misery that follow on from it. So in fact the whole of the present world crisis, or the Armageddon that the Bible said would come about, is due exclusively to fear. Fear is mankind's worst ailment. The greatest problem for mankind will therefore be to combat and overcome fear.

This struggle is therefore nothing new. But as we have seen, it is and always has been based more on the effects of fear than on fear itself. But to combat an evil one does not combat its effects but the root or cause of it. Through a culmination of the darkest and most bitter experiences, people will now come to realise that no weapons whatsoever, not even the strongest ones in the form of atom or hydrogen bombs or the other means of releasing the gigantic forces of the elements with the aim of destroying and killing can dispel fear. Even the very greatest conqueror will never be able to combat the fear inside him using physical means of defence or attack. No material defence whatsoever is strong enough to remove fear from the human mind or from its sphere of thought. This is also the reason why only "spiritually dead" humans, in their fantastic ignorance, hang on to weapons and murder processes in the ill-fated superstition that these provide the ultimate protection. Their superstitious belief is so limitless that they in fact believe that the road to peace can only be paved using weapons and the material or physical power maintained by them.

Peace is not an existence behind palisades of cannons and atom bombs. The peace that can apparently be created by these means, is not peace but a cease-fire temporarily maintained by power and murder weapons, and so it is still war. War in turn deprives both the conqueror and the conquered of freedom. In order to preserve the benefits of victory the conqueror has to bind himself to keeping a military presence entailing costs which inevitably mean a deterioration of culture, to say nothing of the deprivation of freedom through conscription for millions and millions of people that it inevitably brings about. For months, years and days of their lives, the flower of the state's or nation's youth, gifted and in fact peace-loving men and sometimes women, are enslaved by being taught and trained in the very best methods of torturing, murdering and executing other humans and in destroying their irreplaceable cultural treasures and works of art and so also, their peace and happiness. How can this folly, the "spiritually dead" humans' philosophy of life, and the naive masses' blind and foolish bowing down in allegiance to this political policy of death, which restricts all creation of culture and peace, how can all this be the road to peace? As "spiritual death", which is the same as total irreligious-ness, compensates for the loss of belief in Providence or the Godhead by believing in weapons, murder, killing and destruction as a means of protection, it can increasingly lead to nothing else but discord, Doomsday, Armageddon or the modern Hell that mankind has experienced in the world wars of recent decades and in the ensuing cultural and moral ruin.

As it is not possible for weapons or the misuse of material power to create anything other than discord and so to bear the same relation to war as petrol does to fire, and as the basis of this clinging to material power and murder weapons is fear, we have here arrived at the very root of evil. Fear is the true cause of discord. The opposite of it has to be the true cause of peace. But what is the opposite of fear?

But who or what should one trust? Who can one rely on? Can one nation rely on another? Can one political party trust another? The answer always has to be no. Absolutely none of these phenomena, whether countries, people or parties, can guarantee or be worthy of that trust that gives rise to absolute peace. They are all fighting against each other because it is really not peace at all that they are fighting for, but for a widening of their egoistic elbow room, so maintaining the politics of Doomsday known as "everyone being at war with everyone else". They reveal that, spiritually, they are totally dead or ignorant. And absolutely no representation of ignorance with all its ramifications of foolishness, mistakes and disappointments, can provide any foundation for trust. Everyone who bows down to and worships foolishness or ignorance, whether represented in the form of outward glitter and splendour, or in the form of mass-suggestion or mass-worship of this or that object or this or that person, will inevitably come to grief. Foolishness or ignorance is equally dangerous, whether preached by a criminal or a saint, or taught by a king or a pauper, whether it forms the basis of a government or a sect, or it constitutes a religious dogma or a modern political assumption. It is here that people decide their fate. They are all exposed to the colossal power of ignorance or foolishness throughout the whole of daily life. Ignorance is seated in the outdated rules of marriage and family life, just as much as in the equally outdated dogmas of authorised religious morality. Ignorance is present in the activities of the uninitiated leaders in politics just as much as in religion and is seated in the psyche of the masses as suggestion, as firm ideas and so as imagined unshakable truth. So it brings the hypnotised masses to live a lie. But no trust can dwell in the wake or the sphere of lying. Where trust does not dwell, fear takes over. And this can in reality not be combatted with material power or force. In certain situations its effects can stagnate or be held in check for a time with a superior power or force, but the cause of fear can never in any circumstances be combatted in this way. The true and absolute cause of fear is spiritual or cosmic ignorance. Therefore fear cannot be combatted with force and power but on the contrary exclusively with cosmic knowledge. Only absolute cosmic knowledge gives, to the same degree of unshakable trust.

Cosmic knowledge is that knowledge or science, that is accessible to thought or intelligence, that deals with the cosmic universe itself, which means the eternal world picture itself. This knowledge is the hidden side of the living being's appearance known as "spirit". It is therefore rightfully called "spiritual science". It reveals the special universal laws on which the whole structure of the world rests and so also the living beings identity, place and appearance in the world picture, at the same time as also revealing the conditions needed for its true way of living and its temporary goal in this ocean of life and details. To know the true cause in every mental situation is to understand the relationship and conduct of all living beings towards oneself. Therefore one can see that no evil at all in the world can be born or manifested other than through ignorance on the part of the originator through which it is manifested. The reason that people intentionally hate and persecute one another is likewise according to the cosmic analyses only because they have absolutely no psychic or spiritual knowledge. They believe that the object of their persecution is the true cause of the evil that they have been subjected to (hence the persecution) and so they do not understand that the person they are persecuting is not the real cause of the evil in question, but that on the contrary it is the ignorance, that this being succumbs to, that is to blame in all its dealings. But it has as little control over the fact that it is ignorant as it does over whether it has light or dark hair or brown or blue eyes. Its ignorance can in no circumstances whatsoever be a legitimate object of persecution and punishment. Ignorance can only be due to a lack of experience. The person who has already gained experience in a certain field, where another person still has no experience, can easily know about and therefore be critical of the person who is ignorant in that field. But when such a person persecutes and torments or punishes another person because they through ignorance behave unwisely or foolishly, the being who is persecuting or punishing is just as ignorant or foolish as the being they are persecuting. So no strife at all can come about other than through foolishness or lack of intellectuality. With respect to the above just think to what extent the nations, peoples and races of mankind and its culture, morality and ethics, are ruled by foolishness or the ensuing mistaken ideas about or ways of understanding the real facts concerning life. And just think to what extent it is therefore necessary to banish this ignorance, in order that all the so-called evil can be brought so that it ceases to exist. In accordance with this then, spiritual science is absolutely the only way world redemption can lead terrestrial mankind out of the sphere of ignorance and therefore out of the sphere of hatred and evil, out of the domain of war or the killing principle. So only when the being is freed from its belief in war, murder and killing as a means of protection or as the foundation of its existence, is it beyond the fear of death. It is no longer under the law of the jungle. The animal has become a man, and the eternal peace and goodwill toward men of the Christmas message will shine and sparkle out over the world.

Modern defence - or war-orientated, materialistic or godless man will at this point exclaim, "How can the present world conflicts possibly be abolished by proclaiming this new process of making the traditional eternal truths scientific? Who will believe in them?" War is based on is the idea of the right to possess this or that area that another state or power also thinks it has the right to possess. Neither the governments nor the politicians of these powers nor the masses that exist under them who through suggestion have the same views, will let the demands drop just because from some place or other in the world, a new world-view is expounded, even though it is expounded as a science. What each of them demands to have fulfilled by using force and power are not spiritual requirements, but purely and simply material gains, resources or pleasures. It is goods and gold that is desired by the states, politicians and the masses who are under the power of suggestion of these leaders. They do not take any notice of analyses that show them to be ignorant and foolish. They are certain to make haste to silence as much as they can the teaching of this kind of knowledge or world-view. So it will be impossible for them to be rescued from the crisis because of their lack of experience or because of their cosmic ignorance and naivety and the ensuing false ideas that form the basis of their philosophy of life. Just like domestic animals in a fire, they will still try to get back into the burning house that they have just been rescued from. But they are not so fortunate as animals, because for animals one can set up a barrier so that they cannot get back into the dangerous burning house, but for inexperienced humans it is different. It is a condition of the cosmic laws that where a person cannot learn by being guided and instructed, only life itself can do the talking. The person without fail has to learn by taking the road of experience, no matter how awful this toad may be.