In order to use one's intelligence in the right way it is/necessary that another faculty, the faculty for loving, is developed. One will then use one's reason in the service of love. This is the state I describe as high-intellectual. One can recognize intellectual people by the fact that they are receptive to all the information and knowledge that promotes people's development towards humanity and the creation of well-being for mankind. It is precisely to promote this tendency that I have written Livets Bog. It has not been written just because there arose in me a desire to create a work. I cannot say that I am glowing with enthusiasm to write or to give lectures. It is not something I desire. I do it because I cannot do otherwise. It is a task that I have been given; creating these things has become my life. I have been allowed to experience the divine plan for everything that is happening now and that is going to happen to terrestrial mankind.

The cosmic forces are now being released in something I call "the new world-impulse". This cannot generally be sensed, but beings with cosmic clear-sightedness can see this light. In my case this experience began in 1921 when faculties that had been hidden or latent in my consciousness revealed themselves and I could follow the divine world plan. I could see what the future was going to bring people. I could not, however, feel happy with this faculty or this knowledge if I did not in one way or another pass it on to my fellow beings, and this is why I began to write about it even though I had no special ability in writing. Gradually I gained more and more practice and I succeeded in writing down some of the thoughts that I felt should go out to those people who could perhaps gain inspiration and benefit from them.

The first volume of Livets Bog was published in 1932 and it took roughly a year and a half to write. Once this volume was published it was immediately apparent that there were other tasks for me to do, and it was seven years before the second part of my main work was published. I gave lectures and I received enquiries from many people. I was asked a great many questions, which was very much to be expected because the aim of the first volume of Livets Bog is precisely that questions should arise in the reader's consciousness. With regard to some of the most fundamental questions, I did not think that I could go on saying that they would be dealt with later on in Livets Bog, and so I decided to write a series of special articles in the magazine Kosmos that could answer some of these questions, articles that later became the shorter books, The Ideal Food and Funeral Rites (Funeral Rites (Bisættelse) is not yet available in English.), among others. In Funeral Rites I give an analysis of the micro-world, of which I am the first person to give a cosmic analysis of. Many people have analysed the micro-world, but not as cosmic analyses of living beings within living beings. These analyses demonstrate the necessity for the principle of neighbourly love also with respect to the living micro-beings in our organism, and a new area of responsibility becomes a reality for the advanced researcher. This will, among other things, result in many people who were previously prepared to let their corpse be burned after so-called death, now taking exception to cremation because they do not want to subject the micro-individuals still living in the corpse to the suffering and pain that a cremation would cause.

In the religions and philosophies of the past are to be found many cosmic solutions and truths, but they are presented in such a way that most modern people are unable to grasp them. So there had to be created a work that was taken directly from Nature, and that people could understand. Such a work had to be written by a person who had not read about the analyses in books but who could see in his own consciousness the problems of life and their solution, and who could convey the problems of life and their solution in such a logical way that others would be able to understand it. It has become my task to carry out this work - not by creating a religious sect or organisation or anything like that - but by creating a work that in the present day and in future times will be accessible to people whose spiritual maturity renders them dissatisfied with a view of the universe and living beings' existence that either one-sidedly emphasizes feelings or one-sidedly emphasizes intelligence. As it became clear to me that it would benefit many readers to have a kind of primer for research into the eternal problems, that is, a book that could aid the development of the reader's faculty to understand the main work, Livets Bog, I wrote the book, Logic.

Next came the creation of the "Kosmos Holiday Camp" (ed: now known as "The Martinus Centre"). There are perhaps some who claim that this was not necessary, but this creation has already shown itself to be of great importance, and its importance will be no less in the future, quite the contrary. It is not exclusively a question of studying as many analyses as possible; it is also extremely necessary to get the cosmic way of thinking transferred into practice, into behaviour, into "flesh and blood". The analyses have to be pursued further in practical living. One cannot satisfy one's conscience by doing nothing. I saw that there were several tasks for me other than just writing, tasks that were equally important. Some people were of the opinion that I should just write and work with Livets Bog, but I am now glad about the fact that I have acted correctly in having created this place together with Gerner Larsson and a number of other co-workers. A little world has been created here, an area in which the cosmic analyses have become the dominant factor. Here the analyses should find their expression not only in theory but also in practice. This expression will quite naturally be visible where people who are studying Livets Bog are gathered together. If it were not visible or noticeable here, one would form the view that the analyses did not have any practical significance.

People have to learn to love God above all things and their neighbours as themselves, but this is not a love that is based only on feelings; it has to be based on both human feeling and human intelligence. Through the cosmic analyses one learns to use intelligence in areas where it has not previously been used. The greater it is, the easier it is to use it in the service of goodness. Millions of people without knowing it are longing for a world created out of just such forces of consciousness made up of human feeling and intelligence in an inner balance. This longing is stimulated by the religions, but a vast number of present-day people can no longer be inspired by religious dogmas, they cannot bear to hear the words "God" or "the holy spirit", words that over long periods of time have affected their religious instinct and emotional make-up but that their intelligence now reacts against. They have heard these words far too many times and have now had their fill of them because they can no longer see any meaning in them. But it is precisely the task of the analyses to give these words a meaning and significance again that has a natural connection with the individual human being's existence and also with that of the whole of terrestrial mankind both now and in the future. There are already quite a lot of people - and their numbers will steadily increase - who want to and are glad to see that behind the distorted world that we experience today there lies a greater reality, whose laws and principles people have to become acquainted with and use in order to transform the jungle of warfare they live in at the moment into a world of peace and neighbourly love.

In 1939 the second volume of Livets Bog was published, with the third volume following in 1941, and I am continuing to work and will carry on until it is finished. A number of problems can arise when one reads this book, and there are some who think that it did not have to fill so many pages, but if it did not, I would have a guilty conscience. It is true there are many repetitions in it, but I have written it like that, so that no misunderstandings whatsoever should occur. A novel should not contain too many repetitions, but Livets Bog is not a novel. It embraces an area that is so great that it would be quite impossible for someone to sit down and read it in a single sitting and understand the whole of it straight away. It covers micro-, meso- and macrocosmos; everything is examined, and so it is clear that every single analysis has to be comprehensive. A person who does not have a very strong desire to find out the truth will become tired of reading about the same things several times, even though these repetitions are seen in different perspectives. But there is no need to worry if you get tired, because by working with the cosmic analyses, completely new centres are opened in your brain, centres that have previously been latent. Livets Bog is written in such a way that there is no need to remember what one has read before. Of course the more one can remember the better, but one will always be able to derive benefit from what one reads without having to look it up in another place in order to understand it. There will be things that one does understand and things that one does not understand, especially in the beginning, and there will be things one perhaps understands much better when one reads them through at a later date, because of the experiences one has had in the interim.

When one reads the account of a journey, one can understand every single thing, but when I have to write about cosmos, about the universe, I have to also explain using repetitions, owing to the fact that I cannot presume that people understand things that lie outside of their spiritual horizon. I am helping people to understand the cosmic, organic connection between everything in a living universe, which is identical to the eternal Godhead in which we live, move and have our being. I am helping people to understand better the real truth of the matter, because alone they cannot keep it firmly in their consciousness and grasp the true world picture. I have given you the 12 basic solutions and nowhere else is the world picture more concise than here. The repetitions in Livets Bog are not repetitions in the ordinary sense, each time a repetition occurs it fits into a new subject. That is why we need to hear the same thing again and again, but with each repetition a new aspect emerges that we did not know about before.

After the publication of the third volume of Livets Bog, there were many new tasks to be done and the need for study groups will continue to be greater and greater. Livets Bog is for high-intellectual people, which from a cosmic point of view does not mean people with a special academic education and high qualifications, but people with a loving nature and a well-developed intelligence. There are high-intellectual people who are immediately glad to read Livets Bog but there are also a lot of people who are not quite as receptive and who even harbour a strong antipathy towards everything to do with the idea of religiousness. By doing that they are shutting themselves off from a greater understanding of life even though they are really seeking truth. Who is to help these people? One cannot just say that they should make their own way. The elders in existence have to help the younger ones forward, and from a cosmic point of view what is meant by "the elders" are those people who over many incarnations have experienced and have come through the suffering and the difficulties that have developed their faculty for humane compassion, their conscience and also their overall picture of causes and effects, that is their intelligence. These "elders" are the actual creators of culture, whose example and way of being can influence their surroundings. It requires a special attitude towards life. I have created the work that can give this attitude, a work that gets people to become attuned to the higher cosmic concepts, into a gradually increasing understanding of life and existence and not just a blind religious belief.

There are people who are at such a primitive stage of evolution that they are unable to understand Livets Bog, but a very large number of people are intelligent and well-developed civilised people, and their attitude towards cosmic problems will gradually be changed. Livets Bog deals with Nature, that is with all aspects of life. Nature can tell you everything; you just have to understand how to read it, and you will understand that everything Nature tells human beings is exactly what they can build their civilisation upon.

We call ourselves civilised human beings, but the earth has had so many civilisations and they have all succumbed to war and devastation, they have all had their rise and fall, and our own civilisation is no exception. But how can it come about that a civilisation based on Christianity can perish? There has to be something missing in this civilisation, and this "something" is still the great question facing mankind. I think I will be able to explain this in a book I am at the moment working on concurrently with Livets Bog. I will entitle this book The Creation of Civilisation (Kulturens Skabelse, not yet in English -ed.).

Terrestrial human beings have within them a primordial drive, which it is necessary to keep in check and under control, and one can, to a certain extent, to control this primordial drive. This self-control is what I call civilisation and a greater or lesser lack of control of the primordial drive is synonymous with a greater or lesser lack of civilisation. Religions have attached great importance to creating civilisation and have partly got people to understand that one should love one's neighbour as oneself, and even though the religions have less ability to inspire in our day, many of the religious precepts have become more or less habitually conscious in a good many people. But there are still many troublesome tendencies and inclinations that people are unable to control, and this does not apply only to individual people; a state or a nation can just as well possess a level of civilisation that cannot bind all its primordial drives, it can have the same failings as an individual person, such as lust for power, untrustworthiness, inconsiderateness, and similar egoistic tendencies. When a large number of a nation's inhabitants are unable to control tendencies and inclinations such as these, it is like a "hole" is the nation's consciousness, and so sooner or later the nation will perish. It is for this reason extremely important that the individuals that make up the community are developed to become citizens who think and act humanely, and who will gradually influence the community and its laws with their attitude of humaneness and neighbourly love. Livets Bog and my other books, in fact the whole of my work, is an aid to self-help for mankind, the consequence of which should be that human beings come to love one another; that is my task. All my analyses, everything I have worked with, is not only created in order to show the great cosmic structure in the living universe, which we are all a part of, it is also to bring you an impulse, a desire and a longing to be good and loving towards one another, because when one is perfectly loving, one can only be a joy and a blessing for one's surroundings.

I have entrusted the interpretation of my analyses to my co-workers who I see are able to promote these matters through lectures and study groups. And I have produced my symbols, which make the teaching easier, and which in time will be studied throughout the world. They form in themselves an international language and help to avoid misunderstandings in the interpretation of the analyses. One cannot make a mistake about the three X's for example; they can only be understood in one way. What has happened in the past will not happen in the future, namely that one forms different ideas and interpretations of the same analyses just because different people each have their own attitude. The laws and the principles are the same throughout the universe, and when I write my analyses it is not so that they can be interpreted in ten different ways. Livets Bog will provide the absolute truth.

One can say about a thing that it is large or small, and that same thing can be both large and small because of its relation to other things that are respectively smaller than it or larger than it. Here we are talking about the issue of things being relative, in which everything depends on where one sees things from. Everything that you know and sense is relative. One can say of a man that he is good, but if one sees him in relation to someone who is even better he is straight away not quite so good. People have become so used to the sphere of relative or temporal solutions that they do not believe that anything else exists. But relative solutions are unable to provide a fixed point in existence, and once people have lost their belief in the God of the religious dogmas, all they believe in is matter and pure chance, and existence is deprived of all meaning. People are, however, gradually evolving to a stage where they have to have absolute solutions. The great solutions in Livets Bog are absolute solutions; there is nothing that can be changed about them, and they have not come into existence on the basis of anything relative.

A living being is not only the expression of a series of relative solutions and chance amalgamations of matter that have a beginning and an end. Certainly a part of the living being, namely the part I call X3, belongs to what is relative or what is created, but that is just the area through which that living being makes itself known to and interacts with other living beings through its spiritual and physical bodies. Behind these changing worlds every living being exists as an unshakeable, eternal cosmic reality. You have a blind spot in your consciousness, impressions enter through your various sensory organs, you experience a great deal through the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling. But what becomes of all these impressions and experiences? You do not go on and on thinking about them, due to the fact that you can only think one thought at a time. Where are all the other thoughts in the meantime? Where are the impressions that you have of all the people you know? The impressions do not disappear because you get to know new people. All of this is inside yourself in the so-called blind spot in the consciousness and the I. When you have a thought it comes from within this blind spot, this part of the living being that is not time- and space-dimensional. You will never be able to sense or experience the I, because the I is that "something" that senses and experiences. So you will experience that there is something in you that is placed above all other things, something that possesses will, something that can create a thought, something that causes you to move your body. It is not a relative field, but something that is absolutely fixed, it is the fixed point in existence and this fixed point is the triune principle. To be perfectly conscious of these things is to have cosmic consciousness, it is to live "behind" relative things, to be conscious of the fact that one is an eternal being that creates and experiences movements, beginnings and endings. Through its I the living being is at one with the eternal Godhead, it is an eternal, immortal being, whose present physical existence with its beginning and ending is only a tiny fraction of a vast evolutionary process. What is relative is that which has a beginning and an ending, in other words everything that is created, and it is a question of us becoming able to differentiate with our consciousness between what has a beginning and an ending and what is eternal. That is what Livets Bog will reveal to you and help you to understand. One of the most difficult things for people to understand is precisely the concept of eternity.

Another concept that makes it difficult for many people to understand that there is a meaning and a plan to people's lives, is so-called evil and the very apparent injustice that there is in the world. When something happens that to you is unpleasant, straight away you feel a reaction and in most cases that reaction will be that you feel unjustly treated. But from a cosmic point of view there is nothing that is unjust. The cosmic analyses show that there is no being that can inflict injustice, and there is no being that can suffer injustice. But one needs to be able to see the overall picture in order to understand that. If one stands high up on a ridge and looks down over an area that one has previously journeyed through, the same things that one sees from up there will look different than they did when one was walking down below. One can experience them as a whole and see how they relate to one another; one gains an overall picture. It is possible to gain an attitude to experiences and events in one's life, both pleasant and unpleasant, that can be likened to the view from the top of the ridge. Understanding the principle of reincarnation and the law of karma offers just such an overall picture. Both of these are dealt with in depth in Livets Bog and several of my symbols, and through them it will become clear to you that everything has its source in yourself, and that it is you yourself who, with the help of your present thoughts and actions, will form your future fate. You cannot read Livets Bog without your view of existence being changed; you begin to perceive many of the foolish things you are doing that are based on old habits, and you begin to be better able to overcome any tempers, sulks, envy, jealousy and disappointments that occur. You begin to understand that your task is not to change other people but instead to develop yourself to be of benefit to the whole. Every single terrestrial human being is on its way towards cosmic consciousness, even though some will get there before others, which means that they have a greater faculty for loving and sense of responsibility, both of which they have developed through the sufferings and difficulties that they have overcome. That is of course not something to boast about; a person whose humaneness and love is well-developed will never feel pride, only joy in being of benefit. This joy, in combination with the knowledge that one acquires, will develop an inner sense of happiness, that will gradually become habitually conscious. With the development of this habitual consciousness you will to a stronger degree come into contact with the cosmic forces that especially at the moment exist over Scandinavia. This is what Jesus calls being overshadowed by the holy spirit. This is what happened to the disciples, and this is what Paul meant by the white light.

Once you have been overshadowed by the holy spirit, it will mean that your consciousness is then so advanced that you will at certain moments be at one with the consciousness of the universe and in harmony with its vibrations. At the moment when you experience this you will sense the highest happiness that you can, because you will sense that everything is radiant light and love and you will never ever be able to forget this. But you will not get a permanent experience of this straight away - your nervous system would not be able to sustain it - you will get it in glimpses and these glimpses will gradually be of longer duration. The negative sides that are still left in the depths of your consciousness will sooner or later come up to the surface and only when they have been controlled and overcome will you experience this light permanently, it will no longer leave you.

It is my task to give you an impulse to develop your faculty for loving so that you yourself can reach this light; it is not my task to give you psychic faculties. I could easily cause a sensation, but that would not benefit the world. I am benefiting the world by giving people who are seeking what can help them to develop cosmic clear-sightedness, and this help takes the form of an overall picture and an understanding that is transformed into practical behaviour. Livets Bog is cosmic clear-sightedness transformed into a series of words and pictures that you can study and that, if you keep on with it, will unavoidably lead your consciousness in a cosmic direction. It is not so much a question of reading as much as you can in one go, but of transforming what you read into your own way of thinking and acting. Do not worry if there is something you do not understand, if you are orientated towards wanting to understand it, the understanding will come sooner or later. It comes from the blind spot in the consciousness, and the solution to the problem will become clear to you. If you happen to teach you will be surprised to experience that you know much more than you thought. You should not be afraid that it will be too difficult.

Livets Bog is the road up towards the summits of life, and so it is clear that studying it and in particular transforming it into everyday behaviour is no easy thing, but when one takes a step at a time patiently going forward, one widens one's horizon, and eventually one is at the top, one is then in the very midst of God's embrace, one is then at one with the Father and can see that everything is very good.