Through the description of the department store and the museum we have here become witnesses to two worlds. The department store or the commercial firm was solely a centre for the buying and selling of lives. Its elegant equipment, its marble façades, silvery steel pillars; its neon illumination and dazzling lighting effects and so on are only a gilded frame of this "buying and selling" of life or living hours camouflaged and transformed into objects for everyday use. These consumer goods are all phenomena that have cost so and so many workers so and so many hours of their lives. These converted living hours are now offered again to the public for this or that amount of money. Money is still terrestrial humanity's own measure for living hours. Since all life in a department store is thus measured in money, money will likewise be the same as only so or so many living hours. In the form of consumer goods, the department store or business sells living hours and receives living hours back in the form of money. One therefore buys living hours with living hours. And this principle is in itself divine, for indeed it expresses the true business principle. The same value for the same value. It is this principle that the whole universe is based on. Thus every living being must give its life in order to receive its life. It is the mentioned principle or the same law that demands as a condition that "one must love one's neighbour as oneself". But the terrestrial human being, represented by the department store, knows nothing about this, the divinity of the true business principle. It buys and sells living hours and thus gives enough living hours for living hours, but absolutely only on the condition that it gets more living hours back than it gives. A consumer product that may have cost five living hours is not sold for five living hours, but on the contrary for preferably at least double. Yes, one will possibly not call such a transaction "good business", even among the experts.
      But why should five living hours cost more than five living hours? Well, because in this way one can live well on the lives of other people. The more living hours one can rob from or deprive one's fellow beings in this way in the form of legalised trade or business, the more one can oneself become free of meeting the conditions of one's own existence or the fulfilment of the law of life. Thus, to a corresponding extent, one will become free of paying one's own living hours with equivalent living hours.
      And terrestrial humanity has even legalised this camouflaged robbery of life and made it the leading basis for its existence, just as modern upbringing and schooling are, to an extremely large extent, based on making the individuals geniuses or experts in this subject so as to at least give them the ability to protect their own living hours against the robbery of life and the associated "slavery". If one is not simply an ingenious expert here, one's own living hours will be robbed by others. And it is therefore not difficult to see that terrestrial humanity's way of life culminates precisely in violating the highest law of life itself, the one requiring "one living hour for one living hour" or the "same value for same value" and not more value for less value. But when the absolute condition for the perfect existence of life is not fulfilled at all   as the beings consciously develop into geniuses in being able to camouflage everyday life so that they can even legally receive more value for a lesser value and thereby appropriate living hours, for which they give no living hours whatsoever in return   this leads necessarily to the fact that some beings in life do not at all get their own living hours as they are seized by other beings, indeed, sometimes even before they are born. And thereby these other beings cannot possess only their own living hours without providing anything in return, but they also live well on the living hours seized from their fellow beings. It is therefore obvious that under these circumstances terrestrial humanity cannot possibly experience the absolutely perfect life. It is also therefore today that everyone is forced by everyone to focus on how to best protect themselves against this rampant robbery of life. Everyone is thus more or less forced to become experts in the "robbery of life".
      But the more one thinks of being able to protect one's life by means of this evolution, the more the world, which is to say terrestrial humanity's true, normal experience of life, becomes disordered. This again manifests itself in wars of all kinds, such as: wars between nations, wars between workers and employers, wars between religious sects, wars between political movements, wars between one man and another. Truly, there really is needed a "Christmas gospel" or a revelation of light or a being that could demonstrate to terrestrial human beings that "it is more blessed to give rather than to receive" and to "turn the right cheek when smitten on the left", just as one knows that one comes to possess one's life by giving it for others. Thus, it does not at all mean demanding two or more living hours for one, since in reality one has not at all come into the world in order to be served but to serve, and especially since one can serve terrestrial humanity, fellow beings and the world only through "serving" and not through "being served" or by other means setting oneself up as a parasite or harmful abnormality and thereby being a hindrance to the divine creation or manifestation of world peace.