As all substance is thus in its highest analysis "life units", and our food, our flesh and blood, the air we breathe, even our skeletons, our nails and hair in reality also consist of "life units", just as the material for our clothes, shoes, furniture, houses, tools and so on consist of hosts of billions of "life units", one must naturally to a certain degree become acquainted with the "daily life and activity", so to speak, of these "life units" in order, through this acquaintance, to attain absolute knowledge about the harmony of our existence with the rest of life in the world. For without knowledge of the manifestation and living conditions of these "life units" we would not be able to know, for example, if the "life units" in the food we eat are killed or mutilated or if they gain life and development from our contact with them. There are, as mentioned above, "life units" whose absorption as nourishment in organisms means natural development and life, just as there are other "life units" for whom the same absorption means death and mutilation. (By "death" one must here, as elsewhere in my books, understand a destruction of the living being's body, not of its I, for this is eternally indestructible, an absolute death being thereby impossible.)
      People who, in the form of food and drink, consume "life units" for whom this consumption means unhappiness, death and mutilation, here inflict upon themselves a "list of sins" that, regarded numerically, is of such dimensions that the otherwise known "list of sins", for which they, through religion, the church and the priest, have asked forgiveness, is nothing in relation to this. It can here be at most a matter of some hundreds of individuals in their daily surroundings against whom people in one way or another have sinned, but the number of "life units" they have sinned against through faulty nourishment numbers billions. It is true that in the latter case it is merely a matter of microscopic beings. But in accordance with the eternal facts, for the divine or cosmic consciousness "one day for the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day"; for this consciousness microcosmos is consequently equal to macrocosmos. The eternal laws are valid for small things as well as large. The fifth commandment does not state that one may kill small beings. The results of this mass murder of "life units" through wrong nourishment do not fail to appear; they are the cause of the fact that the whole of terrestrial mankind is not healthy but to a great extent a collection of individuals more or less mortally wounded and mutilated by organic illnesses, who, in hospitals, clinics, and sick bays, are making their last efforts to regain the health, life and vigour that for them is a lost country.
      The same mankind cries to heaven about "disarmament", about "the abolition of war", about "an eternal peace". But how can such realities be fulfilled by individuals, by units, who in themselves are active explosives against all harmony with peace as its foundation? World peace cannot be borne or maintained by individuals whose very innermost selves are battlefields for mass murder, war and mutilation, constituting the concentration of all contrast to the warmth of life itself or eternal love. The individual can never come to experience a lasting peace outwardly until he has rooted this peace inwardly in his own heart, in his own body or in the "universe" in which he is himself a Godhead.
      When the individual reaches as far as choosing the foodstuffs for whose "life units" it is vitally necessary to be absorbed as nourishment in an organism, then the mass murder in his physical culture will decrease, then his illnesses will stop, then he will literally create "world peace" in his own breast and can look forward to the karma or fate of coming to live in an outward zone of peace. Only such individuals can send out the vibrations or energies from which a fundamental world peace can arise.