19.20  The root of all existing evil or spiritual darkness in the world, the root of all suffering, of all misfortune is thus exclusively a lack of cosmic knowledge and neighbourly love, which in turn means a lack of ability to understand one's neighbour's way of being and a lack of ability to forgive the aspects of this neighbour's way of being that we think are unjust towards us. A being cannot possibly in its way of being use abilities and aptitudes that it does not have. It has therefore to adapt its way of being so that it can maintain its life with this way of being in spite of this lack of abilities. That this state of living must deviate from the beings' states of living that are based on real cosmic knowledge and culminating neighbourly love is a matter of course. Since the former beings have neither cosmic knowledge nor neighbourly love they cannot possibly fulfil the law of life: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God above all things and thy neighbour as thy self". They are unacquainted with the real God; this God can at most be a mystery to them. The zone of life of these beings must of necessity be an unloving world of suffering as they have no neighbourly love and therefore no ability to forgive, and have to live in a world or a zone of life where all the other beings are more or less of the same kind, not knowing either from personal experience the real godhead or the law of life, and being unaccustomed to forgiving their neighbour. Without knowledge of the law of life, which is the same as the law of neighbourly love, and without the ability to feel neighbourly love, the being can love only itself, which is the same as "egoism" or "selfishness". This egoism or selfishness constitutes therefore the primary drive in the being's conduct towards those in its surroundings. The beings' motto here is "Every man for himself". And the beings defend their life based on this with violence and force, which in turn is the same as the killing principle. But how could beings in a world where everyone more or less uses violence and force to assert themselves regardless of what it may cost others in terms of suffering, pain and indeed, maybe even death, assert themselves in another way? How could such a world be anything other than a world of war, where everyone is at war with everyone else? Here the beings must kill in order to live. Indeed, they must even in certain cases consume the organisms of other beings as food. This makes this world of imperfect beings no less brutal or bloody. This world of the principle of darkness, war and killing stretches in the spiral cycle from the sphere of the meat-eating plants, on through the animal kingdom and here reaches its culmination in the animal nature of the unfinished human being. It is this culmination of the killing principle's manifestation of mutilation, death and annihilation we see in the ability of the terrestrial human being to use the atomic forces as part of its murderous capability. From being able to promote its murderous capability only by means of stone axes, bows and arrows it has now evolved to be able to promote this capability with a capacity that is millions of times greater. By means of atomic and nuclear weapons it can, as in a flash of lightning, wipe out a city of over a million inhabitants with its population and cultural assets. And it has even become a fact that in certain situations one does not shrink from using these hell-promoting phenomena. Today mankind would be able to wipe itself out entirely if it were not totally subordinate to a higher power, if it were not a link in the world plan of a divine providence whose keynote is love and whose ultimate aim is the salvation of the world: the creation of mankind in God's image after his likeness. That terrestrial mankind has developed to such an enormous extent its ability to kill or its murderous capability, shows us that it has as yet no cosmic knowledge and no particularly developed neighbourly love. Where these two realities are lacking, only darkness, war or hell can exist. We see therefore that the people of the earth have been at war during their entire previous existence up to today, where they are also at war. It is true that there is talk of peace between certain countries, but this peace is merely a kind of ceasefire and is maintained only by means of superior military force or force of arms. But peace that can be maintained only by superior military force or force of arms constitutes in principle merely the same peace as that which exists with wild animals that are shut up behind bars, or with poisonous snakes whose fangs have been extracted. Real peace is solely that peace which is an effect of true neighbourly love. True peace is something that is given absolutely voluntarily and not something that exists merely by means of political handcuffs imposed on the beings by superior material powers. This does not of course mean that these "handcuffs" in certain cases are not an absolute necessity or vital condition. But such a state is no real peace. It is merely an enforced ceasefire. But a ceasefire offers absolutely no lasting guarantee of protection. It can fail and then give rise to war, mutilation, death and destruction. People live therefore in a permanent fear of death. This prompts them to create more and more refined and lethal weapons of war. And they have thus reached the colossal murderous capability to which we have referred above. And in the worst case people see this murderous capability as their only fundamental protection against darkness and war. They absolutely do not understand that they thereby root themselves to the darkness and bind themselves to the spheres of war and suffering. Their way of being is, despite Christianity and other world religions, a cult of death.
      But it is not merely the lack of love towards the living beings, animals and humans that binds the beings to darkness and sufferings. The beings' everyday way of being also forms totally the fate of another world than the mesocosmos. This other world is their own organism, which constitutes a universe or a world of living beings. These beings are of course microscopic in relation to us but this does not prevent our relationship to these beings from also inevitably creating arcs of fate. We can create wonderful living conditions for these small beings in our organism, and we can create such miserable living conditions that they receive unhappy fates. As it is by means of the vital functions of these small beings that we are able to maintain our physical organism, this maintenance will be undermined and in the worst case made quite impossible, and the organism destroyed, if we subject these microbeings of ours to neglect. It is this undermining of our organism we know by the term "illness". Illness thus constitutes, like all other kinds of fate, effects that we ourselves are the absolutely primary cause of. We can eat wrong food, we can drink wrong drinks, we can subject our organism to overexertion, we can be the cause of it not getting enough sleep, we can subject it to lack of protection against cold and dirt, and to lack of hygiene and many other phenomena harmful or deadly to its microbeings. There are millions of sick people in hospital while millions of others are sick at home. As millions of other so-called "well" or "healthy" people unheeding this fact have to a great extent the same way of living and the same lethal habits and tendencies as these sick people, we have here the hospitals' future patients. And in many cases the illnesses, despite the energetic and loving care of doctors and nurses, are merely a long process of death. In later symbol explanations we will return to the fact that these lethal habits and tendencies, that is to say the consumption of nicotine, alcohol and drugs, as well as debauchery, overexertion, insufficient sleep and so on, can result to a greater or lesser extent in physical or mental invalidity in future lives. A living being's relationship to the microbeings in its organism is also highly significant for the placing of the being in the physical world. They have a say in which outer natural surroundings the being is placed in, be they pleasant or unpleasant. The living being can come to live in very dangerous places, and it can come to live in the most secure and peaceful surroundings. We see that there are people who live in places where they are not safe from great floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, cyclones and other natural catastrophes. Have not thousands of people been killed by such natural catastrophes through the ages? As absolutely nothing can happen by chance, and as every being is itself the absolute primary cause of its own fate, it absolutely cannot be chance that a being meets with a natural catastrophe. So all the people who through the ages have met with natural catastrophes are also themselves the absolute primary cause of this fate of theirs. If a being's state of life is to a particular degree maintained by the unnatural death of other beings, such as the consuming of animal food or meat-eating, and likewise by murder, killing and mutilation in other situations, and if they at the same time consume the above-mentioned poisons destructive to the body, such a being's arcs of fate are so burdened by the returning effects of this being's murderous mode of existence that it is predestined at any time to meet with the same unnatural death or dark fate that it, with its murderous mode of existence, has inflicted on other beings. In such an accumulation of dark fate this fate lies in wait for the being everywhere. It is not predestined to be born or to live where this fate cannot be, or will have great difficulty in being, released or manifested. It will thus in the main come to live or exist where its dark fate has no difficulty in manifesting itself, for example in countries devastated by war and likewise in countries that are particularly prone to natural catastrophes. It can also meet its dark fate in the notorious so-called "concentration camps", where people in various ways were tortured to death. They were camps or centres for the release of the culmination of dark karma. The beings' experience of dark fate from their natural surroundings, or Nature, will in principle be an experience of what it looks like in the Nature that they, with their consumption of tobacco, alcohol, drugs and so on, create for the microbeings in their own organism, which is the world of these small beings and constitutes the Nature they have to live in, just as the earth constitutes the organism or Nature the living beings themselves have to live in. The consumption of the poisonous products and neglect of the organism gives thus not only karma in the form of illness and the destruction of this organism, but it also contributes to the creation of the being's karma or fate as regards its placing in its surroundings or outer space. We cannot, untouched by karma or effects on our fate, permanently create unhappy and deadly natural conditions for the microbeings within our organism and still live in splendid natural conditions within the macro-organism in which we ourselves are microorganisms. Here too the old saying applies: "What one sows one reaps".
      We have seen now that the cause of all the evil in the world, the cause of war, accidents, suffering, the cause of hell or Armageddon is exclusively the beings' cosmic ignorance or lack of neighbourly love. We have thus seen here that not loving one's neighbour, not forgiving him, taking revenge and hating, being envious or jealous, feeling professional jealousy, murdering and killing (also including killing animals and living on animal food), being evil towards the microbeings in one's own organism through the consumption of unnatural stimulants, tobacco, alcohol, drugs and other forms of neglect of the organism, persecuting one's neighbour with gossip and proclaiming from the housetops his shortcomings or supposed shortcomings, mocking and persecuting everything to do with religion, disclaiming responsibility for one's actions, bringing children into the world without being willing or able to take on parental responsibility for them and give them a natural, loving home, stealing, lying and cheating and all other existing unloving manifestations or actions both physical and mental, lead inevitably to the culmination of darkness, Armageddon or hell. But this hell does not have its domicile beyond death. It has its inevitable domicile here on the physical plane. We will later return to show that the real divine light has its primary domicile on the spiritual plane.