17.21  We have now gained some insight into the principle behind the eternal words from the Bible where God says, "While the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease." That these phenomena cannot continue on the earth when it has perished is naturally a matter of course. But we have now seen that these words express an eternal cosmic principle that we have come to know as the principle of contrast. And we have seen here in symbol no. 17 that this principle creates the basis or foundation for all manifestation, and that this is reflected not only in the purely physical form of day and night, summer and winter, but also on a larger scale, creating gigantic cosmic epochs of light and darkness (the spiral cycles) with the same four principles of the seasons that we know from the physical year cycle. We see too in these gigantic epochs of life, solstices and equinoxes, cosmic epochs of winter and summer continuing without end upwards into the infinitely great and downwards into the infinitely small. If these epochs did not exist no form of life whatsoever could exist. And we have seen here too, in our analysis of the principle of cycles, the necessity and the existence of reincarnation. We have therefore become acquainted with the unshakable truth in Jesus' words to Nicodemus, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." Nicodemus asked, "How can a man be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb and be born?" Jesus answered, "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of flesh is flesh; and that which is born of spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." Indeed, it is just as difficult for the ordinary, unfinished, materialistic terrestrial human being to understand that which is born of spirit as it was difficult at the time of Christ to understand where the wind blew from, where it came from and where it went. But just as in our day we have reached the point where we can determine where the wind comes from and where it goes to, so will we in our day also begin to understand that which is born of spirit, that is the divine highest wisdom, the solution of the mystery of life and so too the knowledge of rebirth – knowledge in an intellectualised form accessible to the intelligence. The analyses here make us think of the most profound meaning in the words we have become accustomed to saying at Christian funeral ceremonies: "From earth you have come, to earth you will return, and from earth you will again arise".* Do these words not imply reincarnation? Has not the living being's physical organism precisely "come from earth", which is the same as it being built up of matter. Will this created organism again disintegrate and become earth? Is that not precisely what happens at so-called "death"? But who has built up this organism? And does this organism exist only for its own sake? Can mere matter or earth begin creating an organism? No, we already know from our cosmic analyses that this is quite impossible, and that both spirit and an I are necessary for the creation of an organism, and for being able to create at all. And we know too from the same analyses that the I in the living being is eternal. It has never come from earth and will never be able to become earth. It constitutes the eternal creator. It can create and build from "earth", which here means matter. So this I can build up a physical organism for itself from "earth", making this its body, and so for a time, as long as this perishable or time- and space-dimensional body can endure, make itself one with this organism and the physical plane of existence. It can in this way make itself one with "earth" or matter. All the beings we meet on the physical plane of existence are clothed in organisms built up from "earth" and can, by means of these organisms, maintain their physical lives by this creation from "earth". Their physical life arises therefore from earth and absolutely cannot arise in any other way whatsoever. But the I's organism shall not merely "come from earth", it shall also "become earth"; it cannot exist eternally. It is a created thing, it is an instrument that gets used. It therefore wears out and must perish. It must disintegrate and become earth again. But the I, which is the creator of this organism, existed before this organism was created and will still exist, because of its imperishability, after its so-called "death" and disintegration. It has thus arisen or been liberated from "earth" or physical matter. So this I or this creator absolutely cannot "become earth" but is still alive and exists now on a plane consisting of thought-matter, that is a spiritual or psychic plane of existence. But because this creator is alive it can, when the necessary conditions are present, again build up a new physical organism, and again create and experience in physical matter, and thus make itself one with this matter, "become earth again" and from here again arise to a spiritual existence, and so on continuously. So in the Christian funeral ceremony we meet with cosmic words that confirm the world redeemer's cosmic analysis: "Except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." We have hereby come through the principle of spiral cycles, and have seen that they form the foundation of our entire experience of life, and that, through this principle, we are guaranteed an eternal, unfailing existence, eternal renewal of consciousness or maintenance of our ability to experience life; we have seen that there is thus absolutely no "eternal damnation" for any living being whatsoever, but that absolutely all living beings experience a radiant epoch of pleasure or a paradise on the spiritual plane, which they find themselves on between physical incarnations or terrestrial lives. We have also become acquainted with the fact that terrestrial mankind finds itself in the cosmic spiral cycle's epoch of winter and is heading for this cycle's epoch of spring. We have likewise seen that it finds itself in this zone of war and suffering in order to be initiated into the mystery of darkness, to be initiated into the effects of darkness's way of being, to be initiated into the absolute cause of the formation of all misfortune. We have seen that the spiral cycles constitute a radiant road of life across the sky of eternity, lit up and borne by the all-penetrating love, omniscience and omnipotence of the Godhead.
 
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* Translator's note: Commonly rendered in English as: "...earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life." Here translated literally from the Danish.