19.21  On the symbol we see this hell or the culmination of darkness symbolised. We see in the background the silhouette of a town. This symbolises terrestrial mankind's present cultural area. The many houses, domes, towers, spires and factory chimneys symbolise the many divine technical assets that modern materialistic science has given people. We will return to those later. But however divine these assets of material science are, they have not been able to give people security or world peace. People fear war, death and financial problems just as the representatives of the above-mentioned science themselves do. Otherwise they would never have agreed to create the terrible infernal phenomena in the form of nuclear weapons and gruesome means of death and mutilation that, through their lack of cosmic knowledge, they have given mankind in the belief that they were a means of abolishing war. It was done of course, with the very best of intentions. How could the originators of this science who, because of their strongly intellectual, material development have lost their religious instinct and thereby the ability to believe in anything religious or spiritual act differently? They have therefore the ability to accept only phenomena that can be weighed and measured. But with their purely material physical senses they cannot experience that which controls and guides all movements and thereby creation, since this is not physical. It cannot therefore be weighed or measured. And since they do not have the ability with which this controlling and guiding in the living beings' organisms can be experienced, that is the faculty of intuition, they do not believe in its existence. They cannot therefore accept this divine element, which we have termed X1 and which is beyond all things, and which constitutes the I in the living beings and thereby collectively God's I. Material science is therefore an entirely godless science. It cannot guide or help the people in religious or profound mental crises. And as it creates doubt about the existence of the spiritual or high-psychic world it plays a role, even if unintentionally, in making the world materialistic and godless. This in turn stimulates people's belief in superior military power as a protection against war, which appears as their race to create the most devilish and destructive weapons of war. But it is not merely within science that the religious instinct has degenerated in favour of the development of the faculty of intelligence. Within a very large area of mankind materialism is spreading in the form of cold, godless politics. On the symbol this godless materialism is symbolised by the dark sky. The skull symbolises the cold view of materialism that death is a total annihilation of the living being. The being has therefore, according to this view, no existence whatsoever before the beginning of its physical organism in the womb and after the death and decomposition of its organism. If this really were the case, what would be the use of physical terrestrial life? There are people who are born blind. Why should these people never be able to see the physical world? There are people who are born to be lifelong invalids in other ways. Will these people never experience being healthy and well-formed like other people? There are people who are born with a temperament that gets them into quarrels and disputes with other people throughout their entire life. Will these people never experience having a temperament by means of which they will come to live in peace, harmony and joy in their life with other people? Why are some people born to great wealth and wellbeing, and others to poverty, destitution and degradation? If people lived only one single terrestrial life and never got any experience of life other than this, the living beings' experience of life would be an ocean of appalling injustice. Materialism's view of life and existence, is not stimulating or encouraging for beings in darkness, suffering or hell. It plays a part in stimulating depression and suicide. It absolutely does not show the road towards the light. The sky of godlessness and materialism is thus as black as night. Here no sun or stars shine. Here only death, obliteration or annihilation remain as the ultimate answer. Here exists the death that was to be the consequence of the eating of the tree of knowledge. Here people live in the so-called damnation that was to make the human being eat his bread by the sweat of his brow. Here exist the "wars and rumours of wars" foretold by the world redemption or the Bible. "Nation will rise against nation: and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places." The following was also said in Christ's predictions: "Let him which is on the housetop not come down to take any thing out of his house: Neither let him which is in the field return back to take his clothes". And does he not go on to say, "And woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck in those days!" And is that not precisely what we are witnessing? Have we not heard rumours of wars and experienced wars with a refined capability to kill on such a large scale that nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the earth? All previous knowhow about killing and war must, in relation to this, almost be regarded as microscopic. And what about coming down from the roofs or coming home from the field in the fall-out from the atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was there anyone who could get away from the devilish, totally destructive flash of lightning in which this bomb explosion took place? What about the women who were with child? Did the glimpse of hell not strike them too so that they became disabled and gave birth to deformed foetuses? Have we not also experienced in this darkness of doomsday here in the twentieth century an attempt to wipe out an entire people with gas chambers and other methods of terror? Imagine what returning dark arcs of fate were released here against this people. And imagine what arcs of fate its persecutors have thereby released and that sooner or later will return to be released or manifested against themselves. Terrestrial mankind thus finds itself at the culmination of the dark sphere of the spiral cycle. Because of its unfinished state, its lack of cosmic knowledge or science and insufficient faculty of neighbourly love it cannot possibly fulfil the laws for perfection, its way of being and creating. And its way of being will, therefore, to a corresponding degree be Armageddon, doomsday or hell, as shown on the symbol.