This book, which is the fourth volume of Martinus' work "The Eternal World Picture", was first published in Danish in 1994. Martinus worked on the manuscript of this volume until 1971 and at that time managed to complete the first five symbols, which are numbered nos. 34-38. After that he chose to devote his time to other tasks, including describing the purpose of his mission and the basis for entitling his works "The Third Testament", material that was published later (in 2004) as posthumous manuscripts in the book "Intellectualised Christianity".
      Martinus did not find an opportunity to resume work on the symbol explanations in Volume 4, and did not therefore manage to complete this volume himself. Since the purpose of the series of books entitled "The Eternal World Picture" was that it should contain all the symbols that Martinus had explained, the Institute, when publishing Volume 4, chose to include the previously published symbols that are not already included in Volumes 1-3. Volume 4 therefore consists of the following two parts:
 

• The first part includes the five symbols nos. 34-38 and their explanations, which have not been previously published and which Martinus prepared for publication in this book.
• The second part contains six other symbols, nos. 39-44 with their explanations, which Martinus published as early as in the 1930s in Livets Bog (The Book of Life), vol. 1, Bisættelse (On Funerals) and the magazine Kosmos.

In the second part of the book the Institute has placed editorial notes after the six previously published symbol explanations stating where the explanations are reproduced from.
      The Institute has added section titles to the reproduced texts by as was found relevant.
 
The Council of the Martinus Institute, 2013.