Most accounts of a life like this start with the signs — the precocious child, the unusual education, the early hints of what is coming. There are none here. Martinus Thomsen had little formal schooling and worked as an accountant. Nothing about the first three decades pointed at the next six.
This video is the first of a three-part introduction. It asks what it would mean if there were a complete account of existence available — not a partial answer, not a belief system, but a description you could follow with your own reasoning and check against your own experience.
What happened in 1921
In 1921 Martinus sat in darkness, focused on God, and had an experience he later described as a spiritual initiation. Two things came out of it, on his account: a specific task, and a faculty he described as permanent intuition — understanding arriving whole rather than assembled step by step.
The video makes the comparison carefully. Artists and scientists describe moments where an answer arrives complete, ahead of the reasoning that would justify it. What Martinus claimed was that this had become his ordinary condition rather than an occasional visitor.
A task with a specific shape
The mission, as he described it, was not to found anything. It was to describe the world picture in a form other people could follow — to take what had arrived as intuition and translate it into something ordinary intelligence could work through.
He spent the rest of his life on that translation, writing until his death in 1981. The output is Livets Bog (The Book of Life), seven volumes and roughly 2,500 pages, together with around a hundred visual symbols, the Eternal World Picture series, several hundred articles, and decades of lectures. All of it develops a single account of what existence is.
Why he insisted it was not a religion
Martinus was direct about this. There is no membership, no initiation, nothing to join. The reasoning he gave, as the video reports it, was that we do not have membership for 2 + 2 = 4 — you either follow the argument and find that it holds, or you do not.
That framing does real work. It moves the material out of the category of things you are asked to accept and into the category of things you are asked to examine. He called it spiritual science: knowledge offered for testing rather than faith offered for adoption. Whether it survives testing is left to the reader.
He also described his work as a continuation of the mission of Jesus — which he called The Third Testament — and the video is clear that this is a claim about content and continuity rather than about founding a church.
Where to go from here
The next video in the series takes up the most basic question in the whole system: what a living being actually is. The third asks where humanity stands in the larger picture, and what that implies about the state of the world.
If you would rather start somewhere else, the material does not require a sequence — see the topics for the other threads.
Key ideas
- Martinus had little formal education and worked as an accountant; nothing in his background anticipated the work.
- In 1921 he had an experience he described as a spiritual initiation, which gave him both a task and what he called permanent intuition.
- The task was specifically to describe the world picture in a form other people could follow and check.
- The result is roughly 2,500 pages of Livets Bog, about a hundred symbols, and decades of articles and lectures.
- He rejected the religion framing outright: no membership, no requirement to believe, and an invitation to test the reasoning instead.
Chapters
- A complete account of existence
- The spiritual initiation — what happened in 1921
- Intelligence vs. intuition — how he could know
- A lifetime of writing — Livets Bog and the symbols
- Not a religion — “we don’t have membership for 2+2=4”
- The Third Testament — a continuation of Jesus’s mission
- Spiritual science — knowledge, not belief
- Thirty years with this material
About this article. It summarises the video above from The Eternal World Picture. The writings of Martinus Thomsen are published by the Martinus Institute. The first five volumes of Livets Bog are available in English.
