The concept of offense and punishment, the fear of punishment, of consequence, is firmly rooted in a material world. Therefore, religious systems also fall back on this concept again and again. The consciousness dominated by the mind can only be dissuaded from its separative actions by the threat of negative consequences. Precisely because the mind, as the dominating force and tool of self-preservation, does not react to anything else and, apart from personal advantage, has nothing else in mind but harm avoidance for itself. For this unredeemed consciousness there is no reason not to kill for one’s own advantage, if it would remain without negative consequences. Or to lie, to rob, to steal, to rage or to hate. Only the threat of punishment – and the fear of discovery and the consequences that follow – can prevent the act with this awareness. Thus, the concept of punishment is the first step in forcing the unredeemed mind-dominated consciousness into non-separating actions. To force it to self-less actions. Punishment is the attempt to use the instinct of self-preservation to achieve selfless behavior. To bring the material mechanism to soul „action“. This goes only over the proclamation of a power standing over everything and knowing everything, which is ready to let follow punishment on misdeeds. This proclamation is an aid, a crutch. For if it remains only with the norms and their enforcement by threat of separation, then only further separation is created between the threatened and the norms themselves. Another step must be taken. Only it is a step that cannot be taken, but one that arises on its own. The final goal is to redeem consciousness from its mind dominance. Only then will the norms associated with punishment and fear of punishment until then be revealed in their truthfulness. Only then is there no longer any reason for the threat of punishment, because the redeemed consciousness, which can now perceive more unity and less separation, follows these norms out of natural impulse and knows through soul knowledge that killing, stealing, lying, cheating, hating leads to nothing but the strengthening of separation. This consciousness then also knows that the eternal power above all does not punish. It knows that the unredeemed consciousness punishes itself through its actions.
The threat of punishment ideally ensures that the mind becomes passive. In its passivity it can give room for the mental perceptions. This enforced passivity is – at least in the beginning – connected with great resistance and leads to the goal only if it is enforced consistently and persistently – and later again and again. To these „punishments“ which lead to the passivity of the mind also belong the enormous catastrophes. It is irrelevant whether it is a personal catastrophe or a natural catastrophe or whether it is man-made. This catastrophe shakes the mind so in its foundations that it can no longer find solutions with its simple scheme. He is ready to give up in the face of this disaster that exceeds all his imagination. He is paralyzed. He is the game that, after a long flight, finally overpowered by the lion, realizes that the hunt is over and now, in passivity and rigidity, leaves his throat for the fatal bite. These are the moments when some of these people „find God.“ The mind gives up, is defeated, and the soul information can flow freely in consciousness. The consciousness recognizes the truth.