M0616
The Holy Spirit
by Martinus

1. Summer is the culmination of God's spirit in physical matter
Nature is celebrating Whitsuntide. Everywhere life is sprouting. The long days of light and warmth, with colours and scents, with the hymns issuing from thousands of tiny throats rising heavenwards, with holidays, picnics, woodland walks, parties and merriment have returned to our northern latitudes and forced the cold and darkness away from the zone that we call "winter", and have thereby once again given us back summer. This gift or this return of life is the culmination of God's spirit in a material or physical form. For wherever God's spirit culminates, life or summer always emerges, whereas winter manifests wherever God's spirit appears in a latent form. This is not some kind of symbolic story, but direct absolute reality. God's spirit is in fact not a person, it is not something supernatural, incomprehensible or unreal, but a real fact in the form of the wonderful power, which is identical to "consciousness", that allows all living beings to sense existence, thereby making them identical to life.
2. God's spirit consists of a dark and a light part, an imperfect and a perfect part, where the light, perfect part is primary
God's spirit is the same as the sensation of life. This sensation enters into the living being in the form of "thoughts". In turn, thoughts multiply in these beings' creative faculties, thereby allowing new thoughts, new fields of consciousness, to appear before their wondering "selves" or "I's", thereby giving them the name "living beings". God's spirit is therefore identical to absolutely everything that exists in the form of thought, consciousness or life. But in order for life to be able to be experienced it has to appear in contrasts, and as a result light and darkness, summer and winter, cold and heat, pleasure and displeasure, prosperity and adversity etc. have been verifiable facts wherever God's spirit in the form of the experience of life makes a "something" into a "living being". One therefore has to understand that it is not possible for an object to be experienced in any other way than on the basis of its contrast. White can only be experienced if there is at the same time something that is not white, and black can only be experienced if there is at the same time something that is not black, and the same applies to any object whatsoever. It can only be experienced on the basis of the fact that there is at the same time something to which it is not identical. The divine spirit will then also, in its cosmic analysis, be expressed as one in an infinite number of degrees of energy appearing in various strengths. And it is these various degrees of strength that form the basis of all contrasts in existence. The sum total of these degrees of strength in the expression of the divine spirit represent a rising scale from a lesser to a greater manifestation of strength. The weaker manifestation forms the basis of what we call "imperfection", whereas the stronger manifestation forms the basis of what we call "perfection". Both these forms of manifestation are also referred to respectively as "darkness" and "light". The divine spirit will therefore in its cosmic analysis be divided into a "dark" and a "light" part.
3. In the absolute sense nothing can kill and nothing can be killed
According to "Livets Bog" all living beings are eternal realities and experience life in the form of gigantic evolutionary epochs or sections, which in "Livets Bog" have been given the name "evolutionary spirals" or "spiral steps". Every such step constitutes a section in which the living beings first experience the divine spirit in latent form or in the weaker manifestation, and then in full manifestation or culmination. As readers of this book also know, such a "spiral step" also appears in six lesser steps or sections. Of these, the first two are well known. They make up what we call the "plant kingdom" and the "animal kingdom". Next comes the "human kingdom" to which terrestrial human beings only partly belong, as they are to a large extent still subject to the requirements of life of the animal kingdom and to a certain extent have to kill in order to live. Here, as everywhere in my articles, killing is to be understood merely as the mutilating or destroying of a living being's body, since in the absolute sense nothing can kill and nothing can be killed. The living being's "self" or "I" is not "what is created" but the "creator", and as such is impervious to any kind of cessation, since only "what is created" can cease or perish.
The terrestrial human being constitutes a transitional being between the second and third step of an "evolutionary spiral", that is to say between the "animal kingdom" and the "human kingdom". The next three steps in the spiral section are by nature supra-physical and therefore only accessible to occult or supra-physical senses.
In the second of the spiral's six steps, that is to say the "animal kingdom", the divine spirit is most latent, while it culminates in the fifth of these steps. In "Livets Bog" this step is called "the divine world". The fact that I am describing the divine spirit as latent here does not of course mean that it is out of action, such a thing can never occur, on the contrary it means that, no matter how strange it might seem to the beginner in spiritual research, the divine spirit culminates in – mistakes. The creation of the mistakes are in fact just as necessary as the opposite. Mistakes are the same as "imperfection", and without "imperfection" there would be no "perfection". In the "animal kingdom" the divine spirit culminates in "imperfection".
4. Human beings have imagined that it is the "devil" and not the Godhead that is the origin of "evil", but "darkness" is just as essential and divine as "light"
As imperfection must always in the end result in "unpleasantness", whereas perfection must in the end definitely give rise to "pleasantness", the Earth's human beings have for a long time distinguished between the two forms of manifestation of the divine spirit, but of course to a large extent without having an inkling that they were manifestations of the same source. They have even to the same extent imagined a certain originator of the manifestation of unpleasantness and not thought of the Godhead as the true originator of it. They have therefore called the manifestation of unpleasantness the "evil" and the imagined originator of this the "devil". But this idea is due to an underdeveloped overview of the absolute facts that, as I have already said, show that "darkness" just as much as "light" are equally great essential requirements of all creation, of all experience of life, and therefore constitute exactly the same absolute blessing for all living beings, and that, in its cosmic analysis, existence is based on the highest degree of love.
As a consequence of the previously mentioned circumstances it has been a time-honoured tradition for many people to acknowledge only the divine spirit's manifestation of pleasure as "God's spirit". The same human beings call all other phenomena "dark powers", "the work of the devil" etc.
But even though one has distinguished between "light" and "dark" spirit, one has nevertheless not directly understood the divine spirit in the everyday, physical phenomena, but understood it only in those degrees of its manifestation where it appears as the highest mental inspiration or power for the manifestation of the most noble, mental states of consciousness, and as such called it the "holy spirit".
5. The "holy spirit" is the same as the pure or perfect sensation of life
Since "holy" is the opposite of everything that is impure, which in this case means everything that contains imperfections, and "spirit" is the same as "consciousness" or the "sensation of life", the "holy spirit" will therefore be the same as "the pure or perfect sensation of life". This is in turn the opposite of that form of experience of life that is full of mistakes or imperfections and that is otherwise commonplace in the terrestrial zones.
Since the "holy spirit" is therefore the same as the highest and absolutely true sensation or experience of life, it enriches the individual with a correspondingly highest and absolutely true knowledge of life or existence. Such a knowledge, which will gradually become identical to all of life's leading or main laws, will to a corresponding degree enable the individual in question to be the conscious creator of its own fate. It is therefore as the controller of all the "basic energies", that is to say instinct, gravity, feeling, intelligence, intuition and memory, equipped with a consciousness that is in harmony with the divine overview in which "everything is very good", that it can radiate nothing but an all-encompassing love towards all and everything. This state of consciousness, or the "holy spirit", is in "Livets Bog" called "cosmic consciousness".
6. The penetration of the "holy spirit" into a being's consciousness is always accompanied by "light phenomena"
Terrestrial human beings have not come so far in their evolution that they have reached such a state of consciousness. They still have to struggle with many imperfections and lacks in their consciousness. Such a consciousness does not therefore constitute the "holy spirit", but on the contrary God's spirit at a primitive or latent stage. But through the religions, through beings that have been ahead of the great majority in evolution, the human beings on Earth have been made aware of, or have come into contact with, the first stages of the "holy spirit". When in the Bible we read about Moses who saw a "burning bush", or about the prophet Elijah being taken up into heaven in "a chariot of fire" drawn by "horses of fire", or Jesus' "transfiguration on the mountain", or Saint Paul who was enveloped in a "white light" etc. they were all phenomena that are connected to the penetration in these beings of "cosmic consciousness" or the "holy spirit". This penetration is in fact always accompanied by strange "light phenomena" that appear in varying degrees of strength. These phenomena are by nature most perfect when they show themselves to the individual as a fundamental "baptism of fire", which means an enveloping of the individual in a cloud of blinding mental light. The individual becomes so to speak transfigured and visible to the occult senses as being of blazing fire. This "fire" is an expression of the highest spiritual energy or matter and cannot pervade an individual without the individual in one way or another already in advance being receptive to this energy through moral purification. In relationship to this purification and to the evolutionary step the individual finds itself on, it is pervaded by the "holy spirit" or life's highest energy of consciousness.
Since this energy cannot pervade a being without it opening or activating the latent senses that exist in the being for this energy, the individual will always after such an experience appear totally transformed. This transformation will be all the greater the more comprehensive the moral purification has been and the more prominent the evolutionary step is that the individual in question finds itself on.
Just as the apostles, when the "holy spirit" in the form of "tongues of fire" sat upon their heads and they were transformed and spoke in "other tongues", similarly all other beings also more or less speak in "other tongues" when they are pervaded by the "holy spirit".
Of course, to speak in "other tongues" does not so much mean to talk in a foreign language, but to talk in another layer of consciousness. This in turn means to talk about and be acquainted with things and phenomena that the beings in question previously absolutely could not see, think or experience. The beings are therefore totally transformed, in fact sometimes to such an extent that it has been presumed that it was a completely new or foreign individuality that manifested through these beings' bodies. But that is absolutely not the case. It is absolutely the individual's own self that is still manifesting, but it has had its sensory abilities expanded to fields in which it was previously not conscious, and through which they therefore were not earlier able to manifest.
7. Jesus' transfiguration on the mountain was identical to the fundamental experience of the "holy spirit" or the "great birth"
As previously mentioned, the experience of the "holy spirit" does not occur to an equally strong degree in all beings, but is released in relation to the being's evolutionary step. In "Livets Bog" I therefore differentiate between the total experience, which in this book I call the "great birth", and the partial or unfinished forms of experience of this spirit that are considered to be merely the embryonic stages of the "great birth".
Whereas Jesus' transfiguration on the mountain was identical to the fundamental experience of the "holy spirit" or the "great birth", the other previously mentioned instances from the Bible were merely expressions, in varying degrees of strength, of the experience of the embryonic stages of this birth.
Among the most elementary or primitive forms of experience of the "holy spirit" are, among others, such experiences as an ordinary religious, sectarian "conversion". A person comes to a religious meeting, is moved by what he hears there, and in a rush of enthusiasm, which resembles ecstasy, is filled with an irresistible urge to change his way of life so that it is in contact with the new layers of consciousness or forms of life that he has come into contact with at the meeting. But since the individual on the step on which such a form of "conversion" exists still does not have the correct understanding of and perfect love towards all living beings, but on the contrary is still a tool for the "killing principle" by taking part in slaughtering, eating meat and being the source of "holy wrath", "justified anger", and at the same time they do not understand that all roads, all experiences, lead to God, they are still to a corresponding extent disobeying the divine commandments. But they are thereby causing sufferings or a correspondingly unpleasant fate for themselves. But what happens as a result of this unpleasant fate is that the individual develops further until they are receptive to an even higher form of "conversion", and so on until they can no longer kill, wound or injure but can be nothing other than an expression of love. They will then be overshadowed by the "holy spirit" or the "great birth" in a fundamental form and they will then witness, as a personal experience, life's greatest analyses or the answer to existence itself: "everything is very good" and their own true identity as an immortal son of God.
It is only after this fundamental experience of the "holy spirit" or God's own consciousness that the individual can be called the "true or perfect human being". This will in turn mean that from being an "embryo" it has now become a "new-born baby" in true existence, or it has become absolutely conscious in the divine experience of life.
8. The "spirit of God" has always and will in all eternity "move upon the face of the waters"
Since you will have the possibility of studying this elevated subject in greater depth in the forthcoming volumes of "Livets Bog", I cannot go into greater details here. But I have felt the urge to send to my readers, as a little Whitsuntide greeting, these rough outlines of this big subject, as this is particularly connected with Whitsuntide. Christianity celebrates Whitsuntide in memory of the "holy spirit's" outpouring over the apostles. The festival of Whitsuntide is the festival of the "holy spirit".
In the new world culture that is now dawning, the festival of Whitsuntide will be an even greater festival in memory of the divine spirit, since we will, to a steadily increasing degree, have our eyes opened to the fact that all life, all consciousness and thereby all wisdom and love is the radiation of a supra-physical, electrical, creative force that in the form of "God's spirit" this very day as in the past and as in the ages to come "will move upon the face of the waters". And when we sense God's shining spirit – through the woods, which today are bright and green, and through gardens, fields and meadows that, bathed in bright sunshine and with a profusion of flowers, encircle everything living, to say nothing of the joyful young people that are drawn out into the open countryside – we will then experience Whitsuntide in contact with the eternal Providence and we will notice the presence of the holy spirit within ourselves as a spark of bliss.
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Original title: Den hellige ånd. First published in the Danish Kosmos no. 3, 1933. Translated by Andrew Brown, 2018.
Article ID: M0616
Published in the English edition of Kosmos no. 2, 2018.
© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk
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