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M0534
The Renewal of the Godhead's Consciousness
by Martinus

1. The problem of "evil"
The fact that to a large extent people have lost their belief in God is in part due to all the darkness, all the so-called evil, that mankind lives in. Through religion people have heard about an almighty, all-knowing Godhead, a loving Father of all, and they are unable to understand how he can allow, and chooses to allow, the terrible misery and suffering that people inflict on each other. They are unable to understand the fact that millions of people die from hunger, illness and depression. To them a loving God would never allow the horrors of the world wars, where people kill and wound each other by the thousand, or the concentration camps where people are executed or forced to exist as slaves. This lack of knowledge about why "evil" exists in the world has led people away from the great world religions, especially Christianity, and many of these beings who have fallen away from the religions have become total atheists.
Of course this does not mean that these people have therefore become "evil". They can just as well be loving people even though they do not believe in a loving Providence. Many of them have lost their faith for the very reason that their capacity to love prevents them from acting in the negative ways that exist in the world. That is why they are unable to find any meaning in existence. They believe that an almighty, all-knowing and loving Godhead should be able to create absolute, unbroken peace, happiness and well-being for people.
2. The principle of contrast and the evolution of living beings
Through my cosmic analyses I have shown how darkness is absolutely necessary in order for it to be possible to experience light. No experience at all can take place without its contrast. One could not create or experience a kingdom of light and happiness without there being a kingdom in which the beings could get to know darkness. But it is also possible to point out the manifestations of darkness in a completely different way, so that one can see that this side of life is actually nothing less than a permanent renewing of the Godhead's eternal faculty to experience life.
Many people will perhaps find it strange that the Godhead's consciousness should be subject to renewal. In order to understand this renewing of the Godhead's consciousness one has to come to an understanding that consciousness certainly is eternal; but because it constitutes an eternal function, an eternal process of changing, an eternal creating and experiencing, it is based on a faculty. This faculty is what brings about the experience of life itself. But experiencing life consists of experiencing contrasts, and the beings' eternal faculty of experiencing life is based on two main contrasts, darkness and light, which terrestrial man experiences at the moment as "evil" and "goodness" respectively. An eternal principle - the mother energy - causes living beings to live through an epoch of life in which the primary factor is an extreme experience of darkness or "evil". Through this experience the beings reach a peak in their knowledge of the manifestations of darkness and its life-destroying and painful effects. This knowledge of the effects of darkness, felt in their own body and in their own consciousness, creates in the living beings such a colossal longing for the contrast to darkness that they begin to think and create in completely new ways. Humanity and the wisdom that is based on the personal experiencing of suffering begin to form an essential part of the beings' world of thought, until they reach a point where they no longer have the heart to create or manifest anything that does not promote humanity and love. A set of thoughts and a way of being like this causes the faculty of intuition in the beings to grow to a state of perfection and through this faculty the beings evolve until they attain the same wavelength as God's consciousness or the very highest knowledge in the universe and the capability that follows on from it. This means that the beings attain cosmic consciousness and a gradually release from reincarnation, no longer being born into physical matter, unless they have a specific task or mission to perform in it, they now experience an epoch of light in the highest spiritual spheres or worlds. So this state of light is the final outcome of the zone of darkness because the living beings' knowledge of darkness has given them the background they need for their experience and creative activity in the zones of light.
3. Hunger and satiation, the basis of the beings' eternal experience of life
In this elevated state of living the beings are at one with God, and it is through these beings that God reveals his very highest wisdom and love. They make up God's primary sensory organs and instruments of manifestation. Through these beings the Godhead manifests his consciousness, manifests his creation of globes and worlds or of organisms in the macrocosmos, mesocosmos and microcosmos. It is through these beings that God's command, Let there be light", reaches its highest fulfilment.
Because the beings' ability to live in the light and to manifest only the highest perfection is a reality that has been created, it cannot go on existing for ever. So it is in fact time- and space-dimensional. It had a beginning and must also have an end. Of course this takes place over a very long period of time and it does not happen contrary to the wishes of the living beings. By going on living in the same sphere of light and dealing with the same manifestations and creations the beings inevitably become satiated with these experiences. No matter how strange it may seem to terrestrial human beings, whose longing and striving is focussed on the worlds of light, there are beings in the universe for whom their manifestation of life in these worlds is becoming boring. And the more boring it becomes, the more the beings long to experience its opposite. This longing will lead these beings into a new sphere of life in which they once again experience the principle of darkness and reincarnation. They will now slip into a new, higher evolutionary spiral, in relation to which the one that they have just lived through becomes a part of their microcosmos, and the spiral cycles that were lived through even earlier move, in the perspective, further down into their microcosmos and make up the matter out of which they construct their future organisms. They are in fact led into physical worlds where they develop new kinds of organs and sets of senses that will give them the most extreme experience of darkness, darkness that is experienced as "evil" only when they are at the point of being satiated with it, and that thereby leads them towards the experiences of light in the spiral. So "evil" from a cosmic point of view, is the unpleasant good, the final outcome of which in an evolutionary spiral is the ability to live in the light of the highest spiritual worlds without having to incarnate in physical matter. So the beings' eternal life takes the form of an eternally ongoing cycle in which they succeed in experiencing alternately darkness and light, all according to their hunger and satiation. It must be said at this point that it is only the principles that are repeated, each fresh cycle being a new variation of the experience of darkness and light. These experiences of the contrast principle in the universe are a requirement for maintaining the living beings' eternal and renewed faculty to create and experience life.
4. The renewal of life for the Godhead and the sons of God
In the religions we hear about a devil who rebels against God, and who is the originator of all the darkness and wickedness in the world, while God represents light and love. But seen from a cosmic point of view there is no devil fighting against God for human souls. Nothing lies outside of God; darkness is also a part of the Godhead, it is God's secondary consciousness within which the renewal of God's consciousness takes place. So the living beings' eternal experience of life is promoted by means of a stage of renewal, the stage of darkness, through which the living beings mature to become organs and instruments in God's primary consciousness, where they experience and manifest life's highest perfection.
As the Godhead is a living being that experiences and creates, it is clear that this same Godhead's consciousness must be subject to change and renewal otherwise the whole universe would be something that functions blindly and automatically, which it does not. The Godhead's faculty for experiencing life must, without any break whatsoever, be at its peak. As the Godhead is the foundation and maintainer of the whole universe, the renewal of the Godhead's consciousness cannot take place in the same way as it does with the living beings who "live, move and have their being" in him, that is, as it does with all the "sons of God" in the microcosmos, the mesocosmos and the macrocosmos. If the Godhead's consciousness also had to degenerate in order to be renewed what would happen to these living beings? How would the universe exist as an extreme form of perfection, where everything is very good? If the whole of the Godhead's consciousness had to undergo an evolutionary epoch and for a time - like terrestrial human beings at the moment - be governed by devil consciousness (animal consciousness plus intelligence) to whom could the living beings direct their prayers in times of need? In a gigantic epoch of darkness like this, in which the Godhead was an extremely unevolved, primitive being, there would be no help whatsoever available for absolutely any being. Everything would be enveloped in the flames of hell; death and destruction would be present in all universes, the primary state of affairs in the whole all-encompassing universe would be a single great horror dripping with blood, that is if anything resembling a universe could exist at all. But fortunately the opposite state of affairs is the case. The universe in its primary state as the consciousness and organism of God is the culmination of light. How is it possible for the Godhead's experience of life to be renewed in a completely different way to that of the living being? In the Godhead's consciousness there are six great spheres of experiencing life. Of these, three make up God's primary means of manifesting consciousness through experience and creation. Through these three spheres of experiencing life the Godhead manifests from the whole of its consciousness the very highest perfection of omniscience, all-embracing love and omnipotence; through these spheres it direct and leads the whole universe, causing it to be in itself a shining and extreme manifestation of light that overshadows all and everything. These three fields of consciousness or fields of experiencing life we know as "the perfect human kingdom", "the kingdom of wisdom" and "the divine world" in every single spiral cycle that exists at all. The kingdom in the spiral cycles that we know as "the kingdom of bliss" also belongs to God's primary consciousness. It is through this kingdom that the Godhead experiences everything that exists in the way of accumulated knowledge or wisdom. The experiences in this ocean of knowledge or wisdom are experiences that are turned in on themselves. These memories are not to be found in external matter, in neither physical nor spiritual matter. They are situated even deeper in the cosmic world structure than these types of matter. The effects of these memories, however, do appear in external matter and we know them as "the mineral kingdom", but of course they exist in other variations besides the ones that terrestrial humans experience. As all activity of consciousness in this sphere is turned in on itself, this matter can seem to be dead matter.
5. Terrestrial human beings as transitional beings between the secondary and primary consciousness of God
Two spheres for experiencing life remain in God's consciousness; they make up God's secondary areas for experiencing life and creating. Terrestrial human beings know them as "the plant kingdom" and "the animal kingdom". The unfinished, that is incompletely evolved, terrestrial human beings belong to the second of these two kingdoms only to the extent that they are still unfinished. As they are also the Godhead's instruments for sensing and manifesting, that the Godhead experiences and the manifests here will to a corresponding degree be unfinished. It is precisely in these two areas, and particularly in the latter one, that the Godhead experiences a renewal of its consciousness. Here the ability to love and the faculty of intelligence are renewed until they reach perfection. These fields in the Godhead's consciousness where life is experienced are eternal realities. Each one has its own special mission in the whole. The incompletely evolved human beings on this earth are still the Godhead's imperfect instruments for experiencing and manifesting. They are here in order to be made perfect, that is to say in order to gain the personal experiences about darkness that will enable the most perfect light, in the form of wisdom and love, to shine through them. For life after life in the cycle or reincarnation they will reap the darkness they have sown and so gain the knowledge they need. And with this as the background and foundation of their lives they will become mature enough to enter God's primary consciousness as organs for manifesting and experiencing, they will become "human beings in God's image" and through their behaviour and way of being they will benefit and bring joy to other living beings.
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Original Danish title: Guddommens bevidsthedsfornyelse. From a lecture given in the Martinus Institute on Monday 16th November 1959. Manuscript for the lecture revised by Mogens Møller. Revision approved by Martinus. First published in the Danish edition of Kosmos no. 23, 1967. Translated by Andrew Brown, 1997.
Article ID: M0534
Published in the English edition of Kosmos no. 4, 1997

© Martinus Institut 1981, www.martinus.dk

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