The Fifth Principle: Strive daily to put the spiritual above the physical

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LESSON 24: Theory of the Spirit World

A. Our lives are connected to the spirit world through our minds.

1. The spirit world is the subject partner to events in this world. It is the invisible, vertical dimension of our external, horizontal reality.

2. By right thought and action we engage the good persons and angels in spirit world and overcome the bad influence of evil persons and angels in spirit world.

B. The spirit world is vast.

1. Our cosmos is so vast: with the Hubble telescope we have estimated over 50 billion galaxies in the physical universe. Each galaxy has millions of suns. Our knowledge compared to the enormity of the universe is like a grain of sand compared to the seashore. Scientists more than anyone should be humble before the Creator of all this.

2. The spirit world, the other half of the cosmos, is even more vast and mysterious than the physical world. Our vision of the stars is obscured by pollution. Likewise, by materialism, we are disconnected from God and the unseen spirit world.

3. Dr. Sang Hun Lee, a Korean philosopher, has done extensive research into the spirit world. The following represents some of the results of his work.

C. The five strata of the spirit world.

1. The Intermediate Spirit World is where spirit persons stay temporarily when they first enter the spirit world. After their stay here, they move to the lower or higher strata according to their own will.

2. Hell is below the Intermediate Spirit World. It is occupied by those who lived a strictly self-centered life on earth. It is extremely dark, clammy and fetid.

3. The Form-spirit Stage Spirit World is above the Intermediate Spirit World. It is occupied by those who, on earth, were unaware of God but sought to live a life of goodness according to their conscience. This includes the charitable, patriots, educators, truth-seekers and good family members who are, however well-intentioned, ignorant of God's Will.

4. Paradise, situated above the Form-spirit Stage, has three sub-stages. The first and second are occupied by people who, on earth, knew God and His Will and sought a life of goodness and love accordingly. This includes truthful Christians, Buddhists, Confucianists, Muslims, Jews, and other righteous people. The third sub-stage is occupied by those who knew not only God and His Will but also His love, and who practiced and taught His Will and love to others. Religious founders belong to this stage. However, true family love is not practiced even in this sub-stage.

5. The Special Stratum is occupied by those who established true families on earth and carried out responsibilities as central families and representative families, vertical ethics, and the four realms of heart, as introduced in this outline.

D. What takes place in the Intermediate Spirit World.

1. Everyone comes here upon physical death, guided by angels or spirits, lifted as if on an elevator, or sometimes passing through a gate. On the way, some people feel warm comfort, embraced in the bosom of a transcendent being of white light. One experiences a sudden enhancement of intellectual ability, and one's speech and actions become totally free. Some relatives and friends welcome them with joy, but they will return to their own places. Before they do, there takes place the so-called mirror of judgment phenomenon.

2. In this phenomenon, all achievements of newcomers without exception are revealed in images just like in a movie, for all the spirit people to see. Hidden good deeds or secret evil acts all are exposed.

3. This is not for reward or punishment but in order to determine the level of the spirit. Welcomers who participated in the welcoming/mirroring ceremony entertain and lead the newcomer to their living places, according to the law of affinity to one's own kind. Whether to follow the direction of the guide entirely depends on the newcomer's own will.

4. The link of the Couple: A spouse already present in the spirit world often appears in this setting. If the couple's personalities clash, they become separated eternally. When their personalities harmonize, they come to live together.

5. Earthly honor, knowledge, rights, position and property all are of no use in the spirit world. Only the true love and practice of truth, beauty and goodness based upon it are of value.

6. Newcomers normally remain in the Intermediate Spirit World up to fifty days before leaving with their guides. However, some spirits remain, wandering and possessing earthlings or acting as ghosts. This happens because they do not realize they are dead.

7. Newcomers are surprised by the beauty of the Intermediate Spirit World, which is filled with flowers and bird songs. The environment of the entire spirit world, except for Hell, is very beautiful, and the higher the stratum, the more beautiful.

E. Hell

1. Hell is the place where people who lived lives of selfishness enter, guided by fellow spirits of Hell who witnessed the past of the newcomer in the mirror of judgment.

2. Hell is subdivided into three levels. They all are dark, stinking, dismal, clammy and miserable. They are divided according to the length and severity of their denizens' evil committed on earth.

• The first level, immediately under the Intermediate Spirit World, is a dark and fetid station where murderers endlessly fight each other. There are also spirit people with faces of goblins (half of the face cut off, eyes dug out, nose missing, ears stretched out) or whose upper body is human and lower body is that of an animal. They also fight each other. A rare spirit in this realm repents of their sins and becomes good, helped by the prayer and efforts of their descendants. They must go through many difficulties to find the stairway leading upwards. Outside the exit they are welcomed by waiting angels and good spirit people, who guide them to the Form Stage Spirit World.
• The second level is below the first, and is much darker and more somber than the first level. The spirits look terribly wretched. Their legs are stuck like and have the appearance of the roots of trees. These are half-vegetable spirit persons, destined to be stuck for thousands of years. Most of these are suicides. Some murdered others with great cruelty.
• The third level is beneath the second, and is even more gloomy, dismal and terribly reeking. Spirits cannot even breathe, but are in a bog-like oil basin from which they emerge only long enough to catch their breath. They continue this for hundreds of thousands of years. Around a jet-black sea coast, some jet-black third-level people stand upright like stone poles, sometimes making a deep, deep sigh. Their identity is not well-known. They are probably tyrants who committed large-scale murders on earth.

F. The Form-Spirit stage of spirit world

1. Immediately above the Intermediate Spirit World, the denizens' minds are like glass boxes, so they know each others' thoughts and live with their friends. They live in villages. Such villages are filled with silence, so that newcomers may feel uneasy, but after a while they are welcomed and served, and can communicate heart-to-heart.

2. The atmosphere is of bright sunlight (in fact, the light of love), and it is incomparably more beautiful than earth. The spirit people design things which eventually are transferred to inventors and designers on earth, for our benefit.

3. There are schools for teaching about God, and for children who went to spirit world. They can travel freely by flying, and wear white clothes.

G. Paradise

1. It is above the Form-Spirit stage, and is more bright and splendid, with magnificent mountains, sweet fragrance and lovely music which comforts the mind and heart. In its upper levels people live in a state of ecstasy. It has three sub-stages.

• Lower-level Paradise is occupied by good religious people. There are many good Christians here, as well as non-Christians, whose level of growth is equal to that of good Christians. Their clothing is also pure white and sometimes emits light.
• Middle-level Paradise is occupied by people of advanced spirituality and love. They include religious founders other than Jesus Christ, such as Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Lao Tse, Abraham, etc. They all spoke of the same God from different perspectives. They forgave and even loved their enemies, and lived for the sake of humankind. Light shines from their pure white clothes and around their head is a golden halo. They are limited in that they taught but various forms of brother-sister love.
• These people are on the level of the highest angels, but Jesus is the son of God, who therefore dwells in the Upper-level Paradise, ruling the spirit world with the love of God.

The Special Stratum and Kingdom of Heaven in the spirit world will be introduced in more advanced texts. First we must look at how we can establish the right balance of the spiritual and physical while we are on earth, so that we can make the greatest possible progress in the growth of love while on earth.

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MEANINGFULL ENCOUNTERS