Spiritual awareness and our relationship to the Earth

All that exists is connected through invisible threads. The connections are maintained through love. All creations make part of this. All of creation can be seen as the body of God and so all people, all living beings and also the stars and the planets and the moons are part of God's body of love.

When a soldier engaged in war and rampage tramples a bed of beautiful flowers, he does not only destroy the beauty of these flowers, but he also causes pain in the heart of the person who cultivated them and he causes pain in the heart of God who is the origin of the love that brought forth such beauty.

The earth is the organism largest and closest to us. Many people see the earth as a dead thing, but how could the earth be dead knowing that the earth produces the mountains and the seas, the trees and the flowers and all the beauty of life that lives on and in its surface.

What is the relationship between Heaven and Earth? Heaven means the world of spirit, the world of God in spirit and the world of angels and of our ancestors. Heaven also is the place of our eternal home. Earth is the environment where we grow up. Since oldest times cultures have known the principle that we must keep to friends Heaven and Earth. We are situated between Heaven and Earth and to live a good life we need to maintain a good relationship to either one of these.

Making out our physical environment, the Earth nourishes us and gives life to our physical bodies. No day passes by without us being in total dependency of the Earth and all it gives us. But the Earth also is our main spiritual environment. Our ancestors who are with us in the spiritual world live on the spiritual Earth.

When we maltreat the physical Earth, it cannot but respond to the inflictions brought upon it. When we deplete the soil of the Earth of its fertility, one day the Earth will refuse to give us bread. We are connected with the Earth through invisible connections of love as the Earth and all other creations of God are one body. If one of the organs of the body are ill, the entire body suffers. We cannot speak about love for fellow man if we cannot love the Earth and all living creatures and things on it.

This is not only an external or a physical concept. This idea has deep spiritual meaning. When we mistreat the Earth, it cannot but be in pain because its harmony and beauty are being destroyed. It may sound strange to some to speak about the pain of the Earth, but why would it be abnormal to speak of pain in what makes out part of God's body? It is God who suffers when our Earth is mistreated because God made the Earth for all of us to have good life. Without a healthy and prospering earth there cannot be good life for all people. Because we are children of God, God suffers when God's love as expressed through the Earth is not well understood.

Because the Earth also is our main spiritual habitat, we cannot have a good life in the afterlife when we made a bad relationship to the Earth. When love is missing for the Earth, love is missing for all people who are dependent on the Earth. When love is missing, also true spiritual life will fail.

This is why in our lives of faith we should not be out for power in the world of man, but we should learn to cultivate the Earth well. A profession such as that of farmer can become a deeply religious and spiritual experience. This is when the farmer learns how to relate well to the Earth, if he replenishes the fertility of the Earth, if he comes to understand about how everything is interconnected, if he discovers about the energetic qualities of the Earth and its rivers and mountains, the air and the birds. If however the goal of a person is to acquire power and wealth, whatever his intended religious goals may be, he will fail in the end because he separates himself from the love and beauty and spirituality that God has created in our home that we call Earth.