Qui suis-je? Où allons-nous? Est-ce que Dieu existe?
Who is the author of the Third Testament?
Martinus was a native of Denmark, the country of birth of the great storyteller Hans Christian Andersen. Of Hans Christian Andersen one could say that he made stories out of reality, of Martinus one could say the opposite!
He took the stories of the Bible, Christianity's message of boundless love and the eternal core of the world religions and made them into spiritual science!
Martinus Thomsen was born on the 11th of August 1890 in the small market town of Sindal in North Jutland. According to the religious opinion of the time, he was what was called an illegitimate child, which was how children born out of wedlock were described at that time. Concerning his childhood and upbringing, Martinus relates that he cannot remember a single day in his life in which he did not pray to God. When he was in doubt about the right thing to do in a particular situation, he always asked, "What would Christ have done in this situation?" and immediately he would know what was the right thing to do. So from an early age, Martinus' personality bore the stamp of a deeply religious nature. His religious ideas were, however, not always in phase with the prevalent interpretations.
During his confirmation classes the clergyman told him that God had laid a curse on illegitimate children. Martinus, however, could not believe that God was angry with him.
Born out of wedlock, his maternal uncle and his wife took care of him. They were loving people who in their old age took good care of him after having already raised a number of children. They were poor and uneducated but warm people. Martinus' own mother died in 1901 when he was 11 years old.
In the following, quoted from as yet unpublished manuscripts, Martinus tells of his childhood and growing-up up to his experience of the Great Birth.
"I received no higher education, hold no scientific qualifications or doctorates and have no knowledge of the great philosophers and writers on religion. As a child I gained my education in a simple village school with only two classes and one teacher. In summer we went to school for six hours a week and in winter a little longer. Besides reading, writing and arithmetic my schooling consisted only of Bible history, some psalms, a little Danish history and geography. That was all.
Because I liked Bible history so much I was quite happy to go to school. My greatest wish was to study and become a teacher myself, but it was not God's will that I should become a school teacher. My foster parents had only the bare necessities of life and were completely unable to support me economically through further education. From the age of fourteen until I was thirty years old my physical existence proceeded in the same way as that of thousands and thousands of other young people who were without means and who had no education or trade. I was in turn a cowherd, dairyman, night watchman and office worker.
During my thirty-first year I experienced a spiritual or cosmic process that led me to a cosmic mission.
One evening in March 1921, I was sitting in complete darkness in my room in Norrebros Runddel in Copenhagen focussing my attention on God. It was while I was concentrating on God, and in this total darkness, that I experienced, in an awake, day-conscious, cosmic vision, my divine calling, unimaginable for me at that time, which was to explain intuitively and to manifest as cosmic science "the great amount" that Jesus could have told his disciples, but that neither they nor the public authorities of the time were evolved enough to be able to understand.
In what follows I will show how it can come about that a man born and brought up in an unintellectual farming community, without studies, exams, research or spiritual guidance was suddenly able to create a cosmic science, the quintessence of which is the eternal world picture that has as its foundation universal love, the immortality of living beings and the fact that they are masters of their own fate.
The vision of Christ that I experienced was not a dream or a hallucination, but an absolutely awake, day-conscious, cosmic experience that contained a clear announcement of a mission that I had to carry out. It is true that I was not immediately able to understand how I would have sufficient power to cope with a spiritual or cosmic task of such elevated and sacred importance. But this inadequate spiritual ability to understand was not to last long.
The quotations from The Third Testament are copyright protected by Martinus Institut 1981.