INTRODUCTION

🌌 In this profound writing, Master Woo Myung reflects on Spinoza’s pantheistic insight that existence, nature, and God are one. Living a simple life, Spinoza realized that all forms in the universe are expressions of a single substance, and that God exists together with the whole of creation.

✨ This teaching goes further to reveal that while many individual forms and “gods” appeared through the formation of egos, these distinctions dissolve when all beings shed their separateness. In the age after the coming of Truth, heaven, earth, and humanity are united as one God, as taught by Master Woo Myung.

ORIGINAL WRITING BY MASTER WOO MYUNG

Spinoza and the One Existence

Spinoza, who lived in the Netherlands, never married and lived a simple life that transcended material possessions. Before he died at the age of forty-five, he asserted the following as a pantheist: existence is one, and it appears as the whole. It is mathematically one, but quantitatively it is the whole. This existence is nature, without which nothing can exist. If God exists, it must co-exist with the existence of the whole. Thus it can be said that existence is nature and at the same time, it is God.

Many different forms exist in nature, but they are all various forms of one existence. God co-exists with the existence of the whole, and it exists as one. When God appears partially, it becomes an existence of form, but this existence has the substance of the one. Thus God is the real substance of existence, which is at the same time an individual existence. All intellectual content is the result of God’s activity. God’s attributes are in all things, but there are two that are only in man: thought and extension. Is his assertion correct?

Spinoza is correct. It was the one God that created all things in the world, but when they came to have form many gods came into existence that we know to be the creations of nature. Thus it is correct when he says that gods of individual existence existed.

God is originally one, but many gods came to exist because of the formations of individuals, but when these existences shed their egos, they will become one. Now, all things in the world have been made to become one, so while Spinoza’s statement was correct in the past, it is not correct any longer. Now, only one God in which heaven, earth, and man have united exists. This is Truth in the time after the coming of Truth. Thus, while many gods exist, they are one.

— Woo Myung

🌿 REFLECT AT SANTA CLARA MEDITATION

At Santa Clara Meditation, practitioners are guided to dissolve ego and return to the one existence where heaven, earth, and humanity are united. 🌠
Through this realization, one experiences the living Truth in which all forms become one God, as taught by Master Woo Myung.