Christ knew all the grades of love, but He could not explain them in his life as Jesus because his audience was not yet ready for that.

So He summarized his joyful message as universal love.

In the gospel it is somewhat expressed how great that love is meant, because it even comprises loving the enemy.

In the twentieth century, the masters of the University of Christ could indeed describe all the grades of love in the books by Jozef Rulof, as a result of which they could explain what grade of love Christ meant exactly.

After all, the grades of love coincide with the grades of feeling.

The article ‘grades of feeling’ explains that on earth four subsequent grades of feeling are experienced.

Universal love is then the fourth grade of feeling.

Universal love is not limited to one person.

It radiates to all people, regardless of their personality or their body.

Helping the fellow human being is the main focus.

This is why it is also called serving love, aimed at serving the evolution of the other person.

This helping love is attuned to the first three spheres of light in the hereafter.

From the fourth sphere of light, people speak of the spiritual or fifth grade of feeling.

This is only achieved by the masters in the hereafter, because that grade is completely detached from the earthly material matter.

As a result, the masters are also masterly in helping, they sense exactly what another person needs in order to develop himself further.

They also oversee when it is better to not help another person, because that other person has to precisely dedicate all of himself to moving forward.

They can see in advance whether their help will have a permanent result, and then they devote themselves completely to that.

Before universal love comes within reach, every soul goes through the first three grades of feeling.

The masters followed this process in the cosmic evolution of the soul.

They know the steps and obstacles on that path.

The article ‘our cosmic soul’ gives an overview of all the articles which outline this path of development.

As a result, we get to know the roots of our love.

When did the feeling ‘love’ occur?

The masters went back to the prehistoric age and saw what kind of love prehistoric people knew.

In their life, those people twice realized the action that people later started to call ‘sexual intercourse’.

The drive to realize this action did not come from themselves, but from another soul who wanted to reincarnate at that moment.

That drive of the reincarnating soul connected itself with these prehistoric people, then it proceeded to the physical being one.

Outside this time, these prehistoric people had no feeling to connect physically with each other.

They did indeed live as twin souls in harmony with each other and they had no longing to connect themselves with someone else.

Life after life, they reincarnated around the same time so that they could experience their earthly lifetime together.

In every life they had two children.

In the article ‘motherhood and fatherhood’, it is explained that as a result of this they assured their own reincarnation, so that they could continually evolve further.

By having children, a feeling also developed which would grow into maternal love much later.

The children were nursed and if there was a threat the mother defended them with all her strength.

If they could continue under their own strength, the mother no longer worried about them, and later she did not even know anymore that they were her children.

After all, the consciousness of these prehistoric people did not go further than their physical experiences.

They knew hunger and thirst in particular and everything that was needed to get food and drink.

Their grade of feeling is called pre-animal-like in the books, they had less consciousness than the current pet dogs and cats.

The more lives they experienced, the more feeling they got of how they could obtain food and drink.

This formed a beginning of a personality, an instinctive sensing where food is usually found.

They also already knew the feeling of fear that no food can be found.

The experiencing of the genitals also gave them physical feelings.

These were positive feelings, because this harmonic event was an expression of the deepest basic powers of their soul.

The article ‘our basic powers’ explains that the female and male powers interpret the essence of our soul, which is called ‘motherhood and fatherhood’, ‘giving birth and creation’ or ‘growing and condensing’.

As a result of the intercourse, the soul reached growing and condensing, and could evolve thanks to reincarnation.

Life after life, those feelings became more conscious.

The personality began to remember those feelings and to distinguish them from other feelings which were experienced as less pleasant.

The human being got more consciousness and wanted to experience those pleasant feelings more often than twice in a human life.

The drive that he got from the reincarnating soul to reach giving birth and creating, was no longer sufficient.

The human being now wanted to love, himself.

Up until then, intercourse had served for reproduction.

However, now the human being got to love the sexual actions and the phenomena, separate from the function of this.

At that moment, lust was born, the will of the human being to experience sexual feelings.

Then the human being left the natural love which is offered by nature and life.

The will for intercourse now no longer came from a soul which wanted to be born, but from the human being on earth as a personality.

The organs were used for pleasure and no longer just for reproduction.

The human being reached desiring of his own feelings, he entered self-love.

Once the human being had learned to use the strength of his body to secure his food at the cost of other people, the battle amongst each other emerged.

The personality grew and reached the animal-like grade of feeling.

This second grade of feeling is characterized by the law of the strongest.

The self-love was now also experienced according to the strength of the body.

The strongest imposed his will on the weaker in order to experience the own feelings of pleasure.

And in this way rape emerged.

The human being wanted to experience more than just his own twin soul and also focused his sexual pleasure on other people.

This lust brought the soul into disharmony.

Other people were dominated and harmed.

As a result, there was murdering and the earthly life came to an end too soon.

The personality built up [[karma[[, which had to be corrected by the soul in following lives.

As a result of this karma, the soul was beaten out of the harmonious togetherness with its twin soul.

This harmony was further disturbed because the personality connected itself out of lust with many other souls.

The human being not only experienced his lust on earth, the personality had also reached the animal-like grade of feeling in the hereafter.

There, the lust took on even larger forms, because it was not curbed by a limited lifetime or a material body.

By means of his lust, the human being created a dark sphere of lust and violence in the hereafter.

In this ‘Land of Lust’, the people lived it up completely with each other.

They also went to the earth, and experienced the lust of the earthly being there by connecting themselves in feeling with this being.

They urged the earthly being to experience more lust, and in this way the influence and obsession for lust emerged.

The article ‘creator of light’ describes the first obsession on earth and the article ‘insanity’ points out how this takes place in the present time.

In the astral land of lust, the unnaturalness of lustful love is visible, because the spiritual body is formed according to the life of feeling.

Anyone who looks lustfully at the other person can be recognised by his protruding eyes which fly through the universe.

And it does not stop at looking, the body loses its natural form.

That whole world is deformed, a natural life such a tree cannot grow there.

And yet it was precisely in this land of lust that a higher grade of love was once born.

When many inhabitants of this dark sphere returned to the earth in order to experience physical lust through the earthly being, the preys became scarcer.

There was now fighting for a material being which made enjoyment possible for the astral personality.

In order to not lose the earthly being, the astral personality began to protect him.

Concern and thoughtfulness entered the astral being, and as a result he felt a warmth which is different to what the earthly body can give.

This inner warmth made him light and happy.

He reflected on this and followed the new feelings in him.

Because he wanted to feel the warmth in him more strongly, he increased his protection and his care for the earthly being.

He began to serve!

And gradually love for the human being entered him, which he guarded and protected.

After many ages of enhancement, that feeling of love got to experience a higher grade, as a result of which the astral personality passed onto the third grade of feeling, which is also called ‘coarse-material’.

In this way, the Land of Twilight emerged, a spiritual world in which the shadowy light reflects the awakening love of the inhabitants.

The inhabitants of the Land of Twilight continued for centuries with serving the human being on earth, and in this way they built on the spheres of light.

Every feeling of care, protection and serving love which they put in practice received a luminous radiance, as a result of which the spheres of light emerged.

The soul now became creator of light.

As a result of these phenomena, the astral being got to know the working of his soul.

Every deed of himself as well as of the human being on earth radiates the light of the grade of feeling which lies at its foundation.

His action can be assessed on the basis of the light which radiates from it and that light is perceived in the hereafter.

As a result, the astral being understood that the grade of love which was visible by means of this radiating light must already have been present in his soul in potential.

Otherwise, it could not have been activated by the serving actions.

Every soul has that light in him, and will radiate it as soon as the personality has reached the conscious serving.

The masters also saw this phenomenon in the origin of the universe.

The article ‘our basic powers’ describes how the All-Soul came to be luminous hazes when it reached the fourth grade in its growing.

These basic powers work in the macrocosmos and the microcosmos, for material and spirit, they form both suns and spheres of light.

The masters saw that by actually loving the other life, they kept on revealing the subsequent grade of feeling in themselves.

The radiating light from their loving actions was absorbed by their soul, as a result of which the soul could give its created universe more light during its next giving birth.

However, every action which was inferior for the achieved grade of feeling, did not give the soul any growing.

The soul could then not add the consciousness of that deed to its development, as a result of which a short standstill occurred for it, until that action was corrected to the level of the achieved grade of feeling.

The masters followed further what lust means for the soul.

From a spiritual point of view, the soul cannot do anything with the experiences which are generated by lust.

The unnatural light of the land of lust does not give the soul any increase in its grade of love.

It cannot accept the consciousness of the lustful actions because this is not in harmony with motherhood and fatherhood which give it evolution.

For the soul it is then a question of waiting until its personality has lived it up in lust and starts to be open to higher feelings.

However, the spiritual development of the soul can also reach a temporary stalemate as a result of the lust, because its personality becomes addicted to lust.

On earth, the soul does not benefit from the lustful actions of its personality, because they do not give a new body in order to gain new experiences or to restore karma.

In addition, the lust on earth can suppress the being open to having children.

The human being then wants to experience intercourse, but without the consequences of the ‘burden of children’, because they encumber the self-love.

The universal love has completely conquered the physical experiencing.

At the same time, that higher grade of love represents exactly the same laws of life as the body, namely growing and condensing.

After all, the human organism reaches growth in the mother’s womb by means of the same basic principles.

The personality can also spiritually master what the body already has in its material growth and working.

Then the human being not only experiences the physical possibility of reaching oneness and as a result creating children, but he also starts to experience that working inwardly.

Because every character trait is essentially a growing of the giving birth and creating life of feeling.

Every gram of feeling that we devote to serving our fellow being increases the growing feeling of our universal love.

If we wish to experience love, we can do that by becoming love ourselves.

The masters experienced that they mastered a higher grade of love by giving and being love, not by receiving love.

This is why Christ advised us to love one another.

Like ourselves, he added, because he knew that most people already knew the required self-love, and by means of that comparison could imagine what universal love would look like.

Christ knew his All-Source and knew that he had allowed that to radiate to divine light by loving all life.

However, when we do not wish to understand another person, then we beat that All-Source within us back into darkness.

We are only attuned to the first sphere of light if all our character traits interpret joy, amiability and openness.

The masters experienced that, by accepting life in all aspects and absorbing it into themselves, they developed a connection of feeling with that life, so that they got to know and could serve that life.

In this way, they reached the universal oneness with all life.

Although we can speak of a lower and higher grade of love, one grade is not less important than the other.

All the rungs of the ladder are necessary for getting to the top.

And it is only on top of the mountain that we enjoy the wonderful view.

Only the highest grade of love shows the ultimate reality for which all the past grades serve.

A past grade is therefore not an aim in itself.

Even if the human being is happy when he feels the happiness and the warmth of the first spheres of light, the higher spheres of light and higher cosmic grades of life still wait to be revealed in the growing soul.

However, the grades of love are not only the rungs of the step ladder, they all also remain a part of the final stage that would collapse if one rung were to dissolve.

The masters also see this natural law again in our body.

During the pregnancy in the first months of our physical growth, organ after organ is formed, then our mature body needs all the vital organs for a powerful working.

If for instance our kidneys or lungs were to dissolve, the other organs would not have the possibility of taking care of this.

The whole consists of the grace of the interaction of all its parts.

This also applies to the grades of feeling.

We can only then experience universal love if we have built up all the past grades of feelings in ourselves to full power in order to fully bear the higher grade of feeling.

We can compare this working with all the floors of a block of flats which keeps the highest floor up high.

The masters reached the fifth grade of love, and by means of the books by Jozef Rulof offer us a look into their floor.

They not only feel a universal love for all life, they also have a connection of feeling with the soul of a life form.

As a result, they know what grade of evolution that life form embodies at that moment and how the soul came there.

The University of Christ teaches us that there is also a sixth spatial grade of feeling, in which people experience a oneness of feeling with all life forms in the universe.

And then comes the seventh cosmic or divine grade of feeling.

Christ reached that highest grade and feels a oneness with all life in the cosmos as far as its deepest All-Source core.

And the good news that the University of Christ brings us is: all of us are not only on our way to that seventh grade of love, but it is an absolute certainty that we will all also achieve that, because the All-Source in us allows us to evolve as a result of giving birth and creating until we also luminously radiate all the love that is present in our soul.

Grades of love -- Sources