7. The Three Ages of Human Life

Human beings spend time developing in their mother’s womb before they are born. They live on earth for a certain period, and then die. Prior to birth, the fetus spends about ten months4 in the mother’s womb. While it is in the womb, it has limited freedom. It develops by receiving nutrients from the mother through the umbilical cord. About all it can do is straighten and bend its fingers, open and close its mouth, and wriggle its feet. Nevertheless, for the fetus, the mother’s womb is a world of freedom and the entirety of its realm of life. After ten months, the fetus is born into the world as an infant and begins to grow. Now its world is the wide earth and human society. (Blessed Families and the Ideal Kingdom of Heaven-1062, 04/24/1983)

Why are human beings born? They are born for the sake of love. For this reason, they are grounded in true parental love and grow in the mother’s womb, which is a bosom of parents’ protection and love. Children grow to maturity embraced by parental love that digests with joy all the hardships without complaint. Upon reaching maturity at about twenty years old, the child should meet their eternal love partner and be engrafted into heavenly love in which they live entirely for the sake of one another. Following this life course, this new couple should have their own sons and daughters and love them.
Only when they experience the depth of God’s love can the substantial realm of God’s love of the object partner be completed. (143-283, 03/20/1986)

Human life in the world can be compared to the life of a fetus in its mother’s womb. It is our hundred-year sojourn in the womb of our Mother Earth. Just as the fetus is ignorant of the world outside the womb, people living in the earthly world are ignorant of the reality of the incorporeal spirit world that awaits them after death.
They only have a vague sense that a world after death probably exists. Yet just as the human world exists in the fetus’s future, even though it did not know about it while in the mother’s womb, even so the spirit world exists in reality regardless of our beliefs or feelings about it.
Yet since the world after death cannot be perceived by our five physical senses, we must overcome our disbelief through religious faith. (Blessed Family-1062, 04/24/1984)

Human beings pass through three ages in the course of their life: the water age, the land age and the air age.
Don’t animals and all things live in the water, on land, and in the air? For human beings to stand as the lords of creation and be qualified to have dominion over all things, we must exist as a complete life form, more complete than any other creature. To be the lords of all creatures at home in the water, we are given an age when we live in water. Next, during the land age, we exist as the highest being among all the land animals. It follows that we must also have an air age.
But human beings do not have wings. Without wings, how can we fly? We should be able to fly higher and farther than any bird or insect. Then what should we do? This cannot happen as long as we are in a physical body. No matter how high we jump, we cannot get far off the ground.
Yet because human beings are the lords of creation, and because we stand in a reciprocal relationship to God, who is a spiritual being, we need to have the same stage of operation as God. It is well known that light travels 300,000 kilometers a second. Human beings can travel even faster. We will have this capability in the air age, when we live as a spirit. (112-201, 04/12/1981)

This world in which we live is not all that exists. There is also the spirit world. What sort of place is this spirit world, where we dwell after we die? It is an eternal world, filled with the air of love. Your physical life is a time of preparation for life in the eternal world of spirit. (140-121, 02/09/1986)