This begins a nine-part reading of the Lord's Prayer, line by line, based on Martinus' work The Mystery of Prayer. The premise is that the words are not devotional formula but a precise description — and that the precision is recoverable.
The first function: focusing consciousness
Before any interpretation, the video makes a point about what the opening line does.
Beginning a prayer with an address performs a mental operation: it collects attention and points it. That function is real whatever your view of who is being addressed, and it is why prayers open this way across traditions.
And the address is our, not my. The prayer is collective from its first word — which, given the distinction between selfish and unselfish prayer, means it is built to work from the opening syllable.
Heaven is not a location
The most substantial claim in the video, and the one that reorganises everything after it.
Treating heaven as a place puts God somewhere — and something located somewhere is, by that fact, not everywhere. The traditional picture quietly contradicts the omnipresence it also asserts.
Martinus' reading is that heaven is not a location but a state, and the whole of existence considered as one. Which resolves the contradiction: God is not in a place because being in a place is the wrong category. The same move as where is the spiritual world — the question asks for a location, and the answer is that the premise is mistaken.
The triune principle applied at the largest scale
The middle section brings in the analysis that runs through everything else: X1 the I, X2 the ability to create and perceive, X3 the created.
Applied here, the visible universe is X3 — the created, everything perceptible. The organising activity behind it is X2. And X1 is the I whose creation it is: not observable, for the same reason your own I is not observable, as set out in why the living being is hard to understand.
So God is not an additional being placed inside the universe. God is the universe understood as a living being — the conclusion the principle of life units arrives at by running the scale upward.
What the line means
Assembled: Our Father addresses the universal source, and the collective form makes the address unselfish by construction. Who art in heaven identifies that source with all-encompassing existence rather than placing it somewhere.
Read this way the opening is not a greeting. It is a statement of where you are and what you are addressing — cosmic alignment, in the video's phrase, which is precisely the state the previous video argued makes prayer work at all.
Key ideas
- The opening line's first function is to collect and direct attention, whatever one's view of the addressee.
- "Our" rather than "my" makes the prayer collective, and therefore unselfish, from the first word.
- Heaven as a place contradicts omnipresence; Martinus reads it as a state and as existence as a whole.
- The triune principle applies at the largest scale: the visible universe is the created, with an unobservable I behind it.
- God is not a being inside the universe but the universe understood as a living being.
Chapters
- Intro — the Lord's Prayer and the quest for logic
- Martinus' analysis — a deeper look at "Our Father"
- Prayer's first function — focusing consciousness
- Is "heaven" a place? Challenging traditional views
- The visible and invisible — God's omnipresence
- The triune principle — X1, X2, X3
- God as the ultimate triune reality
- Meaning of "Our Father" — addressing the universal source
- Meaning of "who art in heaven" — the all-encompassing existence
- Spiritual science — an invitation to understand
- Summary — a prayer of cosmic alignment
- Conclusion and what's next
About this article. It summarises the video above from The Eternal World Picture. The writings of Martinus Thomsen are published by the Martinus Institute.
