FINDING OUR PURPOSE - PART 2

So we each represent a unique point of view. What do we do with this understanding? What can we do with it?

We can glorify our existence and that of our Creator by expanding our individual awareness as far as possible in the direction of the Universal Awareness. We can reach deeply inside our own psyche and seize upon those qualities that are noble, those elements of character that are pure, those thoughts, ideas, and feelings that we just know are humankind’s best. We know what we should be thinking and doing, even when we avoid it, even when we don’t do it, yes, even when we hide it deeply from ourselves.

To paraphrase the Swami Satchidananda, even the vilest criminal has the same basic desires as you and me; he wants peace, he wants freedom from want and fear, he wants love and joy. He just thinks, in error, that his criminal actions will obtain those things. He knows no other way. Under the skin, we humans are the same in our inner desires; it is the outer fulfillment that we disagree upon, and that may lead us far astray.

Our purpose comes from far beyond ourselves, and yet it lies within us. We are not creatures crafted from without, but we are unfolded from within. The fertilized egg that we once were multiplied outward as it was programmed to do, and we have the urges and desires that were placed in us by the intelligence through which we evolved. The very word desire is derived from ‘De Sire’, or ‘Of the Father’, in French.

We are seemingly isolated, individual tiny minds, but yet we have come from the same point of origin. We are indeed the children of the Big Bang; we are physical creatures whose very stuff was forged in the heart of a Supernova, in which the higher elements are born. Imagine for a moment the awesome path of our evolution – not starting as a squiggle of protoplasm in a steaming, sulphurous puddle, but pressed by a million times the earth’s gravity into the fierce fusion of elements.

Life comes only from life, in our experience. It was once thought that flies were born from garbage heaps, but science has cured much of our myopia. We now know that flies come from eggs come from flies, and so on, but not ad infinitum. There were not always flies. If our observation is true, and life always comes from life, then the birth of life is not in the earth, but in that invisible Power that engineered the Big Bang itself, and if so, then the Universe is alive, and Universal Mind is our ultimate parent.

We are children of the Big Bang, through a chain of causality that goes back nearly twenty billions of our years!