FINDING OUR PURPOSE - PART 3

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When we consider that awesome Universal Power, we might then ask, “What is Its purpose?” Could we understand that answer, we would not be human – we would be Universal in consciousness, and we would be those gods that we imagined millennia ago. The purpose of God, if we may use that outmoded appellation, will surely remain beyond us. The word conjures thoughts ranging from animal statues to dead ancestors, from the pantheons of old to the white-haired old man in robes, complete with book of judgment. We need a metaphor that expands our consciousness beyond the limited concepts of the previous millennium.

Our image of Divinity inherently defines for us Its purpose in terms that match the limitations of our thought. We are given the power to imagine – part of the action of Divinity within us. We can ponder, and dream, and we can adopt for ourselves a purpose for the God of our imagining. Is this not all we are capable of? Each culture, each generation, each civilization, decides what simplified, feeble, miniscule image it will assume for the infinite and the unknowable. This image then becomes the rallying symbol for that segment of the human race, in that place, at that time.

In ancient Israel, as we read in the Old Testament, God was, among other things, jealous, angry, judgmental, and punitive. These are qualities that most people today do not tolerate in their fellow humans. Many people today would not feel that an entity displaying such petty emotions was worthy of worship. The Greek and Roman gods were portrayed as devious, jealous, scheming creatures. Again, these might not be found worthy of respect by many today. As we grow, our limited concept of the Divine grows with us, while the object of our conceiving remains, as It always has been, all encompassing, infinite.

In this twenty-first century, surely we can contemplate the infinite and imagine a symbol better than that of eons gone by? Surely we can bring forth a symbol of the Universal Being that will truly inspire higher human behavior?

Human purpose is driven by our concept of the Divine, whether we refer to it in that manner or not. We each have some ideal image, which to us represents that to which we aspire. It would be sad if we only aspired to be jealous, ruthless, or even autocratic. It would be doubly sad if we were to be devious and conniving. These are some of the ancient models, though in fairness there was also courage and love, though often of the most material kind.

We have the example of Jesus’ teaching, which attempts to change the basis for the Divine image from the old paradigm to something more compassionate. Often misinterpreted and ignored, these basic teachings are the beginnings of a model for greater peace, understanding, and co-operation. There will be other, newer teachings, and we must learn to heed them, and not forever look back across the millennia for our guidance. God is not dead, or we would not be here. Inspiration is not confined to centuries gone by, and yet one would think so from the messages we hear, rallying us to secondhand inspiration from ancient books. God is in the world, and beyond it, and yes, in books too, but also in all other things. You will not find the Universal Presence in any Scripture, any more than you can pick apples from a recipe for apple pie; the map, as they say, is not the territory.

It is time that we went from our former level of understanding to a meta-level, which looks not at our symbology, but instead looks at the mechanism whereby our symbols direct our psychology. Our models of the Universal feed our thinking process, such that these models become for us the tools by which we draw forth our daily experience. We invoke our symbols to set our attitude; they translate into our paradigm for living.