Lesson 2 (Principle 1):
Life is pointless… and that is God’s Greatest Gift to us.
This may come as a shock to many of you who think that there is a point to life, and that it is our job to find it, to uncover it, to learn it, to unravel it, to somehow, someday, somewhere discover it --- and then live up to it.
It may come as a shock also to many others of you who think that you have already discovered the Point of Life, and are living up to it. (Most people who fall into this category haven’t really “discovered” the Point of Life, they’ve been told what the Point of Life is, and they’ve accepted that.)
Yet there is no Point to it all. Life has no point. If Life had a Point, who would assign it one? And if you say God, why would God create the Point, then make us all search for it for 50 years! (And, as a society, for 50 thousand years) And if you say God does not make us search, but has given us the answer, why did God not give us the answer in a way in which we could easily understand it, and with a formula upon which we could all agree? And if you say that God has done that, then you have not looked at the world lately.
No. God has not done that. And the reason God has not told us what the Point of Life is, is that there is no Point to Life. Life is pointless.
And that is God’s greatest gift.
Think about it.
It is precisely because God has not emblazoned His purpose across the pages of Life that Life itself is an Open Book. A book that we get to write. We get to decide what purpose we choose.
If God had chosen a purpose – If God had a purpose designed into the plan – would God not tell us what that purpose was? Would God allow us to spend years, decades, centuries, searching, searching, searching for the point of it all?
Again, it must be said to those of you who are now thinking, “but God did announce the purpose of Life!” if that is so, God did a pretty bad job of it, because if you look around you, you will see that no one got it.
Okay, a few. A few think they have gotten it. They know the purpose of life, and it’s just all the rest of the people who don’t understand.
Well, that, of course, is the stance taken by many of the Earth’s major religions! These religions teach that they don’t know the purpose of life. There is even a religion or two which says it is the purpose of life, and that all we have to do is follow the dictates of that particular religion and we will have pleased God almighty – and be saved.
On the other hand, if we do not follow the dictates of that particular religion, we will be sent to the everlasting fires of hell.
None of this would be such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that there are hundreds of organized religions making essentially the same claim.
Could God have really botched the job this badly? If God really established a purpose for Life, and really wanted us to know what that was, do you suppose this is the best God could do when it comes to communicating that to us in a way we could all understand?
Or is it possible that the reason we can’t seem to agree on the point of it all is that there simply is no point?
In Fact, that is exactly the case. Yet this may be difficult to accept for many people until it becomes clear why there is no point.
There is no point because God wants us to create a purpose for our life. And if God had already created that purpose, He would have robbed us of the greatest opportunity, and the greatest tool, that we have as we seek to perform the function of life.
Because, you see, while Life does not have a purpose, it does have a function.
Purpose and function are not at all the same thing. A clock functions by ticking, for the purpose of telling time. A car functions by internal combustion, for the purpose of moving people from place to place. A microwave oven functions by causing food molecules to vibrate very fast, for the purpose of heating food.
Life functions in a particular way, but for no predetermined purpose. That’s because God created as the function of Life the determining of a purpose. Put another way:
Your function is to create the point of your life. In so doing, you create Your Self. You decide who and what you really are – and who you are going to be.
God, you see, is in the constant process of creating and recreating Itself anew. God is in each moment deciding what God is going to be next. This is God’s most exciting function (In fact, it is God’s only function). This is pure creation.
(For a better, and more complete, understanding of this Truth, see Conversations with God – Book One [Putnam Publishing Company, New York City, NY])
This principle is presented here so that you may understand that God has not assigned a purpose or a point to your life. God is waiting for you to do that. It is you who must create a raison d’etre. And that is what you have not yet done. You have not created a reason for being.
So Step 1 here is to decide what life is all about for you. What is the purpose of your life? If you can’t answer that question, go to a larger one: What is the Purpose of Life in general?
Now and here’s the tricky part …do not look anywhere else for an answer. Just sit down and decide this for yourself. Don’t ask yourself … tell yourself!
Tell yourself the purpose of Life in General, and then tell yourself what your purpose in life is going to be.
Now your first reaction to this suggestion may very likely be a feeling of “overwhelm”… as in “I’m on overwhelm.”
You may think that the subject is just too big; that the topic is outside the sphere of your understanding. It is not. And you will see that it is not, the moment you give yourself permission to truly start thinking about this.
Truly start thinking about the real purpose of life and all sorts of ideas will begin to come to you. They will crowd in on you so fast, you won’t know what hit you. Soon, if you stay with the process, you’ll start discriminating. That is, your mind will start throwing out the absurd ideas and will quickly find itself left with only a few good ones. And just as soon as it reduces the list to those few, it will reduce the list even further. Left to your own devices, you will come up with what you think the purpose of life might be before you know it.
That is to say, you will know it before you know it.
In truth, there is a great deal that you know that you do not know that you know. You are carrying around knowledge you do not know that you have. Or, to put this another way, you don’t know the half of what you know.
The only way to find out what you know is to call upon yourself to know it.
That is a mouthful right here, and you may want to go over that statement again.
“The only way to find out what you know is to call upon yourself to know it.”
The problem will not be in your not knowing the purpose of Life, the problem will be in your believing that you know it.
In other words, it will be easier deciding for yourself what the purpose of Life is than it will be to agree with yourself that your answer could be correct!
The reason for this is that you still think that there is a “correct answer” – and if there is, you couldn’t possibly have just guessed it!
Yet there is no “correct answer!”
The function of your life is to give the question an answer – and the answer that you give to the question is the “correct answer.”
Yes God has given you that much authority.
Yes … God has given you that much freedom.
Yes … God has given you that much power to create.
You do not believe this, and so you have spent years trying to figure out the Purpose of Life. And all the while, Life (God) has been waiting for you to decide Its purpose.
For now, don’t try to understand this whole process, or the why’s and where fore’s of it. For now, just follow instructions. It’ll all become more clear to you later. This book is about how to become a Bringer of the Light. It is not about explaining the metaphysics of the entire universe. Because of its limited scope, this book requires that you take some statements on faith and simply follow instructions.
The instructions are:
Get clear about the
purpose of your life.
So do that now. Right now, get a piece of paper and write out the Purpose of your Life.
Make a Statement of Purpose.
As suggested earlier, if you have to start with a larger statement, do so.
Click here for Lesson 3