Читать книгу Beyond Soul Growth - Lynn Sparrow Christy - Страница 10

If I couldn't accept the idea that this world is flawed and that we are its corrupted denizens, then neither could I accept the seemingly more benign idea that all of life is about getting back to where we started. Could it be that untold millennia of human history—all of our aspirations and attainments, all of our struggles and failures, all of our hopes and fears, the love, the pain, and all of the joys that characterize the human experience—all of these are nothing more than the way back to where we began? If you've ever missed your exit on a limited access highway and had to double back for many miles in order to correct your oversight, you know how frustrating and pointless that feels. Is it possible that the purpose of this life has no point beyond retracing our steps back to where we went wrong at the dawn of time? In retrospect, I can see that my passion for evolutionary spirituality had its roots in this very question.

It's not that I find the idea that we are here to undo past choices that separated our consciousness from God totally without merit. To an extent, it answers some of the big questions about why life can be so hard at times and full of pain. A world peopled by beings walled off from their divine source is bound to be a world fraught with difficulties. I can even find great meaning in the idea that successive lives in this world afford us an opportunity to make the corrections that will re-awaken our true nature as sons and daughters of God. It is certainly more logical and more consistent with belief in a loving God than the idea, pervasive in the Western Christian culture I grew up in, that we have only this one life and that our eternal fate is determined by either (depending on which sect of that Christian culture one happens to belong to) the virtues we manage to develop or the faith we happen to affirm while we are here on this earth. A God who gives us every opportunity to come back to our divine inheritance is surely a more loving God than one who gives us one shot at it and then leaves us to figure out the rules for making the grade. Better to think of this world as a school for wayward souls than as a cruel tryout for heaven, where only a fraction will make the cut.

But still the question why overshadows these explanations of life's travails. Why, if we were created in the image of God and have an ultimate destiny to return to God, are we even in this loop, cycling in and out of this world, making such slow progress, and suffering so much along the way? After all, it is supposedly God's image in which we were created. Couldn't God have made us such that we didn't have the all-too-obvious propensity to mess things up? It seems odd that the first thing a being made in the image of God would do is turn its back on God—a kind of design flaw, we might speculate. More disturbing still, what if, once we suck it up and do what has to be done to re-attain the state of oneness, we fall into separation all over again? Will we have to redo the whole process of return? Will it just go on and on like that forever? If the answer to that question is yes, I cannot think of a more bleak and futile existence. Yet if the answer is no, that there will be something in the re-attained state of oneness that includes a safeguard against falling away from God again, then we're back to the same basic problem: Why didn't the all-powerful Creator just make us that way in the first place and spare all of us a lot of trouble and pain?

I remember the first time I articulated this question. I was an idealistic seventeen-year-old attending my first conference at the Association for Research and Enlightenment in Virginia Beach. I had been reading for a couple of years about the American psychic Edgar Cayce and many of the topics covered in his remarkable trance discourses. The ideas I'd encountered there had revolutionized my life and kindled the fire in my soul. I was at that glorious stage when I was discovering the answers to all of life's big questions and my encounter with the knottier questions that would arise later on was still safely tucked away in the future. Everything fit together beautifully but for that one sticking point: If it's possible to be a free-willed being, safely resting in oneness with God, which is the promised outcome of all this that we call life, then why didn't God make us that way in the first place?

I was sitting over a meal with an older conferee (he must have been at least twenty-five or maybe even thirty!) when I voiced this question. He looked at me and said, simply, “That's exactly the kind of being God is creating right now.” In a flash, my cosmology had changed. This “aha!” moment was, for me, the first glimmer of realization that the process of becoming has inherent meaning in the scheme of things.