 We often question what our true purpose is in this world, but rarely do we ask the same of the world itself. The Abrahamic religions tell us that God created the world expressly for the benefit of man. However, the Course tells a much different story then what is popularly believed. Through various lessons in the Workbook, including lesson 64, we learn that we--both you and I--created the illusion of the world as a means of escaping direct contact with God's love. We do this through the use of the body, which is also an illusion whose sole function is to make us forget our true purpose. By choosing to take on a physical appearance we make temptation seem possible and in so doing abandon God and all His creations in our mind. Further, we are told that nothing the body’s eyes seem to see can be anything but a form of temptation, since this was the purpose of the body itself. Why, you might ask, would we the children of God, choose to remove ourselves collectively from direct contact with God's love in the first place? The Course tells us that in creating us, God gave us all of Himself by extending Himself through us. If God is Love, then we are Love, as well. If God is eternal, then we too are eternal. In the mind of God, which is where the Course tells us we truly exist in reality, all of His creations are the same, equal, One. So being created by God and of God and like God in every way, the Course says there arose "a tiny mad idea" among the children of God, which resulted in what I refer in another section of this site as the One Game. Essentially, we had everything as God created us because we literally are everything (more on that later), everything that is except our own creator. And in order to imagine a world in which we are our own creator, a "self-made man" as the saying goes, we needed to remove the memory of our true creation and make a world were we believed we could hide from God. Fortunately, the Holy Spirit has another use for all the illusions we've made, and therefore sees another purpose in them. To the Holy Spirit, the world is a place where we learn to forgive ourselves for what we mistakenly believe to be our unforgivable sins against God, which all have at their root our choosing to imagine that we have forgotten Him. In this perception, the physical appearance of temptation is transformed into an opportunity for the spiritual recognition of salvation, which simply entails our dedicating our life purpose to remembering our true relationship with God. The Course assures us that our only function in this world is given to each of us by God. It's only the arrogance of the ego that leads us to question this, and only the fear of the ego that induces us to regard ourselves as unworthy of the task God assigned to us. No less than the world’s salvation awaits our acceptance of forgiveness, because through it we escape from all illusions, and the imagined temptations that accompany them. By the way, it's only by fulfilling this function that you can truly be happy, because your function is to be happy by using the means by which happiness becomes inevitable. There is no other way, no matter how many things we buy, or people we impress, or times we change our appearance. Therefore, every time you choose whether or not to fulfill your God-given function, you are really choosing whether or not to be happy. So how do you put this into daily practice? You can start by reminding yourself throughout the day that every decision you make will lead to either happiness or unhappiness. Can such a simple decision really be difficult to make? When temptation arises, as it most certainly will, the Course asks us to remember these thoughts: Let me not forget my function. |
