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Universal Human Purpose: Achieving True Happiness
God Created to experience Joy
Humans Created to give Joy to God
The Three Blessing
The First Blessing
The Second Blessing
The Third Blessing
Universal Human Aspiration
Restoring the World Begins with Individuals
The Mission of Religion
Conclusion
The previous discussion of God and creation shows that God's purposeful force harmonizes His diverse creations within one, in-tegrated and purposeful cosmos. What is God's purpose? Why did God create? Since human beings were made in the image of God, and therefore are endowed with characteristics that mirror God's attributes, the key to answering this question is easily derived by understanding the fundamental motivation of humankind.Isis important to know God's purpose in making the creation because human beings can fulfill their own purpose only when they know clearly why God made them. Every being comes into existence to fulfill a purpose given to it by its creator; nothing cre-ates itself or determines its own purpose. Consequently, a creation can fulfill its potential only by implementing its creator-given pur-pose. Since God is the Creator of all, His purpose for the creation is the creation's purpose.
Ills the natural tendency of God's creations to carry out the pur-poses for which they were made. For example, hydrogen naturally combines with oxygen to form water; a lettuce plant unconsciously absorbs light, water and minerals in becoming food for human be-ings and animals; and, without having been shown how, a stork builds a nest to protect its eggs and young offspring until they are strong enough to fend for themselves.
Human beings, however, have free will, allowing them to choose to fulfill their given purpose. Free will is a gift from God that en-ables humankind to know and love God, and participate with God in creative processes. If humans do not understand the purpose for which God made them, they are likely to make wrong choices and consequently live unfulfilled and tragic lives in the pursuit of erro-neous purposes. However, when a person does fulfill his God-given purpose, he experiences complete joy and fulfillment.
The precise purpose for God making the creation and the way that purpose can be fulfilled by humanity and nature are discussed in this chapter
Universal Human Purpose: Achieving True Happiness
The most universal human desire is for happiness. All men and women live to be happy, pursuing that aim as best they know how. Every action of every person is intended to increase his or her hap-piness. Even if pain is to be the immediate consequence of a deci-sion to seek happiness, that pain is understood to be the price that must be paid to gain greater happiness. Thus, artists will make great effort to create substantial representations of their ideas or visions, feeling joy once they have succeeded: athletes will exhaust themselves in training. driving their bodies to the limit so that they can experience the pleasure of achieving fitness and winning com-petitions; saints will live lives of sacrifice and hardship to gain the eternal joy of heaven.
How, then, is joy produced? Consider how any person feels joy. It can never be experienced by an individual alone, but only through having an object that reflects the subject's nature. Joy is the stimulation a subject receives from the object's resemblance to the subject, whether the object is visible or invisible. For example, an artist feels joy when the vision or idea in his or her mind is real-ized as a finished work of art. The work created is a resemblance of the idea for it. An athlete feels joy when, after continual training and practice, he or she achieves sporting excellence. Whether ath-lete, business professional, scientist or artist, the joy of achieve-ment arises when substantial accomplishment in the world resem-bles the goal formulated in the mind. Most exhilarating is the joy experienced by parents as they raise their children to substantiate their parents’ ideal for them, since in the parent-child relationship there is the greatest resemblance between creator and creation.
True happiness. or joy, is experienced only when human beings fulfill the purpose for which they were originally created. All other pursuits of happiness sooner or later lead to frustration and misery. Thus the individual who pursues his own happiness by exploit-ing others can never experience lasting joy. All moral and social crimes are of this nature: seeking happiness that, sooner or later, causes the loss of happiness for others. Action taken with a selfish and unrighteous motive always leads to the creation of human suf-fering, proving that it is contrary to humanity's true, God endowed purpose.
The creation was made to complete itself through the formation of four position foundations based on giving and receiving be-tween subjects and objects. It is when a subject and object form a harmonious union, centered on God's will, that each fulfills its purpose. Sub-atomic particles fulfill their purpose when they form atoms, atoms when they form molecules, and molecules when they form whole entities. Likewise, stamens and pistils fulfill their pur-pose when they cross-pollinate and produce seeds, and male and female animals when they mate and produce offspring.
In human society, this principle applies to all relationships, from the individual to the global. A child fulfills its purpose and is hap-py when it has harmonious relationships with its parents and sib-lings, while a mature man and woman fulfill their purpose and ex-perience joy when they enter into a responsible, monogamous rela-tionship of love, create children and raise a family. The happiness of children and parents produced by the giving and receiving of true love is the greatest human joy. Joy is also experienced in all other human relationships governed by true love, and hence cen-tered on God's love. Giving and receiving love in a family is the model for giving and receiving love in society and among nations. In the family one learns the most essential truth: concern for the whole must be set above the interests of the individual.
Human experience shows that the degree of joy in a relationship depends on the compatibility of the characteristics and purposes of those involved. The most intense joy experienced by a woman is in the love relationship she has with the man who is her eternal mate. The couple's compatibility of purpose is total and the masculinity and femininity of the man and woman are perfectly complemen-tary. When a man and woman unite in true love, their spiritual and physical natures fuse into one to create the highest joy for both partners. This experience of joy and fulfillment demonstrates that man was made for woman and woman for man.
Individuals. families, groups and nations also experience joy in relating to other individuals, families, groups and nations, depend-ing on mutuality of purpose. Social happiness is produced from harmonious relations among families, centered on God's love and truth; international happiness is produced from harmonious rela-tions among nations, centered on God's will for those nations. The will of God is the purposeful expression of His love and truth.Humans can also receive joy from their relationships with na-ture. Because nature was created in the image of human beings (as an environment to sustain and give them joy), men and women together encapsulate the elements of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and are the only created beings that can relate to all oth-er beings in the creation, directly or indirectly. The degree of re-semblance between human and non human beings determines the degree of joy experienced in the relationship. Pets, for example, generally demonstrate a high level of human-like characteristics, giving joy to the individuals who love them.
God is the origin of all love, the First Lover He is not distant from His creation, but intimately concerned with its welfare and develop-ment. Love, by its very nature, must be given, and therefore needs an object that can receive it. One cannot love nothing. God made the creation, centered on man and woman endowed with the ability to receive and give love, as the object to receive His love. Without such an object, God would not be a God of love, heart would remain a God of potential love. Without an object to whom He could give His love, God would not experience joy Therefore, God made the creation, and humankind in particular, in order to give love and ex-perience joy.
Men and women were created by God for love. Giving and re-ceiving love is the central purpose of their lives and the means by which they experience fulfillment and joy. Although God is perfect, He seeks joy from His creation through the flowering of His love. His joy comes from experiencing men and women as they grow from infants through childhood into adulthood when, as ma-ture parents. they create families, groups and nations living in the harmony created by relationships of true love. Their joy is His joy their fulfillment. His fulfillment.
Thus God seeks as much from His partners in the four position foundation as they seek from each other and from Him. Men and women are the culmination of the creation, embodying the dual at-tributes of God more completely than any other beings. The high degree to which human beings resemble God, especially in their capacity to give and receive love, enables them to respond substan-tially to God and His love. God's heart is essentially the heart of a parent for children, and therefore the relationship between God and human beings can best be likened to a parent-child relation-ship.
Humans Were Created to Give Joy to God
God made human beings in such away as to enable Him to experi-ence joy through giving and receiving love with them. Consequent-ly. the purpose of human life is to give joy to God. This is accom-plished by perfecting human relationships to complete the four position foundation, centered on God. Men and women are endowed with heart and creativity. These are the attributes they need to complete the four position foundation and fulfill their purpose as objects of God's heart and co-creators with God. When humans fulfill their God-given purpose, they feel complete and experience joy through returning joy to God. God's joy and human joy are in-separable.
Human beings were not created in a vacuum, but in a nurturing environment which they need for the fulfillment of their purpose. God created the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms in the image of man and woman, to sustain and please human beings. Man and woman are an encapsulation of the cosmos created before them and for them. But they are unique in creation because they have both spirit and body. an internal character capable of intimate communication with God as well as an external form capable of communicating with the rest of creation. Mature men and women, who have become true parents, are the center of harmony between the all-transcending world of God and the world of nature. For this reason, God experiences joy in nature through human joy in nature.
In a complex world presenting men and women with multiple obligations, what are the essential steps they must take to fulfill their purpose? More specifically, what is it they must do to fulfill the four position foundation that gives joy to God?
Joy is produced when subject and object become one, resem-bling the oneness of God's attributes. The harmonization of sub-ject and object creates beauty, which love seeks: love is attracted to the unified being of subject and object. Together, a harmonious subject and object represent a single object to love. Wherever love finds beauty. a subject finds its image in an object, joy is experi-enced by both subject and object in the giving and receiving be-tween them. Since God created men and women out of His desire to give love and receive joy, human beings fulfill their purpose by becoming objects of beauty to God. In giving and receiving love with God, other humans and nature, men and women create beau-ty in all dimensions of their lives, experiencing joy and giving it to God.
How can men and women become objects of beauty to God? They must become the image of God, first as individuals, second in their families and social relations, and third in their interaction with nature. They must complete four position foundations on these three levels, centered on God, thereby completing their pur-pose and qualifying to receive the full blessing of God's true love. Hence the empowerment to establish these three foundations for the completion of human purpose are called the three blessings. To realize the three blessings, men and women must grow to become the image of God as mature individuals engaged in pure relation-ships within their families and the world, and exercise a dominion of true love over the rest of creation. In achieving these objectives, they come to mirror God and embody His beauty as true human beings.
The three blessings are: first, the ability and right (responsibility and potential) to become an individual with perfect personality and achieve the value of a complete, true being, sharing God's val-ue; second, the ability and right to fulfill true love relationships and thereby create an ideal family and world, sharing God's ability to create new life and raise children: and, third, the ability and right to have dominion over things of creation, sharing God's cre-ativity and lordship. By giving the three blessings, God shared His own perfect being fully with human beings, making them objects who can represent Him in the creation and reciprocate His love completely.
Fulfilling the three blessings is a process of growth and develop-ment in which an individual gradually discovers and understands who he or she is and how he himself, or she herself, functions. and then learns how to relate to other people and nature. Through this process of self-discovery, people learn about the laws that govern life and shape human nature. On this foundation, they learn about the laws of relationships and, ultimately, the laws governing the whole universe. With this understanding they can truly inherit the creativity and lordship of God and fulfill their potential: to have perfect dominion over themselves and their environment and cre-ate relationships of joy and happiness in all circumstances.
The first step toward becoming a true man or woman is taken by uniting mind and body, centered on God's will. The spiritual mind, also called the conscience, must have dominion over the body. its object. The body must learn to respond to the direction of the mind because the mind can understand and respond to God. On the other hand, when the body, whose essential desires are selfish, dominates the mind, the person will not know or care to do God's will. God can relate only to that in the creation which resembles Him. Without mutual resemblance, there is no common base for giving and receiving between God and the creation. Unity of mind and body centered on God resembles the unity of God's internal and external attributes. Hence the mind is to direct all the func-tions of the body: drinking, eating, moving, sleeping, procreating and so on, so that mind and body together conform to God's pur-pose for human beings and function in resemblance of His unity.
Endowed with free will as an intrinsic part of their spiritual na-ture, men and women can choose to obey or disobey God. This means they can, through obedience, become the image of the self-less, loving and pure God, or, through disobedience, become selfish and impure beings. Those who achieve mind-body unity centered on God become one with God's will and live in accordance with His word. Their words are one with God's truth and their actions are consistent with their words. They can be said to have godly personalities, and, filled with His love and truth, they are beautiful to Him. As true men and women, they realize the first blessing.
Through realizing the first blessing, men and women become mature individuals who can think and feel as God does and can exercise perfect dominion over their own lives. In maturity, they do not deviate from the will of God because they share His purity of heart and have no desire to violate true love. God's joy is their joy; God's pain, their pain. This unity of love with God is the key to perfecting love in the family and society as well as love for all creation: the realization of the second and third blessings.
Children learn how to give and receive love primarily at home, first in relations with their parents, then with brothers and sisters. The love learned at home prepares a man or woman to enter into mature conjugal love relations. Husband-wife love is the founda-tion for a married couple to have children and create a family. Through obedience to the will of God, a husband and wife create a relationship of true love, based on the true love of God. Their chil-dren are then born into a pure and God-centered home in which they are nurtured with true love so that they can grow into true men and women.
An infant is not conscious of God. The child's parents represent God to it: the father embodies God's masculinity and the mother God's femininity Thus, in a true love family, the children first come to experience the love and truth of God through the love and truth of their parents. For this reason, the personality of the parents (the relationship between their words and actions) is critically important to the development of their children. Only true parents, expressing God's love and truth through true personalities, can raise true children.
Children created in the image of God are true children. They are to grow through stages as true brothers and sisters to become true husbands and wives and, eventually, true parents themselves. The true families created in this process are the building blocks of a world governed by true love. The creation of true love clans, tribes and nations are stages in the building of a true world.God's attributes, internal and external, masculine and feminine, are perfectly one within the divine nature. When a man and woman, endowed with internal and external, male and female characteristics, become one in true love they come to resemble God fully. A family of pure love is the most beautiful object to God because it embodies the image of His own nature so totally. Consequently it can receive God's love in its most all-embracing and profound expressions. When a man and woman create a true love family, they realize the second blessing.
The family unit not only embodies the image of God most com-pletely, it also encapsulates the rest of creation. The union of man and woman in a true family is a microcosm of the perfection of all subject-object relationships throughout the universe, since the structures and functions of the bodies of men and women encap-sulate the structures and functions of nature. Because human be-ings are a microcosm of the universe and the center of all natural hierarchies, true families can exercise God-centered dominion over nature, caring for the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms and, in return, being cared for by the creation. When families tend nature with true love, they create a harmonious relationship between hu-mankind and the rest of creation, a relationship of beauty that re-alizes the third blessing.
Thus God's purpose for creating human beings is accomplished when they fulfill the conditions necessary to receive the three blessings. Men and women complete their God-given purpose by realizing all three blessings.
Although not articulated in the same terminology, the essential aims of all religions and ethical systems are encompassed within the three blessings, which, in terms of human fulfillment, repre-sent the aspirations of all people. There is no one, religious or not, who would not like to be a whole, fulfilled individual living in per-fect love within a joyful family and peaceful world and existing in harmony with nature.
Human misery and suffering increase in direct proportion to an individual's distance from achieving these basic objectives. Isis no exaggeration to say that all human ills, the hatreds, crimes, con-flicts, injustices and oppression that characterize this troubled world, derive from the misshapen lives of men and women who fail to fulfill the conditions to receive the three blessings: individuals who cannot unite mind and body create families lacking in true love and become people who are abusive of other human beings and nature.
Restoring the World Begins with Individuals
The existence of huge contradictions between God's ideal and the reality of the world known to humans implies that there has been a massive human failure to fulfill the purpose of creation. (The na-ture of this failure is explained in Chapter 7.) By understanding the three blessings, it is clear that the path this sickly world must take to regain its health begins with the restoration of individuals. Only true men and women can create good families and a peaceful world of true love.
One can think of the world's problems as the negative repercus-sions produced by the thoughts and actions of disordered individuals and groups, in whom the desires of the human body are unrighteously given precedence over those of the mind. This is the root of all materialism, which sets the value of the external, physi-cal world of the body above the internal, spiritual world of the mind. The evident global disorder is produced by disorder in na-tions, societies, tribes and families made up of disordered people. At root, then, the key to solving the world's problems lies in solv-ing the mind-body relationship within individuals. Restored indi-viduals can build restored families and then restore all other hu-man relationships. They can also restore the human relationship with nature. For this reason, the history of God's work to restore fallen humanity to the original ideal has focused on finding indi-viduals who can become true parents and fulfill the original pur-pose for humankind by realizing the three blessings.
The world's religions have all encouraged individuals to unite mind and body centered on the wilt of God or altruistic principles at one with God's will. Religion recognizes that the root of all evils is to be found in individuals and therefore the cure for humankind must begin with individual purification and restoration. The essen-tial message of religion is that when the mind gains dominion over the body (the first blessing) the other goals of life (the second and third blessings) can be achieved. Religion educates human beings to realize the three blessings, teaching the virtues of individual faith and purity, the sanctity of family and respect for nature. In sum, the mission of religion is to educate people in the realization of the three blessings.
God made the creation as an object to which He could give His love and from which He could receive joy. For God and humanity, joy is produced when an object comes to resemble a subject and enters into a harmonious relationship with it. Men and women were created to give joy to God, which they can do by growing in resemblance to Him, and in harmony with other people and na-ture, fulfilling the three blessings. The failure of humankind to ful-fill the three blessings is the fundamental problem that underlies all the problems of this world. The solution to these problems lies, then, in the restoration of the three blessings, beginning with one man and one woman who can create a true family as the founda-tion for a true world.
The three blessings are not realized in an instant, but as the fruit of a process of growth. As the body needs time to reach physical maturity, so too the mind needs time to reach spiritual maturity. The principles that govern the process of growth to maturity are discussed in the next chapter.