Thursday, March 14, 2019

Today's lesson - What is the purpose of our lives?


Today's lesson, number 65 in A Course In Miracles, is "My only function is the one God gave me."

Paul Pearsall, told psychotherapists that they would not be able to help their client unless they understood how the client would answer three basic existential questions: Why was I born? What is the purpose of my life? What happens when I die?

Today's lesson refers to the second of Dr. Pearsall's existential questions: What is the purpose of my life? A Course In Miracles provides us with an answer to this question. In today's lesson, ACIM tells us that "my only function is the one God gave me."

In the great Christian prayer that Jesus taught us, it is said, in part, "...Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Our function is to bring our will into alignment with what we understand as God's will for us.

Aligning our will with God's will, what they call in Alcoholics Anonymous, "turning it over" or "surrender" is what is entailed in salvation. It is written in ACIM's 65th lesson, "The full acceptance of salvation as your only function necessarily entails two phases; the recognition of salvation as your function, and the relinquishment of all other goals you have invented for yourself."

On the path of the ego we invent many goals for ourselves, delusionally thinking that should we achieve those goals, we will be happy. However, whatever brief sense of happiness we might think we experience is very temporary because when we experience what psychologists call "hedonic adaptation" we only desire and crave more. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, according to the ego, until we get over there and then we usually experience disenchantment and disillusionment.

Our only true function is the acceptance of salvation in turning from the path of the ego onto the path of the Spirit or turning from the world of conditional love to the world of unconditional love.

Univeralism since the late 1700s in the U.S. has preached a gospel of Unconditional Love. Would that we as Universalists could recognize, acknowledge, accept, and extend it to ourselves, and to others throughout all of humanity. This recognition, acknowledgement, acceptance, and extension is the function that God has asked us to fulfill if we would achieve a state of peace and bliss. Unitatiran Universalists seek this in their covenant to affirm and promote their seven principles which simply are vehicles for enhancing an awareness of people's holiness and the sanctity of God's world.


1 comment:

  1. The fourth prinicple is the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. It is this search which gives one's life meaning. It is in the covenanting together to affirm and promote this free and responsible search that we carry out our function.

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