It has been said, God is omniscient, knowing all, both the good and the bad, the joy and the sorrow, the happiness and the sadness, the pleasure and the pain. God, in Its endless attempts to know Itself, yearns to know all. We are best conceived as sensory organs for God. Through each of us, God knows that aspect of himself manifest as "ourselves". We inescapably serve God, no matter what we do, for we serve God through the creation of experience. We have no choice in this. Yet, man seems to have will. We do seem to have the ability to alter our experiences, to choose them, to avoid some and attest to others. We do seem to have the choice as to whether to attest to good or evil. We do influence whether we shall be, for God, the sensors of joy or misery, of happiness or sorrow, or the doers of good or evil. At least to some degree, we influence what aspect of God we will give testament to.
Since we must serve the Greater Power as total slaves to experience or choose suicide, to be or not to be remains the question. But, prior to death, since we do serve, it is best to serve God while serving oneself, that is, to give testament to the better aspect of God or the universe of Its creation. This God will allow us to give joyful and happy testament, or to give painful and sad testament. God doesn't mind. Oh, but we do. God wants all that he can have, namely QUANTITY of experience. But we want experience of certain QUALITY. Here we try to steal some part of life to "enjoy" for ourselves in a selfish manner. But, there is no stealing except where God allows. And God will allow you to give good testament FOR IT, but never purely for you!
If one's ego-person, one's intellect, garners too much power and then trys to steal the body for "its own existentialist purposes", whatever they may be, you can bet that for that arrogant being, punishment in the mode of painful experience is just behind the curtain, waiting. It is the childless fifty year old woman, alone at Christmas, with little or no family, who sacrificed life for "becoming" a vice-president of some pencil-making company or other. It is the drug addict or drunkard, suffering, poor and alone, who wanted to have "a good time" and who wanted "fun, excitement, and thrills" for himself as a youth. It is all of us who believe that serving Man for the sake of Man is the ultimate calling, Humanists, trying to serve only themselves, directly or indirectly, forgetting God, The God of Power, The Father.
We learn to serve God as children through serving out parents. They are our initial source of being, being the channels of the continuity of life, all ancestral history summated in the passing on of the genes and the subsequent fostering and nurturing of life that parents do. Through serving them, we learn to serve "a greater power". Through serving them, we learn humility as children which we will then realize was towards God manifest all along. Through obeying them, we learn to obey. Later we learn to obey ourselves, and through humility, will maintain communication with The God Within, with What-Man-Calls-God. And through communication and obeyance, we will carry out the right acts in life. For they will be God-directed. They will not all bring joy. They will not all be pleasurable. Some will be downright painful and difficult for the individual. Yet they often will be out of the senses of duty and obligation, to carry out those acts of importance which somehow fall to you. Realize then, that you have been chosen to carry out these acts and to endure for reasons and purposes beyond your ability to know.
A. Iosue
table of contents