Being here on Earth has a unique purpose, and it may surprise you.
We are here to take control of our spiritual lives. Not just in a waiting or passive way but in an active and intentional way. Our lives are given to us to educate us spiritually. We are here to choose what we want to be known for and what we want to spend our lives doing. Our choices establish our character and determine our personal actions. And those choices are eternally important.
The rest of life is a means to the spiritual objectives of noble character development and personality growth. Things other than these do not matter, unless they contribute to our spiritual awakening and growth. But, if we pursue every attitude and action with a desire to do something useful and beneficial for others, then everything matters, because the attitudes and principles with which we undertake and confront life’s situations define our character. So, a longed-for material achievement may be pointless but the fairness, unselfishness, courage, persistence, compassion, tolerance, and love we employ in pursuing our goals matter tremendously.
What we are here for is to grow from a 100% selfish, self-serving animal into a self-controlled, useful, and serving mature adult. We do this by developing our personal nobility of character and personality. These have immediate beneficial consequences in our mortal life, but even more important are the beneficial consequences in developing our spiritual, immortal self.
This spirit inspired way of living leads us to make progress by being attracted to goodness. If we want to be a better person and if we put a little effort into it, that is sufficient for now. More will be required later, but we will be trained by our celestial helpers to learn and achieve what is required. Our experiential, spiritual education is never neglected or ignored. We are never left without abundant assistance to achieve what is required and there are as many do-overs as we need.
There are four things we can do during our material lives to take charge of our spiritual lives:
- Establish our personal control over ourselves to form good habits of thinking, behavior and respect for everything and everyone. The goal in mastering ourselves is to establish nobility of character in ourselves and to make progress in caring for others as God cares for them.
- Form an intentional partnership with the deity spirit that abides with us and assists us in becoming more like God.
- Learn increasingly to love idealistic perfection, and to love and want the goodness of God.
- Form a relationship with our grand human family and our celestial family. Form and cultivate cooperative, caring, personal, and friendly relationships with celestial beings and with all mortals who also long to be partners with God, regardless of their brand of devotion.
- Master Ourselves
A major goal for us in this life is to establish personal control of our bodies, our minds, and our emotions to achieve our unique representation of goodness. This involves developing reliability in applying our highest concepts of virtues in order to do good. Developing this mastery of self continues long beyond this mortal life, but it begins here and the circumstances here are ideal for learning the early lessons of controlling our faults as well as managing our virtues.
Experience can teach us the importance of self-restraint of our selfishness, anger, envy, and resentment. We can also learn the need for personal balance so that we will love, but not unwisely, so that we will forgive while not condoning evil behavior, and so that we will be tolerant while not tolerating so much that respect for goodness will suffer. None of these vices or virtues is totally and always right or wrong. Even the supreme value of loving others must be tailored to fit when irreconcilable conflicts of duties develop.
Judgement based on our experience in life here and now supports better balance. This day-to-day and even moment-to-moment experience causes us to make decisions regarding how we will think and behave, and these decisions define our character and our personality. So, a very important thing that we are doing in this earth life is collecting the experience for making these decisions.
Our ideal standard should always be to think loving thoughts and to behave according to loving standards in every circumstance. But outside paradise, most interactions require wise and balanced compromise of perfection. The more imperfect a time and place is, the deeper may be the compromise that is needed to achieve progress.
This time and this place are our opportunity to control ourselves in order to achieve our celestial family’s goals. This would be the case even if this place were not so spiritually primitive. But it is primitive, and that affords us a special privilege for achievement of balanced self-mastery and for doing good for others by applying ourselves to do the good that is possible in these circumstances.
Balance requires standing for the true, the good, and the beautiful while compromising to achieve the best that is possible. Balance requires not allowing our glimpse of perfection to prevent our achievement of the imperfect but highest possible good.
- Partnering with Spirit
There are a lot of spirit activities going on around us in both the material and the spiritual dimensions. There are many celestial personalities working to achieve their assigned tasks. They welcome our cooperation in helping them achieve their plans. Many of those plans are for our individual or group benefit. But many are directed toward changing the present so it can be a better foundation for a more loving and supportive future. The celestials are eager to include us in their teams as soon as we are ready. It is appropriate for us to want to participate, but presently there are very very few mortals who are ready.
We need to ask to understand the celestials’ plans and to be loyal to those plans. The celestials have experts in every aspect of their undertakings. We must find our way to trust, cooperate, and follow their leadership which is far wiser than mortals. Also, patience is a virtue that is necessary in assisting celestial plans. Mortals define success in terms of immediate results. Celestials are likely to think a thousand years to achieve a change is fast. In assisting celestials, we must not seek to take short cuts. They cause long lasting problems we can not foresee.
- Determining and Doing God’s Will
God has a plan for the universe and a grand and generous plan for our role in helping administer it. Being urged to do God’s will may sound like being pressured into doing something even though we don’t want to do it. Actually, we are being invited to join God in an immense, exciting, and tremendously meaningful adventure of spreading God’s love and building an ever expanding physical and spiritual universe. God’s plan is to do all of this based on loving voluntary cooperation to achieve his astonishing comprehensive goal. God’s plan is so large that it even involves universe-wide expansion of the expression of the nature of God, and we are invited to participate.
- Relationship with Spiritual Family
You already have relationships with celestial beings. You may not be aware of these relationships or perhaps you occasionally suspect they exist. However, many of these relationships are continuous and will benefit from your attention and encouragement. These spiritual relationships help you achieve spiritual goals. Your celestial friends are focused on promoting the growth of your spiritual nature.
There is a lot of spiritual help available to encourage us to achieve spiritual progress. This help includes the angels but there is much more. There are ways to tap into this assistance and make it more effective. This spiritual help is God’s provision for dealing with our ignorance and inexperience with spirit. It prevents our total isolation from spiritual reality. It connects us to the spiritual dimension. We need to choose to be connected, not just occasionally, but always. The spiritual helpers present us with opportunities to make character building choices. No one else chooses for us. We make the choices.
