I view God as a loving, divine, infinite power. God is a force for love that exists in everything. This force thus shapes the fundamental nature of all living things, including humans with their functions; physical, pyschological, emotional, and spiritual. This divine force designed humans with the ability of ultimate choice or free will of attention, thoughts, feelings and actions. A good person suffers, not due to God, but because of humans making choices with bad consequences. God created a beautiful world for us to live peacefully and justly in, with compassion and love for all things.
Compassion requires finding everything that we have in common. It means knowing that we have in common our human functions and our ultimate purpose of being happy and satisfied and finding our common experiences over time and location of human society. Through connecting to our commonness, in a universe of unlimited dimensions, we are able to understand or to know one-selves and other people, and thus to love one-selves and others.
What the world needs now is for everyone to connect personal responsibility and personal spirituality with changing the world from escalating social in-justice and environmental destruction to social justice and environmental sustainability. Everyone is responsible for regarding the consequences of his or her actions. Suffering is a reality when humans either consciously or sub consciously choose objects or external focuses of awareness or attention, and subjects or internal focuses of awareness or attention, which generate thoughts, feelings and actions which are destructive to their souls and spirits.
On an individual level human actions are directly motivated by goals, that is, thoughts of intentions, and by what is called one’s perspective, world view, stance, view-point or attitude of mind, which is primarily a feeling function of the human. These terms refer to the way in which one observes and understands the world, and this way is influenced by a person’s daily experiences, or contact with the world. There is a circular effect with what we choose to pay attention to causing happenings or experiences, experiences causing perspective and intentions, and perspective and intentions causing what we choose to pay attention to.
At the global level, everyones actions based on choices of attention, perspectives and intentions together affect every happening in the world. We are the cause. What happens in the whole world is the effect. Our understanding of people requires a historical materialistic, spiritual and religious world-view of humankind. It requires a close examination of the nature of humans, the structure of human groups, and of the inter-relatedness of materialistic, spiritual and religious influences on all of humanity, the nations of the world and on individuals. The welfare of the people of a nation in ways characteristic of each historical era has been dependent both upon the natural resources which the land the people live on yields and upon the actions of everyone in that country and in the rest of the world which together affect nature everywhere due to our inter-connectedness.
History shows us that the first humans lived as hunter-gatherers under a ‘primitive’ system of communism, with a worldview that they were intimately connected to or dependent upon nature. With the rise of co-operative labour, specialised tools and ideas for production among certain human groups, the standard of living of these groups increased. From the hunter-gatherer age, a complex network of human relationships appeared worldwide. As humans manipulated the land to grow crops and to farm animals and as they manipulated people to trade and battle with for resources, some individuals appropriated the means of production by stealth.
The First World or developed countries became dominated by selfish leaders who economically dominated the Third World or developing countries. Such individuals increased their standard of living at the cost of others living in poverty. Selfishness, greed and materialism became their world-view and intentions. These life-denying values became their true religion or their institutionalised deep way of connecting to the universe. Worldwide the religions or institutional vehicles of spirituality became dominantly based on materialism, connecting people to production rather than to nature.
Humankind failed to fulfill their ultimate or single fundamental function and purpose that is to be one of all happy and satisfied human beings in the world.
Our intimate relationship with God, or our spirituality, is repressed as individual people’s attempts to balance materialism with spirituality; that is to balance one’s own needs with other people’s needs have become overwhelmed by a dys-functional world society.
Individuals in a nation inherit their niche or place in society from their descendants and caregivers and from the behaviour of all individuals in the world. Every person in the world is an in-extricable part of the web of political, economic, social, civil and cultural elements of world society. It is not the characteristic skin colour and physical features of the people of a nation that divide people. It is the application of human functions that either divide or unite life.
The world is in need of social analysis and practice, encompassing a historical materialistic, spiritual and religious worldview that promotes a deep understanding of social structures and thus lays the foundation to promote loving contact amongst all people in the world.
The time is ripe now for a movement to point the way to real wisdom or realised knowledge and intentions. We are called to have faith, understanding and intentions, with action, instead of theoretical knowledge and uninformed action. We must spread the message that humans are called to learn and to act, and to intend and to do.
- What road will you take?
The practical application of love requires us to be kind to and to help others daily, and to participate positively in community groups and political processes. If the handful of people in power in the world refuse to live with loving personal morality, then the rest of us can try to influence them to change their selfish world views. A re vitalization of individual personal responsibility to others and for oneself, and of personal spirituality underlies a fundamental transformation of society. Political parties and activists must state, or have revealed the human values which they uphold in order to maintain their systems and the changes they desire. Only then are people able to make a clear, informed decision about their support or non-support of a particular political party or figure.
Those concerned primarily with advocating religious and spiritual or ethical values must direct that these values be put into daily practice, and that individuals extend themselves to searching for the understanding and practices that are required to fundamentally transform the world.
God designed humans to regard the welfare of others. Having concern for others means that one is engaged in altruism. A resolution follows for those who have a calling to make altruism their moment to moment way of life.
“I cheerfully approach life and with a
positive and loving attitude I will
always strive to understand the world
and to help everyone to the utmost
of my ability.”
One person taking up the call to be altruistic generates a chain reaction around her or him of others taking up the call of altruism. The altruistic being of one person among many furthers social justice and peace all over the world.
Written by Celine
August 1996
Our Lovely World 