Introduction
Perhaps the most important question that could ever be answered would be: what is the purpose of life? According to the Bible, man was created for the purpose of glorifying God. However, there aren’t many people – religious or otherwise – who genuinely make “glorifying God” (whatever that means) their life purpose.
One would expect that if religion did nothing else, it would at least be able to satisfactorily answer this question. But religion appears to have failed at this fundamental task. As a result, the purpose of life is often debated as a philosophical question.
The existential movement has theorized that there is no purpose in life beyond the purpose that we create for life. Another theory is that the purpose of life is life itself; i.e. simply to experience life. If we were to address this question from a more spiritual point of view, the answer might be that life is a school for the development of our souls. But why exactly do our souls need development in the first place?
To answer this question, it is necessary to retrace the steps of how humankind came to be on Earth to begin with. Perhaps the most famous version of this story is the Biblical account of the fall of man. Unfortunately, however, this account neglects to mention a few important details.
The War in Heaven
From the Bible, we know that God created humans. Later, we learn that the first two humans were tempted by the Devil in the Garden of Eden. The origin of the devil is not clearly stated in the Bible, but it is a part of Judeo-Christian tradition anyway. Here is a brief account of this story.
Supposedly, there was a “need” (or at least a desire) by God for humans to act righteously. A debate ensued among the angels. Lucifer, who was one of the “leader angels” (for lack of a better term), volunteered to force humans to be righteous. Additionally, Lucifer wanted “glory” for forcing humans to obey God.
In contrast, Christ (who apparently was another angel) advocated that humans should have free will. (Alternatively, this plan might have originally been God’s, and Christ was merely the “leader angel” in favor of it.) Furthermore, Christ offered himself as a sacrifice for the inevitable sins of mankind, if and when they should sin against God. Christ also offered all glory to God.
A “war” in heaven ensued. Eventually Lucifer, and all the angels that sided with him (supposedly one third of all that existed) were cast out of heaven. Lucifer then became the devil, and his follower angels became demons.
Interestingly, Lucifer and his demons decided to do exactly the opposite of what Lucifer originally proposed. I.e., they now try to persuade humans to disobey God. Why they did this is extremely unclear, unless angels are known for holding grudges. Additionally, I don’t think anybody would expect angels to fight each other in the first place (as they don’t have free will), so this story isn’t entirely believable (even for people who believe in angels).
The Fall of Man (traditional version)
According to the Bible, God initially created a single human male, called Adam. And since Adam was all alone, God created a female named Eve to be Adam’s companion. Adam and Eve lived in a sort of heaven on Earth called “the Garden of Eden”. At this point, it isn’t clear what God intended to do with Adam and Eve; initially these two humans seemed to be some sort of “pets”.
Be that as it may, life for Adam and Eve was ideal. They didn’t have to work, and everything was provided for them. But then the Devil came along in the form of a snake and tempted Eve to eat an apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Eating from the “Knowledge Tree” is the one thing that God told Adam and Eve they were not “allowed” to do. But they did it anyway, because a snake told them it would be a good idea. When God found out, he got angry and cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden. As a result, the entire race of humans has been forever punished with the necessity of “toiling the earth” to survive. And all of this happened because Eve thought that listening to a snake made more sense than listening to God.
Hidden in Translation
Hopefully, it is clear that this story of the fall of man is symbolic. It didn’t happen as described, but instead hides the actual events in what is essentially a fable or parable. Using allegories is traditionally a common spiritual practice, as it was understood that the “truth” is easily twisted and misused.
This is why Jesus is quoted as saying “Those that have ears, let them hear”. He was emphasizing that the words he was using contained the truth, but the truth would only be understood by those who were ready to hear it. If he had spoken the truth more plainly, he would have upset a lot more people than he actually did (which is saying something).
If we examine the traditional Fall of Man story more closely, we immediately hit a snag in logic. Supposedly, Lucifer was kicked out of heaven because he wanted to force humans to obey God. But without Lucifer in the Garden of Eden to tempt Eve, humans were in no danger of disobeying God. It was the Devil himself who caused humans to disobey God. Therefore, the explanation about how Lucifer became the Devil doesn’t make sense. And as we commented earlier, this version of events fails to explain why humans were created, and what they are supposed to be doing on Earth.
To understand the true purpose of humans and their mission on Earth, we must turn to a spiritual version of events. The actual details of the fall of man appear to have been partially obscured and/or lost for many centuries. But we are now at a place in history when it is imperative that humans clearly understand how and why they came to be on Earth.
Understanding the True Self
In The Course of Miracles, it is written: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” As with all truths, this one has meanings at several levels. For this discussion, I want to approach one of the more practical levels.
The real aspect inside each human is not the soul, but a “spark of God” that is sometimes referred to as the “I Am Presence”, and is also known as the “higher self” and the “monad”. Contact with the I Am Presence is achieved via the heart, not the mind.
In the Bible, a person who has “hardened” his heart has lost contact with his real, divine nature. He has essentially blocked contact with this divine part of himself.
Contact with one’s divine essence is established by cultivating love for others and for self. That is why Jesus said that the greatest commandments were to love God, and to “love thy neighbors as thyself”. If God is within each one of us, then to love God, oneself, and others is all essentially the same thing. And this is ultimately the path to freedom.
The Soul and Karma
The soul, within the spiritual framework, is not an eternal part of the self. However, the soul does not end with death either. Instead, the soul collects and carries karma from one lifetime to the next. Once an ego (the selfish part of our consciousness that we identify with) makes a commitment to start out on the spiritual path of self-development, the ego will establish a close connection with the soul. The term “conscious”, which is that part of us that intuitively distinguishes right from wrong, is another word for the soul.
As long as there is more negative than positive karma, the soul will continue to exist. But once a soul has balanced it’s negative karma with positive karma, the soul will “disintegrate” and a person’s contact with the soul will be replaced by direct contact with the I Am Presence. At this point, the cycle of reincarnation is broken, and no more physical incarnations are required.
The Spiritual Universe
There is one more thing that needs mentioning, and that is the fact that the human race is by far not the only creation of this “type”. There are many other “star people” (i.e. aliens) in existence who inhabit planets across the universe and on different spiritual planes. There are also other creatures who inhabit the Earth, but on a higher plane. The Kingdom of Pan is of this type. The creatures of this kingdom can see us, but we are unable to see them.
Our Destiny: Co-Creators
In the spiritual world, angels are beings who act according to the will of God. It is impossible for them to act separately as they don’t have separate personalities. I point this out because the human race is being groomed to become co-creators who are equal to God.
For anyone who is from a religious background, the idea of becoming a co-creator will likely sound blasphemous. However, I think it’s well worth considering the possibility. Everyone who has ever incarnated as a human did so with the understanding that this was the goal. Furthermore, the decision was not taken lightly; it was well-understood that there would be a chance of “total failure”. But it seems that the rewards outweighed the risks.
The tricky part of the task is in the creation of unique personalities. For example, if you take an angel and give it free will, nothing will happen. It will continue to act according to the will of God as it has no reason not to. And this is the state of Adam and Eve while they were living in the Garden of Eden. They had free will to disobey God, but they had absolutely no reason (or incentive) to do so.
Additionally, even in the slight chance that an angel decided to test free will, there would be no lasting effect. For example, if an angel chose to “sin”, it would quickly realize the harm in doing so. As a result, it would not choose to do so further, and no lasting uniqueness to the personality would result.
The Solidification of Identity
In order to create a lasting personality, the “spiritual hierarchy” realized that each God spark would purposely need to experience each and every form of sin/negativity and perversion of love. It would be necessary to experience anger, hurt, grief, sadness, disappointment, and causing harm to others. Nothing less than this would result in the solidification of a unique personality that would also embody the wisdom necessary to become a co-creator.
The immense challenge placed before humanity was therefore two-fold. First, there was the challenge of actually experiencing all of these painful experiences. And for it to even be possible for humans to make the choices that would bring about such experiences, it was necessary that humans initially forgot their divine nature.
The second challenge is perhaps even bigger than the first. After living lifetime after lifetime of pain and deprivation, each human must then regain an awareness of his or her divine nature. It would not be enough just to theoretically know one’s divine nature. Each human – by choice of free will – would need to consciously choose to return to his divine nature by manifesting his or her true loving essence. This choice would be made while still living in physical form, and still surrounded by those who had yet to wake up to their true selves.
When A Soul Is Lost
I want to be clear how tough this challenge is. From the beginning, there was the possibility that nobody would be successful. As it stands now, some souls have ascended, and others have been lost (more about this in a moment). For those of us that remain: each of us must ourselves put in the effort to reach the end goal. Ultimately, nobody can help us. We are surrounded by loving guides and angels, but they cannot “develop for us”. It is our individual efforts alone that will determine our fates.
As I mentioned earlier, a personality is solidified via the experience of what may be best described as the “negatives of duality”. The negative situations create negative karma for the soul, which must later be released and/or offset by positive karma.
But it’s also possible that a soul is never able to make significant progress in mitigating negative karma. Instead, a soul may continue to accumulate negative karma up to what might be thought of as a “point of no return”. At this point, it’s simply no longer possible for the soul to escape from its immense karmic burden. Once this point is reached, the soul will be reabsorbed back into the God-source, and the personality, which has been in development for ages, will be lost.
The Story of the Fall
I now will go over a very condensed version of the Fall of Man, in order to include details that the Bible leaves out. Initially, the race of man lived on Earth, but on a higher plane (the astral plane). Humans had bodies, but they were not nearly as dense. At this time, they did not have unique personalities. These human bodies also lived forever; there was no death.
These humans had souls and initially were androgynous. But at a certain stage these humans were able to separate themselves into pairs of opposites (i.e. male and female soulmates). The separation process itself was not difficult because bodies on the astral plane have much less restrictions than those on the Earth plane. Once separated, these soulmates remained faithful to each other.
The Temptation
At this stage, humankind still lived in a state of love and had no reason for committing selfish acts. It was therefore necessary to somehow entice humankind into a life of “sin”. To start the process, an angel by the name of Lucifer (whose name means “light bearer”) volunteered to be responsible for “leading humans astray”.
Lucifer used some sort of process to separate a piece of essence from himself, which was infused with a low-vibrational personality. For convenience, we will call this “offspring” of Lucifer the “devil”. The devil became the soul of a person among a “higher” race of beings that was separate from humans, but existed at the same time as them. For convenience sake, I will call this higher race the “Titans” (if they have an “official name, I am not aware of it).
In the Book of Enoch (which was left out of the Bible), there is a passage referring to the sons of God sleeping with the daughters of men. This is a reference to what happened next. What the devil did was bring the Titans to the human race, and he and his followers told the humans that it would be exciting for humans to have sex with other sexual partners.
The Fall of Man
Initially, humans started to “cheat” on each other with other humans, but eventually started to have sexual relations with the Titans as well. For those whose partners cheated on them came the first experience of emotional pain: heartbreak. And for their partners, these acts of betrayal resulted in the accumulation of negative karma upon their souls. And thus the human race began its descent into the ways of “sin”.
As a consequence of the fall of mankind, a couple of important developments occurred. One change was that mankind slowly drifted down into the physical (from the astral) plane. This was the result of mankind’s vibrations lowering as humans continued to act in “evil” ways. In addition, humans were given the gift of “death” in order to have a respite from life in the physical world.
Conclusion
By now, the purpose of life on Earth should be extremely clear. The goal of each of us individuals is to diligently work at cultivating an awareness of who we truly are, and who we are not. By realizing recognizing and reconnecting with our true divine selves, we can cultivate more love and compassion for ourselves and others. This is something that each of us must choose to do individually, but in doing so we will provide a light that others can follow. The path is by far not an easy one, but this is the challenge that we set for ourselves.
The time for spiritual progress is now. As the Earth enters the new age and the 5th dimensions, any souls that fail to reach a corresponding level will not be able to reincarnate back on Earth. There is no more time for delay. The purpose of life is to know thyself/God, and the time to do it is now.
Photo by: Lisa Fotios