@Bruce - what a lovely post. I really like the sentiment. It is inspiring to think of it this way. It makes me want to be a better person and frames the negatives experiences of life in a way more bearable through fortitude.
I suppose we can develop anger and impatience with the Creator and the
way He has designed His system of teaching. We might feel angry that He
hasn't stepped in and done more to remind us of what we would have liked
to have been doing.
But on the other hand, we discover, the more we look
at it, that the Creator's teaching method is to allow us to make mistakes
and to allow us to get ourselves out of our mistakes. The deeper the mistake
we make and the more we have to struggle to get out of that mistake, the
more we are going to learn about the nature of our being... * He doesn't
want holy and righteous and over-good beings to share his life with him.
He wants these qualities in their proper proportion but only as secondary
natures to the Divine nature itself, which is loving and caring and ongoing
and friendly and creative... You
see that friendship to us, and I'm sure also to our Creator, is more important
than our ability to avoid making mistakes. As soon as we make a mistake
we become, so to speak, unholy, unsaintly, unrighteous and not good. But
in correcting those mistakes we gain understanding, and when we have truly
gained a lot of understanding we become wise, and when we become wise
we realise that wisdom is far greater than holiness or goodness or righteousness
as we understand those things. For wisdom is the highest expression of
love in action and from it such qualities as holiness, and righteousness
and goodness are spin-offs. They are not the primary objective of wisdom.
The primary objective of wisdom is to be itself - wisely to he its loving
creative nature. Wisely, that means to the best advantage of all its friends
and all the situations that it is aware of. * If we
take a narrow view of the Creator's purpose for us, it might be the attainment
of the ability to stay in a heavenly world that He created for us somewhere.
To do that, the sooner we become holy and good and free of any sort of
mistake the better. But if we do that, then we are surely going to limit
our ability to learn; to learn to understand who we are, to learn to understand
all the qualities that are available for us to understand, because we
will limit the mistakes that we are going to make and, therefore, we will
limit the understanding that comes to us through the correcting of those
mistakes. * I feel
that it is possible to say that, if the Creator had simply wanted us to
become beautiful, righteous children who did nothing but be good, as it
were, and delight in the Divine quality of loving, blissful, beautiful
serenity, then He would have arranged for us to be born directly into
heaven where we would have been with all these qualities. But if that
had happened, then we would have lacked the understanding we are gaining
through living through all those beautiful, heavenly qualities and their
opposite, such as ugliness and unkindness and hatred and confusion, and
pain and sorrow and grief and loneliness. Now, through the understanding
of these, negative qualities, we come to know what positive qualities
really are; but if we had only known the positive qualities, we wouldn't
truly have known what they were. We would have been with them but we would
have had nothing to compare them with. And it is only through the art
of comparison that we come to an under- standing of the qualities that
we handle and are capable of handling. * We cannot
become the friends, that the Creator wishes us to become to one another
and to Himself, if we have not got the ability to understand the nature
of the qualities that are available to our being. It's no good if we simply
live as heavenly beings in heaven because we would have little companionship
with one another, or for the Creator, in a creative sense. We would have
no ability to discuss the merits of the qualities that we know about. But if we have lived through them, as we do on earth; and their opposites,
as we do on earth, then we would develop an ability to understand, objectively,
the significance of beauty, of truth, of honesty, of things like kindness
and care. How would we know about loving kindness or loving care in a
place like heaven? There would be no need for kindness or for caring as
we know it, everything would have been taken care of. There would be nothing
to be kind about. We would be with the quality of love, but we wouldn't
be able to express it in the form of care, and we wouldn't know very much
about the sort of qualities that come out of the experience of great friendship. And these are the things that I think the Creator longs to give to us
and wants to share with us in His nature.
*
"William Arkle on the nature of mortal life"
2 Comments -
@Bruce - what a lovely post. I really like the sentiment. It is inspiring to think of it this way. It makes me want to be a better person and frames the negatives experiences of life in a way more bearable through fortitude.
19 February 2014 at 17:38
This is so very true!
20 February 2014 at 16:28