Love Relationship with our Creator
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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE? Program 160 Love Relationship With Our Creator by Ernest O’Neill
How do you get into some kind of realistic contact with the Supreme Being behind the universe? That’s really what we’re talking about these days on this program. The title of the general discussion is, “What is the meaning of life?” which is really, in another way, the question of “Why are you alive? What’s the point of life? Why do you exist?”
In our discussion we have come to the point where we have concluded, on an intellectual basis, that there is a Supreme Being behind the universe. We have also concluded that that man Jesus, who lived in the first century, was actually His Son, and that His explanation of why we were here was that we were made by the Creator to be His friend. That is, to be in a love relationship with Him. You were actually made to be a child of your father, the Creator of the universe.
That’s why he made us like Himself. He made us with the same capacities as He has. What we have been saying is that the part of us that communicates with the Creator of the universe is our spirits. Of course, your spirit is the real you. It’s not your mind and emotions, which is the psychological part of you. It’s not your body, which is the physical part of you. It’s not the part of you that is conscious of yourself (that is, your mind and emotions). It’s not the part of you that is conscious of the world and things through the five senses, that is, your body. But it’s your spirit.
Your spirit, admittedly, is something that you know very little about, and that I know very little about. But it is the part of us that communicates with God. In other words, there are moments (you know them — either when you were young or in recent times), when you’ve been sitting by a lake. You’ve just sensed deep inside you a deep peace and quiet. You’ve sensed that there is a life behind the universe, some kind of life.
That’s your spirit. That’s your spirit beginning to witness inside you that there is a Supreme Being. Or, you know that you’ve been in the other kind of extreme situation where there hasn’t been great peace and serenity around you, but there has been the very opposite. There has been a sudden death in the family. Or, you’ve come into a sudden place of danger. At that moment there comes a strong desire from within you, crying out, almost without knowing what you’re saying…”God help me!”
Somehow, at that moment, you sense a closeness you cannot explain, some sense of a presence that is bigger than yourself. That is your spirit. That is the remains of your spirit, because your spirit, at least most of our spirits are virtually dead to God. We have ignored them for so long. We have lived our lives so much by what everybody else thinks and whatever everybody else says that our spirits are almost dead towards God. Indeed, we have almost lost our individuality, because we are so busy trying to be what everybody else in the world says we should be.
Of course, what we have been saying is that one of the first steps toward a realistic communion with God in your spirit is to begin to respond to your spirit. One function of your spirit that is probably more alive than any other is the conscience. Your conscience is the part of you that urges you to live up to the best that you know. If you respond to that sense of what you ought to do inside you, you find your spirit getting stronger and your conscience getting stronger, and your awareness of God becoming more vivid and realistic.
In other words, one of the more direct ways to get into some kind of real relationship with your Maker is to respond to the part of you that is most really you. Of course, that’s one of the difficulties we all have. We
have almost forgotten what the real “me” is. We have turned into some kind of monster that thinks it knows what it wants, and, in fact, is dictatorial in what it appears to want. But what it appears to want is often a mixture of the views of other people, the ideals of what society sets for us and what is fashionable and faddish.
So many of us are doing hideous things just because everybody else thinks we ought to do them. Many of us are dying our hair all kinds of wild colors, and slicing our hair off in all kinds of ways, because we think that will make us the most individualistic. Actually we are being most conformed when we do those things. It’s very interesting if you look at some of us who have cut our hair in certain ways and we’ve dyed them in certain wild colors. You see several of us looking exactly the same.
Instead of becoming more individualistic, we are becoming more the same. Most of us, perhaps, even if we are not dressing wildly or cutting our hair in wild styles, most of us are becoming more and more dominated by what the outside world and society thinks we ought to do, or thinks it’s fashionable to be than by being what we really sense we should be. So, some of the best steps that you can take toward a real relationship with your Creator are to actually begin to find your roots again and to begin to act according to your conscience, according to what that little voice inside you says you ought to do.
Now, that conscience judges you not in the light of what other people tell you that you should do, but in the light of another function of your spirit. There are three primary functions of your spirit. One is communion with God; the second is conscience; the third is intuition. Inside you, in your spirit, you have an intuitive sense of what to do when. If you think deep down and examine your own life you will find that some of the most basic moves and the good moves that you have made in your life have been made because you sensed you should do something. You sensed you ought to do something and you did it. It resulted in a sequence of events that greatly changed and improved your life.
In other words, we always talk about you ladies and your “woman’s intuition” — that sense you have that something is going to happen, or you know you should do something. In fact, that is just a human expression of the Supreme Being’s life in each one of us. All of us have intuition and actually the Creator of the universe sent you into this world with all kinds of signals that He sends to you of what to do at which time.
He put into you certain abilities and then He put you here on earth to do a certain job that only you can do to bring the world into order under His will in a way that nobody else can. To help you do that, He has given you intuition. When you use your intuition and act according to your intuition, your conscience approves of it. When you don’t your conscience tries to pull you back to your intuition.
Of course, we have mutilated the whole scheme. We think, “Oh no, that’s not what our conscience does. Our conscience tries to get us to abide by all kinds of Victorian rules of right and wrong, and religious views of morals and ethics.” It doesn’t! Your conscience is very sensitive. It judges you and draws you back again and again to what God Himself is putting into your own intuition. So, your intuition is the real way in which you know how to live your life. It’s the real method of knowing what to do and when to do it.
Most of us, of course, are missing its guidance, because we get utterly preoccupied with vocational guidance counselors. We get completely distracted by certain people who praise us for doing certain things. So we think those are the things that we are good at. We get utterly thrown off the track by the fact that some jobs make a lot more money than others. So, we end up not doing what we were meant to do in this life at all, because we fail to listen to our intuition.
Actually, you know this. You know there have come moments (it’s seemed almost as moments of enlightenment and
relevation) when you have known in your intuition what you ought to do. If we begin to respond to these functions of our spirit within us, this ability to know what we should do, this conscience that judges us in the light of that knowledge, we will begin to come into a more real communion with the Supreme Being behind the universe that begins to fulfill His plan and His purpose for us in our lives.
I hope that you may begin to do some of this in your own life in these coming weeks. We’ll continue the discussion of our personalities and how they ought to operate tomorrow.
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