Quote:
Originally Posted by milk_player
Thanks for the responses.
It's just that I am finding it difficult to find any purpose or meaning in my own life when I do not know the ultimate purpose of God's. I can quite happily just live my life without questioning it but what really is the point?
What ultimately is the point in doing God's work?
What is the point in going to heaven?
What is the point of helping others?
You can say for my own self being, I do naturally actively help others it's at the very heart of my personality but for what purpose really?
What is the point in being happy in myself?
What is the point in being happy at all?
What is the point in others being happy?
What is the point in doing good?
What is the point of being alive?
What is the point of anybody being alive?
These are all questions that I am searching an answer for. I will naturally always continue to believe and do good regardless but is it actually of any significance really or is it just an evolutionary characteristic which means by doing good there is a higher probability of the human species to exist?
In addition to spiritual benefits you do receive a personality integration benefit from developing your spiritual awareness its just not "copasetic" to talk about it because you run into dogma on all sides. But God wants you to experience the personal integration as well as the spiritual one or else why make it available to you.
I can't summarize it all at this point but Curt Thompson's Anatomy of the Soul is a good place to start.
A few quotes from his book:
"We live in a world that values knowing things."
"
Knowing...brings power and influence. It is an activity that involves a primary subject (or person) thinking, feeling, or acting while separated from the idea, object, or person toward which his or her thoughts, feelings or actions are directed. This type of knowing is not so bad for facts. Not so good for people."
"From the emergence of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth century through the mid-twentieth century, "knowing things" became prized above all else. But not just any way of knowing. We have mostly valued knowing facts, knowing the "truth" and knowing that we are right."
"The left hemisphere (Thompson is speaking about the brain) is all about the past and future. It tends to systematically take in all the data that the right hemisphere is transponding to it through the corpus callosum and linearly, logically compare that to what is stored in its neurobiological history. Its focus is on "me" as distinct from the rest of creation. The left hemisphere, through, its ability to analyze, enables each of us to distinguish ourselves from one another in order to know who "I" am and what "I" want. We enjoy the idea of having a sense of individuality, of being a separate "me" - that is, until we begin to collect all of our emotional baggage that is uniquely "mine" and feel the separation of loneliness and isolation.
The left hemisphere, then, tends to be more dominant in situations in which we seek to "know" things. It separates us from the objects we wish to examine and analyze, which is critical if we are to interpret what we are experiencing. When such analysis is the dominant mode by which we encounter other people or God, however, joy becomes merely a defined concept. Love is something we know about but do not know. However, the right mode of operation enables us to open ourselves to be touched by God and known
by him in such a way as to become living expressions of love. The integration of the left and right systems is required to experience being known by someone else."