© 1994 Ken Glasziou
© 1994 The Brotherhood of Man Library
| Time for More Change? Symbols, Cults, and _The Urantia Book_ | Volume 1 - No. 2 — Index | Unbroken Communion with our Thought Adjuster |
Condensed from “The Road Less Travelled”. by M. Scott Peck
All of us who postulate a loving God eventually come to a single terrifying idea: God wants us to become as Himself. We are growing toward godhood, for it is God who is the source of the evolutionary force and God who is its destination. This is what we mean when we say He is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
I said this is a terrifying idea because no idea ever came to the mind of man which places such a burden upon us. It is the single most demanding idea in the history of humankind for, if we believe it, then it demands all that we can possibly give, all that we have. It is one thing to believe in a loving, caring God - it is quite another to believe in a God who has in mind for us precisely that we should attain His position, His power, His wisdom, His identity. Were we to believe that it is possible for man to become as God, this belief by its very nature would place upon us an obligation to attempt to attain the possible.
We humans do not want this obligation, we don’t want to have to work that hard. So long as we can believe that godhood is an impossible attainment for ourselves, we don’t have to worry about our spiritual growth, we don’t have to push ourselves to higher and higher levels of consciousness and loving activity, we can relax and just be human. However, as soon as we believe it is possible for man to become as God, we can never rest for long, never say our job is finished, our work is done.
The idea that God is actively nurturing us so that we might grow up to be like Him brings us face to face with our own laziness. Ultimately there is only one impediment to spiritual growth, and that is laziness. In examining discipline, we are considering the laziness of attempting to avoid suffering, or taking the easy way out. In examining love, we are also examining the fact that nonlove is the unwillingness to extend one’s self, to nurture one’s own, or another’s, spiritual growth. Laziness is love’s opposite. Spiritual growth is effortful. In the struggle to help my patients grow, I found that my chief enemy was invariably their laziness - and I became aware in myself of a similar reluctance to extend myself to new areas of thought, responsibility and maturation. One thing I clearly had in common with all mankind was my laziness.
In the Bible story, Adam and Eve broke God’s law. They listened to the serpent without getting God’s side of the story before they acted. In debating the wisdom of a proposed course of action, human beings routinely fail to obtain God’s side of the issue. They fail to consult or listen to the God within them, to take advantage of the knowledge of rightness which inherently resides within the minds of all mankind. We make this failure because we are lazy. It is work to hold these internal debates, they require time and energy. And if we take them seriously, we usually find we are being urged to take the more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than the less, one that may open us to suffering and struggle. Like Adam and Eve, and every one of our ancestors before us, we are all lazy.
Original sin does exist; it is our laziness. A major form that laziness takes is fear. The myth of Adam and Eve can be used to illustrate this. One might say that it was not laziness that prevented Adam and Eve from questioning God about the reasons behind his law, but fear - fear in the face of the awesomeness of God. While all fear is not laziness, much fear is exactly that. Much of our fear is fear of change in the status quo, a fear of what we might lose if we venture forth from where we are now. People find new information distinctly threatening because it may require them to work to revise their maps of reality, and they instinctively seek to avoid that work. More often than not they will fight against the new information rather than for its assimilation. Their resistance is motivated by fear, yes, but the source of that fear is laziness, it is the fear of the work that they would have to do.
Adam and Eve sought the easy way - to eat of the fruit that would confer unearned knowledge. They hoped they could get away with it. But they did not. To seek knowledge from the God-within may let us in for a lot of work. But the moral of the story is this: in the pursuit of the goal to be as God, it must be done.
| Time for More Change? Symbols, Cults, and _The Urantia Book_ | Volume 1 - No. 2 — Index | Unbroken Communion with our Thought Adjuster |