3. What Is Man

The Meaning of Our Lives / 3. What Is Man

3. What Is Man

3:1. Man is not a body. Man is a lump of energy of consciousness (a soul), capable of self-comprehension, remembering, thinking, moving, growing qualitatively and quantitatively and also of degradation.

An incarnation consists in binding a soul with a body (soon to be born) that God performs.

The death constitutes a complete separation of them.

3:2. People are incarnated into physical bodies by God in order to undergo consecutive stages of personal evolution. For all this, everyone possesses considerable amount of free will, i.e. the right to choose the strategic direction of the personal evolution (to the Abode of the Creator — or to hell), as well as ways of solving daily problems and tasks.

God — usually in the aspect of the Holy Spirit — constantly suggests ways to improve, to become better to everyone. In this way He expresses His Love-Care for everyone.

But He extremely rarely interferes “by force” with people realizing their desires.

In this way, God — as the Supreme Shepherd — “shepherds” us on the surface of the planet Earth — as if on His “pasture”. He is interested that we develop in the direction preferable by Him. We need to become Perfect Souls and merge with Him in His Abode, and thus to enrich Him with ourselves.

And if someone does not live the earthly life in the way preferable by God, He inflicts pain to that person through illnesses or various calamities. As a result, some of us start to reflect on it and then reform. But others only grow more embittered and, unfortunately, degrade at even higher rate.

In this way — through realization of the free will — natural selection goes on among the souls embodied by God. He takes the best ones into His Abode. Good souls get in paradise for some time, and after that they get incarnated again. The abode of the worst souls is hell. Some of those souls are given an opportunity to be embodied again, to try one more time, while the worst of them, hopeless in God’s opinion, get destroyed, annihilated forever (this is where the ideas of “blazing inferno” and “infernal fire consuming sinners” originate from).

3:3. Man has to become aware of oneself not as of a body or mind but as of an embodied soul: only from this standpoint it is possible to understand correctly how to live on the Earth.

The expressions “my soul”, “his/her soul”, “their/our souls” or the likes are incorrect. Let us all realize — we are souls.

3:4. People of all nationalities and races, and also of both sexes — are equal in the face of God. What really makes them different from one another is the age of the souls and the degree to which they have developed certain positive and negative qualities.

The basic principles of spiritual advancement are the same for all people regardless of sex, nationality, and other similar characteristics, though the methods of spiritual work do differ depending on: a) the age of a person in the current incarnation, b) the psychogenetic age (age of the soul), c) present level of ethical and intellectual development, and d) the portion of the spiritual Path that an individual soul has already successfully traveled.

3:5. The supreme prospective task of each human being is to cognize God in all of His aspects and manifestations, then, upon achieving the spiritual Perfection, to merge into Him in His Abode and to continue taking part in the Universal Evolutionary Process from there, by assisting the embodied beings in particular.

But what one should begin with is the intellectual development and ethical self-transformation.