INTERFAITH

Becoming a Force for Good
by Dr. Laurel Fuller Clark

From the time that I was very, very young, it never made sense to me that people do things to each other that are mean. Why is it that people steal from each other, why are people cruel to each other, why is it that people rob, why are they greedy? It doesn’t make sense that people live that way or that they treat each other that way. Whether you’re talking about a problem in society like crime, or about an individual problem like depression or loneliness, it never did make sense to me that people would live with problems. A lot of people say, “Well, that’s just human nature. It’s human nature to have problems, it’s human nature to steal, it’s human nature to get angry?” And I don’t believe that and I never have believed that.

I don’t know how many of you are religious people, and whether you are or not it doesn’t really matter. If you read scripture from any religion in the world, if you read mythology, if you read literature that speaks in symbols, you will find a prevailing thought. Every scripture that I’ve ever read says that there is some kind of Higher Power; there is something greater than human beings. And every scripture I’ve ever read says that this greater power is a force for good; it’s not a force for evil.

Another universal element that’s in every scripture of the world is that people are made like this Higher Power that is a force for good. Now it doesn’t matter whether you call It God, or Allah, or Brahma, or whether you don’t even see it as a single deity. It might be the Buddha nature or the Tao. All of those names describe a single concept. And that concept is that there is order in the universe, that the order is toward progressive goodness, the order is toward light (which means awareness), and that all of us are connected in an interrelated whole. So whatever one person does, no matter where you are and no matter who you are, affects everything and everybody else on this entire planet. What that means is that we need each other. It also means that what I do is important to your life and what you do is important to my life. And the more that we understand that and the more that we recognize how related we are to each other the more everybody benefits.

The Bible, which is the scripture that’s widely used in the American culture, describes creation like this: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals and all the creatures that crawl upon the earth. So God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” Now in that one passage it gives you some very important keys to understand who we are, why we’re here and why it is that our true nature really is good. It says that we were created after the likeness of our Creator. That means that we were created to be like our Creator. Think about a child. A physical child is created to be like his or her physical parent. This means the child has similar attributes to the parents. Well, the same thing is true with us being created to be like our mental parent. We have the same attributes that our Creator has. That means that we’re inherently creative beings, it means that we’re inherently divine. It also says that we were created in the image of God. It means that our creator imagined us into existence and that is also how we create, through the use of imagination.

This passage also says that man was given dominion over all the lower forms of life. And I know that some people really, really react to that idea! They think it means that man destroys the planet by trying to change all the lower forms of life. Actually that picture is describing that we are creative beings and that we have the ability to create anything, that all of the substance in this world is in our hands for us to use to create. The key to being a creator like our Creator is to be responsible for what we create. Not to just create haphazardly, but to recognize that any time that we cause some kind of movement it’s going to cause a change somewhere else. It doesn’t mean that it’s bad that we use our creative power. It means that we need to have vision, in order to see how what we do right here is going to affect someone somewhere else.

I live in Missouri where the School of Metaphysics is headquartered, and last year there were tremendous floods that destroyed much of the St. Louis area and the Kansas City area. Many of those floods were caused by the fact that there are manmade communities that change the course of two big rivers running through Missouri: the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. Oftentimes that is the reason why we experience what we call disasters, because in our creative activity we don’t always pay attention to the long term effects of what we are going to cause. So in order to be responsible we need to have some kind of vision of how what we do here will affect someone else over there.

If it is true that humanity really is divine and that we do come from a Creator and that Creator is good, and that means that we are inherently good, then why is is that people fight? Why is it that people are mean to each other, why is it that people steal from each other, why do people rape one another, why do they break into other people’s stores? People do that because they have forgotten or denied the fact that they have a creative essence. They have forgotten the fact or maybe are not even aware of the fact that they’re not physical beings. We have these physical bodies that we use to get around in, but this physical body is not who we are. Who we are is a spiritual being or a soul. You know that by the fact that when you go to sleep at night you are not aware of your physical body, you’re not aware of your physical senses, but you still exist. You exist in what we call a dream state.

The more that people become connected with their own inner Self or their own soul the more they’re able to understand why we’re here and how to use this life for the purpose that is intended for us. When you’re disconnected from your own soul or your own inner Self you also become disconnected from other people. When people are lonely, depressed, or when they are angry it is because they are not fulfilling their own inner nature. When you are not fulfilling your own inner nature you tend to take it out on other people which is unfortunate, and it doesn’t solve your problem. If somebody thinks that they don’t have enough physical resources, let’s say, and they think that they don’t have within them what it requires to earn what they want for physical resources, and they take it from someone else or they steal it from someone else, do you think that really makes them happy? I’ve never known anybody who was a criminal who was happy. I never known anybody who was not good to other people who was happy. So it tells me right there that that is not our true nature.

Life forms other than human beings harmonize with the world around them. They fulfill what their nature is because they don’t have free will like we do. We have to choose to be happy. We have to choose to create. We have to choose to harmonize with one another. So in that there’s a great blessing because it means that we can choose the greatest way to harmonize with other beings, but it also means that we have a greater responsibility. It’s not something that just comes automatically.

If you think about why we’re even here, it seems pretty obvious that we’re not here to make money, we’re not here to buy cars, we’re not here to fill our houses with physical possessions. Even though some people try to live that way. The reason why we’re here is to know who we are, to know how we can become more like our Creator; in other words, how we can become more creative in everything we do. And to know how to love.

Think about what love is. Have you ever had a plant that didn’t seem to do very well and every time you watered it you said, “I hate this plant. It just won’t grow right!”? Well, you do that and in a short period of time the plant is dead. Now if you have a plant, even if it’s kind of weak and maybe not looking so great, and you just really love it and every time you water it you touch it and think to it, “I love this plant. This is such a beautiful plant, I really love it,” it flourishes. In a really short period of time you can see how powerful that energy is. And that’s not just true with plants. It’s true with animals, it’s true with people, it’s true with anything you do. Anything that you love you cause to flourish. Think about when people are in love. When people are in love, everybody around them says, “You’re beautiful, you’re so happy. What is it about you? You just have this glow around you.” That’s what love is. It’s a positive, creative, growth-filled force. And that is really why we’re here, to create and to love.
Now I want you to think about somebody you know who loves what they do in their life. It might be their job, it might be a church they’re involved with, it might be a hobby they have. I guarantee you that is a person who is happy. I guarantee you that is a person who is a real pleasure to be around. I guarantee you it is also somebody who thinks about other people. They’re not just consumed in their own work, in their own hobby or in their own world. When people are creating they are at peace with themselves because they are fulfilling what their true nature is, what their divine nature is.

When people love what they do, whatever the activity is, they are also at peace with themselves. And so they’re good to other people. The people who don’t do that, the people who get involved in crime, the people who are engrossed in poverty, people who complain all the time, are people who are not creative in their lives. They are people who tend to live by habit or they tend to live for physical reasons only. People can be motivated for a period of time with physical goals like money, but it doesn’t last. I have never met anybody who is motivated by money alone. I have met people who have been motivated by the love of their families or people who have been motivated by a spiritual ideal. Most people who do what they love to do are motivated. The money is a nice benefit but that’s not why they do what they do. They do what they do because they have some ideal greater than themselves that they live for. And that really is what all of us seek.

I believe and have found that each one of us as an individual has some unique talent, some unique gift. There is something about each one of us that is different from everybody else. Outwardly we can see it in physical differences of race, physical differences of culture, physical differences of religion and gender. But the real difference between each one of us is our own uniqueness and what it is that each one of us has to offer to the world. Think about the world as being like a giant jig-saw puzzle and each person is one piece in the puzzle. If each person is really doing what they’re here to do this lifetime, if they’re really giving from the inner source of their being, then we have the whole puzzle and it works well together. When people don’t know why they are here or they deny why they are here -- sometimes people do have some idea of their gifts but they don’t use them for whatever reason -- that’s when they take away from the puzzle. It’s when they think they have to grab more than is theirs, or when they get jealous of other people and try to tear down other people. So the real solution for us to live in harmony with all of our differences is for each one of us to do what it is that we’re here to do, what is fulfilling to our souls. In this way we can become more like our Creator. We become a greater force for good in the world.•

This article is part of the address on “The Universal Language of Mind” given by Dr. Laurel Fuller Clark at the Unity-and-Diversity 30th Anniversary Festival in Los Angeles, California.
©1995 No. 13 Vol. 4