Having identified some troublesome aspects of our past and current behaviors, fears and practices, it is appropriate now to shift our focus. We must understand why we do what we do and what we must do to break that cycle as soon as possible. We will then proceed to learn how to do it.

If your view of life is even remotely aligned with the thoughts of the previous chapters, you will realize that we are wasting time and thus opportunity as a species in realizing our potential. We are perpetuating ignorance and pain. Our reactive behaviors that were understandable in our early history are no longer respectable or responsible, and that knowledge should be a powerful stimulus for change. We need, however, a compelling goal and the belief that it is achievable.

Historians note that people who choose not to re-live the less attractive parts of our collective past must study it. The past does contain key information about what may become our Destiny, so we do need to examine the past, both to avoid continuously repeating human mistakes and to help develop a vastly changed concept for the future of Humanity. Alas, what is proposed next may be very difficult to accept, for you must focus your thoughts backwards to critically examine what our ancestors have, in many different ways, referred to as God.

First, God is one word used to identify some power that somehow was/is responsible for the fact that we find ourselves here, experiencing life. Restated, that means we do not know how we got here, yet, but relative to past and present human powers, something very potent was responsible for our origin. It is admirable that we admit some ignorance and do not claim that we created ourselves. And the naturalist philosophical writings of the past and the more recent scientific hypotheses about our physical origin, with possible random chemical reaction initiation of life forms, are totally inadequate too. They fail to address the most fundamental question of all ... that of first principles and causes, i.e. what originated that which, in turn, created or originated our universe? That is the real and only basis for expecting there to be a God, for our utter inability to conceive of any other means by which existence could happen halts further useful thought. In short, you do not expect to be able to teach an ant calculus. Nor should you expect any human today or earlier in our history to have learned or to know the definitive answers to our questions of origin or destiny.

Second, the various religions have identified attributes of God that vary from "unknowable" to "pure love" to "omnipotent" to "vengeful", etc. In short, everyone has some twist that characterizes their understanding of God, whatever God was/is/will be. That is where the problem of interpretation of the cosmos by the ignorant began. It has yet to end many thousands of years later.

The audacity of people giving a God human attributes is amazing. And of course we late comers are told that such knowledge as our ancestors gained was periodically by "divine revelation," or direct contact, which unfortunately, for us, are rather difficult to verify. We are also told that we were made in "his" image, ergo, human male behavioral and physical attributes ... that can then be conveniently used to describe God's likes and dislikes (via Popes, Ayatollahs, Rabbis, etc.), and our inferred status in the animal kingdom.

In practice, ordinary people have been given a dream; they have been threatened regarding their own ignorance and required to suspend rational thought to accept unproved dogma. Destiny eliminates the suspension of rational thought and makes tangible the dream aspect of our existence, as you will now see.

The concept of God is intriguing because we do not know how we got here, as yet, and contemplation throughout history has been seriously approached but without useful results. It is time to address a new approach to God. Specifically, God represents our highest concept of power over existence. Our Destiny is to become our concept of God. That is the secret of history. It is the hidden human need to be more than human. Our highest goal is to have total power over existence across all that we are aware of as our universe. We are to become our concept of God. We cannot begin to fathom what might lie beyond that conceptual goal, for we have not a clue, yet, about first principles or causes. It is our highest goal to have the power to gain that answer, and the path to that understanding depends on our willingness to advance and mature to our Destiny.

We do not easily entertain anyone suggesting that kind of Destiny, for at once it provokes fear of the as yet unknown power that got this universe going, with regard to the competition / anger / retribution cycle, which again are simply more human and other animal traits. And it appears ludicrous based on our limited knowledge of physical science that humans could even begin to achieve knowledge sufficient to overcome the limitations of our physical existence. Yet that is exactly what we attempt to overcome by means of our religions by wallowing in our inadequacy and begging for mercy, effectively creating an afterlife that is based on loyalty towards that power we call God. As if our presumed disloyalty was relevant to a supreme power! That is a ridiculous perception. Was/is He/She/It lonely for obedient children? How convenient for religious leaders!

I once conducted an impromptu experiment in human psychology to explore the depth of our learned fear regarding what created us. I was walking across an open campus with five associates during a violent thunderstorm, each of us on his way to a class. One person remarked on how dangerous it was for us to be using umbrellas. I replied, "You have nothing to fear. I am God and lightning cannot strike us." The reaction of all five was immediate and most educational. Suddenly, I was walking alone. The others had scattered from me at various distances and in different directions from our general destination, and, to the extent of their fears, from each other. Their learned fear of "blasphemy" completely overpowered their logic regarding my insignificance in the grand scheme of any creator. My intentionally foolish remarks were not relevant to anything!

It seems we have learned to believe and not question the inherent slave concept, and in the idea that our only path to "salvation" is abject obedience and admission of personal worthlessness. Cow pucky! Harris' book, I'm Okay - You're Okay, was a study of transactional analysis between humans that examined our behaviors with each other in terms of rational, equal interchange (adult), controlling interchange (parent) and innocent interchange (child). Individually, we can operate at all three levels at different times depending upon the situation and our partners. Collectively, we tend to behave as children or parents because there is so much we do not know about existence and so much we are aware of that is frightening to us. So most of us do as children do and seek a parent to comfort us. We have learned to expect a parental form of control over our destinies. We avoid an adult approach to facing the unknowns of life, for being adult, in the sense I am using the word, means taking responsibility for learning everything possible and acting on that knowledge.

We are so caught up in the model of the parent/child cycle that we refer to God as father and we are pressed into blind obedience (faith) rather than forming the more difficult and more adult perspective of taking responsibility for what we are and what we are to become. We are baldly told that a "bad" angel questioned God's authority and was committed to Hades as ... the Devil! We are told plainly by our religions that it is not our privilege to advance beyond our limitations or to question "authority."

We will continue to die until we learn the Destiny paradigm, as follows: we have the seeds of immortality within us and it is our responsibility to grow ourselves to overcome our limits. The gifts of life, our planet and the dynamic human brain, are all that we were given. They are all that we have. We must do the rest.

Up to this time in history, we have not demonstrated any common understanding of the Destiny paradigm. We continue in our deliberate ignorance in the belief that we lack any power over our "destiny." Consequently, we continuously repeat virtually all the mistakes of our ancestors.

One of the reasons we play these games is that we are all too aware of our closeness to lesser tribes and to the rest of the animal kingdom, and of the fact that we actually are ignorant and without power over existence. We have searched in vain for self-respect by invented differentiation from our fellow humans so we can subjugate them, and especially from other animals, so we can kill and eat them in good conscience. We appear to demand invented hierarchies of value for personal worth and merely subtle actual differences to justify or explain our unpleasant behaviors.

Note that all living things that we see have to eat, and they mostly eat other living things, all the way up the food chain. We even have carnivorous plants! Isn't it interesting that the Judeo-Christian concept of deceased humans and angels, etc., in a heavenly setting, removes the physical form of existence and the dependence of that existence upon eating?

We are psychologically recoiling from our horror at existing only through the death of other living, sentient beings. That is one reason why some of our religious perceptions/creations regarding an afterlife contain the essential ingredient of a non-physical form of existence. And why religions in the Eastern Hemisphere, e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism, value life in all forms. Another reason is our desires to be exempt from physical pain and limitations, ergo our current form of existence. A third, very convenient reason is that one does not have to prove the existence of non-physical entities in order to claim belief in their existence. Finally, it is exceedingly convenient to shift the responsibility for our existence and our future wellbeing onto some entity other than ourselves. These smoke and mirror games give us license to do anything in the name of whatever we choose to call our religion, and allow us to forever remain children, particularly nasty children at times.

If you step back and look at these realities in a general sense, I am saying that our ancestors really got things backward. Instead of accepting their current state of ignorance and deferring proclamations about cosmic reality to the future, they insisted on personifying something to which they could attribute their existence. Our Human Condition propensity to keep our feet firmly planted towards the past, rather than the future, is a blatant symptom of our readiness to repeat the errors of our ancestors. That can finally be stopped with the Destiny paradigm shift in our self-perception.

Some additional perspectives are essential to frame our Destiny in terms of time and current human limitations. We have already spent at least 50,000 years in arriving at our present state of knowledge. To assume that we will progress substantively towards our Destiny in anything short of another 10,000 years is optimistic. In fact, there is no guarantee at all that we will achieve what was defined above as Destiny at any point in our future. We may get halfway there and self-destruct. We may not apply ourselves if we find other distractions that please us; e.g., consider the all-consuming power of mind-altering drugs on the user and extrapolate that to some semi-advanced state of the human animal with continuous capability to experience intense orgasm. An ancient Greek wrote about that capability re the pantheon of gods. We could experience another period of the Dark Ages, possibly lasting thousands of years. Then again, there may be means to assure none of those negative scenarios occurs.

There have always been naysayers who lacked the vision to accept that what is known by them at their moment in time is a very tiny part of what can be known. Naysayers make the simple mistake of assuming that humans are essentially static in their potential. Of course, the naysayers will be right if we fail to realize our potential. History demonstrates that the most prominent characteristic of human ignorance is intentional blindness to our fantastic universe and the tantalizing messages to the curious of our species. So, let the naysayers babble. They will not lead, they will not follow, so ignore them; they defeat themselves in their administrative attempts to stop the growth and application of knowledge.

You can rejoice in the existence of the relatively few humans who have helped lead us out of ignorance via science and applied technology. Also rejoice in the work of philosophers and creators of ideologies, who have focused on our inherent value, but sadly lacked the means to understand the possibility and the necessity for physical evolution.

The Destiny defined in this chapter is most certainly a complete revamping of our concept of ourselves in the cosmos. As such, it is to be expected that the responses to such a radical departure from conventional thought will contain much derision. So be it. I suggest to those who have the greatest difficulty accepting the Destiny concept for our total power over existence that our grasp of reality is and always has been subject to question.

We simply do not know that we do not know what we think we know. Reality for us as individuals is thus amorphous, and we are forced to alter our perceptions when overpowering events occur in our lives. And we may live for many decades without experiencing major change events, so we tend blindly to assume rightness in our beliefs when the truth is we simply lack experience. Our unwarranted pride in our past is much like that of the builders of the Titanic, before the reality of the disaster. Actual reality, which exists independently of our personal beliefs, is something for us to seek for progress. In the physical world, we continue to use our best logic and insistence on provable facts to guide us in our decisions. Once we depart the known physical world, however, none of us is qualified to claim genuine understanding of reality. That includes both you and me.

Let us not attempt to deceive each other in that regard. Destiny is a proposition, not a foregone conclusion. The future, not the past, does contain the answer. We are to become our concept of God. Every action proposed from this point forward in Destiny is predicated on the acceptance of this highest goal.