Claim. Human beings are not the cause of their own birth, life, or death, so the purpose of human life cannot be discovered by looking inside the self — it must be sought in the origin that produced us.
Elaboration. “You should not think that you were the cause of your birth. People are born into this world yet do not know the origin and purpose of their birth … Neither our birth nor our life nor our death stems from our own intentions” (1.1. Problems in life have been like a maze, 7-178, 1959.9.6). Philosophy has labored for millennia to solve this problem on its own terms and “all ideologies and assertions … fell by the wayside” (ibid, 141-125, 1986.2.20). The implication: if humans are resultant and not causal beings, then any purposeful account of life requires recovering the causal origin — which SMM identifies with God as Parent. The maze metaphor frames the rest of Book10’s opening: people wander because they have inverted the chain of dependence.
See also. csg-human-beings-are-resultant-beings