Interesting questions indeed. Welcome to Openhand :-) Here at Openhand we don't believe in beliefs. Or faith. Only realisation - to know what is truth for you. And so we share a perspective on truth and invite others to see what they feel about that. But not to think about it as such. Not to debate with the intellect and come up with the best idea. Not to theorise, but instead to realise. It's that deep "aha" sense inside when you recognise truth. It's like falling in love; true love has no formula, it simply is, and is known.

And when you realise, it is only ever your truth. Your truth doesn't need to mean it's true for someone else; and if it isn't, that doesn't negate your truth either. In this way, we avoid the black-hole that religion so often falls into: the need for others to follow your truth so as to make it more true for you. Often, probably because truth hasn't been realised at all, only ideas are taken on board and believed in as 'faith'. The concept of faith, to me, is simply the fudge which tries to excuse the fact that you don't know.

So with that in mind, I put it to you that to consider ourselves 'trapped' or 'victims' here is to give identity to the soul. If that were the case, where did such identity come from? I put it to you that the sense of identity, as in a small "I", that can be victimised by the universe in some way, is really the ego. At Openhand that means where the soul becomes attached to reality and thus distorted in some way. Also, I put it to you that there is no purpose to life as such. For there to be a purpose, that would presuppose a being to have the purpose. And where did that being come from? Who created it? Who created the creator? But there is sense of purpose; which people experience as a pull within them to ever higher sense of unity and oneness - the pull to unconditional love. Really choice is an illusion. I put it to you that all sense of choice arises from the interplay between separation and unity consciousness which arose at the bigbang - as the presence of the One subdivided into these opposing flows of awareness, of consciousness, of light. Most people think they're making choices when really what's going on, is the resolution of the interplay between these two flows of consciousness inside of them. The soul gets stuck for some considerable time within attachments such as perceived needs and desires - often addictions. Or else frequently, it's the need for a particular outcome from the moment or a resistance to something else. I put it to you that really there is only ever one authentic choice a being can make, and that is to surrender into the mainstream of the soul felt as a movement within, reuniting you with the source. It's something that can happen in every moment which then drives authentic choice like a path of light opening before you. This state, would be an enlightened one - in the Openhand view. You might find this helps understand the approach...