Following on from Part I, read it first.

The wizard lands were stagnant. Millions striving to create their own language, their own script, their own scales, and not succeeding. Some few succeeding in a minor ways. A mere handful truly achieving greatness . . . and then dying, and their greatness dying with them.

The land without magic was not stagnant. Gleaming towers were there; and gleaming rockets to the Moon, and to Mars; and gleaming teeth. They were not stagnant. But if an angel were to jerk back the veil on time, you would see that their trajectory was a curve. Up and then over and then down. It would take no angel to see the signs that were already there. Their arts were complex enough now that no one person could achieve much in the way of greatness. But they were so far removed from want that struggle and suffering were no longer spurs to them either. Their growth had slowed. Movements and ideas insulated from reality were starting to spread. Individuals who wanted greatness were fighting for preeminence and celebrity instead. They had grown slowly and then for a few dizzying decades had grown very quickly. Now they would decline slowly and then very quickly.

But if the way of magic didn’t work, and the way of the country without magic didn’t work, what then?

A new thing was seen in the land. A boy was inspired with a new language. In it there were rules that made the language individual for each speaker. It captured their experience and their character. Their words would be shaded by their relationships with their family and their friends. Their achievements were built in. Only they could speak it. But others could understand them. Each one who learned the rules was able to create their own language, and speak words of power. And the words they spoke together, the songs they sung together, were more powerful still.

Anyone can become a wizard. They just have to create their own fully realized language to speak their commands in.

Anyone can write down their spells into spellbooks. They just have to create their own unique script to do it in.
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There once was a boy who was set to watch sheep. Some wolves gathered and he ran to the village for help. “Wolves! Wolves!” he cried. But shockingly, in describing the wolves he said that some of them were “bitches.” This was offensive. The villagers beat him a bit and then the village elder took him aside to counsel him. When the boy said that the wolves were already among the sheep right then, the village elder pointed out that the delay was entirely the boy’s fault. The slain sheep must be on the boy’s conscience. Finally the boy was let go to salvage the situation as best as he could on his own.

Wolves learn from experience even if boys do not, so the next time the wolves attacked they behaved and dressed in a very peculiar fashion, like an outrageous gay stereotype. The boy fought them but finally had to run to the village for help. He described the wolves as ‘acting gay.’ The villagers would have reacted badly in any case to this association of sexual minorities with vicious predatory beasts but they were even more concerned given the boy’s prior history of offensive conduct. They beat him thoroughly and lectured him long.

The next time the boy ran into town he said the wolves were painted in blackface and saying “n*****.” The villagers had put up with the boy’s antics for a long time, but saying “n*****” was really too much. They beat him almost to death and drove him out.

It was too bad about the sheep.

When you are old, what sacrifices would you be willing to make for another year of health to enjoy your children & grandchildren?

What sacrifices would it require to create that year now, by having them earlier?

-thus “XD JCB”

Follow up, from “Spectral Theorem”

How much would your family & each person in it be diminished if you’d never had your youngest kid? How many joys, observations & insights missed? For what convenience/$ would you trade him/her existing? You’re making that trade by not having 1 more.

This haunts me too.  My blessings are less then they could be.  I have left winning lottery tickets of happiness untouched on the table.

Introducing

the Society for the Encouragement of Faith Transitions

Faith transitions are the hot new trend.  All the performative people are having one or at least being exquisitely compassionate and understanding to a friend who is.

You’d love to be part of this exciting trend.  But there’s a problem.  You aren’t having one.  Neither is anyone you know.

Don’t worry, SEFT is here to help.  With our easy 6-step program, you’ll be transitioning like gangbusters in no time.

Even if you start like this

just

Pray

Act on Inspiration

Get Involved at Church

Love your Family and Neighbors

Study Scriptures

Fill your Heart with Gratitude

and your faith will transition like this

Faith transitioning is easy, anyone can do it.

Faith transitions–they aren’t just for people who are decreasing in faith any more.

Take care, and be SEFT out there.

I will cause the heavens to shake for your good

-thus D&C 35:24.  Not every disaster is a catastrophe.  Built up corruption needs brought back down.  But even for we good who have built well, sometimes our cottages need cleared to make room for mansions.

Save yourselves from this untoward generation, and come forth out of the fire, hating even the garments spotted with the flesh.

-thus D&C 36:6.  Don’t read “flesh” as a fancy way of saying iniquity.  Read it as flesh.  These clothes are soiled with the putrefaction of corpses.  You are fleeing the charnel house  (funny how that reads on the other side of the corona–how many people have we found out believe we should fear not that which kills the soul, but rather that which kills occasionally the body).

Ye hear of wars in far countries, and you say that there will soon be great wars in far countries, but ye know not the hearts of men in your own land.

-thus D&C 38:29

His Majesty is feeling much better.

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A young Saint’s basic model of revelation looks like a circle between a person and God. Prayers go up, answers come down. The answers will be from the Holy Ghost if its a question, or simply blessings if the prayer is a request.

This is a good model of revelation to have.

A Saint who pays attention in Church will develop a fuller model of revelation.

They still pray but also realize they need to be “studying it out in their mind” with the help of the scriptures and also proposing solutions to the Lord.  They also realize that some of their answers will come through the Holy Ghost, or through dreams, or visions.  But they also realize some answers will come through the prophets and apostles, the current ones and the former ones whose answers got written down into scripture, and who are engaging the Lord the same way they are.

This is a good model.

We can add to it.

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The greatest of all achievements that we can attain in our long and challenging journey through immortality is when our claim to discipleship of the Lord Jesus Christ reaches the stage where we can say, with all honesty, His ways are our ways and His thoughts our thoughts.

–thus Brother Shimabukuro

We have higher goals. That is the reason we are different.

Other posts from the Sunday afternoon session of the April 1992 General Conference

 
Marilyn Nielson Resurrection is another creation

Someday a poet will arise. He will take each work from the 19th through 21st centuries and lovingly consider what in them poisons men’s minds and what in them points to the greatness of mankind. He will, like a surgeon, alter each work delicately, subtly, to remove the story elements which are unworthy. Each arc will be replaced with one closer to the true Story behind each work, a clearer and cleaner vision, the mirror darkly a little more polished.

-a prophecy from the ether

The poet will pray each time. Angels and Christ and the authors themselves will talk to him.

Everyone wants to know the secret of Dr. G’s Hyperreal Fat Camp.  Why is it so wildly successful?

Let me peel back the curtain a little bit.  Let’s take a peek at  a hyperreal part of the hyperreal first day.

After orientation and other preliminaries, the inductees are taken into a pitch black room.

The room is strewn with furniture and other obstacles. (more…)

This advice is framed as weight loss advice.  It’s actually advice for life.   It was the message of General Conference.

If you want to lose weight, don’t start tomorrow. Don’t start today. Start yesterday. Start last year. Start framing your life as a continuous series of learning experiences rather than a fragmented series of failures.

-thus twitterling @realJohn_Taylor

The difference between a hero who comes out of nowhere to overcome all odds and a loser who pathetically stumbles from disaster to disaster is whether they get up that last time they fell.  That is it.

You have feared men and have not trusted in me to strengthen you, like you ought to have.    Your thoughts have been in the things of earth more than in the things that are of me, your creator, and in the ministry to which you have been called; and you have not paid attention to my Spirit, nor to those who have been placed over you, but those who have persuaded you are people I did not send.

-my paraphrase of D&C 30:1.  I struck me with more force in Spanish than in English.

My daughter did something neat this conference.  She wrote down all the things she laughed at and all the good stories.

There were some good stories and some deeply moving ones, like  Sister Aburto and Elder Palmer’s experiences with their siblings dying.

I wasn’t trying to write any type of note in particular, but as usual I seem to have gone for memorable phrases and pithy aphorisms

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The tomb is empty.

All tombs will be.

That is their telos.