It struck me recently that there are some pretty strong parallels between the 4th Article of Faith and the traditional schematic of the Plan of Salvation

Faith –> Premortal Life   We don’t have experience, we have to take the plan and basically everything else on trust

Repentance –> Mortality  A time of change and growth

Baptism –>  the Spirit World  A spiritual state after symbolically or literally dying

the Gift of  the Holy Ghost –> the Three Degrees of Glory the presence of a member of the Godhead

Bonus step below the fold (more…)

There is a well-known literary device in Hebrew called a merism. A merism expresses two extremes in order to signify the whole range between them. When Christ calls Himself Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, He is not limiting Himself to those endpoints but claiming everything they encompass.

In my study of Isaiah, I began to notice that this meristic logic often operates beyond the phrase or verse level. Frequently, a text presents two bounded domains, and then follows them with a third unit that does not introduce a new idea, but enacts what the first two already defined.

The third unit is not a summary. It is not a synthesis. It is the first lived traversal of the space the merism establishes.

When a meristic pair is followed by such a realizing unit, I refer to the pattern as an Extended Merism. When this occurs across chapters or major literary blocks, I refer to it as an Extended Architectural Merism.

This framework clarifies a question that has generated an extraordinary amount of unnecessary speculation: why do we have two creation accounts?

Rather than multiplying theories, we can observe the structure.

This pattern is present in Genesis, but it is far clearer in the Book of Moses. The Book of Abraham employs a different meristic axis, but preserves the same underlying logic.

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For awhile I have been dissatisfied with the conventional LDS schematic for the plan of salvation.  It’s missing the stage of bodily innocence.  In time (and in the temple) that’s Eden.  In our lives its childhood. Christ’s commandments to become as a little child and the temple both tell us that this is an important stage.  So important that many many souls are allowed to skip their mortal existence as adults, but are not allowed to skip being a child.

I now see that if we take the ‘premortal existence’ to mean our existence before we are accountable mortals, our schematic does account for the stage of innocence in the body.  The pre-earth life is the pre-existence of the spirit, and childhood is the pre-existence of the body and soul.

Ideally the pre-earth life ends with a decision to go down into death, and ideally so does the pre-adult life into the waters of baptism.

• The temple teaches us that the Garden and the Fall are mythic–that is to say, they are a true story but they describe something basic about what it means to be human and the course we have to follow.  We all get that the story teaches that you have grow up, you can’t stay a child forever.  But few of us realize that the story also teaches that you have to start as a child.  Innocence is a necessary stage of growth.  Why?

• The tree of life in the garden represents infinite time.  The tree of knowledge represents  making choices that matter.  There is a sense in which if you have literally *infinite* time, nothing you do  matters.

• 2 Nephi 2 has a LOT to say about the Garden and the Fall.

• A lot of what the story has to say about the sexes is specifically about sex.

• The snake’s temptation of Eve is basically a denial a tragedy.  His answer seems to be a complete non sequitur at first.  She says, ‘but if I eat that fruit I will die.’  Snake says, ‘no, you won’t, because the fruit gives you knowledge.’  How is that an argument?  Well, its an argument if you have the hidden premise that it would be mean or unhappy if acquiring knowledge meant you would die, so therefore obviously you aren’t going to die.  In other words, the hidden premise that makes the whole argument work is a denial of tragedy. This may have been particularly appealing to Eve in that she lived in a world without tragedy.  Randomly enough, some of these tendencies map in my mind to modern political persuasions.  Liberalism is the denial of tragedy.  Conservatism is the recognition that the tragedy is real and bitter and nasty and unavoidable.  I no longer consider myself a conservative, though, because I believe that beyond the tragedy is a deeper miracle that redeems it.

• Thou Worm Jacob.  (Credit to my sister in law for pointing this out).
  • The snake tempts Eve and is punished with being lowly, but while still having the power to ‘bruise the heel’ at the price of having his head crushed
  • Jacob bruises Esau’s heel —Genesis 25:26
  • The Lord calls Jacob a worm–Isaiah 41:14–which is Israel, i.e., us
  • “Worm” and “snake” are the same thing in the scriptures.  See, e.g., Micah 7:17,
  • “Worm” is usually a symbol of death and decay in the scriptures
    • I don’t what any of this means, but given the close connection between the fall and having seed, it is interesting to think of Eve as in a way being tempted by her descendants (Israel)

More insight into the Garden and the Fall.  What a treasury.  I am not near grateful enough.

Eden (Childhood) as an overlooked but necessary part of the Plan of Salvation

Why is life so *infernally* hard? (Incredible guest post)

Trickster God (incredible, from MC)

The Tree of Daily Life

We are going to do something new here.  We are going to put up stuff relevant to the upcoming Sunday School lesson before it happens.

We have had a fair amount of Fall posting lately

• Beekeeper thinking about the Fall
• Enduring Glory
• The Fall is a True Myth  (highly recommended–why the Fall is both good and sinful, why it requires an atonement, and more)
• The Sin of Adam (much value in the comments)

We also have much of worth from the archives.  See below.

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I got curious about the journey the Jaredites took, since they are so different from the rest of our Hebrew and Greek scriptures. And because their journey appears to have taken place near the end of the Ice Age.

The account in Ether is highly abbreviated. It appears they traveled eastward, in part because Hugh Nibley pointed out that the Book of Ether resembles early Chinese historiography in form.

Siberia / Northern Asia doesn’t match well. There were no long stretches with “many waters”. Seasonal freezing would severely limit repeated barge use. And continental interiors do not produce sustained, dominating wind systems. Ether does not describe prolonged cold, frozen travel, or famine.

The Tibetan Plateau/ Central Asia was my first guess, but it doesn’t work well either. Extreme altitude and hypoxia are never mentioned, nor is river travel. Surface water on the plateau itself is sparse. Travel logic favors rapid crossing, not repeated habitation. Winds are strong but episodic, not system-scale and entraining. This might have been easier in terms of overland travel, but this suggests the Lord deliberately placed them in environments where they gained repeated experience building barges, because they would need that practice when they built their final ones.

What does work, is a journey across Iran, India, south of the Himalayas and ending in Southern China or Southeast Asia, like Vietnam.

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The dog has lost his age
Snow is youth for German Shepherds
In my nostrils cold and woodsmoke wage
their war.  Sunrise, nut orchard lane.

Last year I invented one of the many major concepts for which I will shortly be world famous, school children will be forced to memorize reams of my turgid prose while they draw a mustache on my picture in their textbook,* and then won’t you be sorry.

Seriously, all vainglory aside, it really is an important insight and whoever thought of it first (probably not me) deserves the thanks of a grateful nation.

I am referring to the insight that there is Gross Power (gross freedom) and Net Power (net freedom). Delta Power, in other words.

Someone with a great deal of power/freedom/agency/capability doesn’t feel it when all of it is already committed. Presidents don’t get gray hairs because of the heady Dionysian rush of untrammeled authority. The more they can do, the more they have to do. Exercising a great deal of gross power or gross freedom isn’t what we think of when we think of power or freedom. Instead, we basically only *feel* powerful and free when we have acquired some new power and freedom and haven’t committed it fully to anything yet. The glorious sense of freedom comes only in the transition.

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(This is a guest post from ~lagrev-nocfep)

“A world of choice is a world of consequences. A world of consequences is a world where you can’t simply walk back what you just did and revert to the prior state. Of course an angel and a flaming sword bars the way. Of course the way is shut. The angel is called time. The sword is called agency.”

On capturing a wild swarm

Not the apotheosis of red sprung
From breast fast in cat’s jaw, the beekeeper’s
Elsewise pensive, wishing the bell unrung—
The hurt of husbandry falls on sleepers

Awaken! Now ronin against their wills
At last to die under stars—the sting
Is medicine or poison, but any dose still kills
By vigorous rattle of the chain of being.

In time’s amber light cannot help but cast
Shadow into the crucible of its absence.
The arrow’s head can be only forwards passed.
The world takes its meaning from its consequence.

Our poor eyes see marring, not the tale told.
But fire turns straw to a more perfect gold

The specific event was that I had to gather a wild swarm and for days afterwards confused and lost workers came back to the place the swarm had been looking for their home.

One of the things that I believe will precede the fall of Babylon, or our collapse in general, is a crisis of meaning. Specifically, this mean our myths and heroes are hollow or not taken seriously. This is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.

The Jedi Church may be laughable, but a society incapable of even that… that is terrifying. A society without heroes or myths is spiritually dead. It can still move, still function—but only on momentum, like a corpse that hasn’t yet realized it’s dead.

And related to this, is a crisis in telling stories. You can’t have a compelling story without meaning.

It is interesting to note, that of the Eminent Men and Women who appeared to Pres Woodruff, said they laid the foundation of liberty for us. Besides the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the majority were artists and authors. What we might call mythmakers.

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I’m reading a poem that has a couple of the best lines about the Fall I ever read.  I am jotting them down in my little book.

The sting is medicine or poison, but any dose still kills

And

the world takes its meaning from its consequence

On the sweetness of Mormon life.

You are at a tiny little branch in a tiny town on the snowy plains.  You are there with your father-in-law.  None of you have been here before, you are visiting him while he is a on a work detail in this place.

You left with plenty of time because of the snow, so he gets into a long discussion with the Branch President.  Two texts come in–the two speakers for the service are snowed in.  Why don’t you talk then, the Branch President asks him.  He does.

A “Yankee Heater” is when you go outside in the cold for awhile. When you come back inside, the interior feels much warmer because you are comparing it to the outside.  Even if its not toasty inside, it will feel warm to you compared to where you have been.

We had a young family getting baptized this afternoon. The arctic cold front has covered everything with ice and though we do get some weather out here on the high plains its more than the town can handle. The town isn’t even trying. A few cars are creeping across the ice. And our cars, because we are going to the baptism.

We come in from the cold to the warmth of the church. But after awhile, the church starts to feel a little cold, once we get used to being inside. There is some air moving around or something.

The couple in particular looks a little cold. Then they go down into the water—we set the temperature at the high end of comfortable—and they are toasty warm again.

Then they come back out and the cool air hits again.

I think there’s a figure of baptism in that. Call it “Yankee Baptism.” You come in from the spiritual cold and everything feels warm to you. But after awhile, you realize that there are still drafts even inside the Church.

The only solution is the one we learned from Lehi’s Dream—you can’t just taste the fruit once, you have to come to it again and again. You move from cold to warmth, from cold to warmth. You repeat the baptism experience through the sacrament and other spiritual experiences as your capacity to experience spiritual warmth increases.

Our high council speaker had a mantra, ‘choose your hard.’  Whether  his own or got form somewhere I didn’t catch.  The idea was, you can choose to have pain now or pain later, you can choose loneliness or messy relationships, you can choose the broad path to hell or the rocky path to heaven, but you can’t choose having cake and also eating it.

It made me think of what the Savior taught–no man can serve two masters.  Implied, and also true, is that no man can serve no masters.  We are infants in the universe, barely able to breathe and sleep.  We will either have a father or an owner.