“Table Talk” is the way us literary gentlemen say “random observations.”

First,

Handle has an approach to virtue that I think is less useful for thinking and systematizing but better for applying.     Basically less accurate in  my opinion but probably handier.

Here is how I think of it. In any situation and context, there is the right decision. We are used to talking about “the narrow path”, but that is walking on a two-dimensional surface, and so deviations are only to the right and left.

Imagine instead that “the narrow path” is a flight plan for a small airplane, and you can divert from it and your “trim could be off” and be going off course in two different ways, which are distinct dimensions. You could be off yaw and going too far to the left or right, or pitch, lacking balance between weight and lift, and going too high or too low.

We are already familiar with Aristotle’s axis of deficiency or excess in any particular virtue. Call that the “yaw” axis.

But for situations of conflict between competing virtues, the “pitch” axis is one of striking the proper balance / temperance / moderation, and the extremes of the axis are “bias” (favoring one virtue too much at the expense of the other), and “indiscriminate” (unjust neutrality, false equivalence, unfair equality over merited equity.)

So, all this is like a recipe for decision making. Decisions happen at human scale and “must fit the pans” of human nature and experience – so you cannot make your cake arbitrarily large or small. But to make it you need the right amount of complementary ingredients, and you need the various ingredients to stay in the right, balanced proportions.

The virtue sets arise naturally in terms of the virtue which pulls you in the opposite direction of the pitfall which awaits you if you become obsessively focused on, or entranced by, one particular objective, and forget to keep it in check.

-thus Handle

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Awhile back I invented virtue charts.  Its a tool to think more clearly and systematically about virtues and vices.  It draws from the common-sense idea that there are virtues and vices that are opposites.  It adds the Christian insight that most vices are distortions of virtues.  And its adds in Joseph Smith’s deep understanding that even virtues have “opposite” virtues–all knowledge is proved in contraries.  The result is a square.  Put a virtue at one corner.  The two corners on either side of it are going to be vices.  One of those vices is the opposite of the virtue.  The other vice is the distortion of the virtue.  Then the opposite corner is the “opposing” virtue.  Remarkably enough, the vices will also link to it neatly.  The vice that opposed the first virtue will be a distortion of the second virtue, while the vice that distorted the first virtue will be the opposite of the second virtue.

For example–(I am using “bloats” instead of “distorts on this diagram)–

The two opposite virtues make a powerful combination when put together (and one that is very worth thinking about and exploring).  So do the opposite vices.

Comely Modesty is beautiful and testimonial.

Uglified flesh-flaunting is the direction so much pornography or immodesty is headed: tattoos, piercings, self-damage, mutilation.

But virtue charts do not have to be limited to virtues and vices.  They can be used to explore the good and the bad even if they are not the result of deliberate personal choices.

Take comeliness and ugliness for example (more…)

Everyone wants to know about what happens after this life.  Everyone wants to know about the Judgment.

It is simple.  You see God.

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Power to get eternal life

-D&C 45:8

In this verse God does not offer eternal life as a reward.  He offers power to get eternal life as a reward.

That’s a big difference.

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D&C Bits

37:1  “And let every man choose for himself until I come.”  More there than meets the eye.

38:11  “All flesh is rotten before me.”  We are so used to this metaphor we don’t even notice it anymore.  We automatically translate it as “all people are corrupt.”  But what does corrupt mean?  It also means rotten.  You should read this scripture as “everyone is rotting flesh.”  The world is your charnel house.

38:17-20  These scriptures are promising land for a family inheritance, meaning for the children to grow up and farm, and the grandchildren, and on and on.  We don’t have or understand this mindset any more.  We live like nomads but without the willingness to get up and leave.  We are fettered by temporary things.  No generational ambition any more.

38:28  “but if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.”  “Ye” is plural.  We have to be prepared as a people.  If its just you who is prepared, you should fear.    We badly underestimate the degree to which the scriptures are collective, not individual.  Nephi says ‘liken the scriptures unto us’ and we mentall convert it to ‘liken the scriptures unto me.’

38:39 Interesting balance in the phrase about being the richest and about having the riches of eternity

16 years ago my little daughter died of cancer. This is what I wrote on the birthday she never quite made it to that year, with slight updates since.

Today would be your 20th birthday, Betsey. The full flower of young womanhood!  Instead you are always not-quite 4.

Happy Birthday, Betsey Pearl.

We miss you. We want to see you.

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.

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

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.

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.

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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