Say what you hear.
Among other things, I am looking for insight on how to be more than I am and how to lead my family to greatness in time and eternity.
I also hope to spend some time at the foot of the cross with some of the speakers, this being Easter weekend.
A great bear came out of his winter cave to see the sun rising pink over the still snow-patched fields and meadows. The bare trees were dark against that brilliant light. The bear was overwhelmed and had what he felt was a vision of true insight. “Beauty is good,” he said to himself.
He painstakingly set to etch patterns in each claw using his other claws and gentle patient nibbles with his great jaw. It took a long time. The changes were subtle. But when he was done he was an ordinary bear in all other respects, but each claw was truly beautiful.
In his rejoicing, he lifted a great log and tossed it, and felt the joy and glory of his strength. “Strength is good,” he said to himself, and then improved his strength in the ways that even bears can do. When he felt himself to be truly strong, even for a great bear, and with his claws truly beautiful, he went forth slashing and destroying. He knocked down and ripped and tore and left broken trees and dying animals and dead men and women in his wake and horrible death and corruption. In that way he became the first ogre and the grandfather of all that kind.
Moral: Beware isolated beauty. Beware isolated truth.
There once was a man who was born to be a womanizer. Without trying he grew up tall and remarkably handsome. He had a natural talent for mixing sympathy and teasing, with a lot of interest and empathy for woman but also had a kind of untouchable and remote inner core–social dynamite. He had catholic tastes in girls and was attracted to sex. He even–please don’t judge him, it just happened–had a sort of sixth sense for someone’s inner vulnerabilities that could be exploited. All in all, he would have been a superlative womanizer and he knew it. Fortunately for him, he grew up a follower of Christ. Though he knew he could womanize and saw the appeal of doing something that he was very good at, it didn’t work with the burning vision God gave him of leading a beloved wife and children and grandchildren into the eternities. A natural talent for womanizing doesn’t just turn into a natural talent for being a husband, it turns out. There were bumps along the way. Sometimes when he thought of the great gift he had been born with, he had to laugh.
[Editor’s note: yes, this is weird even by our standards. Dunno, it just came to me]
Satan said, give me thine honor, which is my power.
-D&C 29.
Honor is power.
There is an overwhelming amount of pointers in scripture towards a metaphysics which is based on honor, glory, and power, which is almost completely ignored. The few people who do address it have silly reductionist things to say about it.
And the righteous shall be gathered on my right hand unto eternal life; and the wicked on my left hand will I be ashamed to own before the Father;
28 Wherefore I will say unto them—Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.
29 And now, behold, I say unto you, never at any time have I declared from mine own mouth that they should return, for where I am they cannot come, for they have no power.
30 But remember that all my judgments are not given unto men; and as the words have gone forth out of my mouth even so shall they be fulfilled, that the first shall be last, and that the last shall be first in
That “but” looks like its going to be a qualification on the apparent eternal state of the damned. But the revelation launches into a discussion of spiritual and temporal creation and never addresses damnation again. I don’t know what to make of it.
31 For by the power of my Spirit created I them; yea, all things both spiritual and temporal—
32 First spiritual, secondly temporal, which is the beginning of my work; and again, first temporal, and secondly spiritual, which is the last of my work
Creation is first spiritual, then temporal. Easy enough. But what is the inverse part at the last mean? First resurrection, then the sanctification of the soul? First the millennium and then the celestial earth?
On the sweetness
A sister gives a talk about her dream job.
She got it about a year ago. She felt inspired to take it.
It has been rough on her family with her out of the home.
Last week a young lady taught a lesson to the young women on the Proclamation on the Family. She, the sister with the dream job, felt inspired to go back to being at home. So she gave notice.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.
***
No evidence of alien species because most advanced species correctly intuit that information is pollution, and cease communicating in patterns. Their language approaches static, their architecture approaches nature.
-twitter user @ctrlcreep
***
Any sufficiently advanced activity is indistinguishable from ritual. (more…)
My wife says that I have a subconscious rule that I must move things from one place to another at least a hundred times before I can bring myself to give them away. Suffice it to say, if you need help in this, there are better experts than I to teach you.
-thus Brother Bradford, from his talk Unclutter Your Life.
It is not really a talk about clutter. It is a talk about systems, and means and ends, and goals. (more…)
The one Lord,
from the two branches hung,
three days in the grave,
the four quarters saved
In mortal terms, a father is someone who went from thinking it would be fun to gleefully and dangerously blow up stuff with his friends to thinking it would be fun to gleefully and a little less dangerously blow up stuff with his kids and his friends.
Mortal fathers, by natural design, have a lot of fun with their kids in the rough and tumble.
God is the Father.
Repentance is the path to greatness. That is the path we have to choose.
We could also say it is our path to glory or goodness or heaven. All true. We were meant for greatness but we are not yet great. We are too illformed as yet. So we must change.
We can imagine someone who doesn’t need to be change to be great. They only need to develop further who they are inwardly. Christ was like that, I think. We are partly like that too. We were meant for greatness, the seeds are already there, we are just unfolding them. But for us it also means changing who we are. We have contradictions inside us.
Where we are, and where we have to go to get to our destination explains why ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way.’ We will all wander. But if we wish to arrive at greatness, eventually we are going to have to choose a path that leads there. “Why can’t I be saved in my sins?” is morphologically the same question as “why can’t I go to Paris without having to go to France?” (more…)
There are those passages in D&C 19 where God says something like ‘endless punishment doesn’t mean punishment without end, it means divine punishment, because Endless is my name”. We usually take it to mean that God is proclaiming that his punishment is temporally bound. But He doesn’t actually say that. Its a puzzling passage, but I think a better reading is that he is telling us that we if we are concerned about how long His punishment is, we are asking the wrong question. The better question is Whose.
Like when I put my kids in time-out because they have been quarrelling. If the first question they ask is ‘how long?’ I know they need to be in for awhile, because they are not yet in a penitent mood.
To make sense of endless punishment, remember that you are amphibious with respect to time. You swim in it and will forever, but you also breathe the air of eternity. (More here). So the punishment you experience at any one time will have an end at a future time–it is not endless–but that punishment will also be present with you always in eternity–it is Endless.
Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is terrifying. The real punishment is that you have displeased Him. Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is being administered lovingly–He wants all things to turn for your good. Punishment being God’s punishment means that you can repent–what He has put out He can draw back.
I read a talk recently by Elder Oaks. The whole thing is great but you would love it if only for the first three lines.
Joy is more than happiness. It comes from being complete. . . and in harmony with our Creator and his eternal laws.
The opposite of joy is misery. Misery is more than unhappiness, sorrow, or suffering. Misery is the ultimate state of disharmony with God and his laws.
Joy and misery are eternal emotions whose ultimate extent we are not likely to experience in mortality.
Marilyn Nielson Find relief in charity
Reap.
Behold, the field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.
Yea, whosoever will thrust in his sickle and reap, the same is called of God.
Therefore, if you will ask of me you shall receive; if you will knock it shall be opened unto you.
There is nothing to indicate here that harvest is a metaphor for missionary work alone.
The world’s field is overflowing with ripe excellences. You only need to claim them as yours for God to claim you as His. Ask, and He will give to you. But you must ask with your whole soul. You must ask with your time and with your deeds.
I am following up on my post yesterday about the Eternal Imperative. I riffed off of Kant’s Categoral Imperative to offer a basic rule for morality, in three different formulations.
*Act as if you were part of a story that involves your ancestors and your posterity.
*Act as if you were working towards an ultimate goal that you could will everyone would be working towards.
*Act as if you eventually would come into a relationship with everyone past, present, and future.
Here are two more formula that I think are equivalent to those three. But they are not obvious.
Act as if you had zero time preference.
Kant’s Categorical Imperative had a bit of the right idea, but along the wrong dimension.
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.
It is too universal. It abstracts away from the embodiment of being in a particular time and place. It is all blandness and universal solvent. It acts as if time need not exist.
