The root and divine pattern of the damsel in distress

Adam’s adamance

According to the temple account, when Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, prior to the fall, Satan first came tempting Adam to partake of the forbidden fruit.

LUCIFER APPROACHES ADAM

[Lucifer enters.]

LUCIFER: Well, Adam, you have a new world here.

ADAM: A new world?

LUCIFER: Yes, a new world, patterned after the old one where we used to live.

ADAM: I know nothing about any other world.

LUCIFER: Oh, I see–your eyes are not yet opened. You have forgotten everything. You must eat some of the fruit of this tree.

[Lucifer pantomimes picking two pieces of fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He offers the fruit to Adam.]

LUCIFER: Adam, here is some of the fruit of that tree. It will make you wise.

ADAM: I will not partake of that fruit. Father told me that in the day I should partake of it, I should surely die.

LUCIFER: You shall not surely die, but shall be as the Gods, knowing good and evil.

ADAM: I will not partake of it.

LUCIFER: Oh, you will not? Well, we shall see.

[Adam withdraws from view.]

Satan failed to directly tempt him because Adam was adamant about not breaking God’s commandment. How do you get someone to yield whose very nature is not to budge an inch? Was there no way around Adam’s adamancy? Yes, there was, and Satan, that cunning one, knew that Adam had a weakness which he had planned to exploit. And so off the devil went to tempt Eve.

Eve’s acquiescence

Satan used on Eve the very same approach that he used on Adam, directly tempting her with the wisdom and knowledge that the fruit offered as benefits. Instead of Eve acting like the unyielding Adam, though, she acquiesced and partook of the fruit.

Why did Adam refuse? Because it was his nature to stick to the decision he had made to obey God and not to yield to temptations.

Why did Eve partake? Because it was her nature to yield to persuasive arguments. It was her nature to vacillate.

Why did Satan wait for Eve to be alone? Because if Adam had been around, he would have offered counter arguments to Satan’s temptations and Eve might have drawn strength from Adam’s unyielding nature and resisted the temptation.

Here is how it went down.

EVE PARTAKES OF THE FRUIT

[Eve returns.]

LUCIFER: Eve, here is some of the fruit of that tree. It will make you wise. It is delicious to the taste and very desirable.

EVE: Who are you?

LUCIFER: I am your brother.

EVE: You, my brother, and come here to persuade me to disobey Father?

LUCIFER: I have said nothing about Father. I want you to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil that your eyes may be opened, for that is the way Father gained his knowledge. You must eat of this fruit so as to comprehend that everything has its opposite: good and evil, virtue and vice, light and darkness, health and sickness, pleasure and pain. Thus your eyes will be opened, and you will have knowledge.

EVE: Is there no other way?

LUCIFER: There is no other way.

EVE: Then I will partake.

[Eve pantomimes taking one of the pieces of fruit from Lucifer's hand and eating it.]

LUCIFER: There. Now go and get Adam to partake.

[Lucifer pantomimes placing the second piece of fruit in her hand. He withdraws from view.]

Indirectly tempting the adamant Adam

Having received instructions from the devil to tempt Adam to partake, Eve went to find her husband.

ADAM PARTAKES OF THE FRUIT

[Adam returns.]

EVE: Adam, here is some of the fruit of that tree. It is delicious to the taste and very desirable.

ADAM: Eve, do you know what fruit that is?

EVE: Yes. It is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

ADAM: I cannot partake of it. Do you not know that Father commanded us not to partake of the fruit of that tree?

EVE: Do you intend to obey all of Father’s commandments?

ADAM: Yes, all of them.

We see from this that the devil’s plan to indirectly tempt Adam failed, for Adam was still every bit as adamant about obeying all of Father’s commandments as he ever was. The man simply refused to budge and break any commandments. Neither direct nor indirect temptation worked on Adam, for it was against his nature to budge on his decisions. But notice what happened next.

Why did Adam partake of the forbidden fruit?

EVE: Do you not recollect that Father commanded us to multiply and replenish the earth? I have partaken of this fruit and by so doing shall be cast out, and you will be left a lone man in the garden of Eden.

ADAM: Eve, I see that this must be so. I will partake that man may be.

[Adam pantomimes eating the fruit.]

There were three reasons that Eve gave Adam to get him to partake of the fruit. The first was

“It is delicious to the taste and very desirable.”

But that wasn’t enough to get Adam to budge on Father’s commandments. So Eve tried a strategy which appealed to Adam’s desire to obey the commandments. Her reasoning was that since “God commanded them to multiply and replenish the earth,” that required that they remain together, but since now Eve had “partaken of this fruit and by so doing [would] be cast out,” Adam would “be left a lone man in the garden of Eden.”

That got Adam to partake and the standard interpretation is that Adam chose to obey one commandment over another, that he was placed in a situation in which the two commandments conflicted and he chose to obey “the greater commandment” of staying together and having children over “the lesser commandment” of partaking of the fruit. We often take the view that obeying God’s commandment to have children was Adam’s prime motivator.

This is an understandable interpretation, given that the text has Adam saying, “I will partake that man may be.” To everyone who hears that (including me), Adam was obviously talking about having children.

Three commandments

However, that may not be the whole picture. There were three commandments that God gave to Adam.

• Don’t partake of the forbidden fruit.

• Remain together.

• Multiply and replenish the earth.

After Adam partook of the forbidden fruit, God asked him, “Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, if so thou shouldst surely die?” And Adam replied,

“The woman thou gavest me,

and commandest that she should remain with me,

she gave me of the fruit of the tree and I did eat. ”

We see from this response that Adam himself explained the reason why he partook of the forbidden fruit. It was to comply with the commandment that the woman remain with him. This commandment was given to him because God had said that “it was not good that the man should be alone.” But let’s backtrack a bit, for we need to understand what “man” is.

What “man” is

There are four things that “man” is.

• Man is Adam, not Eve (woman/help meet).

• Man is Adam + Eve. (“One flesh.”)

• Man is children and posterity.

• Man is Eve. (Mankind.)

We can do some substitution to try to determine what Adam meant by “man” when he said, “Eve, I see that this must be so. I will partake that man may be.” The exercise might pull some additional information out of the text that is not readily apparent in a cursory first reading.

“I will partake that [children/posterity] may be.”

I think it is safe to say that most people think this is what he was referring to, but neither Adam nor Eve had any concept of what children were, for they were still innocent themselves. So, let’s try another substitute.

“I will partake that [Adam, not Eve] may be.”

Eve had partaken and broken the commandment, whereas Adam had not, therefore, Eve was already spiritually dead (and would later suffer a temporal death). So, we can look upon Eve as spiritually dead when she tempted the spiritually alive Adam. This substitution, then, doesn’t make sense because the words “may be” indicate bringing something into existence, or making something alive. The fall had brought death upon Eve, not life. By partaking of the fruit, then, Adam would also bring death upon himself. Therefore, since he was already spiritually and physically alive, it makes no sense that he needed to partake of death in order to become (spiritually or physically) alive.

“I will partake that [Eve] may be.”

Eve was already spiritually dead, therefore, Adam partaking of the same forbidden fruit does not bring her back to life, it only makes him just as dead as she is. So, this interpretation doesn’t work, either. Let’s try the last substitution.

“I will partake that [Adam + Eve] may be.”

If Adam viewed Eve as part of himself, as literally “the other half” of him, then when he saw (“Eve, I see that this must be so”) that a change had come over her and that she had become fallen, what he saw was that man (Adam + Eve) had already ceased to exist. Half of him was fallen and half of him had not fallen, causing a separation, or death, between the two halves. In truth, Adam never saw Eve as a separate individual, separate from himself. For example, there’s this:

This was bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; now she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man; (Abr. 5:17)

and also this:

This I know now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man. (Moses 3:23)

In one view, it is said that Eve was his bone and flesh (prior to her being taken out of him), and in another view it is said that Eve is his bone and flesh (after being taken out of him). In either case, she is him. Then we get these scriptures, which reinforce the same idea that Adam + Eve is man:

So the Gods went down to organize man in their own image, in the image of the Gods to form they him, male and female to form they them. (Abr. 4:27)

And I, God, created man in mine own image, in the image of mine Only Begotten created I him; male and female created I them. (Moses 2:27)

Adam, then, was like unto the left-brain-mind of man and Eve was like unto the right-brain-heart of man. The one is firm, fixed and adamant (unyielding), the other vacillating. They were the personification of our two brain hemispheres. Just as we need both halves of our brain for existence, so they needed to remain with each other to be complete and alive. If you leave the left-brain-mind of man alone to itself, without any interaction with the right-brain-heart, it goes insane, just like all those crazy chess players.  The reverse is also true. A right-brain-heart cannot remain separate from its corresponding left-brain-mind.

What Adam was thinking

Remember those three commandments Adam had received from God?

• Don’t partake of the forbidden fruit.

• Remain together.

• Multiply and replenish the earth.

Well, in Adam’s mind, half of himself (Adam + Eve) had already broken the first one, making it impossible to comply with the second and third commandments. Because only half of himself (Adam + Eve) had partaken of the fruit, man (Adam + Eve) had ceased to exist. In order to save or rescue man (Adam + Eve) and bring man (Adam + Eve) back again into existence, the other half of himself (Adam + Eve) had to also partake of the forbidden fruit. This would allow the now fallen, yet still existing man (Adam + Eve) to comply with the second and third commandments.

Adam’s chief motivation, then, was to rescue man (Adam + Eve), for without Eve, man (Adam + Eve) could not exist. Adam would perform the rescue through condescension (“voluntary descent from one’s rank or dignity in relations with an inferior”), by voluntarily allowing himself to fall. Now Adam and Eve would again be on an equal (fallen) footing and Adam, and through his faith, repentance and unyielding obedience (for this was his nature), could perchance bring both himself and Eve, his other half, back into the presence of God.

This view of Eve as himself did not allow him to merely cut his losses and walk away from her. To lose Eve was to lose himself. This wasn’t some fallen, romantic love affair in which two separate people come together, this was orders of magnitude more intense, because Eve was literally taken out of Adam. They weren’t just made for each other, they were each other! So, the possibility of losing Eve was not an option to Adam. Eve needed to be rescued.

Eve, the prototypical damsel in distress

Adam partook of the forbidden fruit because Eve was in distress and he desired to rescue her. By her transgression, she had lost the promises and would be cut off, both physically and spiritually. She had already shown that she was unable to resist the direct temptations of the devil in her paradisaical state while separated from Adam, so, what kind of a chance did Eve have to resist the devil’s temptations in a fallen state and being alone in a fallen world, with no Adam to rely upon and help rescue her? Not a chance in hell.

(Before I continue, it needs to be understood and emphasized that both the temple and scriptural accounts of this event are most likely just a part, or an abridgment, of the actual conversation that took place between Eve and Adam. Nevertheless, we can see from the few words of Eve which have been given to us by revelation, that she was in dire need of some comfort, for she makes it a point to say to Adam, and this, I believe, is the main point that resonated with Adam, “I…shall be cast out.”)

Now, everyone who has dealt with a woman in distress knows just how very nervous and agitated they can become. It is likely that Eve unloaded a barrage of words on Adam to get him to partake of that fruit, crying to him with tears of sorrow, as a weeping woman pleading for rescue. Adam likely had never seen tears before, so the sight of a hysterical woman must have been a shock to him. As this was a life and death situation—for Eve was now slated to die (spiritually and physically), alone, in the dreary world outside of the garden—it is highly unlikely that the conversation we have recorded in the temple and in the scriptures is the full account.

So, she likely used every argument she could think of to persuade Adam to partake of the fruit and to be kicked out and die with her. Obviously something she said actually worked to get him to partake, whereas the direct temptations of the devil had failed. Was it the appeal to keep the replenish commandment? Probably not. For in order to stay together, Adam would still need to break a commandment, and the end result would be the same. So why did he partake? It can only be because she was a damsel in distress and he thought to save or rescue her.

How to bring down an adamant Adam

Now this was the devious plan of the adversary, by which he would get around the adamant nature of Adam. The strategy was to use Eve to destroy Adam by putting Eve in peril (through her fall), which would cause Adam to voluntarily put himself in peril (through his own fall) in order to save her. It worked because it was based upon the nature of Adam, which was patterned after God Himself. In other words, although it was Adam’s nature to be totally obedient, it was also his nature to save his loved ones, even if it meant the voluntary sacrifice of his own life. Sound familiar?

Damsel in distress and rescue as gospel principles

As a result of these events, God patterned the entire gospel on that interaction between Adam and Eve, which resulted in the fall. How so?

By partaking of the fruit, Eve became the prototypical damsel in distress and all her daughters would follow this pattern, becoming themselves, in the gospel plan, damsels in distress.

Adam became the prototypical knight in shining armor that puts himself in jeopardy in order to rescue the maiden from the danger she is in, and all his sons would follow this same pattern, becoming saviors (or rescuers) on mount Zion.

The cries of Eve to Adam to save her from her dilemma is the prototypical prayer, by which all prayers to God, in which we plead to Him for mercy and salvation, is patterned after. Just as she wept to Adam, so are we to weep to God. When we perform a proper prayer, after this order of Eve, we take upon us the role of the damsel in distress, and God hears and answers our prayers.

Adam’s response to Eve, in which he condescended to save her from her distress, is the prototype after which the atonement of Jesus Christ is patterned. The condescension of God, then, is patterned after the condescension of Adam.

The male priesthood orders, which administer the ordinances of salvation, are based on the “rescuer,” while all female priesthood orders are based upon the “damsel in distress.”

When Jesus faces God, He pleads with Him in our behalf as a Damsel in Distress. When He faces us, He stands as our Rescuer. When a man faces Christ, he pleads with Him as a damsel in distress. When he faces his wife and children, it is as a rescuer. When a woman faces her husband or Christ, it is as a damsel in distress. When she faces her children, it is as a rescuer. Children all have the role of damsels in distress until they are of age.

The root and pattern of the damsel in distress can be traced to Eve, from the time of her fall, and the rescuer principle can be traced to Adam, from the time of his fall. The gospel given to Adam and Eve after their fall, and given to all of their children, retains the same pattern.

The ancient church, as written in our scriptural canon, was almost entirely based upon assigning men the role of rescuer and women the role of damsels in distress, with but few exceptions. The men fought the wars, not the women, and thus they became the protectors of the women. The men were expected to be the providers for their families (rescuing them from hunger, etc.), not the women. The women and children had claim on their husbands, not the other way around. And when it came to leadership, the leader was typically male. In the modern church, we now use the word preside, which is also an expected role of the men, as stated in the Proclamation on the Family.

Some Book of Mormon instances of damsel in distress

Captain Moroni’s title of liberty was “in defense of our wives.” That is damsel in distress. The kidnapped Lamanite women created a damsel in distress situation which brought out the vast Lamanite army to search for 24 women. Jacob’s rebuke of Nephite husbands because of their desire for additional wives and how they were making their wives feel bad was a damsel in distress theme, the rescue provided by the Lord who sent His prophet to call the husbands to repentance. The Nephites were commanded to defend their wives and children against Lamanite aggression even unto bloodshed. Why didn’t the Lord just authorize the Nephites to wipe out the Lamanite threat? Well, one reason might have been so that Nephite wives would have a continual source of potential distress, in the form of the Lamanites. This would allow them to more fully cleave unto their rescuing husbands.

Damsel in distress found in non-gospel cultures

Because the damsel in distress theme has gospel origins from the time of our first parents, it is to be expected that we would find it played out in many different non-gospel cultures and stories of all ages, and that is, in fact, what we see.

Fascinating Womanhood was based on damsel in distress

The book, Fascinating Womanhood, which was written by a Mormon woman, attempted to teach women what “true” femininity was. As might be expected, it had (and still has) a polarizing effect upon both men and women, some swearing by it, others wanting to burn it. It stood out like a sore thumb among many other self-help books because it claimed to be based on biblical principles, on the very laws of God. It relied heavily upon the damsel in distress theme, where woman were taught to use their weakness to activate a man’s strength, or, to put it another way, they were taught to more fully assume the role of the damsel in distress, to which, it was claimed, men naturally responded (like Adam did) by seeking to rescue them. These teachings completely contradicted modern ideas, which seek to make strong, empowered women that do not need to rely upon men. (Another book was written by the author’s husband, called Man of Steel and Velvet, which was written for men and based upon the rescuer role of men.)

Modern movements against the damsel in distress stereotype

Go back a hundred years and virtually all dramas in plays, movies, radio or print (and later in television) were based on the damsel in distress theme. Times, however, have changed. Now there is a concerted effort in media of all forms to remove it and replace it with either equal roles for the sexes or a dude in distress theme. The strong female who can mop up the floor of any guy or group of guys is now found everywhere. The weak female needing male attention and help is virtually non-existent in current media. The heroine who rescues the dude in distress is becoming more and more prevalent. For example, take Disney, which used to base their fairy tales on damsel in distress and now have the fair maiden saving the man from the fire breathing dragon.   In many of the kiss and sex scenes nowadays in movies and television, it is the woman who initiates (and often dominates) and the man is on the receiving (submissive) end.

The blurring, elimination and/or reversal of the damsel in distress/rescuer theme in media is manifestly intentional. It is done according to a plan. Damsel in distress is painted as a antiquated cultural artifact that needs to be eliminated from society. And much of society has bought into that view. Even Mormon society. For example, ordaining women to the male priesthood orders would confound the damsel in distress and rescuer roles found within the church, yet there are many in the church who feel that this should happen because they do not see damsel in distress as a divinely appointed principle.

Damsel in distress in prophecy

In a previous post, I explained that at some point in the future, the women of the church shall be ordained to the male priesthood orders, and that they would fulfill the prophecy of the wicked, ruling daughters of Zion found in Isaiah 3:12-23. My next post on the orders of the priesthood was an extension of the daughters in Zion post. This post may also be viewed as an extension of the same topic, but in this post I would like to unfold that Isaiah prophecy some more and also tell what will happen afterward.

The return of the order of the Nehors

Given that there are forces at work to subvert the damsel in distress doctrine, both within and without the church, it might be asked, what would be the result of total subversion, meaning these forces completely unfolded? The answer to that question is this: when there are no more damsels in distress, there is no more need for rescue or a rescuer. In other words, there will be no more need for salvation and for a Savior, for all are saved and no one is in distress and all can rejoice. In other words, complete subversion of damsel in distress leads to Nehor’s doctrine.

And it came to pass that in the first year of the reign of Alma in the judgment-seat, there was a man brought before him to be judged, a man who was large, and was noted for his much strength.

And he had gone about among the people, preaching to them that which he termed to be the word of God, bearing down against the church; declaring unto the people that every priest and teacher ought to become popular; and they ought not to labor with their hands, but that they ought to be supported by the people.

And he also testified unto the people that all mankind should be saved at the last day, and that they need not fear nor tremble, but that they might lift up their heads and rejoice; for the Lord had created all men, and had also redeemed all men; and, in the end, all men should have eternal life.

And it came to pass that he did teach these things so much that many did believe on his words, even so many that they began to support him and give him money.

And he began to be lifted up in the pride of his heart, and to wear very costly apparel, yea, and even began to establish a church after the manner of his preaching. (Alma 1:2-6)

Notice, in particular, that Mormon describes Nehor as being “lifted up in the pride of his heart” and he said that he began “to wear very costly apparel,” which is a similar description to how Isaiah described the wicked, ruling daughters of Zion in Isaiah 3:12-23. The daughters of Zion, then, spoken of by Isaiah in those verses, will be Nehors.

A change in conditions

Subversion of damsel in distress and the rescuer principles can only happen during times of economic prosperity and peace, for when women have money and can provide for their own, and have no need for protection, or can purchase it with their money, they do not need to be rescued by any man. Therefore, the Lord will deal with His wicked daughters by changing the conditions among men, taking away the prosperity and peace, so that Isaiah 3: 24-26 and Isaiah 4:1 will be the next thing that happens, ushering in an immediate re-installment of the damsel in distress and rescuer doctrine, for all women left alive will be in distress and will look to any man left alive to rescue them. Thus, all those who remain alive will be humbled to the dust.

And it shall come to pass, that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink; and instead of a girdle a rent; and instead of well set hair baldness; and instead of a stomacher a girding of sackcloth; and burning instead of beauty.

Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy mighty in the war.

And her gates shall lament and mourn; and she being desolate shall sit upon the ground.

And in that day seven women shall take hold of one man, saying, We will eat our own bread, and wear our own apparel: only let us be called by thy name, to take away our reproach. (Isaiah 3: 24-26;4:1)

Now, the Lord’s plan is to use the same instrument to distress the wicked, ruling daughters of Zion as He did the ancient Nephite women, namely, Lamanite aggression. All those souls that survive shall repent of their sins and cleave unto their husbands, and the husbands unto their wives.

What of the righteous?

These prophecies speak of men and women who will, in their wickedness, confound the gospel doctrines of damsel in distress and rescue, but one might ask, will the righteous, meaning those who promote and support these divine principles, be among the people of the Lord when the prophesied destruction takes place? The answer is, “No.” The Lord will remove all of His people who obey His laws to places of safety prior to the Lamanites being sent in, but know this: prior to that time, all those who refuse to support any philosophy of (wo)men that subverts the Lord’s damsel in distress principle, will be tested with persecution. So, plan accordingly.

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THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF GENOCIDE Pt. 2 – Not Side-Tracked but Related Thoughts on the Relation of Thought to the Predicament of Man and Womankind

WHAT WERE WE THINKING?!

Have you ever given much thought to thought? Thought is always either a memory about the past or a fantasy about the future. Thoughts appear in the present, but their content is always about the past or future because there is never enough time in the present to have a thought about the present. You can’t think that fast. By the time you think about an event, it is already in the past. The late, great and rightly named comic genius, Mitch Hedburg, was well aware that the thoughts flying through one’s head are merely the tip of the iceberg. He used humor to point out the fleeting nature of thought with the following joke.

One time, this guy handed me a picture of himself. He said, “Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.” Every picture of you is of you when you were younger. Now tell me,  “Here’s a picture of me when I’m older,” and I’ll say, “How’d you pull that off?! Lemme see that camera… what’s it look like?”

When we try to capture or take in the moment with thought, we are like pathetic tourists, everywhere, incessantly flashing photos, so busy documenting the life God has given us now in hopes of getting around to enjoying it later. But the after-life looms forever on the horizon and is unobtainable except through Christ. To live a Christ-Centered life means to live in the present. In Holy Scripture we are admonished to keep the image of Christ upon the Cross constantly before our eyes, like crosshairs which help us keep from looking beyond the mark. “Let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord,” says Alma (Alma 37:36). LDSA does a nice job of exploring this principle in his post entitled, “And the Labor Which They Had to Perform Was To Look.” How can we walk by faith if we are forever focusing on one of the two thieves of time known as past and future, who are hanging on either side of Christ Jesus as a distraction?

Scriptures can help but scriptures are just scripts and when we become too sure of our script the same script-sure in which we think we have eternal life (John 5:39), starts to play tricks on our mind. One more joke from Hedburg illustrates the prideful position man takes in relation to his God when he fails to understand that everything has meaning and that meaning is multi-layered and endless.

“I wrote a script and gave it to a guy that reads scripts. And he read it and said he really likes it, but he thinks I need to rewrite it. I said, “F#¢% that, I’ll just make a copy.”

Forget what you think. It is outdated. It is preventative to the flow of faith. For example, right now you’re probably thinking, “What does all this have to do with genocide?” In the words of Tevye, the Yiddish milkman, “I’ll tell you…I don’t know.” That is the best that our thought can produce without help from on high – TRADITION! The false traditions of the fathers are false gods. When man has a thought it produces a form which hovers above his head. This thought-form will glean, collect, seek out, solicit and even provoke the production of similar thought that it may cleave with itself. Cleave is an interesting verb which can mean either ‘to split’ or ‘to stick to’. Thought forms can be divisive and work ‘to cleave’ our brains right down the corpus callosum. They also cleave to anything of a similar vibration. We read in D&C 88:40, that:

“Intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence; wisdom receiveth wisdom; truth embraceth truth; virtue loveth virtue; light cleaveth unto light; mercy hath compassion on mercy and claimeth her own; justice continueth its course and claimeth its own”

But in our pride do we fail to connect this with earlier verses in this same section which clearly state that Christ himself is in and through all things, the light of truth? Our faulty thinking can see only one thing at any given moment and it rejects more than it reflects the light of Christ which is in all things. If our thoughts truly reflect the light then the resulting thought forms will recognize the same light in others. We will comprehend all things as our own. But tragically, most apply the words of the scriptures in a destructive and partial manner, claiming, cleaving to, embracing and loving only that which looks like their selves in terms of gender or race.  By this point in history the atmosphere above our heads is thick with pollution and the resulting fog of mistaken thought forms thick mists of darkness which lead many astray. Whereas thought could be used as a laser beam of precision to direct in the way we should go, more often than not we find that the valve is broken and the eternal flow from Right and Left hemispheres of our brain, clash violently.

The House of David is the House Divided. Seen as a dangerous and foreign fertility goddess, feeling is fought by thought. Thinking to ourselves that “Father knows best” we secede the rights of divine Kingship over to Saul who is solar (Saul-ar), masculine (Mask-you-line), 100% Man! He’s got the crown, the armor, everything. Only one slight problem – there is no such thing as 100% man since masculinity is only 50% of the universe at most, just as the sunshine is only half of each day. So inevitably David, the young punk, poet-king breaks up the line of succession, switches up the direction and eventually gives rise to Solomon. Sol-o-Mon, as his name indicates, is a balanced mix of Solar and Lunar energy. This is what makes him such a wise, feeling and thinking, ruler.

I am not saying that all of these characters were merely symbolic, they are real in of themselves, but they are obviously, additionally, signs and types of something more real than dynasties which come and go through the ages. Every thought of man is by nature a passing one. All empires are based on thought. That’s why they all come and go. Only two in the history of the world have even made it to the thousand year mark. (If you don’t know about the Vedic and Aksumite empires, you might wanna aksumbody.) The overwhelming majority of earthly kingdoms last much less than 500 years. Meanwhile we have the Aboriginal peoples of Australia who, in isolated pockets, have been living with the same order since the dawn of time.

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES – THE BEGINNING AND END OF ALL BATTLES

In this age, thought is more tyrannical than anything. Each bunk brick we lay at the behest of the Pharaonic (or we could say paranoiac) Line of Thought, only buttresses belief in bloated priest-hood-lums. Every line of reasoning that gave rise to lines of authority, to keep us in line throughout the delineation of time up to this modern era, has done so by the use of little lines configured into letters, strung into words and sentences served in bondage to man’s law. Linguistics is not in of itself evil. It is a wonderful tool given us by a loving Father in Heaven. But beware of cunning linguists who seek to transpose your personal and private modes of divine discourse. Always remember:

 ”Every man prays in his own language, and there is no language that God does not understand.“

Thus spoke Duke Ellington, a man who attuned himself to the music of the spheres to channel joy into the hearts of people. But even music can be deconstructed and used for the nefarious purposes of the ‘boys only’ band of robber barons which oppress us today. Linga-linga-ling! Is the sound of the bells, and Shiva’s lingam is resembled by the shape of the whistles which bid us slave and languish under the self-proclaimed Masters of Language. Pharaoah’s priests are not magical only tricky. Linguistically removing the Phallic ‘Ph’ of ‘Ph-araonic’ bloodlines, then rearranging the DNA into an impossible base pairing of (a)denine to (a)denine for a supposedly new and improved AAronic Priesthood, only results in a lesser priesthood or having less priesthood. The refined spirit of the Prophet Joseph sweeping the land today, more alive than the living-dead zombie leaders in Salt Lake, trumps all past foolishness and urges us to abolish the useless and non-eternal, Old Testament idea that….

 “God made Aaron to be the mouthpiece for the children of Israel, and He will make me be god to you in His stead, and the Elders to be mouth for me; and if you don’t like it, you must lump it.”
Joseph Smith — History of the Church 6:319-320

In latter-day practice Aaronic Priesthood is nothing more than a spiritual castration. Political eunuchs are needed to serve under higher-ranking priests in the false order. As guardians of wicked rulers’ harems, it is essential that they can be trusted not to share’em. Priesthood which is designated as Aaronic, apart from being based on a false concept altogether, is, in a way, also a misnomer. As it is currently used among LDS, the thing should more accurately be termed the Eunuch Priesthood. Of course this is all a joke, as the real and royal priesthood which is meant to serve alongside and be served by the Melchizedek Priesthood is not this Eunuch Priesthood but the Yonic Priesthood. This organization should and shall be filled by Queens and Priestesses of immense power not witnessed on the earth since pre-His-Story when Her-Story swept stoically and majestically across the land. Women enjoyed great power until the reforms of king Urukagina of Lagash (ca. 2300 BC)

Today’s world is one where almost all Holy Priesthood is of almost no effect, almost all of the time, since, according to D&C 121:39, “it is the nature and disposition of almost all men” to exercise unrighteous dominion almost as soon as they think they have gotten a little authority. But shedding the natural-man, orthodoxy-mormon, we can see that ‘all/most’ is an oxy-moron. Most is not all and “almost all men” does not necessarily mean that “almost all men and women” are equally susceptible to corruption. Let me be clear, the Brains & Brawn approach of the false priesthood definitely draws on Eva Braun’s evil energy for in-fellation of the ba-looney mind-state of the Great Brain. But Most of the Universe, in terms of mass, is composed of Mater-n-al Mater-i-al (Madona is a Material Girl). The Divine Mask-u-line does not take up the same amount of Space as he disseminates himself to fill her immensity. (D&C 88:12) Most of All, D&C 121 is the Word of God to LDS people, explaining that the fullness of the operation of Pre-Stood power depends entirely on the co-operation of men and women in unison. Miracles are only possible when copulation between Left and Right brain hemispheres occurs. Personal harmony is the key and as Justin has written regarding this topic….

“The Eastern concept of the yin and yang is a symbol for explaining the dance that goes on between the masculine and feminine aspects within each individual person.  Whether we chose to have a male or female gender as a personage – we are all comprised of masculine and feminine particles, aspects, and characteristics. When in balance within an individual person, the right-brain-heart will receive [feminine/yin] inspiration and the left-brain-mind will act upon [masculine/yang] that idea and be the tool that carries out the will.”

The greater part of the majority of male humans are obviously corrupt and much of the female population may very well be infected too. But what is that part that hath corrupted the vineyard? Is it not the loftiness of the branches or the haughtiness of so much thoughtiness, which doth encumber the trees? If the Left Brain activity were to be trimmed back, we would suddenly and automatically find the critical mass, so sorely needed to deliver the Zion Child into this world. It is not to be found in yet another quorum of brethren but in our sisters and mothers. Or in other words: Jack Sprat could eat no fat, His Wife could eat no lean, and so, betwixt them both, they licked the platter clean. Aaronically and ironically, it is always the thought we most quickly dismiss which is, in reality, the Chief Cornerstone. Square in-between the two great ones (Thought and Feeling) is the greatest. Between The Father and The Mother, is cradled the Soulution to all our problems. He is the Answer to the questions of all the ages.

In chemistry, which comes to us from Khemet (the Black Land of Ham), a solution is a homogeneous mixture composed of only one phase (state of matter). In such a mixture, a solute (male priesthood) is a substance dissolved in another substance, known as a solvent (female priesthood). The solvent does the dissolving. Jamaican Patois translation: Di Queen, She duz di solvin’. So if we ever want to solve humanity’s problems we will have to confess the vital and eternal greatness of the woman. Then, in harmony, we may watch as the problems are dissolved before our very eyes. Chemistry also shows that the Solution (Son) more or less takes on the characteristics of the Solvent (Mother Matter) including its phase, and the solvent is commonly the major fraction of the mixture. The concentration of a Solute (Father) in a solution is a measure of how much of that solute is dissolved in the solvent. Here then, we are given the formula for creating Christ Children. The proper role of thought in this process is as a concentrator to direct the condescension of God the Father into Material/Maternal form.

When Nephi saw the Virgin in vision, he was asked by the angel, “Knowest thou the condescension of God?” (1 Nephi 11:16), he answered humbly, “I know that he loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.” After which Nephi sees that the Virgin was carried away in the Spirit, and after the space of a time, he sees her bearing a child in her arms. Obviously there was a whole 9 month gestational period and the birthing itself that fateful night in Bethlehem. But the vision seems to flash forward, like in a movie where the sex scene is implied but not explicitly shown. Had Nephi been able to reply that he did indeed know the condescension of God, would the angel have let the akashic footage of the Immaculate Conception play out unedited and thereby clear up much of the mystery surrounding that event?

As it is, we are left to speculate. I do not believe that tenth president of the LDS Church, Joseph Fielding Smith, could honestly answer that he understood the matter any better than Nephi. But he certainly sounded sure of himself when he said, “Christ was not begotten of the Holy Ghost. Christ was begotten of God. He was not born without the aid of man, and that man was God!” (Doctrines of Salvation, V. 1, pg. 18, 1954). Unlike President Smith, I do not pretend to know. But also unlike his critics I do not exclude any possibilities, judging them by the inappropriate human perversion of incest. Neither do I believe in the catholic version of the Immaculate Conception. The record says that the angel Gabriel “came in unto” Mary, whereas an angel appears to Joseph in a dream only. Whether by angel, spirit, or even a roman soldier as recent theorists have speculated, there is no doubt that it was done by the power of God. I, like Nephi, do not know the meaning of all things, but I do know that God loves His children. My belief in and first-hand knowledge of that love and its power leaves my mind open to any possibility even one as seemingly horrendous as impregnation by a roman soldier. The Holy Spirit has the power to purify even the lowliest of forms. Stranger vehicles for the work of the Lord have been used and what could have concentrated Mary’s thoughts more intensely on the desire for the promised Messiah who would deliver all men from oppression? No matter the details of the matter, it was done according to the words of the angel by the power of the Most High and through the pure faith of His Handmaiden.

The coming together of divine masculine and feminine energies, the sacred art of Sexual Alchemy, of which, sciences such as metallurgy and chemistry are merely an externalized furtherance, may be badly misused, but as a point of convergence between the seen and unseen, it at least still provides explanations for many occurrences in observable reality which will elude most men, whether they be of scientific mind, religious or both. These two seemingly split camps are in fact joined by an invisible medium through which they perceive each other as enemies on a battle field. This misunderstood and usually unacknowledged medium is also the force through which either party works what they refer to as modern miracles. The miracle of birth will remain the greatest of all. But this condescension of God is not limited to the moment of conception. In fact, later on in Chapter 11 of 1 Nephi, Nephi hears his angel guide announce: “Look and behold the condescension of God!” The images that follow are of Jesus’ Baptism at the hand of John and the immediate descending and abiding of the Holy Ghost upon Him. This coming of the Holy Ghost upon an individual is the common element in both Mary and Jesus’ experiences. If the Holy Ghost is interpreted as the Divine Feminine, as per all ancient Hebrew and Gnostic scripture, then we see at play that same truth expressed in chemistry, namely, that the Solution (Son) more or less takes on the characteristics of the Solvent (Mother Matter) including its phase, and the solvent is commonly the major fraction of the mixture. The ratio of Divine Masculine to Divine Feminine energy throughout the universe at any given moment never exceeds 50/50 and is more often than not, expressed in a 40/60 balance. The more subconscious the dosage of The Word, and the more the mixture favors Humanity, the more potent the message.

This is why Jesus came primarily to preach to the Jew but to redeem also the Gentile. His mission: To remind the Jews of their own roots in a distant past when it wasn’t just about what ‘jew’ did and not at all about what ‘jew’ looked like. Anyone could be a Hebrew, welcome and accepted within the laid-back and loving camp of Abraham and Sarah. Simultaneously set apart from the rest and one with all, they reveal God’s wisdom. For whenever a thing is split, by absolutely any ratio of fractions, there are always two factions. Which will survive? -That remnant which lends itself to mixture. Throughout all scripture and throughout the Book of Life, you will never see God work with a remnant without mixing it. He is a chemist, nay, The Chemist or Al-Chemist of all creation. Considering the Strage Alchemical Work of the Father in creating Spiritual and Chemical Solutions, it is extremely interesting to note that when it comes to Jews in particular, even Senior Nazi officials referred to their genocidal program as “The Final Solution” to the Jewish Question. But neither their evil works nor those implemented by Americanazis in regards to what was once called the Negro Question, can thwart the work of the Lord. Hebrew hardens into Jew, necessitating a breakdown wherein Jew is preserved in Sephardim, further morphed into Ladino, later becoming Latino. In Spanish there is a little rhyme that says,

“En lo puro no hay futuro. La pureza está en la mezcla” – meaning, “There is no future in the pure. Purity is in the mix.”

Contrary to our rigid racial stereo-types, ‘Latino’ could describe anyone from the whitest to the blackest with origins in Latin America. Among this Afro-Euro-Moorish mix here in the Americas, there is another important and wide-spread component. That is the additive of the Lamanite remnant which is itself a mixture of various groups. The Nephite blood is here so diffused that it is already non-detectable to the science of genetic researchers. This is because, the particles of solute in solution cannot be seen by the naked eye. Diffusion of the blood leads to distillation of the essence and this distillation not only purifies but literally de-stills, stirs, activates the power of resurrection in the spirit; awakening it and liberating it from its dormant state of bondage.

“As ye have looked upon the long absence of your spirits from your bodies to be a bondage, I will show unto you how the day of redemption shall come, and also the restoration of the scattered Israel.” (D&C 45:17)

The Ten Tribes, lost in thought, wonder as they wander through this male-chauvinistic, Male-Chizedek, dominated world. In this state they will always find it necessary to retreat. The only way for us to actually advance in the cause of truth will be to re-think and re-link to those re-ligious re-lics of a time be-fore time. A healthy reintroduction of vitamin B-4 (Adenine) is just the thing to make that link. Taking by the hand, the happy Goddess who was shunned in her Edenic glory and labeled He-donic, we can rescue Mother Earth and her daughters from this He-donic Regression which hacks them into separate parts and views each only in terms of its market value. Learn to love pleasure. Invite love again into the realm of wholesome recreation or it will forever remain tied to guilt in the fragmented domain of whole/some wreck-creation. Guilty pleasure inflicts us with misconceptions and miscarriages as the pure angelic fetuses are smothered in our suffocating sea of unnecessary shame. It leaves us painfully vulnerable to the ravishes of STDs, which bear the signs of having been man-u-fractured in scientific laboratories to indiscriminately kill adults and children by first discriminating against and killing the innocence and free spirit of certain target groups. Stop categorizing your brothers and sisters as Heathens and Sheathens and learn to see-them for who they truly are. Demonyms or gentilics are words that are used to classify people. They seem to serve a helpful function, but too often they’re used to demonize. Class divides and labels limit. To categorize (from kata,”down to” and agora “public assembly,”) is to put down and gossip. Dr. Iyanla Vanzant declares:

“I have a voice. I say the important things that need to be said. I do not waste my voice on gossip, slander or disrespect of myself, my sisters or other people. I know the power of the spoken word and I use my words wisely.”

In many modern languages we read from Left to Right. Left Brain thinks it is taking the lead when we read but in actuality, by the passive-aggressive progression of words on the page he is pushing the Heart through a narrow doorway and then thinking himself chivalrous for doing so. “M’lady” turns to malady. In the case of the sequence, D-N-A – where the ‘A’ is Adenine – if we would only return to the order of more ancient tongues (Right to Left) we would discover a world of endless possibilities by simply converting the self-limiting reading of “D-N-A” into an everlasting, open-ended “A-N-D?” Our nice-guy training has remade us in the image of the landed gentry. Genteel cult-sure is nothing more than a bunch of Gentiles parading about as so-called Gentlemen, referring to their spiritually ill ilk as “well-bred” while breeding fellow humans like wild-stock. Too long we have held to a backwards exploitation of the principle of “Ladies First” sending the women on ahead while we hide behind them. This is not putting women first in our lives, as real men should.

No more “Mr. Nice Guy”! Ne (Not) Scire (To Know), To be nice literally means to be stupid, weak, needy and foolish. Of course the greatest foolishness of the “Nice Guy” is in his social training. He will open the door for his wife and children, then along comes an old woman and he is obliged to hold the door for her. Soon a gaggle of unobservant and irreverent teenagers happen along and the Nice Guy’s social standing dictates that he not shut the door in their face, much less the ungrateful and self-absorbed businessman who rushes through the doorway in route for some important meeting no doubt. There is no jamming his ‘door-stop’ programming. He remains paralyzed as the ravenous wolves storm through an open door, manned or we may say un-manned, by his pitiful self. The Nice Ones are sworn to a Nicene Creed, the negative effects and very existence of which, they themselves are oblivious to. The Nice Guys in Ties are killing us. We may say it is the Nazis, but for every Nazi that rises to power there are literally hundreds of Niceys who uphold and sustain them. The Nazis could not do the evil they do without the aid of the Niceys.

To preside with First Lady by your side can be glorious and virtuous, but to rule together with a Quorum of Queens is a heaven much higher than most men, whether Christian, Jew or Muslim, ever reach in this life or the next. How many can sing with the confidence of Fela Anikulapo Kuti?

Somebody come bring trouble
You no talk, you no act You say you be gentleman

You go suffer
You go tire
You go quench

Me, I no be gentleman like that
I no be gentleman at all

I be African man original!

Gentleman – Fela Kuti

The time is long overdue for all Zion seekers to reassess and challenge the way we think about gender roles. Your thoughts about who you are will never adequately represent who you are. Entrenched thought will trap us in ruts, breaking our backs, digging ditches and falling in them along with the task-masters of Babylonian thought. One of the best ways to stop building Babylon is to stop thinking so much.

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it —– ALWAYS.”                                                                                          Mohandas K. Gandhi

It is what is back of the thought that, if allowed to break forth in waves strong and steady, will break down the damnation of paralyzed thought processes. Unless put to use as true spiritual training for total revolution, recreational thought of the type engaged in on blogs like this one will deteriorate to wreck-creation-all. What I mean is that any immaterial or material creation based on ideas without eternal spirit basically amounts to a piñata full of sweet nothings and just as the party gets started it will be torn to pieces – by little children no less. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a man who knew a thing or two about righteous action; having witnessed and stood boldly face to face with the cruelty of genocide, said:

“Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”

So go deep in your heart unafraid and unashamed. What do you feel about the state of affairs in the world today? Now what do you think you ought to do today? If the two do not mesh then some repentance/rethinking is in order. If we have a truly re-pensive attitude we will see that there is no need to correct the heart, only to let it flow. By so doing, the stagnant waters will cleanse themselves naturally. We can put our minds to better use as canals for the fountain of all righteousness and channels for the purification of thought.

THE C.C.C. – COLLECTIVE CAUCASIAN CONSCIOUSNESS

I believe that all people, white, black, red or yellow, raised in a society where racism has been (and still is) so prevalent, will have internalized various elements of racist thinking: certain beliefs, stereotypes, assumptions, and judgments about others and themselves. Although the white man is fond of monopolizing things, he by no means has a monopoly on evil. I hope to be perfectly clear when stating that it takes two to tango. But I will touch on this devilish dance later on. Right now I wish to address “my people,” the so-called “Fair Ones”.

The overhang of thought forms peculiar to the Japhetic race could be termed the Collective Caucasian Consciousness or C.C.C. Its mark can be easily identified and is seen in many dark corners, but nowhere more prominently than in the religious realm. 501c3 is the designation for religious organizations granted tax-exempt status in order “that they might the more easily commit adultery, and steal, and kill, and do according to their own wills,” (Helaman 7:5). In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints we see the formation of that great and abominable Church Correlation Committee in the 1920s which morphed into a Curriculum Correlation Committee in 1960. Originally and intentionally created to keep white American members sheltered from the onslaught Hippies and their Free Love ideology so they could in turn school non-white converts in the double-minded Gentile tradition of “Work We Must But the Lunch is Free”. The Priesthood Correlation Committee, as it came to be called, eventually overran the internationally expanding Church with a crippling Gringo Gospel that stifled the spirit of the saints like never before. Today Mormon manifestations of the C.C.C abound with fine-twined linens and all manner of precious clothing, City Creek Center heralds the arrival of The Golden Man who Lucifer prophesied would be bought and built with precious metals. He has nearly finished his work, making droids of each of us. Indeed we may say along with C3PO, “Protocol is my primary function.” A golden, glittering, automated army of “Mormon Millionaires” join the swarm of killer White Anglo Saxon Protestant churches preaching and practicing “Prosperity Theology” like Christian City Church who in recent years changed its name to simply C3. This conspicuous move shows the raw reasons behind such suspicious yet streamlined, if only subconscious, employ which the Devil makes of the Triple C energy through the minds of man.

What is this synchronicity we see appearing and should it be dismissed as mere coincidence? As a young, gifted and black boy, Michael Jackson sang out simple secrets like, “ABC, as easy as 123,” but when his parents sold him to Master Masons, they indoctrinated his endocrine system with their system of god-complex mathematics, giving him one shiny white glove and promising the other later. Pursuing the priesthood outside of his self, Michael died an old, bamboozled and white man. But the Supreme Mathematics still hold true. So, ABC=123 and the Triple C is Triple Three. The sacred power of the Trinity is misapplied by the C.C.C. in “diverse” ways. Vitamin C3, or Ascorbyl Palmitate, is Vitamin C that has been turned into a fatty acid so that it is lipid-soluble and not just water-soluble. This is a sign and type of the way in which C.C.C. (Collective Caucasian Consciousness) gets applied, or misapplied to the skin. Always preferring to work from the outside inward, we play into the white-gloved hands of the apron-clad adversary, who said to the progenitors of the Adamic race: “Cover your nakedness!”                        We were told that it was for our protection from “dangerous” UV rays which The Sun emanates daily. This skin-deep application of The Light is akin to partaking of only the bread while rejecting the wine of the Holy Sacrament. This is precisely what our progenitor, Cain, did when he refused to make a blood sacrifice and instead tried to content his spirit with only grains. When we come to hear Jesus preach to the throngs, do we come for the free food and fail to appreciate the sprit which we deny entrance into our temples? Well some of it will inevitably soak in. But what makes us feel that we need to be so damned modest or moderate with our intake of The Light? Are we so fond of our whiteousness that we would reject righteousness and content our-cellves with a lack of spiritual content. We need not embody and let the light shine from within when we can appear pure on the outside, or so goes the thinking.

Now our skin is white. The mark of C.C.CAIN is upon us and as it seeps into our neural tissues it eventually resurfaces in sometimes violent reactions as the mark of K.K.KAIN. Sliding from C to K, 3 to 2 we pretend not to notice our devolution. But inwardly we feel something missing which leaves our immune system vulnerable to attacks from Germ-Men Think Tanks who come to blast our inner children out of the Garden of Eden, round them up and put them in Kinder-Gardens. We strive desperately to focus our concentration in these camps on what is being taught. Even though their religious teachers placed so much importance on the number 12, it is only a side by side grouping of numbers 1 and 2 which if truly joined become 3, so there was never any need for the student to move beyond the 3. Our inner children think that they can once again attain to that level of priesthood they enjoyed in their pre-existential state of completion by completing Sunday School   [] drills and proving themselves worthy upon reaching the age of 12. They figure that 3×4=12. But K-12 does nothing for them and in fact weakens them. “Keep going,” they are told. They feel terribly disillusioned when – starting from K (aka 2) and advancing through the ranks of ¹ Elementary ² Middle School ³ High School, and ⁴ College, they end up one short of the ‘9’ that was promised or advertised by the 3.3.3. This is because 2×4=8 and the 2ality introduced into their minds during their initiation causes them to forget to add the True Self to the equation. Focused on a false, outward self, they never learn that I am You, I=U, 9=3. We have been fooled and schooled to embrace our race above and to the de-gradation of all else. But the gradation from tint (light) to shade (dark) blinds and binds us with a false sense of place within an ordered scale. This instills a psychologically perceived need to advance by regular degrees through a Church of Educational Systems, along what the sinister ad-ministers of the 33 degrees tell us is the proper way but is, in reality, a CES-spool of madness.

Talking to myself

This is me asking myself questions and then answering them. It is just an exercise, in which I take a text and interpret it, to see what I come up with. I’m posting it here because I found it interesting. You can read along and watch the process evolve, if you like, but please keep in mind that these are just thoughts. Don’t take any of this as gospel, except the quoted scriptures. My text is D&C 98:4-18.

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and now | verily | i say unto you |

concerning the laws of the land |

it is my will | that my people should observe to do all things | whatsoever i command them |

and that law of the land | which is constitutional | supporting that principle of freedom | in maintaining rights and privileges | belongs to all mankind | and is justifiable before me | therefore | i | the lord | justify you | and your brethren of my church | in befriending that law | which is the constitutional law of the land |

and as pertaining to law of man |

whatsoever is more or less than this | cometh of evil | (DAC 98:2)

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The laws of the land

Question: What is the will of the Lord concerning the laws of the land?

Answer: It is the will of the Lord that His people should observe to do all things whatsoever He commands them.

Q: Why does the Lord answer a question on His will concerning man-made laws with a direction to obey His heaven-sent (revealed) laws?

A: See the rest of this post.

The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights

Q: What is the will of the Lord concerning the U.S. Constitution?

A: It is the will of the Lord that only that part of the constitution which supports that principle of freedom in maintaining rights and privileges is justifiable before him, and that His people are justified in befriending that portion of the Constitution.

Q: Which part of the constitution is He referring to?

A: The Bill of Rights. (See What the Lord has said about the Constitution.)

The Bill of Rights is the collective name for the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution. These limitations serve to protect the natural rights of liberty and property. (Wikipedia entry for United States Bill of Rights.)

A bill of rights is a list of the most important rights of the citizens of a country. The purpose of these bills is to protect those rights against infringement. (Wikipedia entry for Bill of Rights.)

Q: Why does the Lord say that this part of the U.S. Constitution (the Bill of Rights) “belongs to all mankind”?

A: Because the Americans of that time viewed these principles as only applying to white men and the Lord was correcting this perversion by showing that the Bill of Rights protected all people in their rights and privileges, whether black, white, male, female, bond, free, American or non-American. In other words, God does not view the principles embodied in the Bill of Rights as limited in their scope of protection to only a sub-set of the human population of this planet.

Originally, the Bill of Rights implicitly legally protected only white men, excluding American Indians, people considered to be “black” (now described as African Americans), and women. These exclusions were not explicit in the Bill of Right’s text, but were well understood and applied. (Wikipedia entry on United States Bill of Rights.)

When the Lord states in His preface to the Doctrine and Covenants, “for verily the voice of the Lord is unto all men,” this includes all of His written words which are sent out among men under inspiration of the Holy Ghost, for all things written by the power (or under the inspiration) of the Holy Ghost and publicly published “belongs to all mankind,” therefore, this shows that the Bill of Rights, although penned by the hand of men, was inspired of the Holy Ghost. The Bill of Rights, then, cannot be applicable to only a subset of society, but must, of necessity, be applicable to all mankind, just as the revelations of God given to the Gentiles of this nation apply to the Gentiles of all nations*.

This also shows that the Federalists were not inspired of God, as is currently viewed by many LDS and Christians, for the Federalists were the ones who desired and created the U.S. Constitution and it was their intention to bring forth that document without a bill of rights.

And this shows also that the Anti-Federalists were inspired of God, for it was they who were against the U.S. Constitution and it was their insistence upon a bill of rights that allowed one to be created and attached to the constitution.

Q: Was the Bill of Rights the only inspired part of the U.S. Constitution?

A: Yes, the Bill of Rights was the only inspired part of the U.S. Constitution. This is why the Lord qualifies which part of the constitution is justifiable before Him. In other words, the only part of the U.S. Constitution that the Lord’s people are justified in befriending is the part that was inspired by Him.

Q: What about the other parts of the U.S. Constitution? Are we justified in befriending the other parts?

A: No, we are not, for the Lord categorically states, “Whatsoever is more or less than this, cometh of evil.”

Q: Does this mean that the U.S. Constitution is evil, excepting only the Bill of Rights, which was inspired of God?

A: Yes, that is exactly what it means. It means that the devil inspired men to write the U.S. Constitution, and all other man-made laws, excepting only bills of rights. Bills of rights, which protect all people in their rights and privileges, are inspired of the Spirit of freedom, which is the Holy Ghost, and are justifiable before the Lord. Everything else is evil in the sight of the Lord.

*Because the Lord has approved of, or justified, the Bill of Rights, latter-day saints are fully authorized to include it as part of their scriptural canon. This is not to say that it is scripture, for it was not written by the power of the Holy Ghost, nor does it contain the revealed words of God, nevertheless, as an inspired and approved writing, it may be used to defend or safeguard one’s rights in a church setting.

To give a brief example, as to what I mean, let’s look at the sixth amendment:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

All of these enumerated rights apply equally in any church prosecution, for this justified, inspired text is inalienable property of all mankind, including the saints of God who stand accused within the church of God, and they can use it to keep ecclesiastical abuse at bay. In like manner, every single one of the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights is applicable in a church setting, for the word of God does not supersede these protections.

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i | the lord god | make you free | therefore | ye are free indeed |

and the law also maketh you free | nevertheless | when the wicked rule | the people mourn | wherefore | honest men | and wise men | should be sought for diligently | and good men | and wise men | ye should observe to uphold | otherwise | whatsoever is less than these | cometh of evil |

and i give unto you a commandment |

that ye shall forsake all evil | and cleave unto all good |

that ye shall live by every word | which proceedeth forth out of the mouth of god | for he will give unto the faithful line upon line | precept upon precept |

and i will try you | and prove you herewith |

and whoso layeth down his life in my cause | for my name’s sake | shall find it again | even life eternal | therefore | be not afraid of your enemies |

for i have decreed in my heart |

saith the lord |

that i will prove you in all things | whether you will abide in my covenant | even unto death | that you may be found worthy |

for if ye will not abide in my covenant | ye are not worthy of me | therefore | renounce war | and proclaim peace | and seek diligently to turn the hearts of the children to their fathers | and the hearts of the fathers to the children |

and again | the hearts of the jews unto the prophets | and the prophets unto the jews |

lest i come | and smite the whole earth with a curse | and all flesh be consumed before me |

let not your hearts be troubled | for in my father’s house are many mansions | and i have prepared a place for you | and where my father and i am | there ye shall be also | (DAC 98:3)

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The Lord makes us free

Q: What does the Lord mean when He says, “I, the Lord God, make you free, therefore, ye are free indeed.”

A: He is speaking of the atonement and resurrection that He Himself wrought, which through repentance and faith on the Lord has power to break every band and free every people, even from the devil’s spiritual bondage.

The law makes us free

Q: To what law is the Lord referring when He says, “And the law also maketh you free”?

A: He is referring to all those laws given by the Spirit of freedom (which is the Holy Ghost), which encompass all the revealed laws of God, which free us from the power of the evil one. The Bill of Rights may also be included, for they were penned by men writing under inspiration of the Holy Ghost and they help to maintain our God-given rights.

This “law that makes us free” has no qualifications for justification before the Lord, unlike the uninspired, man-made laws do, because this law is given under revelation or inspiration of heaven, and thus tends toward increasing one’s agency. Every other kind of law, whether commandments of men or doctrines of devils, tends toward bondage, and thus is inspired of the devil.

Wicked rulers

Q: What was the Lord referring to when He spoke of wicked rulers? Were these wicked political leaders?

A: The principle encompasses every area of life, whether political, social, religious, tribal or family, but specifically, He had view of the rulers of His church, meaning the priesthood leadership of His covenant people, for these are the only ones who have the law that makes one free indeed (meaning freed from the devil’s power of captivation), which are the revealed laws of God.

I refer back to the original question: What is the will of the Lord concerning the laws of man? To obey the law of God, that is His will concerning the laws of man. Over and over again in this and other revelations, the Lord stresses that all we are required to do is keep His commandments. Now, His commandments are found in the word of God, or the scriptures. And that word of God is His law. Therefore,

thou shalt take the things | which thou hast received | which have been given unto thee in my scriptures | for a law | to be my law to govern my church | and he | that doeth according to these things | shall be saved | and he | that doeth them not | shall be damned | if he so continue | (D&C 42:59-60)

i am the lord | thy god | and i give unto you this commandment |

that no man shall come unto the father | but by me | or by my word | which is my law |

saith the lord | (D&C 132:12)

And what does the Lord command concerning the laws of the land?

let no man break the laws of the land | for he | that keepeth the laws of god | hath no need to break the laws of the land | wherefore | be subject to the powers that be | until he reigns | whose right it is to reign | and subdues all enemies under his feet |

behold | the laws | which ye have received from my hand | are the laws of the church | and in this light ye shall hold them forth |

behold | here is wisdom | (D&C 58:21-23)

So we see that even here, where the Lord states, “let no man break the laws of the land**,” He still ties it into keeping the laws of God. This is because the only thing that is important to God is that His people keep His sayings. The Lord is not concerned with the laws of men. His only concern is His own law, which He has given to His people. In fact, it is His purpose to do away with all the laws of men and have only His revealed law lived by His people.

but | verily | i say unto you |

that | in time | ye shall have no king | nor ruler | for i will be your king | and watch over you | wherefore | hear my voice | and follow me | and you shall be a free people | and ye shall have no laws | but my laws | when i come | for i am your lawgiver | and what can stay my hand | (D&C 38:22)

So, again, what is the will of the Lord concerning the laws of the land? That we keep the law of God. His focus is always on the heaven-sent laws, for all man-made laws are corrupt, or come of evil, excepting only bills of rights.

For this reason, the wicked rulers that He is specifically referring to are those who cause the people to mourn despite them having the law that makes them free, which is His law. Thus, these wicked rulers are the leaders of His church.

**And what laws of the land is the Lord referring to here? Why, the only laws of the land that are justifiable before Him, namely, the Bill of Rights, for, think about it, if one keeps the laws of God then you cannot be infringing on the rights and privileges which are enumerated in the Bill of Rights. And this is the only meaning of the scripture. It does not mean that there will never be any corrupt, unjustified, man-made laws that will conflict with the laws of God. Of course, there will!  But as far as the Bill of Rights is concerned, there is no conflict between it and the revealed laws of God.

Seeking and upholding good men is, and is not, voting

Q: When the Lord states that we should seek and uphold good, wise, and honest men, is He not talking about the political process?

A: No, He is not talking about the political process, for what does the Lord have to do with the political process? The political process has jurisdiction over a corrupt set of laws, consisting of the commandments of men mingled with doctrines of devils. As the Lord sees the whole gamut of laws as coming of evil, excepting only the Bill of Rights, why would He desire His saints to become involved in such affairs? He has already said that He places the basest of men over the kingdoms of men:

this matter is by the decree of the watchers | and the demand by the word of the holy ones | to the intent that the living may know | that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men | and giveth it to whomsoever he will | and setteth up over it the basest of men | (Daniel 4:17)

That being true, it is a given that wicked rulers and man-made laws go hand in hand, therefore, it is not the place of the saints to attempt to make better (meaning less corrupt, but still, nevertheless, corrupt) man-made laws, or to select good rulers to administer in a better manner the corrupt, man-made laws, for the whole operation is doomed to failure.

No, the place of the saints is to obey the law of God, which is not corrupt, and to make sure that only good, wise and honest rulers are found in the kingdom of God, so that they can administer the good, wise and honest laws of God, that the top may match the root, because if this is not the case, despite the good laws of God, a wicked ecclesiastical ruler will make the lives of the saints a living hell.

Now, this is accomplished in the church of God by making sure that only honest men and wise men are called to the various church positions of authority and responsibility and by making sure that only good men and wise men are elected by vote. And this election is done by vote, by the raising up of the right hand, which is how such men are upheld, or sustained, it being a type of what was done to Moses’ hands.

So, yes, the Lord is referring to an election, even the calling and election of the leaders of his church, but He is not referring to any political election, nor to any political process.

Q: What does the saying, “whatsoever is less than these cometh of evil,” mean, as it concerns the wicked leaders?

A: It means that if the people of the Lord’s church allow wicked leaders to be over them, it with be through their own transgression. It means that the Lord’s people have the responsibility to elect only wise, honest people for the Lord’s church. They are bound to seek out and sustain only such people. If they knowingly sustain any other type of individual, they transgress the law of God.

It also means that the evil one’s strategy is to get wicked rulers into the Lord’s church, that the good laws of God may be ignored, misinterpreted, trampled upon, and perverted. The law of God presents a problem to the adversary, so he attacks the church individually, through individual transgression, or with church-wide effects, through the installment of a wicked ruler. The current environment of voting by rubber-stamp has already set up the conditions whereby wicked rulers may be installed in every level of the church. Nevertheless, the law of God is still there and in effect.

Forsake all evil, cleave to all good

Q: What is the context of the Lord’s commandment to forsake all evil and cleave to all good?

A: It is a commandment given to the saints of God, living within the jurisdiction of the gathered church of God, finding themselves in the midst of a congregation which is ruled over by a wicked ruler. What is a saint to do in such a situation? Well, they are to forsake all evil and cleave to all good. In other words, this is the test of the saints: to be put under covenant to obey the laws of God, to be placed within a congregation and to have wicked rulers placed over them. Now, obey the laws of God, despite the fact that that wicked ruler is going to oppose you. Obey the laws of God, anyway. That is your test.

Q: When the Lord then says to live by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, is this the same context?

A: Yes, the context is the same. The wicked ruler over the church of God, whether of a local or general jurisdiction, will speak words, orders, counsels, which will proceed out of his own mouth, to those who come under his jurisdiction. The Lord, then, says, “you are to live by every word that comes from God,” as opposed to the words coming out of that wicked man’s mouth. The words of God are found in the scriptures. The faithful, meaning those who exercise faith like unto the ancients, will also have more words given to them, precept by precept, by the Holy Ghost, visions, angels, etc. All these words of God, then, are what the saints are to live by. They are not to live by the words of the wicked church ruler.

After these instructions, the Lord then says, “and I will try you and prove you herewith.” So, again, this is the test. Will we keep our covenants and the commandments of the Lord, as written in the scriptures, and as delivered to us by God’s angels, the Holy Ghost, etc., as they come from the Lord’s mouth, or will we follow the wicked rulers placed over us? Will we do so even if it costs us our life? Hence the Lord talking of laying down our lives for His sake.

Who are the enemies?

Q: When the Lord, then, in these verses mentions enemies, when He says to not fear our enemies, who is He talking about?

A: This has broad application, for there are enemies both foreign (outside of the church) and domestic (inside of the church), but the specific context of these words is the enemy found within the church, namely, these wicked rulers. We are not to fear any of these enemies, but are to keep the Lord’s commandments, or as He puts it in this revelation, we are to “observe to do whatsoever He commands us,” and are to simply trust in Him. If we die, we will inherit eternal life. If we live, we still get eternal life. We win in either situation.

At some point in the future history of the church, the wicked church rulers will conspire to kill the saints within their congregations. They will be successful a certain number of times, fulfilling the prophecy about the blood of the saints crying from the ground against them. The Lord in this revelation is calming the fears of His saints, by telling them to stand for the right, no matter what the church environment is, or how bad it is going to get, to stay true to the covenants and commandments and to live by His words alone, and although blood will be spilled, it will still be well with them.

For all those others who will break their covenants and the commandments of God, by following a wicked church leader, they will be accounted as unworthy of the prize.

Renounce war and proclaim peace

Q: What of the renounce war and proclaim peace bit? Surely, that must be talking of the political process, right?

A: Again, these principles can be applied generally, but there is a specific context to the words, and that is within the context of the church. In other words, at some point the wicked leaders are going to create dissension and conflict, even war among the body of the saints, or a great division. We will see a repeat of the Book of Mormon times, where church members will engage in heated arguments with each other and exchange blows. Amalickiah comes to mind, who himself was a dissident member of the church of God. So, the Lord is beforehand telling them, or giving them the principles whereby they may be guided in wisdom’s paths, namely, that they are not to engage in such behavior. They are to stand for the right, but not to wage war, or encourage war, upon anyone. They are to always hold up the standard of peace, unless commanded by God to hold up the banner of war.

The hearts of the children and fathers

Q: What is the Lord referring to when He talks about turning the hearts of the children to the fathers and the hearts of the fathers to the children?

A: It refers to the dissension and division which will be among the church, father being divided against son, son against father, mother against daughter, daughter against mother, etc. The saints who live by every word of God will be seeking to mend this division among the church, by getting everyone back together, in a spirit of love, compassion and understanding. Those who break their covenants will be seeking to widen the divide.

Q: So, this passage does not refer to genealogical work and the temple?

A: No, it has reference to this prophesied division and the repair work that the saints of God will be engaged in.

The hearts of the Jews and the prophets

Q: What is the meaning of the saying about turning the hearts of the Jews and prophets to each other?

A: It has reference to the wicked church leaders, and the work of the saints in their midst of turning them back to the Lord, through the words of the prophets, both found in the scriptures and among the population, who will be prophesying, so that the Jews, or leadership, would repent of their sins and become clean again before the Lord. The saints, who will judge all things pertaining to Zion, will seek at that time, to recover the leadership, through preaching and prophesying, or will turn their hearts to the Jews (the leadership.) The Jews (the leadership), will likewise have their hearts turned to the prophets, those prophets who reside in their congregation and those of the scriptures, and will be recovered, at least, those who repent will be recovered, and the rifts mended.

All of these things, which will happen among the Gentile church, is a type or a shadow that will happen among the tribes of Israel, as well, for the Jews (the non-Gentile people of the Lord) will also have their hearts turned to the prophets, and their children and fathers turned to each other.

Let not your hearts be troubled

Q: This saying of “let not your hearts be troubled” appears to be a general theme of this revelation. Why is that?

A: It is because the revelation is a prophetic time-line. It starts out by saying that their prayers will be answered and that they need not fear. (See DAC 98:1.) Then it talks about the laws of man (the State) and a saint’s relationship to those laws, giving permission to befriend only the Bill of Rights. (See DAC 98:2.) Then it goes into what a saint must do when wicked church rulers are found within it. (See DAC 98:3.) Then it holds up the church at Kirkland as a contemporary example of wickedness and gives a warning of chastisement if they do not repent and obey the Lord’s commandments. (See DAC 98:4.) Next, it gives a promise that if the church obeys the Lord’s commandments, essentially every adversary will be turned away from them, including the very Adversary himself. (See DAC 98:5.) And this particular prophecy will be, in part, fulfilled by the wicked turning on each other. The next bunch of sayings (DAC 98:6,7,8,9) deal with anarchic laws of conflict, showing that by that time the Lord will have made an end of nations and people will have once again gone back into the tribes of the earth.

Regardless of where an enemy is found or of which phase of society a saint lives in, whether it is the civic government phase, the wicked church phase, the phase of the division in the church, or the tribal anarchy phase, the saints are told the same message: observe to do all that the Lord commands you, seeking reconciliation and peace, repentance and forgiveness, trusting in the Lord and His promises, doubting nothing and fearing no one (not even your enemies), and if you do this, it will be well with you.

Complete List of Articles authored by LDS Anarchist

Evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother: Let me pull the mote out of thine eye—and behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother’s eye. — Jesus Christ

In the Doctrine and Covenants, we read:

The teacher’s duty is to watch over the church always, and be with and strengthen them; and see that there is no iniquity in the church, neither hardness with each other, neither lying, backbiting, nor evil speaking; and see that the church meet together often, and also see that all the members do their duty. (D&C 20:53-55)

Cease to contend one with another; cease to speak evil one of another. (D&C 136:23)

Thou shalt not speak evil of thy neighbor, nor do him any harm. (D&C 42:27)

And in the temple of the Lord, we are put under covenant:

We are required to give unto you the law of the gospel as contained in the Book of Mormon and the Bible; to give unto you, also, a charge to avoid all lightmindedness, loud laughter, evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed, the taking of the name of God in vain, and every other unholy and impure practice; and to cause you to receive these by covenant.

Latter-day saints have taken this charge to avoid evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed and perverted it. Here is what evil speaking actually means, from Webster’s 1828 Dictionary:

EVILSPE’AKING, n. [evil and speak.] Slander; defamation; calumny; censoriousness. 1 Pet.2:1 (“Wherefore laying aside all malice, and all guile, and hypocrisies, and envies, and all evil speakings”.)

SLA’NDER, n.

1. A false tale or report maliciously uttered. and tending to injure the reputation of another by lessening him in the esteem of his fellow citizens, by exposing min to impeachment and punishment, or by impairing his means of lining; defamation.

Slander, that worst of poisons, ever finds an easy entrance to ignoble minds.

2 Disgrace; reproach; disreputation; ill name.

DEFAMATION, n. The uttering of slanderous words with a view to injure another’s reputation; the malicious uttering of falsehood respecting another which tends to destroy or impair his good name, character or occupation; slander; calumny. To constitute defamation in law, the words must be false and spoken maliciously. Defamatory words written and published are called a libel.

CALUMNY, n. Slander; false accusation of a crime or offense, knowingly or maliciously made or reported, to the injury of another; false representation of facts reproachful to another, made by design, and with knowledge of its falsehood; sometimes followed by on.

Neglected calumny soon expires.

CENSORIOUSNESS, n.

1. Disposition to blame and condemn; the habit of censuring or reproaching.

2. The quality of being censorious.

Evil speaking, then, in the scriptures, is the malicious use of a lie (in the form of a false report, false tale, false accusation or other falsehood) in order to harm the reputation, work or livelihood of another. Not only are such deeds against the law of God, but they are also against the laws of men.

How the LDS pervert this principle

The LDS have twisted the commandment and covenant against “evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed” into any spoken saying or written word published that brings the leadership of the church into disrepute, regardless of the truthfulness of the saying or writing. (Since I’m quoting definitions, disrepute is a “lack or decline of good reputation : a state of being held in low esteem.”) Thus the LDS have changed the meaning of both “evil speaking” as well as “the Lord’s anointed.”

To speak the truth about someone is not evil speaking. If such must be labeled, it can only be called good speaking. The saints of God are commanded to always tell the truth and never tell a lie, therefore, they must call a sinner a sinner, even if that sinner is a hypocritical leader, garbed in the priesthood and presiding over them. To understand why saints must do this, we first must review who is authorized to call people to repentance.

Who can make the call to repent

There are two groups of people who need repentance: those who belong to the church of Christ, but aren’t yet sanctified, and those who do not belong to the church of Christ.

External Preaching

In the case of those who do not belong, it appears that all saints are under commandment “to persuade all men to repentance” (2 Ne. 26:27.) Also, all saints who possess the priesthood (except teachers and deacons) are under commandment to preach the gospel to those who do not have it, which includes telling them to repent of their sins.

Internal Regulation

In the case of those who belong to the church, who have not yet been sanctified, it belongs to the high priests of the church to regulate the church, calling them to repentance. But high priests can only do this if they themselves are sanctified, as they are supposed to be. (See Alma 13:12.)

It takes a saint

Only saints, meaning sanctified people, are authorized to call people to repentance. The reason is that sanctified people cannot look upon sin except with abhorrence. In other words, when they see sin, any sin, they shrink with horror, disgust or dislike of it. This means, first, that saints can recognize what is and what is not sin, by this recoiling, shuddering, excessively repugnant reaction they have to it, and secondly, that they will not shut their mouths at the sight of it, but will naturally seek to eradicate it. Saints are like the Lord: they cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance.

A non-sanctified person is unable to recognize every sin. Some “very great” (as they suppose) sins may cause non-sanctified people to shiver and bristle at their appearance, but not so with all the so-called smaller sins. They may witness such sins and not experience any extreme detestation to it or they may not even know that what they are witnessing is sin. Or, if they do observe a sin and are able to recognize it as sin, they are capable of just saying, “That is just a minor thing. I will let it slide and leave them to themselves without opening my mouth.” Another thing these people will do is charge someone with transgression when they have not transgressed. This comes from not being able to recognize sin from righteousness, so that the two become confused, righteousness being called sin, and vice versa.

For these reasons, non-sanctified people are useless to the Lord when it comes to calling people to repentance. Only sanctified, purified, justified people (saints) will do for this particular labor.

The general authorities and leaders of the church

Many people are afraid of speaking out against any hypocrisy they see among the general authorities and leaders of the church because of the following scripture:

Cursed are all those that shall lift up the heel against mine anointed, saith the Lord, and cry they have sinned when they have not sinned before me, saith the Lord, but have done that which was meet in mine eyes, and which I commanded them. But those who cry transgression do it because they are the servants of sin, and are the children of disobedience themselves.

And those who swear falsely against my servants, that they might bring them into bondage and death—wo unto them; because they have offended my little ones they shall be severed from the ordinances of mine house. Their basket shall not be full, their houses and their barns shall perish, and they themselves shall be despised by those that flattered them. They shall not have right to the priesthood, nor their posterity after them from generation to generation. It had been better for them that a millstone had been hanged about their necks, and they drowned in the depth of the sea.

Wo unto all those that discomfort my people, and drive, and murder, and testify against them, saith the Lord of Hosts; a generation of vipers shall not escape the damnation of hell.

Behold, mine eyes see and know all their works, and I have in reserve a swift judgment in the season thereof, for them all; for there is a time appointed for every man, according as his works shall be. (D&C 121:16-25)

We are taught by our leaders that speaking evil against the Lord’s anointed is a very grievous sin and that members that do this are in apostasy. Thus, because of this false interpretation of “evil speaking,” even if hypocrisy is perceived in the leadership, the LDS will shut their mouths and leave the matter in the Lord’s hands.

And so the leadership of the church, and more specifically, the general authorities, are given free sway to pretty much do what they want and say what they will, all of it being ascribed as speaking and working by the power of the Holy Ghost, all by virtue of their office and calling as general authorities and the second anointing which they receive in the temple.

Of course, such an interpretation wrests these scriptures, for the Lord was not speaking of any earthly anointing. When the Lord says, “Cursed are all those that shall lift up the heel against mine anointed,” and also, “Wo unto them; because they have offended my little ones”, and also, “Wo unto all those that discomfort my people, and drive, and murder, and testify against them,” His anointed and His little ones and His people are all the same group of people, even those who are sanctified, justified and purified, known to us as saints and little children.

In this scripture, the Lord uses the same wording that he used in His warning against offending little children: “It had been better for them that a millstone had been hanged about their necks, and they drowned in the depth of the sea.” The reason the warning is the same is because a saint (a fallen man who has become sanctified) and a little child (who is alive in Christ and thus already sanctified) are both innocent before God. As long as they endure in their sinless, sanctified, and purified state, they will inherit eternal life.

Little children are not anointed in any earthly ordinance, yet these scriptures equally apply to them as much as they apply to adult saints. So, when the Lord says, “mine anointed,” He is not talking about an earthly ordinance, but of a heavenly ordinance, such as the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost, which Jesus alone performs. All earthly ordinances must be approved and confirmed by a heavenly manifestation (ordinance) performed by the Father, the Son or the Holy Ghost. So, when we have priesthood conferred upon us, all we get are the rights to the priesthood. The actual priesthood is only bestowed by God Himself, and the same goes with every other ordinance of the gospel, all things requiring a ratification or confirmatory heavenly ordinance to make it eternally binding.

So, mine anointed and my little ones and my people and little children and saints are terms that speak of people who are sinless (guiltless), purified and sanctified, whether from the beginning of their lives or after having received a remission of their sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. In no way, shape or form did the Lord ever mean to say that no one had a right to call hypocrisy when they saw it in someone ordained to His priesthood.

The gospel rule is to assume hypocrisy unless demonstrated otherwise, for all adult men have received the fallen nature:

Trust no one to be your teacher nor your minister, except he be a man of God, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments. (Mosiah 23:14)

Again, the rule is to trust no one. The exception to that general rule is not “except he be ordained to the priesthood,” as many believe. Instead, the exception is, “except he be a man of God, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments.” Priesthood ordination and calling have nothing to do with it.

Discerning teachers and ministers of God

The assumption that everyone makes about the general authorities is that they are holy men of God, already sanctified, justified and purified. This is assumed because they hold these high and holy callings. The logic goes something like this: “God would not allow men who were not sanctified to hold such callings and offices, therefore, they must be holy men.” But such thinking denies the history of the people of God upon the earth, and all the many times that corruption entered into the very priesthood God had organized on earth. God obviously allowed this corruption to occur, so then it must follow that in our day, corrupt or un-sanctified priests and teachers would also be allowed to rule over us.

The Lord has set up His kingdom with signs whereby one saint can know another. These signs are heavenly manifestations given by God alone. They allow saints and sinners to see where the Lord’s people are, so that they can listen to them, heed the word of God preached by them and gather with them. A preacher or teacher who does not manifest any of the various signs is simply not approved by God.

The prophet Mormon answered the questions, “How do we know if a man is of God, walking in His ways and keeping His commandments? How do we know that he speaks the truth to us and is sent by God?” when he wrote:

And now it came to pass that according to our record, and we know our record to be true, for behold, it was a just man who did keep the record—for he truly did many miracles in the name of Jesus; and there was not any man who could do a miracle in the name of Jesus save he were cleansed every whit from his iniquity— (3 Ne. 8:1)

So this is how we know. If the members of the first presidency, the quorum of 12 apostles and the quorums of seventy (as well as the members of any other leadership quorum), are going around doing all manner of miracles in the name of Jesus among the people, then we know that they are just men of God, even saints. But if they aren’t performing a work of miracles in the name of Jesus among the people, then they are still un-sanctified hypocrites (actors) and are not to be trusted.

Sanctified people point people to Christ

“Priestcrafts are that men preach and set themselves up for a light unto the world,” wrote Nephi. Priestcraft is the Pharisaical way, the doctrine of privilege and prestige and taking offense. It says, “Do as I say, not as I do, for you are not authorized to do what I do.” Or, “Look unto us as the Lord’s righteous servants. Follow us. We are obedient and holy. We know better than you. We have the office, calling, power and authority. We enter first, we partake first, we get the best seats. All must rise when we enter. We are the Lord’s anointed, occupying Moses’ seat. No one gets to God except through us.” This is all, of course, hogwash. (I’d use a stronger word but the blog is rated PG.) It doesn’t matter what earthly anointing you have received, if it hasn’t been confirmed by the Lord or His angel, there is no witness (evidence) that you have exercised any faith, whatsoever, and thus that your anointing has been accepted by the Lord and that you are authorized to call anyone to repentance.

The saintly way is different. Although saints are bold, they care not for prestige, honor or privileges. They spurn such things. They do not say, “Follow us,” but, “Follow Christ.” They are completely Christ-centered in both thought, word and deed, pointing all to Jesus. They care not what you call them, whether you use a title or not, nor whether you acknowledge their calling and office.  They abase themselves at every opportunity, for they know and believe the word of Jesus that those who abase themselves will be exalted. They are wise and fun and cheerful and knowledgeable, yet they mourn when they see sin. There is nothing stuffy about a saint. They take no offense at people who reject them, their message or their priesthood, and consider it a privilege to suffer persecution for Jesus’ sake like the prophets of old.

If it walks and talks like a hypocrite, but has the priesthood, it’s…not a hypocrite?

The gospel of Christ is a gospel of truth, for Jesus is full of grace and truth. When the Lord put all those who went to the temple under covenant to not speak evil of His anointed, He was not saying that we had to turn a blind eye to hypocrisy in the leadership and obey them regardless of their hypocrisy. That is not what it means to refrain from “speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed.” The phrase only means that we are not to falsely call someone who is sanctified (a saint) a sinner.

All saints have a duty to God to do right, to heed truth, to expose and to forsake and to fight evil and falsehood and hypocrisy, and to speak the truth at all times. The saints are the bulwarks against Pharisaical tyranny, for saints don’t shut their mouths at sin. They call a duck a duck and a hypocrite a hypocrite, when they see one. They are like the Lorax, who speaks for the trees, except that they speak for the Lord. You simply can’t shut them up when they see sin and error.

No one breaks their covenant of not speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed by pointing out the hypocrisy manifested among the LDS church general and local leadership. If the Lord has not shown His approval of any of these men by His divine miracles and manifestations, no one, not a single person, is bound to follow their sayings, counsels or commandments. In fact, it becomes our duty to God to both speak out against hypocrisy and to ignore its directives. It is through the miracles of God alone that we may know whether a man is approved of God. Ordination is not the appointed sign, nor are the words or actions of that man, for hypocrites are, by nature, actors, acting the part of a righteous person. As we cannot know what truly resides in the heart of any person, the Lord in His mercy has provided the signs for His believers, the saints, that we might recognize who really is one of His people. This is because no one can act the part of a miracle worker, being out of the scope of man-made power.

The saints will judge who is, and who is not, an apostle, prophet or bishop

Behold, I, the Lord, have made my church in these last days like unto a judge sitting on a hill, or in a high place, to judge the nations. For it shall come to pass that the inhabitants of Zion shall judge all things pertaining to Zion. And liars and hypocrites shall be proved by them, and they who are not apostles and prophets shall be known. And even the bishop, who is a judge, and his counselors, if they are not faithful in their stewardships shall be condemned, and others shall be planted in their stead. (D&C 64:37-40)

The inhabitants of Zion are the saints of God, for no one will inhabit Zion who is not sanctified. This church that the Lord mentions in these verses is the mystical church of God made flesh, who have repented of their sins and come to Christ, receiving the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost. Judgment is committed into their hands because they are the only ones qualified to judge between sin and righteousness. Those hypocrites who make claim to priesthood titles alone will be judged by these title-less saints and be uprooted and their names blotted out. The truth of the matter is that all leaders must pass through the judgment of the saints, the Lord’s little ones, before they can get to God, not the other way around. Not even those whose listed priesthood duty is to judge, such as the bishop, will be exempt from the examination made by these alive-in-Christ children and adult saints.

For these reasons, no one has any authority to silence a saint. The authority of a saint supersedes the authority of any priesthood office. And if a saint speaks out against your hypocrisy, Amen to your priesthood. And if anyone speaks out (evilly) against a saint (the Lord’s anointed), they’d be better off drowning themselves in the depth of the sea. Nothing pisses off the Lord more than people who bother His saints.

Now, before I end this post, let me address one more point.

Test them, says Lucifer

In the temple, we hear the following conversation:

PREACHER: Shall we ever have any apostles or prophets?

LUCIFER: No. However, there may be some who will profess revelation or apostleship. If so, just test them by asking that they perform a great miracle, such as cutting off an arm or some other member of the body and restoring it, so that the people may know that they have come with power.

Later on, the conversation goes:

PREACHER: [To Peter.] Do you profess to be an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ?

PETER: We do.

PREACHER: This man told me that we should never have any revelation or apostles, but if any should come professing to be apostles, I was to ask them to cut off an arm or some other member of the body and then restore it, so that the people might know that they came with power.

PETER: We do not satisfy men’s curiosity in that manner. It is a wicked and an adulterous generation that seeks for a sign.

There are two extremes of thought, both of them false. On the one hand, claimed credentials (“we profess to be apostles, bearing the priesthood, with valid ordination”) are rejected and a demonstration of power is demanded, otherwise no one will believe. On the other hand, demonstrations of power (“we perform all manner of miracles”) are rejected and a proper priesthood ordination is demanded, otherwise no one will believe.

The first scenario is represented by the temple conversation, which temple patrons are taught to avoid. Unfortunately, they then leave the temple and adopt the second, also extreme way of thinking.

The saints who judge do not require that a professed apostle or servant sent from the Lord perform a miracle in their presence. Nor do they require that all their priesthood papers are in order. They only require that the apostle carries the appointed witness that comes after the trial of one’s faith. All saints have received this witness and so when presented with another saint, bearing the same witness, they can recognize a brother or sister. The witness itself is a miracle, but one that is born record of verbally, for the word is to be first heard, not seen, in order that faith is engendered. These witnesses are like the tokens or signs spoken of in the temple, by which one knows a true messenger from God.

In conclusion

The commandment to refrain from speaking evil of the Lord’s anointed is a true principle, but only encompasses spreading lies about the saints of God. (Although we are also commanded to not speak evil of anyone else, which encompasses the whole human race.) However, this commandment does not muzzle the saints, who are not prohibited from saying the truth about someone who is acting hypocritically, even if they are leaders of the Lord’s church. Thus, the Lord’s admonition to first take the beam out of our eyes before we go around telling people that they have a mote in their own eyes does not apply to saints, because they have neither beams nor motes in their eyes.

Complete List of Articles authored by LDS Anarchist

Making SENSE of It All – Pt. 1

SUIT UP & TUNE IN – WE WILL GO DOWN

When we take the Faith Fall from heavenly angelic status to three dimensional mortality, it is as the poet has said, “Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness” but equipped with a backpack full of supplies. These supplies which protect us from suffering irreparable injuries like total amnesia or overexposure to the new elements with which we will come into contact, could be accurately described as the functions of a special space suit. The space suit not only covers us but also features a communication device in the helmet, so that we may ever maintain contact with our Celestial Home Base. When we were issued these psychonaut space suits, we were told that – Inasmuch as we do not defile them, they will be shields and a protection to us until we have finished our work on the earth. The space suit is your physical body and its particular functions with which your soul interfaces are the senses.

Ray Bradburry, who recently completed his “work on Earth”, called it the “Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.” Brother Bradburry spoke of this interfacing not only in terms of the powers with which the suit seems to endow us, but also the gifts that we bring to it. By cherishing it and refusing to die, one may become an illustrious or Illustrated Man. Hue-Man beings clothe themselves in coats of many colors, through which their Christ Light may shine to the world. But we must remember that it is not the clothes that make the man. God makes the man and wears him as clothing. Perhaps this is not the best analogy for we who have been raised in modern materialistic culture to place such importance on clothing and not so much on the body and even less on the spirit. It is this imbalance that turns useful tools into stumbling blocks. But I am of the opinion that many of us are awakening day by day to a greater understanding of the condescension of God. And we are starting the journey with an echoing of Nephi’s humble declaration: “I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things.”

Whether Lehi’s Dream or Nephi’s accessing of that same dream; from Joseph Smith’s First Vision to Saul’s Visitation on the road to Damascus, what is being described in these scriptural accounts is typically multi-sensory. There are sights, sounds, tastes, smells and sometimes extreme shaking. But were these in every case detected by the physical senses or were they sometimes only perceived spiritually? Or is it in fact necessary that there be a separation between the two? I believe that what we commonly refer to as the five carnal senses exist only as extensions of their spiritual counterparts. We read the words on the pages, where holy writ admonishes us to activate the spiritual senses, but do we really see with eyes to see or hear with ears to hear?

At church we have all heard mention of our spirit bodies but in our pride and ignorance we rarely pause to ask Sunday School teachers, Priesthood™ leaders or even ourselves about these bodies. The youngest of children in the Nursery and Primary programs sing a version of “Head, Shoulders, Knees & Toes” which is peculiar to the disappointingly non peculiar people of LDS culture. Our version, however, shares much in common with the rest of the World’s version and they both end with the lyrics, “Eyes, Ears, Mouth & Nose.” It just so happens, that the Yod, Heh, Vau, Heh of the sacred name of YHWH correspond with Sight, Hearing, Taste & Smell. Touch also is alluded to in this children’s song through the pointing actions which accompany the performance of it. When the spirit brought these facts to my attention, I began to suspect that senses were of more import than I had been led to think. For it had been an Inner Sense in the First Place, that inspired my mind only moments before the revelation, to invoke the name and thereby tune into the radio frequency of  ^EEAA_OOAA^EEAA_OOAA^EEAA_OOAA^EEAA_OOAA^EE

Proverbs 20:12 – The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, Yahweh has made even both of them.

Isaiah 11:3 – His delight will be in the fear of Yahweh. He will not judge by the sight of his eyes, neither decide by the hearing of his ears.

BABY STEPS – GROWING UP UNTO THE LORD

It is not too surprising that we should be generally unaware of our spirit bodies. We are, after all, awakening from a Deep Sleep that came upon us directly after the formation of our physical bodies was completed. At this point, that we are as childish “babes in the gospel” should be to our shame, as Paul teaches in Hebrews. But babes or child-like in terms of purity of soul are exactly what we must become if we are to inherit the Kingdom. At some point after a little baby takes her first “breath of life” it starts to fall into the Deep Sleep. But for a time she retains much awareness of and from within the Heavenly Realms. It is the lower realms that take some getting use to for the newborn at first. For example, how long does it usually take a baby to discover that she has a mouth? But notice how much of the world the baby is already instinctively discovering through that mouth even before understanding that she has one? The young child, upon finding himself in the Lone and Dreary World, already loosing some feeling in his spirit body, seems to retain enough spiritual wherewithal to use the mouth to cry out unto the Lord. “Oh GOD, hear the words of my mouth!” We would do well to realize that the prayers of the righteous are only advanced baby cries. Now we find ourselves working backwards to become like little children again. A psychological map would be helpful. From where we stand now, we have a severely limited concept of things like, spiritual taste buds, even though these pre-seed the physical taste buds on our temporal tongues by who knows how many millennia. We have to grow back into them. Be of good cheer and let the Gods soothe us in our growing pains. These spiritual senses, though they may hurt coming in (like wisdom teeth) are the Gifts of The Spirit. And they are spoken of by many of the mystics of Mormonism and countless other traditions.

Alma the Younger – “It must needs be that this is a good seed, or that the word is good, for it beginneth to enlarge my soul; yea, it beginneth to enlighten my understanding, yea, it beginneth to be delicious to me.” -Alma 32:28

Joseph Smith – “This is good doctrine. It tastes good. I can taste the principles of eternal life, and so can you. They are given to me by the revelations of Jesus Christ; and I know that when I tell you these words of eternal life as they are given to me, you taste them, and I know that you believe them. You say honey is sweet, and so do I. I can also taste the spirit of eternal life. I know it is good; and when I tell you of these things which were given me by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, you are bound to receive them as sweet, and rejoice more and more.” -King Follett Discourse

Where clairgustance  (perception of the essence of a substance through taste from the spiritual realms.) is manifest we can be sure to find clairalience, (the gift of psychic smell). This is so because the temporal gifts reflect those of the spirit. Smell goes hand in hand with taste. Without it, prophets could not have been aware of the presence of brimstone (sulfur) in visions of Hell. Even Lehi, although he never claimed to have seen an angel outside of “visions and dreams” takes special pains to explain the vividness of his perceptions such as, “most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted” and “white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen.” It is interesting to note that these things were perceived in a dream state yet are unhesitatingly compared to things perceived in a waking state. What is the difference? If anything we can see that Lehi’s perception while in dream state was more intense than “normal” waking experiences typically are. Things seen, heard, felt, tasted or smelled while “in the spirit” are in this “sense” more real or true than those detected with the outer senses. Our mortal frame is only a shadow of our light/spirit body. The five so called Classical Senses are developing in their probationary state and are therefore inferior to the Spiritual Senses.

Although they are today commonly grouped together and referred to by the vague term,  “sixth sense”, the Spiritual Senses were actually much more widely understood and utilized in ancient times. Mankind collectively has, for the most part, followed the same path as we see the individual take. It’s a round leading from enjoyment of intimate contact with the divine through fully functioning Inner Senses, to increasingly lower levels of spiritual sensation while the Outer Senses take over. Then, if we are diligent in honoring the Circle of Life both within and without, we will come back around to heightened spiritual awareness. But when we come back we will notice that although the “Prodigal Sense” has returned, all is not exactly as it was before our departure. No, this time everything is even better! Now the party really begins and we know what it is to FEEL a FULLNESS of Joy!

STUNTED SPIRITUAL GROWTH – A GROWING  PROBLEM

Why should we be shocked that The Gifts of The Spirit are one and the same as the Psychic Abilities we hear spoken of more and more these days? Are we represented by the character of the “Good Son” who never left Home but lacks a great deal of love and understanding when he displays a “goodie goodie” attitude toward his brother upon his return? I hope we will rather exemplify the more positive aspects of adolescence; namely those of curiosity and an adventurous spirit.

Many a Mormon youth at Especially For Youth (EFY) has asked their supposed spiritual leaders: “How can I know if it’s the Spirit or if it’s just me?” Their leaders, who “receive not the spirit” and therefore should “not teach” as per Doctrine & Covenants 42:14, will unhesitatingly respond with some regurgitated piece of vomit about a “burning in the bosom”, which, to hear them describe it, sounds indistinguishable from indigestion induced heartburn. Then they will strongly recommend always double checking it against the rule of thumb issued by “The Brethren”. They are not to be trusted, especially with our youth. They have, in all too many instances, buried alive that portion of spirit with which they were entrusted. Like the wicked and slothful servant whose soul is stripped from him in the parable of the talents, they supposed that they would be justified because of their “knowledge” of “how the World works”. So they buried their Lord’s talent in that dust of the earth which, for now, composes their temporal bodies. That our temples may serve a holy purpose, it is true. But they are nonetheless TEMPles which when not understood, deteriorate to factories of “dead works” (Moroni 8:23) or “whitened sepulchers” (Matt 23:27) wherein the “dead bury the dead” (Luke 9:60) while vainly imagining they are doing some great service. This goes for LDS temple buildings as well as our physical persons.

“Burning in the bosom”, is a term taken from Holy Scripture and it is all too often erroneously applied to mere emotional reactions. In proper context it is used to describe one single sentiment out of endless possible manifestations of clairsentience,or the alignment of external feeling of the flesh with inner feeling of the spirit. One problem with this overemphasis on a “heart warming” sensation as the main fruit of the Spirit is that it is perhaps the most easy to isolate from the Spirit. And once cut off from the Source this vibration fragments into a series of automatic muscular reactions which can be easily replicated and used by the deceiver to synthetically provoke spirit-like spasms on demand. The implications of such emotionally manipulative imitations of the presence and voice of God being available at the flip of a switch to those who seek control over their fellow beings are very terrible. The general public does not know about or think about things such as Extreme Low Frequencies (ELF). This is particularly dangerous because they know and think even less about the still, small voice of the Good Shepherd. Not having anything else to compare it to leaves them in a very precarious path indeed when trick-nology comes into play.

Once again, it is the children who suffer most when “burning in the bosom” is downgraded to “warm fuzzies,” then further diminished in any of its remaining spiritual qualities by uprooting it completely out of the hearts and minds of LDS youngsters and placing it in the physical plane to die alone as a pom-pom in a jar; a false form, literally sealed off from the life sustaining air/ether/prana of the spirit realm of imagination. This was an actual project carried out to honor Pres. Monson’s 82^ndbirthday. (Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?) They then used it as a gimmick to push sales for his biography “To The Rescue” though Deseret Book.

http://deseretbook.com/warmfuzzies

ELIJAH TO THE REAL RESCUE

So the kids have need of being rescued from imposters. They are ex-peer-encing some inter-fear-ence while trying to re-cognize the REAL voice of the Good Shepherd. Their right brains/hearts are “failing them for fear” [False Evidence Appearing Real] “and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth” Luke 21:26. And Jesus says it’s only going to get worse during the commotion that ensues after the destruction of the Temple. Take special note of the verb ‘looking’ that Jesus uses in that passage. Remember it is crucial that we use our sense of sight correctly and that means developing what is technically and truly our First Sight but often called Second Sight, which ironically and poetically could be said to emanate from our Third Eye. One, Two, Three…Three, Two, One. Are you starting to see how it all works? First, Last…Last, First. “Yes, yes, that is all very interesting.” we might say, “But tell us, who will save the children?” –The Storyteller responds: “Why, who else would come to rescue The Children but The Fathers?!”

The Lord is sending the Spirit of Elijah or in other words, The Spirit of The Ancestors, “To turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers,” D&C 110:15. According to D&C 138:48, this great work is “to be done in the temples of the Lord in the  dispensation of the fullness of times, for the redemption of the dead, and the sealing of the children to their parents, lest the whole earth be smitten with a curse and utterly wasted at his coming.” But how is this possible when Jesus told us that the Temple itself would be utterly wasted as the kick-off for all this excitement? How will the Fathers rescue the Children? They will act through the Children. And how will they act through us? It will happen via our genes and our senses. So we can see that it is of utmost importance that we purify our physical senses and attune them with the spiritual wavelength of the ante-sensors (ancestors).

THE SACRED SCIENCE OF SENSE

While the act of connecting with one’s ancestors is very organic and bound to blossom in a variety of personalized ways, there is however a scientific side to it. And praise be to the ancient ones for that. Our minds need a healthy level of scientific method. The left hemisphere of the brain has the potential to present us with as many stumbling blocks as it can tools of precision. It is Adam, an inner husband kneeling across the altar from our right brain bride and swearing to play the role of personal protector. But unless the left brain/mind is given the right things to fixate on, it will inevitably become confused. In a confused state it alternates between being a poor protector at best and an abuser at worst. The left brain likes a certain degree of causality. It makes him feel productive and puts him in touch with his creative powers. From this left side of our brain we stand and issue edicts and laws like a king as our queen looks on from her spot enthroned at our right hand, stoic, silent, sexy. When the King and Queen are in agreement as to how to rule the land, it provides balance and peace. Looking to antiquity we find very few examples of this type of arrangement perpetuated perfectly throughout history, whether on an individual or more literal level. What we do find when we retrace humanity’s steps are certain times and places when people considered all things to be more sacrosanct.

The Wadjet Eye  or Eye of Horus, is an ancient Egyptian representation of the inner recesses of the brain. Its individual parts were also used to represent mathematical fractions and the senses

Eye of Horus – Human Brain

Besides the mysterious absence of the last Sixtyfourth, it is also intriguing to see the overall resemblance to the configuration of Thalamus, Hypothalamus, Medulla Oblongata and Corpus Callosum that scientist call the reptilian brain. Furthermore the various pieces of the image seem to match up with those outer body parts which would be used in the gathering of sensory data from the presently detectable world around us. We have glyphs looking very must like the nose, an eye, an ear, the tongue and a finger. But the most fascinating aspect of all this is the fact that thought is presented as one of six senses. Thought is here represented by a linear waveform , which when incorporated with the complete pictogram, becomes the brow over the Eye of Horus.

When we look back in the archives of religious records there are several shining examples of righteous rulers who remind us that you can not have RIGHTeousness without the RIGHT Brain. But one stands out in a special way because we are told that he and his people, who founded a whole city/nation, were taken up, people, place and things alike, into Heaven. This is a singular achievement which has sparked man’s imagination ever since. Many who speak about the concept of Zion will refer to this as the ultimate success story. Whether you are a Mormon who only talks about it, or one of the few who actually desire Zion in reality, you will be somewhat familiar with the City of Enoch. Enoch appears in the ancient Egyptian pantheon as an ibis headed man named Thoth. As the god of magic, healing and wisdom, and patron of scribes, Thoth -Taught -Thought. His main cult center was the city of Khumun, which sounds like ‘Common’ and translates as ‘Eight Town’. Could it be that Thoth or Thought is the Common Sense, the Sixth Sense connecting the five carnal senses with the two houses of our spiritual senses located in our left and right brains? Can Thoth be thought of as the Sixth Chakra ball of energy spinning in the vicinity of the pituitary gland which activates during adoleSENSE alerting the teenage initiate to his potential for adulthood? Is thought then the Christ which, if allowed to roam freely between Heaven and Earth, will eventually succeed in reconciling us with Father & Mother? Think about it.

I THINK, THEREFORE I-SLAM – INTRODUCING AVICENNA

If the ancient inhabitants of Egypt worshiped previously translated beings but failed to grasp certain plain and precious truths lost in translation and so were not collectively translated themselves, then subsequent eras under Greek and finally Arab domination brought with them, not only more open rejection of The Truth, but continued chances for redemption as well. Even from within the cage of enforced religion, the sacred Ibis of human thought yearned to fly again. And the avian aspects of man’s thinking sang a song of freedom through the thoughts of Ibn Sina known in Europe by his Latinized name, Avicenna

Avicenna(981 – 1037 CE) was the major influence upon the history of Islamic psychology, taking the ideas of the Greek philosophers, who had taken them from the Egyptians, he adapted them to fit Islamic doctrine. He began with Aristotle’s idea that humans possessed three types of soul, the vegetative, animal and rational psyches. He held the belief that man shared the first two in common with the plants and animals and that the latter was something shared in common by man and God. Man was thus simultaneously earthbound and heaven-bound.

Avicenna attempted to shed light on this curious condition. He proposed that we have seven inner senses to complement the outer senses. This was an attempt to understand the mechanics of reason. We could say he was presented with an obstacle by the Islamic prohibition of dissection. Nevertheless, he was led by the Spirit and came up with the following psychological map of the inner senses.

• Common Sense: This sense collates the information gathered by the external senses.
• Retentive Imagination: This sense remembers the information gathered by the common sense.
• Compositive Animal Imagination: This sense allows all animals to learn what they should avoid and what they should actively seek in their natural environment.
• Compositive Human Imagination: This sense helps humans to learn what to avoid and what to seek in the world around them.
• Estimative Power: This is the ability to make innate judgments about the surrounding environment and determine what is dangerous and what is beneficial. For example, an innate and instinctual fear of predators would fall under this sense.
• Memory: The memory is responsible for remembering all of the information developed by the other senses.
• Processing: This is the ability to use all of the information and is the highest of the seven internal senses.

COME UNITY – ALL THINGS IN COMMON

“And now come, saith the Lord, by the Spirit, unto the elders of his church, and let us reason together, that ye may understand” – D&C 50:10

If we understand the first point on this chart to be transitional, then we will see that the word ‘Common’ in the phrase, ‘Common Sense’ should not be misconstrued as holding the same meaning as when we say ‘Common Knowledge’, since this term is often no more than a clever euphemism used to try and grant a more regal sounding heir to misleading popular opinion. In reality, ‘Common’ here refers to the meeting place between the outer and inner senses.

Modern neuroscience tells us that it is the cerebral cortex or pallium where the brains of all vertebrates take sensory information to integrate it, learn from it, and decide how to respond. The equivalents to the cerebral cortex in invertebrates are clusters of neurons known as mushroom-bodies. Until recent years, scientists thought that invertebrate mushroom-bodies and vertebrate pallium had arisen independently during the course of evolution. But in-depth research into the marine ragworm has proven this was most probably not the case. How could they possibly determine whether the Gods spoken of in Genesis laid the foundation for the brain of Man at the very moment that their spirit “moved upon the face of the waters”? Well it intuitively makes sense that the blueprint for God’s own children would be present throughout all creation, but the particular proofs that modern research points to were found when comparing the olfactory of the worm with that of man.

What could be more amazing than finding a humanlike brain structure in a worm? How about the identification of a wormlike structure in the human brain? The cerebellar vermis is that worm. In the 14th-century Cambridge brain diagram illustrating Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine, the cerebral worm is represented between the powers of memory (vis memorativa) and cognition or imagination (cogitativa vel ymaginativa). Mediating between the two, the worm works as a valve modulating the active and passive operations of thought, its movement translated in the human tendency to lower the head when thinking (You and each of you, bow your head and say yes) and raise it when we are re-collecting (sense data from the realm of the past). We raise our heads in order to expose our nostrils more directly to the air; so that through this elevation we may evaluate the information which God is whispering on the wind at any given moment and compare it to that which he has communicated to us in times past; so as to have the most potent effect on the present and into the fragrant flow of the future. For everyone who has a nose knows that smell, more than any other sense, has the power to conjure up memory.

Avicenna’s Cannon

Vermis Detail

When we consider that our sense of smell is perhaps the most anciently bestowed of God’s gifts, it seems very appropriate that the olfactory would be associated with the ½ fraction in the breakdown of the Eye of Horus symbol. Halfway between Heaven and Earth., man is endowed with a nose to lead the way before him. Functioning as a sacred rendezvous platform between worlds, the olfactory bulbs are the only parts of the nervous system which have direct contact with the outside world. In-cense stimulates Inner Sense when lit and offered up at the apertures to the Holy Temple. But if the afferent priest, who’s lot it is to “make perfume” going into the sanctuary of the Lord, should doubt the message of his inner senses, it will be with him as it was with Zachariah. The moral of that story is: Don’t be ‘dumb’. Listen and believe in what your inner senses tell you.

The lost people we are, could anything be of more value to us in helping us find our way than memory of past eternities? But alas our odor decoders are taken for granted or repeatedly weakened through doubt, causing this most poignant of sensations to be so fleeting. This is known in scientific terms as sensory adaptation. We might also call it a lack of faith and a rebellion against God. To rebel means to wage war again. Our fallen senses have cut themselves off from the presence of the Lord and still suppose that they know how to interpret their surroundings better.

“For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy [Senses], and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the at-one-ment of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.” Mosiah 3:19

When King Benjamin says that “The natural man is an enemy to God” he is not talking about people who enjoy camping or being in ‘nature’. Nor is he saying anything of those who follow their natural inclination to “multiply and replenish the earth”. Other passages in the Book of Mormon are very clear on the effects of the fall, which King Benjamin cites as the point where the problem began. In speaking of the fall, Alma says:

“Therefore, as they had become carnal, sensual, and devilish, by nature, this probationary state became a state for them to prepare” Alma 42:10

When Alma says ‘sensual’ he does not mean ‘sexy’ or even ‘sexual’ since it was God who made us to be sexual beings. No, he means simply that we are controlled by the carnal senses. We trust the outer senses over the inner and have therefore fallen out of touch with reality. We are double-minded beings, tottering back and forth between inner and outer nature but mostly focusing on the outer. We must do as the scripture advises, put off the natural man and become saints through the at-one-ment of Christ. If our inner and outer natures are not AT ONE with each other, then we will forever be AT ODDS with ourselves. We will be enemies to God.

When we feel both our inner and outer natures come together, this COMMON ground establishes a Zion and a sense of expansiveness comes over us, causing us to exclaim:

“COME ON people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together, got to love one another right now!”   –  “Get Together” by Youngbloods

An appeal for Prayer and Fasting

Tom [an LDS blogger who was a frequent commenter at this, and other, blogs] sent me an e-mail over the weekend asking for some support in a personal matter of his.  I wanted to post his story and his appeal for fastings and prayers here — so anyone who regularly follows our posts can offer-up some spiritual support for Tom’s friend

Below is what he wrote me:

I’ve kind of disconnected a lot recently, but was wondering if I might be able to enlist your help in mobilizing some spiritual help — prayers, fasts, etc. on something happening with a very close friend of mine.

This Wednesday (05/02/2012) at 11:30 am MST — will be a court meeting for a friend of mine who is in desperate need of any prayers or fasts that anyone could offer-up and dedicate onto her and her sons behalf.

Her soon-to-be ex-husband has been molesting their 4-yr old son over an unknown length of time, and the court hearing on Wednesday (May 2nd)  is where the judge will be considering allowing the father (at the recommendation of a court appointed adviser) to have unsupervised, overnight visits with the son.

All the mother and son need — besides some obvious healing — is some additional time for both CPS and the local police to finish their investigations into the abuse allegations — but there’s a very real chance, based on the recommendation from the adviser, that the unsupervised visits will recommence following this meeting with the judge.

All I’m asking, if possible, is for you to send an e-mail blastout, post a message on Facebook or perhaps throw a little glib up on your blog — etc.

Hoping that the universe will intervene.

The request could be simple, leaving out most the details, but I would leave that up to you.  The more support, prayers, and fasts offered-up for the sake of this mother and son could perhaps help to turn the tide in their favor.

You may comment in reply to this post if you plan on participating — so that Tom may be able to see the support his friend will have.

On Not Having Polygamy for Polygamy’s Sake

Per LDSA noticing that, “at other Mormon blogs, and I see a tiny blog post with very little to no new information and two hundred comments will follow,” I’ve decided to publish this post at under 1,000 words.

BTW — I failed by about 200 words — maybe it will still get comments though.

What is Marriage:

A man and a woman vowing to come together as husband and wife, cohabitate, make love, and remain together permanently.

In a gospel-centered marriage, this man and woman will also have covenanted with Christ — binding them both to Him as individuals, as well as to each other.

Once formed, a marriage family should _grO^W — both horizontally [adding additional spouses] and vertically [having children].

In neither dynamic should a family limit itself – because that is an attempt to place bounds on the human ability to love, which since “God is love” — we are meant to develop and foster that ability [not box it up].

As such — I share the official LDS and predominate Christian creed that ”marriage is the union of one man and one woman” — it’s just that I’ve never seen satisfactory reason to forbid people to only one such marriage union during their life [mono+gamy].

Plural Marriages:

All consensual marriage vows between a man and a woman are valid in the eyes of God — at least for a time.

All covenants, contracts, bonds, obligations, oaths, vows, performances, connections, associations, or expectations [...] are of no efficacy, virtue, or force in and after the resurrection from the dead; for all contracts [...] have an end when men are dead.

All human vows, covenants, obligations, oaths, ordinances, etc. come to an end when the parties have died — but while living — the Lord expects us to honor our word and faithfully keep our agreements.

God has provided the sealing power to priesthood holders on the earth – so that we may obtain permanency in our freely-entered into covenants — because God restores good for good, and evil for evil  at the resurrection:

ye can do good and [...] have that which is good restored unto you; or ye can do evil, and have that which is evil restored unto you.

The sealing power allows for marriage to be restored for marriage.  It allows for men and women to be rewarded for their righteous desires in marrying — by bringing that connection back for an endless duration.

It’s a stumbling block to say certain marriages are acceptable while others are more or less acceptable — and others are completely unacceptable.  In the eyes of God, all marriage is honorable:

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled

and it is a deception of the devil to label this-or-that form of marriage as dishonorable or unjustified:

Whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man.

Charity in Plural Marriages:

A gospel-based, egalitarian, multihusband-multiwife tribe does not force anyone to be married to two or more people.  It only allows for the full expression of charity to exist.

Charity is a gift from God – so entering a GEMTAM tribe cannot be evidence that a person has charity, or that a person will get charity.  What the tribal marriage model does is facilitate the excercise of charity — since it allows a person to share all things and be bound with others in all things:

That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.  For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;

Having a family orgainzed as a GEMTAM will only allow a person to learn whether they have charity — or not.

If you profess to have charity but refuse to share talents, resources, time, spouses, etc. — then the GEMTAM has discerned your lack of charity.  On the other hand, if your family is organized as a GEMTAM because you feel charitable — now instead of just having the desire to share all that you have with everyone else, you are free to act on and express it.

So — does tribal plural marriage create or cause charity?  No.  It allows for the full and free expression of charity to go forth — something that monogamy hinders.

When we have men and women marrying as many spouses as their hearts desire — we don’t end up with male dominance and abuse.  We end up with an egalitarian tribe — which was exactly D&C 132′s goal – to knit the Gentile church of Christ together as a tribal family.

Establishing a Tribe:

A friend wrote the following to me:

Attachment to more than one person is not only natural, it’s healthy.

Our society has really reduced it’s joy because of the one-on-one romantic love relationships that have forced us into these big homes in pairs. Feeds anxieties, too. If you lose that one person, you lose everything.

[A single spouse] can’t fulfill all [of a person's] needs for connection — and it’s not a fair thing to expect. We have to change it.

As my wife and I were watching Sister Wives on TLC last week, I remarked to her that the problem I see with what they do is that it appears that they are living in polygamy for the sake of plural marriage.  It’s a part of their theology — to need to be polygynous.

I’m not interested in polygamy for the sake of having plural marriages — I’m interested in building tribes.  Without the tribal/family aspect, plural marriages hold no interest for me whatsoever.

I don’t want to live in a monoculture, monotonous nuclear family.  Humans are symphonic beings — we have nuances of expression and a capacity to love every one of our fellow brothers and sisters.

And that’s what I want to cultivate with a gospel-based, egalitarian, multihusband-multiwife tribe – not rows-and-rows of a monoculture wasteland, but a diverse garden where people can uncover their own unique Self — without pressure on a person to be the one, true source of everything for their spouse [or parents for their kids].  Giving every member of the tribe access to as many models of behavior, personality, and spiritual gifts as possible — instead of isolating people with the minimum number of humans possible.

Culture has become our extended family — because we’ve discarded the tribe.  In the GEMTAM, every mother and father have a covenant interest in caring for every son and daughter in the tribe.

But the rejection of one-on-one romantic love relationships can’t devolve into swinging or “open-relationships” either.  I’ve always believed in permanent unions — i.e. marriages.

If I’m going to marry a second wife, then I want her to be with me always [just like my first wife].  Same for her — if my wife wants to marry a second husband, then I want us all together so that the relationship can mature and grow.

It is the establishment of righteous, gospel-based tribes that I desire [both for myself and everyone else].  What I’ve found [as we've worked on the GEMTAM book] is that the scriptural ideal for a gospel-based tribe of righteouness is egalitarian, multihusband-multiwife tribal anarchy.

It is this form of a tribe that satisfies every aspect of the gospel of Jesus Christ — and it can be easily and quickly established now, even if the members are currently living within a fully-functioning State government.

“It is our purpose to explain the principles behind the ideal gospel tribe, as found described in the scriptures, and to demonstrate and encourage each reader to form righteous tribal societies now, before the coming collapse of nations, so that when the governments are destroyed, there will be no need to join the wicked tribes that will be forming in every quarter.

The tribes of righteousness, already pre-planned and pre-established, will become bulwarks, within which the saints of God can safely live the gospel and from which can be launched missionary efforts to preach the gospel to the tribes of the earth.”
[From here]

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Previous Article by Justin:  Split-brain Model of the Gospel: The Fall of Man

Split-brain Model of the Gospel: The Fall of Man

By the transgression of these holy laws:

[God] created man, male and female, after his own image and in his own likeness, created he them;

And gave unto them commandments that they should love and serve him, the only living and true God, and that he should be the only being whom they should worship.

But by the transgression of these holy laws man became sensual and devilish, and became fallen man.  [D&C 20:18-20]

“These holy laws” were not given to Adam and Eve while in the Garden of Eden.  The only commandments given to them before their Fall were to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and for Adam to remain with Eve:

And I, the Lord God, commanded the man, saying: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, nevertheless, thou mayest choose for thyself, for it is given unto thee; but, remember that I forbid it, for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”  [Moses 3:16-17]

and

And the man said:  ”The woman thou gavest me, and commandest that she should remain with me, she gave me of the fruit of the tree and I did eat.”  [Moses 4:18]

However, after the Fall, Adam and Eve were given new commandments that pertained directly to the worship of God:

And Adam and Eve, his wife, called upon the name of the Lord, and they heard the voice of the Lord from the way toward the Garden of Eden, speaking unto them, and they saw him not; for they were shut out from his presence.  And he gave unto them commandments, that they should worship the Lord their God, and should offer the firstlings of their flocks, for an offering unto the Lord.

…

Wherefore, thou shalt do all that thou doest in the name of the Son, and thou shalt repent and call upon God in the name of the Son forevermore.  [Moses 5:4-5, 8]

So, here is where “these holy laws” were given — to Adam and Eve after their partaking of the fruit of the tree of good and evil and their subsequent removal from the Garden of Eden.

At this point, mankind was not carnal, sensual, or devilish because Adam and Eve were obedient unto these commandments [Moses 5:5], and they:

made all things known unto their sons and their daughters. [Moses 5:12]

They brought up their children in light and truth, and were thus innocent before God.  But:

And Satan came among them, saying:  ”I am also a son of God”; and he commanded them, saying: “Believe it not”; and they believed it not, and they loved Satan more than God.  And men began from that time forth to be carnal, sensual, and devilish.  [Moses 5:13]

So now we see the transgression of “these holy commandments” spoken of in D&C 20:18-20.  The sin of real idolatry entered in — and so:

Every spirit of man was innocent in the beginning; and God having redeemed man from the fall, men became again, in their infant state, innocent before God.

And that wicked one cometh and taketh away light and truth, through diobedience, from the children of men, and because of the tradition of their fathers.  [D&C 93:38-39]

Paradise:

Man did need to become a kind of animal that had a left-brain concept of a Self as being some separate, skin-encapsulated center of will in the universe.  We had to begin seeing ourselves as something not-God – something fallen away from Him, pretending that we are not one-in-the-same thing.

The Fall brought about by the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is how we could take this cosmic step back [or away, or down, depending on one’s perspective] and start to look at God from an outside perspective, see what kind of dance it is He’s doing – so we could do it too.

The Self [a left-brain, rational conception of “I”, a persona] is one-step removed from God because, though it represents the human wisdom to conceive of God — in order for humanity to gain that wisdom — they must begin to believe that they are somehow separate from God.  With this word “I”, reality splits – like the human consciousness is split, into the subject and the object, doers and doings, this and that.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [John 1:1]

represents the realization of the Word, “I” [who was, in the beginning, both with God and was God], that causes a concept of a separate Self to exist – instead of all things being continuous with God — one continuous happening — or Supreme Being.  The beginning of the human ability to conceive of God comes only when it’s been separated into this-or-that separate Self.

The only way for the mind to understand something is to name it [or to clothe it in language] – essentially taking a step away from it, pretend it’s not you for a moment and simplify it into a model [or personification] of the thing using the intellect.  The universe was created by the utterance of “I am” because this is the beginning of an existence that is separate from God.

So the isolation of the individual as a separate Self is a fiction that mankind has concocted – but then went on to forget that we did so.  It’s a story we’ve all have been telling ourselves – so we can turn around and look at God, as though that weren’t really us.  But this state of individualness is a great fiction – a story each one of us has created as a way to come to understand things by looking at them from the outside, as a way to experience God by pretending that He and us have no relation to each other.

Children and child-like cultures [what we’d label as “primitive” cultures] are still in touch with this paradise to the extent that they have not fully learned the illusion of Persona.

So though mankind did need to “fall” into a conception of their Self as separate existing centers of will surrounded by all of existence [the result of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil], they have no need to become carnal, devilish, or fallen man [the result of heeding the temptations of the devil, becoming subject to him].  The scriptures have examples of specific people or classes of people who work out their own salvation without sin and without the devil having any power over them:

Mortal children:

But behold, I say unto you, that little children are redeemed from the foundation of the world through mine Only Begotten; Wherefore, they cannot sin, for power is not given unto Satan to tempt little children, until they begin to become accountable before me; [D&C 29:46]

Faithful men and women of God:

Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men. [Alma 48:17]

Transfigured believers in Christ:

Therefore, that they might not taste of death there was a change wrought upon their bodies, that they might not suffer pain nor sorrow save it were for the sins of the world.  Now this change was not equal to that which shall take place at the last day; but there was a change wrought upon them, insomuch that Satan could have no power over them, that he could not tempt them; and they were sanctified in the flesh, that they were holy, and that the powers of the earth could not hold them. [3 Nephi 28:38-39]

All people during the duration of the Millennium:

And the earth shall be given unto them for an inheritance; and they shall multiply and wax strong, and their children shall grow up without sin unto salvation. [D&C 45:58]

and

And in that day whatsoever any man shall ask, it shall be given unto him.  And in that day Satan shall not have power to tempt any man.  And there shall be no sorrow because there is no death.  In that day an infant shall not die until he is old; and his life shall be as the age of a tree; And when he dies he shall not sleep, that is to say in the earth, but shall be changed in the twinkling of an eye, and shall be caught up, and his rest shall be glorious. [D&C 101:27-31]

Fallen man became carnal, sensual, and devilish because when we left paradise — we forgot that this whole probation was really just a cosmic game of pretend.  When Satan lured humans into believing that the feeling of a separate Self was in fact the actual state of things — it created isolation, fear, and competitiveness.  We started to be “that guy” who starts taking the game of Monopoly a bit too seriously.  We start acting like life is something that we can master or one-up — like life is a bank that we can rob.  We exalt the Self above all else — we place our first allegiance to a fictitious feeling of Personhood.  We transgress “these holy commandments” because we see God as something “other“, and then try to make our Self love Him above all else.

The purpose of the devil:

And it must needs be that the devil should tempt the children ofmen, or they could not be agents unto themselves… [D&C 29:39]

After Lucifer rebelled against the majority vote against him in the pre-mortal council, he lost all power [agency] and was going to be straight-away removed from the kingdom of God into outer darkness.  He thought up a purpose for himself and those who rebelled against the law of common consent — and proposed that he and his angels instead be cast down to earth to try and tempt the children of men because, as he reasoned:

if they never should have bitter, they could not know the sweet…

As this was the desire of one of His children, God rendered according to that desire and allowed the matter to be voted on by the rest of us.  We used our agency to chose to have an adversary be on Earth to tempt us.

We were “agents unto [our]selves” in heaven and voted to have Lucifer here doing this work among us – we gave him a purpose he wouldn’t have otherwise had.  God always honors the agency of all things [or He would cease to be God], meaning that everything must be done by the common consent of the governed – or in other words, the keys of the heavenly tribe must be honored, which is why “it must needs be that the devil should tempt” us here – otherwise, our agency expressed in the pre-mortal council would have been abridged or over-ridden.

So we have Satan, the great dragon, being:

cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.  And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.” [Revelation 12:9-10]

and

…by the power of mine Only Begotten [agency], I caused that he should be cast down; And he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive and to blind men, and to lead them captive at his will, even as many as would not hearken unto my voice. [Moses 4:3]

Satan and his angels were cast down to the hell here on Earth, instead of straight into outer darkness — not because God needs a Satan-figure to fulfill the plan of salvation, but because God needs Satan here “that we might be agents unto ourselves,” or so that our vote and choice to have the devil here to tempt us would be honored.

Mortality is, for the most part, a hands-off period of examination.  God puts us in a learning environment and then sees what we do with it.  The Lord has stated that:

it is not meet that I should command in all things… [D&C 58:26]

God always prepares for every contingency, so even with Satan here [voted in by us], He prepared a means to save us from Satan’s power, should we have fallen into it – so we could then choose to be liberated by the prepared Savior.  Regardless of what men choose with their agency, the plan of salvation that God has prepared cannot be frustrated, with or without a devil among us.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil:

The primitive , child-like [innocent and unfallen] state of humanity experiences God as essentially all things in existence.  This natural state recognizes human life as something inexorably connected to all other things.  It’s the oceanic feeling that infants and animals [non-rational life] experience – purely right-brain, a divergent view of all things at once, a single spontaneous happening.  This is the right-brain, the mind’s Atlantis, the realm of visions and dreams, the lunatics and werewolves, unconscious, unreason – inspiration.  It is without concept of time, persons, distinctions, and morality.

However, a paradisical state of oneness with nature [and God] does not allow for a concept of God to exist because to be one with something means you cannot know or discern the difference between it and you.  You can’t look in your own eyes, touch your own finger-tip, taste your own tongue, etc.

Per our vote in the pre-mortal councils – it was decided that Satan would be permitted opportunity to try and to tempt mankind while on Earth.  In order for us to be agent unto ourselves, God designated a time in which Adam and Eve would be left unto themselves to allow Satan the opportunity to tempt them to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

This fruit was forbidden by commandment during the duration of time God left Adam and Eve unto themselves to be tempted – to see if they would partake at the direction of Satan or await further instructions from the Lord.

This fruit had no magical properties to it – it was just a bitter fruit in a garden of sweet and pleasant to taste fruits.  Humanity lived in a state of uncontrasted existence.  They had no left-brain vision of contrast, distinctions, and separation.  The purpose of the fruit was to awaken them to an understanding of differentiation between things — to turn on their left-brain and cause it to start dividing the world into man and woman, pleasure and pain, light and dark, life and death, virtue and vice — this and that.

Partaking under the direction of God would have caused the Fall [left-brain consciousness and death] – but not carnality, sensuality, and devilishness.  We would have had death — but not hell.  Death [like apocalypse] seems scary, but it is also natural.  Death, in plainer terms, just means “a change of state“.  It’s the death of the old that births the new — the death of all our earthly ambitions, worldly ideas, and petty emotions so that we can be reborn as the highest manifestation of humanity — God as a human, or Jesus Christ.

You see, the relationship between humans and God is the relationship between humans and the realization of their highest Self.  Meaning that the only difference between God and humans is that humans still see a difference between God and humans [because they are using their left-brains to look].

We can our spend lifetime searching for salvation, enlightenment, the Philosopher’s Stone, the City of Gold, Atlantis, the Garden of Eden, the Fountain of Youth, etc. — when all the time, we carry it around in us:

behold, the kingdom of God is within you. [Luke 17:21]

Partaking, however, under the direction of Satan, caused left-brain consciousness and death, along with carnality, sensuality, devilshness, and hell.  Without God’s further instructions, the left-brain became awakened but then immediately darkened in captivity to the devil.

And if we remain in that state until mortal death — then we are damned, which means to be fully captivated by the power of the devil, fully subject to him — because we yielded in obedience to him:

that same spirit which doth possess your bodies at the time that ye go out of this life, that same spirit will have power to possess your body in that eternal world.  For behold, if ye have procrastinated the day of your repentance even until death, behold, ye have become subjected to the spirit of the devil, and he doth seal you his; therefore, the Spirit of the Lord hath withdrawn from you, and hath no place in you, and the devil hath all power over you; and this is the final state of the wicked.  [Alma 34:34-35]

and

Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness [Romans 6:16]

Instead of being a tool used to take a step-back from a continuous and unified state of existence with God and nature, in order to gain wisdom of Him and the dance He is doing – the left-brain became the tower in which our unconscious, right-brain attention, the moon, and womanhood lay chained — hardened and atrophied.  The female power within every human [the lunatic power of the moon], constrained in the ring of the seven male stars of the classical liberal arts:

• Arithmetic
• Music
• Astronomy
• Rhetoric
• Grammar
• Logic
• Geometry

Such power – the left-brain system of symbols and images — used to suppress a natural state of mind that had ruled for millions of years – next to the relative short period of man’s 6,000 year reign.  But the masculine pattern of control grows weaker amidst our current tumultuous times — when the right-brain, feminine dynamics may begin to re-emerge.

Redemption:

Whosoever will come after me, let [them] deny [their] self, and take up [their] cross, and follow me. [Mark 8:34]

Redemption from the Fall is about getting over the sensation of being a Self locked out from everything not-Self – of being only one Self who was flung into competition and conflict with every other object it can experience.  Humans have come up with many different systems to accomplish this project:

• religion
• psychotherapy
• Zen meditation
• yoga
• hallucinogenic drugs
• sensory deprivation
• fasting
• positive thinking
• chanting mantras

The problem with every one of these systems is that getting seriously involved in any one of them just further boxes you into another elite group – another Self that sees itself as separate from the rest of everything not-Self.  You didn’t get out of the box, just made another one to jump into.

The out-of-the-box, right-brain consciousness experience of your Self cannot be made to happen by any act of your fictitious will because that perspective only validates the existence of the separate Self [unless of course the repeated efforts to be accidental on-purpose eventually reveal to you the futility of such efforts].  There is no way to internally manifest the will to get rid of the feeling of separateness as a Self.  That would be like trying to go to sleep – for in your trying, you mess the whole thing up.

It’s why moralistic preaching doesn’t work.  Focusing on behavior and doctrine only breeds good hypocrites [good actors] — people sermonized into shame, guilt, or fear – forcing themselves to behave as if they actually believed the things they say they do.  We make disciples by sitting around and talking – and then act surprised when our disciples go on to sit around and talk.

We work at trying to do things that would just be part of our nature [how we are] if we would soften our hearts in repentance.  God’s commandments are not instructions on behavior that will get the Spirit to work on us – they are descriptions of what results once the inner nature of a person is changed by the Spirit.

Churches are a problem too because currently, they aren’t communities.  They are groups of people trying to produce a community.  It’s backwards.  The church gathers because of their changed hearts and their connection to each other – it doesn’t gather in order to make those things happen.  The “ekklesia” was supposed to be the vacation or rest from the world – while we can’t think of anything better to do after three hours of church on Sunday than to get home and rest from it.

So — you can’t get rid of the fallen, left-brain, Self-sensation – so don’t try.  Take it, like any other feeling you have, as a feature of your total process – a wave of hot or cold, angry or sad.  Working to get rid of the Self is the ultimate act of Self-ishness – it simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling.

This is what’s made me reevaluate what prayer is to me.  Any spiritual exercise [be it prayer, meditation, yoga, or whatever], when practiced in order to get some spiritual experience, only strengthens the fallacy that I am my Self.  Speaking “out there” to God as though He was only this separate entity that resides somewhere else in the cosmos just continues the Fallen fiction that my Person is something separate from God.

There is nothing wrong with praying just to pray – in the same way we listen to music just for the music.  You don’t worry about the value of it.  What’s the purpose of prayer – it has no purpose, and that is its purpose.  That may sound like Eastern, paradoxical nonsense – but think about what is the practical application of the universe — of billions of galaxies swirling around?  What’s the use of playing music [or any other art or game]?  If you play music to make money, or outdo another artist, or be a person of culture, etc. – then you aren’t really playing because your mind’s not on the music.  Things like games or art are a waste of valuable time and money that could be put into more practical applications – rather than making elaborate patterns or color or sound.  But what would we think of a society with no room for music and games, dancing and art?  Such a society would be surviving [biologically alive] – but to no end.

• The universe is, at its core, an illusion [the Latin ludere], a play, or a ludicrous game of pretend.
• It’s magic – being enchanted [the Latin incantare] by the song of images and measurements.
• It’s meaningless, meaning it has no point unto itself.  Like a flower is meaningless – it’s all just dancing patterns of light and sound, water and fire, vibrations and rhythm, electricity and space.
• The world is an amazing [amasian or lost in a maze] arrangement of letters – a spell [the Latin fascinum], or spelled with A-T-C-G, Lys-His-Met-Ala-Pro, C-H-O-N-P-Na-Cl-Au.

All of existence, then, is one thing, one shape, one happening.  Separate persons and events are merely arabesques is an over-all fractal pattern – which is all continuous with the whole created universe — all of it continuous with [or unseparated from] God.  A redeemed sense of reality.

You can return now to your separate moments, separate selves, and separate rooms — and know that separation for the imaginary [or image-based], feeling that it is.  You can go about your practical affairs again – but now with a new sense about it all.  There is no “You” who can get something out of this game – life is not a bank that you can rob.  Your Self is God attempting to look at itself from billions of points-of-view.

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It maketh no matter to me: God accepteth no [one]‘s person

When Jesus quoted, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ‘Ye are Gods‘?” [John 10:34]  He was making the point that though He preachs Himself as the Son of God – the good news is that you are too!  God becomes flesh in everyone of us as well – and it is by the putting on of a “person” [persona, meaning mask].  It’s in how we take the word and make it flesh ourselves.  Taking our myths literally [meaning according to the literature, or as it reads].  Choosing the images that we will bring to life by living according to them.

But if the actor gets too into his part and forgets he is acting – he could then become a “hypocrite” [hypocrites, meaning actor].

Galatians 2:6 tells us that God accepts no one’s “person” – He doesn’t care about my mask, or the game I play, the “Self” I go around saying that I am.  Jesus said, “deny your Self” – quit the act and repent ["to change the mind"] of that stuff.  Stop parading around in your persona like it’s something special.  Have the same mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, thinking equality with God was not something He needed to be grasping at — but rather devoted Himself to being a servant [Philippians 2:5-8].

Jesus’ teachings are dangerous to any -archist situation:

However, once gone, the clergy took Jesus and said, “Well fine, He was the Son of God – but let it stop right there.  We don’t want anybody else causing that kind of trouble.”  So He was relegated safely upstairs where no one else would get the same mind in them – and start being a big nuisance.

In order to make the gospel more useful/practical, it gets reduced down to some simple set of principles – as if Jesus’ main goal was to make 1^st century Judean life easier.  In fact, ease of life seemed to be the furthest thing from His mind.  The gospel comes with full disclosure – following Jesus can be hazardous to your health and to your relationships with others.  When Jesus said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” the original context of the phrase meant, “to die on one,” which was a reason why many people didn’t really want to follow Him back then.  However, these days it means:  putting up with fellow church members you don’t particularly like, sitting through boring meetings, getting rid of this or that bad habit, or not getting angry in bad traffic on your commute, etc.

The things Jesus was all about [the miraculous works of the Father] are entirely outside of the scope of normal, human experience.  In time, the whole of the kingdom He preached was to be manifest to all – but certain things got labeled “spiritual” and others as “historical”.  So things like physical resurrections, literal second comings, supernatural gifts, prophecies, tongues, healings, and revelations were all ruled out and labeled as spiritual concepts.  Now everyone could join the church of the King who never reigned.  A triumphant rule was never a part of the program, you see – so the Gentiles get what they wanted, a church patterned after their idea of what a church should be.

The gospel is just another moral school of thought without active spiritual gifts, powers, miracles, and signs following them that believe.  It’s just another set of creeds or principles for civil policy and governance – one without the embarrassing holes in its hands and feet.  Salvation becomes a self-help program.  Christ-like discipline boils down to the “7 principles of…” or the “4 R’s of…”, etc.  When dead to the gifts of Holy Spirit, the gospel will be used to work for men and women – rather than working on them — creating them as new creatures patterned after the person of Jesus Christ.

Left-brain, right-brain, and the nature of “real”:

As I was reading the scriptures one day recently, I thought out-loud to myself:

“These are just arrangements of ink on paper, what makes me expect them to alter my physical reality?”

This post is the same thing – arrangements of pixels on a screen.  Such things don’t seem “real” — in our Western-sense of the word — so how can they “do” anything?

Reality, at first glance, seems to be a simple thing.  There is an endless detail of a physical, material world ever present and surrounding me.  These things are real because I can measure them with yardsticks, voltammeters, scales, etc.  You know, real stuff.

But now there’s the mind.  This immaterial knot of memories, ideas, and feelings that we call “ourself” also exists – just not in some measurable sense that science can describe.  Consciousness is not quantifiable, yet this fuzzy mosaic of awareness is the truest reality we can ever really know.

The “here-and-now”, material aspect demands our immediate attention.  The inner world of feelings and ideas are dismissed as “less important” – even though our physical world and entire civilization was once naught but ideas.  Our entire material experience is actually founded on a realm of consciousness who’s nature and geography we’ve allowed to largely go unexplored.

Before our Age of Reason, human beings had bona-fide strategies for interacting with imagination and the mind.  Their complicated magical systems and pantheons of Gods, Goddesses, demons, and spirits were all the images and names they used to label the powerful human forces.  These were the ancients’ attempts at mapping the whole of human existence – the physical as well as the non-.  They used the macro [planets] to symbolize the micro [levels of awareness/understanding].  They personified human desires, virtues, fears, and vices as the pantheons of Gods and demons as an attempt to better understand them, deal with them, and in some cases – become them.

The domain of the right-brain is [for the most part] a savage landscape that we wander without a map – because we’ve thrown them out with Atlantis, buried under the waves of left-brain rationalism.

The left-brain, conscious attention takes the “fuzz” of the external reality and draws nice little lines around things to give definition and order.  It uses invented intervals of measure [like inches, pounds, seconds, etc.] to construct a kind-of “grid” that can be placed on top of existence in order to better focus on parts of it and describe it.

It represents our human ability to focus on individual “here-and-now”s and “this-and-that”s.  It provides us with that sensation of “self” as some skin-encapsulated center of will/activity in the world, which is entirely an illusion [meaning it's a matter of convention, or an invention, a tool].  As a function of the left-brain-mind, it is only one part of you, the tip of all existence that pokes up through the surface.  It is this aspect that emphasizes [notices] separateness.  The left-brain can only see the parts, the bits, the boundaries of distinction [which can be helpful] – but if we’re not careful, we can start to think that the whole universe is naught but the particles and ignore the waves.  We see the images the left-brain uses to look at, think about, and interact with the rest of the world — but we can forget about the whole picture underneath.

We take something like nature, which is amoral, impartial, and anarchic — and come in and bring judgments like kindness and cruelty, meaning and order to the whole thing.  Nature itself, outside of our left-brain consciousness, is a blank canvas for our projection, and humans have been working for millennia to make nature a safe, organized place.

We’ve come up with city-states, monetary systems, concepts of property, monogamy, monoculture, etc., but no one realized how boring the whole thing would become.  Now we have the whole world property-lined, zoned, speed-limited, paved, taxed, regulation, registered, addressed, and licensed.  But nobody left room for life.  With no possibility of real disaster and chaos, we have no chance at real salvation and peace.  The same systems we made to keep us safe are the same ones that condemn us boredom.

Any attempt to control a single variable in a natural system will only result in more variables becoming chaotic.  This is because a natural system is at rest.  It is at equilibrium and it can stay at equilibrium without any energy input.  When force is applied to one part of the system, the other parts react proportionately in an attempt to restore that equilibrium point.  This is man’s fall, which is pride – trying to control the world, instead of being spontaneous as we suppose children or animals to be.  Until we reach the point we are at currently, where we spend most of our energy fighting to control what our attempts at control have caused.

However, there is a vast world beneath the left-brain’s conscious, “here-and-now” attention.  There is the “flood-light” consciousness of the right-brain-heart.  Here is where we can see the whole picture.  We can “zoom out” and see the Self that is below the surface [not just the front we put up for a nice display, like an embroidery], and we can see the connections that exists between other Self’s.

Jesus would want us to bring on the apocalypse:

So, really, the “unreal” is often more powerful than the “real”.  Think about what’s more powerful:

• the physical computer you are looking at
• or the idea of a computer.

Which has altered human existence to a greater extent – any one, physically real computer, or that nebulous idea of a computer?

Only ideas are immortal.  Stone crumbles, wood rots, paper decays, and people die.  But an idea – something as whisper-fragile as a dream – can endure.  It can change the way people think, the way they see themselves and the world – and that’s what will change the world.

The world is not this physical planet or the life that’s on it.  The “world” is our systems, politics, economics, bank notes, and borders – it’s our ideas about the world.  We term the end of the world “apocalypse” – which is nothing but the Greek word for revelation.  An earth-shattering revelation bringing about the biggest change in the human state of mind – large enough to completely end this world and usher in a new earth.

You see, the four horsemen don’t cause the apocalypse – just look around — they’ve been riding for millennia.  They are a description of how the world is:

• Statism
• War
• Famine
• Death

They are the reason we need an apocalypse.

And Jesus was that revelation — He brings that apocalypse.  His miracles were meant to show His disciples how to have a world without those horsemen:

• There will be no hungry, so He feeds them
• There will be no sickness, so He heals it
• There will be no devils, so He casts them out
• There will be no storms, so He calms them
• There will be no death, so He raises the dead

Our life here on this world simply isn’t one of those things for which the concept of “meaning” has any purpose or beneficiality.  There is no sensical answer given to “What is the answer to the ultimate question of life?” because the question is itself non-sensical.  And life is not something we can just dream, wish, manifest, affirm, or BE into the shape we want it to be in — using the law of attraction, positive affirmations, prayers, etc.

Life is one big drama, it’s an act.  If it were a genre of acting, life would be improv.  I did improv in Speech and Drama in high school.  The number one rule they taught us when practicing for competitions was – you are not the most important person in the scene, everyone else is, and your job is to pay attention to them and help them out.  It all works because, well, you are in the scene too – and that same rule applies to you too [from the others’ perspective].  Thus, like life, there are no “leaders” in charge of the scene – only a group of servants serving the servants.

Life is not about achieving some “goal” at the end [whether we define it as a healthy retirement in this life, or this or that version of heaven in the next] – it’s like a dance, or a song.  The whole point of dancing is not to end up with your feet in a particular position on that part of the floor – the whole point of dancing is to dance.  The whole point of singing is not to get to that last note – but the whole point of music is all of the notes played.  It’s meant to be fun, but most of us turn into “that guy” – you know, the one when you’re playing flag football or Monopoly and he starts taking the whole thing too seriously, forgetting the whole thing was began as a way to play a game.

Life is about the acting – not the actor or the actress.  It’s interesting that we call God “The Supreme Being” – when “being” is a verb.  God is The Ultimate Doing – and we should be about doing the same thing, singing the same song.

Next Article by Justin:  Two Plasma Interpretations of Portions of Revelation

Previous Article by Justin:  The Garment, with additions

Zion will not be Established by Unrelated Persons

My text for this post is Acts 2:37-47

37 Now when the people heard Peter preach the word of God, they were pricked in their hearts and said unto Peter and to the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?”

38 Then Peter said unto them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.  39 For this promise is to you, and to your children, and to all the Gentiles, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.”  40 And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, “Save yourselves from this perverse generation!”

41 Then those who gladly received the word were baptized:  adding 3,000 believers that day.

42 And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching, in fellowship with each other, in breaking of bread, and in prayers.  43 And fear came upon every one of them:  and also many wonders and signs were done through the apostles.  44 And all that believed gathered together and had all things common; 45 And sold their possessions and goods, and imparted them to all, according to anyone had need.   46 And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread at every house, they did share their meals with gladness and simplicity of heart,  47 all while praising God and having favor with all the people.

And the Lord was adding those being saved to their assembly daily.

After preaching a scriptural exposition along with an eyewitness declaration of the risen Christ, Peter instructs converted hearers [those with the softened, or "pricked", hearts]:

• Repent
• Be baptized in the name of Jesus
• Receive the gift of the Holy Ghost

Those who, with gladness received the word of God as delivered by an eyewitness were baptized.

Now what?

Once the heart had been softened, repentance had come, baptism had been performed, and the gift of the Holy Ghost had been received — these believers formed a community.  This group was characterized by:

• Continuing steadfastly in the word of God as delivered by the eyewitnesses
• Fellowshipping one with each other
• Sharing of sacramental bread
• Praying
• Being wrought upon by the fear of God
• Working of wonders and signs through the traveling eyewitnesses
• Gathering of believers
• Sharing of all things common
• Selling of material possessions to impart to all according to the needs of anyone
• Harmonious worship services to praise God
• Sharing meals

This group of believers didn’t see things in terms of an institution and meetings — but as one family under God.  In the LDS context, we’d refer to this type of community as “Zion“.  Among these believers, open wonders and signs were commonplace and worship services and prayer were joyful experiences that were operated according to the best gifts of the Spirit.

This abundance of spiritual manifestations was seen because this group of believers was equal in the bonds of all things — earthly first, and then heavenly:

Nevertheless, in your temporal things you shall be equal, and this not grudgingly, otherwise the abundance of the manifestations of the Spirit shall be withheld.

and

That you may be equal in the bonds of heavenly things, yea, and earthly things also, for the obtaining of heavenly things.  For if ye are not equal in earthly things ye cannot be equal in obtaining heavenly things;

They did not see property as something exclusive to themselves alone, but as something for all to have equal claim on to meet their needs.  In such a community:

all children are alike unto [the members]; wherefore, [they] love little children with a perfect love; and they are all alike [unto them].

When property rights are a concern, paternity is frantically ascertained and protected because when people own property as individuals in a money-based system — they want to project those rights for their future seed through inheritance.  This is the reason why polyandry is almost always a no-go for most people [LDS or not].  Disgust for even the idea of polyandry is the one place where Mormon monogamists and Mormon polygynists will find complete agreement.  Once women are allowed polyandrous marriage covenants — only maternity can be truly known, whereas paternity will always unknown.  And the heart of patriarchal societies is insecurity over paternity.

Zion:

The heart of a Zion society, by contrast, is charity.  Zion takes the “equal in the bonds of earthly things” principle to apply not only to money-free communities — but even further to include the bonds of matrimony, applying it to multihusband-multiwife communities.

Zion requires great intimacy and connection among the members.  The church lacks this intimacy and connection because we are all still strangers.  The only way to achieve Zion, or even a Zion-like atmosphere at church, is for the men and women to all be connected to each other through covenants.  As it stands, we are connected to Christ through covenants, but not to each other.  As long as we remain unfettered by covenant relationships with each other, we will never achieve Zion and our conversations [and actions] will never approach the level of intimacy and sharing required of that ideal.

Kinship ties:

The type of community described in Acts 2 [which is Zion] is not established by groups of unrelated people.  Without kinship ties, community will only be maintained by sheer effort of will.  When things get difficult, people will defend family first.  Most non-related groups of LDS that go off to form their own Zion community run into failure because, no matter how pure the intentions up front, when things get stressful or tough we align with family, which causes division.

The same thing is seen among other Christians who want to “get away” from the institutional church experience by starting a home church.  These attempts to “do church” more scripturally just end up being slightly less controlled replications of the same dynamic that they were trying to get away from.

This is all because a sense of familial love must exist prior to gathering — it does not come as a result of gathering.  Without charity pervading, such communities will only have joy in their works for a season.

The “church” are the called-out ones.  It is the assembly of justified believers in Christ — and it comes as a manifestation of the communal feelings generated by virtue of their relationship as one family under God.  Think about your own family.  You meet together — but you don’t have meetings.  You meet because of the feelings that being “family” produces — the feelings of family are not produced by your meetings.

In the church today, we invert the whole thing:

• Instead of our congregations being a natural outflow of the connectivity we share — we try to have “church” be the precondition to creating it.
• Instead of leaders who habitually serve the members, submitting to the will of the people — we have leaders who are used to being habitually obeyed by members.
• Instead of the ministry bringing a miracle and then requesting a meal — we have leaders who demand support first, the blessings to follow.

If the church actually wanted Zion, then I think most would be surprised over the number of non-LDS who would be ready to sign on for it — if it meant living for a higher purpose.  But they don’t.  Marching orders are to get as much education as you can, so you can make as much income as you can, so you can pay more tithes and offerings.  It’s to live as normal of a life as you can — with just a bit of Mormon flare to it [e.g., serve a two-year mission, civilly marry in a temple, pay 10% of your paycheck to the church, abstain from the parts of the word of wisdom most important to Heber Grant, do hometeaching, etc.]

The current focus is on keeping many small, separate nuclear families [many small, separate Zions].  The tribal model takes this and connects the dots.  It says, establish Zion by connecting the already existing separate nuclear families into a bone fide tribe of Israel.  Connectivity is the key.

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