Being honest with myself.

[Anonymous]

wayfarer wrote:

I’m human… And you know… In that moment of authenticity, we support each other in very unique and special ways. And this, to me, is participating in the divine.

When I started posting here around two years ago, I was helped immeasurably by certain key individuals. All were helpful but for some reason I was drawn to the postings of some more than the others.

Perhaps because they had done so much for me, I put them on a pedestal. I was thinking that once I could walk this middle road of enlightenment as well as they – things would work out better – I would cease to be hurt or offended because I would see the motives and limited viewpoints of my injurers and forgive them.

Over time I have gotten to know everyone better (as much as is possible for quasi-strangers typing on computers). I have come to understand that those whose wisdom I admire most still struggle. Having a measure of wisdom does not elevate you above life or being human. I still admire those friends here – even more so now because in the midst of their own problems they still cared enough to help me.

[Anonymous]

Roy, I think being truly honest with ourselves is the essence of enightenment.

When Peter started getting enthralled with himself while walking on water, he sank.

[Anonymous]

wayfarer wrote:

We go through cycles. Every one of us is deeply human. Making mistakes, feeling down… This is what it means to be human.

Realizing this is divine, I believe.

I think there is an additional burden (is that the right word?) of Middle Way thinking, because it is personal to how you assess it. That can make it more meaningful and of greater personal value. It can also feel lonely at times.

I think, my friend, your authenticity is respected by and shared by others. At times, I honestly feel the same way. And I find myself still striving to learn more each day. We go through cycles.

Thanks for your example, and all you add to the forum.

[Anonymous]

Wayfarer, you are a favorite of mine, too! I love your comments. A couple years ago I was having an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine who is a former bishop and very TBM. I said how much I disliked it that people held the prophet to be infallible and pushed wrong thinking like the Fourteen Fundamentals without being corrected. Rather than being shocked at my skepticism, he readily agreed. He said he fully believes that the prophets have to work out their salvation with fear and trembling like we all do.

I believe it’s just wishful thinking and abdication of personal responsibilty. If it’s possible to get an A+ before the test is even done, how is that fair? And if people can be saved by being unthinking drones (when the brethren speak, the thinking is done), then what’s the merit in exaltation?

[Anonymous]

Wayfarer, I’ve appreciated your comments. You’ve helped me to see that things aren’t so black-and-white.

wayfarer wrote:

I read somewhere today that the church isn’t so much about truth as it is about authority: that god has appointed a living prophet, and he is the authoritative source of all I need to know and be happy. All I need to do is follow the prophet and I will never be led astray.

I can fake it ’til the cows come home. I don’t believe it. I don’t accept it. It’s a control drama I refuse to buy into.

We only rely on authority as a source of truth when the facts are uncertain, and we rely on evidence when the facts are clear. We appeal to authority when we have nothing else to appeal to, when nobody has any idea what the answer is and there is no good evidence supporting any answers. Authority is the “last resort” for finding truth. The reality is that nobody knows what happens after we die and nobody knows what God is really like because the evidence is so tenuous, so we have to rely on authority because we don’t have good evidence.

wayfarer wrote:

But you want to know what I really believe? None of it.

I am slowly coming to this realization, piece by piece. It’s extremely hard. My whole worldview is falling apart, and I have to go item by item in my mind and reevaluate what I believe.

[Anonymous]

I believe a lot of it.

I don’t beleive a lot of it.

Iow, I believe what I believe – and I’ve become accepting of that.

[Anonymous]

Old-Timer wrote:

I believe a lot of it.

I don’t beleive a lot of it.

Iow, I believe what I believe – and I’ve become accepting of that.

perhaps i was too rash in saying i believe none of it. we all have our days. there is a lot of good.

but there is a side of me that, having been lied to so many times, i lose trust in what is said…and that is not faith. i realize that to say i have been lied to is a sharp, negative stance. but the church to me is like a close, beloved, but abusive, dysfunctional family member, who cannot own up to his/her own abusive tendencies.

[Anonymous]

wayfarer wrote:

but the church to me is like a close, beloved, but abusive, dysfunctional family member, who cannot own up to his/her own abusive tendencies.

I’ve thought in the recent past that I’m in an unhealthy relationship with the Church and I need to leave the relationship. I’ve left the TBM relationship with the Church, and in this way I’ve “dumped” the TBM Church. I also broke up with the traditional LDS view of God. So now I am trying to negotiate a new relationship, and I could never go back to the old relationship, because I do think that it was dysfunctional.

[Anonymous]

wayfarer wrote:

but there is a side of me that, having been lied to so many times, i lose trust in what is said…and that is not faith. i realize that to say i have been lied to is a sharp, negative stance. but the church to me is like a close, beloved, but abusive, dysfunctional family member, who cannot own up to his/her own abusive tendencies.

Thank you. +1000!

Chad Waldron

[Anonymous]

Wayfarer remember the “middleway” path? It helped me from completely jumping ship when I read some of your words. I’ve been hanging out on the MD&D board alot and they are a little tired of me but I can’t get over their bulletproof testimonies and how they’re able to sustain them. After awhile they’ve continued to have some somewhat plausible answers to my posts so they also have kept me from jumping ship. But somedays I just feel like jumping off a cliff, it becomes so hard to be in the middle sometimes. So I hear you loud and clear.

[Anonymous]

wayfarer wrote:

but there is a side of me that, having been lied to so many times, i lose trust in what is said…and that is not faith. i realize that to say i have been lied to is a sharp, negative stance.

I can understand these feelings, and I think they are valid. It can feel like we’ve been lied to…which doesn’t necessarily mean lies were told.

There are days when I think to myself there is no way the church can possibly be true considering all these things that rattle around in my brain…which doesn’t necessarily mean it is false.

I am glad a middle way is a balanced option to allow myself to feel these things, to doubt many things, and to hold on to things I love. In the long-run…it helps me to allow myself those options and learn from those feelings.

[Anonymous]

Heber13 wrote:

wayfarer wrote:

but there is a side of me that, having been lied to so many times, i lose trust in what is said…and that is not faith. i realize that to say i have been lied to is a sharp, negative stance.

I can understand these feelings, and I think they are valid. It can feel like we’ve been lied to…which doesn’t necessarily mean lies were told.

Telling a one-sided story, when you know the other side, is s type of lying. Even the Gospel Principles manual says that.

Gospel Principles wrote:

Lying is intentionally deceiving others.

…

When we speak untruths, we are guilty of lying. We can also intentionally deceive others by a gesture or a look, by silence, or by telling only part of the truth. Whenever we lead people in any way to believe something that is not true, we are not being honest.

I agree with the above. it is what the Church teaches. it is not what the church does. avoiding inconvenient truths, teaching for doctrine the commandments of men, knowing that there is no doctrinal justification for teaching them: i sense no integrity in these things, and I realize that i no longer can trust the declared normative or doctrinal statements, without fully vetting them for myself.

Perhaps learning and accepting for myself is exactly what Joseph Smith had in mind, but my skepticism profoundly isolates me in today’s church of absolutes. i feel a progressive distancing by TBM family and friends as my words simply confuse them, that i should get back to simply accepting and believing.

Heber13 wrote:

There are days when I think to myself there is no way the church can possibly be true considering all these things that rattle around in my brain…which doesn’t necessarily mean it is false.

of course not. to say it is “true” or “false” without a qualifier is to speak in absolutes. it is both and neither…the church is in the middle as are we all.

Heber13 wrote:

I am glad a middle way is a balanced option to allow myself to feel these things, to doubt many things, and to hold on to things I love. In the long-run…it helps me to allow myself those options and learn from those feelings.

amen to that!

[Anonymous]

in another thread,

SilentDawning wrote:

So here is a case of learning definitely leadng to wisdom…. so, how do you feel about your conclusion that much of the LDS theology is a control mechanism, as you said in another thread? Feel free to answer it there…was it due to a disconnection from God and others?

Any system that is based upon fear or reward as a way to condition current and future behavior is indeed a control mechanism. Fear and reward both focus on the non-present: they are future-oriented. YHWH, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, ego eimi…these are all present tense, indicative. God is not “I will be”.

so, when someone threatens a loss of (future) salvation if you don’t do today specific things, they are conflating a subjective speculation of the future with a fictional judgment on your objective behavior. this is manipulative and wrong.

desire and fear are the basis of our emotions: desire is focused on the left hemisphere of our emotional center, and fear on the right. desires, appetites, and passions are the provenance of the left amygdala and insula, and fear, disgust, contempt are the provenance of the right. When we are given threats to lose what we desire, when we are conditioned by fear, we are being manipulated to be off-center in our emotional balance. Fear becomes the principle driver to keep the “local systems in line”. Fear becomes the imperative shut-down of any reasonable thought.

When I said, “I don’t beleive any of it”, the context of the OP was about the idea that ou religion is more about authority than about truth, and that such is a control drama of sorts. Because after over half a century, I have been conditioned so much by these control mechanisms, fear governs so many of my decisions in life. I avoid work by posting here, because I’m afraid of screwing up in the work I have to do — fear paralyzes. And until I completely reject that forced-upon schema of fear-based decision making, I will never be free to act for myself.

This is why the Middle Way, as outlined by Confucius and Guanzi, are critical. I need to recognize that all desires, appetities, and passions are to be kept within the bounds the Lord has set — this means that as I traverse on the Way, the side-paths of emotion:

– on the left: the future satisfaction of desires, appetities, passions, pride, satisfaction in rewards, and feelings of certainty;

– and on the right: the paralysis of fear, anger, hatred, disgust, contempt, and cognitive dissonance.

The moral compass bisects these bounds of left and right to outline a middle course of truth — all truth. It does not mean the place of ‘no emotion’, but rather, that the emotions we have are spiritually connected to our center — the Middle Way — and therefore balanced.

The pivot of the Middle Way is this center between the extremes of emotion, and between emotional subjectivity and intellectual objectivity in this very moment between the past and future.

[Anonymous]

My question, though, was whether all that thinking about the church intellectually disconnected you spiritually from God, so you landed on a rather dispassionate view of the Church as a result. Did your emphasis on learning and intellectual thinking this last while block the emotions necessary for true learning (I think that’s what you said earlier, that you can’t disconnect true learning and knowledge of God from emotions) and therefore, the intellecturalism lead you to a conclusion that caused you to reject a lot of the LDS faith in spite of presumed past spiritual experiences that drew you to it?

You gave what I feel was a really good explanation of your conclusions based on your study of philosophers in the Middle Way, but I was asking whether the intellectualism disconnected you from the emotional side of your brain necessary to make a connecton with God — leading to spurious conclusions.

If so, this would be an example of being learned, leading to a state of being “unwise”.

[Anonymous]

SilentDawning wrote:

My question, though, was whether all that thinking about the church intellectually disconnected you spiritually from God, so you landed on a rather dispassionate view of the Church as a result. Did your emphasis on learning and intellectual thinking this last while block the emotions necessary for true learning (I think that’s what you said earlier, that you can’t disconnect true learning and knowledge of God from emotions) and therefore, the intellecturalism lead you to a conclusion that caused you to reject a lot of the LDS faith in spite of presumed past spiritual experiences that drew you to it?

Let’s be careful here — What I reject is the idea that the authoritarian model of knowledge — insisting that whatever the leaders say is truth and I must accept it as truth. I reject this as categorically false. “I believe none of it”, means that I believe there is no truth whatosever in blindly following leaders. I believe as well that Joseph Smith categorically rejected this model as well. He said that the LDS would have no creed, because a creed binds what is to be believed.

So I actually accept the Joseph Smith premise as being completely valid, while rejecting the stated all or nothing position of the church and the requirement to follow authoritarian truth determination.

SilentDawning wrote:

You gave what I feel was a really good explanation of your conclusions based on your study of philosophers in the Middle Way, but I was asking whether the intellectualism disconnected you from the emotional side of your brain necessary to make a connecton with God — leading to spurious conclusions.

If so, this would be an example of being learned, leading to a state of being “unwise”.

no, i don’t think so. I have always had more of an esoteric/spiritual understanding of truth. my attraction toward asian and other Ways was based upon having similar “in your mind and in your heart’ experiences that I had with the Book of Mormon, and therefore, could not longer accept the idea of exclusivity in the LDS church. in fact, as i found evidences of a sacred bridge between certain sacred words in our faith with those in ancient texts of all faith, I felt the presence of a universal, emergent awareness of truth amidst many of the faith traditions.

This is the challenge of propositional learning: and when Joseph Smith ‘translated’ the scripture noted in the other thread, he was observing a profound concept: that an increase in [rote or propositional] learning does not increase wisdom or knowledge. The rabbinical tradition had all sorts of learning about the torah/talmud. yet, how much of it matters when science proves something else? if we are not open minded, if we are not honest with oursselves, we cannot learn.

[Author]

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