- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
This question came up in another thread and thought I would start a separate thread because I think it is an important topic. How do you tell the difference between good feelings and the Holy Ghost? For those of you who no longer hold the traditional view of the Holy Ghost, perhaps you view it as your intuition, so do you trust your intuition?
To my knowledge, the roles of the Holy Ghost are (1) to testify of Truth, (2) lead us in our daily affairs including (a) prompting us to do good, and (b) guiding important life decisions and (c ) to warn us of danger be it spiritual or temporal.
My personal experience with those three roles is as follows:
1. I am still struggling with having depended on good feelings as an indicator of truth, and coming to find that this is extremely unreliable, often times even an impediment to learning truth.
2.
(a) Whenever I have had good feelings prompting me to act kindly toward another, I have never regretted it and have a almost always had more good feelings follow.(b) Some good and some bad. For those that went bad, I’ve tried to find the good in it but it hasn’t always been easy. For example, pre-mission, I prayed to know which job of two jobs I should take. I ended up taking the job that felt the best and was laid off only a month into it and it was now too late to take the other job. This one was easy to reconcile because I made some good friends in that time, learned a few things and ended up getting a better job anyway. The next example happened on my mission. In another thread I shared a bit about how important the mission was to me and how strongly I felt I needed to go although I was already 23. I ended up being sent home early due to medical reasons. This really threw my life off track and took a few years to recover. Some think that the mission and the stress of it all caused the illness. To reconcile, I had to believe that the illness had always been there, but dormant, and that the mission only brought it out. I’ve had to view this as a blessing because if the illness had to come out, it was the best time for it, I was mature enough to deal with it, but did not yet have a family or any serious responsibilities. If I had, that would have been absolutely devastating. Even though I tried to see it all in a positive light, it severely damaged my confidence in the Lord and my faith overall.
(c) I have had some experiences where I felt led out of both spiritual and temporal danger.
When I began going to church I was on a spiritual high that lasted nearly a year. Slowly the intense feelings of the “Spirit” began to lessen and I wondered if I was doing something wrong. My wise bishop reminded me that we don’t do what is right so that we have good feelings, we do what is right because it is right and we love the Lord and our fellow man. This was an eye opener for me because I had always been chasing feelings in one form or another, be it WoW issues or other pleasures, and this led me down a dark road. I realized I was still chasing feelings. I would still like to believe that I was blessed with these intense feelings as I tried to do what was right as sort of a training that allowed me to completely change my life for the better, then little by little the Lord weaned me off of it and trusted me to do what was right, not for the reward of good feelings, but just because it was right and I loved him.
As I said on the other thread, I’ll write a longer view of this anon, but I appreciate that you’ve started this thread. It’s a complex subject. Unknown, your post makes a good point. Feeling the Spirit can be complicated. I do agree with your bishop that good feelings by themselves don’t always come from the the Spirit. I look forward to responses on this thread, thanks for starting it. As I said in the other thread, my FC is directly related to this issue and I really don’t know how to tell what is the spirit and what is just emotion. I am accepting of the idea that if it’s good go ahead and do it anyway, but sometimes it’s not apparent that something is good or bad and sometimes it might seem good but have a bad outcome. I also understand that there is intuition or the Light of Christ or something out there that may be related to the spirit or not. My grandmother, not a member of the church and not religious at all, often “had a feeling” about things and was usually right. There were probably feelings she didn’t say anything about when it turned out to be wrong because she rarely mentioned them until after the fact and could therefore just not mention when she was wrong – but I don’t know that to be the case. Is that the Holy Ghost even though she didn’t have the GotHG?
I’ve always attempted to filter out the doubt that I was only experiencing emotions by telling myself that the spirit speaks to our hearts (emotion) and minds (intellect). Doctrine and Covenants 8:2 wrote:Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.
I’ve probably brought this up before but I viewed it as being the truth established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. Emotions being one witness, intellect being the other. Either witness standing alone being insufficient but together they could provide direction.
Another way of looking at it, if your heart and your mind are telling you to do something does it really matter what label is assigned to it? Intuition, HG, if you really feel a positive urge to do something and it makes sense to do it you might as well experiment on the feelings and look for the good fruits afterwards… which it sounds like you are doing. Maybe a decision didn’t pan out but you looked for the positive in the outcome so it made for a positive experience. In the end that’s what really matters to me, looking for the positive.
DarkJedi wrote:I look forward to responses on this thread, thanks for starting it. As I said in the other thread, my FC is directly related to this issue and I really don’t know how to tell what is the spirit and what is just emotion. I am accepting of the idea that if it’s good go ahead and do it anyway, but sometimes it’s not apparent that something is good or bad and sometimes it might seem good but have a bad outcome.
I also understand that there is intuition or the Light of Christ or something out there that may be related to the spirit or not. My grandmother, not a member of the church and not religious at all, often “had a feeling” about things and was usually right. There were probably feelings she didn’t say anything about when it turned out to be wrong because she rarely mentioned them until after the fact and could therefore just not mention when she was wrong – but I don’t know that to be the case. Is that the Holy Ghost even though she didn’t have the GotHG?
The first thing that you will learn and can actually demonstrate and proof in psychology and Neuroscience is that there is no feelings or energy and originate outside of you. It’s all started in the brain.
How the brain transfers those feelings depend on the reaction the brain is taken(what chemicals are getting released and how much—gets transferred to different parts if the body).
Quote:How to Understand Your Emotions
Most people would agree that it’s important to communicate what you’re feeling. But how do you KNOW what you are feeling? Here are some simple yet profound ways to know what you’re feeling and how to use those feelings to improve your life.
Quote:Know what feelings are. They’re simply energy that moves through the body. We sometimes try to stop our feelings from moving through, either because we’re embarrassed by them, or because we think we’ll be seen in a negative light. This causes exhaustion. In reality, feelings are flow, they are connected to our sense of wellness and creativity. If we are able to access flow/feelings, then we can maintain our physical, psychological, and emotional health.
Quote:Get in the zone. Each feeling has a particular zone in the body that it travels through.
Fear often starts in the belly and moves upward in the body. Most of us are familiar with butterflies in the belly. Fear, like all feelings, is important because it gives us information with which to keep us safe and healthy. If a person continually ignores their fear sensations or is carrying around old fear that they’ve never expressed, they can develop physical symptoms in the zone of the body where the fear is blocked. Irritable Bowel Syndrome, ulcers, indigestion,and nausea,are often related to blocked fear in a person’s body.
Quote:Sadness often begins in the chest and moves upward through the throat and up to the eyes where we see tears. You’ve probably heard the expression “She’s all choked up.” or “My heart hurts.” We’ve all seen someone cry. But often “we try and control our sadness because we think it’s too painful to feel and we stop the energy before it can come up through the eyes and out into a healthy expression. However, actually allowing oneself to cry fully can be one of the most cleansing experiences.” Paying attention to the physical sensations in these areas and allowing the energy to move completely assists us in grieving a loss, empathizing with others’ suffering and maintaining health and well being. Sadness, when blocked in these areas of the body, can lead to heart/lung problems, throat/voice problems, and eye issues.
Quote:Anger begins in the back between the shoulder blades and travels upward, along the back of the neck and around the sides of the jaws. Anger is the “No trespass” emotion and assists us in creating healthy boundaries. Healthy anger can assist us in saying “No” to things that are not in our best interest. If you notice sensations in your back, neck, and jaws such as tension, pain,and pressure, it’s likely that you’ve been stuffing your anger energy. Most people do this because they have been taught that anger is an inappropriate emotion or they saw someone who used their anger to injure people and they don’t want to do the same thing. True healthy anger doesn’t injure anyone including the person feeling it. Healthy anger doesn’t blame, abuse, or attack others. Moving anger in healthy ways allows the energy to come all the way up and through the body enabling the person to give voice to their experience and to create something different.
Quote:Joy is the last of the five core emotions. Joy is often felt in the chest (Similar to sadness we have tears of joy) but it may radiate outward more than simply moving upward. To experience Joy fully it’s imperative to cultivate the ability to move all of the emotions through completely, because they are all connected. If you want to feel Joy, you need to be willing to also feel your fear, and your sadness, anger and sexual feelings. If you are stuffing one or more of the more “Painful” emotions, then you’ll also be stuffing your joy.
Quote:Keep a journal and record what you experience during certain events. For example, how did you feel during your happiest moment? During your saddest? During your most passionate? Then when you are trying to figure out how you were feeling, try to match up your current state to one of those moments.
Quote:Knowing what you’re feeling opens the door to your creativity, your wisdom, your intuition, and your health. These emotions are not so much painful as they are a strong feeling that we seek to stop, which ultimately creates way more pain than allowing the energy to move freely.
Quote:People often think, if I allow myself to feel this, I’ll never stop. The truth is, that true authentic feelings move through in waves, and most don’t last more than a few minutes. If you’re experiencing feelings that persist for hours or days, there is likely a different feeling underneath that is needing to be felt and expressed.
Drs. Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks.
Everything that we feel or sense or are aware inside of us comes from the limbic system. The amygdala, the hippocampus, and the thalamus and a few other parts of the lambic system.
Knowing and getting in touch with what you are feeling and when and releasing it in a positive matter without holding it in is crucial to mental health and expressing what you are feeling end when and to whom, including what people call the HG.
There are different names for this inside different cultures and sciences. But all point to the same source and origin and source when studying images of the brain.
We use different words for the same thing, HG is predominately described as the “burning of the bosom” and “the feeling if the burning of the chest” by apostles and prophets and GA.
Guess where that comes from and what feeling that is?!
I certainly buy into all that FC. I suppose the question then is does the Holy Ghost, Light of Christ, or whatever have some “supernatural” power to affect our feelings, or do these feelings just happen and we attribute them to the Holy Ghost, or is it a mix of the two? If it’s the former or latter, how do we distinguish? If it’s the middle one, aren’t we just fooling ourselves? DarkJedi wrote:I certainly buy into all that FC. I suppose the question then is does the Holy Ghost, Light of Christ, or whatever have some “supernatural” power to affect our feelings, or do these feelings just happen and we attribute them to the Holy Ghost, or is it a mix of the two? If it’s the former or latter, how do we distinguish? If it’s the middle one, aren’t we just fooling ourselves?
Good question darkjedi. Unfortunately that answer is fuzzy at best if you are looking for evidence or certainty.
The answer that it does depends entirely on the “I think therefore I am” philosophy.
Since there is zero evidence for it, the idea is based entirely on thought or the idea alone that it does.
I don’t see any right it wrong based in an idea alone. So you get to choose.
However the facts as they unrivaled themselves at paint a deeper and deeper pictures of us as children if god with our desires and beliefs.
I tend to acknowledge both views at once, simultaneously trusting those “feelings” and not trusting them.
I make certain decisions if that’s all I have to go by. However realizing the whole time I can be wrong open to further evidence later.
But I try to use it in light of evidence currently a usable to me as well
As good fruit. And take it into perspective.
I would not however base an entire life or belief around it. Just way way to much evidence to do that.
A catastrophe waiting to happen in ones life with emotions.
The equivalent of emotionally jumping off a cliff in a unforeseen future time.
Is it worth it?
This is a great question, and it’s one that I’m very concerned about. I’m not sure my thoughts will help you at all, so I’m posting partly as a fellow questioner and seeker of help. I can best illustrate my thoughts on this with a few brief stories. When I was on my mission, I struggled with impure thoughts. The country I was serving in is very open about portrayals of the naked human body (some might call it public pornography), and I had a hard time with that. When discussing this with my mission president, he expressed the opinion that the thoughts I was having were from Satan. I had never thought of it much before then, but at the time I was really disturbed by the idea that some unseen entity could actually plant thoughts in my brain without me knowing it. To me, it felt too much like mind control—limited, perhaps, but it opened the question of which thoughts were genuinely my own and which weren’t. Then I started wondering about the Holy Ghost. I started studying the Holy Ghost, and it seemed to me that the most common method the HG is supposed to use for communicating with us is through our feelings. But how can I know for sure that a certain thought or feeling comes from the Holy Ghost rather than myself?
Around the same time my companion and I were teaching an investigator. I could barely speak the language at the time, so my companion was doing most of the teaching. We taught him about how the Holy Ghost answers prayers and asked him to pray about the truth of the Book of Mormon. We knelt on the floor together, and this humble man said a simple and sincere prayer. Afterwards it was very quiet. My companion asked him how he felt, and he said he felt peaceful. “That’s the Holy Ghost,” my companion said. “THAT was the Holy Ghost?” the man asked in wonderment. I don’t remember much else, except that I personally felt nothing at all. It wasn’t my prayer and I wasn’t the one asking a question, but it still disturbed me that I couldn’t feel anything. The country I was in was pretty secular, and I didn’t have many chances to teach other investigators. I think I only taught three or four second discussions my entire mission.
After I got home from my mission, I learned a lot about critical thinking and cultural awareness. I started to wonder how much of my beliefs and attitudes were affected by my home culture, especially the church. Very quickly I started to recognize that many of my beliefs had simply been accepted based on the teaching and attitudes of my parents, church leaders, and peers in the church, and that deep inside I didn’t really feel a strong conviction about much of anything in the church. The testimonies I had borne in the past, the talks I’d given, the actions I’d taken made me feel good, but not in a strong, burning testimony-of-truth kind of way—more in a pleasant, comfortable feeling of belonging to a community. Some people might feel content with that, but I didn’t. I still wondered—how could I determine if my good feelings were just normal good feelings that anybody might have or whether they were actually the Holy Ghost? My feelings seemed pretty mundane to me, the sort of thing that anybody might feel about their home culture, whether it be Buddhism or humanism or whatever. I had never actually prayed to ask about the truthfulness of the church before, so I decided to give it a try. If the church was true, I reasoned, the Holy Ghost would give me an answer that was unmistakable, something that was obviously from outside myself. During my prayer I did have a strong feeling, but it was one of loneliness—I felt that God was not there at all. I felt that I was talking to the wall.
My experiences have led me to believe that emotion isn’t a reliable basis for determining truth. For whatever reason, God hasn’t seen fit to grace me with strong emotions. Sure, I cry at funerals and sad movies and exquisitely beautiful musical performances. But I have never had what I would call a spiritual experience. I see my emotional reactions as physical things that come from inside myself—not from some unseen, external being—at least as far as I can tell. And if I can’t tell, then what’s the point?
I recognize that others have had spiritual experiences, or experiences that they believe to be spiritual in nature, such as promptings or burning-in-the-bosom feelings, and I can’t claim that they have not. My wife is among those people. But those experiences belong to the people who experienced them, not to me. I also recognize that strange and unexplainable things happen in the universe. Some people have experienced things that they can only see as a miracle. People have near-death experiences that can’t seem to be explained neurologically (yet). So I’m open to the idea of God or a supernatural force. But my experiences haven’t confirmed anything to me yet. And I’m skeptical that God would work through something as unreliable as emotion. (If you are interested, look into the idea of confirmation bias.)
That said, maybe emotions are just one tool God uses to great effect for certain people. If you are one of them, that’s awesome. If you have had emotional experiences or promptings that you believe were from the Holy Ghost or some spiritual source, and those experiences and beliefs make your life richer and better, then I don’t see anything wrong with trusting yourself and your experiences. Be grateful for the good experiences you’ve had. Just don’t throw your intellect out the window.
I don’t try to make the distinction, in most cases, since, generally, I don’t have good HG radar. I’ve had some overpowering experiences that came completely out of the blue in unexpected ways, but, generally, I’m much more of a thinker than a feeler. Thus, for me, with a very few notable exceptions, I experience what I would call the Holy Ghost more as “pure flashes of intelligence” than as feelings of any kind.
Daeruin wrote:My experiences have led me to believe that emotion isn’t a reliable basis for determining truth. For whatever reason, God hasn’t seen fit to grace me with strong emotions. Sure, I cry at funerals and sad movies and exquisitely beautiful musical performances. But I have never had what I would call a spiritual experience. I see my emotional reactions as physical things that come from inside myself—not from some unseen, external being—at least as far as I can tell. And if I can’t tell, then what’s the point?
I recognize that others have had spiritual experiences, or experiences that they believe to be spiritual in nature, such as promptings or burning-in-the-bosom feelings, and I can’t claim that they have not. My wife is among those people. But those experiences belong to the people who experienced them, not to me. I also recognize that strange and unexplainable things happen in the universe. Some people have experienced things that they can only see as a miracle. People have near-death experiences that can’t seem to be explained neurologically (yet). So I’m open to the idea of God or a supernatural force. But my experiences haven’t confirmed anything to me yet. And I’m skeptical that God would work through something as unreliable as emotion. (If you are interested, look into the idea of confirmation bias.)
That said, maybe emotions are just one tool God uses to great effect for certain people. If you are one of them, that’s awesome. If you have had emotional experiences or promptings that you believe were from the Holy Ghost or some spiritual source, and those experiences and beliefs make your life richer and better, then I don’t see anything wrong with trusting yourself and your experiences. Be grateful for the good experiences you’ve had. Just don’t throw your intellect out the window.
This sums up my thoughts as well, Daeruin. I do not believe emotion is reliable, either, and that is based on my experiences. You mention ho emotion may be only only one tool but it seems to be the only tool and that’s the problem for me. If it’s the only tool and is also unreliable then what good is it? Why would God do that?
Curtis wrote:I don’t try to make the distinction, in most cases, since, generally, I don’t have good HG radar.
I’ve had some overpowering experiences that came completely out of the blue in unexpected ways, but, generally, I’m much more of a thinker than a feeler. Thus, for me, with a very few notable exceptions, I experience what I would call the Holy Ghost more as “pure flashes of intelligence” than as feelings of any kind.
I don’t try anymore, either, but I used to think I was very in tune with the Holy Ghost. I’m not sure if I feel less or just ignore more. Either way, I don’t trust my feelings. Unfortunately for me the few notable exceptions were just as strong as each other and one of those led me to where I am today. Perhaps I needed the faith transition, but it has not been good in many ways for me or my family.
For some reason I think there was a GC talk given on this question, “How do I know it’s not my own thoughts?”, but am having trouble finding it. nibbler wrote:I’ve always attempted to filter out the doubt that I was only experiencing emotions by telling myself that the spirit speaks to our hearts (emotion) and minds (intellect).
Doctrine and Covenants 8:2 wrote:Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart, by the Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you and which shall dwell in your heart.
I’ve probably brought this up before but I viewed it as being the truth established by the mouth of two or three witnesses. Emotions being one witness, intellect being the other. Either witness standing alone being insufficient but together they could provide direction.
Another way of looking at it, if your heart and your mind are telling you to do something does it really matter what label is assigned to it? Intuition, HG, if you really feel a positive urge to do something and it makes sense to do it you might as well experiment on the feelings and look for the good fruits afterwards… which it sounds like you are doing. Maybe a decision didn’t pan out but you looked for the positive in the outcome so it made for a positive experience. In the end that’s what really matters to me, looking for the positive.
I like this. If we are looking at things symbolically, as many of us do, recognizing the promptings of the Spirit is a good metaphor for acknowledging our emotions yet keeping them them in check by getting approval for our intellect. So yes, maybe they are just my own thoughts, but there is still something to learn from the Church’s teachings about seeking inspiration and making decisions. I suppose the danger is twofold, 1. placing too much weight either the emotion or the intellect and 2. expecting this to be infallible. Even if I accept the doctrine of the Holy Ghost and promptings of the Spirit at face value, I would be better off expecting to make a few mistakes here and there anyways, and being ok with that. There is any number of ways to interpret what happened when things didn’t work out, but I think knowing that they won’t always work out lessens the heartache a bit when they don’t.
As I stated in the original post, I have also had some mishaps in following what I thought to be promptings of the Spirit and it has taken some time to recover from it. For a long time I didn’t trust my instincts or believe they were divinely inspired in anyway. But I find that as I do trust myself I am happier. I haven’t returned to where I was in my faithful days, but I am learning to trust myself again and I think that is progress.
I also love the concept of moving forward when something resonates in my heart and seems good to my mind. That is the general standard I use. The comments mentioned is what I sometimes find confusing. It’s really hard to say at times when it is the Holy Spirit we’re feeling, or Satan, or bodies natural processes that cause those feelings. I’ve heard there are people out there that claim they feel the Holy Spirit or intuition when they do horrible things to people. Not something I understand.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.