Who and What is the Holy Ghost?

[Anonymous]

DarkJedi wrote:

SamBee wrote:

I’ll write a longer reply when I’m on a computer, but for me the HG is similar to an energy. (Man, that sounds New Agey too!) I find my internal experience hard to describe.

Obi Wan Kenobi: The force is “…an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.” Early comparisons of Star Wars and the church aside, this seems to fit what you guys are talking about is some ways. I’m reading this thread with interest and I’m trying to get my head wrapped around these different ideas instead of that which I have been taught in church (the Holy Ghost is a personage of spirit, he can be in only one place but his influence can be felt everywhere, etc.). I do recognize these things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Hmm… no, I’m not really thinking of that. (For me personally) What Obi Wan describes is more like the Tao, which has been renamed the Force for western consumption. I think the tao is the energy that runs behind all life, and perhaps the universe. That’s a subject in itself.

I first felt the spirit in a Pentecostal meeting. I felt it very strongly. And when I said a prayer to become a born again, I felt it incredibly strongly. It wasn’t really much like anything I’d experienced before. When the New Testament talks about a companion, that was it. I felt very much like it was there with me. I didn’t get a sense of it having a personality, but it did certainly give me direction. I didn’t conceive of it quite like the Priesthood, which is used for doing physical things (supposedly), nor was it quite like happiness that I gained from doing good things. As a companion it got me through ordeals in ways unlike before, confirmed or reinforced certain things, and also occasionally acted like a sat nav.

While I have felt it on numerous occasions in the LDS, I didn’t feel it particularly when I was given the gift of the spirit. (I wonder if it is truly for anyone to give, or whether that’s Simon Magus thinking.) There are certain meetings and talks in the LDS I certainly DON’T feel the spirit at, and certain practices. I don’t agree with a lot of LDS teaching on the spirit as it doesn’t accord with my own experiences. However, it was extremely odd for me, after thinking the LDS was a load of baloney to suddenly feel it in an LDS context. This was certainly something I HADN’T been conditioned to.

As I say, it is very hard for me to describe it.

I see all of these as slightly different things –

* Tao, the Force, the life behind life and the universe.

* The light of Christ, this is apparently the conscience.

* Happiness gained from social contact and positive experiences.

* The Spirit.

* Intuition, or psychic knowledge.

* God as king of the universe.

This is without getting into healing etc.

[Anonymous]

The Holy Ghost is a million years of evolution combined with your own experiences that makes your brain react in a specific way to certain situations. That is more inspiring to me than an unseen entity tweaking the neurons in my brain telling me to turn left instead of right. My way It could still all be part of Gods plan.

[Anonymous]

Evolution doesn’t explain it. How come I don’t experience it outside spiritual contexts? Its survival use to me is fairly minimal, and I certainly didn’t experience it until after a prayer. It makes no sense on a biological level.

[Anonymous]

SamBee wrote:

Evolution doesn’t explain it. How come I don’t experience it outside spiritual contexts? Its survival use to me is fairly minimal, and I certainly didn’t experience it until after a prayer. It makes no sense on a biological level.

You may not experience it outside of spiritual contexts but many people including myself do.

[Anonymous]

Cadence wrote:

SamBee wrote:

Evolution doesn’t explain it. How come I don’t experience it outside spiritual contexts? Its survival use to me is fairly minimal, and I certainly didn’t experience it until after a prayer. It makes no sense on a biological level.

You may not experience it outside of spiritual contexts but many people including myself do.

How do you know that I experience the same as you?

Or if I am experiencing something quite different?

I don’t get it after a good movie. I don’t get it after I’ve had a good night out. And I don’t get it after various things that I enjoy or feel right doing.

I cannot think of a survival use for it at all. Particularly as I lived for years (un)successfully without any such thing. So how come I reached adulthood without sensing it at all?

[Anonymous]

I don’t think our scientific understanding of the brain and consciousness is developed enough to say how spiritual experiences might fit into evolution from a scientific point of view. This is one area where you need to have faith in the scientific method and faith that the theory of evolution will eventually cohere with seemingly unrelated things like spiritual experiences.

I will say, however, that not everything has to “make sense” from a biological or evolutionary perspective. The process of evolution doesn’t guarantee that absolutely every trait a species has is 100% optimized or has a specific, obvious purpose. Some traits become useless as time passes and things change (tailbone, appendix), some traits aren’t useful at all but are tied to other traits that are useful, some traits develop randomly and are merely neutral with regard to species survival, etc.

[Anonymous]

As a survival mechanism, and as a breeding mechanism, its use is essentially zero.

Even music has applications in breeding and work.

i also do NOT think all HG experiences are the same phenomenon. I hear other people talking about HG in terms unrecognizable to me personally, so I suspect they have something different.

[Anonymous]

SamBee wrote:

As a survival mechanism, and as a breeding mechanism, its use is essentially zero.

The Holy Ghost and/or spiritual confirmations help you believe in the truth (presumably). They help you form bonds and communities with like-minded individuals. They make you feel more self-confident (usually) and/or open to new ideas. I can see survival benefits in all those things—whether they occur in a strictly spiritual context or not.

SamBee wrote:

i also do NOT think all HG experiences are the same phenomenon. I hear other people talking about HG in terms unrecognizable to me personally, so I suspect they have something different.

By the same token, since I have never experienced anything I can positively identify as the Holy Ghost, I tend to suspect that nobody else has either, and that their experiences can be explained in other ways (plain emotions, confirmation bias, etc.). Or maybe some of them really have felt the HG and others haven’t. Or maybe the HG speaks to everyone differently, depending on their abilities and situations, and doesn’t speak to others at all. I’m not sure there’s a single right answer—certainly not an objective, provable one (not even by science, yet).

[Anonymous]

I’ve never heard (external) voices, but some people evidently do, including a close friend of mine.

In actual fact, the HG experiences I’ve had DON’T help me socially. It

keeps me in a church my schoolfriends hate, and I’m embarrassed of in

some senses (blacks, women, sexuality), and which would make many people (including potential mates) laugh at me. It gives me feelings when reading alone. And no it doesn’t give me confidence in itself either, or help me with new ideas.

So personally HG is of limited use to me in social bonding. I did okay

without it.

[Anonymous]

My comments were only examples of possible mechanisms. I offered them to show that it may be possible to justify feelings from the HG from an evolutionary perspective. Science just needs to work on it a little more. That’s my opinion, but I could be completely wrong. We all find inspiration and peace in different ideas. If you’re interested in pursuing these ideas more, I’ll be happy to explain the theory a little further and maybe share some helpful articles I found. It seems promising to me.

This is all Cadence’s fault anyway. Here I am defending an idea he threw out there and then abandoned.

[Anonymous]

For what it’s worth, we do have a number of features of no apparent survival value – musical appreciation for one.

[Anonymous]

I have absolutely no doctrinal/theological basis for this, but I’ve been kind of feeling lately like our Heavenly Mother(s) is/are the Holy Ghost. One of the names we like to use in our church for the HG is ‘the Comforter,’ and I was thinking about this when my kids were all sick with a stomach bug the other week. I was doing a lot of comforting. The things that the Holy Spirit does are very, very similar to the things that *I* do as a mother.

Also, I like the idea of the Godhead actually consisting of a nuclear family – father, mother, son – since families are supposed to be central to the Plan of Salvation. It just makes more sense to me than a Godhead of father, son, and unrelated, mysterious being whom we know nothing about but we are positive it must be a male spirit. And I would never so much as float this theory to my TBM spouse. But the truth is, we know so little about the nature of the HG that it’s almost silly to insist that it has to be male. In truth, absolutely nothing about the nature of the Holy Ghost would be changed if we found out it was female.

(Now that I have this all typed out I realize it sounds really, REALLY crazy. Sorry.)

[Anonymous]

Joni wrote:

I have absolutely no doctrinal/theological basis for this, but I’ve been kind of feeling lately like our Heavenly Mother(s) is/are the Holy Ghost. One of the names we like to use in our church for the HG is ‘the Comforter,’ and I was thinking about this when my kids were all sick with a stomach bug the other week. I was doing a lot of comforting. The things that the Holy Spirit does are very, very similar to the things that *I* do as a mother.

Also, I like the idea of the Godhead actually consisting of a nuclear family – father, mother, son – since families are supposed to be central to the Plan of Salvation. It just makes more sense to me than a Godhead of father, son, and unrelated, mysterious being whom we know nothing about but we are positive it must be a male spirit. And I would never so much as float this theory to my TBM spouse. But the truth is, we know so little about the nature of the HG that it’s almost silly to insist that it has to be male. In truth, absolutely nothing about the nature of the Holy Ghost would be changed if we found out it was female.

(Now that I have this all typed out I realize it sounds really, REALLY crazy. Sorry.)

I actually like that theory a lot! I’m glad you posted it.

[Anonymous]

I’ve actually heard this theory brought up in classes before, although admittedly a long time ago. Expanding a bit, the reason we don’t know much about the Holy Ghost, and the reason The Holy Ghost doesn’t have a real name, is to protect the heavenly mother’s identity (according to the theories postulated in those classes). So, I don’t think this idea is totally foreign to some members.

[Anonymous]

Thanks DarkJedi and daeruin. It’s nice to know that I don’t sound as crazy as I thought I would.

We are always told that Heavenly Father doesn’t want us to know about Heavenly Father because He loves and respects her so much that we must never talk about her. (That’s the party line, and it’s silly.) But I think about it this way. My husband loves and respects me a lot. He goes to work each day and interacts with a bunch of people that I don’t know and he talks about me to them all the time. When I met some of his co-workers at the company holiday party a lot of them already knew about my sewing business or where I attended college because my husband wants the people he knows casually to know how talented and smart his wife is (tongue planted firmly in cheek here). More so than simply gazing into my eyes and saying “I love and respect you,” finding out secondhand that he has bragged about me to others tells me that DH loves and respects me. So I can’t imagine Heavenly Father loving and respecting His wife so much that He doesn’t want everyone to know how awesome she is. But the idea of Heavenly Mother hiding in plain sight is kind of genius… We talk about the Holy Ghost all the time in church, we have all (or mostly all) felt its influence, and yet it’s the one member of the Godhead that is never talked about in disrespectful terms. At least in American culture: the names of God and Jesus are taken in vain all the time, but never the HG.

I dunno. It’s food for thought. I should probably post al mmy thoughts in a separate thread at some point rather than taking over this one.

[Author]

Posts