Aphorisms on the Book of Mormon

Over the past few months, I've done a lot of thinking and praying about the Book of Mormon. I am now more convinced than ever of its truth, and I feel obliged to continue writing posts that elucidate it's deeper significance. But I think I've reached a point in my understanding where I would ruin the insights that I've gained if I ever put them down directly in writing or speech--just like in the Book of Mormon, there are some things that are better felt than said.

So in what follows, I'll try to convey what I've learned through indirect means. By using the aphoristic format (short, ambiguous, phrases), I'll try to convey what I've learned in a way that shows more than it says. So without further ado, enjoy:

1. The Book of Mormon often speaks of clouds and mists. How appropriate, then, that the book sometimes strikes us as so opaque.

2. The Book of Mormon is overcast. With what? With words.

3. How often a voice pierces through these clouds!

3a. Voice--the harbinger of light.

4.Like with those at Bountiful, Christ only manifests himself to us when we turn to the voice we hear.

4a. Faith--a hearing, a turning, a seeing-through.

5. Surely it wasn't the devil who shook the ground and raged the sea before Christ came. God did all this.

5a. To think--a God that shows Himself in darkness and destruction. What a comfort to the tempest-tossed soul!

5b. Of course, what is divine darkness but an unfamiliar light?

5c. Perhaps our eyes just need time to adjust.

6. Christ's birth: a day within night

6a. Christ's death: a night within day

6b. But of course--night and day contain each other.

7. The Book of Mormon was born out of the ground. But how was it conceived?

7a. Dying--a fertilization of the earth.

7b. Death--a great womb.

7c. The Book of Mormon--a resurrection in miniature.

8. The voices crying from the dust--what do they cry for? 

8a. The answer comes in a flash from the pregnant darkness--they want to live again.

8b. What is the Book of Mormon (and the act of reading it) but an ordinance for the dead?

9. Moroni "knows our doing," and so, in some sense, he is here with us.

9a. Maybe he, too, lies hidden behind the clouds.

10. The Book of Mormon didn't only come through a Urim and Thummim--it is one itself.

10a. The Book of Mormon contains and conveys the light poured into those glass stones at the time of the Brother of Jared's vision.

10b. It is a light in the darkness as we voyage to the promised land.

11. Where does the sealed part of the plates lie? In heaven, you say? Then perhaps we should turn toward it.

11a. Maybe "the words which are sealed" will be translated when we learn how to find them.

11b. Maybe Joseph Smith, too, needed to turn toward a voice to find and translate the Book of Mormon.

12. The Book of Mormon--deeper than it is tall.

12a. Most of it lies below the surface.

13. Perhaps we need not only gather Israel in the world, but in us as well.

13a: Maybe you, too, are a "captive daughter of Zion." Maybe you are a Jerusalem waiting to come forth.

13b: Zion--the leaven in life's bread.

Thoughts on the Heavenly Mother

Many people wonder why we don't talk much about the Heavenly Mother in the Church. I gave my take on this problem in my post on gender and sexuality, but despite any intellectual answer that a person might give, I suppose this issue will still seem troublesome. However, I've recently realized that, although we don't really talk about the Mother in church, how we describe the Father relies heavily on emotions and traits that many (including the Church) describe as coming more naturally to women. For instance, it goes without saying that our Heavenly Father is nurturing, and all our images of Him rely on feelings of warmth, safety, and tenderness. It thus seems odd that a church which so heavily emphasizes the role of women as nurturers should ascribe to the male Father only nurturing traits.

To clarify, I'm not going with the party line that women are essentially better at nurturing; this belief tends to alienate more sensitive men (such as myself) and leave them feeling out of place, so I won't touch that notion of exclusivity with a ten-foot pole. However, there does seem to be a tendency for women to nurture more than men do, and though some ascribe this tendency to socialization or hormones, I have an idea that those two reasons don't explain all of it. In addition to social or biological influences, I get a very strong impression that the symbolic image of womanhood (and not womanhood itself) is fundamentally attached to images of nurturing, tenderness, etc., and that women pick up on and identify with these images. Though the image of the nurturing mother may vary in degrees from culture to culture, certain fundamental themes recur again and again in the scriptures, mythologies, images, and stories of the world. For instance, with very few exceptions, the earth is always personified as a mother in polytheistic systems. In addition to earth, water tends to be more symbolically feminine, perhaps evoking images of the womb before birth. Also attached to the symbolic image of womanhood are notions of internality, depth, emptiness and darkness (in a positive sense, as in the yin side of yin and yang; remember that the womb is both dark and empty).

If I were to sum up all of these images in one concept, it would be the notion of immanence. The word "immanence "is derived from the Latin prefix "in-" (into, in, etc.) and the Latin word "manere," which means "to dwell." Combine these two and you get the very definition of what I am aiming at: remaining in the midst and mess of things, as opposed to transcending them to go on to something higher and better. Immanence means staying within, as opposed to going outward and upward. Thus evoking a sense of internality and depth, it resonates deeply with the symbolically feminine images and archetypes mentioned above.

But the odd thing is that out of all Christian denominations, Mormonism tends to be one of the most focused on immanence. Eschewing notions of heaven as place of "separate and single" people, we insist that marriage is fundamental to the life of the Spirit, as are the institutions of family and other kinds of relationship. Instead of ignoring the dead and death (as has become popular in the West), we insist that our lives are intimately bound up with those who have died, even going as far as to say that we cannot be saved without each other. Moreover, we also avoid notions of an ethereal, airy heaven, declaring instead (as Joseph Smith said) that "all spirit is matter." Each of these uniquenesses declare our fidelity to the mess and dirt and tangles of life--we stay within our family relationships, our marriages, our origins in those who are dead, and the finitude of our life in matter. We don't transcend life--we embrace it and all of its flaws and its dirt. Methinks old Mother Earth would be proud (see Moses 7:48 for a Mormon take on this image).

But what does this have to do with the Heavenly Mother? Well, one thing I have realized is that you cannot separate your relationship with something or someone from the images you associate with that entity. For instance, my mother is always tied up with my image of her--whether that includes my personal feelings or the images of womanhood or motherhood in general. Moreover, it doesn't take more than a look at our body language (or our common metaphors) to show that human beings think fundamentally in terms of images. Knowing this, what is my relationship to my Heavenly Mother or Father (our parents in the most absolute sense) without the images that human beings so ubiquitously associate with motherhood and fatherhood? These heavenly parents and the respective images of parenthood are tied together--you can't have one without the other.

Considering both the Church's focus on immanence and its attribution of nurturing and tenderness to the Father, an idea surfaces. What if, instead of ignoring and passing over the Mother, our church is actually one of the closest to Her? What if the embrace we offer to the messiness of the world were actually part of the embrace the Mother offers to us? We favor attachment above all, and I wonder if this focus on connection is actually evidence of our Heavenly Mother declaring Her presence after centuries of our culture's symbolically masculine focus on transcendence, detachment, and going-beyond. That's an idea, at any rate--I won't go as far as to declare its absolute truth, partly because I consider the matter too sacred to profane with such rigidity of thought. But it's worth pondering, at least.

In fact, I feel that it's appropriate to discuss some of the imagery in the LDS scriptural canon that supports this idea. For instance, in both the Doctrine and Covenants and in the Book of Mormon, there is a lot of imagery related to symbolism of womanhood. Take for example the ubiquitous term "bosom," as in "a burning in the bosom," and especially when referring to God. For instance,

"I am the same which have taken the Zion of Enoch into mine own bosom" -D&C 38:4

"...his Only Begotten Son, who was in the bosom of the Father, even from the beginning" -D&C 76:13

"The power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things." -D&C 88:13

"And now we ask thee, Holy Father, in the name of Jesus Christ, the Son of thy bosom..." -D&C 109:4

"And were it possible that man could number the particles of the earth, yea, millions of earths like this, it would not be a beginning to the number of thy creations; and thy curtains are stretched out still; and yet thou art there, and thy bosom is there..." -Moses 7:30

Et cetera, et cetera...

Also significant are the references to "bowels," evoking connections to the womb:

"Now my brethren, we see that God is mindful of every people, whatsoever land they may be in; yea, he numbereth his people, and his bowels of mercy are over all the earth..." -Alma 26:37

"And thus he shall bring salvation to all those who shall believe on his name; this being the intent of this last sacrifice, to bring about the bowels of mercy..." -Alma 34:15

"Have ye any that are sick among you? Bring them hither. Have ye any that are lame, or blind, or halt, or maimed, or leprous, or that are withered, or that are deaf, or that are afflicted in any manner? Bring them hither and I will heal them, for I have compassion upon you; my bowels are filled with mercy." -3 Nephi 17:7

Also note that the aforementioned scripture with the "mother" earth describes a voice speaking out of the bowels of the earth. Moreover, why not also include the motherly image the pre-descent Jesus Christ uses to describe how he would have gathered Israel?:

"And again, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, who have fallen; yea, O ye people of the house of Israel, ye that dwell at Jerusalem, as ye that have fallen; yea, how oft would I have gathered you as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not." -3 Nephi 10:5

To make a more daring connection, one could associate the Book of Mormon's frequent references to its being "hid up [in the earth] unto the Lord" with the images of pregnancy and childbearing. Though this may sound odd, it is not without precedent, as the old and deeply powerful Egyptian story of Isis and Osiris demonstrates. To state it very briefly, the god Osiris was destroyed by the god Seth and was severed into fourteen pieces; the goddess Isis then returned to his severed body and used one of the pieces to inseminate herself, after which she gives birth to Osiris anew. Despite the seeming explicitness of this story, it gives a very basic image of the resurrection--namely, that after we are buried in our mother earth, she delivers us anew in a resurrected body. And more importantly, you can associate the symbolic mother's capacity to re-birth a destroyed body with the Book of Mormon's origin story--a record that contains the essence of a people that, though destroyed, lives on again in the book we now hold dear. However, the most relevant takeaway from this principle is the maternal imagery inherent in delivering a book to be reborn out of the ground, making the maternal focus of the Book of Mormon starkly evident.

To wrap up, I think it's very important to realize that, even though we don't really talk about the Mother, that doesn't mean She isn't present in the Church. Even when The Father's and Her images intermingle, we can perhaps discern the immediate presence of a maternal focus in our religion, an emphasis on nurturing, tender love, and growth. To the question of why we don't talk about Her, I can perhaps offer a quote from a famous piece of literature as a response. At the very end of the second part of Goethe's Faust, we encounter a vision of "the Realm of the Mothers," a culmination of the titular character's quest to reconcile himself to the feminine principle. It speaks deeply about the problem, and I exhort those with ears to hear to, well, hear:

"All that must disappear

Is but a parable;

What lay beyond us, here

All is made visible;

Here deeds have understood
Words they were darkened by;
Eternal Womanhood

Draws us on high."

5 Years as a Mormon Mystic

Hello everyone! Exactly five years ago today, on December 16th, 2009, I published this blog's very first post. The post is called "Mormon Mysticism?," and it represents the very beginnings of my still-growing impulse to share the thoughts, insights, and ideas I have with the world. Looking back on it now, I've realized that my decision to make a blog was nothing less than a prompting from the Spirit. Even if I don't consider the effects it has had on other people, the blog has helped me to develop as a person, a thinker, and an individual in more ways than I can count. True to its name, it effectively acts as a giant journal (or series of journals) for me to record and revisit my intellectual insights and the progress I make as I pass through them. When I testify of the gospel's truth in its pages, I effectively testify to my future self and help him with the doubts that may have creeped in since the relevant posts. This blog has also helped me develop confidence in myself in a writer and as a thinker, for some of the favorite things I've ever written can be found here. Finally (and a little surprisingly), this blog indirectly led to my first romantic relationship.

But as far as I'm aware, I think that my blog has helped other people, too. From the people that contact me or comment on the links to my posts on Facebook, I've gathered that this blog has given light and insight to people in the midst of the dark times of doubt and isolation. I don't say this to boast. Instead, I (like Ammon) boast in the majesty and mystery of God, who I believe used me as a simple tool to assist other people in their time of need. In that sense, my experience resonates with Adam S. Miller's statement that, “working, you will find that you are not your own and that God is at work in you. You will find that God, in both rough and subtle ways, is working in and through you to do things you can’t do and create things you don’t entirely understand.”

And that's precisely the thing: oftentimes I don't understand the full meaning of what I've written here until months after I post it. To use another Book of Mormon idea, I believe that many of my blog posts are like seeds, which only grow into their fullness and their relevance with time. As to where these seeds come from, I can only say that I have often felt "carried along" by my impulse to write a post, but even that doesn't give a true picture of what it's like. In fact, I suppose that one could best describe these posts as the "pneuma" of John 3:8, of which you hear its sound, but can't tell where it came from or where it's going.

In summary, my blog has probably been the biggest way in which I've come to see God's hand in my life. The posts I write here help me become aware of the divine currents constantly nudging me to go where I need to go and to believe what I need to believe, and without it I wonder if I could have ever found my way to where I am right now. Writing this, I now see that the Spirit working invisibly within me knew that all these wonderful things would happen when it gave me an impulse to write my first blog post. And knowing that, how can one not wonder what mysterious blessings lie hidden in a seemingly insignificant prompting followed today?

Quotes on Childhood, Innocence, and Pre-Existence

I think that most of us have felt a certain nostalgic longing for the joys of childhood. The inevitable loss of childhood innocence is what I consider to be the tragedies of life; despite the freedom of adulthood and all the joys it brings, something is definitely lost when we grow old. However, as a result of my voracious reading, I have discovered several thinkers who, in one way or another, espouse a return to the state of childhood. This is not infantile retrogression, by any means. On the contrary, it is a reconnection with the joyful fire at the depths of our memory. By reconnecting with our childhood, they say, we reconnect with the heart of being.

I won't explain the nuances of this idea myself. Instead, I'll just present quotes from the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg and the phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard (examples of these thinkers), figuring that they could explain it better than I could. Also, be on the lookout for connections between the thinkers--they are there, and they reveal profound truths about the what lies at the depths of our memories (or rather, what lies before our birth).

"And now, verily I say unto you, I was in the beginning with the Father, and am the Firstborn; and all those who are begotten through me are partakers of the glory of the same, and are the church of the Firstborn. Ye were also in the beginning with the Father; that which is Spirit, even the Spirit of truth" -D&C 93:21-23

"In our dreams toward childhood, in the poems we would all want to write in order to make our original memories live again, to give us back the universe of happiness, childhood appears, in the style of the psychology of the depths, like a real archetype, the archetype of simple happiness. It is surely an image within us, a center for images which attract happy images and repulse the experiences of unhappiness. But this image, in its principle, is not completely ours; it has deeper roots than our simple memories. Our childhood bears witness to the childhood of man, of the being touched by the glory of living. From then on, personal memories, clear and often retold, will never completely explain why reveries which carry us back toward our childhood have such an attraction, such a soul quality. The reason for this quality which resists the experiences of life is that childhood remains within us a principle of deep life, of life always in harmony with the possibilities of new beginnings. Everything that begins in us with the distinctness of a beginning is a madness of life." -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

"To meditate on the child we were, beyond all family history, after going beyond the zone of regrets, after dispersing all the mirages of nostalgia, we reach an anonymous childhood, a pure threshold of life, original life, original human life. And this life is within us--let us underline that once again--remains within us. A dream brings us back to it. The memory does nothing more than open the door to the dream. The archetype is there, immutable, immobile, beneath memory, immobile beneath the dreams. And when one has made the archetypal power of childhood come back to life through dreams, all of the paternal, maternal forces take on their action again. The father is there, also immobile. The mother is there, also immobile. Both escape time. Both live with us in another time. And everything changes; the fire of long ago is different from today's fire. Everything which welcomes has the virtue of an origin. And the archetypes will always remain origins of powerful images." -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

"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." -D&C 93:38

"When we are being regenerated, we are brought first into the innocence of infancy, which is realizing that we know nothing of truth and are capable of nothing of good on our own, but that we long for what is true and good simply because it is true and good. These gifts are  granted by the Lord as we advance in age. We are led first into knowledge about them, then from knowledge to intelligence, and finally from intelligence to wisdom, always hand in hand with innocence, which is, as already noted, the recognition that we know nothing of truth and are capable of nothing of good on our own, but only from the Lord." -Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 279

"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 Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement 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

"People who are in the inmost or third heaven, though, are in innocence of the third or inmost level; so they are the very innocent of heaven, since they above all others want to be led by the Lord the way infants are led by their father. This is why they accept divine truth directly into their intent and do it, making it a matter of life, whether they receive it directly from the Lord or mediately through the Word or sermons. This is why they have so much more wisdom than the angels of the lower heavens. Because this is the nature of these angels, they are the closest to the Lord, who is the source of their innocence, and they are also distanced from their self-centeredness so much that they seem to live in the Lord. In outward form they look simple--even like infants or little children in the eyes of the angels of the lower heavens. They look like people who do not know very much, even though they are the wisest of angels. They are in fact aware that they have no trace of wisdom on their own and that to be wise is to admit this and to admit that what they know is nothing compared to what they do not know. Knowing, recognizing, and perceiving this is what they call the first step toward wisdom. These angels are also naked, because nakedness corresponds to innocence." -Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 280

"I have also been told that true marriage love derives its origin from innocence because it comes from the union of the good and the true that engages the two minds, the minds of husband and wife. When this union descends, it takes on the appearance of marriage love because the spouses, like their minds, love each other. This is the source of the childlike and innocent play in marriage love." -Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 281

"Thus, taken in the perspective of its archetypal qualities, put back into the cosmos of great archetypes which are at the base of the human soul, meditated childhood is more than the sum of our memories. To understand our attachment to the world, it is necessary to add a childhood, our childhood to each archetype. We cannot love water, fire, the tree without putting a love into them, a friendship which goes back to our childhood. We love them with childhood. When we love all these beauties of the world now in the song of the poets, we love them in a new found childhood, in a childhood reanimated with that childhood which is latent in each of us." -Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

My Experience with Self-Esteem

For long stretches of my life, I really didn't like myself. By all objective accounts, you'd think that a National Merit Scholar and produced playwright like me would have every reason to think highly of himself, but that's simply never been the case. For no matter how awful or how favorable my circumstances were, a feeling of self-dislike always bubbled under the surface of my mind. It was more visible at some times than others, sure, but it was always there waiting for a sudden disappointment to set it loose. 

However, I have recently found some really helpful strategies to help with those feelings. These strategies may or may not be what you'd expect from such a piece of advice, but they are what has helped me, and so I hope that it can help some of you.

I realized a while ago that all intelligent beings have a drive to somehow see themselves in their experience of the world. This is not narcissism (at least as the Narcissus myth is conventionally interpreted), but rather a concrete desire to know that you really exist, that you are not just a subjective phantom, but are real. In ignorance of this desire's existence, many people try to satisfy it by recklessly trying to prove themselves to others. In these cases they look to their actions and others' opinions of them as a mirror in which to see their worth, for they secretly believe that they would stop existing if they stopped their figurative reflection-gazing (Thomas Merton talks about this in his book No Man is an Island). I did this extensively, but I didn't realize that this way of going about it is not only futile, but misses the whole point of the matter. 

You see, I have recently found that the best "mirror" to use for this purpose is love. That might sound like a trite cliché, but when you look into the nuances of the idea, you realize that it's quite an effective solution to the problem. As Swedenborg explains, we are all beings of love, and so each person sees herself in what she loves. Love effectively projects one's being onto the outside world, and so as a consequence of this, all a person has to do to effectively see himself is to love somebody else. I learned this only slowly, but I eventually discovered that I could only really get a sense of my true worth by externalizing my concern onto the lives of others.

In that sense, you could say that your heart wants to roam far and wide across your experience of the world, but that if you limit its range to your own experience and concerns, you will stifle it and force it into the captivity of your selfishness. Selfishness, then, amounts to nothing more than an act of self-negation, for by it you force your being to only reside inside your own skin.

However, I will say that serving others often isn't quite enough to fully establish my self-esteem. While it is true that love externalizes your being, it is not the only emotion to do this. Feelings ranging from anger to despair to anxiety are all images of a person's being, and so it is also true that you can see yourself in all of them. And this is the crucial point, for if you don't value those emotions, you neglect valuing yourself.

On this point, I have discovered that it greatly helps my self-esteem to treat every emotion I feel with value. And I do mean every emotion--whether I feel despair, guilt, spiteful anger, or even lust, I have found it incredibly helpful to respect those feelings and the parts of me from which they come. If I don't do this, I find that I don't feel at home in my own skin; indeed, if I don't trust my emotions, how could I ever learn to trust myself?

Practically speaking, I realized that this means respecting both the physical sensations and the fantasies that the emotion causes in me. I talked about the sensations and fantasies of sexual hunger in the post Letters to a Doubter: on Gender and Sexuality, but it is also true that they exist for every emotion. Take a feeling of anger, for instance: though you may resent the intense sensations involved with anger (for me, they are mainly in the chest) and its sudden fantasies of revenge, for me, forcing these manifestations down only makes the problem worse on a long scale. The same works for despair, its feeling of depressed panic, and its fantasies of emotional self-flagellation: if I aggressively fight those feelings, I fight the only part of me I can concretely see while in the midst of that pain.

To reuse an idea from Adam S. Miller's Letters to a Young Mormon, I have found that it is best to experience the emotional sensation or fantasy without either losing yourself in it or forcing it away. I try to just sit with it--letting the emotion and its manifestations come and go without passing judgment. And as I let this activity of emotion simply happen, I get the sense of increased well-being. I feel more solid, more alive, more real. And I guess I shouldn't expect anything else, for I had just respected the only manifestation of myself I could access in such a dark moment.

So, as far as I can tell, self-esteem is a question of truly believing you exist. If you can't see yourself somehow in your experience of the world, I suspect that you will feel somewhat ghostly and unreal. Fixing this can involve letting your love so shine as to illuminate the whole world of your experience, but it also helps to shine upon your entire emotional life the light of value. Doing these things really make one feel embodied and at home in the world, while without them no one can feel at home anywhere.

An Esoteric Islamic Take on Eternal Progression

ARMCHAIR SCHOLAR WARNING: Though I've become an enthusiast of various kinds of mystical thought, know that at least for Islamic spirituality I am far from an expert. What I present here I gleaned largely from books by the orientalist and scholar of comparative religion Henry Corbin. So if you find mistakes here, don't be surprised--I'm still kind of new to this topic.

Mormonism is, without a doubt, an odd religion. Not only do we believe in seer stones and Liahonas, but we also affirm the existence of a human God, complete with hair, a nose, and toenails. But by far the oddest belief we hold is that of a hierarchy of gods, or rather, that just as God was once a man, you can someday become a God or a Goddess yourself. 

However, at least with the last belief, it may console the self-conscious believer to know that another, completely independent belief system believes in almost exactly the same thing. This system is the Ismāʿīlī sect of Shia Islam, and though it may seem exotic, there are actually few things closer to the Mormon worldview.

As opposed to many other branches of Islam, the Ismāʿīlīs place their emphasis on esoteric and mystically-minded interpretations of the law and the Qur'an. As such, they have a concept of ever-deepening spiritual interpretation (what they call ta'wil) that they hold in especially high regard.  But ta'wil doesn't just mean the act of interpretation. At least in an Ismāʿīlī context, ta'wil refers to the act of bringing something back to its eternal origin. To do this with a sacred text means seeing through the text to the aspects of divinity that manifest through it, but it is far from a mere textual exercise--even events in the world can be spiritually interpreted this way.

Here we have the first inking of a connection with Mormonism: in both perspectives all things strive to go "upwards" toward God, to connect in actuality with the eternal potential they had pre-existently ("the measure of its creation," to quote D&C 88:19). In the Ismāʿīlī perspective, this happens because what they call "the angel of humanity" was himself cut off from the ultimate divine source and thus  longed "nostalgically" to go back to it. Much like Joseph Smith's presentation of God the Father, this angel of humanity acts as the creator of this world, its window to divinity, and the "image" off of which each person's own angelic potential was based. Again in alignment with Mormonism, this angel is not ultimate--he is actually relatively far down the chain of spiritual hierarchy that pinnacles in who Muslims call Allah.

And though I don't know much about this particular aspect of Ismāʿīlī belief, I have read that once a person dies, they believe he or she is able to indefinitely progress with that angel of humanity back to the divine source from which all emanates. Hence here we have something strikingly similar to the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression.

It's worth noting, however, that this indefinite spiritual progression happens in a way you might not expect. The process actually occurs through ta'wil, or the attempt to return to the source of something's being by ever-deepening interpretation. Ta'wil lets one encounter the divinity manifest through an object, animal, or person; instead of being opaque, they become transparent to divinity. By doing this with your life, you get "drawn up" to divinity, while divinity becomes glorified in you. Thus ta'wil, as a method of seeing the source of things through an object of perception, lets one reconnect with that source both here and in eternity.

Though people might find it distasteful to believe that the process of eternal progression happens through ever-deepening interpretation (i.e. in a Mormon context, too), I don't see any reason why somebody shouldn't. After all, Joseph Smith talks about "all things [having] their likeness, that they may accord one with another--that which is earthly conforming to that which is heavenly," and insists that rituals like baptism for the dead act as such a salvific window to heaven. In fact, to view the concept of eternal progression in terms of ever deepening insight into the nature of reality echoes Joseph Smith's oft-repeated declaration that man is saved through knowledge.

In fact, if one recognizes the eerie similarity that the Ismāʿīlī system has to Mormon doctrine (it strikes me as hard not to), one might gain insight by reading certain Mormon concepts in an Ismāʿīlī way. For instance, to the question of how "progression" can occur in a timeless state, we might turn to the Ismāʿīlī notion that "past," "present," and "future" mean different things when separated from lower, "earthly" time. Namely, in higher spiritual echelons the present simply means eternal being. Similarly, in such a state the future refers to that eternal being in an active sense, while the past refers to the same eternal being as utilized toward action. Naturally this is quite difficult to understand, but the gist of it is that eternal time is nowhere near as absurd as time is here (in which we chase forever after ever-receding future satisfaction); there the past, present, and future exist together, only differentiated in mode of being.

One might also compare the Mormon notion of "many worlds" to its Ismāʿīlī parallel. These Muslims also believe in many worlds that are all presided over by the same overarching divinity, but they avoid the common Mormon way of interpreting these worlds as literal planets (which I think is in error). Instead, they declare that they are independent emanations from other angels, which themselves are emanations from higher ones. In other words, these worlds aren't just separated by quantitative distance--they are different from our mode of being in a qualitative way (in which one could never travel there in a spaceship, for instance). To use a crude metaphor, one could compare them to the parallel universes of science fiction, though that image is too materialist for my taste. But most interestingly, they declare that these parallel worlds (which, by the way, can be "higher" or "lower" in the spiritual hierarchy) connect with ours through the spiritual archetypes/aspects of divinity that manifest in both. It's the same image in both places, so to speak.

Moreover, one might productively understand Mormon conceptions of gender difference as do the Ismāʿīlīs. For them, the feminine principle represented the esoteric side of reality, the principle that, though hidden, is so because it is closer to God. Naturally, then, the masculine principle would represent the exoteric principle, that which is concerned with outer appearance and literalisms (Gaston Bachelard, whom I quoted in a recent post, says something similar in his Poetics of Reverie). As I mentioned in my post Letters to a Doubter: On Gender and Sexuality, one can read human anatomy in this way--though the woman's reproductive organs are more hidden from sight than the man's, they represent the origin of all human life. One might even say that, just as human life has an invisible origin in the woman, the human spirit itself rests upon and derives its entire being from the less-talked-about feminine aspect of the divine. Such would be an understanding of the feminine that, while symbolically manifest in the female body, does not necessarily determine the woman's personality or destiny (again, see the post mentioned above).

Finally, one might compare the Ismāʿīlī idea of the "The Final Imam," who will come at to initiate the final resurrection, with the Mormon/generic Christian idea of the Christ of the Second Coming. For Ismāʿīlīs, the final Imam will come as the embodied summation of the entire human spiritual community. In that sense, he is the manifestation in the world of the "angel of humanity" mentioned above, of whom we are all images. Naturally this conures images of "the body of Christ" and of Paul saying that "when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory." (Colossians 3:4). In a very real sense, we are in Christ. Though this might strike you as needlessly sectarian, even the Book of Mormon says that "in Christ there should come every good thing," implying that Christ is indeed the recapitulation of all the good in the world. What comes from this observation, one which says that Christ's coming is really the coming to earth of the fullness of all good, is that we contribute toward that coming's fulfillment by manifesting that good within ourselves. Indeed, you could say that every manifestation of that good brings Christ back in miniature. The Ismāʿīlīs certainly thought this of their Imam, of whom they declared "may we be those who bring about the transfiguration of the world." But lest you think I'm eschewing or the personality of Christ, know that, as far as I'm aware, the Ismāʿīlīs thought of their Imam as a very real, concrete figure to come (whose body they spoke of in very real ways). Likewise, though I think that Christ will bring all good things with Him when he comes, I don't think that's opposed to the idea of his literal body. Oppositions of that sort are only exclusive to the mind attuned solely to the everyday.

In summary, l think we as Mormons have a lot to learn from the esoteric parts of Islam. As If have tried to show above, I believe that these two systems represent different perspectives of the same eternal landscape, if you will. By comparing the two, we may get a better intuitive grasp of what the landscape looks like in itself.

Adam S. Miller's "Letter to a CES Student"

Hello all! This post will be extremely short, as in it I'm just redirecting you another post. Here it is:

http://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2014/10/letter-to-a-ces-student/

It's written in response to the (in)famous Letter to a CES Director, and I think the author (Adam S. Miller, who I've referenced often on this blog) hits the nail on the head. Mormonism is not about Mormonism--Mormonism is about grace. If we look for Mormonism we will not find it; if we look to the grace that Mormonism aims us to, we will find both grace and Mormonism to boot.