Until this summer, I've operated since I was 16 thinking that God had spoken to me directly in response to a prayer I prayed wanting to know if the Book of mormon was true. I prayed it knowing there was increased accountability with knowledge (for unto who much is given, much is required, and he that sins against the greater light receives the greater condemnation) but I prayed it anyway. I wanted to know.
I'm still exploring all my quirks, but for now I would diagnose myself with a severe propensity for anxiety. I've always had this since I can remember, and I have a good memory. I remember worrying about what the other kids thought about me in pre-school and a little before, too. It didn't take me long to become very insecure and conclude that I was unaccepted.
I went to school every day, every year, with this anxiety, and remained aloof from everyone. Very early on, my LDS indoctrination began to fuck everything up for the worse. Talking in church got my parents sikked on me, and I quickly learned to be "reverent" to avoid wrath. I began taking in the doctrine and paying attention in church.
It began making me feel very guilty (as it will do) and it worsened my social anxiety at school too. I could be in the world, but not of the world. But neither could I really converse and connect with my peers at church, because it made Heavenly Father angry (projecting some of my dad on God) if I wasn't "reverent," meaning quiet, meek, and submissive.
After puberty started and being ill educated about sex and human nature, I quickly came to feel unworthy in a whole new way reaching a new height when I had to learn from bishop what mass-terr-baishon was. For fear, I had a knee-jerk reaction and denied it, and spent the next several years wading through the grief/shame/unworthiness/anxiety to admit to my bishop (who by that time was my dad) that I had received all my priesthood ordinations, callings, and temple permits unworthily and had lied about it.
Anyway, this all relevant, because it's the emotional context I had going into reading the BofM for the first time. After years of guilt and antisocial tendencies that I blamed on myself, several EFYs, firesides on the BofM, firesides on porn, and many priesthood session guilt trips, the message finally got to me. They told me I could know, and I wanted to know, I just had to be "willing to act on the answer."
I soaked up the book in faith, just like they told me to do. I read it as if it were true. I couldn't help but notice a few glaring plot holes, vague/strange verses, and lack of evidence, but this was all part of the test. I put these on the back burner and internalized the book. I wouldn't "condemn the book for its imperfections."
After several months, I finally finished it. It was an exhilarating read, because I was actually testing whether or not this faith that i had no choice but to live was actually worth it. I wanted it to be worth it. All those months I was counting down to the end when I would pray about the book and see what happened.
I wanted that "witness" I was promised. At the end of the book, I giddily kneeled down and asked God if the book was true. A feeling seemed to well up inside me. It was a tingling followed by a warmth. My heart did indeed "burn". It felt like the warmest part was my heart and I could feel it pulsating under an increased sort of pressure.
The joy, though, was the most noticeable part. I was so happy. The response was so sudden, so exquisite, and so unscripted, I was utterly convinced I had just received a response to my prayer––a witness directly from God.
It was a spiritual gem to me, but once the feeling wore off the usual anxiety came right back to me. Having a 'knowledge of God' never did jack-shit to assuage my insecurities. If anything, it only added an increased sense of responsibility to the feelings I'd always suffered. I retained in my memory though, and used it as a center. I was miserable as hell, but at least I knew God was real!
When I should have broken or collapsed under my stress, my fear to offend God kept me going, meeting the high expectations of the church at least minimally. It made my parents happy, which made me happy. I lived for praise, because I'd grown up without any sense of self-confidence whatsoever.
There was only one other person who I'd ever met who said she had had a burning-in-the-bosom kind of communication from God. It was on my mission. She called up my comp and me and told her she was going through a faith-crisis. She'd just been reactivated and a cousin "anti-ed" her thoroughly. I knew there was a time-limit on these things where after a person lost all sense of their mormon spirituality, there was nothing we could say to reclaim them to the faith.
It was a whole week before we could get over to that side of our huge-ass area. By then, she had stabilized quite swimmingly. She told us she had been desperately praying to God who seemed to be ignoring her. Finally after the most desperate of all her desperate prayers, she got a burning of peace and calm. The catch was, she interpretted her experience quite differently from anything I had interpretted in mine.
She said she knew it was from God, but that was all the message was: I'm God, and i love you. For her, it was a feeling of pure love and joy. It seemed given to her by an external agent (she had been praying to an external agent), so she concluded the feeling of love was something sent from God.
But then she got into what I would have described at the time as a "hippy theology". God was all that existed. He was the only real reality. Our reality was a temporary dream that would pass away someday, and we would awake as from a dream and lose our individuality as our divine sparks rejoined the essence of God.
She kept saying over and over to anything we said, "He just IS."
We appealed to scripture, and she said those books were nothing but dust to her. I was at a loss. I'd had the same, or similar, experience she was describing. How could she not see that it wasn't just God, it was Heavenly Father? Any detail in the message was to be extrapolated from the context, and it seemed so clear to us. Good feelings like that meant yes, meant God loved you, meant that whatever you had just asked God was true, etc. Why didn't she get it?
I stored this away and would remember it later.
By the end of my mission, by "witness" became a curse. I knew Mormonism was cultish, that it had never made me happy, that I would never obtain acceptance and validation from socializing with mormons. But I was afraid because of the witness of the Holy Ghost. Think: "I knew it, and I knew that God knew it, and I couldn't deny it, neither dared I...", but instead of confidence and joy, it utterly crushed your will to live.
My witness then became the door-stop that kept the abuse flowing into my soul. The anxiety finally became too much, my soul under strain finally gave way, and sunk into a a deeply depressed apathy. I couldn't live life out in the world knowing what i knew. I was convinced I couldn't be happy outside the church, but i was never happy in the church either. The expectations to accomplish a state of happiness were far too high, and I'd lost all hope of accomplishing it.
Moroni's promise was so real to me, even after I lost my drive, I dared not deny it. I was afraid of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. If I'd had my head screwed on straight, I would have left the church immediately after my mission, just on the fact that it was a poisonous place, but Mormonism had emotionally destroyed me. I was so thoroughly indoctrinated, it took this long just to deprogram myself and overcome the fear of questioning. As soon as I was able to grant myself the sacred right to hold my happiness above my religion, I more than happily threw the shackles off my mind and indulged in study on every topic I had ever been forbidden. I was happy to figure out that it was all bullshit.
For good or evil, Mormon culture does induce many spiritual experiences, especially in those most desperate for the message to be true.
I think my experience was a combination of a few principles of psychology.
1) Moral elevation.
http://www.psych-it.com.au/Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=262Moral elevation is a sense of moral beauty built into the human condition. Whenever you see an altruistic act, or witness an altruistic act, it 'touches' you. Much of the phenomenology sounds very close to what I experienced. The consequences on your psyche are an elevated state, an inspiration to be a better person. Mormons often seek 'edification' as part of their spirituality, and one of the most poignant experiences of moral elevation is the burning in the bosom.
2) Cognitive Dissonance theory.
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.htmlWe are indoctrinated our whole lives and restricted under the church's authority. We get a sense that everyone means business, and the consequence of failing to meet expectations is dire shaming from the community and the threat of excommunication, or at least alienation, from everyone and everything we have ever known. There's a high need for closure here, and we need the gospel to be true. It doesn't matter that there's an inconsistency here and evidence against the church there, don't you see? –– the believing brain says –– It's all part of the test! At the critical moment, the brain will suddenly shift between two conflicting cognitions, bringing one into harmony with the other.
When that happens, it's often the the cultish behavior of our friends and relatives, the injustices of mormon culture, or inconsistencies in the BofM that fall to the authority of the church that has been beat into our heads our whole lives. This process is helped along by the black and white, all or nothing way the gospel is pushed on us and the constant exposure to propaganda we experience since we could understand words.
We begin to see it as true, and we wonder how we never saw this before. Suddenly a thousand inspirational stories we were taught growing up gain substance, and this has something to do with how it incites a powerful response of moral elevation.
*****
Does God speak to us through our thoughts and emotions? I don't think so. I think those are just your thoughts and emotions. As human beings, we have a great capacity to be deceived and to deceive ourselves. Not that they've studied psychology, but tscc goes for this effect, or some other kind of effect, anything that will get you to stay, pray, pay, and obey.
Some of the spirituality you can experience in the church is riveting, but to act then as if the church is greatest place on earth is fail to take account that the happiness the church offers is few and far between the moments of loneliness and self-loathing and that the facts destroy the message if you can free yourself long enough to think critically (that can be the hardest part).
Even if there is a God and the burning in the bosom is from God, it does not follow that you can interpret a desirable emotion with its physical context and thereby put yes/no words in God's mouth. Where is it written in the subtext of the universe that good feelings mean yes and bad feelings mean no?
It's not. Interpreting our thoughts and feelings as the Holy Ghost is just an emotional type of cleromancy, e.g. casting lots.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleromancyIn other words, you have to assume a set of rules that aren't actually testable to think that God speaks to you through means that would otherwise be just thoughts and feelings no different from any of the others that your brain matter and neurochemistry generate on a regular basis. It has never been and can never be established that God actually speaks this way. There's no way to fact check it.
Consider this example of cleromancy from the Bible: The Israelites lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines, supposedly because they would not repent and the LORD (a god who has never been known or seen, who never was and never will be, except in anecdotes) was angry with them. The Philistines had a terrible time too, for plagues seemed to afflict them in whatever city they tried to set up the ark in.
1 And the ark of the Lord was in the country of the Philistines seven months.
2 And the Philistines called for the priests and the diviners, saying, What shall we do to the ark of the Lord? tell us wherewith we shall send it to his place.
3 And they said, If ye send away the ark of the God of Israel, send it not empty; but in any wise return him a trespass offering: then ye shall be healed, and it shall be known to you why his hand is not removed from you.
4 Then said they, What shall be the trespass offering which we shall return to him? They answered, Five golden emerods, and five golden mice, according to the number of the lords of the Philistines: for one plague was on you all, and on your lords.
5 Wherefore ye shall make images of your emerods, and images of your mice that mar the land; and ye shall give glory unto the God of Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from off your gods, and from off your land.
6 Wherefore then do ye harden your hearts, as the Egyptians and Pharaoh hardened their hearts? when he had wrought wonderfully among them, did they not let the people go, and they departed?
7 Now therefore make a new cart, and take two milch kine, on which there hath come no yoke, and tie the kine to the cart, and bring their calves home from them:
8 And take the ark of the Lord, and lay it upon the cart; and put the jewels of gold, which ye return him for a trespass offering, in a coffer by the side thereof; and send it away, that it may go.
9 And see, if it goeth up by the way of his own coast to Beth-shemesh, then he hath done us this great evil: but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that smote us; it was a chance that happened to us.
(1 Samuel 6:1-9)
Were these experiences of God, or just chance? It seems even back then they were aware that it wasn't actually knowable whether God was trying to say something through the context of an experience or whether it was just the way things happened to end up.
You can see how arbitrarily they set up a test to determine wether it was God, and if it was God, how to interpret his will to find out what he wanted so they could please him.
Whether the cattle actually, unguided, went in a straight course to Bethshemesh or not, how does it follow that that means that God suffered the Philistines to take the ark or that the diseases were judgements of God upon the philistines? It doesn't. It's not possible to establish these connections, you have to assume these rules.
Once you assume them, though, it is entirely probable that you will convince yourself that God speaks in a yes/no fashion through kine, or dice, or sticks, or oracle bones, or that he's in our thoughts and emotions somewhere. Once it seems like this is a pattern that works, at least some of the time, it's a pattern you keep seeing, it's a rule you will keep operating under, just because it's the first rule you thought you figured out, or the one you were raised believing. Confirmation bias.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias"Recognizing the whisperings of the Spirit" is a faith position. I was taught that the witness of the Holy Ghost was a sure kind of knowledge above any kind of knowledge you could learn with your 5 senses, one you could not deny. But the entire premise is a baseless assumption, an arbitrarily defined set of rules. We don't know that God speaks to us through our thoughts and feelings, or even if he does whether a strong feeling is meant to be interpreted by its context. The whole thing is just too vague and inconsistent for me to put stock in it anymore.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/28/2015 05:41PM by Cold-Dodger.