There is a wee bit of a problem with the whole concept of the Atonement of Jesus Christ that the faithful don’t seem to have a good answer for, other than to have more faith and not worry about it . If Jesus was all-good and “perfect,” as is commonly taught in the LDS church, then that makes him innocent, which makes his crucifixion and suffering for sin unjust, assuming, that is, that you agree that punishing an innocent person for something he didn’t do is unjust. Yet, in The Church of J.C.o.L.d.S. at least, the Atonement of Jesus Christ is often described as “answering the ends of the law,” or, “satisfying the demands of justice.” But an unjust act (Christ’s suffering, torture, and death for sins he did not commit), cannot satisfy the demands of justice any more than a handful of dirt can satisfy your appetite.
If something hard happens to me and I somehow manage to get through it, does that experience make me stronger or better?
No.
I might become stronger or better before, during, or after the hard experience, but it is never the experience itself that makes me stronger or better, despite such prevalent sayings as “Adversity builds character,” and its many variants, or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (cue Kelly Clarkson, who I’ve heard many times, or Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, which I’ve never read). Maybe these are just things people say to make themselves feel better about the suck parts of life. It has a sort of old-timey Protestant flavor to it I think – a feeling that everything has to have a purpose and ultimately be for your own good because it’s all part of the plan. So be sure to eat your vegetables and thank the Lord for your suffering. This is humanity’s way of putting some straight lines and right angles over the wiggly mess that is the reality of life, especially all the nasty bits that we don’t like.
If I get really sick and almost die but then I recover and later I feel stronger because of it, then it was not the sickness itself that made me stronger, The sickness made me weaker, which is why it almost killed me, and there is no good reason to be grateful for that, unless you believe that there is. Getting through a hellish health problem might show me what I’m capable of enduring, which might give me confidence, which could understandably make me feel stronger. But that would be a case of something being revealed to me about myself, and not of something hard helping me out.
When muscles are torn, they can build back stronger, and maybe that could be true of mental health as well – if an experience really breaks you up inside, maybe you rebuild better – but then again, maybe you don’t. It depends on who you are and what your circumstances are like at the time. Reinterpreting the hard stuff in a soft light can be a fun or comforting game to play, but that’s all it really is – a game. The totally sad stories about people who get knocked around by life until it knocks them right into their grave just don’t get mentioned as much, which is another part of the game – the game of counting hits not misses.
I started thinking about this whole concept more as my mind kept revisiting the question of whether or not the two year full-time mission I served for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was an unusually challenging experience, was good for me. Even with all the problems I’ve discovered about The Church I still kept thinking “Well, my mission was good for me, so I can’t really argue with that, and it made made me a better, stronger person in a way I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, so I guess no matter what The Church does, I’ll always have to be grateful to It for my mission experience. But something didn’t feel right about that for some reason.
Eventually I realized that my LDS mission did not make me a better person and I do not owe The Church a thing for it. The experience wasn’t inherently anything in particular on its own, other than what I believed it to be.
Do I regret serving a mission? Yes. Do I feel like I learned a lot and had some very valuable experiences on my mission? Yes. Did I enjoy my mission? Yes. Did I dislike my mission? Yes. If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, would I choose to serve a mission again? No. Am I glad I went on a mission? Yes but it depends on when you ask me. Just like everything in life, it is what is is, depending on who’s looking, when, and where from.
The Church does not deserve my gratitude for my mission experience, I deserve theirs. I personally have done far more for The Church than The Church or any of its members or leaders have ever done for me personally.
The hard parts of life reveal who you are – like a sculptress revealing and refining more of her masterpiece with each strike of the hammer and chisel. But whether life turns you into a beautiful sculpture or hits you too hard and you crumble is not up to you. If it was, everyone would come out looking like Michelangelo’s David or Aphrodite of Knidos.
By the time you come out on the other end of a hard experience and are starting to interpret it in a positive way, you’ve already survived with what you already had going in. As Galen Strawson once said, “What you do follows from what you are.” If you survive the blows of life they can show you what you’re already made of, and while you may get better and you may get stronger, that is a testament to your own strength of character and not to adversity itself. There is no need to seek out adversity in the name of self-improvement – adversity will find you just fine, don’t worry. And there is no need to try and comfort yourself and others by putting a positive label onto every hard and hurtful thing that happens to you – unless of course you truly enjoy doing so, in which case be my guest and knock yourself out kid, you earned it I guess.
The scriptures of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints contain a well-know verse about forgiveness that I heard many times during my life in the Church. In Doctrine and Covenants Section 64 Verse 10 we read:
“I, the Lord, will forgive whom I will forgive, but of you it is required to forgive all men.”
This is probably inspired by verses dealing with forgiveness in the New Testament, such as Matthew 6:14-15 and 18:21-22.
I used to accept these scriptures without thinking, but after being exposed to the work of the philosopher Alan Watts, I’ve gained a different, and I think more true and useful perspective on forgiveness, as well as living, loving, and all forms of human behavior really. I’m particularly interested in his application of Gregory Bateson’s concept of the “double-bind” to certain kinds of behavior that we tend to require of ourselves and others.
In his 1966 book, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts wrote “Nothing fails like success – because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force.”
And so, in response to The Church and The New Testament, and as inspired by Alan Watts, I created the following graphic using a photo I purchased from iStock and my original design and words:
The social double-bind game can be phrased in several ways:
The first rule of the game is that it is not a game.
Everyone must play.
You must love us.
You must go on living.
Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.
Control yourself and be natural.
Try to be sincere.
Essentially, this game is a demand for spontaneous behavior of certain kinds. Living, loving, being natural or sincere – all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores – weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith – in other people, and in oneself – is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
-Alan Watts, The Book On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints we are taught that before the Earth was created we all lived with Heavenly Father and Jesus and Satan somewhere else, in a “premortal” existence. As part of the Father’s “Plan of Salvation” for us, the Earth and everything on it was created so that He could have somewhere to send us off to, where we could be placed inside of mortal bodies and be tested, to see if we will do what He wants us to do, and if we will prove ourselves worthy to return home to live with Him in Heaven after we die. And, if we are extra, extra good, we are promised that we will become like Him and inherit all that He has. It sounds nice and makes some kind of logical sense on the surface. It can also be comfortably familiar, like the idea of children leaving home to go off to college and find their own way in the wider world, so they can return home someday, wiser and well-seasoned, ready to take over the family business.
But you cannot arrive from elsewhere into a world that you have always been connected to any more than an apple can arrive from elsewhere onto its own apple tree. In other words, in the same way that apples aren’t grown elsewhere and then placed onto their tree, people aren’t grown elsewhere and then placed into this world. Thank you to the late philosopher Alan Watts for this idea and for the metaphor of the apple tree. As Watts once said in his 1965 talk “Myth of Myself:”
Look: here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples. And we call it an “apple tree” because the tree apples; that’s what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that—at least on the planet Earth—the thing peoples, in just the same way that an apple tree apples…Because, you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree.
Have you ever had an experience that was not connected to this world in some way? If you have, congratulations, but you are presumably reading this right now from your point of view in this one, so you decided to come back? It seems you can’t get away into other worlds without your body remaining in this one, not counting astronauts in space. Even in the case of space exploration though, you must take your Earth-grown body with you and you must reproduce certain Earth-like conditions in order to keep it alive and continue having an experience as whatever “you,” that you feel yourself to be. If anyone is reading this from their location in any world other than planet Earth, please let me know. And if you are, are you a human being, and did you grow your body on Earth?
In thinking about how we have always been connected in some way to our home-grown bodies, consider the following five points. Let’s give them a name just for fun. How about the FIVE POINTS OF FOREVER?
Every part of every thing is connected to some part of some other thing, in some way. This is true because something cannot be connected to nothing, and nothing cannot be connected to nothing either. And why can’t something be connected to nothing? Because there is nothing there to connect it to. But not only is there nothing there to connect it to there is also nothing there to not connect it to. True nothing is nothing at all and cannot be represented in our minds and language without making it something in some way. True nothing is an idea and not an experience. Because true nothing does not exist on its own in objective reality (or if it does it cannot perceived), everything just goes on forever, or at least it does as far as we can know, because we cannot experience non-experience. Space will continue to open before us, and we will never get to the fence at end of the Universe, because we cannot perceive a final boundary if there is truly nothing beyond it.
There are no gaps in objective reality. Even if there were, we could never detect them because we cannot detect nothing in objective reality, because there is nothing there to detect and there is nothing there not to detect. We can only detect nothing (or a lack of something) in relation to other things, and we cannot detect it on its own or in relation to nothing. A black hole, for example, is not a gap in reality, it is a feature of reality, even if it looks like a gap in reality. Darkness is something, light is something, “empty” space is something, even if it doesn’t have anything “in” it. Every thing is some thing and no thing is no thing. To say there are no gaps in reality is to say there are no gaps in space.
Everything goes on forever in all directions, in a sort of endless, all-ways, ocean of the universe. Imagine you are floating underwater, in the center of an ocean of transparent water, an ocean with no bottom and no top, an ocean that seems to both hold you where you are and stretch away from you in all directions, forever. Now replace the water with “empty” space and populate it with everything else in the universe. Hopefully this helps create some visual sense in your mind of how everything can be connected and go on forever. In the same way that water connects everything in the ocean, space connects everything in the universe. Everything that exists in the ocean is touching water, and water is touching everything that exists in the ocean. Everything that exists in the universe is touching space, and space is touching everything that exists in the universe. The ocean and its contents go together in the same way that space and its contents go together. And if a container and its contents always go together then there is a sense in which the container and its contents are connected and are simply different aspects of the same thing (another Alan Watts idea). With this metaphor we also can find an interesting difference between an ocean of water and an endless all-ways ocean of space, and that is that things can be dropped in or pulled out of water, but things cannot be dropped in or pulled out of space. No thing can be dropped into space from outside of space because there would be no space to hold it in before it is dropped in. In the same way, no thing can be pulled out of space, because there would be no space to place it in after it is pulled out. It could only be moved from one location in space to another.
God exists and everything (and everyone) is connected to and a part of God already. And if everything is a part of God already, and there are no gaps in reality, then there is a real sense in which everything IS God already. As an added benefit, if everything that exists is God, then God definitely exists, because everything that exists definitely exists. If that is the case, then God could truly be all-powerful, for the only way to possess all power is to be everything that possesses power. That is, if each thing that exists is the only thing that possesses the power to be itself, which is the same as the power to do what it does.
God is that which is common to all that exists. The only thing that is common to all that exists is the space in which it exists. We can say that God is space. More specifically, God is space and its ever moving contents, since space always come with its contents, its contents always come with their space, and everything is always moving on some level. God is that which brings all things into existence by allowing all things to come into existence. And how does God do this? Simply by being the space in which everything comes into existence on its own. In stark contrast with the God of Christianity, the one all-powerful God of objective reality does not hold all power by creating all things and then trying to control them, but by being one and the same with all things, and not trying to control them at all. God is all-powerful not by interfering but by not interfering. That which does not interfere at all is always welcome at the party. Or better yet, that which does not interfere at all IS the party, because it is the space that makes all things possible and in which anything can happen, forever and in all directions. The never-ending, formless form of God is what gives rise to all possible forms, and it does so without any judgement, other than that judgement which its many forms may conceive of for themselves.
Maybe the only God that is really real is the ALLTHING that is thus no thing in particular.
Okay, it’s time for me to stop twirling around in this topic for now and move on. I’ve probably plagiarized Alan Watts more than enough for one post here. So, until next time, keep doing what you’re doing at your particular place in space, and enjoy being God, the true master of your own little domain of the Universe. After all, you so rarely get to enjoy it as your true self, instead of as the self you’re so often busy pretending to be.
Mormon Mouse 