(First time poster. BIC, life-long devoted, one foot out the door. Don't know where my journey will lead me...)

The following quote from Jed McKenna is one of my favorites. I'm posting it here hoping that it might help someone who it trying to understand what they are feeling and trying to understand how or why others might be treating you in a negative way.


"We're all afloat in a boundless sea, and the way we cope is by massing together in groups and pretending in unison that the situation is other than it is. We reinforce the illusion for each other. That's what a society really is, a little band of humanity huddled together against the specter of a pitch black sea. Everyone is treading water to keep their heads above the surface even though they have no reason to believe that the life they're preserving is better than the alternative they're avoiding. It's just that one is known and one is not. Fear of the unknown is what keeps everyone busily treading water. All fear is fear of the unknown. If someone in such a group of water-treaders betrays the group lie by speaking the truth of their situation, that person is called a heretic, and society reserves its most awful punishments for heretics. If someone decides to stop struggling and just sink or float away, every possible effort is made to stop him, not for the benefit of the individual, but for the benefit of the group. To deny at all costs the truth of the situation." -Jed McKenna

It turns out that the group of water treaders is very near the shore, but they won't look, they can't look, it would betray the fact that they have been utterly wasting their time and effort. Break free my friend and come to the solid shore of reality. There are new adventures to be had, new friends to make, and hopefully old water treader friends who may even listen to your call to join you on the firm but hard ground of reality and truth.

I was watching this video (http://www.wimp.com/misconceptionsuniverse/ ) recently that talks about the possibility of no end to space and it snapped me back to when I was a child thinking about endless space. It was a quick existential trip to my childhood feeling of nothingness.
Thinking of this brings to mind several poems by Rumi that I include below. He uses the ocean as a symbol of the source or infinite.

***
Late by myself, in the boat by myself
No light and no land anywhere
cloud cover thick, I try to stay
just above the surface, but I am already under
and living in the ocean
***
Don’t run around this world
looking for a hole to hide in.
There are wild beasts in every cave!
If you live with mice,
the cat claws will find you.
…
Live in the nowhere that you came from,
even though you have an address here.
…
You own two shops,
and you run back and forth.
Try to close the one that’s a fearful trap,
getting always smaller. Checkmate,
this way. Checkmate that.
Keep open the shop
where you’re not selling fishhooks anymore.
You are the free-swimming fish.
***
“You have been walking the ocean's edge,
holding up your robes to keep them dry.

You must dive naked under and deeper under,
a thousand times deeper. Love flows down.

The ground submits to the sky and suffers what comes.
Tell me, is the earth worse for giving in like that?

Do not put blankets over the drum.
Open completely.”

one more

The great religions are the ships, and poets the life boats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard. -Rumi

Those are some beautiful quotes, thanks for posting!

Rumi's poems are 10,000 times better for me than any Mormon scriptures.
The Rumi line about not selling fishhooks anymore applies directly to leaving Mormonism. Now that we are not selling fishhooks the question to ask ourselves is, "Am I a free-swimming fish?"

Good on you.

The church is a lie

This thread caught my eye...yes, Rumi rocks. One of my favorite passages of his is the oft-heard but always invigorating:
"Let the beauty of what you love, be what you do; there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the Earth." A thousand ways indeed, besides subservience in the "box" as it were of organized religion.

But yup, people are afraid..so they trudge along dutifully and huddle mindlessly, like "March of the Penguins" en masse.

Hell, I'm afraid too..but infinitely (pun intended) more afraid of being locked in a box. Where I can't ponder infinity and other imponderables.

Emily Dickinson has a poem that starts off: "Escape is such a thankful Word/ I often in the Night/ Consider it unto myself..."
She is referring no doubt to escaping the confines of a corseted (in every sense of the word) 19th century marriage - basically, synonymous with slavery for a woman back then, and more particularly I believe to her narrow escape from conversion to church/Christ during the conflagration
of religious fervor and revivalism that swept the nation when she was a young woman...and which young Joseph Smith obviously rode like a seasoned surfer dude.

Love my obstinate Emily. She would have made one godawful Mormon.