Posted by:
Elder Berry
(
)
Date: March 17, 2016 06:52PM
This post got me thinking. That is dangerous for me.
http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1785055,1785099#msg-1785099What if I pretended to buy into all the Mormon Hooey I was raised to believe and to follow? What if I accepted a pre-existence with my Exmormon mind? It might play out a little like this...
I probably didn't pick the best pedigree or potential in my pre-existence but I picked a very Mormon one. In fact picking Rulon Jeffs as my grandfather and Hugh B. Brown as my great grandfather would have been "solar" (better than stellar) choices as these luminaries have made a mark on Mormon history for some time to come. Brown is still remembered and he died 40 years ago.
So, there is this little nobody spirit who was initially besotted with that sexy angel of light Lucifer. I probably, like I am want to do all ready to hitch my little pre-mortal spiritual handcart (no angelic pre-Columbian horses for me) to a bigger, better looking, and much more aggressive male spirit. I found some to my liking. Brown was a kinder gentler patriarch and Rulon was daring and crazy. My own father was nice but nothing to write Elohim about.
So I signed up with their wagon train to "The World." I'm thinking that I made great choices and these spirits were dazzling, daring, and definitely on our dear Lord Jesus' side. I'm set, go toward the womb! I didn't really care about the "vessels" of the Lord. I was just interested in where my little male spirit would be towed towards an eternity of bliss worshiping all the glory other men were gathering for themselves.
And it's my turn, my turn, my turn on Earth. I get tripped by an angel running towards my own mortality with my handcart full of dreams and fall down, falling down, like a gentle raindrop through darkest space.
I get pushed out of a woman I am to call mother. I meet the spirits I met long before. I have no idea what life was like before mortal life. I struggle and I strive to be worthy of my heritage, my family line, my life as a child of God.
And after 30 years and periods of rebelling against the truth here I realize that this test of my spirit was the exact opposite of what as a wee spirit I thought it was supposed to have been.
My memories from my pre-existence come rushing in on my like a message from outer space. Shuddering I come full into the knowledge of where I'm from and what I've done in my life before my life. I realize life for eternity is about real relationships and not choices. It is about the connectedness we feel one for another. It is. It is not about alliances, choices between dueling gods.
With shaking tremors that fill my body like I once thought The Holy Ghost filled me I realize that I've been the plaything of beings bigger than myself. I chose what seemed safest and best based upon what entities vying for the control of mortal existence wanted and not what the more passive yet eternal nature of the universe wanted for creation.
The people least likely to enlighten human being have been the spirits I shackled myself to in hopes to share in the spoils they imagined for themselves when creation started. The men of whom a great grandfather of mine had been among their ranks were just as deceitful as their enemy they called The Father of Lies. I was merely a pawn in the greater game; the game where Jesus refused Satan's offering because he knew he could get so much more than mere kingdoms thousands of years ago. He could get the souls of light streaming to Earth for 2 thousand years and growing exponentially.
My captains for "more good"-ness were playing their part in dividing up the spoils. Returning souls of light to their master who was a master of turning ignorance and darkness into the glory of doing good as he channeled it. And in return they got the things of the Earth of which money was primary. I had joined a group of people on Earth who offered feelings of goodness in return for being possessed by a spirit and a portion of their Earthly wealth. They actual made their own people buy the bread their master had promised he would feed them with forever.
I had hitched my self-drawn wagon to a train of takers and promisers, and ultimately deceivers for a feeling. I had stroked myself, created my own light, let myself be invaded by the spirit of a dead messiah, eaten bread bought with the same willful ignorance I had and thought I would live forever on it. I had made good into a commodity and let myself be led to doing their bidding because I had wanted it even before I came here and experienced what evil was to know what was good.
My spirit was no Celestial hero. I wasn't destined to be born with truth but with lies. My task was to see in mortality what I was blind to in spirituality. That I was a free agent. I needn't have hitched to a wagon train West into temporality to guarantee myself the wisdom of my elders, betters, and more glorious beings in their spirit forms. They were the ones who had gotten it wrong. They had thought the size of their spiritual into mortal entourage gave them glory. They had bent and changed the rules of the eternities to suit their grabs fro glory. I had been caught in their glory game. I had fallen like Lucifer for artificial light and attempted to gather enough of it to think I could become a god in the next life.
But no more. I burned my handcart. I illegitimized my pedigree. I stopped eating their bread bought and paid for by the ones foolish enough to grab something the universe offered freely - glory in being and doing the good I myself determined in looking out on the vast spaces of existence and pondered my connectedness with it and the spirits around me. Nothing incorporated would attempt to posses my spirit. Nothing more shallow in reducing the human spirit to mere adherent would bring my spirit down.
I am truly free. Free to be good in whatever guise it comes to me in and with whatever spirit grand or slight I posses. I became what my former wagon train of ancestors and leaders most feared for its posterity and posse - an actual free agent. Free to explore the universe of possibility. Free to roam the planet recognizing good in all its many ways, shapes, and forms of connecting one human being to another.
That littlest spirit with nothing but a cart full of dreams of glory had upset the apple cart of his betters. I had abandoned the plan for me made by others going back generations. I have thrown off the mantle of ghosts of people I never knew and their ideals of good in authorities I chosen in ignorance lacking even a brain. And when I died my agencies in mortal things will go but the freedom I grew in my spirit will lift me higher then all the glory in the kingdom of the god that was only a man for the glory it would give him.