Identifying With the Enemies in Zion

if you want to increase your personal revelation and spiritual power, you need to continuously develop your intuition skills. Even if you are already a prophet, seer, and revelator you can still benefit from intelligence-boosting spiritual intuition. In other words, even Gordon B. Hinkley could use some augmenting of his divine hunches. The information I am providing in this article can increase your spiritual power enormously by alerting you to certain theological processes in the Mormon Church which may be keeping you shackled to spirit-limiting Mormon spirituality.

Intuitionist Vs. Consecrationist
The religious ideals we accept as true have a direct effect on the way we think. There is an intuitive relationship between religious ideals and our thoughts. And if we are not careful, the ideals we accept as true can limit our thoughts and our ability to produce the spiritual results we want. Ayn Rand once said, "No mind is better than the precision of its concepts." And I would venture that the same can be said in a spiritual context as, "No ideal is better than the precepts of its most zealous converts."

Many personal revelation-lovers continue to uphold ideals, which limit their ability to use their personal revelations productively, especially when promoting them. I'm referring to spiritual fraud ideals such as "Zion," "prophet," "covenants," "authority," etc. Using these ideals in expressing your spirituality keeps you locked in a consecration mode of thinking which is basically a solemn dedication of your personal spirituality to the goals of an individual or organization.

Many Mormon scriptorians who should know better are stuck in this position since The Book of Mormon history places an individual’s spirituality in greater importance than its Biblical counterpart. In other words, people understood in the Bible that they were possessed by a religion. The consecration mentality of ancient Israel is legendary. The people who traditionally fought against consecrated spiritual rulers were the prophets. This is why in The Book of Mormon the ideal of a good ruler compared to a bad ruler was always based on spirituality.

Everything scriptorians study reveals their scriptures contain radically different religious ideals that have no application to their spirituality today. For example, in The Book of Mormon a spiritual leader named Korihor is bounced to the most prominent religious leader from the absolute political leader. This ideal that a religious leader is better able to judge Korihor’s actions is a consecration way of thinking.

Instead of simply learning how out of date the consecration way of thinking has become they waste their time, money and energy praying that being obedient to a useless organization more concerned with their statistics than their spiritual growth will make these ideals an observable reality. You can see the irony in this: trying to talk about your personal spiritual revelations using consecration hyped terminology. No wonder people can't get their spiritual revelations across. It's a guaranteed no-win situation. Just by using these ideals - without qualifying their authorship or authenticity- you blind yourself to your own impotent institutionalized revelations.

In order to avoid this trap you need to shift to an individualistic mode of thinking spiritually, which includes using ideologies in a way which reflects this orientation. In an individualistic framework, you think in terms of individual theocrats rather than a gigantic, overwhelming "church." You think of the intuition of revelation be it for yourself or the world in general as emanating from the individual as opposed to being granted by (so-called) "authority." You think in terms of seeing God for yourself instead of asking for "permission" from the (so-called) "prophet."

But if individualistic thinking is so much more productive, why do so many revelation advocates continue to operate within the consecration framework of thinking? The rest of this article is an attempt to shed some light on this problem.

Questioning Your Spiritual Assumptions
Part of the problem is that many people do not bother to question their spiritual assumptions or premises. They operate from the same assumptions that everyone else is operating from. Expanding your skill in this area will help you.

The problem multiplies when; faced with new and different spiritual revelation, which challenges the old assumptions, a person automatically, without consideration, rejects the new information. Many people even react emotionally and/or violently when confronted with information which challenges their organizational beliefs. They react as if their church is a loved one who has been physically attacked.

What is the explanation for this behavior? Part of the answer lies in a process called "normalization."

Spiritual Normalization
Spiritual normalization is spiritually the process of incorporating certain aspects of spiritual experiences with an organization’s standards into your self-concept, your sense of who you are. People can spiritually normalize almost any kind of standard into their self-concepts – an ideology, feelings, their body, other people, their house, their car, their job, their "church," and on and on. These kinds of spiritual normalizations are better known as a kind of temporal "idol" worshipping when it is expressed overtly. The less well known types of spiritual normalization expresses itself in how a person’s religious biases exhibit themselves as their "standards."

We all know a close friend who is overly sensitive or "touchy" when we try to buy a controversial book or attend a rival church or anything else, which they feel, belongs outside their spiritual standards. They act as if we are trying to take a part of their own spiritual well being away by our association to them. Another good example is a person who sees their standards in an analogy of a car as an extension of their ego. People normalize their religion by attaching what psychologist Charles Tart calls the "this-is-me" quality to something. Individual standards, which have the "this-is-me" standing attached to it, are treated differently than other standards. In this sense the religion a person identifies with is not just a choice that suits them. Like the car a person chooses to drive it becomes an extension of them, and they feel this connection emotionally.

One consequence of this spiritual normalization is that creates a personal standard stamped with the "this-is-me" quality. The religion is not just a beneficial organization that "helps" them understand and come closer to God. It now possesses a kind of "spiritual charge." For example, watch how you feel after reading each of the following statements. "Joseph Smith thought he was a prophet." "You [the reader] think you are a prophet." The first sentence is just a piece of information, in the same way that the statement, "The sky is blue," is just a piece of information. The second sentence, however, has a spiritual element to it. This is because you spiritually normalize your church’s standards with your beliefs. People often react to a verbally associative attack as if they were being physically attacked. If I say you are a dog you know you aren’t a dog and you may react aggressively to this assertion. The same is true of accusing you of thinking you are a prophet. This is because the power of consecrated concepts (a church standard) for what a prophet is can be further increased through a connection with your basic spiritual ideals (i.e. the nature of God and your relationship to Him) thus creating strong emotions.

This not only happens with verbal attacks - such as name-calling - but also with any challenge to theological information stamped with the "this-is-me" quality. The crucial point to understand is that when someone reacts emotionally or dismisses out of hand any theological information, which conflicts with their "me-information," they are not defending the validity of the religious ideals, but rather they are defending their self-concept. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of this debilitating psychological phenomenon since a person’s spirituality is of an extremely personal nature and spiritual normalization mostly occurs voluntarily in a "church" setting and unconsciously in all other settings. The ability to detach yourself from the standards of "the church" and look at it objectively in and out of the church approved activities greatly enhances both your thinking skills and your spiritual power.

Almost all of us were conditioned or even coerced into normalizing with an organized religion’s fraud-concepts. For the most part this took place when we were children. Recall how you were forced to accept Jesus as a savior before you knew who or what he represented or the concept of God for that matter. What did the teachers do if you said you didn’t want Jesus to be your savior? What if you never bought into the ideas that you needed to act remorseful for calling people names? What if you saw your spirituality completely separate from the stories and words of scriptures? You were conditioned to spiritually normalize with things, which may have been contrary to your choice of spiritual expression.

The way to minimize the negative effects of spiritual normalization is to practice spiritual self-observation and become more conscious of your own mental processes. When you are in control, you choose whether or not to spiritually normalize with something. Be aware: when you give your spiritual identity to something outside of you, you give away some of your spiritual powers. Many times it's beneficial for you to do this to one degree or another. The key point is that any "spiritual normalization" (as described here) is always done voluntarily and consciously.

Conscious Spiritual Normalization
There is core spiritual concepts in any religious organization that normalizes emotionally and passionately with our individual spiritual ideals. A lot of the time we "eat, drink, and sleep" within the activities of a religious organization. This is beneficial spiritual normalization - it results in dedicated work to help us personally succeed and expand the tolerance of others within our religion. It inspires new ideals to improve our religious organization from the inside.

But if someone sends us a letter criticizing our religious organization, we don't get upset. The spiritual normalization within our religious organization is conscious if we don’t feel attacked. Even though we spiritually normalize within our religious organization, we evaluate the criticism consciously. We ask: "Is the person really criticizing our religious organization, or is he just venting his negative emotions and writing about his differing ideals that have become prejudices, biases, and misconceptions?" If the criticism is validated by carefully looking at the situation, then we can take a good look at what we need to improve. This is not the case within the Mormon Church. Corrective actions are either done covertly and unobtrusively (e.g. temple changes, gay patriarch removal, removal of patriarch calling etc.) or sounding the trumpets of Israel to herald the arrival of God’s word as in the 1978 priesthood policy changes and polygamy abandonment. They were all related to embarrassing spiritual normalization’s that involved an us and them condition (e.g. the sectarian preacher, black-blooded people, gays in the priesthood, polygamy etc.) but the way they were carried out just led to more criticism about how the Mormon Church operates.

Conscious spiritual normalization also means that our religious organization never becomes an idol to us. The Mormon Church has not encouraged conscious spiritual normalization. Strict obedience to a hierarchy that picks and chooses how it wants to normalize a person’s spirituality within its set of unwritten rules has been the norm. In this way the Mormon Church’s spiritual ideals look more like idols. They offer a brand of personal happiness within their spiritual standards that takes control from the individual and place it in an organization. The organization effectively becomes the idol that the membership normalizes and makes their own. Anyone who questions this process is considered apostate.

Concentrating all of the Mormon spiritual ideals in the administration of a single man makes this man an idol for their belief. Never making spiritual ideals into a spiritual idol is a game we must learn to play. The problem is it is almost impossible to not convert spiritual ideals into idols in the Mormon Church since it doesn’t show people that their spiritual ideals are just ideals. No one should be expected to emulate spiritual ideals without question unless they consciously decide that is what they want. The questioning whether a single man or an organization has crossed the line from ideal to idol is not an issue in the Mormon Church.

Idolatry
Spiritual normalization and idolatry are closely related. An idol is something you worship - or hate; something you spiritually normalize with positively or negatively. Most modern idols are abstract concepts - often consecrated concepts like "the church," "the apostles," "the general authorities," or "the Relief Society." Clinging to these concepts - positively or negatively - is both a normalization process that leads to idolatry.

Idols like "Choose The Right," "one true church," "celestial laws," etc. are inculcated through cultural and spiritual brainwashing.

The urge to spiritually normalize with something outside yourself is an aspect of including the scope of your conscience. So we find a Scientologist spiritually normalizing with founder L. Ron Hubbard and saying: "What you say can't be true, because if it were true, Ron would have said it." And we find Gordon B. Hinkley followers adopting his "we are not weird" and "we can offer them more" as idols.

Because such idols have a "this-is-me" quality, when they're questioned or challenged, the idolater tends to regard it as a personal attack and may become emotional or even vicious.

One of the most self-empowering things you can do is to smash your own idols. The ability or thinking skill to be developed is QUESTION EVERYTHING.