Birth Memory

This is how I felt that day, before Laura hypnotized me:
I am nothing but a biological computer. I've been abandoned by God because he doesn't exist. I believe in nothing. There are no souls, there is no truth, nothing is special. I don't even believe in love. My emotions are pointless, my thoughts are useless because they mean nothing. They are only there to make me want to survive or procreate. I'm a big walking set of genes that want to replicate themselves. Every thought, every feeling is manipulative and false. I have no connection to anything greater, anything unexplainable, anything powerful. I'm falling in the dark with nothing to grab on to. Every handhold I try to grasp disintegrates into dust, and I fall further. I have no center. I have no equilibrium. I have no home.

This is what I experienced while my sister hypnotized me:
I was brought into a deeply relaxed state. I moved no muscles, and I didn't feel the need to. I was told to think of my favorite color, and breathe it into my lungs. Immediately, the floor of my consciousness became salmon pink. But salmon pink was not my favorite color. My favorite color was a very specific shade of red-orange. My conscious mind had long decided that red-orange was the most beautiful color in the world, and I tried to eradicate the pink and replace it with orange, but when I tried to envision the color it hit a brick wall. I could not hold onto it for longer than a flash. So I allowed salmon pink to take over, and I breathed it into every cell of my body. I was told to use the name of the color I was breathing in as a key word for future relaxation. My conscious mind said that pink was a stupid word. I couldn't use that word. It was silly. I refused for a while to use pink, and would only think the word, "Color". But my subconscious continued to be adamant that pink was indeed the color appropriate for my deepest relaxation, and I let go. I released all ego and embraced the wisdom of my subconscious. As I slipped deeper and deeper into relaxation I dug up the origin of salmon pink. I knew why my mind had chosen it. It was the exact same color I used to see as a child, falling asleep in my bed. I'd always remembered the image. When I was young, the image of a pink, balloon like shaft used to take over my mind. The balloon would suddenly collapse in on itself and become a dark, crumpled mass. Then it would blow up and become perfect and smooth again. Over, and over and over. I was instructed to wake up. I heard counting 1...2...3... and I opened my eyes with a calm, silent gasp.

This is what happened after I was hypnotized:
"Laura, my conscious and subconscious minds were totally battling over colors during that."
I told her what had happened. I told her how I'd uncovered the weird, deep memory of the balloon that became shriveled and black. I'd never understood the image. I'd never told anyone about it before. It had always baffled me.
"Oh, I know what that is." Laura said immediately. What? She did? She understood it instantly when I'd been confused by it my whole life? "Those are contractions.” She said. “You're remembering your birth. That's what it must have looked like."
It struck me as obvious. Of course. Of course. The sensation of contraction would inevitably be a part of us, somewhere. The idea made my mind open. It made everything seem clearer. We realized that since flesh is see through, and babies can see light while they're in the womb, salmon pink was probably the color that surrounded me. My first color. My first memory.
"What's interesting," She said, "Is that the image of contractions is not a distressing memory for you. It was actually the most relaxing thing your mind could come up with." We realized how powerful this image could be for me in the future, when I'd give birth to my own children.
"Everyone retains a memory of their birth, in some form." She said. "For some it's ingrained into their personalities and life choices. Others may experience it through emotions, or physical feelings. You're an artist. It makes sense that your brain retained it visually."

This is how I felt the day after I was hypnotized:
Something was said in one of my religion classes that I disagreed with, and instead of my mind swimming in the horrifying sensation of abyssal cognitive dissonance, I used my key word and the imagery to make myself extremely relaxed. In this state I was able to solve the problem, to get inspiration, to make sense of the dissonance at hand. For the first time in months I was able to reach a resolution. I am not powerless. There is goodness, there is truth, there is power in the universe, and I can access it through my body and my mind. I have somewhere to go. I have a handhold to grasp when everything else is pure confusion. I am complete as I look back at my very first thoughts as a living organism. I can connect to who I was from the beginning, my very deepest self, the person without pride or shame, the child who was not trying to impress anybody. I remember the being who hadn't yet obeyed fear, who knew only one color, one image, who only felt love and connection and trust throughout the process of entering the world. I can return there whenever I need. This gives me a center. I can find equilibrium. I have a home.

Another battle with Benson

"You were not created to be the same as men. Your natural attributes, affections, and personalities are entirely different from these of a man. They consist of faithfulness, benevolence, kindness, and charity. They also balance the more aggressive and competitive nature of man. The business world is competitive and sometimes ruthless. We do not doubt that women have both the brain power and the skills to compete with men. But by competing they must of necessity, become aggressive and competitive. Thus their godly attributes are diminished and they acquire a quality of sameness with man. The conventional wisdom of the day would have you be equal with men. We say, we would not have you descend to that level." -Ezra Taft Benson

If a woman is really born with divine, nurturing, compassionate traits, would the world of business so easily destroy those qualities? I think women would change the business world for good, long before the business world would change women. Women are not malleable like children. If simply going to work can remove these qualities and replace them with new ones, perhaps they are not as ingrained into women as we think.

But if women truly are the naturally benevolent beings the church teaches us, what damage could possibly be done by allowing their influence to reach every human institution? What harm would any organization experience with a balanced leadership of female and male? What part of our world would collapse if it was more generous and kind? What about our current patriarchal, screwed up, warlike world are we so desperate to preserve? Are we so captive to our traditions, our history of death and despotism, that we'll turn our heads and let it remain the same forever, under the pretense that it's just the way God made things for men and women, that women have been as powerless as slaves because that's the way it's supposed to be? Here's a simple law of the universe: If you keep doing what you're doing, you're gonna keep getting what you're getting. Women have always been barred from authority and what do you get? A very dark, bloody, tragic world history. I say, just because masculinity has ruled the world without femininity for as long as we can remember, doesn't mean it's right. Just because women have motherly attributes, doesn't mean those attributes should be confined only to the home. If we have ever needed female qualities to take root in the businesses and organizations and policies and events of the world, it is now.

God's Body

Humans have a story. The story is that all-powerful, human shaped beings created the universe, and that we are their children. We have a serious fixation on the story of parental higher beings. Is this universal sense of almighty humans some evolutionary by-product, or evidence that its real? We believe we're the children of omnipotent people, because we're just so dang smart. We are real, real intelligent. The conclusion that follows is, clearly we'll rule the universe someday, or at least, there are glorified humans who rule the universe. Obviously, super, super intelligent biological creatures must be God's children. But what qualifies us to be God's children, when whales and dolphins and great apes are fairly intelligent too? Why is this shape, the human body, the only shape that becomes divine? Why would God need this kind of body when this body was evolved because of evolutionary necessity--hairlessness for endurance hunting, opposing thumbs to hold tools, the simian shelf moving forward and becoming the chin making room for more complicated vocal communication, skin color in response to the environment, reproductive organs, bellybuttons, etc. Why would God have a body designed for the earth?

Or did God simply direct evolution? Did God make sure our environment would shape us just so, so that we look like Gods? Why would God bother making sure we ended up in the same shape as them? Why would it matter that we appear like Gods in our mortal lives? We're going to lose our bodies anyway. Can God's spirit children only occupy the shape of a human body? Is there something in the DNA of a human that enables progression, all the way to creating universes? That's a real bummer for those smart whales that swim around and think about the mysteries of the universe, but just can't do anything about it because they have no thumbs. But there are no whale shaped Gods. There are only Gods for humans. Perhaps humans are the “special” ones simply because evolution has allowed us to become extremely productive, because of the shape of our bodies. Perhaps it is our productivity that will allow us to progress, that sets us apart, not how intelligent we are compared to whales. Perhaps God needs human DNA because the work that a God does requires fine motor skills and feet and brains and hands, just like us. Developing the nebulous, seemingly magical cyber-world was only possible because of the work of actual human hands. Perhaps the seemingly miraculous work of Gods comes about from actual hands, too. The shape of a body leads to the kinds of things it can create. If God is the creator of the universe, God's body must somehow facilitate the kind of creation that takes place.

Unless Gods are beings of pure thought, in which case, why have a body? If that kind of creation comes from pure will of thought then is a body really necessary? Perhaps it's necessary for consciousnesses to have a house in order to create stuff, and that's why a God would have some kind of body.

But maybe they are not beings of pure thought. Maybe they don't create by thinking and making it so. Maybe what it takes to create universes has to be done with hands. Then what is it those hands are doing? They're not reaching into the earth and moving the tectonic plates to create mountains, or squeezing dirt together to make a planet. Technically, God didn't actually make anything. When a baby is growing inside of you, God is not piecing together the organs. The baby is growing based on the DNA map and biological principles. What God makes are principles. God designs principles and physically makes those principles functional, and puts them into play. So that when a primordial soup of matter is floating around, principles start functioning, and creation starts happening on it's own. God designs gravity, somehow using a body, so that matter is attracted to each other. God designs electromagnetism so that charged particles respond to each other. God designs entropy and relativity and the strong and weak nuclear forces. God decides that quantum particles will be based on probability, that the speed of light is a barrier, that energy may transfer into different forms, that observation changes electromagnetic particle behavior. These are principles and these are the things that God creates. The result of their creations is a functional universe which eventually leads to intelligent life which then creates independently. And they achieve this somehow with physical bodies.

Alright, then, if physicality is necessary for these principles to be created, why would a human shaped body facilitate it? Is it possible their bodies are very, very different than we imagine? Is there any reason to think bodies that have been evolved to carve weapons and build houses and operate machines, also have the capacity for principle creation?

Well maybe it doesn't matter what kind of body it is. Maybe God's will simply needs a house, a brain to control. Maybe God looks human because they're simply partial to it. Maybe they chose these bodies because, heck, ya need some kind of body and brain to live in, and human is how they looked when they were in the infancy of their progression, still learning to make clubs and houses and computer chips, so they identify themselves as being this shape and there's no reason to change it.

So Gods look human then. And they make spirits who look like humans. But why would they make our spirits in the shape of human bodies? Can intelligences only be organized into “spirits” if they look like humans? Or perhaps they actually use their bodies to make spirits, so the spirits end up looking like bodies, spirit bodies that look just like our future physical bodies for some reason, because God, being omniscient, knows exactly who we are going to mate with someday, and for our convenience made the spiritual matter resemble twenty-year-old humans.

Or maybe we're just monkeys. Whew.