Existential thoughts on a plane

I'm sitting in the middle of the sky. That's where I am right now - the sky. In an object way too large to be floating in the air. Designed by a tiny organic mass in ape shape, smart enough to mimic the behavior of other tiny organic masses. An adorable exaggeration of a bird. Built by manipulating the crust of the earth until the material is unrecognizably smooth, shiny, and hard. A quality of matter the earth would never know if it weren't for the utter discontentment and driving jealousy of a network of electricity, chemicals, and cells.

And so I'm sitting in the middle of the sky. Seeing something I was never meant to see. Seeing the surface of an alien planet, the most beautiful alien world in the known universe. The bugs that collectively made this experience possible for me are now too small to see. All I can see is the subtle evidence of their intelligence, the gentle shapes that meet their needs.

Mostly, though, the surface of the planet is untouched. Completely void of intention. Our purposes are almost not even a presence here. From this distance I can't say why any of them do what they do. And they're barely doing anything at all.

Except I do see that scattered, here and there, the gentle manipulations compound into works of art. Giant drawings on the largest possible drawing surface. Painters that don't know they're painting. Studies in composition that can only be comprehended if you're looking down on the clouds, not looking up at them.

I'm inside of a cloud. This shouldn't be real.

"I will wait"

I will wait, I thought. I'll wait as long as it takes for you to change your mind. Eventually, you'll realize. You'll realize that you've never felt anything like what you felt with me. You'll remember the things I told you, like that you made humanity beautiful. You'll try and be close to others, and you'll see that it's pale and weak. You'll commit to someone and you won't bare your soul. Your mind won't be understood. They won't ever love you as much as I did. I will wait until you realize. I will have faith that it felt special for a reason. That I couldn't care so much about you if it wasn't meant to be an amazing, nail-biting story.

Please don't wait for me, I thought. I can't have your guilt around the corners of my eyes while I explore. I will hurt you. But I don't want to. Your devotion frightens me. Your certainty makes me uncertain. Since I can have you whenever I want, I can't want you. Even though I want to. I'd like to try, to test the waters. But if I do, I fear you'll pull me in, past the point of no return. I hide away so I won't drown. I need to breathe. Don't wait until I change my mind. I won't. You're not my story.

Pathetica

Died for you twice. Washed in a wall of sound and screamed.
But I'll stay longer, I'll love harder, I'll give you everything, shorten my dreams, drown my beliefs,
Then you'll see.
Just for this feeling.
Just for your mind.
Rip away another one, I can take it. Suddenly inhuman, I've been there. Take what you need. I can't leave the leash.
Say I'm pathetic, but I'm not crazy. Still I'll stay longer, I'll love harder, I'll give you everything, shorten my dreams, drown my beliefs,
Then you'll see.
Just for my children.
Just for my mouth.
All for the feeling.
So I can say I won.
No one can tell me it's more pathetic to hold like a human, than to let go like a monster.

Baby Scene (Part 2)

Pull me, take me,
I trust where you place me.
I can't scare you
and you won't change your mind.

You know what we are,
you love that we're lowly.
You hold me low,
and sink when I'm down.

I'm not lying this time.
Your voice changes me.
My ears drown out,
I only hear you.

Blind to honor,
you see me differently.
Cradle my touch,
you startle, ear on my stomach.

You know my mind
well enough to lead my body.
Gave you my weight,
I hold together.

You make my end
the thing most worth living.
You cause my pain
and take it on with me.

I won't make a scene until it's you.

The Story

Descent from a sky,
given elite from all life.
Isolated in destiny,
all blackness for our light.
The stars lined for one movement
Handed will not by choice to choose what is forced
Depraved without sensing you and nothing next to you
Something too large for the story that holds it,
Complicate what's simple
Pacify the mystery.

Grown from the wreck,
risen from mud.
We're shrapnel given time
and made of destroyers,
same as old stars.
Connected by weakness
we're making what's greatness.
We don't last long but we feel forever,
and sometimes love seems longer than all of it.
Show me a more beautiful story.

Will

This morning I woke up thinking about the disconnect between the macro and micro worlds, wondering how, and if ever, they connect. Large objects obey the rules of inevitability, cause and effect: energy is conserved as one event changes another, which changes another. Small things obey the rules of probability, as seen in the electron orbitals around atoms. The probability remains constant, while the electrons themselves appear completely randomly; no one ever knows where exactly one will be. So these are the too ways in which change occurs: randomly, or by cause and effect.

But there is a really weird kind of energy (or means of change) that can exist on the scale between the micro and macro--incidentally the size of intelligent organisms on earth: will. We are as large as a universe to our atoms and as small as atoms to the universe. We are hinged between the two worlds, our brains having a quantum nature, and our bodies a physical one. We function using both processes, all the time. And we can feel it. We always have. What else is responsible for the idea of spirits being separate from the physical world, the overwhelming feeling that we are made up of two elements, the sense that we are wearing our bodies. Humans and large brained creatures like us are dichotomous beings. And when you combine the laws of the micro and macro, you get something very odd, that can affect the universe in a new way, and it looks a lot like free will. Will is neither cause and effect, or probabilistic randomness, but the connection between them, a new force that exists when those processes touch. It is intention and choice, a means of influencing matter that rarely occurs in the universe, and it is the avenue by which the universe draws meaning from its inherently intentionless and purposeless nature. Will may have been evolved through natural processes, some odd by-product of natural selection, it may benefit the propagation of certain 'selfish genes,' but once accidentally established by evolution, it breaks from the inevitability of natural selection and can even fly in the face of it, creating creatures that have the ability to destroy themselves, and may very well choose to do so. Will, as well as consciousness may be an illusion, but I feel that I'm real, and I choose to have free will, even if the universe never intended for me to have it. Choosing to make free will a reality is the ultimate manifestation of the energy itself; what power is there in agency, if it wasn't your choice, if it was handed to you by some other being?

I actually remember the moment I chose to be more than chemistry, and a victim of the macro laws. As a child, the chemicals in my body were causing me to be in perpetual fear, and my actions weren't under my control. I literally didn't decide where my legs took me, if I got scared enough. I've never been sure why, but one day in ninth grade I chose to have a will. I had been functioning purely under the laws of cause and effect, when suddenly my brain made a leap and I said to myself, "feel the fear, and then move anyway." I was able to set aside cause and effect for a moment, and jump to a new way of thinking, without following any concrete mental pathways. This is why you need the random element in order to have will. Brains have the ability to jump from place to place because of their quantum nature. In that moment I chose to have the ability to decide. And there's really no reason it should have happened; most anxiety disorders don't just slip away, most people need therapy (the purpose of therapy being teaching people how to choose.) But I stopped walking painfully fast, I started choosing to go to public places again. The universe changed, just a little bit, and the force behind that change was intention, choice. To me it doesn't matter if will is an illusion or not. We make it real.

Baby scene

Cough and pull,
drag and dull.
Stuck and loose in
limbo scream. Horror
at our baby scene.
I'm left alone with
your eyes on me.
You're not my need.
But I can't run, or
stay or sleep or dream.
My dreams shed light
on dishonesty. Our feet
are contradicting me.
We love and dance
in place, and I hold to
hope of love for me.

I see a mother and
I know your heart
would leave. A pointed
eye in breathing sing.
No hand on my both-sides
to hold me strong with
whispering. A body used
for trembling. I tremble
with lack of anything,
and you remind me I came
here accidentally.

I can't love or leave,

and you can't love
me off my honor, sweat,
and hands and knees.
My hand's a fly you
shew off with mercy,
and I can't get your
hands on me.
I gave a girl, she's not
your heir, will never be.
You can't love this if
you don't love me.

Stuck and loose in

limbo scream,

You can't love this if

you don't love me.

If we were Gods

I woke up and had an existential crisis this morning. It's always in the morning for me, just after I wake up, that at least one aspect of the strangeness of my existence will blindside me between the eyes. I guess my brain gets surprised that it's still here most mornings. Most of the time it passes before I have time to do any real thinking about it. I feel it and then it's gone. This morning I suddenly comprehended reproduction in the oddest way. That it all started because a vesical was smashed in two by a rock or something, and now replication of organisms has taken over the surface of the earth. All these squirming little balls of cells making more, and more, and more. Mutating, again, and again, and again, until you get a monkey shaped ball of brain that calls itself Julia, that didn't choose to be here, and is planning on making more squirming balls; growing slimy humans inside of her body. And then pushing them out onto the surface of the earth so that they can squirm all over it, and pass on a few mutations that get to play in this game called natural selection that nobody set up, and nobody is watching, it just is.

I felt all of that in just a moment. And then I began following this reproduction process further in my mind, following the path far into the future. What's going to happen to us?

Lets say all the best circumstances take place. Lets be true optimists right now, and say that all of this will be possible in the future. Our first step to insure that we can keep replicating is to get off planet. The Earth could become unsuitable in a thousand different scenarios, and if anything goes wrong, we're screwed. Our next step is to get out of this solar system before the sun dies, and kills us all. We need to populate the galaxy. But we probably need to get out of the Milky-way before it collides with Andromeda, and occupy the rest of the universe. And then, the hardest of all, we need to get into other universes before this one undergoes heat death, where every star is dead, and every bit of matter/energy disintegrates into heat, which finally cools and then nothing exists at all.

This is a big project. But lets say we pull it off in trillions and trillions of years. We're a species that has figured out how this universe works, well enough to leave it, and probably control the fabric of space somewhat. We're not human, but we resemble humans in the same way humans used to resemble chimpanzees. We're a new species probably called "Gods." Perhaps our binomial name is Homo deus. We've probably integrated computers into our brains, so that our consciousnesses can now complete tasks that were impossible for brain tissue. We've eliminated aging, and if you're careful, you can live forever. We continued to advance socially, and now the species at large is more benevolent, kind, gentle, loving, forgiving, and we've long since weeded out bigotry.

So what do you do with your time, now that you can travel from universe to universe? I think I would start a project. Maybe I'd start an evolutionary cycle on a planet very different from earth just to see what kind of life was generated. I'd probably try and see if there are other ways that intelligence can be evolved. Maybe I'd spend my time as a xenobiologist, studying alien life, or trying to communicate with it. But do you know what I think would be my big project? I think that I would search around the multiverse until I found a planet very, very much like earth. As close as possible to the conditions on earth when life began there. I would try to get there before there was any life, and I would start a system of competing vesicals, as close to how it began on earth as possible. And I'd watch. I would have so much knowledge about early earth and the events that led to my evolution, that I would know what events needed to happen for a similar creature to evolve. Perhaps I would have control enough to propel a large asteroid toward the planet to eliminate the far-too-successful lizard-like creatures that most likely would never evolve intelligence. But I would want to see, with all my heart, a creature that started to resemble an ape. I guess there would be no real reason for it, other than the excitement of it, the feeling like I wasn't alone in my ape-ness, the desire to recreate my origins. It wouldn't be my only project, but good God I would want to see if I could do it. I mean, why not try it? I literally have forever to play with. I would be thrilled beyond belief if the apes started to evolve to look like my predecessors, homo sapiens.

So lets say my big science project worked. An earth-like planet with intelligent beings on it that remind me of myself in the cutest way. What would be my relationship to them? Would they know about me? Would I talk to them? How much of my time would I spend in the observation room? Would I care about their behavior?

I don't think that I would make them aware of my existence. Such a thing would have too large an impact on their societies. I wouldn't want to mess with it. If I came to their planet and showed them how advanced I was, they would certainly start to worship me, factions would start, some would want me to rule, others would conspire to kill me, they'd probably start killing each other because of me. I'd probably end up dead in the end if I lived with them. If I set up the kind of government that actually works, in order to help them, I think it would be a disaster. You can't force knowledge or freedom on anyone. Besides, it's not like I could control them. There would be too many of them. The only way to set up a proper government for them would be to enlist my Homo Deus friends as enforcers, and then too easily it would become a slavery situation, God's ruling over great apes. No, the truth is, humanity was able to become great because they didn't have a supreme authority making decisions for them. If I ever wanted these creature to progress, I would need to leave them alone. I guess it would kind of be like they were my children. I would hope the best for them, but like a parent, I would need to let them go and let them make decisions for themselves, even when the answer to their problems is so obvious to me.

Would there behavior matter to me? I think yes. Not on a small scale, but in the great scheme of things, I would know how much they would need to progress in order to get off their planet in time. If they were behind, I would get worried. If they couldn't figure out how to end bigotry and prejudice in time, they probably wouldn't be able to pull together to figure out the big puzzles. Perhaps I'd even get interested in a specific person's life every once and a while. In fact, I'm sure of it. Because I'd know that really the only thing that matters is the individual. Only observing the species as a whole would get dull. I would want to see the art, the intimacy, the beauty, the real purpose of life that you can only find when you look closer. I wouldn't read their thoughts though, even if I had the technology to decipher their brain waves. Truth be told it would be a waste of time, an invasion of privacy, and what would I do with all that information anyway? How would that help either of us? And even though I'd be aware of their major mistakes, I wouldn't send punishment to steer their actions or anything creepy like that. I have no business doing that. Because I know that humanity learned well enough through natural consequences. No need to assign extra weight to their actions. There would, of course, be no reason to send a friend there to pay the price for their mistakes. There's no great cosmic justice here. Each action they take either leads them to survival or destruction, starflight or nuclear war, and it's their choice. Besides, if I did send someone to help, it would probably just end up polarizing them, and they'd kill whoever it was.

Would I ever try to communicate with them? Maybe. Maybe when they were intelligent enough to understand I'd feel comfortable giving them little tidbits about science or government or proper behavior, the type of behavior they would need to have if they ever joined the community of intelligent universe-hoppers. Why not, right? This is my project, I can do what I want. But how would I get the information to them? For Homo Deus, we have computers built right into our brains, and we all access the Cranialinternet instantaneously in our minds. I guess sending an "email" via Cranialinternet, a message that travels directly from mind to mind would seem a lot like telepathy, but it's not. I would need to invent some way for these creatures to perhaps access this trans-universal web of information with their brains, too. Program some feature to specialize in connecting to unaltered brain tissue. It wouldn't be impossible, would it? It's designed to be accessed with at least partial brain tissue, it seems like they could get some access to it. Their connection would be deathly slow, but that's better than nothing. Yes! This is genius! I've got the figure this out. Because this way, I don't have to try and communicate with them one by one (slow, impossible, and futile), their minds will be accessing small amounts information from the Cranialinternet when they need it. This could make all the difference in speeding up their progression.

How much time would I spend paying attention to them? I wouldn't consume myself in it. I'd keep myself updated, watch their news, keep up on world events probably. But I have my own life to keep me occupied. And watching everything too closely would drain me no doubt. I'm not perfect, and I'm not all-powerful. It would suck not to be able to do much about the things I saw.
Or maybe, I would pay a huge amount of attention. I do have so much time to kill.

And finally, what would be the fruition of my project? Introducing them to the rest of us, I think. When they finally began to resemble us, when they finally were more like peers, I would definitely want to meet them. Just thinking of it, I know my heart would explode. Being equals for the first time. Finally getting to teach them everything we've learned. It would be glorious. Perhaps we'd even have advanced enough biological science that we could reassemble old consciousnesses, and I could even meet some of the people I was more intimately interested in who died along the way.

Then I thought, maybe someone did something like that for us humans. Maybe someone did set up all these squirming replicating bags of slimy human brains.

But she wouldn't make herself known. She wouldn't read our minds. She wouldn't keep tallies on sins we committed. She wouldn't send punishment. She wouldn't set up organizations for us, or encourage factions. She wouldn't know our future. She wouldn't send a God to rule us, or to save us, or to be killed by us. She wouldn't speak to us personally; it would be up to us to download inspiration from the cosmos into our minds. And maybe, if we play our cards right, we'll join the community of universe-hoppers someday. Surely there must be things more intelligent and advanced than that one species, on that one planet, in that one Milky-way galaxy, out there already.

Or maybe we're the only life that has existed, anywhere, ever.

And that's why I laid in bed for hours this morning.

Found me in the wake

You found me in the wake.
Dried up on shore, I didn't move.
I can't say you rescued me, but I left

every letter downstairs.

Too lucky for breathing. I blink and feel you
closing in. Almost too soon.
Just as I laid down my lies you picked me up.
My truth held close for the first time.

As a child I walked too quickly
after school. I shuddered with my
feet in a ditch as dusty boy spoke to me,
now I won't fall from your running water voice.

Bled me out and drag me
through white wake. Follow and sway.
One delay and I live again.
Just in time. Just in time for you.

Stay home for me

Once, I shook next to you on a bus.

I folded my arms under your coat

so you couldn't see how you took over me.

Once I looked down with my head on your chest,

with your words in my hair, and I couldn't bring

myself to put my arm where I wanted it.

You drove an hour once, all the way back home,

when my scream hung in the air and you tasted

your loss, still you didn't stay home for me.

One time you appeared unannounced upstairs.

I wore an old hoodie and you proved I was pretty

after declining to touch me two days before.

This one time, I lifted my forehead from the carpet to your leg,

and your hand stroking my hair stilled my jagged breath

as you listed the reasons you knew who I was.

When it was dark and I broke at the thought of you leaving,

you never knew that I watched from the window
as you knelt on the sidewalk, and prayed to God for us.

Once, on the way to my sister's where I'd finally be alone,

you wouldn't stop turning and looking and crying.

Your eyes stayed off the road, but you couldn't stay home for me.

You found me next to you once in the middle of the night,

and made yourself very clear. You told me again in words, in time,

in promise, then lies, then left, because you wouldn't stay home for me.

Religious Suicide

My cousin committed suicide two weeks ago, on the ninth of August, because she thought Heavenly Father wanted her to. Her decent into mental illness was slow and subtle, like a frog in a boiling pot. No one understood how bad it really was, and therefore no one took drastic enough preventative measures to stop the tragedy. This is her story.

She grew up in the most beautiful Mormon family, the oldest of six. She was about ten years older than me, so we were never close, but I played with her younger siblings my entire childhood. I think we all looked up to her as some distant object of perfection. She was a living snow white--She had perfect white skin, and gorgeous, long dark hair. She sewed her own clothes, cooked for everyone, and knew how to can anything. She had no qualms about scolding or telling you how to behave--A born mother.

And that's exactly what she became. After her mission to the Philippines, (a difficult and disturbing mission. She was in the last group of sister missionaries ever allowed to serve there. I have wondered if the disturbing things she saw somehow contributed to her illness,) she married the first man she ever dated and became a mother. The man she married painted for a living, and didn't provide her with the bounteous, lovely lifestyle she was used to. He moved her to a dump of a place, far away from her family. The pressure of being a poor, new mother without support sent her into a post-partum depression that never seemed to lift. And every time she added another child the pressure built, the depression thickened, and people started noticing she was not acting normally.

"The men in my ward are all flirting with me." She said. That's how it started. She would tell elaborate stories of how this elder and that elder couldn't stand her beauty and were always implying that they wanted her. I remember laughing behind her back, thinking that she wanted male attention so desperately that she was just inventing flirtation that wasn't there. I told my family, "She should have dated more men before she got married. She never got to experience the fun of flirtation, and so she needs it now." But pretty soon the stories of flirtation turned into more unbelievable tales about the bishopric, how they wanted to have affairs with her, how they desperately wanted to put their seed in her, especially when she was pregnant. She started telling everyone that the bishop had set up surveillance in their home. Everyone told her that she was mistaken, that they were worried her grip on reality was failing. She responded with an ultimatum-- The bishopric was planning something awful, and it was going to happen in six weeks. If it didn't happen then she would admit she was crazy.

It didn't happen. She got up in sacrament meeting and began reciting her list of “The Top Ten Reasons Why I'm Crazy.” She started telling everyone the things she believed about the bishop, and other completely inappropriate things, but she didn't get very far because her husband walked up to the pulpit, took her out of the building, and immediately drove her to the mental hospital.

She didn't stay there very long. Her parents drove down to see her in the hospital and she seemed to be completely normal. “She's fine.” They assured everyone. “She just needs to take it easy.” They brought her to live with them so they could help with the kids and ease the pressure she was under. It helped. She seemed to be doing better. But when she moved back home the descent started again. She named all of the rooms in their home a room in the temple. Their bedroom was the celestial room. The closets were the temple dressing rooms, and they were only allowed to get undressed in the “dressing rooms.” She spent every night obsessively reading the Book of Mormon. Her sister found her scriptures once, flipped through them and saw the word “hotdog” written on every page. “Why did you write hotdog all over your scriptures?” She asked. My cousin replied, “Well, clearly I couldn't have written penis on them.” Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Every time she read a verse that reminded her of a penis, she marked it with “hotdog.”

And then came the day that she stumbled across Matthew 5:30, “And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” It struck her to the core. It resounded within her, as if God were answering a prayer, as if God had shown her the way to atone for her guilt. She told her husband that God wanted her to atone for her sins. She knew it. She could feel it. My brother, who used to cut his wrists every time he masturbated in order to punish himself and knows well the amount of guilt even a sane member of the church can experience, suggested that perhaps it was masturbation that she thought she needed to atone for. She felt that her arm was evil, that it was causing her to sin, and that she needed to get rid of it.

Her husband found her in the kitchen late one night, rifling through the drawers.

“Honey,” He asked apprehensively, “What are you looking for?”

She sighed. “I know you're not going to understand this, but I need to cut off my arm.”

“No.” He said. “If you do that, you'll die, do you understand?”

But she didn't. If you ever tried to talk reason to her she would grin and nod her head, like she was on a higher plane than you, so you couldn't possibly understand as well as her. She believed that if she only accomplished this Abrahamic test, God would preserve her. Her husband found websites about successfully amputating a limb in her recent searches. He hid all the knives and arranged for her to stay once again with her parents, because he had to go to work and could not keep an eye on her all the time. He drove her up to Utah, and on the way they stopped by a temple. He got out of the car, and she got in the driver's seat and drove off with their three children, leaving him stranded at the temple. She drove so fast that she got in a car chase with the police, all the while holding the Book of Mormon in front of her, believing it would protect her. The cops couldn't catch her. They threw down spikes on the freeway, but she dodged them, and finally OnStar actually turned off her car, and the cops sent her to jail. She was charged with child endangerment, but the charges were dropped, her parents successfully brought her back to their home, and everyone was so grateful that they had dodged a bullet, and that it was all over. Things were looking up.

Before she entered the house, her sister hid all of the knives. The whole family spent the evening with her, and watched as she sprawled out her patriarchal blessing, church talks, and her scriptures all over the floor, and obsessively marked them. Her sister asked her, “What happened to you? What caused all of this? What is it that made you like this?” My cousin started weeping and said, “There's just so much pressure to be perfect.”

She slept in her little sister's upstairs room with her three children that night. But she didn't sleep. As soon as everyone was quiet, she slipped out of her room and found a garden saw in the garage, and a pair of sewing scissors in the sewing room. She laid out her temple dress, and pinned a note to it, telling her little sister that she would wear this dress when she became a bride of Christ. She went to the downstairs bathroom and cut off all of her long dark hair in front of the mirror. She sat in the sewing room in her garments and tried to cut off her arm, but didn't make it all the way through. She tried to make it up the stairs to, what, get help? To put on her temple dress because she had a vision of the way she wanted to be found? She didn't make it up the stairs. Her father found her in the morning, and now our entire family is plagued with nightmares. I can hardly stand to listen in church, because the religious phrases frighten me. My relationship to the church was already complicated, but now it's impossibly difficult because while it was religion that contributed to her path of destruction, it was religion that I needed for comfort in the aftermath. And yet I couldn't find comfort in the doctrine that led to her death, or even the sweet religious phrases that people say. They just sound frightening and demonic to me now.

Have any of you had any experience with mental illness? Has anyone else seen religion play a heavy part in it? I would like to discuss the possibility that religious ideas can be damaging to the mind. How do you sift through the good ones and the creepy ones? How can I feel comfortable teaching my children ideas that I fear will warp their minds?

Losing Faith

My philosophy of religion teacher gave us 3 reasons why people lose faith in their religions. The list surprised me, because I realized that not one applied to me.

The list was this:
1- There are doctrinal issues that they simply cannot rectify, and they reject the religion altogether.

2-They desire no consequences, and reject God in order to do whatever they want.
3- They are afraid of looking stupid for believing in God.

But I do not lose faith because of these things. I immediately began writing my own list:

Why do I lose faith? (Benefits of losing faith)
1- I judge people less when I reject the religious definition of sin.
2- I accept other people more when I don't believe my world view is the only ultimate truth.
3- I lose debilitating fear when I reject the notion of Satan.
4- I gain mental freedom when I consider my thoughts to be private.
5- I have ambition and hopes and dreams for myself when I reject the doctrinal place for women.
6- I have more control over myself when I don't blame my thoughts, feelings, and actions on good or evil spiritual influences
7- I allow my brain to mature to full adult mental capacity when I stop allowing religious information to bypass my critical factor.
8- I am more open to the discovery of truth when I am not afraid that it doesn't fit into the skeleton of church doctrine.
9- I come to more logical conclusions when I don't force religious and secular ideas together with over-complicated logic.
10- I feel an urgency to be productive and make the most of my life when I think that this is my only chance.
11- I find no reason to ever waste one second being unhappy when I believe death is the end.
12- I am less likely to base decisions on emotion when I believe the source of my emotions are chemicals, rather than spiritual influences.
13- It is easier for me to forgive and love myself after I make a mistake when I look at the actual natural consequences, instead of feeling guilty for sinning against God.
14- I understand the functions and purposes of my body when I believe that it was evolved over millions of years, and that everything about it was evolved because it was good and beneficial.
15- I am comfortable with my body and my sexuality when I don't associate it with religious shame.
16- I feel peace in my own skin when I don't believe that my natural self is an enemy to God.
17- I feel more connected to all life on earth when I believe we all have a single common evolutionary ancestor, and I have more respect for other organisms when I let go of religious human egomania.
18- When I let go of Mormon expectations for my life's path, a thousand possibilities open up for my future. Not being absolutely certain where life is going to take me is exhilarating.
19- When I reject Mormonism, my sense of goodness and morality is stripped down to elemental principles like kindness and freedom, and I have to think and study and decide for myself whether or not an activity is beneficial, instead of automatically labeling things as "sinful" or "righteous," based on a pre-made structure of principles that may be contrary to reality, or have nothing to do with my life.

But after I wrote this all down, I thought, "So why don't I leave just leave then? Why don't I pick up and leave Mormonism behind? There must be reasons why I stay." So I proceeded to write an equal and very opposite list, to illustrate the full extent of my cognitive dissonance.

Why do I keep my faith?

1- When I believe in Jesus Christ I believe that any problem I face can be overcome.
2- When I believe in God I believe that I have a lasting purpose.
3- When I believe in God I believe events are directed, not random, which (in some cases) is comforting.
4- When I believe in God I believe that my thoughts and prayers can in reality affect people.
4- When I believe in God I believe I have unlimited potential.
5- When I believe in God I believe my feelings are significant instead of meaningless chemical reactions.
6- When I believe in God I believe all of my questions about the universe will eventually be revealed to me, instead of me ceasing to exist with unrequited curiosity.
7- When I believe in Jesus Christ I believe that the human race is worth infinite love.
8- When I believe in Jesus Christ I value kindness and forgiveness for others.
9- When I believe in God I believe love is transcendent instead of something that exists only so our genetic material has a greater chance of replicating. (We only love our families because we're more likely to survive if we stick with them, and we only fall in love so that reproduction is irresistible.)
10- When I believe in God I don't feel completely alone when I have no humans to turn to.
11- When I believe in God I have a sense of protection, rather than being subject to randomness, probability, and the cold impersonal universe that doesn't care how much pain I experience.
12- When I believe in the Mormon church I'm capable of feeling "the spirit", which is a feeling of warmth, understanding, excitement, love, and like any obstacle is surmountable.
13- When I believe in the Mormon church it is easier for me to feel a part of my social group.
14- When I believe in the Mormon church it is easier on my mind, for I have a predetermined schema given to me with which I can use to judge all ideas.
15- When I believe in religion I have a very concrete idea of morality, and it's easy to judge whether an activity is bad or good, rather than having to think and decide and risk making a poor decision.
16- When I believe in religion I believe that all loose ends with be tied up-- I will see dead loved ones again, all pain and suffering will be made up for, all injustices will be justified, all mysteries will be solved, all knowledge will be given.
17- When I believe in Mormonism I have a very clear idea of the way in which I'm going to parent my future children, instead of having no idea how to present the idea of religion to them.
18- When I believe in Mormonism, it is easier to listen to the things that people around me say, and I never feel uncomfortable around those who believe, and I don't feel the need to role my eyes.

Inside of Music- A visual explanation of Sufjan Stevens

I have an idea for a body of artwork that I need to create.

It came to me after a few experiences:


Experience #1:
A Sufjan Stevens song came on as Laura and I were talking in the living room. It was one of my absolute favorites, and I was certain that she would like it. But much to my surprise, as soon as she started listening her face dropped and and she smirked like there was a bad smell in the air. She said, "This is... the stupidest music... I have ever heard." I rushed upstairs and turned off the music, terribly confused and embarrassed.

Experience #2:
I went to the Sufjan Stevens concert. The music that I heard there was the weirdest, most indescribable sound I have ever heard. My mind struggled to process it, and listening to it was one of the most brain intensive activities of my life. I had to work so hard to understand it, I came out a little different. My brain had been stretched in new ways, and the way I thought about music was altered. I struggled to enjoy that music the first time I listened to it. But then something changed. The way I perceived the music changed. And now, even though my brain is receiving the exact same information, I process it so differently that I actually hear something else. It's sounds beautiful to me.

Experience #3:
Laura began to make fun of the way Sufjan makes music. "You can't actually like it, Julia. It sounds like Mr. Rogers. It sounds like Sesame Street. The stupid horns! The clarinets and oboes! It sounds so stupid!"
"You can't tell me I don't like it, Laura."
"It's just that sometimes I think you're only saying you like it to seem cool, or to please Brian. I mean, come on. The way it sounds, the actual sonic quality is not good. It's not enjoyable."
"Laura, when I listen to it, that's not what I hear. I hear something different than you. I've let go of all prejudices about certain instruments. I don't associate the sounds with anything predetermined, I just listen to the sound. There is this one song in particular, that if I were to show to you, you would hear it as the ugliest, stupidest, cheesiest sound you have ever heard, but that's not what I hear."
"Ok. Well then, what are you hearing? What does it sound like to you?"
"I can't describe it in words. It brings out specific, subtle emotions that no other music expresses, that there aren't words for. It actually sounds beautiful to me."

When Laura responded to one of my favorite songs the way she did, it was very jarring-- I realized I couldn't possibly comprehend how other people were hearing my music. I never would have considered the possibility that that song would be, "the stupidest music" she's ever heard. I assumed she would love it. But listening to music is a mental process, and can be done in very different ways. Laura and I were receiving the exact same sound waves, but what our brains did with those sound waves was completely different.

The way I listen to music has changed. I used to hear the top layer, the shell of a song. This shell is our automatic judgment. It is each sound's perceived connotation. It is expectation of what we think music is and should be. It is the association of certain sounds with predetermined emotions. It is assumption, and impatience, and ego, an unconscious refusal to appreciate something others may label as silly, annoying, or strange.

This hollow shell is the only thing I use to hear while listening to music. It meant that while some music reached me deeply, far fewer pieces were able to reach me at all. But I was slowly exposed to artists who drove me to new levels, and different thought processes. They challenged, one at a time, all assumptions, expectations, connotations, and judgments that I made about music. And now, when I hear a piece, I listen to it from the inside-out, not the outside-in. That's the only way I can describe it. I'm in the song, I'm inside the world that it creates while it's playing. And it sounds completely different from the inside. It begins to display emotions that you didn't know you had, ones that are not simply "angry" or "sad" or "joyful." With all assumptions set aside, a specific song will communicate things that nothing else can communicate. You might think that stripping music down this way would eliminate all meaning, that if all pre-decided associations were dissolved then music would be nothing more than purposeless noises, like the unorganized sounds you hear walking down the street, or how a word loses meaning when you say it over and over. But this is not the case. Listening to music in this elemental way opens the way for more direct communication. It doesn't dismantle meaning, it uncovers it. Because that is what music is-- It's a form of communication. It's a language. It has meaning. It can communicate obscure ideas and emotions that words cannot even begin to approach. It's worth it to give a song a chance. It's worth it to be patient, and suppress your automatic aversion to the noise, because it may just communicate something precious.

And when you begin thinking about music in this new way, the way your mind thinks in general will open up. The patience and questioning and lack of ego will translate into all of your thought processes. Your brain will become accustomed to being accepting and free. It will get used to questioning an initial judgment. You won't get locked into one mindset, or one way of thinking.

Not all music will speak to you, even after you give it the opportunity to do so. I suspect that Sufjan Steven's music affects me personally because of who I am, and Laura would not find the same meaning in it, even if she were to look for it. But I want to answer that question, "What are you hearing? What does it sound like to you?" And I can't do it in words. I can however, attempt to express it visually. I will describe my individual perception of it through color. I will make pairs of paintings for several songs, one representing the outer shell, and next to it a representation of what it sounds like to me.

This is gonna be fun. :)

The Zombornography Apocalypse

The prophets use fear to keep men away from pornography.

"Avoid pornography as you would a plague." -Gordon B. Hinckley

"Today we have a rebirth of ancient Sodom and Gomorrah." -Thomas S. Monson. (Referring to pornography.)

"Pornography, though billed by Satan as entertainment, is a deeply poisonous, deceptive snake that lies coiled up in magazines, the Internet, and television." (He describes pornography as a snakebite that spiritually poisons you, then continues...) "Sexual sins are among the most poisonous." -David E. Sorensen.

"Pornography is overpoweringly addictive and severely damaging." -Richard G. Scott.

"Stay away from pornography as you would avoid a serious disease. It is as destructive." -Gordan B. Hinckley

"Pornography is like a raging storm, destroying individuals and families, utterly ruining what was once wholesome and beautiful." -Gordon B. Hinckley

"There appears before us in this generation a sinister and diabolical enemy-- Pornography... [It is] the carrier of a deadly disease... The constant march of pornography blights neighborhoods just as it contaminates human lives. It has just about destroyed some areas. It moves relentlessly closer to your city, your neighborhood, and your family." -Thomas S. Monson

The fear tactics used here are astonishing. It sounds more like they are describing a zombie apocalypse than anything else. I am not saying the prophets are not correct, surely pornography is a problem, just as they are suggesting. I simply wonder if the tactics they use are effective. Because it seems as though the problem of pornography is just getting worse and worse. It makes one wonder- perhaps if saying the same kinds of things over and over again in every conference is not working, then a change in methods is necessary. Telling people they are infected with a disease gives them a terrifying, hopeless view of themselves, and instead of seeking help they may just give up. They also become terribly ashamed and hateful towards themselves, which does not help break the cycle of pornography use one bit. In fact, shame may be a key contributer to the cycle. I am not assuming any authority on the subject, and I will not propose what the new tactic should be, but it seems to me that if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. If the brethren keep teaching this the way they do, the results will be the same. Clearly the root of the problem is not that men are irresponsible, fearless, careless, and want to eat, drink and be merry. Otherwise, describing the diabolical dangers of an action might have an effect. I think men know it's wrong, they know it's destructive, they know they have a great responsibility to their families, they care so much that it eats them alive, and they want to please God. They get the point. But pornography still has a hold over them, suggesting that the root of the problem lies elsewhere. Perhaps pornography gains such an iron grip on men because of how terrified they are of it. Perhaps the huge dose of adrenaline and cortisol they receive when they slip, due to how ashamed and evil they feel, actually reinforces the addiction with those chemicals so powerfully that it becomes ridiculously difficult to overcome. Perhaps a better coarse of action for the church to take would be, instead of instilling extreme fear of pornography use into men, they concentrate on fear release, on letting go, on self empowerment and self-esteem, assuring that such material is not as powerful as the human mind, will, body, or spirit.

I have had experience with the effects that a pornography addiction can have on relationships, even after the addiction is overcome. The effects can indeed be serious, but perhaps not for the reasons most people suppose. I had been dating a young man for over a year when I found out he used to have a pornography addiction. It threw a wrench into our relationship. Also, some of my close family members' marriages were damaged when they discovered their husbands had current pornography habits. I believe most people think pornography hurts relationships because it makes the man into a bad companion. This is certainly the case sometimes, if the addiction is uncontrolled and extremely advanced. But I think that pornography hurts relationships most of the time because of how the women respond to it, having been raised to view it as the most destructive infection on earth. It upset the relationships in my family, but not because the man was disrespectful, or distant, or unkind, or inappropriate, or not gentle. It ruined everything because the women (myself included) suddenly saw their man as an irreparable, diseased, weak, partaker of Satan's very own intellectual property, a disgusting porn-looker. Since we believed it had destroyed and poisoned the minds of our sweethearts, we couldn't let it go. We wondered, “How does this poisoned mind see me, after looking at porn? How can I appear beautiful to him? How can I ever be close to this infected man again? How can he be a good father after witnessing the most family-destroying material on earth?” In my case, I felt like running away and completely erasing my relationship. I distanced myself and looked at him differently, with judging eyes. In the case of my family members, they made actual plans to leave their husbands and rip apart their families, when their husbands had been nothing but good fathers, lovers, and providers. Certain that the men were plagued by Satan, the women did nearly all the work of destroying their relationships. So yes, the brethren are completely correct when they say that pornography is the cause for broken families. But we are the ones doing the breaking. We are the ones who are letting pornography have so much power and influence over us. We are leaving good men, distancing ourselves from our spouses, making decisions based on fear, becoming obsessed and scared, perseverating on our thoughts, quarantining the “infected,” flooding ourselves with shame and guilt, on the premises that pictures are more powerful than people, that sexual feelings are nearly as evil as murder, and that what you look at determines your worth as a human being, rather than whether or not you are Christlike in the treatment of those around you.

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.

The Santa Clause Phenomenon

I felt like an alien in my own world. No one at church was like me. I heard members of my ward speak, and I could only stare dumbly at the things they were saying. I couldn't imagine how it was possible to be a human being and also think and speak the way they were thinking and speaking. How can these smart people... be the way they are. It didn't make any sense.

But how can I be feeling this right now? I know exactly what it's like to be a believing Mormon. I was one, for my entire childhood. Every person I know is a true blue Mormon. This is the only way of thinking I've EVER been exposed to. How is it possible that I feel like such a fish out of water? This is my world. My only world.

And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that I was surrounded by an entirely different species, and the language they were all speaking was foreign to me. Perhaps it's because I can't imagine being an adult and still believing the things I believed as a child. I believed in Santa Clause. But I grew up. I started using my brain and I figured out it was a bunch of hooie. Same with the church. I was solid in the church until about thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that's why church is so incomprehensibly strange to me. All these educated, intelligent adults getting excited about the presents that Santa Clause brings them.

The children I can understand, but the adults? They're either incredibly stupid, or too afraid to exist in a world where everything they've been taught isn't entirely correct. Am I the only person who isn't scared shitless to think about things?

But how am I thinking this right now? I know the adults in my family aren't stupid. They're not mental cowards either. Then why do they still believe in Santa Clause? No one makes sense, they're all aliens, they're all from a different planet.

When did I become disconnected from every human being I've ever met? If I'm not connected to Mormons for heavens sake, then what on earth am I connected to? Maybe if I had a group of non-Mormon friends, maybe if I'd ever witnessed life outside of Utah, it would make sense that I was rejecting this so that I could cling to something or someone else. But there's no one. There's nowhere. I'm an alien to everyone on earth. When did this happen to me?

I thought backward. It was the worst part. I could remember believing in everything, and also not being stupid. I could remember it but I couldn't figure out how it was possible. I remembered sitting in church and suddenly thinking, 'right now, anyone could say anything to me, and I'd still believe Joseph Smith was a prophet.' I remember going to girl's camp and feeling so lucky to have the truth of the gospel in my life that I bore my testimony around the campfire and told everyone firmly, “If any of you have any doubts, just don't.” Just don't, I said. Like it was so simple. Like the truth of the church was blatantly obvious.

I remember watching tv or hearing stories about people and always asking, "Well, are they Mormon?" Because if they weren't it was like they weren't real people. If someone wasn't Mormon then they almost... didn't count. It was hard for me to swallow that the founding father's weren't Mormon because then how could they have possibly been led by God? But then I heard that their work had been done in the temple and that they'd accepted it in the afterlife, so whew, now the founding fathers counted as real people. I remember listening to my favorite artists, Maynard Keenan and Tori Amos and fantasizing that they would become Mormon someday because then they'd be real, despairing that all of these people I admired had pointless lives because they weren't Mormon. I could only understand the minds of Mormons, I could only relate to those also in my exclusive club.

Then things started to happen. I got sick of Joseph Smith because of the infamous “Joseph Smith Year”. The Joseph Smith year in church was designed to strengthen everyone's love and testimony and appreciation for Joseph Smith by literally never speaking of anything else. Forget Jesus. Forget repentance and forgiveness. By the end of that year I was so bored of continuous Joseph Smith bludgeoning, that I lost my testimony of him. I missed talking about Jesus. And I never wanted to hear the words, “Joseph Smith is a prophet” again, for the rest of my life.

Things that I heard in church started feeling wrong, like when someone said the purpose of women on earth was to help men. The fact that my role and destiny as a female was completely mapped out for me made me feel rebellious. And I finally let myself ask the question, "why the hell don't women have the priesthood?" without putting it out of my mind and telling myself, whatever, it doesn't matter, god has a reason. When I finally let the question in, I felt a kind of heartbroken rage I'd never felt before. With my mind finally unafraid to open up, I also stopped pretending that polygamy never happened. I mean, I always knew somewhere inside myself that polygamy had happened, but I was like the people in 1984, using doublethink, making it disappear from the past, refusing to think about it. But when I finally had the courage to ponder it, I had a clear and horrifying sense that it was putrescent and horrid and evil and wrong, a mistake a mistake a mistake... I tried to ignore my intuition and explain it away as something harmless, but I got sick of denying my own truth sensor. And more and more things started tripping off my truth alarm. Like in my Doctrine and Covenants class at BYU, when my professor brought up the subject of Heavenly Mother and questioned aloud whether or not she was even divine. I've never felt so black inside, hearing him question her divinity. I've never felt so much negativity and falseness in one room. I started blacking out during the lecture. I struggled to breathe and held in frantic tears on the way to my next class.

And worst of all, or best of all, I read Orson Scott Card's Xenocide. His character called Gloriously Bright believed that her own disturbed and genius mind was the Gods speaking to her. She had an unshakable testimony in something completely false. I remember reading Xenocide during seminary once. Gloriously Bright was knelt over, in a ridiculous religious ritual caused by severe obsessive compulsive disorder, speaking to the “Gods” in her mind. I looked up from my book and looked at the TV screen. They were showing a seminary video on prayer and revelation. A young women was kneeling, closing her eyes and folding her arms... speaking to God in her mind. I couldn't breathe. Mormons were Gloriously Bright. We do all of these rituals and believe we're Godspoken and we know it's true, just like Gloriously Bright knew. She was too faithful to see that what she KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt was false. I could never look at myself or anyone the same after witnessing such close parallels between her and the entirety of Mormondom.

I started out feeling unbelievably blessed. I believed. Then I became cynical of the culture, sick of it. Then I thought maybe it was possible it was false. Then I wanted to believe, but feared that it was false. Then I couldn't see much truth in it, but I wished and hoped and dreamed that it was true. Then I wanted more for myself as a woman and secretly wished it wasn't true. Then if I were to have found out it was true I would have been very surprised. Now, I realized, when I meet someone who is Mormon I automatically feel like I can't relate to or understand them. Now if I were to find out it were all true, if I found out that there was a big scary monster called Satan, if I found out that all main Gods were male, that God's wife did and said nothing, that Joseph's polygamy experiment wasn't the blunder of the century, that I was being judged for saying swear words in my head, that my brother wasn't going to make it to the celestial kingdom because he's a “sinner!!!”, I would be heartbroken. Devastated. Now I wouldn't want to live in a world where it was true.
What has happened to me?

A Day

You were a stranger without that look,

a hidden flickering game
of indifference that hits me with

a shrouded pathway from the eyes.

I didn't know you, but I knew you didn't

need my sanity to stay. You'd stay anyway.

And when you didn't ask for conformity,
it shattered, fell limp.

You stayed awake for me that night
and took nothing but my gentle presence
to breathe relief to deep hollow.
I buried my head, you swayed.

My ice and your stone broke well before the sun
came up through the window where I first left home.

You didn't alter, strong current set us eye to eye.

I hid my upper lip, you told me it was perfect.

You permanently stand in my thoughts
and you didn't try. But I see you even now.

I was in, you let me be there.
No doubt you saw all of me.


For a day. Then you didn't care.

Questions

This quote by President Ezra Taft Benson made me feel diminished and then pigeon-holed. But by the last sentence I was made to feel superior to men, to balance out the previous pigeon-holing.

"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."


I asked myself one question. And then the questions wouldn't stop coming.


But what am I meant for?

Does my sex determine my destiny? Does sex determine every individual's destiny? An individual's Purpose? Even an individual's personality? How is it that my personality can be pre-determined and recited to me, simply because my genetic code lacks the Y chromosome? How is it that the nature of my spirit is decided for me? How can they tell me what my spirit is like? How can they tell me what my personal divine attributes are, when they have never heard of me? Just because I "am" what they call a woman? Do they know what a woman is? Or do they only know what they think a woman should be? How can they tell us not to descend to the level of a man's characteristics, when those are divine in nature as well? Must we only strive to become half of perfection? Must we avoid development in certain areas, and cling to it in others? Are "masculine" divine attributes detrimental to a woman's divinity? Are only decidedly feminine characteristics beneficial for my personal progression? Why would two individuals sharing an attribute weaken them, or weaken the the union between them? Can not I, and my brother as individuals work toward being nurturing as well as powerful? Must people artificially divide themselves in half so that the sexes need each other more? Can we not all be complete people? Can a union between a man and a woman not function with well-rounded individuals? Must I base my marriage on the fact that I am incomplete? Wouldn't it be more powerful for two people to be whole and use their agency to choose to unite themselves, rather than to compensate for the attributes that they have neglected, or that have been socialized out of them? Why did I feel uneasy when my three-year-old nephew carried around a doll in public? Why are we told it's not natural for males to be nurturing? And why, in turn, do we make that characteristic unacceptable from infancy, deterring any natural nurturing instincts? Would a man be un-manly if his culture had allowed him to cultivate a "feminine" characteristic? What benefit to society is there in discouraging gentleness in males, when they are considered the ones responsible for the majority of crime? Would a woman be un-feminine if her culture had approved of her being an "aggressive" participant in society? What benefit to society is there in encouraging passiveness among women, who then so often let themselves be taken advantage of? How can we attribute our own silly, human, mormon, modern american culture to the way the universe actually works? How can we assume that the traditions and dysfunctionalities of our time and place have anything to do with how divine people function? How can we think that the way we've learned to be women, mothers, and wives reflects in the slightest what it means to be a Goddess? How can we believe that the way masculinity is taught and implemented here is in any way similar for Gods?


Foolishness.