My Mormon Experience
Posted by shirlstars on March 7, 2010
I have no axe to grind with any religious sect or its participants. . .except when they attempt to force their beliefs on me.
Whatever belief system assists anyone on their journey through life is their choice and they have a right to that choice. If they find JOY and fulfillment and spiritual peace in any organization, that is fine with me. That is one of the major aspects of this life on earth. Whatever brings you joy, love, and fulfillment is the path you should follow. However, if those teachings and beliefs bring you fear, self-loathing, judgmental views of self and others, a concept of forever unattainable search for perfection. . .I would advise anyone to run from them as fast as possible. We are here to experience and in that process of our experiences we are here to find JOY and be filled with the love of All That Is.
I was raised in the Mormon religion. The actual name of the group is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They have been called Mormons as a reference to the Book of Mormon which is at the base of the Church’s founding.
I began my education in the Church as a 5 year old when a devout LDS family adopted me and my older brother. So, I began in the children’s Sunday School. We learned Bible Stories and Book of Mormon Stories. We were told what behavior made us good or bad. It is the usual indoctrination of children that all Christian (and other) religions use.
My situation perhaps was different from most others. I had been to a Christian Science Church once that I recall at about the age of 3. There I heard one very important universal truth. . .God Is Love. I knew that was truth. I knew that was right. And whatever else they may have taught or now teach, that one is a winner. It still holds true today and eternally. God is Love. Love is all there is. There is no more powerful force or energy in all of Creation than Love.
Growing up in the Mormon Church I was immersed in all of their doctrine, if not bombarded with it. There was a church group meeting of some sort or other almost everyday of the week. You were expected to go. I went to most of them all of the time.
The thing was that I am who I am. I have always been some version of that. I had questions and I needed and wanted substantive answers. I always got answers but not always substantive and not usually given with anything less than irritation that I would ask. The answers generally just brought forth more questions. People generally weren’t too pleased that I had this never ending need to understand in greater depth and detail. By the time I was 15, very indoctrinated in spite of it all, I was feeling a deeply spiritual part of me that really needed to know more in order to grow.
I began reading more and more of church history, books written by church hierarchy, in depth studies of the founding of the church and how the doctrine had unfolded and morphed into what it was at the time in the mid 1950′s. Indeed I studied the church at great length and continuously even into my 40′s.
As with anything humans put their limited understandings and skewed viewpoints to, I found a lot of contradictory information. But I was smart enough to do what “they” always instructed us to do when we had a problem or confusion. I prayed about it. I prayed very seriously about it. I expected “God” to let me know what was correct and what was amiss. I most certainly expected an answer. I got answers. The answers were not always clear cut nor decisive but more often than not it was the feeling of follow your heart, do what you feel is right, go where you are led, just know that all is well between you and I. Keep seeking truth.
By age 19, I could no longer tolerate the hypocrisy of many of the local members. Their endless judgmental views of others, their finger-pointing and gossiping, the constant “casting the first stone” when indeed they had no place of such perfection or “sin-less-ness” to even consider throwing stones at others was more than I was willing to tolerate any longer. I left the church behind me and began to study ALL religions and spiritual philosophies a study that continues to this day.
In all the studies, all the expansive information and knowledge I acquired I found there was no “organized religion” that had much truth. All have some fragments of truth. None have all the truth. And humans have altered, changed, discarded so much of the little truth they once had that there has been nothing there to draw me to them.
During my years upon years of study, yearning and desire for spiritual advancement and truths that could actually pass the test of my “truth-o-meter” I began to gather up the fragments of truths wherever I found them, knowing that at any moment in the future any one of them or all of them might very well be replaced with an expanded understanding and knowing of what was really intended.
I had a deep knowing inside of me that I was on the right path. Since those years from age 15, I carried on long and deeply serious conversations with God and the Angelic beings. I told them everything. I asked for help and understanding. I KNEW I would be guided to what would be the higher truths of things as best I was able to comprehend them. I was right.
There is a “catch” in all of this. There have always been advanced beings in body on the earth with the knowing of greater truths. The catch is that we lesser evolved, or unawakened humans can only conceive of so much at any given moment in time. Everything we learn is filtered through what we already think we know and what those around us think they know and what the convetional wisdom of those times tells us. So we have had to be fed small doses of basic truths in ways (stories or parables or metaphors) that we could begin to comprehend what we are learning. There are not many kindergarten children that can comprehend String Theory Physics or Quantum Mechanics (although if we taught it properly, I’ll bet a lot of them could get the basic concepts). The masses of humanity have been as small children only able to eat pablum. We just haven’t been able to digest anything more complicated. For the most part curiosity is discouraged. Questioning is frowned upon. Seeking knowledge of things outside of acceptable parameters is not encouraged or supported.
Churches and other large groups or organizations are founded and fueled by the need for those “in charge” to remain in power at all costs and to hold sway by whatever means will keep them there. The most successful way to do that is to keep their members and associates in fear and guilt. Churches have mastered this with their “you are a sinner” and “you are not perfect and thus not worthy” with some sort of plan or program that might get you closer to being acceptable to your “God” but never a promise of actually being able to accomplish that perfection.
As I studied hundreds of spiritual philosophies, hundreds if not thousands of religions, and I continued my endless discussions with non-physical entites I could see that there was none I should join. No Guru, no teacher, no Priest, no Prophet, no Shaman, no one that I should take as an authority on things of spirit. Do not join and do not be a follower, ever. There was nothing ambiguous about this guidance. It was clear and unmistakable.
And that is an interesting correlation to the Joseph Smith Story. The young man at 15 years of age who was surrounded in small town upstate New York by enormous religious fever and revival everywhere from every sect imaginable. From his deepest heart he went into the woods and prayed wanting to know which of these religions were right. Who had the truth and which should he join. The answer was clear. None of them.
I found a lot of things about the Mormon story that I related to for a long time in my life. I had seen things that many call visions all of my life. I had no trouble believing that Joseph Smith had visions. The stories my family told over and over again were filled with the miraculous happenings within our own family. I had no trouble believing in the miraculous. I found the stories in the Book of Mormon about the people who lived on the American Continent to be viable history that I could believe as far as it went. I could see how the Church was formed and founded and how it changed many things because it was more culturally acceptable than that it was actual truth. One must read the actual diaries and writings of Joseph Smith during his short lifetime to see what was really going on and what opposition he met at every turn., from members as well as outsiders, to comprehend the endless persecutions he and the early members suffered. The stories as retold as the “common wisdom history” of the church often leave out important things, even to this day, because they are too outside the main stream, too scary, too unacceptable to those we interact with everyday. It is hard to grow a church when people think you are crazy or “evil.”
In reading the accounts of Joseph’s visions and “revelations” I can see how close he came to getting it. (meaning close to many of the truths I have come to embrace personally) But you see, when we receive information from Angelic Beings or “God” as we perceive that entity, things he called revelation or that we might call channeling today, all of that is filtered through our experiences and our, albeit limited, knowledge and perceptions. If we work diligently on our connections (energy frequency vibrations) with “higher” beings, we can tune into an ever clearer channel like we do on the radio dial. And some have done this very well and we get pretty clear information through them. Yet still, all of them have some elements of the beliefs and perceptions of the person receiving the information however unintentional. That is why we say take what resonates as truth for you and set aside those things that do not. Don’t dismiss what does not resonate at this moment, but ask that it be verified to you. That is why we must always be open to allowing our understanding of anything we consider truth to change, grow or resolve into something greater than it once was.
There is NO ONE GREAT TRUTH of anything written in stone. We are an evolving people on an evolving planet, guided by an evolving Creator Source. What resonates with me as truth may not resonate with any other in the same way or at all.
The next installment will relate what was the most difficult thing for me in finally letting go of my childhood indoctrination and how I managed to do it joyfully.
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