A light in the dark
As someone who has acquired greater light and truth, you are capable of seeing others and their place in reality to a more accurate extent than they can see themselves. Because you have a broader and deeper view of reality, you can guide them around obstacles they do not see to better outcomes than they are aware. You can emit light by helping them see what is currently darkness to them.
Even when a person is fully reconciled to the light they have, their perception of reality is incorrect or incomplete in every way. While your perspective is likewise incorrect and incomplete, if it is advanced compared to theirs, through your skillful interactions, you can share with them what you’ve obtained while sparing them a great deal of the cost you had to pay to obtain it.
This process of emitting light is akin to what happens with a lighthouse in the dark. A lighthouse shines its light for a moment on each section of the sea as it broadcasts its beam in a circular track. Everything in its spotlight momentarily transforms into what it could be if it were continuously surrounded by light. Shapeless blobs transform into differentiated surfaces, some shining back, others absorbing the light. Then, the beam continues on. Any ship that happened to be touched by the light can decide how to respond to that light.
Because the light inside you is bright, you can use it by allowing it to shine into your observations and reflect back a vision of what could be if they had the same light within them. Then you can share that with them. You can lift the downtrodden by helping them see how much God loves them. You can remove the scales from the blind by helping them see causes and consequences of which they were previously unaware. You can articulate their potential, and help them believe that something better is both possible and attainable.
Your light will bring forth potentialities in others that otherwise would not manifest. The light within you is like salt, which preserves and enhances what it is added to:
13 Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.
14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.
15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.
16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 5)
You have immense capacity for good. Use it.
Be aware that when you shine your light, it will be the minority of people that respond beneficially to it:
27 And the love of men shall wax cold, and iniquity shall abound. 28 And when the times of the Gentiles is come in, a light shall break forth among them that sit in darkness, and it shall be the fulness of my gospel;
29 But they receive it not; for they perceive not the light, and they turn their hearts from me because of the precepts of men. (D&C 45)
The greatest sorrow is to see the potential of what others could be if they embraced the light. It is also the loneliest sorrow, because they don't see it themselves. You bear the weight of knowing what could have been, and you carry that weight alone.
Sorrow is not the only cost you incur by shining your light. Realize that a candle on a hill is a beacon, but it is also a target. As you shine your light, you will find that while some benefit from and respond well to it, it will mostly attract negative attention. Do it anyway.
Order from chaos
In the opening lines of the Bible we read:
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1)
The Greek account of creation parallels that found in Genesis: “From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night (Nyx); but of Night were born Aether and Day (Hemera), whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus.” Translating these characters into the properties they represent, this reads: Unspecified matter was divided into deep darkness and night, and night was further differentiated into light and day. It is interesting that the Greeks made a distinction between darkness and night, and light and day, whereas these four different ideas are collapsed into two in modern Christian thought, though they obviously exist separately in the Genesis account.
There is much discussion about what the Genesis account means. In Hebrew, “the Spirit of God” is the word ruah, which means “breath” or “spirit.” Though the New Testament is translated from Greek, the best use of this concept is probably used there:
7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (John 3)
The Spirit is what actuates chaos. It is how order is born of chaos.
Chaos is the unknown—everything that lies outside of your awareness. As a bearer of light, your job is to exercise the increased trust in God that you possess to walk deeper into chaos than your fellows, to mine light and truth, to bring it back into the normal world, and to offer it to others in carefully organized packets: “To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:79)
The creation story of creating order from chaos is not just a nice story, nor is it only a literal account of how God organized us and our surroundings. It is a description of a system that is just as vital to your daily life as it is to the creation of the cosmos. The creation narrative teaches us the pattern of how light is propagated. Whether in the universe or in you, God addresses the void, an invitation is issued, light is distinguished from darkness, and light is mined and grouped.
Matter is eternal. It cannot be created or destroyed. This matter is not the light, but each piece of matter has a degree of light and truth it has attained. Matter can be organized into bodies great and small, and when this happens the degree of light and truth of the body is an amalgam of the light and truth attained by its parts.
Creation is a machine that increases the light associated with matter by extending invitations to greater light and truth. Some matter responds by one, ten, or a hundred fold. Some matter does not respond. The purpose of the gospel is to provide a means through which all matter can increase in the degree of light it possesses.
What does it mean to order chaos? You set up walls around a piece of the infinite unknown. You systematize it, name it, think about it, and reduce it. You create a finite approximation of the continuous unknown. You help other people deal with problems that lie beyond their capacity to contend with. By bringing the causes of these problems from the unknown into the known, you give them a way to deal with what they couldn’t deal with before. You discover more light, you perceive more of reality; you distill it, codify it, and name it.
Order from chaos is about abstracting the chaos into a form that requires far less attention to understand than it did in its raw form. Think of a farm. You don't just go to a virgin piece of land and start planting grape vines. You first clear an area and use the logs to build a cabin. And there is a right way—an effective way—to do both. You don't worry about the stumps right away—that is polish. You just focus on clearing enough land to grow wheat to keep yourself alive. You find a wife and start having kids so that in a few years you'll have a whole lot of extra labor. And so on. You aren't constantly reinvesting the huge amount of labor it takes to clear land. You shift your work output into more refined expressions to leverage the foundation you have built. You plant orchards and fields, then shift again to annual planting and harvesting.
We aren’t meant to continuously spin on the basics of knowledge. We are meant to systematically learn more and more. Even if we have to rehash something we thought we had figured out before, it is to replace it with something better, not to rebuild the same cabin from scratch without any improvement.
Adam was tasked to name the animals God created. The role of men is to survey the formless chaos and bring order to it by imaginatively differentiating it—using language to describe it, to partition the continuous and unknowable into discrete, knowable chunks, to mine out and distill the light from the darkness by penetrating the darkness with light.
We must first discover beyond what we know. This can come by several means, including an impromptu revelation, a situation that overcomes our current principles, or by actively seeking more instruction on a topic. Second, we must overcome the awareness that we have gained through deriving or discovering new or better principles than we previously held.
Only then can you become a guide to others in their chaos. A guide doesn't necessarily solve these problems. What he does is provide a framework for dealing with them: A language for understanding them, a system of causality. Here is this tangled mess that overwhelms you just thinking about it, and here is a way of understanding it in an actionable way. This is what can be done about it. You expose them to a world they didn’t know, and then you provide them an entry point to their own journey. You give them the tools they need, and send them off.
God created by speaking into the darkness. He acted while there was yet nothing to act upon. He, alone, organized form and order amidst chaos. He did so by generating a plan and executing it while there was still no temporal basis for it. He knew where he was going, even if it wasn’t obvious to anyone else. This is how you must operate if you would be a guide to others in their journey through chaos.
Chaos is neither good nor bad. For one, it depends on what you do with it. Secondly, “good” and “bad” are concepts that require the context of one’s awareness. By definition, chaos is what is beyond one’s awareness. All things are created from and refined in chaos. In Genesis, land comes from water. Light comes from darkness. Day comes from night. Whales come from the sea. Adam comes from the earth. These are all good things.
In manageable quantities, chaos sustains creation, or organization. In unmanageably large quantities, it destroys by overwhelming.
Take, for example, the chaos that comes from water. Water is required for life, but too much water dismantles creation by flood, tidal wave, etc. There are quantities of water that no structure can sustain. Too much water is additively destructive. It puts too much into a system and overwhelms it.
While water creates, fire is destructive, purifying chaos. It takes away. It removes anything that cannot bear it. It challenges. Precious metals are refined through fire. Fire burns away what is dead. Paul taught: “Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.” (1 Corinthians 3:13) Cardboard is very ordered, and wood is very ordered, but the order cannot withstand fire. Improvement can’t come without fire.
When you are in a water phase, you are ascending. You are growing. When you are in a fire phase, you are being pruned, purified, and tested. You are either growing fruit or being pruned:
1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.
2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (John 15)
You are either in the water or in the fire. There isn't a third road. While you will rest from all things you’ve overcome, there is always more to overcome. Any perceived rest during this life is fleeting and temporary. You are either being created, or you are being refined. There is no rest. The fire purges the impurities from you, revealing both what you have and what you lack. The water provides the womb-like building state, where you can address those holes.
There are people in this world who lack the skills, knowledge, and/or determination to acquire the requirements of life. They are unable to order the chaos that exists at the minimal end of life. They have not developed the principles required to overcome the basic challenges of subsistence. They are unable to anticipate and overcome unexpected outcomes.
How do you help these people? If you stepped in and removed the symptoms of their inability to deal with the minimal levels of chaos, chaos would inevitably generate more symptoms from the same sources that the previous symptoms came from, as the principles to deal with and overcome them have not been discovered and adopted. You can't help them by removing the symptoms, and they are not interested in learning the principles.
Society today has the unfortunate attribute of being a system that sinisterly exposes people to far greater chaos than they can handle by insulating them against the consequences of their decisions on the most basic topics by giving them more resources than they can effectively manage. Technology, debt, and other illusory innovations cushion people from their limitations and mistakes, allowing them to encounter even greater levels of chaos that they are certain to fail to order instead of allowing them to contend with their inability to correctly make the most basic decisions in life. To get to a place where they can actually develop, and where they must develop before they are ready to contend with greater chaos, they must see through the illusions and perceive their limitations and the fruits of their feelings, beliefs, and actions.
Your duty is to obtain a greater awareness and then intentionally and skillfully impart ordered chaos to them.
Carrying light from chaos to normality
The journey from normal life into the chaos and back again is not for the faint-hearted. Every step of the way is difficult and no amount of practice makes it any easier. Most people avoid taking the journey altogether. Some few engage in it, but many are overcome along the way, becoming distracted or succumbing to temptation or apathy. Some finish the first part of the journey and go into the chaos, but can’t find their way back out. These never journey back to normal life to make a contribution to their fellows, ending up as hermits, nomads, or unapproachable eccentrics. Some are institutionalized or end their lives. Some very few complete the journey back to normality to share their boon with others.
Does this description seem exaggerated or fanciful? You see this pattern all over our myths and stories. But it is also reality. You find it recorded in the scriptures. Examples include the journey of the Lord, Moses, Abraham, Enoch, Paul, and many others. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a righteous man in the scriptures who did not follow this pattern. You also find this pattern all over modern history if you look into the lives of great intellectuals from Newton to Nietzsche. You will find this to be the case: The more light one seeks, the deeper into the darkness they must go, and the less likely they are to recover.
Why is the journey so difficult? Mining truth requires an immense amount of otherworldly focus. Obtaining the truth requires the ability to drill deep into thoughts that lie far outside normality. You have to develop the ability to enter and stay in a deep limbic space. The more effective you are at going into that chaos, the harder it is to dwell in normal life. As tradition teaches, Enoch faced this challenge when his visits to heaven got longer and longer until finally, he stopped coming back. The Lord experienced this tension as he awoke early to interact with the Father before carrying about his mundane-by-comparison daily work.
There are some strategies that may assist you in navigating this cycle. From Moses’ experience, we learn the importance of transition time and space. Moses waited on an isolated mountaintop for a week before entering the Lord’s presence. That mountain was not quite heaven, but not quite earth, either. He was isolated from society, but not quite in heaven. Coming down from that experience, he wore a veil to cover his face, which still glowed from the experience. As you have these experiences, you have to realize that it takes time to get into and out of limbic space. You have to be intentional with how you manage these transitions. You may need to wake up very early in the morning, as Jesus did, to provide a separation from daily life through sleep and isolation, as well as time to transition out of limbic space before it is time to go to work.
As mentioned before, there is a real danger of losing one’s mind or soul in this process. The problem with chaos is that there is so much more there than you could ever do anything about. When you open the door to chaos, you also open yourself to being overcome. The secret is knowing what you can do something about, how to handle that, and how to not worry about the rest. You absolutely must develop the ability to focus on a specific goal, and learn to ignore everything else.
Those who struggle with anxiety will never be able to mine light from chaos until they overcome it by acquiring the tools their condition reveals they lack. They must learn to intentionally and correctly discern between what they can affect and what lies outside of their control. Anxiety is the manifestation of an inability or unwillingness to distinguish between what you can do something about and what you can’t. When you incorrectly classify these categories, or don’t classify them, you get stuck in a negative feedback loop where you know you ought to be doing something more, but you feel overwhelmed and can’t enumerate specific actions. When you correctly distinguish between what you can and can’t do anything about, and you do all you can on what you can, you become free from anxiety.
When you can successfully order what you already know, you are ready to order what you do not know by walking into the chaos.
As you gain practice in walking into chaos and returning with light, you will see that, contrary to our myths and stories, where the hero goes through this journey once, you can come to the point where you do it daily. In fact, you will see that the greatest epic journeys are actually composites of daily mini-journeys.
While those who take up the cross of truth-seeking are already in the minority, and justified in their exhausted retirement at the end of a cycle, the reality is that you came to this world to mine and dispense as much truth as you have life to give. There is no reason the cycle need take place only once. We ought to wear out our lives in seeking, acquiring, and dispensing all the truth we have the power to.
Crawling into the light
Jacob was shown a ladder into heaven, with angels ascending and descending. But he understood that experience very differently after he later climbed the ladder himself. The process is seen from the outside as climbing a ladder, but experienced as crawling with your face on the ground.
In his youth, fleeing from his murderous brother, Jacob crossed the wilderness to spend twenty years as a stranger in a strange land. He lived in a foreign culture, serving under an unfair and dishonest man, dealing with the daily struggles of serving two capricious and inconsistent wives, many children, many servants, and a large cattle operation. This daily grind culminated in his return home.
His journey was intense. He was in charge of a sizable company of men, women, cattle, and small children. There would have been substantial work to do to care for the cattle and children along the way, making the long journey of several hundred miles even longer. The trip could have taken months. The whole time he was beset by anxiety over what Esau might do to him and his family once they reunited. Jacob “was greatly afraid and distressed” in fear of his brother, who he thought wanted to kill him (see Genesis 32:7).
Upon reaching the river, Jacob sent his company ahead in partitions. He was left alone at evening. Despite the arduous journey and the exhaustion that no doubt overwhelmed him, he spent the entire night in focused, intense prayer. At some point in the night, the Lord appeared to Jacob. Here is the Genesis account of Jacob’s experience:
24 And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.
25 And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him.
26 And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
27 And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob. 28 And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.
29 And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me, I pray thee, thy name. And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.
30 And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
31 And as he passed over Penuel the sun rose upon him, and he halted upon his thigh.
32 Therefore the children of Israel eat not of the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh, unto this day: because he touched the hollow of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew that shrank. (Genesis 32)
This account has been modified and degraded over time. Here is a more accurate account of what transpired.
Instead of appearing in a dream, where the physically impure body is protected from the glory of the Lord, Jacob physically saw the Lord in glory. Initially, the Lord appeared in an impulse of light and fire some distance from Jacob. It was so intense that it knocked Jacob to the ground with such force that it popped his leg bone out of his hip socket. As a witness to the force that hit him, this injury is most often seen today in intense car accidents.
The Lord dwells in everlasting burnings, and this self-contained, nonextinguishing ball of fire was at once violent, loud, peaceful and beautiful. The overwhelming nature of the light at first pinned Jacob on his face. The light from glory is not like the light we see in the telestial kingdom. It is not just a visual phenomenon. Even with the brightest telestial light, the only physical effect is warmth on the skin. Light from glory pierces your body thoroughly. It is an utterly intense experience that permeates your being. In extreme pain from both his hip and the reaction of his flesh to the glory of God, he struggled to breathe as he attempted to shield his face from the light. The scene went on for what seemed like an eternity: Jacob struggling to hold on, and the Lord patiently waiting in silence. As the light penetrated his shielding arm and his closed eyelids, the glory began to purify Jacob's flesh. The pain started to gradually ease as the glory of God burned out his impurities. As he persisted in God’s glory, he became more and more sanctified and more and more comfortable in God’s presence. Eventually, he was able to remove his arm, then open his eyes. At first, the light was too bright to see clearly into. Then, his eyes adjusted enough that he could make out the shape of a man.
Most men, knowing they were in the presence of God, would have long since recoiled and said, “it is enough Lord.” Jacob was not like most men. Jacob was a man of great tenacity, physical strength, and courage. He mustered every ounce of strength left in his devastated frame, and he did the unthinkable. He inched his arms forward, and scraped his body forward along the rocky soil. He immediately collapsed from exhaustion. The Lord patiently waited. Recovering some fraction of strength, he repeated the process. His injured leg hung powerless by his side. He repeated the process again and again, each time using his last ounce of strength, then collapsing for some time, then pulling from some previously undiscovered reservoir of strength to inch forward again.
Eventually, he came within arm’s length to the Lord. Still prostrate, exhausted beyond measure, he lurched up and grabbed the Lord's feet. Like a boxer at the end of the bout of his life, he clung tightly to the Lord, who permitted him to remain there for a great deal of time. Finally, the Lord spoke and announced that he must go. The Lord blessed Jacob for having wrestled with his glory all night and overcoming. Most men quit long before their prayer yields the presence of the Lord. Of those who don’t, very few indeed would endure God’s glory without pleading with the Lord to stop the experience. Jacob truly was exceptional, and yet he was not exceptional enough for the Lord to tell him his name, a special blessing reserved for a special few.
We may wonder why the account we have is so abbreviated and adulterated. The answer lies in the false traditions of the revisionists. They did not like the idea of a man coming face to face with God. It offended their traditions—traditions created to sooth the pride of those who dismissed the possibility of such a story being literal in order to settle the contradiction between their inflated self-image and lack of personal experience. Our pride can drive easy acceptance of what would otherwise be dismissed as patently absurd. Thankfully, they could only revise the story so much around the two fixed points provided by the name of a physical place (Penuel means “face of God”) and the well-known tradition of Jacob's limp.
This is a literal story, but it is also archetypal in that it is the form of what every man of God experiences. Abraham crawled toward the Lord's glory throughout his life. He was born into an apostate family. He learned the value of God’s word on his own. He left a life of luxury to become a nomad. Almost everyone around him—his father, his brother, his nephew, his wives, his children—failed to appreciate his sacrifice and failed to rise up to his level of love for the Lord. Every day of his life was a test to see if he would trust God in spite of great hardship. The scriptures are filled with similar situations.
Rather than providing a list that would include almost all of scripture, here is one specific example: that of Nephi, son of Helaman. He was the president of his nation. He resigned because he could not turn away from his desire to truly help people in the most direct way—by preaching the gospel. He ranged the entire known world—including among those who were the enemies of his people and had tried to kill them—going on mission after mission (see Helaman 5).
Many mistakenly think that God will not call you on such a mission, to abandon everything you know and serve him full-time away from your home. Maybe not. But if you are to enjoy the same privileges with those who have, you will indeed be required to sacrifice to the degree that they sacrificed, even if in a different format.
Everyone is required to consecrate their lives to the Lord, including consecrating their lives to acquire, assimilate, and disseminate all the truth they can. This is the practical description of “crawling toward the Lord's glory,” as Jacob did. You will probably not do it in one night, as Jacob did. But it will be just as consummate, just as intense, and just as scarring. You will emerge from that experience changed for life, certainly emotionally and probably physically injured in some way for the rest of your life.
You will realize that the consummate effort of acquiring light and truth and packaging it for others requires your full attention. It will settle for no less. You will develop the capacity to focus to the extent needed to mine truth. You will find a space free of any interruption. You will create such a space physically by waking up very early, before anyone else in your house. You will shoulder the burden of chronic lack of sleep, summoning the strength to be true to your character in the way you treat others and not subject to your exhaustion. You will learn to cope with the rude contradiction between your early morning deep dive into the light of God and the heavier, dirtier environment of the people and things of the rest of each day. You will realize and then adjust to the fact that there is no one in your life who can comprehend how you feel. You will realize and adjust to the fact that the distance between you and the people in your life is increasing much faster than the distance between you and God is closing. You will have an uninterrupted series of invitations to slow down, to take a break, to stop, to be normal, to do something you shouldn’t do, to do something less than your best. And you will just keep on going, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.
Having risen to a certain level of light in your daily interactions, you will seek to do more with more people. Because of technology, physically travelling across or outside of the country will probably not be the most effective way to do this. You will leverage the internet to create more interactions with more people. Like Nephi, you will find that this is your principle objective every day, and the normal pursuits of most people will become only a sidebar in your life.
Ascent comes through trusting God
All of God’s light is available to every person:
Behold, here is the agency of man, and here is the condemnation of man; because that which was from the beginning is plainly manifest unto them, and they receive not the light. (D&C 93:31)
Why don’t we perceive it, let alone obtain it? Because we don’t trust God sufficiently.
As God reveals more and more of the unknown to your awareness, you must have commensurate trust in God to overcome its effects. Like Peter walking on the water, when his trust was placed in Jesus, he overcame the vast waters beneath him. When he lost that focus on God, he also lost his ability to interact with the water.
As the curtains are pulled back, you will realize to a greater extent than you can imagine that reality is not order with spots of chaos, but a sea of chaos where everything you know is a tiny island of artificial and fleeting order.
There is no limit to the chaos. No matter what you learn, you will always be surprised, and the realization that there is no limit to how awful these new truths can be will and should frighten you. This will shake you to your very foundations until and unless you learn unconditional trust in God.
If you keep yourself fully reconciled to the light God has given you, he will protect you from experiencing more chaos than you are prepared to endure. He will protect you both from too much fire and too much water:
1 But now thus saith the Lord that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.
2 When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43)
The gospel gives us a framework to deal with the chaos that surrounds us. Faith in God provides adequate strength to endure greater complexity at a faster pace and deeper depth than can be otherwise undertaken. It provides adequate deflation of ego (what you deserve, what you expect, what others owe you) while growing beyond the limits of normality.
Trust in God is the determining factor in how much truth you obtain. Jacob’s ladder is a ladder of trust in God. The more you trust in God, the higher you go.
There is a rung representing every stage of eternal progression. Every righteous desire has associated with it a set of challenges that must be first overcome; ignorance that must be recognized; knowledge that must be obtained; light that must be acquired. Those who obtain salvation (however you define it) do so by conquering all the challenges associated with that level of blessing. They must live that law, which requires a discrete amount of condescension equal to the exaltation that follows.
Here is an eternal truth: God will not force upon anyone here more awareness than was given to Adam and Eve in the garden. God will not force you to climb the ladder. You have to choose to climb.
You will not receive a fullness of knowledge pertaining to our mortal scope unless you ask for it. Even then, it will not come at once, but in packets that grow in intensity as you respond by building your trust in him and reconciling yourself to what is given to you. As you overcome each wave of awareness, he will send you more in the form of something harder. This process is no different for degrees of truth beyond the telestial, but as the degree of trust required grows substantially from one kingdom of glory to the next, the jump takes significantly greater trust, effort, and obedience.
In order to ascend to higher degrees of light, truth, and glory, you must willingly seek and submit to greater pain based only on your trust in God. This was well-understood by some in the past, but it was corrupted over time and resulted in some people inflicting ritual pain on themselves by whipping or other means in an attempt to gain stature with God.
God does not delight in suffering. Suffering outside of the constraints of life does not result in progress or improvement. You need not go in search of pain. If you follow God, it will find you, and it will be far worse than what you can do to yourself. But unlike these artificial ritual beatings, every ounce of it will yield incomparable progress with God.
How does trust in God manifest itself? One way is through your willingness to let go of what you think you have for hope of something better. This covers everything from stopping to minister to another to possessing the radical open-mindedness needed to question a fundamental piece of your perspective.
Another way of measuring your trust in God is to think about how you would react to the ability to relive your past. Most people would like to change some aspect of their past. Few would be willing to relive it. However, if you really trust God, you will see the events of your life as the masterwork of a perfect loving and wise God. If he couldn’t make it better, how could you?
Another metric of your trust in God is whether you have any limitations in your obedience—both in what he does ask you to do, and what he could ask you to do. Immediate belief in anything and everything he teaches you is required. It is also possible:
And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them. (1 Nephi 3:7)
Abraham was commanded to sacrifice Isaac. If you haven't read that story, or haven't read it recently, consider making it your next reading from the scriptures. Many people call Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac the “Abrahamic sacrifice,” and use it as a type of what God requires from each of us before we can be redeemed from the fall. As important as this experience was, it was not the first time that Abraham was tried (incidentally, tried and tested are not the same thing; it is more correct to think of the Abrahamic sacrifice as the purging of impurities from metal through heat rather than a test you take in school). Abraham was tried as a child when he was assigned to guard his idol-maker father’s wares and chose to destroy them. He was tried when exposed to textual accounts of Shem, Noah, and the fathers and their experiences with God, recognizing his father's religion was inferior and choosing to believe there was something better. He was tried when he was sacrificed by his father, and tried when he had the opportunity to forgive him. He was tried when commanded to leave his home in Ur. He was tried when his father and brother—whom he had rescued through his own merits and mercy—turned away from him. He was tried when his wife was taken by a rich and powerful ruler—twice— for long periods of time without his knowledge of her condition or any likelihood that she would come back to him. He was tried when he took Hagar to wife. He was tried when his marriages were ravaged by the jealousy of Sarah. He was tried when God told him that his beloved son Ishmael would not be his heir. He was tried when Lot, for whom he had sacrificed so much, selfishly chose the better section of land at their parting, not because he cared about the land, but out of sympathy for Lot and what he still lacked in spite of all Abraham's efforts on his behalf. He was tried when he went into battle to rescue Lot. He was tried when he parted ways with Ishmael and Hagar. And finally, he was tried when he was asked to sacrifice Isaac.
The Abrahamic sacrifice isn't one thing. And it isn’t always giving something up. It is a repetitive process where God challenges you to change your paradigm, specifically by changing what you believe. Giving something up or taking something on are only the manifestations of that change in belief. The Abrahamic sacrifice is not a single-point event, it is a process. The goal of that process is to successively increase your trust in God until you are willing to yield completely to him without exception. This is the same as saying that you would do anything he might command, no matter what it is. This is the same as saying there is nothing that you would not do if he commanded it.
God is worthy of your trust. He will never let you down, and without trusting him, your progression will be eternally halted.
God’s justice brings you higher
Every additional quantity of light and truth will better enable you to successfully interact with reality. The more light you have, the more you can anticipate what others do not see coming. The more light you have, the more capable you are of obtaining material benefits in this world. With every acquisition of additional truth, you have a choice. You can either quietly use that light for your own benefit, or you can use it for the benefit of others. If you choose the former, you will prevent yourself from acquiring more light, but you will be able to avoid a great deal of the suffering endured by others here. If you choose the latter, you will willingly abdicate that life of comfort, exchanging it for the special persecution and pain reserved for those who dare try to help their fellows.
The latter choice is called abasement and condescension. It is the act of willingly abdicating blessings you have earned in order to help others.
The best example of this process is found in the prototype for salvation: the Savior Jesus Christ. What was the condescension of God? In coming from thrones on high, he condescended to a lowly mortal state. He qualified for eternal life, yet chose to live a mortal life, making himself less that he might do more for others.
This is how Paul described it:
5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:
8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.
9 Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; (Philippians 2)
Abasement is the means by which we leverage the justice of God to encounter greater blessings of experience, wisdom, light and truth than we otherwise would qualify for.
God’s justice is immutable. But God’s characteristics do not exist in isolation. God’s justice does not exist in a vacuum. Like white light is a composite of all colors, God’s character is a composite of all his attributes. One of these attributes is mercy.
The interplay between justice and mercy turns justice from an attribute that harms us into one that helps us. Those who consistently live in a state where they are reconciled to their best understanding of good can rest assured that they are justified , or that they are free from the penalties of their past conscientious sins and all their sins of ignorance, because God’s mercy paid the price for those sins through the atonement of Christ.
For the justified, God’s justice is a ratchet that imparts to them greater levels of light and truth than they could otherwise obtain.
We typically see God’s justice as a negative attribute—one that can only harm us. But for the righteous, justice is a blessing. For them, the day of judgment is a “glorious day when justice shall be administered unto the righteous.” (2 Nephi 9:46)
For the justified, God’s justice is only positive: it grants all rewards for the good one does and, in conjunction with living reconciled to God, frees them from God’s negative judgment for past sins and present and future ignorance.
Willingly abdicating the blessings they have earned by submitting to suffering for others sanctifies the righteous:
34 ...Now this was a great evil, which did cause the more humble part of the people to suffer great persecutions, and to wade through much affliction.
35 Nevertheless they did fast and pray oft, and did wax stronger and stronger in their humility, and firmer and firmer in the faith of Christ, unto the filling their souls with joy and consolation, yea, even to the purifying and the sanctification of their hearts, which sanctification cometh because of their yielding their hearts unto God. (Helaman 3)
For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father. (Mosiah 3:19)
Counterintuitively, exaltation can only come through abasement; the only way to ascend is to first descend. Each iterative ascension can only be exceeded by first enduring a descent greater than anything you’ve previously endured.
Jesus taught about the progressive exaltation and abasement cycle with a parable:
8 When thou art bidden of any man to a wedding, sit not down in the highest room; lest a more honourable man than thou be bidden of him;
9 And he that bade thee and him come and say to thee, Give this man place; and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room.
10 But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher: then shalt thou have worship in the presence of them that sit at meat with thee.
11 For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 14)
You are raised commensurate with the degree to which you abased yourself. This happens through the justice of God. Although you can be justified (forgiven, cancelled out debt) through mercy, you can only be sanctified (exalted, increased) through justice. God looks upon your condescension on behalf of those who did not merit it and blesses you by judging you in absence of your sin for which you have been forgiven by and through Christ.
Abasement is not for the faint of heart. The amount of darkness you are willing to walk in will determine the level of light you will acquire. Make no mistakes, this experience is absolutely awful. It is indescribable. This is what the Lord himself went through on the cross. The physical trials—as awful as they were—were not divinely difficult. Many men were crucified, and none of them were counted as a sacrifice to God. The Lord’s experiences were atoning because he unjustly went without connection from the Father during them. The cross was not the first time Jesus had gone without the Father’s contact. It happened at regular intervals, and it was never something he deserved. Instead, he submitted for the benefit of others.
What was it like to be Joseph, son of Jacob? Joseph endured a tremendous amount of toil and affliction in order to come to the point where he was capable of saving the known world—including his family— from starvation. What did it take? Can you imagine being left to die in a pit as a young boy, as punishment for being an obedient son? Can you imagine becoming a slave, even though you are the child of a king? Can you imagine winning over your master through your positive attitude in spite of what has happened to you, only to have him turn against all the good you have done because of a flimsy false accusation? Can you imagine doing it all over again in a dungeon, only to have those whose lives you saved forget you? Who did Joseph turn to during all of this? To which of his peers could he turn and find in them more of the spirit of God than he already had? He had no one to turn to, no one who could understand the burden he carried, and no one who could deliver more light and truth to him. He had to get it all the hard way—by mining it piece by piece from God himself. Every step of the way, he received nothing but contempt from those he helped. Yet he just kept going.
God’s revelation of more and more awareness without reaching the point of peace is like a bank account bearing compound interest that is not deducted from. At any point, the righteous can cash out their chips by saying “Lord, it is enough.” But those who endure the darkness will obtain a greater degree of glory than those who do not. In fact, the accretion of light and truth through unjust duress is much greater than linear.
We are so concerned with temporal blessings. We want companionship. We want comfort. We want money and luxury. Instead of wanting God to pay out your merited blessings every time you endure a test, you ought to grow accustomed to living off of just a bit of the increase—not the principle—of your state with God.
You have to learn to live off of the proceeds of the interest of your abasement. Adopting this perspective will make it so that his blessings in your life start off as much more like a trickle than they could be, but over time that trickle will turn into a flood. Remember that compound interest is an exponential affair, and that the last few steps in the doubling process will make the first half of it relatively imperceptible.
God said: “seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” (Matthew 6:33) There is no way of cheating this promise. In order to have it fulfilled, you really do have to place your heart fully on God, not any of the goodies. If you do this, the goodies will flow to you because they are dividends on your investment, not because you seek them. But, because your heart has changed, you will find very little pleasure in these things. Instead, you will see them as gifts from God to bless others. You will also need them, because your body, mind, and spirit will be beaten to a pulp by the time you get there.
Abasement can occur due to factors outside of our control. Job, for instance, did not ask for everything he had to be taken away. However, the most powerful abasement is voluntary.
14 And now, as I said unto you, that because ye were compelled to be humble ye were blessed, do ye not suppose that they are more blessed who truly humble themselves because of the word?
16 Therefore, blessed are they who humble themselves without being compelled to be humble; or rather, in other words, blessed is he that believeth in the word of God, and is baptized without stubbornness of heart, yea, without being brought to know the word, or even compelled to know, before they will believe. (Alma 32)
Jesus was not forced to be born onto this earth. No one made Abraham do what he did. And so it goes with the scriptural examples of righteous people. No one made them do it. It was all voluntary.
We are not capable of exalting ourselves, but we can abase ourselves of our own free will: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.” (Matthew 23:12)
Voluntary abasement is the key to the greatest happiness that we can obtain. This is counterintuitive.
It is easy to become jaded. You may reach the point where you have to think for a long, hard time when someone asks you about your happiest moments. The more truth you acquire, the rarer these will be in this life. However, the more truth you acquire, the deeper these happy moments will be, and the more resplendent they will be in the world to come.
Always remember that the whole point of all we suffer is to obtain greater happiness. This is the entire point of everything we do. What seem like deviations from this end are only the required navigation of the unavoidable consequences and constraints of reality.
And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it. (Mosiah 2:41)
Happiness is the path of ascent after descent. It comes through abasement for the benefit of others who did not merit it. You have to endure all the things God has to throw at you before you attain the level of happiness that requires having overcome those things.
In order to obtain eternal life, you must descend to a very low point, and prove faithful all the while. This always occurs in steps of everincreasing abasement followed by ever-increasing exaltation. Every step forward requires you descend below your previous lowest point. This is a pattern we see all over scripture.
No matter how foreign external happiness may be in your life here, the more light you have, the greater will be your internal peace and joy. Your hope for others and yourself propels you through a great deal more affliction than most could endure. You may not have regular happy moments. Instead, you have oriented your life toward a fullness of joy, something that does not occur regularly, but is no small event when it does. Suffering compounds. It bears interest. The more you submit to suffer without quitting, the more God can grant you blessings. It compounds more than linearly, meaning for every bit more you are willing to suffer, you get a lot more out of it.
In summary, happiness is not the absence of sorrow, but the accumulation of knowledge earned through sorrow incurred through righteous intercession on others’ behalf.