My wife, Raven, and I went to see the film The Greatest Showman, starring Hugh Jackman, a week ago. Say what you will about the movie/story, but we thought that the soundtrack was phenomenal, and the songs have stayed with me over the last few days. They deeply move me! What is it that moves me? The Life, the Joy, the Light. I believe these are reflections of the Divine within us all.
Although it may sound blasphemous to some, even most of Christianity agrees that the end goal for humanity is theosis, deification, or divinization, which means to "become God."
I recently read three different articles that all had a very similar message. It was essentially this: there is a limit to knowledge and intellectual thought, and some answers may not be found that way. I've written about this before, but there is always more to say. We'll see why, below.
I see mysticism in Joseph Smith and his work at nearly every turn. Joseph united his mind and consciousness in God to such a great degree that he spoke with the voice of Christ. One only does that if one is genuinely in mystical union with God, or delusional, or a con man (a fake). I perceive Joseph was the first, and I'll share a few reasons why.
I wonder if we might find some insightful parallels and further understanding in the 23 distinct personalities who inhabit the mind of the one main character of the recent 2016 American psychological thriller film Split, starring James McAvoy, and the many personalities manifested through the writings of the Prophet Joseph Smith in the Book of Mormon narrative.
An addition to the BHT, where Paul addresses the people in Corinth about who teaches the truth about God. (The painting above is "Conversion on the Way to Damascus," by Caravaggio, c. 1600-1601.)
I perceive that priesthood was originally an inner experience of Divine Power and Presence in humans, a deep Realization when they subdued their egoic psychological "natural man" self in consciousness, and perceived their real Being underneath it in Glory, beyond words. I believe humans eventually organized this mystical experience, and the knowledge of it, instituting it into the "ordination" to an "office" of "priesthood," meant to indicate those who had direct experience of God.
A kind reader reached out to me and asked me to elaborate how my writings about the nature of God work with Joseph Smith's First Vision, since it seems that his vision was meant to "clear up the confusion" surrounding the nature of God, the prevailing idea that God "was not made with body, parts or passions." Wasn't "the point" of his vision to "define for the world who/what God was"?
God wants to speak to us. God yearns for it, and many of us yearn for it too. God wants us to know Him ourselves, in our Selves. This is the very definition of Eternal Life (John 17:3). But we must do our part. We must get out of our own way. We must surrender and submit our egos, our egoic mind, in order to allow God to speak to us. The Prophet Joseph Smith seems to have known how to do this, but we seem to have lost this ability today, even the kinds of practices that lead to it.
I shared this account in my introductory paper about mysticism, but I think it should be shared as a stand-alone post as well. This is because it is so stunningly similar in many respects to Joseph Smith's accounts of the First Vision.