Notes From the Climb: May – June 2013

The following are selected excerpts from my personal “small plates“. I am an advocate of recording personal revelatory insights and desire to share my experiences to encourage others.

May

• Fear lulls us into a false comfort. Real and rewarding comfort comes after we have been in a condition where we actually need to be comforted.
• If people are not occasionally offended by you, then you are withholding truth that may end up damning you instead of them.
• Trust in the ability of the Spirit to speak through your inadequate words.
• Forgiveness is more than just releasing someone from blame, it is then deeply loving them and having compassion on them. Forgiveness without love is not forgiveness.
• The amount of personal liberty we enjoy is directly equivalent to the laws we know and the obedience we demonstrate toward them.
• Perfect your obedience and see miracles.

June

• Justice both exalts and damns, while mercy only exalts.
• Sins can be idols that we feel compelled to continually or periodically worship.
• Earth is a place where all glories can be experience and where we may decide what we are willing to enjoy.
• Life is learning, playing and enjoying music; the pleasing energy that reverberates through existence.
• Christ is the destiny of all willing souls. To become perfect as he is and share in his joy.
• “Live so that you can abandon yourself and not read from a script and be led by the Spirit.” – Boyd K. Packer
• Obedience perfects faith.
• Faith without works is dead. Repentance is a work of faith. While work itself does not save, unrighteous works that we do not repent of will surely condemn us; we are saved as we repent.
• Mysticism – pursuit of communion with, identity with or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth or God through direct experience, intuition instinct or insight. – Wikipedia
• Mysticism – an intuitive and ecstatic union with deity obtained by means of contemplation and other mental exercises – Hugh Nibley
• A mystic is one who participates in mysteries, i.e., secret rites one is initiated into (musterion: a secret or “mystery” (through the idea of silence imposed by initiation into religious rites)).
• We have sufficient faith more often than we realize. Faith is what we do, and showing up, being where we should, and exercising simple obedience is at most times all the faith that is required. The power of God to be manifest requires just one more simple thing: we need only believe.