Minimal Post

I've been reading a blog. It's really cool. I think it may be the secret of the universe. In keeping with it's theme, I won't repeat any of it here. I will offer a quote: "The ability to focus attention on important things is a defining characteristic of intelligence."
Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance
Everywhere I hang out; work, home, car...I look around me and there's so much stuff, that focus is pretty near impossible.
Here's the blog

Simple Truth

I have accumulated quite a stack of "Yoga Journal" magazines. Since I'm on vacation this week and have no trip to take, I'm spending time de-junking and the magazines have to go. I'm keeping them because each has an article or two that has information I want to keep. Last night I took an Exacto Knife and went to work reducing an 18 inch stack of paper to less than 1/4 inch.
One of the articles I wanted to keep was one on "Simple Living". I believe a good portion of my "stuff" gets in the way of my happiness. One of the premises of this article was that most of us need to reduce the "things" in our lives and acquire/keep/maintain only those things that we truly love. Of course some things are not so much tangible things as they are thoughts, attitudes, relationships or other entities that take up our time and emotions; not just space.
Yoga has a set of foundational principles upon which the whole philosophy rests: yamas (moral restraints) and niyamas (observances). One of the yamas is aparigraha,which means "greedlessness". But it can also be translated to include not keeping a lot of unnecessary things around you and not wanting what others have. (Thou shalt not covet... to us Westerners) The yama of aparigraha leads to the niyama, santosha, which means contentment--being satisfied with what you have and not constantly desiring more. (Or as Paul put it in 1 Timothy 6:8, "And having food and raiment let us be therewith content.") Both Paul and Patanjali, who wrote the Yoga Sutra, are agreed that materialism can eat our souls.
But you can go nuts with any good and true principle.
Proved by one of the article author's quoted "authorities". This guy suggests that our materialism doesn't just hurt us, it hurts others because we "take an unfair share of the world's resources, exploiting developing nations of cheap labor and destroying the environment."
Nice. First of all, for the most part the earth is a resource-generator; it recycles and reproduces resources we use. There's even evidence that some non-renewable resources like oil fields are actually in a constant state of regeneration. So as long as we define our stewardship of the earth in terms of being conservationists, managing resources to provide an orderly, constant resupply, there is in this world "...enough and to spare." (Quoting God; a bigger authority than the guy quoted above." It's only when we look at stewardship of the earth in terms of environmentalism, which seeks to "freeze" the environment and create a museum out of it, with little or no human influence, that we arrive at the notion that it's a closed system with a finite pool of resources that can't be renewed once used.
As for exploiting developing nations for cheap labor--How the hell does this fruitcake think these nations are developing??? By staying in the stone age and not producing goods that others desire to purchase? These "exploited" people are for the first time in history moving beyond bare survival. Their children are being immunized against childhood killer diseases. They are being educated, exposed to news and ideas from around the globe, saving money for what to them is an entirely new concept: the "future". What these folks need right now is a little more "exploitation" until they enjoy the same standards of choice and pursuit of happiness that we "exploiters" have. I don't see many of these hand-wringers renouncing their residency in the United States to go live with the exploited who supposedly live lives we have no right to meddle in by providing a market for the things they produce.
I heartily agree that many things that we demand from China should never find a market in the USA. We should be more discerning than to buy some of the crap that finds its way over here. We should indeed buy less, demand more quality for the which we should expect to pay more. And in doing so, we would create markets for goods and services that producers could find more fulfillment in creating and delivering. But to suggest that developing nations are actually being harmed by our consumption is just wrong-headed.
Having fewer things, that meant more to us would benefit us and those who provided those few things. And paying for them when we buy them, as opposed to partnering with Visa & Mastercard to delay payment and place ourselves in perpetual indentured servitude as part of the deal, would be even nicer.

The Veil O'er The Earth

Today, church was a bishopric's dream; All meetings canceled on account of the Oquirrh Mountain Temple dedication. So at 7:00 I went to the usual High Council Meeting and then ushered for the 9:00 dedication session that was telecast into the stake center. I have to admit I didn't give the dedication a whole lot of thought. I figured it would be a repeat of the one for the Jordan River Temple that I'd been to years ago. I was prepared for a nice meeting, not a memorable spiritual feast. But as soon as the meeting was called to order by President Monson, I started receiving a spiritual feast that I wasn't expecting. I suppose it was God's way of nicely explaining to me that the dedication of a temple is not something to be taken casually.
For me, the take-away thought came while we were singing the closing hymn; The Spirit of God Like a Fire. In the second verse it says, "...the knowledge and power of God are expanding; the veil o'er the earth is beginning to burst." I can't remember anything I've ever heard swell up in my heart with much more power than that sentence fragment did this morning. I thought of all of the incredible insights that I've been receiving for the past several months and not just from "church sources". Most of them have come while I've been reading popular fiction or essays and memoirs etc. that have become topics of interest out in the world lately. Some of the things I've read from unlikely sources--like "Autobiography of a Yogi" of all books, have shed new lights on our own theology. In some cases I think a look at a topic from a slightly different angle has just added some insight to a truth I already know, and that if I hadn't already been familiar with the concept, I would have missed the insight entirely. But I've been impressed again and again with the thought that much truth all over the world was once had and has been lost or obfuscated and is now being reintroduced from many sources because people are looking for truth and are prepared to receive it. Not every scrap of truth that is revealed or is being rediscovered or illuminated is going to come from an office in Salt Lake City.
I'm impressed with the thought that in the near future missionaries will explain the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who already believe them and have only been waiting for someone to give them context and a system with which to apply them in their lives. I also am convinced that life-long members of the church are going to discover or rediscover sources of additional doctrine that will intensify the power of what is taught commonly in the church right now. (You have only to casually peruse "The Journal of Discourses" to understand that many things have been revealed that aren't included in standard lesson manuals for Sunday classes. This is probably because it's not comfortable for new members of the church to come to Sunday School or Priesthood meeting and be fed through a fire hose.)
Part of the Golden Plates were sealed and Joseph was instructed not to translate them because the sealed portion contained things that weren't to be revealed until later. I think most church members assume that when the time is right the additional truths will be translated from the formerly-sealed plates and sold at Deseret Book. It may be that they will be revealed simply by being allowed to filter out of the sources already existent on the earth under influence of the Spirit that will confirm to those who find them that they are indeed as true as what's in the canon of scriptures we tote to church each week.
At least I know one thing. If God wants to reveal something to the church, it could very well come in the form of a stanza from a song sung at a temple dedication. He may no longer have a need to send an angel with golden plates to get a message to us.