Week 7 Share Insights from the Book of Mormon

To be honest, Week 7 was overwhelmingly too busy for me and I couldn't keep up. It was of course my fault, but that easily leads into the insight I gain from the reading for the week.

Following is something that caused me to wonder at the ways we define reward, punishment, good, and bad:

2 Nephi 24:10-16
10 All they shall speak and say unto thee: Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?
11 Thy pomp is brought down to the grave; the noise of thy viols is not heard; the worm is spread under thee, and the worms cover thee.
12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! Art thou cut down to the ground, which did weaken the nations!
13 For thou hast said in thy heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north;
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.
15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
16 They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and shall consider thee, and shall say: Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms?

So, my main thought was, how do we exist in hell and does our very perspective and words have power over that existence?  This is deeply into the abstract of reality, but since we tend to think of hell as suffering and pain, we think very little about hell as a place with dimensional relationship to God.  For those who earnestly study the Book of Mormon, the idea that there is an arbitrary Heaven and Hell is long forgotten, because most of us know better what awaits us after we die and after we are resurrected, but even before this mortal world, it seems there was an equivalent to hell that represented a place and an experience.  This is why I wonder if place and experience are not as separate for a spirit as they are for one of us mortals.

Since this is a question, I will add my affirmation worth teaching, that we existed before this life and we have a kind of continuing relationship, suggested in this scripture, with all our spirit brothers and sisters, particularly the peers that are within the same class of righteousness and judgement that we fall under..  We ever were and ever will be social beings, and this may be the central reason social concerns have such great power over people to empower or destroy them as we have probably seen with individuals given praise and individuals with destructive perceptions about themselves or others.  We have no choice but to acknowledge this social nature of ours if we are to have much influence over our destiny.  This is love, charity, and the endless squiggly cycle of so-called karma.  We are either genuinely interested in the happiness of others, incidentally increasing our own likelihood of the same, or we fail in this and lose much power over whether we are happy or even anything raw skill cannot provide.



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