Physical and Spiritual Bodies
Anthropism
[Every World Follows a Pattern Like Every Other World]
75 I’ve been writing like fury all morning now as a result of this. To the Christian world Adam’s fall was the sin. It was vile and unspeakable. “It brought death into the world and all our woes,” as Milton tells us, with the loss of Eden until a Greater One redeems us. There was everything nasty and vile that followed it. The early Fathers of the church tell us that it was matter and matter alone (substance) that was the defilement. That’s what the Neoplatonists taught. It was what the Gnostics taught; it was what the Hermetics taught. As Plotinus said, any contact with matter would completely corrupt God himself. That’s how bad matter was. Where did they get this idea, this Neoplatonic obsession that the Christian world adopted, that matter was all bad? (We were talking about Christ coming to the Nephites here.) It was in their world. They couldn’t even think of existing without misbehaving. The world had become so nasty, corrupt, and decayed, as ours is becoming, that they would just equate the two: Having a body means being vile. You don’t have to, you know.
75,76 Does having a body make it necessary for you to be utterly vile? That has become the idiom of our time. What does the spirit lack? What do you have that you didn’t have as a spirit? Substance—that’s what you have, you see. The spirit apparently doesn’t have enough. Does the spirit have enough substance? Well, enough for what? Brigham Young has a lot to say about that; he is very good on that. Well, it is all physical. We get into quantum physics, you see. It’s all forms of energy anyway; there’s no real substance there at all, except we know it does exist. We are aware of it at various levels. Joseph Smith absolutely shocked everybody when he said “spirit is a more refined form of matter.” We had spirit bodies. You don’t just go around as a gas when you are a spirit, you see. The Christian world doesn’t know how to handle that. They didn’t know how to define spirit. Origen, the first and greatest of all the Christian theologians goes into this quite deeply. He said, “There is only one thing you can say about a spirit; it is ASOMATON. It has no matter, no body, no photons, no electrons, no neutrons—nothing in it at all. It is just pure idea and nothing else.
76 Psalm 19:5 Brigham Young tells us that there are peculiar kinds of joy that you can experience here. We’re told about appetites, desires, and passions. Are they bad? Are appetites, desires, and passions to be wiped out, ignored, denied, and suppressed entirely? What’s the formula? They are to be kept within the bounds that the Lord has set. They are to be there, but to be within the bounds the Lord has set. As Brigham Young tells us, these are for our edification and enjoyment, but don’t overdo them. A good example of that is in Psalm 19. I looked at this verse and then suddenly looked at the first verse and realize that this is anthropism of a high order. This takes us right into the whole problem. Psalm 19 is perhaps the one people know best, next to (Psalm 23), “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” This is what I’m talking about here (Psalm 19:5): “Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.” You rejoice to run a race—that is a physical experience. A strong man rejoices to run a race, and a bridegroom comes glowing (the word it uses is YASIS) out of the bridal chamber—perfectly legitimate pleasures that they couldn’t have as spirits. This is a very interesting point.
76 Notice how Psalm 19 starts out. This is right on this theme. It is cosmism; it deals with the cosmos. “The heavens”—always in the plural.
76,77 Day after day his utterances gush forth, in continued creation, and night by night Y’HAWWEH DA’AT, “he blasts forth knowledge.” That’s pretty strong. There is no OMER (they use that word again and again), meaning “teaching, doctrine, or knowledge,” There are no words and no statements whose voices are not heard—without the hearing of their voices. We are being blasted with information whether we know it or not. The stars do send forth hints; all we get from them is hints. We have been unable to react to them. As Hawking says here, we could have known all this as early as the time of Newton; all the data we needed was there. But he says we had another plan of the universe we were sticking to, so we completely ignored it. That’s what we do now. God is trying to teach us. BDKHOL HA-ARETZ is everywhere. This is an amazing verse. There are two different sentences actually. Everywhere YATZA; it goes forth. It says, “His string is extended everywhere.” Now what on earth does that possibly mean? The word here is QAW that means “the string of a musical instrument.”
77 Psalm 19:5,2 Hey, I’ve written this all out this morning. Let me go through here. What am I bothering about this for? “Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth . . .” We’ve come to verse 5. Now, what rejoicing? This smacks of the anthropic principle. Man is not an observer but a participator in the universe, we are told now, in which everything is immediately influenced by everything else, including himself. So we’ll read the Psalm. “The heavens declare [forth] the glory of God [and I see and react to it—declare it to me as a personal message]; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” YABBIAC means “to gush forth in torrents,” and YDHAWWEH means “to breathe out, to blast out knowledge.” You can’t control it. Verse 2 is on communication by speech, language, voice, and hearing. All those are mentioned in this verse here. (They are numbered differently in different editions.)
80 Moses 7:30,24 Now, the supreme example of this anthropic principle, or the unity of everything, is in chapter 7 of Moses. Notice the expressions he uses here in verse 30: “the particles of the earth, yea, million of earths like this, . . . and thy curtains are stretched out still; and yet thou art there [there’s the anthropic principle—wherever you go you are there], and thy bosom is there; and also thou art just.” You are there, even to your bosom. Moses 7:24: “And Enoch was high and lifted up, even in the bosom of the Father, and of the Son of Man.” What are these? They are all embraced in one single—not system, because there’s no end to it. It embraces everything. This is right in line with what they [scientists] are talking about these days.
80 Moses 7:31,36-37 “And thou hast taken Zion to thine own bosom, from all thy creations [all the creations are there; they are all one, and he can take one out], from all eternity to all eternity.” It is endless. Verse 36: “Wherefore, I can stretch forth mine hands and hold all the creations which I have made; and mine eye can pierce them also.” A little while ago we would have said, that’s absurd. How could the same man who walked around here be doing all that? This is something, but this is the way it works now—as we shall see, I suppose. Verse 37: “And the whole heavens shall weep over them [when one world has to be destroyed the whole heavens shall weep for them], even all the workmanship of mine hands.” They all weep because they all had a share in it; they are all together. You can’t separate one from the system. I’ll have to find some of those passages; there are some very good ones here. In just a second I will. “Wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?”
80 See, every world contributes to all the other worlds, so no two worlds are alike. An infinite number of combinations are possible. It’s not monotonous, in other words. “And it shall be Zion which shall come forth out of all the creations which I have made.” Each one emerges out of the others and shares with all the others. Notice, never in all the scriptures does the Lord ever imply or say, there are no creations but mine. He never says that at all. He says, these are my creations; this is what I do, etc.
80,81 Those other worlds are uniform and similar, as in “the other worlds we have heretofore formed.” Everything follows the same pattern. It doesn’t make them monotonous, but the point is they’re all the same substance, all by the same principle. He says those two things are absolutely astounding—that there should be all these other worlds, as far as we know, and along with that they are also uniform, all made of the same substance. The possibility of other worlds is made almost certain by billions of other galaxies. The second is that it’s the same everywhere, “like unto other worlds I have hitherto created.” Is it monotonous? No, they are all alike, but they are all different. As he says, each one comes out of all the others. They share the common existence. (We just shared those passages.) They weep because they all had a share in the creation of each. There is no end that we can see to them. This is again what Hawking writes: “The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility in which there would be no boundary to space/time [‘from eternity to eternity’; there’s no boundary to space/time]. The boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary. The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would be neither created nor destroyed; it would just be.”
83, We should get back to 3 Nephi which is the greatest revelation we have of this. This makes everything come out; we shall see that. Read it again. Remember, seventeen chapters are devoted to the mission of Jesus among the Nephites here after the Resurrection, which is something.