Lose Your Self

The defining struggle of our existence is the fact that we are all beings that consist of an eternal, pure, divine soul that has been placed inside of a mortal, corruptible, fallen body. These two parts of ourselves don’t mix well. They’re like oil and water. By definition, for all of us, throughout all of human history, our reach has exceeded our grasp. We are the children of Divine Parents and all of us yearn to fill the immensity of space, to be in and through and a part of all things, to create worlds without end. But we’ve been crammed into these small, weak, deeply flawed mortal bodies, bodies that end up taking the driver’s seat and calling the shots much more often than we would like. It is easy to identify with our bodies - they’re the things with which we primarily think and feel and experience the world around us. It is so easy to identify with our mortal, corporeal experience that we consider it the natural state of affairs. Thinking and feeling things with our bodies is the normal thing to do, and thinking and feeling things with our Spirits is strange and unnatural and rare. We might talk about having a Spiritual experience as a unique and special event, not something that is necessarily part of our everyday life. We might even feel that we have to be in the right place or engaged in the right activity to even have such an experience. But our Spirits have existed long before our bodies were ever formed and will continue to exist for long after our fallen, mortal bodies have returned to ashes and dust. Taking an average of our eternal experience, the normal, natural thing would be to experience the universe through our Spirits. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:25). The life that we think we have, all of the stuff that makes us happy or sad or angry, all of the things that bring our bodies and our hearts and our minds pain or pleasure, it’s not going to be enough. The “self” that we have cobbled together out of a string of failures and successes, traumas and recoveries, it’s too small and too weak to hold everything that we want to put in it. Our Heavenly Father has promised to give us All that He has. The world, the galaxy, the universe, the multiverse. All of it. It’s not going to all fit in the wispy little self we’re holding onto. It’s gotta go. We have to lose our self. That pain and frustration that we feel all of the time is us trying to cram all that the Father has into this tiny little mind and hear that we have to work with. We think that we need to put some kind of separation between our selves and the rest of the universe. We have to make a little container that has an inside where we can be and an outside where everything else is. We don’t need the container. There doesn’t need to be nor should there be a separation between us and the rest of the universe. How is God everywhere all of the time? Because He lost His self. He got rid of the thing that was separating Him from everything else. It all belongs to Him and He belongs to all of it. Abinadi tells us that when Jesus performed the Atonement, He allowed His will to be swallowed up by the will of the Father. Jesus swallowed the whole universe and the universe swallowed Him right back. The notion that we are not enough or we don’t have enough is an illusion. Yes, we will never have enough room inside of our tiny selves for all of God’s love and grace and blessings. But if we lose the self, if we let our will be swallowed up by the will of the Father, if we swallow the universe and let the universe swallow us right back, then not only do we have the whole universe, but we also have a place to put it all - right where it’s at. Forcing ourselves to identify only with our own self is like someone sitting by the side of a lake and trying to put the whole lake into a single jar. We just got to lose the jar and enjoy the lake. I know that if we can lose our self, we will find it again, everywhere we look. We will experience the universe through our eternal Spirits, and the natural, normal thing for us will be having spiritual experiences.