The only thing on my mind right now is something that I really don't want to talk about. Not here. Not yet anyway. Maybe I can find something else to share.
I haven't watched/listened to President Thomas Monson's April '09 talk Be Your Best Self recently, but the title alone is intriguing. My first thought is that everyone has the potential to be very good or very bad, just as a thermometer can indicate being very hot or very cold. President Monson's advice seems to be to stay as close to the "good" end of the scale as we can. But, being a Gemini, I can't help seeing another interpretation of the advice to "be your best self." Here's my twist on it:
Every person you'll ever meet has an (at least) dual nature. If nothing else, we have our bodies and our spirits. Our bodies, and the desires and needs of our bodies, are very simple. They want food, comfort, sleep, many other things that are good for us, and even some things that are not good for us. I'd call this our "carnal selves," but the word "carnal" has a bad connotation in our church, and having a body is not a bad thing. Let's instead call it our "physical selves."
Our spirits are harder to define (partly because there aren't many scientists that have put years of research into understanding the nature of the human spirit as they have with the human body). Our spirits' desires and needs are less well known. However it is known (or supposed by me) that our spirits have the desire to feel and express love, and to observe beauty in music and other forms of art, including nature.
At first observance, it would seem that our spirits are better than our bodies in the things that they desire, and therefore, our better or "best" self is our spiritual self. Therefore, we should be our spiritual selves and not our physical selves. But that isn't fully true.
We already were our spiritual selves, and just our spiritual selves, in the pre-mortal existence. If that was, and still is, our best selves, why would we need to come to Earth and gain bodies? Some would say, "experience," and that's a very good point. However, it's not the only reason we need bodies. If it were, we could come down to Earth and gain bodies so we could gain experience, and once we had obtained sufficient experience, we would no longer need our bodies. We'd discard our bodies at death and once again become purely spiritual, but now a bit wiser, selves.
...Until the Resurrection. Our bodies are an important part of our selves. Our spiritual selves and our physical selves must combine in order to create our "best self." I'm not going to pretend to understand all of this; All I'm saying is that our bodies are good and important, and we need them to help us "be our best," whatever that means.
However fuzzy that concept may be, God has been much clearer on the subject of which aspects of ourselves we don't need. And now, I think, I can return to the term "carnal self," and for the purpose of this blog post, I'll define "carnal self" as everything that is bad about our bodies, including a wide variety of evil passions and desires like pride, envy, and lust.
The carnal self is part of our physical selves, and as far as I understand it, its purpose is to strengthen our spiritual selves - especially our spiritual selves' control over our physical selves. It strengthens the spiritual self by giving the spiritual self an opportunity similar to an athlete's opportunity to train against an opponent or rival. By struggling against, and ultimately overcoming, our carnal selves, our spiritual selves become stronger, and thus our overall "self" is improved.
However, our carnal selves are not part of our best selves, so when our spirits have been sufficiently strengthened by experience, our carnal selves will be removed (unless I'm wrong). This removal (if it occurs) may be by our own efforts - our spiritual selves totally overcoming our carnal selves; by ourselves with God's help; or by God's direct intervention. I know that when we're resurrected, our bodies will be changed. I don't know which aspects will be kept or which aspects will be removed or replaced. But if our "carnal selves" are everything that's wrong with our physical selves, they'll have to be removed or overcome somehow before we can be our best selves.
While I don't know everything about this topic and I really ought to read that talk, it seems pretty obvious that some parts of us are good and some parts of us are bad, so it's equally obvious which parts of us we should strengthen and which parts of us we should strive to overcome. Some aspects of ourselves fall into a grey area, and maybe we should leave those parts alone until we understand them better. In the meantime, God has given us plenty of stuff we can work on. Perhaps we should start with improving those aspects of our selves.
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