Conviction without concern

No worries, we are secure in our hope for salvation from the prisons spoken of earlier in this blog.

As a reminder, the prisons are due to: gravity, metabolism, time, society, perspective, thought, and death.

Death

Jesus Christ survived death, and although he didn't explain to us what it was like, he does give us hope that we can escape it as well. It is very likely that we will view existence in a very different way once we have broken that barrier, whatever the breaking experience itself might be like.

Gravity

He ascended into heaven, without the use of any machinery, so he escaped the prison of the surface of our planet as well. Another, Elijah, was also taken up, with a "fiery chariot" (some kind of mechanism, drawn by "fiery horses"). And the entire city of Enoch was lifted up, and perhaps was set down on some other planet, but we don't know. In any case, it appears that escape from the surface of this planet is possible.

Time

Apparently, God somehow lives outside of time, and there is reason to believe that we might — some time in our future — also escape the linearity of time. "The angels ... reside in the presence of God ... where all things ... are manifest, past, present, and future..." [D&C 130:6-7]

Thought

As we may think (an article by Vannevar Bush presaging the world wide web) explains how, in the age of hypertext, our thinking is shifting and we can more easily meld our thoughts with those of others. It is certainly easier now to escape the cycle of thinking the same thoughts over and over and over.

Perspective

There is some evidence in near death experience (NDE) research that our thoughts may be perceived by those around us without our having to speak, and vice versa. If true, this might mean that we will be able to understand things as others understand them, from their perspective as well as our own. Such experiences certainly qualify as out-of-body experiences, since NDE accounts are of a time when the person is outside of their body.

Society

It seems that we will associate with others in a different way in the next life. Some say we will still be with our families, but we will also be able to visit with others easily. However, "... that same sociality which exists among us here will exist among us there" [D&C 130:2], so we may not wish to escape in this way after all.

Metabolism

On the road to Emmaus, the resurrected Jesus interacted with some disciples, and may have eaten with them. Or not; for sure he broke bread with them. In any case, much earlier in his ministry, he fasted for forty days. It may be that we will no longer be required to eat and drink, etc., or that we may be freed from this necessity as well. Logically, the fact of immortality should imply the possibility of continued life without metabolism.

Notes

Explanation of title: the second meaning of conviction (hope) without worry or concern about it. While the previous post's title appears to be a contradiction in terms (syntactically like the title of the entire blog), this one appears to be a pleonasm. Hopefully this post is more hopeful than the previous one, as this post outlines a way to recognize our limitations in this sphere of existence while hoping for relief in the next.

"salvation from the prisons" reminds the author of his younger self's impatience with the entire notion of salvation. "Saved from what?", he was wont to plaintively inquire. "From the prisons enumerated in the earlier post," his older self replies today.

Trivia: Elijah, it was promised, will return before the second coming of Jesus [Malachi 4:5]. Elijah returned in the Kirtland temple on April 3, 1836 [D&C 110:13-14] (which was the second day of the Jewish passover season).

"escape from the surface of this planet is possible" reminds the author of a claim he made to an uncle that "no gets off this planet alive" and which he thought was quite clever at the time. Elijah apparently did.

"outside of time ... some time in our future" illustrates the difficulty of expressing the notion in language, or just how thoroughly the arrow of time is embedded in our language. Once we are "out of time" will we still be able to look back on the time when we were not?

Conviction without conviction

 We are born prisoners.

Gravity

We are bound to the surface of our planet, by gravity. Leaping may give us a meter. Dreaming of flying gives some satisfaction, and has led to actual flying machines, now within the reach of many of us. For a brief moment — hours at most — we are off the surface. A few adventurous souls have reached low earth orbit, some for months. Even fewer have ventured further. All such altitude gains are temporary. We must soon return to the surface.

Even on the surface, we seem driven to climb to a higher point. 

Metabolism

We must feed, and regularly. We transform food into ourselves, and waste which must be disposed of. For many on our planet this work requires significant effort. For the more fortunate, it can require little thought beyond a few simple choices. For some it becomes an all-consuming (pun intended) obsession.

Time

We must live in the present moment. While we can trade some attention in the present for memories of the past, we can never revisit past moments. Nor can we ever do over. Trading some attention in the present for thoughts of the future is also possible, but we don't get there until we get there. Our attention is trapped in the present moment, always on the move. We are trapped in the linearity of time.

Society

We were born into a family, a town, a nation, a culture. Escape is possible, after many years and much work, but only to another family, town, nation, and culture. Our very thinking is shaped by or influenced by others around us, on whom we depend for food, protection, and company.

Perspective

We are, by construction, self-centered. We can only perceive the world through our senses, which are bound to our physical bodies. Even standing right beside another, parallax gives each a separate view of the world. Some claim to have out-of-body experiences, but most never leave the interior of their self.

Thought

We are what we think. Thinking happens in the present, but its traces form us as thoughts form patterns which we revisit. Over and over again we think the same thoughts. The only escape is temporary, as during sleep. And even then, during sleep, our thoughts form their most chaotic versions as dreams and nightmares.

Death

We are all prisoners – doing time – with a death penalty awaiting us at the end. We die, prisoners still, when our metabolism stops, our thinking stops, our senses cease, attention wanes, and our culture disposes of what remains. Even in death we remain bound to the surface of our planet.

What is death like? No one has lived to report it. We who witness it are watching from the outside and do not experience what is happening on the inside, so we cannot know. When we experience it ourselves we will know but will not be able to tell.

Notes

The unusual title for this post reflects two meanings of the word conviction: sent to prison, and hope. At least, that was the only synonym for hope that I could find beginning with con.

This post captures a thought pattern that frequently plays in my head, and has now ventured out into the world wide web.

Communication without complexity

Last Sunday we talked in church (sacrament meeting). Partly to put off preparation, and partly because it was there, I was playing around with a little web page produced by a program that I wrote many years ago. The program's job is to display a random verse from the Book of Mormon.

The message

Most verses are short enough to display nicely on the screen of my iPhone, and I just pull one down — to cause the page to be reloaded — to see the next random pick. As I was doing this, I was galvanized by a verse that appeared (Alma 29:9) because it was precisely what I needed for the topic of my talk.

The more I reflected on this, the more amazed I became. There are over six thousand verses to pick from, and the code that does it is extremely small. It is also very mechanical. So, I choose to believe that seeing this verse at that time was a kind of message from a higher power, because it was precisely what I needed at that time.

It described my message — the one that I ended up delivering — which is that sometimes a person can be at the right place at the right time with just the right tale to have an impact on the world. It was the story of that one time when I was "an instrument in the hands of God to bring [one] soul to repentance;" and that was "my joy."

How the program works

[Victims of mathophobia can skip this section.]

Since it involves a random number, the odds are very low that the program would pick out any particular verse. The one it picked happens to be number 3,332.

#!/bin/bash
echo "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8"
echo
sed -n `echo $((RANDOM%6604+1))`p ../../bofm/eng/all.txt

As indicated by the first line of the code, this script is to be interpreted by the Bash shell (that has been used —in the same way — in many of the earlier posts on this blog).

The next two lines are just sent back to the browser as-is. Line two lets the browser know that what it receives next is just plain text (as opposed to HTML, say). And, line three (a completely empty line) lets the browser know that that's all we have to say about what will be sent.

All of the work is done in line four, repeated below with some extra spaces and underlining to show four distinct sections.

sed  -n  `echo $((RANDOM%6604+1))`p  ../../bofm/eng/all.txt

It runs the sed program, which is a stream editor, which operates on its input line by line. Its input is the file located at the path given in part four, two directories above the one the program resides in and then in a folder named bofm containing a folder named eng containing the file named all.txt (which contains in order all 6604 verses of the Book of Mormon (one and half million characters)).

Normally this program would print out every line as it was read in. The -n flag tells it not to produce any output unless explicitly requested. 

The next bit of code looks really complicated, but it just gets re-written in stages. Those stages are shown below, one at a time.

`echo $((RANDOM%6604+1))`p

`echo $((23143%6604+1))`p

`echo $((3331+1))`p

`echo 3332`p

3332p

That process is called "evaluation" and happens from the inside-out. First a random number is selected from the range 0–32,767 which here we are assuming was 23,143. Then it is divided by 6,604 and the remainder^* (if you have a calculator with a "mod" key, you can try this out), 3331, is retained. Then one is added to that, giving 3,332. Finally the back-tick part becomes just the string "3332" which is concatenated to the "p". So, in this case, it is as if the hard-coded command

sed -n 3332p ../../bofm/eng/all.txt

had been used. That simply asks sed to look in turn at every line in the all.txt file and print out line 3,332 ignoring all the other lines. So, the browser only sees that one line, which is verse 9 of Alma chapter 29.

Each time this program runs, a different random number is chosen, and so a different verse gets shown. Everything in the program remains the same, except that RANDOM is replaced by a different number each time the program runs.

Tying in the title

This was a communication to my mind of a particular verse of scripture that I needed to make a cohesive message for a talk and it came very simply, through a device that I myself had created years earlier. The mystery is that that particular random number was chosen at that particular time. For whatever reason it was, this recent event perfectly mirrored the event in my story in that just the right ingredients all came together at the right time.

Notes

Alma 29:9 says "I know that which the Lord hath commanded me, and I glory in it. I do not glory of myself, but I glory in that which the Lord hath commanded me; yea, and this is my glory, that perhaps I may be an instrument in the hands of God to bring some soul to repentance; and this is my joy."

^*Because of the Quotient-Remainder Theorem of arithmetic, whenever you divide an integer by 6,604 you will get a unique quotient and remainder. In our example,  if the integer was 23,143 then the quotient is 3 and the remainder is 3,331. The remainder is also called the modulo. That is, 23143 = 3 x 6604 + 3331

"if the integer was 23,143" Other integers that lead to the same verse are 3331, 9935, 16,539, and 29747, so we don't know and can't tell what the actual random number was, just that it was one of these five possibilities.

Perhaps you will take issue with my claim that "it came very simply" in view of the long explanation of how it works. Keep in mind that line four of the program is almost as simple as a program can be.