What follows is part of a message I sent to a friend who asked me how he could enjoy life when so much of his life was tied to a spouse with whom he could not get along. The issue between them is Mormonism. She believes. He does not. They as a result do not communicate as they used to, and do not enjoy doing many things together. Hence, his comment regarding something I said on another thread here regarding the way in which post Mormonism has enabled me to enjoy each moment in ways not possible before, was that his relationship to his spouse radically limited his ability to do what I had described.

What follows supplements a Case Study Regarding Spousal Cognitive Dissonance at http://mccue.cc/bob/medium.htm.

I like the wisdom that says we should decide what we value, decide what we can influence through our actions, decide whether we are willing to act in light of the probable consequences of our actions, then do what we are prepared to do, and finally and most importantly, fully accept and get happy with what we cannot influence. A great deal of our unhappiness relates to our recognition of things we cannot influence, and our unwillingness to accept them.

I note that the process just decribed seems to me to vary depending upon the breadth of the perspective we employ. For example, today I can either work out early in the morning, get some extra sleep or type this post. If I choose the sleep or this post, I should not brate myself for not working out. Sleep would provide the benefit of some extra rest that makes me feel better instead of the benefits of a workout that in a different way would make me feel better. I won't discuss the merits of this post. But once I have made a choice, I should embrace the results or make a different choice. There is not point beating myself up for what I have chosen, or cannot change.

The decision as to whether to leave a relationship as important as that with our spouse, fraught with issues related to children etc., is worth a much greater investment of time and effort than most other decisions. So, I might decide what is important to me, and what I can do to increase the probability that I can achieve it (including leaving my marriage if necessary) and then say to myself, "This is one of those really important decisions that has wide ranging financial and relationship ramifications, so I am going to measure four times before cutting. I will use the next (x months, years, whatever) to maximize the probability that I have made a wise decision as to what is important to me, by gathering as many points of view as I can in that regard, and then I will use (x months, years, whatever) to try to bring what I value into my life as it currently stands. If it appears that I cannot achieve what I consider to be the minimally acceptable situation in that regard, I will leave my marriage."

Once I have choosen the process just described, and embarked upon it, I have chosen a particular type of sunset, and can enjoy it to the max. I can revel in the learning process that occurs while I collect perspectives. After I have decided what is important to me, it is highly probable that I will have to plough through, and drag my spouse through, heavy emotional seas as we see whether there is enough overlap in our lives to make them worth living together. I can allow those heavy seas to simply wash over me. I need not fight my way through that process. I will be seasoned by it, and will explore part of the human terrain that most travellers either do not explore, or are so numb while they do so that they do not see much. This is a sunset of a different type. I have made a choice and I can fully accept and embrace the consequence of that choice. And when I decide either to leave my marriage and face many painful and joyful consequences in that regard, or to stay in what will assuredly be a less than perfect situation, I should embrace what I have chosen. It is another sunset.

So, I would say that your difficult spousal situation (which is not that different from what mine was) is a sunset. We cannot choose many of our sunsets in the short term. We can choose more of them in the longer term, but even then our choice is limited. But we can always choose whether to embrace, or fight with, what the combination of our choices and random circumstance has served up. That approach to life, it seems to me, is the factor that correlates most strongly with a long term satisfaction. While I don't agree with all he says, Victor Frankl addresses this topic eloquently in "Man's Search for Meaning".

As I have said before, one of the Church's greatest evils in my view is the manner in which it furthers its institutional agenda and as a consequence encourages innocent young people to build their lives together on false foundations. This is what puts people like you, me and our spouses in situation you have described. However, it seems that humans of various stripes have forever dealt with similar things. Some of the greatest art with which I am familiar comes from this font. And more to the point, we can either use this experience to plumb our human depths, or fight it, regret it, etc. Once we are sufficiently self aware and for those of us who have the tools to do this, it seems clear to me which route is likely to be more satisfying.

The process as I describe it above also makes it clear to me why so many Mormons simply refuse to look or think about Mormon history and the social and personal conseuquences of Mormon belief. They choose to embrace their current relationships. For many personality types, this could not be done with a full intellectual awareness of what Mormonism does, means, comes from, etc. So, they shut down the process of learning about those things. This allows them to embrace what they have chosen to the greatest extent possible. I do not believe I was capable of doing that, but am not overly critical of those who are steered by their unconscious mechanisms in that direction. The only people in that situation I challenge are those within my own home, because of the degree of love and concern I feel for them, and because of the way in which they affect my life and the lives of other family members for whom I feel similar love and concern.

All the best,

bob

"But they reside in the presence of God, on a globe like a sea of glass and fire, where all things for their glory are manifest, past, present, and future, and are continually before the Lord."

William Blake (1757-1827)
Jerusalem: I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
(excerpt)

1 see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep
2 And its fallen Emanation, the Spectre and its cruel Shadow.
3 I see the Past, Present and Future existing all at once
4 Before me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings,
5 That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose;
6 For Bacon and Newton, sheath'd in dismal steel, their terrors hang
7 Like iron scourges over Albion: reasonings like vast serpents
8 Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.
9 turn my eyes to the schools and universities of Europe
10 And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,
11 Wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth
12 In heavy wreaths folds over every nation: cruel works
13 Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
14 Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which,
15 Wheel within wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony and peace.

• There are so many really smart Mormons who believe Mormonism is "true".
• The smart Mormons are much smarter and better educated than I am. They all have PhD's and most teach at BYU after all. And many of them have also been designated by God as his leaders. They are not only smart, but have greater powers of spiritual discernment than I have, as evidenced by their divine selection as Mormon leaders.
• So, on what basis am I justified if I disagree with the "smart Mormons"? History and science are uncertain, after all. The safe thing to do - and the "smart" thing to do, is to reject my own conclusions in favor of those reached by the "smart" crowd.

• The hero leaves the safety of the group and goes into the unknown where all kinds of horrors exist that are not found within the world inhabited by his group;
• The unstructured, dangerous nature of the world outside the group (chaos) represents the dangers most humans perceive to exist if they leave their group either physically or intellectually;
• The hero faces the horrors of chaos, and finds that he has unexpected powers, some given to him by the authorities who authorized his adventure and others that seem to well up from within or are found during the course of the adventure;
• The authorities who authorize the adventure are often not the mainstream authority within society, but rather alternative sources of wisdom or power that are unknown to the main group but have an important influence on the welfare of the group as a whole;
• The hero is changed by his adventure, and often returns with a treasure quite different from the one he set out to find.
• Ironically, the hero often finds the most important part of his treasure only after returning home. In one Near Eastern myth, the treasure sought by the hero the world over was buried under his own porch upon his return from his epic adventure.

• The hero seldom seeks this adventure. Rather, it seeks him. This often manifests itself in a force beyond the hero’s control that takes her over and throws her into chaos. This is the fish that shallows Jonah or the monster Tiamat that swallowed Heracles. While under the control of this greater power (in the belly of the beast), powerful forces both strip the hero of her power (Heracles symbolically lost his hair, so becoming childlike) and cause new powers to coalesce. The hero emerges from this womb-like state humbled, reconstructed and ironically more powerful.
• There is often a descent from the ordered life into something less ordered or completely disordered as in the many cases where a hero descends into the underworld and its chaos (the usual rules cease to apply) to perform some task essential to those in the land of the living. Out of this relative chaos, a new kind of person is formed. Since as I am writing this the chaos in New Orleans caused by hurricane Katrina is still killing people each day, I am grieving that loss of humanity and civilization, and wondering what kind of new order will emerge from the chaos there.
• These heroic experiences often occur either at night or in a place of darkness, such as the whale’s belly or the underworld, and re-emergence into the light of morning or the outside word evokes the image of the rising of the Sun or its strengthening and life giving influence in the Spring of each year.
• The hero’s journey requires a withdrawal from society.
• During darkness, wisdom is often conferred upon the hero either by humbling experience or divine gift. Mohammed’s famous “night journey” that some modern Muslims are trying to understand through the lens of near death experience research (see http://www.near-death.com/muslim.htm...). Near death experiences are well known to have reconstructing influences on those who have them that are similar in many ways to those found in the Jonah type of legend (see http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence05.html). I heard Bruce Greyson (see http://www.newsun.com/greyson.html), one of the leading researchers in this area speak about it recently.
• As the hero emerges from her seemingly dark, confined, chaotic space, the world itself often appears to have reconstructed and in hence more receptive to the hero’s new powers. Thus was the world changed during Noah’s time in the Ark, and for Lehi and his family as they emerged on a new continent from their mytic barge/submarines. The reader is often left to wonder whether the world is actually different, or whether the hero’s new perspective causes all to be reborn with her.
• Often new parents, or guides, are found for the journey through the hero’s new world, as was the case as Moses emerges from the bull rushes.

• we are interconnected to that reality
• these interconnections inspire in us feelings that we have in common to large degree with all of humanity, including wonder, reverence and terror, as reality unfolds in understandable as well as inscrutable ways before us;
• our actions have profound short and long term effects on those we love, all other life forms of which we are aware, and many other aspects of physical realty; and
• a concerted effort is now required of us if we wish to preserve life as we know it.

• Deja vu experiences when we meet someone or experience something familiar (You knew this person or knew of this experience before coming to Earth).
• The powerful impulse to do one thing or another we sometimes feel (God is speaking to us from the other side of the veil – see Jon Krakauer’s “Under the Banner of Heaven” for a chilling account of where that can go).
• The way nature sometimes moves us (Nature is God’s handiwork and he often communicates his love to us while we are in tune with it, which means we must be in tune with him, and when we feel these wonderful feelings this is evidence that God continues to do His most important work through the leaders of the Mormon Church).
• The reverence and awe Mormons feel when in the presence of their religious leaders, particular in large groups (These men are God’s literal representatives on Earth, are the only humans who communicate with God on an intimate basis, and hence the veil around them is thinner than usual).
• The feelings of peace and joy that come to Mormons when they make tremendous financial and other sacrifices for their faith, believe that this earns them a higher status after death as a result of passing this part of God’s test for them, and are recognized by their community for those sacrifices (Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of Heaven, one of which is a thinning of the veil so that we can feel God’s love).
• The feelings of peace and joy that come to Mormons when they are in Mormon temples, which are opulently decorated, reverent places filled with people dressed in white and in an attitude of worship (Mormon temples are literally the only place on Earth holy enough to accept God’s literal presence and hence to which he literally comes, and hence the veil is particularly thin there).
• Etc.