Mormon Musings

It was Marcel Proust who wrote insightfully of pre-mortality as follows:  “All that can be said is that everything in our life happens as though we entered upon it with a load of obligations contracted in a previous existence. There is no reason arising from the conditions of our life on this earth for us to consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be tactful, even to be polite. … All these obl igations whose sanction is not of this present life, seem to belong to a different world, founded on kindness, scruples, sacrifices, a world entirely different from this one, a world whence we emerge to be born on this earth, before returning thither, perhaps to live under the empire of those unknown laws we have obeyed because we bore their teaching within us without knowing who had taught us.” (Marcel Proust, La Prisonniere, as quoted in Homo Viator by Gabriel Marcel.)

"For the  natural   man  is an  enemy  to God, and has been from the  fall  of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he  yields  to the enticings of the  Holy Spirit , and  putteth  off the  natural  man and becometh a  saint  through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a  child ,  submissive , meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father." Mosiah 3:19

Wonderful talk by Elder Oaks: https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2000/10/the-challenge-to-become?lang=eng

"Man was also in the beginning with God.  Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.  All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence." D&C 93:29-30