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So Phil, I'd like to ask you to talk about something else you raised in your yoga of Christ essay. You talked about how in the church, when we are encouraged to participate in certain activities or to fulfill certain callings to obey certain commandments or elements of counsel from our priesthood leaders.

That the carrot that's often dangled in front of us is, well, first of all, that there usually is a carrot dangled in front of us. And that carrot, we might call it blessings. And usually the blessing is a promise of happiness.

And you mentioned that you thought that that process of encouraging us to create these expectations as a motivation to obey or to do something might not exactly be helpful to our spiritual development was hoping you could talk about that.

Yeah, see that orientation is reflective of a parent child relationship with God. It is a necessary stage at the beginning for early spiritual development, but it's not a mature way.

And it obviously is not, again, leading toward the inner sort of spiritual rebirth and transformation that's being promised in the scriptures. And so we have a ton of frustrated Mormons.

I've received, I'm not exaggerating, I've received hundreds of emails from active, faithful, impressive members of the church who describe decades.

Of extraordinary devotion, commitment, sacrifice, service, magnifying their college, doing everything they've been asked to do in the belief, in the hope in the desire that there would be a richness of spiritual life and rebirth.

And what they're reporting is after decades of that, that hasn't been realized.

I'm just curious, can I interject a question here? In what context are these people contacting you?

Is it that they've read your essays and that what you wrote resonated or is it in the context of your being a meditation instructor? What's the context here?

In most cases, in most cases, they've read those two articles. They've read either the mantra article or the yoga article or both.

And I mean, that mantra article was written four or five years ago. I still get a couple of emails every week. People running across that.

And that's what they're saying to me. I've done all of these things for 40 years. I don't have the spiritual richness I desire. Is it possible this meditation thing will help me to experience that?

And this business of work and blessing, obedience and blessing, I mean, it is true at a certain level.

But when it comes to deeper, richer spiritual growth, it's what is described in section 93. It's grace for grace. It's learning how to receive, how to be open to the flow of sanctifying grace into our lives.

It's not a mechanical, keep 100 commandments and get 100 blessings. I mean, there are so many members of the church who have spent their lives being obedient and devoted and sacrificing, expecting certain outcomes.

And they have a, you know, they lose a child or they lose a job or they lose a marriage and they want to know why they start questioning themselves. Maybe I didn't keep enough commandments.

And they'll try to multiply the number of spiritual of commandment, keeping they need to do to get the extra blessing. Or they'll question God. They'll finally get bitter at God for not coming through with the blessings when they've done so much. And it is just an immature form of spirituality that doesn't bring about the blessing of spiritual rebirth.

Do you see this, what you refer to as an immature, this parent-child relationship? Do you see this as something that members of the church are coming up with, sort of in rogue fashion, in spite of what church leaders are teaching?

Or do you see this parent-child relationship being encouraged by and taught by and promoted by church leaders?

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