Recently, I saw a portion of a program on public television by Dr. Wayne Dyer. He adopted a practice while studying Taoism that I think would be great to apply to scripture study. He would take four lines of text and try to apply the principles of the text to his life for 3 days. The result of focusing intently on one or two principles for a space of time helped him to master those principles. Think of it as literal application of Nephi's "liken" doctrine 2 Ne 2:23.
As a side note, I do believe Dr. Dyer is crazy, as he believes that he is akin to Jesus and that people who read his book will be using his work as a ladder to reach enlightenment and eternal life. I guess he is either unfamiliar with the story of the tower of babel or he really believes that he can create a ladder to reach the heavens.
In any event, I want to start applying principles that I find in the scriptures to my life in a similar fashion. My first application will come from:
Over the next 3 days, I will focus all my energies on thinking thoughts of a spiritual nature. I will try to avoid the thinking that directs my attention towards the things of this world. I will resist the temptation to make rude remarks by trying to think of those around me as the Lord thinks of them. This will be a hard task to measure progress since the results are entirely hidden from view.
This concept is spoken of by King Benjamin in one of my favorite sections of scripture. In Mosiah 4:30, he gives us a clear formula. He states, "watch your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds". There is a clear progression from things that we think, becoming words that are spoken, which then become actions. If we can stop the thoughts, we will be able to hold our tongues and keep ourselves from acting out spoken plans of evil.
This formula is certainly cyclical in nature. As temporal beings, our first instinct is to try and stop the behavior that is leading us astray. We set goals to be nice to the person in the office that gets on our nerves. We do our best to perform kind gestures and strike up conversation. But we still have trouble not talking about this person when they are not around. Over time, our hope is that by changing our actions, we will also be able to avoid speaking about this person in an unkind fashion. After we are able to do that, we hope that we will be able to actually stop having thoughts about this person when they do things that annoy us.
While changing our behavior first may be the most common approach to overcoming bad habits or temptations, I believe that it is also possible for this process to work in the same fashion as described by King Benjamin. I believe that if we were to have enough faith, with prayer and fasting, we could have our thoughts replaced by the power of the Atonement with the thoughts of the Savior. This is our greatest struggle in my opinion. Our greatest wrestle may be with our own thoughts. It is much easier to change behavior and words than it is to avoid thinking certain things at all. Truly, if we can control our thoughts, we will be in control of our lives at a level that would most certainly lead to Christ. Until that is possible, I will continue to repent for my natural way of thinking and strive to think better thoughts.
