Physical constitution as a barrier to understanding, "juice" as a solution

If you really want to rip up your mind

If you want to take the lid off your life . . .

Might as well get juiced

Might as well get juiced

-- the Rolling Stones

This is some very strange stuff from a rather eccentric Mormon thinker, but, hey, sync is sync.

I just read William Wright’s September 9 post "Ancient Juice as something that will be brought with the Sawtooth Stone." He discusses how our ability to understand is limited by the nature of our physical bodies and proposes that drinking a certain "juice" can remedy this, speculating that Moses and maybe even Jesus had to drink this juice before they were able to do what they did.

The juice is designed to change his body, quite literally. . . . On the cosmic scale of intelligence, we here on Earth are morons, I think, and it is the extreme limits and fallen nature of the bodies we inhabit that makes this so.  Our brains are part of these bodies, and though our spirits can and do shape these brains to our use the best that we can, still we can't get past the fact that the hardware we are working with is pretty bad.

Thus, I think without this juice, the interaction between [Heaven and Earth], at least for purposes of transferring complex thought, ideas, words, etc., would probably be as effective as me trying to transmit what I consider complex thought to my dog. My dog might understand that I love her, and even gather general words and meaning, but would be unable to fully grasp what is being said.  She would need a significant change or boost in how her mind operates for that to be possible. . . .

Another example would be Moses and his interactions with God, in which a change was needed for Moses to be able to both abide God's presence as well as understand what was being said.  It is likely, in my opinion, that although not recorded in any account we have, Moses likely also needed to drink this juice-nectar as part of his own experiences.

This "juice" is apparently not something like a psychedelic drug which temporarily cleanses the doors of perception, but rather something that effects a permanent change in one's body and thus in one's ability to understand.

We are not accustomed to thinking of our limited understanding as "mere mortals" as being a physical problem with a physical solution. It's an unusual point of view. Less than an hour after reading Mr. Wright's post, though, I ran across the same idea again. This was in Vol. 4B of Daymon Smith's Cultural History of the Book of Mormon; the author is quoting 20th-century Mormon leader Joseph Fielding Smith, great-nephew of the Prophet.

[Smith] counseled patience about understanding intelligences, for "there are many things that we will know when we receive the resurrection," things "which we cannot understand in this mortal state even if they were revealed to us."

The implication is that a resurrected body can understand things that a mortal body cannot. Mr. Wright, too, suggests that the effect of the "juice" is to confer not only enhanced understanding but physical immortality: "Moses was changed so as not to experience death (translated, essentially), I think by means of this drink."

Juice itself is a sync with something, too, but I can't put my finger on what. Quite recently I ran into the word juice used in a strange non-sequitur way -- maybe in a dream, or on an Engrish T-shirt, or in something a student had written -- but the precise memory eludes me. Maybe it'll come back to me eventually.