The first, "What Came With Such Noise From the Doomed Temple of the Jews?" by Jonathan M. Smith, is about the departure of the gods from the Temple of Herod at its destruction.
The second, "Enjoying the Temple, Becoming as a Little Child" by G, characterizes enjoyment of the rituals at the Mormon Temple -- seen by believers as being, like Herod's, a restoration of the Temple of Solomon -- as childlike. His example of the kind of story children enjoy involves the destruction of houses:
Somehow in the sacrament on Sunday I got to thinking about children’s stories. A lot of them have a lot of repetition and easily grasped structure. The Big Bad Wolf huffs and puffs at each house, using the same formula, and we go through a simple three-step progression from house type to house type. The ending is no sense a surprise, especially because almost always the child has heard the story before. The child wants the repetition of the same ol’ story they know and love.
The third, "Distinguishing Final Participation from Original Participation" by Bruce Charlton, begins by defining Original Participation as childlike:
It was Owen Barfield who defined Original Participation - characteristic of young childhood and the early states of Mankind's development of consciousness (roughly, the nomadic Hunter Gatherer stage); and Final Participation - which was the divinely-intended future development of consciousness that was posited to come after the modern alienated consciousness which is cut-off from participation.
Bruce ends with this summary of the difference between the two types of participation:
In summary - for us modern people: Original Participation happens in a state of rest or stasis, while Final Participation happens when mentally active; OP includes a loss of the sense of self, while FP includes an intensification of self; OP leads towards a sense of oneness and timelessness, while FP is a dynamic and connected form of "ongoing" consciousness.
This is in some ways similar (though with opposite value judgments) to the distinction with which G ends his post:
And then I had a vision–not a Vision, nothing miraculous, just something in my mind’s eye–of telestial and maybe terrestrial people happily wandering as adventurers through the infinite variety of creation, never bored, always finding something new. But the celestial people becoming as large as gods, seeing everything, feeling everything, as large as the universe, and deeply deeply happy because the all of everything was as familiar and belonging to them as the inside of their home.
Anyway, all three posts are recommended as interesting and thought-provoking, beyond their synchronistic interrelation.
Update: Two entries down from Bruce's post on my blogroll was "Clondalkin Memories" by Maolsheachlann -- reminiscences about a Dublin suburb, with no seeming relevance to the posts discussed above until I found this near the end of the post:
Clondalkin also had a Mormon temple, on which I frequently gazed with great interest as I passed. On another occasion, as I was leaving the house, I heard a lot of African voices in an upstairs room of a neighbouring house, singing something about being washed in the blood of Jesus.
A Mormon temple in a Dublin suburb? Many years ago? Press X to doubt. Surely he meant a Mormon chapel, the distinction between the two not always being appreciated by outsiders. Just to be sure, though, I googled dublin mormon temple. I found an article titled "Dublin Ireland Temple" -- with the subtitle being "Planning and approval phase; site location unknown; groundbreaking not announced." Plans to construct it were just announced in October 2024. So I was right. Something in the sidebar at that site caught my eye, though:
In my post above, I had specifically mentioned that Mormons think of their temples as being like that of Solomon. I had a little trouble getting the above screenshot, though. I had pressed "back" to check exactly what my search prompt had been (accuracy matters!), and when I returned to the Dublin Ireland Temple page, I found that it was now displaying a different "Temple Quote." Apparently it shows a different one, randomly selected, each time you visit the site. I had to refresh many times before it once again served up the one I had seen when I first visited. Along the way, one of the quotes I got was this:
Maolsheachlann had put the reference to a Mormon "temple" in Dublin and one to "something about being washed in the blood of Jesus" in the same short paragraph. I had originally only quoted the Mormon bit, but once "washed in the blood" had also become a sync, I added the rest of the paragraph to my quote.
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