Premeditatio Malorum

 Dear Jordan,

"Pray then like this: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.'"

I don’t know if it’s a failure of memory, my attention span, the LDS church’s curriculum writers, or the adults in my ward, but my only childhood recollection of the Lord’s prayer coming up in a theological context is adults complaining about how other types of Christians use the verses to justify saying “rote prayers” without really explaining to me how or why that’s a misinterpretation. The divine significance of Jesus’s words here were never quite communicated to me.

The result of this, amongst other things, was a rather toxic relationship with prayer. As a teenager my prayers would be incredibly short because I didn’t really know what to say. The things I wanted were either trivial, so I wouldn’t ask for them, or were not given to me, such as a visceral manifestation of the Holy Spirit. I also felt totally incapable of feeling a connection to God. Prayer became something short, something done out of obligation because it was the right thing to do. I tried to follow Paul’s call to “pray without ceasing,” but while I felt connected to something while I was doing so, the emotions I’d feel were always various forms of discomfort and anxiety.

I know that you’ve been experiencing significant discomfort and anxiety lately, and I’m sorry that there is no apparent solution for your troubles. I know you know the feeling of knowing that a loved one is going through trouble, desperately wanting to fix the issue, but knowing there’s literally nothing you can do. I’m sure that feeling is a contributing factor to your current negative experience. I’m writing this due to your expressed interest in studies and work I’ve done which has helped me overcome and/or alleviate these sorts of emotions.

After beginning my “real” spiritual journey as an adult I sought to rectify my broken relationship with prayer. This was done largely through experiment: I’ve put myself into trance states, I’ve done forms of meditation from several practices, I’ve cast spells while connecting to ~The Universe~, and I’ve even tried to bow my head and address our Father in Heaven from time to time. Whenever I’ve gotten the opportunity to explore some sort of strange or new way to communicate with Heaven I have taken it. This has led to some ~Love and Light~ and some pretty intense darkness, but I, knowing the risk, have charged straight into it all as experience is the best teacher.

One of the biggest dangers I’ve faced in my experiments with prayer has been the sin of over specificity. By, without realizing it at the time, demanding something of God instead of being open to His plans. Allow me to share two examples: the first will be an example of a bad way I’ve practiced prayer, the second will be an example of a good way I’ve practiced prayer.

First, and I’m only sharing this example because it’s the funniest possible one, I definitely prayed to get laid. It was much deeper and connected than how it sounds, but that was essentially what I was looking for. Early in the sine wave phase of Celeste and mine’s relationship I had decided, rather temporarily as it turns out, to let her go and focus on dating other women. However, (I have spent five minutes trying to write the rest of this story and there’s no way for me to not sound like a dumbass, which I guess is the point) I really had no desire to sleep around with just anyone given how I’m such a refined gentleman. I very specifically requested, of the King of All Time and Space, that I get to sleep with someone who I love, respect, and feel attraction to.

It turns out there aren’t a lot of people that can describe, and I hadn’t really thought that fact through, because the drive I put out led me right back to Celeste and us having sex far too early for either of us. I was still working on whatever was pushing me to be with someone who couldn’t stabilize with me for me than two weeks. She was figuring out some very big questions in her own life, including things causing that instability. Our earlier sexual experiences led to some intense emotional backlash and pain; it wasn’t in the God’s timing.

Second, I recently had an opportunity for a promotion to a full-on supervisory role, I had a rather good shot at getting the job given my status at work and given my history of successes. I worked really hard on preparations for the interview; Celeste was at a job she hated at the time and the raise I’d get would give her the chance to quit without us having to be too worried. That money was going to make a big difference for us! The night before the interview I exercised one of my favorite techniques for petitionary prayer: I organized my desires into a clear intention, I turned that intention into an abstract symbol, and then I placed the symbol on the folder I was using to carry my letters of recommendation. My intention was that I would be placed in a job which would best serve me in acting on my values, values which are oriented towards my spirituality (see my previous post on Aretic Values).

Essentially, I turned to God and said, “Your will be done.” A couple days later I got a call from my director. He told me I didn’t get the job. Not to toot my own horn, but my emotional preparation done via that prayer let me handle the rejection with total grace and confidence that when I did get a new and better job, that it’ll be the one God intends for me. Celeste later told me that seeing how I carried myself in the defeat was the moment she decided to propose to me.

The dichotomy I’m drawing is that making specific requests from God is generally not a good move, while surrendering to His will is generally smart. The question becomes: how do I get into a headspace to allow for that? The answer came from another contemplation technique which is deeply philosophically tied to, “Your will be done,” but specifically originates from the Greek philosophy of Stoicism.

Premeditatio Malorum (PM), which I promise is not a Harry Potter spell, translates to “pre-studying the bad.” Stoics make the claim that the human relationship with the future is often toxic. Instead of trusting God (which they refer to as Logos, a concept Greek Christians tied to Christ right around the era where the most prominent PM writings were drafted), preparing ourselves by becoming more resilient, and then getting ready to adapt to new moments, we make an arrogant attempt at guessing at the future and then trying to control it before it happens. We’re always wrong when we try to do this, and those attempts hold us back from adjusting appropriately when the future actually comes. By practicing PM it is supposed to be possible to leave an anxious relationship with the future and enter a productive, more faithful, relationship with it.

To practice PM one must:

1) Enter into a meditative, contemplative, or prayerful mindset and posture.

2) Consider each negative possibility one has been anxious about, one at a time.

3) Take time to fully accept that negative possibility as being fully possible.

4) Take time to accept that negative possibility as being totally inevitable.

5) Take time to accept that you are prepared to handle that negative possibility.

6) Take time to consider the potential positives which could come from that possibility which you hadn’t thought of before.

7) Continue considering each possibility until you have exhausted the negative potentials.

8) Leave the thoughtful mindset, prepared to act as guided by your Virtue.

This process is designed to get us from demanding a future from God to accepting what He wants.

Not long after our dinner with you, Cianne, and Monique at Taco Taco I found myself in one of the biggest emotional messes of my life. Celeste and I’s relationship was in a precarious place. I cared for her so much and she cared for me, but her priority was not with me and instead with the MLM she was involved in. I was investigating it by going to her meetings, partly out of curiosity and partly out of my unhealthy infatuation for her. It became pretty clear, the more I was exposed, that the business model was toxic, that the company itself was evil, but also that I’d be pretty damn good at roping people in and would probably be more successful than most. I also knew that if I decided to sign up, my chances with Celeste would go up significantly.

I was pretty torn up inside, I felt like I was at a crossroad in my life. Being with Celeste felt like the most important thing in the world to me, other than perhaps holding onto my moral values. Do I decide to work for the scummy company which traps people in a shame cycle so that I could be with the woman I love? Would I ever have a chance to be with her if I didn’t? If not, when would the next time be that I get to experience feelings for someone in that way? It had been so rare for me to be even interested in dating, hence how the previous sex story went, and I didn’t know when the stars would align again.

I decided to turn to my Stoic training. I wasn’t as sure of my Virtue back then as I am now, but I did know that the “What if?”-ing was killing me. I practiced PM, accepted the worst of the worst, and decided to act on my Virtue. I wouldn’t sell out my soul, not for anything. Celeste and I soon broke things off in a terrible fashion, but six months afterwards she came to me in openness and vulnerability, knowing that while I had certainly made mistakes along the way my choice to not join the MLM was the right move. She and I dove deep in conversation about her Virtue and what was important to her, she decided to leave the group, and we started our healthily connected relationship two weeks later.

The practice of PM takes sacrifice. Every time I use it I have to let go of my immature vision of the future. It forces me to accept my place in the universe as someone who is trying his best, but is way too dumb to hold mastery over the world, and who just needs to trust that whatever forces are guiding what happens are doing things Rightly. However, every time I’ve engaged in the practice things have proven to work out as if that faith were placed properly.

To me, the practice of prayer/contemplation/meditation is the practice of altering our judgments. This can be done to align our thoughts more with our Ego, or more with Divinity. I remember, as a kid, being taught that “worshipping idols” isn’t just bowing down to a dope-ass statue of Artemis, but also placing anything else higher up in one’s hierarchy than the Will of God. I have found in my life that allowing my anxieties to run rampant is a form of that, where I am placing my opinion of How Things Should Be over valuing How Things Are, true reality is the only thing even remotely relevant to the Logos. As I continue to experiment more with forms of such alignments (currently I’m practicing a Neoplatonist technique designed to allow people to see into the world of Forms) I’m finding myself getting better and better at using ones that get me closer to the divine.

Outside of the mental training they give us, the truth is that prayer, contemplation, and meditation aren’t particularly special. If we classify them all together, let’s say as prayer, what we see is they are really just a form of thinking and attention which aren’t dramatically different from our normal moment-to-moment thoughts. Anxieties could really just be seen as a prayer to the Ego, as are feelings like frustration and unreflective desire. From this perspective Paul’s request that we always pray is actually easy-peasy. The real challenge, then, is to make sure we’re praying to the right thing as often as we are able. This is what concentrated prayer can train us to do.

My preferences are as follows: 1)the best outcome is that you read this letter and didn’t really need it because your situation is resolved, if not 2)something I’ve written here enriches you or otherwise helps you, if not 3) you find my thoughts and stories to be as charming as they obviously are.

I recently came across an idea from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: there is no such thing as a right or wrong belief, rather, what matters is if our beliefs are helpful or hurtful. While materialistically we live in a cold and uncaring universe, I've found that taking on a spiritual perspective has been immensely helpful and intrinsically valuable. Rather than seeing through a lens of whatever happens to us as meaningless, though sometimes that idea is quite helpful in its own way, interpreting events of my life as being some sort of method of teaching from the universe, a call to learn, has been an immensely helpful belief. While I am not in the business of giving advice, I report my experiences to you as a way of saying, "You are not alone in your struggle, here is what has helped me, I hope my struggles benefit you by the learning I've done, but if not you still have my love and support."

To learning through pain, but not too much.

Love,

Scott Ryan Udall