When We Come to Ourselves

I've been to bed but I'm up again.  Yet another night with too much on my mind.  My latest panacea for sleeplessness has been reading my currently favorite book.  M. Catherine Thomas' Selected Writings.  In my mind she is spiritually brilliant, humble, hopeful and a truth speaker (as well as seeker).    I thought I would share a few quotes:

From an essay entitled When We Come to Ourselves: 

"Choice is powerfully creative because there are no choices without consequences.  (Alma 41:13)  Each choice increases or decreases the scope of action of an intelligent being.  Our own intelligence was created with full potential to become godlike, but the actual development moves forward by the nature of the choices made."

"...the truth is that we move from dimension to dimension based on what we choose to believe and do.  States of victimization are self-chosen; states of self-libertion are also self-chosen.  We are capable of activating different realities - like degrees of glory - in this life, and depending on the laws we neglect or observe, we ascend toward a state of blessedness which can be tasted in this life, or we descend to a degree of misery, which is very common."

"Our spirit has been encouraging us to face the truth of our divine being for a long time.  It may even have precipitated breakdowns of various kinds in order to press us to that insight.  Even so, we may have buried the demands--or the call to truth--of our spirit in our subconscious, where these truths war with our actual choices.  It is a war to see which spirit, of truth or of lies, will have ascendance in our souls."

"To deny our divinity by our thoughts, words, and behavior is to have to keep lying to ourselves and to others.  To be who we really are is to give a gift to others."

"Until we come to ourselves, we are likely to be self-focused in a negative sense.  We have a lot of energy tied up in trying to establish our own worth and we're missing the coming and going of many higher purposes trying to get our attention.  We free up a lot of energy getting settled on who we are, why we're here, who God is, and how our own choices affect our reality."

Sadly these are just a few extrapolations from a larger whole well worth reading.