Temple Recommend Quotes

He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn't tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn't tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn't recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn't say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside.

Everyone contributed to this legend except Phineas. At the outset, with the attempt on Hitler’s life, Finny had said, “If someone gave Leper a loaded gun and put it at Hitler’s temple, he’d miss.” There was a general shout of outrage, and then we recommended the building of Leper’s triumphal arch around Brinker’s keystone. Phineas took no part in it, and since little else was talked about in the Butt Room he soon stopped going there and stopped me from going as well—”How do you expect to be an athlete if you smoke like a forest fire?” He drew me increasingly away from the Butt Room crowd, away from Brinker and Chet and all other friends, into a world inhabited by just himself and me, where there was no war at all, just Phineas and me alone among all the people of the world, training for the Olympics of 1944.

Young sisters, be modest. Modesty in dress and language and deportment is a true mark of refinement and a hallmark of a virtuous Latter-day Saint woman. Shun the low and the vulgar and the suggestive. . . . Don’t see R-rated movies or vulgar videos or participate in any entertainment that is immoral, suggestive, or pornographic. And don’t accept dates from young men who would take you to such entertainment. . . . Also, don’t listen to music that is degrading. . . . Instead, we encourage you to listen to uplifting music, both popular and classical, that builds the spirit. Learn some favorite hymns from our new hymnbook that build faith and spirituality. Attend dances where the music and the lighting and the dance movements are conducive to the Spirit. Watch those shows and entertainment that lift the spirit and promote clean thoughts and actions. Read books and magazines that do the same. Remember, young women, the importance of proper dating. President Kimball gave some wise counsel on this subject: “Clearly, right marriage begins with right dating. . . . Therefore, this warning comes with great emphasis. Do not take the chance of dating nonmembers, or members who are untrained and faithless. A girl may say, ‘Oh, I do not intend to marry this person. It is just a “fun” date.’ But one cannot afford to take a chance on falling in love with someone who may never accept the gospel” (The Miracle of Forgiveness, pp. 241–42). Our Heavenly Father wants you to date young men who are faithful members of the Church, who will be worthy to take you to the temple and be married the Lord’s way. There will be a new spirit in Zion when the young women will say to their boyfriends, “If you cannot get a temple recommend, then I am not about to tie my life to you, even for mortality!” And the young returned missionary will say to his girlfriend, “I am sorry, but as much as I love you, I will not marry out of the holy temple.

The single book that has influenced me most is probably the last book in the world that anybody is gonna want to read: Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is dense, difficult, long, full of blood and guts. It wasn’t written, as Thucydides himself attests at the start, to be easy or fun. But it is loaded with hardcore, timeless truths and the story it tells ought to be required reading for every citizen in a democracy. Thucydides was an Athenian general who was beaten and disgraced in a battle early in the 27-year conflagration that came to be called the Peloponnesian War. He decided to drop out of the fighting and dedicate himself to recording, in all the detail he could manage, this conflict, which, he felt certain, would turn out to be the greatest and most significant war ever fought up to that time. He did just that. Have you heard of Pericles’ Funeral Oration? Thucydides was there for it. He transcribed it. He was there for the debates in the Athenian assembly over the treatment of the island of Melos, the famous Melian Dialogue. If he wasn’t there for the defeat of the Athenian fleet at Syracuse or the betrayal of Athens by Alcibiades, he knew people who were there and he went to extremes to record what they told him.Thucydides, like all the Greeks of his era, was unencumbered by Christian theology, or Marxist dogma, or Freudian psychology, or any of the other “isms” that attempt to convince us that man is basically good, or perhaps perfectible. He saw things as they were, in my opinion. It’s a dark vision but tremendously bracing and empowering because it’s true. On the island of Corcyra, a great naval power in its day, one faction of citizens trapped their neighbors and fellow Corcyreans in a temple. They slaughtered the prisoners’ children outside before their eyes and when the captives gave themselves up based on pledges of clemency and oaths sworn before the gods, the captors massacred them as well. This was not a war of nation versus nation, this was brother against brother in the most civilized cities on earth. To read Thucydides is to see our own world in microcosm. It’s the study of how democracies destroy themselves by breaking down into warring factions, the Few versus the Many. Hoi polloi in Greek means “the many.” Oligoi means “the few.” I can’t recommend Thucydides for fun, but if you want to expose yourself to a towering intellect writing on the deepest stuff imaginable, give it a try.

Humans are very strange creatures, unconscious too, dominated by mechanics that are hidden in front of their eyes. They call you wrong when you quote their own books, completely oblivious to the fact you may have been the author, even when they claim to believe in reincarnation. They always think their interpretation of reality is more right than that of others, even when you use their own books to explain their mistakes. If you tell them you write books of a spiritual nature, they may call you a liar if you don't match their deductions on what spirituality is. If you don't tell them you write books, they will in many cases recommend you to do it, because of how you speak, even though your speaking is the result of a mental training accumulated with the exercise of writing. If you tell them that you want to write a book, however, they may laugh and tell you it's a waste of time. If you love someone, she will lose interest and if you don't, she will want to know why. If you teach inside a classroom or a temple, people listen to you, but if you speak outside these two places they don't, unless they want something from you. They call you selfish if you don't give them what they want, but act selfishly when you ask the same from them. They don't want to be lied to but lie to others, and they don't want to be afraid but enjoy being in control. They talk about injustices but never apologize. When you are near they ignore you, and when you disappear they remember you. They say life is about luck but they create their own luck every day.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resort. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night. Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana--epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments--the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. It wasn't all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance. As In Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup; their movements, too, were stylized and "unnatural." It began to sink in that this kind of "presentational" theater has more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance that traditional Western theater did. I was struck by other peripheral aspects of these performances. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren't paying attention half the time. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over. The Balinese "shows" were completely integrated into people's daily lives, or so it seemed to me. There was no attempt to formally separate the ritual and the show from the audience. Everything seemed to flow into everything else. The food, the music, and the dance were all just another part of daily activity. I remembered a story about John Cage, who, when in Japan, asked someone what their religion was. The reply was that they didn't have a strict religion--they danced. Japanese do, of course, have Buddhist and Shinto rituals for weddings, funerals, and marriages, but a weekly thing like going to church or temple doesn't exist. The "religion" is so integrated into the culture that it appears in daily gestures and routines, unsegregated for ordinary life. I was beginning to see that theatricality wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was part of life in much of the world, and not necessarily phony either.

Krishna told Arjuna that Veda’s (holy rules) can guide a person to reach the demigods (Sun, moon, other forms of gods) and to get a good life, however the one who has attained the Yogic state is not pleased with them  nor impressed by the power it gives. He who is in Yogic state can control the senses and still be living a normal life. When he meets the supreme power, he also loses the worldly interests and reaches the god without any obstacles. For that yogic person, Veda’s serve no purpose. "Our Life: We have seen, most of us don’t understand Veda’s clearly and their purpose. There are few, who has learnt Veda’s, but I am not including them here... Most of us do lots of ceremonies/rituals in our house/temple without knowing the purpose, but with the belief it’s god's language or ceremony and he will be pleased with that. We always forget, that solely thinking about him in our mind/heart and perform our duty, will please him more than anything! But the truth is, we believe rituals alone will bring peace and harmony to us and our kin. How untrue this is! We also see, there are some VIP's/rich people who enter in to temple/church/mosque and get high priority for them and get some recommendations from the priests and they think that god has blessed them. God is equal of every living being here and no need of any mediator here (the concept of Guru is different) and the importance given to them is a manual happening and it’s not from god. The first thing, believe your god is knowledgeable. Don’t think he can be fooled! Similarly we see some temples/churches/mosques getting high donations; I am sure more the money comes from Sin and as part of the share for the Sin. We believe God will reduce our punishment, if we give him some share :)

We just walked into the bishop's office, flung our temple recommends on his desk and told him we worshipped Satan now. A good man, he recognized the subtle signs of nursery burn out and agreed to give us new church jobs.

I ask about Temple Grandin, since she understands modern agriculture and Smithfield has hired her for consultation. She advices extra space so the animals can turn around, "soft, pliable" objects to chew on, and toys so they can play. She's a Ph. D too. Yet to all appearances, Smithfield has put none of her recommendations into practice. "Temple, he replies, "is a person that we pay to come in and say, 'How is the best way to deal with these animals?' We seek that advice. We pay those people." Exactly. They pay animal-welfare consultants for the privilege of saying that they have paid for animal-welfare consultants, without actually heeding any of the recommendations.

I recommend that you begin with short ten-minute meditation periods, once or twice a day, and over several weeks gradually lengthen your meditation periods to twenty-five minutes, even if you can only find time to do this once a day. Even for an experienced meditator, it often takes ten or fifteen minutes to really settle into a meditative state, and so it is not surprising that the minimum length of time for a meditation period in temples and monasteries is usually twenty-five minutes.

Shakyamuni Buddha recommended that his monks plant and see to the care of five trees during their lifetimes. Throughout the Buddhist world the practice of reforestation and revegetation has been followed around many temples and monasteries.

Hidden history of the turf,’ Harry said. ‘Commissioner called Happy Henry Carmody. Happy shot through on a big punter, Baby Martinez, came from Manila, Hawaii, somewhere like that, got into a few duels with the books. Silly bugger, really. Happy did a bit of work for him, came highly recommended too. Then one Satdee Happy had a kitbag of notes owed to Baby, thought bugger it, Baby’s just some dago’ll cop it sweet, go home and weep under the palm trees.

between 321 and 300 B.C., recommended that ambassadors use cryptanalysis to obtain intelligence: “If there is no possibility of carrying on any such conversation (conversation with the people regarding their loyalty), he [the envoy] may try to gather such information by observing the talk of beggars, intoxicated and insane persons, or of persons babbling in sleep, or by observing the signs made in places of pilgrimage and temples, or by deciphering paintings or secret writings.