At-One-Ment Quotes

“A number of them commented that they couldn’t feel the Spirit there. They said the space felt “pagan” and “dark.” Being an estranged member of the Church and a practicing Buddhist at that time, I felt hurt by the comments. It wasn’t until many years later I was able to articulate that those young students were projecting their own qualities onto that temple. At a deeper level, what I believe they were saying was something like, “I don’t know how to feel the Spirit when I’m outside of my own religious comfort zone.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“Let me put it in more stark terms. If the state of our everyday mind is one of chronic distractedness and a predisposition to focus on, even obsess over, problems and negative mind states, how much choice do we really have in life? Mind training is profoundly humbling because it reveals, with increasing clarity, how much of the time we’re not in choice, not free to choose at all. In the restored gospel, I think we rightly emphasize the importance of agency above other virtues. What we don’t pay enough attention to is the spectrum of agency we all occupy. That is, when our eye is single, our mind unified, we can intentionally respond to life with greater choice. However, in other moments, when we’re fragmented and bent on avoiding our own discomfort, we act compulsively, with little choice at all.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“Working out new ideas, concepts, hypotheses in a methodical, linear fashion is an indispensable part of human growth and becoming. But if all we have is the thinking mind—no openness to the heart, to the body’s knowing, to awareness itself—the mind tends to loop on itself, driving endless circles on well-worn lanes. We get stuck in the mind’s traffic jams and can never find an exit that will take us to the beach.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“When we are willing to travel without “light or guide”—that is, the conventional support of intellectual understanding—a knowing beyond any understanding burns within us.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“One way of understanding Christ’s teaching is that the hunger and thirst in each of us is already a manifestation of Divine Grace living through us. This presence of Grace means that as you engage in the process of transformation, you can relax in a way that perhaps you’ve never let yourself relax. It means that right now, already, always now, you can be One with the very Love that you seek.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“Said another way, our relationship to time is a direct reflection of our relationship to Eternity. If we can’t accept Eternity on its own terms right now, who says we’re going to be able to accept it later? We run the risk of continually rejecting the Glory of Now, wrongly supposing that a more agreeable now will come later. It will not. Or if it does, what is agreeable to us then will at some point become disagreeable again, and we will never get off the merry-go-round of misery, perpetually waiting for conditions to change in our favor.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity

“by paying attention to how we pay attention, we can transform beyond what we imagined was possible.”
― Thomas Wirthlin McConkie, At One Ment: Embodying the Fullness of Human-Divinity