The words "success" and "successful" once had broad application to numerous circumstances. Attempting to retrieve a kite from a tree, or a baseball from a roof could be achieved, and the outcome would be called "successful." Now the words almost exclusively apply to gathering the things of this world—power, wealth, prestige, and the pleasures of the flesh—in a large quota, and in a somewhat lasting way—right up to the moment of death.
The scriptures speak of a man who had obtained all these things, everything the world had to offer, and yet he was unsatisfied. We do not even know his name; he was King Lamoni's father, also a king. If I read the record correctly, he was healthy enough to try to kill Lamoni in armed combat. He had a large family, with at least one granddaughter of marriageable age. He was the wealthiest land owner of his day, with thousands of citizens who revered him as their king. People had to come to him to ask permission to build synagogues. He held feasts with his family (I recall the 4th of July picnics of my youth, and cannot imagine the food he served was any better, though the setting and dishes were probably far more expensive and opulent). This man had every physical thing this world has to offer, and yet he was dissatisfied, a grouch by all outward evidence. He came close to murdering his own son. What was missing in his life?
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Lamoni was missing what we all long for, whether we know it or not—to bask in the glory and presence of our Heavenly Father. The absence of that glory is, I believe, the source of much emptiness and undefinable longing we experience here in this life, and people shovel into their systems vast amounts of stimuli (like drugs or sex or noisy music) and vain groping for glory and praise, along with seeking for power, all in the attempt to fill that emptiness. The attempt itself kills the sensitivity necessary to even enjoy the stimulus; "habituation" is the clinical term for such numbness. Elder Neal A. Maxwell captures the idea with his characteristically clear and eloquent turn of phrase: "Brothers and sisters, the cast of players on this planet for whom the revelations and translations are so pertinent includes those who, in that familiar phrase, are living “lives of quiet desperation” (see Henry David Thoreau, Walden [1965], 7). They have now been joined by those living lives of noisy, slurping indulgence, wrongly celebrating their capacity to feel so that they finally lose their capacity to feel and become “past feeling” (see Moro. 9:20; Eph. 4:19; 1 Ne. 17:45). Hence they lick their particular platters in a desperate search for more sensations" (How Choice a Seer!, Oct. 2003 General Conference).
So keen was that feeling in Lamoni's father that he was willing to part with everything he had accumulated just to experience fullness instead of emptiness. It seems clear to me that the desire, hope for, and anticipation of the things of this world is more enjoyable than actually receiving them. (Recall childhood—Christmas morning is something of a letdown after the weeks of buildup.)
Are the things of this world a complete loss, then? Far from it: "And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it" (Mosiah 4:21). The Book of Mormon also contains numerous reiterations of the promise that those who keep the commandments will be prospered in the land. "Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul" (D&C 59:18-19). The Doctrine and Covenants takes us millions of miles away from the apostate creeds of Christianity: "For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy" (93:33-34). Jesus returned from the grave, not as an intangible ghost, but having "flesh and bone" (Luke 24:39). He was not only handled by His followers, he also ate fish and honeycomb to prove His physical resurrection.
The scriptures speak of a man who had obtained all these things, everything the world had to offer, and yet he was unsatisfied. We do not even know his name; he was King Lamoni's father, also a king. If I read the record correctly, he was healthy enough to try to kill Lamoni in armed combat. He had a large family, with at least one granddaughter of marriageable age. He was the wealthiest land owner of his day, with thousands of citizens who revered him as their king. People had to come to him to ask permission to build synagogues. He held feasts with his family (I recall the 4th of July picnics of my youth, and cannot imagine the food he served was any better, though the setting and dishes were probably far more expensive and opulent). This man had every physical thing this world has to offer, and yet he was dissatisfied, a grouch by all outward evidence. He came close to murdering his own son. What was missing in his life?
As I have pointed out elsewhere, Lamoni was missing what we all long for, whether we know it or not—to bask in the glory and presence of our Heavenly Father. The absence of that glory is, I believe, the source of much emptiness and undefinable longing we experience here in this life, and people shovel into their systems vast amounts of stimuli (like drugs or sex or noisy music) and vain groping for glory and praise, along with seeking for power, all in the attempt to fill that emptiness. The attempt itself kills the sensitivity necessary to even enjoy the stimulus; "habituation" is the clinical term for such numbness. Elder Neal A. Maxwell captures the idea with his characteristically clear and eloquent turn of phrase: "Brothers and sisters, the cast of players on this planet for whom the revelations and translations are so pertinent includes those who, in that familiar phrase, are living “lives of quiet desperation” (see Henry David Thoreau, Walden [1965], 7). They have now been joined by those living lives of noisy, slurping indulgence, wrongly celebrating their capacity to feel so that they finally lose their capacity to feel and become “past feeling” (see Moro. 9:20; Eph. 4:19; 1 Ne. 17:45). Hence they lick their particular platters in a desperate search for more sensations" (How Choice a Seer!, Oct. 2003 General Conference).
So keen was that feeling in Lamoni's father that he was willing to part with everything he had accumulated just to experience fullness instead of emptiness. It seems clear to me that the desire, hope for, and anticipation of the things of this world is more enjoyable than actually receiving them. (Recall childhood—Christmas morning is something of a letdown after the weeks of buildup.)
Are the things of this world a complete loss, then? Far from it: "And moreover, I would desire that ye should consider on the blessed and happy state of those that keep the commandments of God. For behold, they are blessed in all things, both temporal and spiritual; and if they hold out faithful to the end they are received into heaven, that thereby they may dwell with God in a state of never-ending happiness. O remember, remember that these things are true; for the Lord God hath spoken it" (Mosiah 4:21). The Book of Mormon also contains numerous reiterations of the promise that those who keep the commandments will be prospered in the land. "Yea, all things which come of the earth, in the season thereof, are made for the benefit and the use of man, both to please the eye and to gladden the heart; Yea, for food and for raiment, for taste and for smell, to strengthen the body and to enliven the soul" (D&C 59:18-19). The Doctrine and Covenants takes us millions of miles away from the apostate creeds of Christianity: "For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy" (93:33-34). Jesus returned from the grave, not as an intangible ghost, but having "flesh and bone" (Luke 24:39). He was not only handled by His followers, he also ate fish and honeycomb to prove His physical resurrection.
So the physical aspect of life plays a vital role in realizing our complete happiness. Success, in the ultimate sense, is not to husk the inconvenient flesh, but to tame it to the will of the spirit (see Mosiah 15:1-5).
It would be nice if we could always have both, spiritual joy and physical comfort, but there are times when one is at odds with the other. These are the times when we show whether the spirit or the flesh rules our hearts. I am convinced that to be "like God" (a phrase we often use too casually) means to completely subject the will of the flesh to the will of God, to the Spirit. Jesus is our exemplar in this venture. Throughout His life, but especially in the last hours of His life, He was surrounded by enemies, forsaken by friends, and the Father even temporarily withdrew His sustaining influence. Jesus submitted to all manner of torture, starved and thirsty, drained even of blood. He was stripped of all clothing and material possessions, mocked instead of revered, "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." All we like sheep have gone astray, and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquities of us all." (It is easy to dissociate Jesus' suffering from our sins, but our sins were precisely the reason He went through all that pain.) Jesus was bereft of anything that could be construed as worldly success.
Yet Jesus declared the venture a success: JST Matt. 27:54: "Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, saying, Father, it is finished, thy will is done, yielded up the ghost." Death is the feared and strictly avoided aspect of life, though it is also the only inevitable part. Yet Jesus topped off everything He had suffered up to that point by voluntarily dying for others, for us. Death is easy to contemplate in the abstract, but the few moments of terror in my life when death seemed imminent to me highlight the difficulty entailed by such an act. I remember a specific occasion when I turned left before an oncoming bus; we both wanted to jump through the brief window offered by a passing yellow light. I assumed (wrongly) that the bus was going to stop. I saw a diagram of an underground bunker, a sort of doomsday haven, built for billionaires in distress. "O Lord, I have trusted in thee, and I will trust in thee forever. I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of flesh. Yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm" (2Ne. 4:34).
I want to compare two people whom I admire, at least their views and values with regard to life and death.
Steve Jobs, successful enterpreneur, describes his personal encounter with mortality: "About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan...it clearly showed a tumor...The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening...when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."
He was not "fine:" Steve Jobs died of cancer in his fifties, and undoubtedly had access to the finest medical care available. I am duly impressed by his fortitude and forthrightness in the face of this great threat, to say nothing of his ability to change the world in other ways. He was a success in every worldly sense of the world.
But what about the things that last forever? I am convinced that WE are the products, the gold being refined, while all the good projects we work on, like Temples or computers or anything else, are merely process materials, secondary bits and pieces that will fall away like a mold or scaffolding when the process of becoming is completed. The point of this life is our immortality and eternal life, not to build good, yet impermanent, things.
JST, Luke 9:25: "For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and yet he receive him not whom God hath ordained, and he lose his own soul, and he himself be a castaway?" There is something about clinging to one of these things (the world, or the Savior and our souls) that makes holding onto the other difficult.
Hugh Nibley was a poor college professor; he risked his life on the dirty battlefields of Europe during WWII, and survived numerous close calls. He had no bunker to hide in, no fortress of wealth shielding him from death. Yet he lived to be ninety five years old. Rather than seeking the gross material things of this world, he seemed to tread the path of Abraham: "And, finding there was greater happiness and peace and rest for me, I sought for the blessings of the fathers, and the right whereunto I should be ordained to administer the same; having been myself a follower of righteousness, desiring also to be one who possessed great knowledge, and to be a greater follower of righteousness, and to possess a greater knowledge, and to be a father of many nations, a prince of peace, and desiring to receive instructions, and to keep the commandments of God, I became a rightful heir, a High Priest, holding the right belonging to the fathers" (Abr. 1:2). Hugh Nibley found what he was looking for, it seems. Rather than look for a way to outsmart death, he looked to Christ for a remedy. He tells an imaginary, yet all too real, parable of a successful businessman who confronts his own mortality:
"Imagine, then, a successful businessman who, responding to some slight but persistent physical discomfort and the urging of an importunate wife, pays a visit to a...doctor. ...it is with an unquiet mind that he descends the steps of the clinic with the assurance, gained after long hours of searching examination, that he has about three weeks to live.
"In the days that follow, this man’s thinking undergoes a change, not a slow and subtle change—there is no time for that—but a quick and brutal reorientation. By the time he has reached home on that fateful afternoon, the first shock of the news has worn off, and he is already beginning to see things with strange eyes. As he locks the garage door, his long ambition to own a Cadillac suddenly seems unspeakably puerile to him, utterly unworthy of a rational, let alone an immortal, being. This leads him to the shocking realization, in the hours that follow, that one can be rich and successful in this world with a perfectly barren mind. With shame and alarm he discovers that he has been making a religion of his career. In a flash of insight he recognizes the truth of the old Greek doctrine that seeming and being are two wholly different things, and on his knees discovers that only his Heavenly Father knows him as he is. Abruptly he ceases to care particularly whether anybody thinks he is a good, able, smart, likable fellow or not; after all, he is not trying to sell anyone anything any more.
"Things that once filled him with awe seem strangely trivial, and things, which a few days before did not even exist for him, now fill his consciousness. For the first time he discovers the almost celestial beauty of the world of nature, not viewed through the glass of cameras and car windows, but as the very element in which he lives. Shapes and colors spring before his senses with a vividness and drama of which he never dreamed.
"The perfection of children comes to him like sudden revelation, and he is appalled by the monstrous perversion that would debauch their minds, over stimulate their appetites, and destroy their sensibilities in unscrupulous plans of sales promotion. Everywhere he looks he gets the feeling that all is passing away—not just relatively because he is saying goodbye to a world he has never seen before, but really and truly. He sees all life and stuff about him involved in a huge ceaseless combustion, a literal and apparent process of oxidation which is turning some things slowly, some rapidly, but all things surely to ashes. He wishes he had studied more and pays a farewell visit to some friends at the university where he is quick to discover, with his new powers of discernment, that their professional posturing and intellectual busywork is no road to discovery but only an alley of escape from responsibility and criticism.
"As the days pass...he is visited ever more frequently by memories, memories of astonishing clarity and vividness—mostly from his childhood, and he finds himself at the same time slipping ever more easily into speculations, equally vivid, on the world to come and the future of this world. The limits of time begin to melt and fuse until everything seems present but the present. In a word, his thinking has become eschatological.
"'What has happened to our solid citizen?' his friends ask perplexed. ...he cannot conceal his change of heart. As far as his old associates can see, the poor man has left the world of reality. Parties and gold no longer amuse him. TV and movies disgust him. He takes to reading books, of all things—even the Bible! When they engage him in conversation, he makes very disturbing remarks... He even becomes careless of his appearance, as if he didn’t know that the key to success is to make a good impression on people. As time passes, these alarming symptoms become ever more pronounced. His sales record drops off sharply. Those who know what is good for their future begin to avoid being seen with him... What is wrong with the man?
"...As he...walks the streets, he sees, in the words of Joseph Smith, 'destruction writ large on everything we behold.'
"Now the question arises, has this man been jerked out of reality or into it? Has he cut himself off from the real world or has cruel necessity forced him to look in the face what he was running away from before? Is he in a dream now or has he just awakened from one? Has he become an irresponsible child or has he taken the measure of Vanity Fair? Some will answer one way, some another. But if you want to arouse him to wrathful sermons, just try telling the man that it makes no difference which of these worlds one lives in—that they are equally real to the people who live in them.
"...Our businessman, for example, begins to wonder...What about the hereafter? ...Is there going to be a judgment? He almost panics at the thought, which has never bothered him before because he has been successful...
"To anyone who does not experience it, the view of things is pure myth—an invention of an overwrought mind desperately determined to support its own premises. Only what they fail to consider is that those who have had both views of the world interpret things just the other way around:...only strong and disciplined minds are willing to see things as they are, and even they must be forced to it!...To conclude our parable, what happens to our man of affairs? A second series of tests at the hospital shows that his case was not quite what they thought it was—he may live for many years. Yet he takes the news strangely, for instead of celebrating at a night club or a prize fight as any normal healthy person should, this creature will continue his difficult ways. “This,” he says, “is no pardon. It is but a stay of execution. Soon enough it is going to happen. This situation is not really changed at all.” So he becomes religious, a hopeless case, an eschatological zealot, a Puritan, a monk, a John Bunyan, a primitive Christian, an Essene, a Latter-day Saint. In every age such people...have...paid dearly for their folly" ("Way of the Church," pp. 829-30, 833. Taken from “Of All Things! A Nibley Quote Book” p.60-64).
I am certain that Steve Jobs, as well as numerous other telestial innovators, have played a divinely decreed role in establishing technology on the earth. I wish I had more of that vitality and drive. But who FEELS successful when they cross the finish line of death? Who looks back at their dead body without remorse, and looks upward, hopeful about their future? Who can look Jesus in the face, unashamed and happy? That, to me at least, would constitute ultimate success.
