"Follow the Spirit" does NOT mean "Distrust all your previous thoughts and feelings"

More stuff I've been thinking about lately: 

There’s lots of talk in the Church, I feel especially lately, of people saying things like “I had plans for myself, like I wanted to be there in that place, but the Lord didn’t want me to.” Or “I didn’t want to go on a mission, but I knew that I should.” Statements like this are oversimplified and convey lack of trust in one's own understanding or desires. It leaves out some crucial information.

Why?
If I don’t trust myself, my feelings, my thoughts, my beliefs, my opinions, my intuition, who is there to trust? God speaks to me through my feelings and thoughts. He doesn’t speak to me in some other language that somehow transcends human understanding. Yes, it's different than what we think and feel when we understand worldly things, but even the greatest testimony from God and taste of celestial glory is communicated to us through our thoughts and feelings and methods of communication that are familiar and somewhat obvious to us.

It can seem like a good teaching strategy early on in a child's religious education to teach them to doubt their thoughts because they are just learning to recognize the Spirit, but later this will bite them in the behind because they will start to doubt their spiritual experiences.

Going back to the original statements:
"I didn’t want to go on a mission, but I knew that I should.”
What does “should” even mean? It means that really, deep down, you did want to go on a mission because you knew that even though it wasn’t all going to be peaches, it would be hard work and it would be worth it. Deep down you had a testimony and you wanted to share the gospel with others despite your shyness or liking the current situation. Talking about doing things against our will implies a culture of doing things all the time that we don't want to do and call me a hippie but I think that is destructive to the concept of a healthy mind.

“I shouldn’t have trusted my own thoughts, I should’ve trusted the Lord”: It's not that you were and are stupid, it means that your thoughts and understanding of the truth changed over time. At one point you thought one thing and had certain plans, but by a series of experiences and step-by-step revelations, the Lord showed you and taught you and gave you a new point of view, a broader, more far-sighted one that helped you realize what choice would be in line with what you truly value.

Sometimes people say “I always have this tendency to go with what I know and what I think in my mind should be right, but I just need to pay attention to what I feel.” Well guess what. The Lord didn’t give you a brain just as a stumbling block. He doesn’t say “I’ll tell you in your heart,” He says “I’ll tell you in your mind and in your heart.” He says “reason it out first in your mind,” and then promises that He’ll give us either a confirmation, a burning in the bosom or in other words, a fiery conviction that what we have reasoned to is true, or He’ll give us reason to doubt what we thought before – new experiences, new thoughts, new information, a new perspective with new priorities; things that we can understand and know and feel. It’s not some mystical, magical, un-understandable, arcane information that we can never hope to fathom in our lifetime.

Probably the most important and correct paragraph in this rant: I bring these things up because I feel that from an early age, learning about revelation, I was taught (or maybe the teaching was good and I just misunderstood) that I should not trust myself or my reasoning or the things that I think are right, but that I should wait for some kind of mystical all-important confirmation from the Lord. The problem is that I didn't know quite what kind of confirmation to look for - event? epiphane? magical transformation? And since I had been taught from an early age to doubt my thoughts and rely on the Lord instead, I also doubted what I thought might have been the Lord, and there is a continual urge to also doubt my past testimony-building spiritual experiences. The Lord talks to us in our own language and we should not second-guess the Spirit. Elder Bednar says "stop worrying about it, just be good boys and good girls, do what you're supposed to, and later you will find that the Lord has guided you."

If you can't trust your own feelings, thoughts, and reasonings, who can you trust? The Lord helps us recognize and understand our thoughts and feelings, not throw them away.

anyways. I guess my goal is to point out what I see as an unfortunate side of LDS (and maybe Christian in general) culture that we try to exalt the Lord and His status and the miracle of communication through His Spirit by debasing and cheapening the miracle of human understanding. We humans are valuable. God calls us not his pets or his toys or even his servants, but his children. We, all 7 billion of us, are imbued with many God-like qualities and I believe we are good at heart. I hope we can remember that.

If you've read this far, I am truly impressed.

Editor's note: I originally posted this on Facebook, and here are some contributions from the comments section:

If you haven't already, you must read Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Divinity School Address." It ought to be canonized. What you've written is an echo of the point he draws across in this short address, with one of his main points being that "intuition cannot be received at secondhand." Also, unfortunately, institutions (including, yes, churches) often pervert divine personal intuition.