This post mentions some details from Severance (mostly season one, with one brief observation from season two). You may prefer to read after watching to avoid spoilers! 

A premortal “outie”

Latter-day Saint religion teaches that each human was an individual, conscious being before birth–that we had past selves in the spiritual realm and made decisions to be born on earth. Leaders have also taught that premortal performance plays a role in determining what kind of life and blessings we receive at birth. These teachings have been passed down to the young people of the Church through sacrament meeting talks, Sunday school lessons, and firesides. Personalized revelation about our premortal selves can be offered through priesthood blessings, esp. patriarchal blessings, which serve as a kind of life map.

I’m not interested here in addressing whether these ideas are literally true. They are mysterious possibilities they may or may not be affirmed by study and spiritual experience. But I’m curious about how these teachings impact our spiritual lives, including our sense of self, our relationships with God and others, and our overall well-being. 

I’ve been watching Severance (Apple TV). In this world, workers at a company called “Lumon” have opted into having a procedure done to their brains such that they have become “severed” into two separate selves: a “outie,” who lives at home, remembers their birth, family, and all their life prior to working at Lumon, and a new “innie” self who has no memories outside of what happens at work, and who is essentially stuck at the office, only experiencing hours spent at Lumon.

This serves as an interesting analogy for the two selves outlined in LDS teachings. Like the outie, the premortal self has a fuller range of memories, and makes a major decision that requires the mortal self to accomplish something arduous. Like the innie, the mortal self has no memory of having made this decision and their experiences are limited to what happens due to the decision.

There are benefits that can come with teachings about the premortal life or having an “outie,” esp. during our formative years. Trusting in these teachings, young people may enthusiastically say, There’s a reason I’m here, and I chose this! I’m special to God, and I had gifts and a personality even before I was born! Yet, do the benefits continue as we grow older and continue to spiritually develop?

Hazards of ulterior motives

I grew up with a strong sense of my premortal outie. She was hardcore and bold. She fought bravely on God’s side in the war in heaven. If you grew up LDS, you were likely told similar things about your premortal self. I don’t share these descriptors here to mock them. This view of myself helped me in many ways. In fact, it is one reason I became someone who has the courage to post on this blog. Yet, as a middle-aged person, I am concerned about how premortal merit may be used in the Church (whether intentionally or not) to influence behavior and beliefs. To me this seems like quite a hazard and easy trap to fall into.

In Severance, Lumon subdues workers by telling them flattering compliments about their outies. When Irving suffers from truth-telling nightmares about Lumon, he is administered a wellness treatment in which bizarre “facts” are read to him about his outside self that are designed to appeal to personal fantasy. “Your outie is an exemplary person,” wellness worker Ms. Casey explains as she introduces the treatment, “These facts should be very pleasing.” She goes to share: “Your outie is a friend to children, and to the elderly, and to the insane. Your outie is strong and helps someone lift a heavy object. Your outie attends many dances and is popular among the other attendees…A photo of your outie with a trophy was once in a newspaper. Your outie has no fear of buggers or knaves…Your outie is skilled at kissing and lovemaking.”

These things may or may not be true about outie Irving. The problem is that Lumon uses these claims about Irving’s outie to motivate him to do things their way. It’s also a red flag that many of the “facts” are inappropriately intimate; we sense that seduction rather than wellness is the true intention. These are things Irving should discover for himself rather than be told by his employer. The compliments are meant to distract him from his growing malaise, and to keep him in a stagnant, passive state of trust in the company.

We should be mindful of the danger of ulterior motives any time people try to tell us they know things about our spirits or premortal selves. Recently, I listened to something called “The Dream Interpretation Podcast” looking for support making sense of a dream. I became uncomfortable when I realized the hosts teach listeners that the content of their dreams provide strong evidence that they are reincarnating beings. They claim listeners’ specific dreams reveal very detailed things about their spirits, premortal pasts, and futures. They appear to do this without acknowledging listeners’ spiritual worldviews or making space for what others believe. I found the imposition of this very personal spiritual material boundary violating and paternalistic. How much are intriguing pre-life details divulged in hopes of selling courses, programs, and books?

It may very well be true that we lived with God before this life and that teaching this can help people, but if this concept is to be taught, motives should be conscious and pure. Shaping behavior or trying to cement religious loyalty through flattery, ego puffing, or creating a elite “in” group is not loving or edifying. Teachings should inspire awe and compassion for creation rather than pride or superiority. How much has premortal-based flattery at church slowed down growth and distracted us from the real spiritual work in our lives?

Any efforts to use premortal life as a persuasion tactic to convince children and converts that they fully opted into a Latter-day Saint life before birth are sketch. Like at Lumon, the message “you chose this path before you came here, but you just don’t remember,” proves unethical (see section below entitled, “Resenting and questioning our premortal outies’ choices“).

The flattery aimed at Irving works to keep Irving in a more child-like, dependent state for quite a while; he enters a very pleasurable state of mind during the wellness session. Yet eventually, dissonance with Lumon causes him to grow out of being satiated by fantasies about who he is on the outside world. We may experience something similar at Church as pressing issues in our personal lives make the importance of life before and after mortality fade into the background.

It is not necessarily an advantage to have an outie who was a boss

Another hazard of being taught your outie was a spiritual overachiever at Church is how this may be used to set high expectations. Was your outie super faithful, hardworking and brave? Even just to maintain who you are, you are expected to measure up to this, and this can feed perfectionism and self-criticism. To what degree have we been needlessly hard on ourselves due to trying to live up to the versions of ourselves described in patriarchal blessings or firesides we attended as teens? Have we resented or been jealous of our past iterations of ourselves that we have no memory of?

What if I’m a very different person from my outie?

What if it turns out we are radically different as humans than we were as spirits in the premortal life–if our personalities and behaviors changed in ways that made us almost unrecognizable? In Severance, innie Helly R. is a dramatically different person than her outie, and not in negative ways. At the beginning of season 2 (as far as I’ve gotten while writing this), Helena appears to be very intrigued by and jealous of Helly’s uninhibited ways. Her innie is free to develop her own values and personality without pressures from her dynastic, controlling family. Helly R., for example, spontaneously kisses her co-worker Mark as they go their separate ways on a daring adventure to the outside world. Helena watches this moment over and over as if she’s obsessed with this other version of herself. It’s like a soap opera about her alter-ego that feeds personal fantasy. Perhaps Helena has never loved someone the way Helly R. has learned to do.

I feel pretty different from my “outie” sometimes. While she seems to have been some kind of a fierce warrior, I am naturally shy and struggle with things like driving anxiety. And while she badly wanted to be born into the Church, I feel ambivalent about whether this same Church is really good for my soul as well as whether it actually cares about me, my development or my well-being. And ironically, the Church I’m in also doesn’t actually seem to like or tolerate women who are hardcore, brave, fighting spiritual warriors.

Yet is it possible that if my outie could see me now, she’s the one who would be impressed? Despite the fact that I may appear weaker or less confident about things than my outie, what makes sense to me at this point is that I am actually wiser, stronger, and more informed now than I was then. Theoretically speaking, we should be more developed people than we were in the premortal life because we’ve surmounted all kinds of things they didn’t have to face. Maybe we’re meant to become very different than we once were, and maybe sometimes we need to give ourselves permission to become so or to let go of the things we were told about our past selves. It’s unfortunate premortal narratives are so centered on a war between God’s children and the people coming to earth being the ones who won this. Is this really good for us to identify with? I’m not very interested in warring over religion or spiritual approaches, it feels like the real skill set I need and want is being a compassionate peacemaker.

Hazards of being taught we earned a Latter-day Saint Life in the premortal life

I grew up being taught that my premortal self’s valiance is the reason I was born into a family with the restored gospel. Today, I am troubled by the idea that I somehow earned a more advantageous life than others. Earning the blessing of being born in the Church seems equivalent with earning a middle class life in the US and all the social and economic privileges that comes with that. These ideas are conducive to feeling guilt and pity toward others instead of gratitude or love. It’s comparable to my least favorite aspect of Hindu thinking: a spiritually-based social caste system. The idea that superior performances in past lives lead to greater privilege, comfort, and choices here and now can lead to all kinds of social inequalities and vices to avoid.

A LDS meritocratic view of the premortal life implies God enhances inequity in the world–that God places weaker souls in circumstances in which they are even less likely to succeed, and gives yet more advantage to those already thriving. Like Adam Miller in Original Grace, I seek faith in a God who provides what is needed for healing and progression for all, rather than who doles out justice through assigning deprivation or suffering.

Resenting and questioning our premortal outies’ choices

Sometimes we might experience tensions with our outies’ choices to come to earth. This came to the forefront for me a few years ago when a child at my son’s school died in an accident. A familial wound awoke in me. My six-year-old aunt was killed by a speeding car in Utah in the 60s, and this chance event has created many painful ripples in my family. I became angry at God as I grappled with the realization that the same exact kind of event could easily happen to my own children. I didn’t feel capable of facing the grief that would follow such a death. I wanted to scream at God that I wanted out of this life, that I regretted my choice, and that this whole plan was manipulative. I wondered who that premortal self was to throw me into such a fragile and grief-filled world (I wrote this essay about spiritual experiences surrounding this for Wayfare). 

A comparable dilemma is portrayed in Severance season one. Newly severed worker Helly R. instantly becomes despairing in her new life, which presents her with very limiting conditions that she is not allowed to control. Helly R. asserts she shouldn’t have to live out the decisions of her “outie,” Helena, who never asked her consent. Helly makes a request to be released from her work at Lumon that her outie quickly denies. Helly threatens to cut her fingers off with a paper cutter and even attempts suicide, but Helena stays firm.

Helly doesn’t have a choice; she has to live with the situation she finds herself thrown into. Steven Peck has pointed out that Helly’s narrative arc calls LDS theology into question. Is it possible, he asks, that premortal decisions prove problematic or void since we couldn’t really understand what it would be like to experience earth life? “In coming to Earth under these conditions,” he writes, “has something manipulative and unsettling occurred?

Premortal frameworks are used to try to resolve the problem of evil and suffering in LDS thought. Opening the possibility that human spirits are co-eternal with God certainly is interesting when grappling with the problem of evil (the question of why evil exists/why God allows suffering). But to what extent do teachings about the premortal life only complicate such difficulties rather than resolve them? As Peck asks, what does it mean that God asks us to choose to be born on earth when we couldn’t know for ourselves what it would actually be like until we arrived?

It’s healthy to explore the fact we usually experience life as if we’ve been thrown into it

LDS premortal life frameworks tend to conceal and diminish the fact that practically speaking, we don’t experience life as if we chose to come here or ever lived before. We really can feel like we’ve been thrown here without choosing it, much like Helly R. when she begins her life splayed out on a conference room table, having no memory or sense of who she is. Recognizing this for myself is helping me work through my ambivalence and concerns about the things I was taught about the premortal life growing up.

Interesting questions and meanings can open up if we’re willing to embrace the fact that we experience life as if we find ourselves here by surprise whether we believe in a premortal life or not. Doing this might help us experience life more as a grace or mysterious gift rather than a burden or something we take we granted. It might also help us lower high expectations for ourselves and break down walls we’ve put up against others.

It would be healthier for everyone to make space for uncertainty about the premortal life at Church instead of encouraging young people to treat this as a crucial point or a point of pride. It is not necessarily an important part of the gospel to have faith in or focus on, and the hazards it brings are reason for caution. Ultimately, we don’t know much at all about what happened before this life and we have very few scriptures about it. If young people resonate with it and it genuinely helps them, great, but if they don’t, we should probably just not worry about it. We need to do a better job of making space at Church for people at Church to do their own personal meaning-making. Members of all ages should be given more space to explore and develop their spiritual identities and attributes themselves rather than having them fed or dictated to them.

Watch for part 2 tomorrow, “Tensions with our Past Orthodox ‘Innies’: Thoughts in Dialogue with Severance”.