(January 12, 2021 at 2:23 pm)Nay_Sayer Wrote: Have you ever been in the celestial room?
Yes. Many times. It is the finishing room for an endowment ceremony. Most temples have you move through a curtain into different rooms, starting with the Creation Room and ending through the veil in the Celestial Room. All the rooms are a sort of "classroom" where you sit for a time, listen to an ongoing lecture and explanation of the handshakes and hand signs, watch a couple films about the creation and the garden of eden, get dressed in certain ritual robes and hats, and ritualistically pray at the altar. After you present at the veil of the Terrestrial Room all the handshakes you learned and tell the orderly representing God all their secret names and meanings, he allows you through the curtain and you go to the Celestial room.
The Celestial room usually looks like a lavish, white, beige/cream, silver, and white gold hotel lobby. There is carpet, several chairs and couches, with ornate end tables and white covered Bibles and Book of Mormons at hand, and chandeliers. Sometimes they have mirrors and plants but it is different in different temples. You can only speak in a whisper and they discourage much conversation in this room at all. Most people when they finish an endowment session just leave to go back to the changing rooms. But others, if they came to the temple to be closer to God in his house, will linger here. They will sit and meditate/ponder, and quietly pray over problems in their lives or read scriptures looking for inspiration from the Holy Ghost. And then they eventually leave but there really is no time limit so long as the temple is open.
The ceremony itself is a meat tenderizer for the mind, three hours of ritual, and the Celestial room predictably leaves you feeling "at peace" and numbed.
