“I can see nothing,” said I, handing it back to my friend.
“On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.” (Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson from, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle“, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)
In my last post I wrote about the Ark, the Veil, and the Deep. I described the “Deep” as a fearsome place go to, and that, “The deep is a code word or metaphor of what lies beyond the veil. To venture into the deep is to drink generously of the waters of revelation and receive from the treasure house of heaven that is the Holy Spirit, or mind of God.” I should have also said that the deep is the mystery and knowledge of all things. In Doctrine and Covenants 88:6-13, the Lord reveals to Joseph Smith how Christ comprehended everything and descended below all things in order that he could become all things, the Light of Truth. The Lord describes the light of Christ and how it permeates everything: “Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space– The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God who sitteth upon his throne, who is in the bosom of eternity, who is in the midst of all things.” We think of the deep as dark, but Christ describes it as Light!
The deep is a fearsome place to us because to venture there is to experience the absolute truth of things, which can be fearful and strange to the human mind. Light shines and reveals what is hidden in the dark. The author of Job writes, “He discovereth deep things out of darkness, and bringeth out to light the shadow of death.” (Job 12:22) In our minds, in the way we think, some knowledge is relegated to the category of darkness because we are like the Isrealites described by Isaiah whose hearts were fat, their ears were heavy, and their eyes were shut, and chose not to comprehend it, so it remains dark to them and to us (Isaiah 6:9-10). Some things we are told are mysteries and it is not meant for humans to know. Rubbish! The fact was the Isrealites heard and saw many things exposed from the deep, but understood not because they chose not to understand; they “perceive not”. The deep is a fearsome place because it utterly changes one’s perspective. If you have invested all your time and efforts in making a place for yourself in this world, by learning the rules that dictate how to get ahead, you don’t want to give that up. Also, perhaps, the deep is fearsome to us because all of our transgressions and weaknesses are laid before us in all their truth. There is an intense existential fear of the unknown, especially if it has the potential of exposing you and changing your belief system.
The Deep is the mind of God. It surrounds us, it permeates all existence, and we move through it, existing like a fish in the medium of water, but unaware. It is the matrix, if you will, that lies just beyond our perception, that orchestrates things, influences events and thought. It is the substance of faith. I suppose you could say that the deep is a place, but not in the sense that you have to travel to it like you would board a train or airplane to get there. It is more a state of mind or spirit, a dimension that co-exists with our own, but we have been shut off from experiencing it. The idea that you have to enter an ark to travel there is only a symbol, a thought device to explain to our finite minds something that is difficult to grasp. The immensity of space is a fearsome concept that the human mind has a difficulty grasping. How long is eternity? How far is infinite space? If the universe is finite, what is beyond that? The mind shudders at such questions and answers.
Christ tells us how to access the deep, the light and knowledge that remains hidden from the world. In a more detailed telling of the Saviors conversation with Nicodemus in “The Testimony of John” John writes this:
“There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, who was in darkness and came to visit with Jesus. He sought wisdom from Jesus and said, Enlightened heavenly guide, some of us know you have descended from the High Council of Heaven because signs confirm you have authority from God. Jesus answered and said to him, In the name of Father Ahman I testify there is a new dispensation begun. You must accept the ordinances of this new Light or you cannot hope to progress to know God.”
“Nicodemus said to him, If I believe this, can I ascend in this life, or will it be accomplished only in the afterlife? Jesus answered, In the name of Father Ahman I say to you, Except you receive the ordinance of baptism to join the new dispensation, and thereby forsake your sins and receive forgiveness and an outpouring of the Spirit, you will not ascend to God’s presence in this life or the life to come.“ (Testimony of John 2:1-2)
Christ spells it out: 1) receive baptism into the new dispensation (covenant) 2) Repent and 3) receive baptism of fire. If this is accomplished then the doors or gates to the treasure house of knowledge and light will be opened to you. The Savior continues:
“All who are devoted to the ambitions of the flesh remain imprisoned by the flesh, and those who are born anew through the ordinances, receive the Spirit of Truth, and are able to know the record of Heaven by the Spirit of Truth. Do not question if what I say is true because the Spirit of Truth confers light, knowledge, and understanding of the mysteries of Heaven within every soul who receives it.“
Nicodemus questions what the Lord is telling him and Christ explains why it is so difficult to enter into the path and obtain access to the Holy Spirit and eternal life. These words are just as apt to our condition as they were to Nicodemus and the Jewish mindset.
“…you who lead Israel fight against it and you refuse to humble yourselves. If I offered you a position of respect and authority, as you now hold, you would believe. But because I testify only of heavenly things that require faith and sacrifice, you refuse to believe? I tell you, if you want to ascend to the Heavenly Council, you must first acknowledge and give heed to the messengers sent by them.“
Here is Nicodemus’ problem with accepting what Christ is telling him- he loves the world too much. The two worlds, the mortal physical world and the spiritual one do not integrate well. You can understand the one but not the other, because they are so diametrically opposite in the laws of physics that govern how they work. You can travel instantaneously in the spirit world, but not in this world. Existence is eternal in the spirit world, not here. All knowledge and truth is accessible to you in the “deep”, but this world is filled with deception, half truths, and lies, mingled with scripture. Those who are comfortable with the way things are in this world will not be at ease in the spirit world.
The Nature of Our World
During the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe there was a philosophical discussion about the nature of existence. How can we be sure that anything exists outside of ourselves? Rene Descartes famously stated that, “I think, therefore I am.” It is a given that an individual can know with certainty that he/she exists, but because our senses can be faulty, we can never be absolutely certain about the nature of things outside of ourselves.
This may seem like a nonsense argument, but consider a recent TED talk titled “Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality”, given by Anil Seth (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a54QHJYC8lM). The basic idea is that our minds, or brains, have a hard time with uncertainty. If we experience or see/sense something we don’t understand our mind is unable to process it, so it makes something up. The basis for interpreting something our mind doesn’t understand is to explain it as best it can with past experiences or something we had been taught, something with which we are already familiar. Perhaps that is why St. John explains his experience at the Sea of Galilee with the risen Lord in mythic terms. That is also why people have such a hard time with Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, Book of Abraham, etc. How do you explain spiritual things to a people steeped in worldly religion? They will judge by the judgement of the world. Uncertainty and paradox surrounds us, but the world provides convenient explanations anyway for things that seem out of order.
When you consider that at one time we had to experienced everything for the first time and had to rely on previous knowledge or experience to gain an understanding, you get the sense that we have created a world that is built on sand. In the beginning we had to rely on some external source, like parents and teachers, to explain things to us. So, our entire experiential life and understanding is built upon supposition and assumption. Everything. In a sense we and all of our fellow humans have co-created a world based on a collective sensory interpretation. God has stepped in from time to time to course correct us, but for the most part has left us to sort things out using our wills.
As we get older we are able to make some sound and logical judgments about the world on our own, but if you think about it, our judgement is still fundamentally grounded in what we have been taught. You will always judge things by what you have already experienced, laying bricks on a foundation that has already been set. I will give you an example. Each person raised in their respective culture has an orientation in the way they perceive the world. If you had been born in Medieval Europe you would believe that trial by ordeal or trial by being dunked in a lake was perfectly logical and correct. You would be superstitious and believe in witchcraft -that witches and their curses are the cause of disease, mischief, and mayhem. You would also believe that sickness was caused by imbalance of the humors. Science, basic rights of civil liberties, and hygiene practices would be incomprehensible to you.
There are other ways that culture affects us. Language itself impacts the brains of developing children; it even impacts the way you think about things. Benjamin Whorf studied the Hopi language in the 1940’s and found that the Hopi language shapes the way the Hopi’s think. You are captive to the milieu of family and culture; you cannot escape it. It shapes your thinking and dictates your belief system. Why then do we rely on only what we can see, touch, and hear. Even religious people have a hard time experiencing spirituality.
The author, H.G. Wells published a story, “The Land of the Blind”, about a man named Nunez who is attempting to climb a peak in the Andes in Peru. He becomes lost and stumbles into a hidden valley that is populated by a group of people who had lived there in isolation for hundreds of years. Large earthquakes and landslides had sealed off the valley and prevented anyone from entering or leaving the valley, until Nunez stumbled upon them. He discovers that the entire population is blind. A disease or genetic mutation had rendered all of the population blind from birth over the centuries. Nunez thought that he could teach them and become a ruler over them, for he knew of the old saying, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” But things didn’t work out the way he thought they would. The people were not helpless, in fact they had evolved their other senses in such a degree that sight was unnecessary. In fact they were fairly prosperous and felt that sightedness was a liability. Over time they came to consider that Nunez was the handicapped one, and they decided that they needed to remove his eyes because they thought it was a source of his failures in their society. So, he left their valley only after a very harrowing experience escaping from them by climbing the cliffs that surrounded the valley.
All of this points to the fact that your senses can be a liability to you if you depend entirely on what those five senses tell you. I believe there is a spiritual sense or quality that is undeveloped in us because we tend to emphasize the physical. Until you realize this you are entirely captive to the cultural biases you are raised with, which have been formulated almost exclusively by observation and adaptation to the world. You can’t get away from the cultural influence you are born with. So I guess in this view I am a behaviorist. But, I also believe that there are other influences, the Light of Christ for one, that will provide other evidences to correct our belief system and entice us to embrace truth if we desire. When you approach through the veil and are invited into the deep you will not be able to experience it with your five senses. It will be with your mind, or intelligence- your spirit. You didn’t have your eyes or ears in the preexistence, why would you think that you would need them to experience the universe of light?
This all condenses to this one thought: If you think the universe works a certain way, you are probably wrong. The only thing you can be certain of, using your five senses, is that you exist and there is an external world with other people and objects, but you really don’t and can’t understand them because you are experiencing them second hand through biological processes. Philosophers will debate this idea, but I maintain that you can know absolute truth. This is because, as prophets tell us, the Holy Spirit testifies of truth in a way that defies your rational mind’s ability to deny.
“Enough is underway that rejecting it means you prefer darkness to light. Humble yourself and admit the prophets foretold the very things now underway; repent and be baptized and the Spirit of Truth will open your eyes (your spiritual eyes). If you want greater light, you will obey this instruction. If you refuse, then you never meant it when you greeted me as an enlightened heavenly guide.” (Testimony of John, 2:4)
What does this little philosophical discussion mean to you? It means that all your opinions, all your assumptions, all your judgements are subject to interpretation. Our western culture, scientific based upbringing has taught us that what you see is what you get. We are taught that only our sight, hearing, and science (which is based on observation) is reliable, that spirit as a concept is subjective, and that the entire universe is material in nature. This idea, this world view, colors the way we think of ourselves and the world. It doesn’t matter if you are a Baptist, a Catholic, a Mormon, Islam, Hindu, Atheist, or even a believer in the Doctrine of Christ, your understanding of things is infected by culture and religious belief. Even if you reject your culture, change your religion, and decide to go live in isolation on an island, you are basing your belief system, not on acceptance, but on repudiation. You will continue to compare your present experience to what you had rejected; your past life still impacts your world view and your decisions. In the Fellowship world in which I mingle, people are still focused on what the Mormon church is doing, even though they have left that church. There is a tendency to want to do things antithetical to the way “The Church” does it. They can’t leave it alone. I like to think that I have moved on from this way of thinking, but, of course, I am caught in the same trap of thinking.
The Awakening
And so, what is a person to do with this understanding? How do you harness the knowledge and power that is all around us in the Light of Christ? First of all I would say – believe. Believe Christ. I want to tell a story that was related to me by a friend from Colorado that happened a few years ago at the beginning of his awakening to a real relationship to Christ. I will call him Rob, because we need to keep the names of people involved private. Keep in mind that faith is awareness or knowledge and that the universe, or should I say creation, doesn’t operate the way we think it does. There is a power that resides in the deep that hovers all around us constantly streaming light and knowledge/truth. We only need to believe and learn to tap into it, to receive it and be invited into it. Christ is the gateway, He stands “at the horizon of the morning star”, “at the sacred entry”, beckoning us to approach the veil.
One day Rob was praying very earnestly to understand why miracles, healings and gifts of the spirit weren’t as common place as they were in the times of Christ and the apostles. The answer he received was both surprising and forceful, “If you want healings and miracles, you must perform them!” Rob’s reaction was, “What?? Lord, what do you mean?” No answer. It took awhile for Rob to contemplate and come to an understanding that the reason miracles were not common in this day and age was because of the absence of belief. He also came to understand that if a healing was needed, the Lord had given him permission to do it, given that specific permission to proceed was granted. Rob would soon be given a test to prove these things.
Rob was a scout leader in the LDS Ward he lived. He had been planning to do a week long canoe trip down a river in western Colorado with his scouts and several adults. He had conducted several river trips with other large groups over the years which had all been very successful, but as he was planning this trip there was a foreboding that something was going to go terribly wrong. He wondered if he should cancel the trip. He spoke to his wife about the feelings he was having about the trip and she confirmed that she also had some feelings of dread. Rob took his concern to the Lord and asked what he should do. The Lord told him that he should continue with his plans and that something was going to happen on the canoe trip, but the outcome would rest entirely in Rob’s hands. Well, that really scared him.
In the weeks and days leading up to the trip, Rob emphasized safety to the boys and to the adults to the extent that they thought he was being a bit overboard. When they packed up and drove out to the embarkation point on the river they prayed. As they got to the site and prepared the canoes to go into the water he gathered all the boys and the adults and had another prayer. The adults were all wondering, “Whats with all the praying?”
The first day went great, no incidents, everyone had fun. On the second day, at the end of paddling about 10 miles they stopped at a place where there was a large meadow on the side of the river to camp. Within a few minutes of setting up camp, four of the boys became seriously sick. They became almost comatose and could not move because of the pain which they felt all over their bodies. Rob understood that something was seriously wrong and that they may have to call for a medivac helicopter to transport the boys to a hospital. They were a hundred miles from the nearest hospital inside a canyon with 500 foot cliffs on both sides with no roads for miles around. Rob spoke to Jim, who was the ward young mens president, and told him how seriously the boys were sick and needed priesthood blessings. Jim had no idea that the boys were that sick and was a little hesitant to give them blessings. My guess is that he had never experienced miraculous healings through laying on of hands. He agreed, however, to gather everyone around. He told the boys and the adult leaders that they needed to give the boys priesthood blessings and assigned each of the adults to perform the blessings.
Rob took a moment to talk to the boys and told them that the four boys were really sick and that they needed to have faith the blessings would heal the boys. He asked them if they had faith they could be healed. They all kind of nodded their heads, but the adults all looked at each other. Jim would later confide that he was concerned for the boys faith if the blessings didn’t work.
Within 20 minutes of being blessed the boys went from completely bedridden and unable to even speak, to walking around and asking if dinner was ready. Rob went off into the woods to thank the Lord for his great mercy.
The next day the group traveled another 10 miles on the river and started looking for a place to camp for the night. Rob was in the lead boat and found the spot he planned to camp. They beached the canoe on a sand bar and jumped out. As soon as they had their feet on the shore they were attacked by swarms of mosquitos. They came in swarms as thick as the smoke of a camp fire. He received hundreds of bites within seconds and jumped back into the boat setting out as fast as possible to the middle of the river. After 4 more attempts to find a place they could camp that wasn’t occupied by swarms of mosquitos, the party beached on a small sand bar in the middle of the river away from the swarms to figure out what to do.
Rob took Jim aside and told him they needed to have one of the boys pray for guidance to find a place they could camp for the night. Again Jim was reluctant, but he did ask one of the boys to pray. As the whole party gathered around, Rob took the boy aside and told him he needed to pray for a spot they could camp where the mosquitos wouldn’t be a problem. In his prayer, the scout asked the Lord to let them find a place where there were “no mosquitos”. Jim confided later that when the young man prayed for no mosquitos he grimaced. The boys prayer seemed too extreme to him and he was afraid the boys would be disappointed.
Everyone got back in the canoes and started down the river one more time. Rob says they went around a bend a few hundred yards down river and saw a perfect place with a large dry sand bar. As they landed they were not attacked by swarms of mosquitos. In fact, they found there wasn’t a single mosquito. The air was completely clear. Later Rob went up the side of the mountain to find a place he could get cell phone reception. As he walked through the heavy brush, he was sure that he would attract the mosquito swarms, but there was not a single mosquito. What a dramatic answer to their prayer. All of the adults and the young men knew that the Lord had intervened to help them, answering their prayer request precisely. Thank goodness for the faith of the young men, because the faith of the adults would not have had the same results.
Prayer is the key to accessing the powers of heaven. Faith and belief is the juice that lubricates the door hinges. I like to think that faith is the image I hold in my mind of the possibilities. The image I hold in my mind is an active creative conceptualization. After all, if it is the mind that we use to connect with the spirit realm, not the eyes and ears, then the images or impressions created in our minds is the substance of faith. I think it is important to accept that what you sometimes shrugged off as the pure imagination of an active mind was actually the Holy Spirit, the Mind of the Father, trying to communicate with you. Your mind can be influenced from one of two sources, the Holy Spirit or the Adversary. This fledgling mindful creativity we experience is the same process that the Lord used to create the world. He created the world spiritually, conceptually, before the world was created in the physical dimension it now resides.
I find it amazing that faithful church-going Latter Day Saint Mormons lack belief in the power to heal through priesthood blessings. It is an example that faith and belief has diminished greatly from among the Latter Day Saints. They are so used to seeing priesthood blessings as nothing more than simple prayers of comfort. They have lost the ability to draw down the powers of heaven to perform miracles, healings, and spiritual gifts. That is evident to me when I hear sermons from General Authorities who say things like, “You must have the faith not to be healed.” Or you hear blessings being given where the person giving the blessing says something like, “If it is the Lord’s will that you be healed.” You should already know the Lord’s will before you give the blessing so you have full confidence that you can say, “In the name of Christ, BE HEALED!”
You must be willing to venture into the unknown, to take the risk. Be bold, be brash, seek for the things the rest of the world says is forbidden. Persist in knocking at the door of the veil. Believe what is revealed to you, because it will not match your expectation. And pay attention to a gentle summons that come to all of us. If you are not careful you may be missing an invitation.
Here you are, existing in this classroom we call the world. This classroom, unlike many others you have sat in, is pretty unique. The laws of physics and chemistry apply only to this classroom, not to the unseen universe that surrounds you. Because your memories have been suspended while you are in this classroom it is the perfect place for you to exercise your will apart from God. You are free to believe in anything you want and indulge in the physical and material gifts that are provided to you, to the extent that you can become “imprisoned by the flesh”. Or, you can use your class time to find out what this course, you have been enrolled in, is all about. What lies outside the classroom? And once you pass this course, wow, the next classroom waiting on the other side is…well…much deeper.