How "Spiritual Eyes" work - personal experience
Posted: Mon Feb 11, 2019 1:12 pm
In the couple of years leading up to my mission I became kind of obsessed with having some sort of mystical/visionary experience to authorize me as an emissary of God. Moroni's challenge wasn't happening for me so I started looking around for options. I came across a book about methods of inducing visionary experiences. One of them was a device, basically a box lined with aluminum foil, that you stare into through a hole in one corner, basically the same way you would a hat with a rock in it. There were instructions, so I made one. I'm pretty certain that just about any object that you could stare at for a long period of time would probably have worked the same.
The method was very simple: cover one eye and stare into the hole with the other, try to focus on infinity, clear your mind and keep staring until pictures start to form in your head.
I spent a lot of time looking into that thing, and eventually my mind would begin to give me pictures. I would interpret these as having religious significance, of course. One that I remember was an image of a human hand with a lot of planets floating in the background. In retrospect I decided the hand probably had a nail hole in it and was therefore a confirmation that Joseph Smith saw the Father and Son as physical beings and that Jesus was the creator. Look Ma, I'm a seer! I wrote this experience and the interpretation down in my journal with the embarrassingly pretentious flourish, "whether in the body or out I know not."
I imagine that someone who spent years staring at a "magic" rock in a hat and learning to tune his mind to channeling subconscious thoughts could bring all kinds of interesting images and ideas to the surface. And I imagine that if I spent a couple of hours kneeling in the quiet of the woods with a charismatic man, who I believed to be a seer, calmly suggesting to me what I should be seeing in my minds eye, my imagination would have performed an impressive feat of making me "see" exactly what he wanted me to see.
The method was very simple: cover one eye and stare into the hole with the other, try to focus on infinity, clear your mind and keep staring until pictures start to form in your head.
I spent a lot of time looking into that thing, and eventually my mind would begin to give me pictures. I would interpret these as having religious significance, of course. One that I remember was an image of a human hand with a lot of planets floating in the background. In retrospect I decided the hand probably had a nail hole in it and was therefore a confirmation that Joseph Smith saw the Father and Son as physical beings and that Jesus was the creator. Look Ma, I'm a seer! I wrote this experience and the interpretation down in my journal with the embarrassingly pretentious flourish, "whether in the body or out I know not."
I imagine that someone who spent years staring at a "magic" rock in a hat and learning to tune his mind to channeling subconscious thoughts could bring all kinds of interesting images and ideas to the surface. And I imagine that if I spent a couple of hours kneeling in the quiet of the woods with a charismatic man, who I believed to be a seer, calmly suggesting to me what I should be seeing in my minds eye, my imagination would have performed an impressive feat of making me "see" exactly what he wanted me to see.