Seeing With Our Whole Bodies
Adapted from Seeing, by Mason Kamana Allred, available for purchase at Amazon and Deseret Book.
The Doctrine and Covenants makes the provocative wager that spiritual vision is a mode of seeing that lights up the whole body so that we feel, sense, and know not just through the eyes. This realization illuminates passages like those that promise readers if their eye is single to God’s glory, then their whole body will be filled with light (Doctrine and Covenants 88:67). It promises that we will see more truth concerning spirit and matter once our whole bodies are purified (Doctrine and Covenants 131:8). As the book emphasizes repeatedly, we must learn to see in ways that are not so easy, so passive, or so culturally normalized. We must learn to see better and more deeply. Learning to exercise discerning vision not only allows us to recognize the presence of God in all things, but it also changes us in the process. We learn to see with our whole bodies, including our hearts and minds—even our whole souls.
In the Doctrine and Covenants, then, the Lord teaches his followers how to see with new eyes. This teaching initially corresponded with the historical period when optical science (the study of light) and the study of the human eye enjoyed unprecedented breakthroughs. The first ophthalmology courses and clinics began right when Joseph Smith was born and spread during his lifetime. Experiments and inventions around optics and lenses were booming. In fact, the mid-nineteenth century is considered the golden age of studying eyes and eyesight.[1]
An important shift took place in the way eyes were understood during the 1830s and ‘40s that has significance for our reading of the Doctrine and Covenants. Instead of basing their understanding on a disembodied conception of the eye—where the eye would seem to function on its own within a retinal system—people began explaining the eye as inseparable from the “physiological functions of the body.”[2] The ways humans see couldn’t be fully explained if divorced from the rest of the body. Indeed, “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee” (1 Corinthians 12:21).
It just so happens that during this period of the flourishing study of sight, the early Church revelations were promising extraordinary visions and were anxious about visual deception. The Lord was opening the eyes of the Saints’ understanding but often did so through words of instruction that resonate for our day in new ways.
The Doctrine and Covenants offers moments that teach us how to see or how to understand what we see with new (additional) light. This is crucial to catch the powerful play between literal and metaphorical uses of seeing. Because our first visual impressions are of surfaces, seeing can remain superficial or be distorted and misleading. But it can also be connected to deeper understanding and discernment. Therefore, learning to see develops through both sincerely engaging with the surface appearances of life and seeking greater understanding from God. This even happens in productive ways throughout the Doctrine and Covenants, like when a passage from the Bible is inserted and we read it with new eyes, right there in the flow of the text. This is more than cross-referencing. It is training spiritual eyesight through textual eyesight. These little techniques can allow the book to function as a manual or handbook on handling truth.
In section 130, for instance, Joseph Smith gives us the passage of John 14:23 but includes the explanation that “The appearing of the Father and the Son in that verse, is a personal appearance; and the idea that the Father and the Son dwell in a man’s heart is an old sectarian notion, and is false” (Doctrine and Covenants 130:3). He reteaches us how to see that verse. It is now the same surface but a different sight than when we might encounter it in the New Testament. We literally look at that verse and have a different image in our minds when doing so once we’ve accessed his instruction here. Our imagining of the intended meaning between the lines of text is altered through our eyes, both our physical eyes and our metaphorical “eyes of understanding.” What’s more, the shift in meaning in this example is about an actual vision and the physical embodiment of the gods. Extending this logic, we realize that when we see them, we are truly seeing them as they are.
We must first understand this—see it—in text before we can see it with our eyes as material bodies in front of us when we see our Father and his Son one glorious day. But note that both of those acts of seeing are rooted in matter. Spirits, bodies, and books all exist as matter along a continuum of visibility and refinement.
As we learn to hearken with our whole bodies—both see and hear him better—the Doctrine and Covenants comes alive, and the purpose of our lives comes into greater focus. The text can help train us to listen, feel, intuit, and even see the Lord in our lives. For some, full-bodied hearkening to the Lord may be attending to the goosebumps on their arms, hearing a distinct and calming voice, or feeling burnings or electricity-like sensations from head to toe. For others, it may include seeing a type of aura around people or even sensing truth through music, manual labor, creating art, human touch, or focusing on breathing. Employing more senses allows the Lord to communicate with us in a more holistic way and enables us to obtain more truth.
Reading the Doctrine and Covenants should be a similar act of acquiring more light. Of course, as we take on more light, our vision is also improved. Like the seer stone in Joseph Smith’s hat, the book becomes a light that shines forth from the darkness. It can both illuminate and focus our attention by dampening out other possible points of distraction and filling up our views with enhanced understanding. This can then help us make our eyes single to the glory of God. Our eyes see differently and get linked up with new understandings. Inundated with images in our twenty-first-century screen culture, what spiritual gift would seem more prescient?
We can learn to see better with an eye of faith. It makes me think of the short-lived craze for computer-printed “3D Magic Eye” pictures when I was a kid in the 1990s. These were images generated by an algorithm that would create repeating patterns that could encode the depth of an object within a 2D image. They were originally intended to test depth perception but were then marketed as fun books for kids and adults alike. The catch is they only work if you stare through the image and allow your eyes to sort of “relax.” Although at first glance, the image appears to be a simple computer-generated pattern of colors, after a bit, you see a shape with depth! The process requires that we abandon our reflexive perception of what’s in front of us. It requires a little work and a little letting go, but the end result is impressive. And once you see it, it is difficult to “unsee” it. Sort of like attuning our eyes to decipher the forms of a 3D Magic Eye image, we are in the fleshly process of learning to see in ways that are intensely physical but also spiritual and often packaged in metaphor.
Learning to intently read the Doctrine and Covenants, truly hearkening to the teachings found therein and seeing them in all their beauty, even if for the first time, is meant to turn its readers into visionary children of God—children who see their siblings and the world their eternal parents created for them with enhanced eyes of understanding. This is an ocular metamorphosis. As President Russell M. Nelson described decades ago, like a pair of binoculars, our perception will fuse with the Lord’s so that our focus becomes 3D and results in our eye becoming single to the glory of God.[3] By changing our eyes of understanding and connecting this enhanced spiritual perception with physical eyes, we will see things in the Lord’s light, as they really are.
[1] Mary Wilson Carpenter, “A Cultural History of Ophthalmology in Nineteenth-century Britain,” BRANCH, Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (2012), branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=mary-wilson-carpenter-a-cultural-history-of-ophthalmology-in-nineteenth-century-britain.
[2] Peter John Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 4, 14, 213.
[3] Elder Russell M. Nelson, “With God Nothing Is Impossible,” Ensign, May 1988, churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1988/04/with-god-nothing-shall-be-impossible?.