MIPodcast #177: Seeing (Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants) Featuring Mason Kamana Allred

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, Dr. Mason Kamana Allred. Welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Mason Kamana Allred: Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here with you.

Welch: Today, we're talking about your volume in the Maxwell Institute's “Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants” series. And the title of your volume is quite simply, Seeing. If I were to give an elevator pitch to somebody, and I actually have done this, sort of explaining in just a minute or two what your volume is about--because it has a really intriguing and kind of enigmatic title, right, Seeing--I think this is what I would say: Mason's book shows us how seeing can be a spiritual practice.

If we think about religions in general, they have a way of taking kind of our most basic elemental actions and ways of being in the world and turning them into something sacred, right? So something like eating, which we do every day--at church, we eat the body and blood of Christ, and eating becomes the sacred practice. If we think about getting dressed, something we do every day, well, we wear the temple garments, and that becomes a sacred practice. So, each of these kind of basic senses and abilities and things that we do can become sacralized through religion, through the gospel. Tell us how seeing can be a sacred practice, a spiritual practice.

Allred: Yeah, thank you for that. That's a great way to summarize it, because you're exactly right. Let me jump from the title, like you said. Because initially in conversations about this, we thought like we were pitching ideas to each other. And it was like, this is probably Visions in the Doctrine and Covenants. It's such a visionary text. It has like, people having literal visions in it. But honestly, the more it came together, the more I was rereading these passages that were really inspirational to me, it was more of what you just described. It's more about this practice; this habitual practice we have day to day of the way we look at things. And what that is, is a sensory input and how we make sense of that.

So you're right. This book is all about turning our day-to-day practices of seeing things, looking, into a spiritual practice, gaining more truth in the ways we look and what we look at.

Welch: Yeah. So, I mean, what does that look like in your everyday life as a disciple of Jesus Christ? How is looking a kind of spiritual action for you, a spiritual activity?

Allred: Yeah, I mean, I hope a lot of people can relate to this, and maybe it's more pronounced for me because of my academic study of visual culture. I'm constantly thinking about what sorts of things around us are calling for our attention, the ways that our attention is sort of commodified, and how distraction and boredom work together. But I think for all of us, we gotta look at something all the time, and we're constantly, for most people, they're sort of apprehending the world through sight. And so we have to do some deeper thinking about what that might mean as a disciple of Christ, and how this practice should look.

And so this could be as simple as, I tend in the book to call it “turning surface into depth.” Because when you're looking at things, you're thinking with surfaces, right? So, it's just a way to kind of be a catch-all for all these different things we could look at. And I mean that from like surface of a movie, to surface of a social media post, to surface of another human being, to surface of a leaf or a waterfall. All of those are sort of sights that we take in and can respond to in mindful ways.

So like I found this, let's just say I can see a leaf right now at my window, but like, you you look at a leaf like this and you can completely neglect it and miss it in your peripheral vision and just walk right by it in the busyness of your day, or you can stop and contemplate it. But you can even think about maybe what it might be symbolic of, its connection to other leaves, the kind of genealogy of that leaf into the ground, what it means for the oxygen, the air that I breathe. I mean, there's a lot of ways to go deeper with that and to fill our interconnectedness and its role in the plan of salvation. Like, quite honestly, it has a role in that and that's huge and I tend to forget that and live in a way that is, in that sense, as far as my sight's concerned, it's neglectful.

I'm just missing a lot of opportunities to think more deeply about that. It also happens with other humans. And I mean, this could be a spouse, a sibling, a stranger. Like I hope people have felt this and I wanna push for more of this in my life, which is like I've had these moments where I feel like I learned to see someone closer to how God would see them. And that's really transformative because they change in my sight, but I know that I'm changing by doing that. And that kind of reciprocation is like, I'm really, really interested in that. And I think the Doctrine and Covenants pushes us to do more of that.

And then of course, the book itself is trying to do this, but that is taking the surface of like a scripture, scriptural texts and going deep with that. The whole Maxwell Institute is about that actually.

Welch: That's right. Yes.

Allred: I love it for that--it's often taking these, it's taking these surfaces of words of disciples and prophets and trying to take them levels deeper to be a disciple scholar, to come closer to the Lord through enacting these ways of trying to get more depth out of these surfaces.

So in other words, I don't want to pretend like surfaces are bad or that they're superficial. They can be. But I think that through intentional practice, we can be sanctified to do this in better ways. Like I even think of, maybe this is kind of a dumb example, but my mind even thought of like in like the Barbie movie, the scene in the Barbie movie where she sits on a bench and she sees the old woman, Ann Roth.

And it's this really interesting interaction where she looks at her and then she's sort of like, you can tell she sees her, like really sees her, and just says, “you're beautiful.” And it's like this almost teary-eyed moment of like, she is realizing something in that moment. I want more of that in my life. I have experienced it. I think we're supposed to do that. I think that's how we would be seen by our Heavenly Mother and by our Heavenly Father.

Another scene that reminded me of this, like after I'd written the book, I'm watching some of these things like, that's what I mean, is in this great Japanese language movie, Perfect Days, but it's by German director Wim Wenders. Came out a couple years ago. But this guy's job day to day in Tokyo is to clean public restrooms. And he'll take breaks and he'll just stop and he'll just look up at the trees and he'll notice the wind through the trees or the flickering of light through it in the shadows. And sometimes he'll take an analog photo of it. But it's clear in his in his facial expression, what he's doing there, this kind of looking up, we could call it appreciating. But I actually call that something more like letting truth and light pour into you and like being more cognizant of the awe, the wonder, the beauty, and honestly the truth around you. That's letting it in as you feel the sun on your skin, you notice it in the trees, and it's a recognition, cognitively I know, but also in an embodied way, you're sort of capturing truth in ways that I'm afraid most of us neglect. I think we often think of inspiration and revelation as, me think this out, then let me pray and I'll hear an answer. That can totally happen, but I think we're missing some major opportunities if we neglect the rest of our senses in ways of getting truth.

Welch: Yeah. One of the things I love about your book is how it does help us to think much more expansively about the role of sight in our religious lives. There are some times and places in our church lives where seeing is kind of deliberately and, and focally what we're doing. For instance, if we're witnessing an ordinance, right, we're watching very carefully that ordinance to make sure that it's performed fully. When we go to the temple, of course, we watch the temple film and together we're visually taking in this information that's coming at us.

But you're talking about something more expansive. You're saying that our sight can be a spiritual sense even outside of the meeting house, outside of the temple, just in the world around us. There can be a kind of spiritual realization that happens when we look at something-- the world, another person, as you said--and we see them maybe as God sees them, right? We see them full of their potential. We see, you know, the neighborhood around me, I look at it and maybe for a minute I can see its potential as Zion, or I look at my husband's face and just for a moment, right, I can see the godly potential that he has in him. So, it's a way of kind of skipping ahead in time and sort of seeing for a moment, having this fore-glimpse, of the spiritual potential of the people and places around us. And that means that our sense of sight can be a connection to God at all times and in all things and in all places, right? Not just at those sort of overtly religious moments and settings.

Allred: Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I like the word you might have just coined, which is a fore-glimpse, but that's right, that you're sort of seeing it before it's happened. In other words, if you sort of flatten time for a second, you're seeing its full potential that's already within it. This person or this situation, or this sort of natural creation in the natural world. That's it. And I think that while I do try to do some focus on ordinances and stuff that you would encounter in the meeting house or in the temple--that's really important. And the way that those package covenants as an embodied experience is really important. But I think those are trying to teach us how to engage with everything you just mentioned better. Like you're supposed to leave those, you can't do ordinances like 24 hours a day. So, you do them in order to engage with the neighborhood and the neighbor and the spouse and the school teacher and everything in much more charitable and open, and loving ways.

And sight is part of all of that. And part of the reason why in the book, as you noted, I try to be very expansive or embodied in the way I approach this is because I think it's an important theoretical way to think about it. I think it's suggested in a few passages in the Doctrine and Covenants. But I also kept thinking to myself, so what does this mean for our brothers and sisters who go through life with no sight or very, very limited sight or for our brothers and sisters who don't hear?

Because no matter what situation you find yourself in, as far as your sensory outputs and inputs, the way you experience the world, you're still gonna be having an embodied experience. And so sometimes it's great when you have those moments where you have a family member or a friend, or you witness this in a ward or in the temple where someone's gonna do an ordinance and they have no hands, or someone does an ordinance that does not hear. It's actually really great for us, because it kind of shakes things up and you realize you're not just doing it with one sense.

Even though as you note, there are several situations where it feels like sight is paramount in that moment or whatever. But even in those moments, I don't want us to ever lose sight of the fact that it's actually your whole body involved. And a great way to put that in kind of archaic language is like your whole heart, strength. I actually think that's a way to sort of package what I'm talking about here is that like, you're trying to get in tune with a body and not be, you know, shy about it or, run away from that to actually lean into that because you're learning how to become like an embodied God. Like we want to enact with a body like our Heavenly Mother would or like our heavenly father would because I believe that they do it perfectly. And so that kind of training is really important. So yeah, the sight will be, you know, a central focus throughout the book, but always reaching into the other limbs and organs and feelings and sensations that you would have through that because recognizing those connections opens us up to receiving more light.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, that's so interesting. I don't know if you recently saw an article in BYU Studies by a scholar here at BYU, his name is Philip Abbott, and it's all about synesthesia in the scriptures-- times, moments in the scriptures where the senses seem to come together.

So, the Book of Mormon sort of famously talks about light in several places as something that you can taste, right? The sweetness of the bright light fruit on Lehi's tree, for instance. So, this is a kind of “whole body seeing,” right, where we use the language of sight, but it recruits our other senses as well, and not just our sensory input, but kind of our spiritual senses in addition. And Phil Abbott makes the interesting observation that, especially for ancient writers, this kind of merging of different senses comes to symbolize the merging of the human and the divine in the Savior. And of course, for us as Latter-day Saints, we understand that to be our own spiritual potential as well. So, it's really fascinating to think about this “whole body seeing” that is not only limited just to our eyes and our optic nerve, but really recruits every faculty that we have.

Allred: Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen that yet, but I totally agree with that. Even when you call things like delicious like Joseph Smith liked to do, but I think that shows up in Psalms and a couple of other places that when truth is delicious and light is sweet as you say, and you eat the book and it's bitter in your belly and sweet in your mouth, certainly there's something happening there. And I don't know that we've spent enough time thinking about it, but also feeling it, you know, and acting on it, and acting in it, yeah.

Welch: Yeah. Philip has this really interesting observation, which is that oftentimes, I think, in the church today, hearing tends to be our sort of dominant metaphor for spiritual experience, right? President Nelson, of course, has asked us, “how do you hear him?” You sort of take us back to the Doctrine and Covenants, where arguably maybe sight and vision is the dominant sense language that we use for spiritual experience.

But Philip Abbott has us think about when we talk about reverence in the modern-day church, we tend to think about the sound environment, right? When we talk about being reverent, we talk about being quiet, making sure that there's no extraneous sources of loud, harsh sound and that our bodies are still so that we can hear that still, small voice.

But he asks us to imagine, what if we considered sight, right? What would a sort of visually based reverence look like? Maybe we would want to block out really harsh fluorescent lights, right? That would make it difficult to see spirits that wanted to come visit us. Or maybe we would pay a lot of attention--I'm looking at your background here, right? A very colorful and busy visual background. Maybe you would think about a very calm and quiet visual environment.

But that was a fascinating kind of thought experiment to think about what might reverence look like in this sense of full body seeing and full body sensing of the spiritual realm.

Allred: Yeah. So, I definitely think there's something to, again, being intentional about that, thinking about the field of auditory or visual input. I did try to emphasize what I think is reflective of a really fascinating, unique feature of early Latter-day Saint theology, culture, and practice, which is that it is true that the Protestant tendency definitely was more of this sort of hearing, right? And I mean, especially hearing sermons and hearing scripture read out loud and then potentially hearing revelation. But even that was a little bit suspect sometimes. And I'm speaking mostly here of the work of like Leigh Eric Schmidt on this, Hearing Things.

Latter-day Saints share a lot of that, and they obviously become a print culture very like from the get-go. But what's so interesting to me is how open they actually were to visions, to being a sort of visionary group. And of course, some of those have to be sort of like policed and enforced in ways. And you see that happen as well. But the idea that you're not just gonna read the text to each other, but like, it was almost to be expected that this text would provoke new and more visions. That's actually really amazing.

So I do think that's happening. And I do think it's coming out of a time period where there's actually a lot going on with the kind of rethinking of human vision, just on a kind of biological optical level, but also spiritual vision. And that's peppered throughout the Doctrine and Covenants as well. The idea that you might be deceived, the idea that you could also see something and that spirits are showing up for better or for worse. I mean, we get like whole sections on how to discern that, right? And Joseph is a visionary prophet--even before you're talking a lot about the first vision, having the vision of seeing like the heavens and stuff, this is huge. And this is a religious movement that announces itself as revelatory, as seeing things, as translating a text, right?

And I just, really like that, I mean, even Joseph Smith is doing this; to go back to the natural world, he's doing this through looking through a stone at times. He's doing this, he got the first vision walking into the forest. I mean, there's just so many moments where it's wrapped up with kind of having your vision directed in the right ways.

So, when you say things like, you know, try and have your eyes single to the glory of God in scripture, I think there's a lot to unpack there of what that might mean for us. And I think Joseph Smith actually set a really good example in many ways that he did that that reflected then in the early culture of the Latter-day Saints.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, that's something you really opened my eyes to is the possibility that the Latter-day Saints did represent this kind of unusually visionary people and visual religious culture. And as you say, then you start reading these phrases of the Doctrine and Covenants or you read Joseph Smith's sermons and suddenly your ears are opened, your eyes are opened to this. You quote Joseph saying, “If you could gaze into the heavens for just five minutes,” you would know more than you know, whatever all the tomes of theology that are on the shelves.

What he learned and what he knew of God seems to have come to him in a visual and visionary way. And he wanted that for his people as well, right? It seemed that he was driven his whole life to find a way to open these visions. He didn't want to hoard them for himself. He wanted all of his people to be able to see what he saw.

And of course, that's what print does, right? The Latter-day Saints were also an unusually print-based culture. And very early on, Joseph realizes, well, one way that I might be able to do this, to open these visions to everybody, is to get them down in print, and then they can read them. And so then that leads to a very specific type of scripture reading practice, which you alluded to just a minute ago, but I wanted to invite you to dig into that a little bit more. How is it that Latter-day Saints’ scripture reading practice as a specifically visual practice might have differed from like the way Protestants at the time read the Bible?

Allred: Yeah. Well, I think there's a few examples that really highlight some of the ways that it would have been distinct. Again, of course, there's going to be some overlap, but it is strange that you have what would probably by religious studies scholar be considered more sort of Catholic or mystic in some of the ways that the Latter-day Saints seem to be approaching and working with scripture. Also, the many examples you have of people seeing, say, characters from the Book of Mormon show up to them, and it's not just Joseph, like you said, that is consistent with his quotes. And I think his practice to democratize this visionary experience--it doesn't mean that everyone can stand up and try to the Church. That's chaotic and organization is forming from the very beginning. But for people to see things to know for themselves, that's also from the very beginning.

And the fact that you publish three witnesses and eight witnesses with the Book of Mormon, that is part and parcel with this print culture. Is that when you have a book, it's gonna standardize the type and the print and the pagination. So you read in the same book that I'm reading so we can be individually separate in our own homes, but we can share a vision out of this book. The words on the page should hopefully lead to us doing this. And the Book of Mormon itself sort of opens with some of that with Lehi having a similar experience, right, with his own vision.

So that invitation is taken up and the Lord makes good on it because you have several early days saints seeing things and recording that and sharing that. It's not like they're scared, they're able to share that, even though there is a culture where you get a lot of pushback on some of that. Because people are very worried about deception as well, and they should be. So am I being deceived with this new book? Is this actually really scripture that Joseph Smith is bringing forth? If I do see something that seems supernatural and credible, is it deception? Is it from God?

That's the space they're living in, that I think we should actually be living in more too, is being open to dealing with some of that uncertainty, but the miraculous insights that can come from that. Because that book, that Book of Mormon, for the way Latter-day Saints are reading it and sharing it, is like you pop it open, it can project open new visions that will come out of it, if you're open to that. And they were, that was definitely part of that early culture.

Welch: Yeah, so in other words, you open up the Book of Mormon or maybe you open up the Book of Commandments--for us, we open up the Doctrine and Covenants now--and we're looking at ink on paper and these symbolic forms that we've learned to decipher. But as we're looking at those symbolic forms, really we're looking past them and we're seeing something different. We're looking at a page of scripture, but we're really seeing a vision, right? We're seeing D&C 76, right, of Christ in the bosom of the Father, or we're seeing what Joseph saw in D&C 88, where we see the sun as the energy radiating throughout the universe. So Latter-day Saints were trained and learned and taught each other how to look at a page of print, but to see God--to expect to go there to see God and experience that.

And it seems like in some ways that's different, perhaps than maybe some of their Protestant neighbors might have expected, right? Whereas they might open up the Bible and maybe they would find there kind of a discursive truth of who God is or a kind of set of propositions about theologically how the universe was created or something like that, right? Whereas Latter-day Saints go there, and they expect to see visions.

Allred: Yeah, yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah, so that Protestant practice, that sort of print culture there is, and even missionary work, a lot of that is, yeah, that more kind of studious, intensive working through a scriptural text in terms of, like you said, say a discursive truth or a doctrinal explication or something like that. But for Latter-day Saints, it is, it's a reading, let's say through the text, right? Like it's, again, it's that surface, but they'll read through it.

And one of the really fascinating things that I still love to grapple with is some of the ways that Joseph Smith and other early members of the church, it's like they did this almost seemingly paradoxical thing, which is take the text almost too literal and it leads to like an amazing vision. So, it's almost like it seems like you're leaning into the surface maybe too much, but it actually led to like a crazy new depth. That is wild to me and really inspirational that if you take that surface so seriously that you consider what it might mean if it's literal or metaphorical and all these things, it can actually lead to new strata below that surface level that will lead to new insights. And that definitely happens as well.

Welch: I love--you remind us of that beautiful moment in Moses chapter 6, I think. We tend to remember Enoch's vision of the weeping God. My colleague, Terrell Givens, has beautifully expanded the salience of that moment for us. But I love Moses 6 where Enoch is instructed by the Lord to anoint his eyes with clay –with the earth itself, right– just as Joseph was gazing into a stone, a piece of the earth, Enoch is instructed to put mud on his eyes. And he does, and then he opens them up, and suddenly he sees all the spirits that God has created, right? It's as if he can see creation in action in that very moment. And in a way, that's what the scriptures can do for us if we come to them with that expectation and with that openness, right? That looking into the page of scripture can be like anointing our eyes with that clay, and then we can open our eyes and see God at work in the world all around us. That ongoing creation that's happening at this very minute, right? This is something that Latter-day Saints kind of uniquely believe, is that the spirit world is here with us and it's happening around us, and that we might even be able to visually connect to that.

Allred: Yeah, exactly. It is a beautiful passage because yeah, on the one side, it is sort of a metaphor for what we can do with scripture as you say, like it sort of anoints our eyes and teaches us to see anew in spiritual ways. There is also that aspect of it being of the earth as you mentioned, I mean like atoms of the earth, right? We're all of the earth and we are currently in the earth. And as we talked about before trying to see people and to see things as they will be or as they “really are” as the scriptures say--which I think is that sort of more eternal perspective, the full potential of something if it lives up to the full measure of its creation, what is it at its best? And the very clay you could anoint your eyes with, the very earth that we are currently on is or will be celestial. Like that's the path we know it's on, like that's the doctrine. So to try to see it in that way is the hope and the wager of the book too, is to take that part of the Doctrine and Covenants seriously. That yeah, turning to the scriptures in that way is really important, but it should also be happening all around you and could happen at any moment with the sort of natural sights that are already given to you.

This becomes incredibly important in our current situation. I tried to connect it to that earlier context of the Doctrine and Covenants as I spoke about optical technologies and breakthroughs in the study of ophthalmology and all this kind of stuff. But because today for a lot of us, like even if you're in, you know, like a poverty-stricken area or even what's considered developing country or something, smartphones are everywhere. And so, for a lot of us, our field of attention and our sight is bombarded and fought over in ways that can seem, as you described my background here, like sort of chaotic or there's a lot going on. And so finding a way to deal with that, I didn't wanna say like, just completely drop the phones and delete all the social media accounts. Part of me would love to say that.

Welch: Is that how you really feel though, Mason?

Allred: I mean, there's a part of me that definitely does, teaching media studies. But more realistically, and if you want to follow the tack that the church has obviously gone is to still engage with all that but find ways to try to be as savvy and also premeditated about the way that you do that. So I'm just trying to balance, again, kind of taking stock of what we just did, taking stock of the engagement with scriptures, with the natural world, and with these manufactured cultural sights, which, you know, for better or for worse, the ones that come to us through our phones and in movies and just the visual culture around us. Like all of that's on the table.

So it's not a practice of just like discerning and just, you know, quick judging. That's bad. That's good. That's bad. It's actually not that. It's much deeper, much more intentional. It's much more open arms to the world, ready to embrace, but then obviously cautiously discerning and making righteous choices as we do so.

Welch: Yeah, yeah, it reminds me of that beautiful phrase. I know it's in Doctrine and Covenants 76 and I think it shows up elsewhere in the D&C. Those who are of the Church of the Firstborn are those who “see as they are seen,” right? I think we could, I mean, I've actually meditated a lot on that phrase and there are just layers of meaning, but on one level, it's exactly what you've just said, right? That we know that our Heavenly Father, our heavenly parents see us with this all-knowing, all-loving, generous, and yet also rigorous gaze, right? And that we then are asked to turn that kind of discerning yet open and loving gaze on the people and the world and the surfaces around us too, because there is always this potential for deception. And this is something that Joseph Smith deals with explicitly--you'll have to remind me Mason, what section is it where he lays out how we can tell whether a spirit that we've encountered might be good or bad.

Allred: 129, section 129, yeah.

Welch: Thank you, 129, section 129. Because yeah, sight offers the sense that we can verify and know something is true, precisely because we put a lot of faith in what we see, right? “Seeing is believing.” It also has great potential to deceive. That was something that really worried Joseph, that he wanted to clear up for us in section 129. It applies to us today in a slightly different way, but no less important, right, that we be discerning in how we approach the visual media that we interact with, whether it be on our screens or just in the world around us.

Allred: Yeah, yeah, because let me just connect those two disparate contexts for a second here and not to pretend like they're perfectly parallel, but if I'm reading the Doctrine and Covenants for our day, which I want the book to do, you're right. You think about the ways that our eyes can be deceived today. It's wild, right? Even just the economy around like collecting your data and what you're looking at and how long you're looking at and how you engage with it. And it's huge. The fight for your attention again.

But even now with, you know, what will be misinformation and what will be a deep fake that seems pretty good, getting better and better. All these ways to deceive us, distract us, lead us astray so that we're not seeing in the right way. It even goes, oh, look what I have for you, Rosalynde, hang on.

From that early, like, you know, you think about kaleidoscopes in the early 1800s, you think about this thaumatrope that would animate, I don't if you can see it on the screen, but it would look like this monsters on top of this lady here.

Welch: Yeah.

Allred: These are the kind of toys that people love to buy. If you had a mirror, you would look at this through the shutters and it will be animated. All these different kinds of optical toys and inventions that are literally coming out of the 18s, 20s, 30s, primarily, but clear into the end of this century, where there's a kind of what's been called a “frenzy of the visible,” but this, all this attention and excitement and anxiety around how we see and the fact that it becomes readily apparent, even on the level of like cheap little toys, that your eyes can actually be tricked very easily. So, the fact that we're open to deception on a material and technological level has consequences for ideas around the idea that we are susceptible to spiritual deception. And so that is certainly playing out in the Doctrine and Covenants, especially as the temple is starting to come together and ordinances there. And then that section 129 about if you see a spirit, how to deal with that, how to corroborate what you're seeing with touch and so forth.

So, kind of diving back into that as an original context and reading it that way, then updated for us today, I think it only magnifies the relevance of what was happening there, that we clearly are bombarded with all kinds of invitations to direct our attention this way or that way. So, getting better at this and truly trying to like adopt some healthy, mindful practices around your sight, I think, is really, really important for disciples right now.

Welch: Yeah, that's a point you made several times that I really appreciated. It is partly a question of whether we'll be deceived and think something is real that is actually false or is fake, right? But a big part of it is just where we choose to allocate our limited, finite attention. We only have so many waking hours in a day. And as you say, we're bombarded on every side by bids for our visual attention. Now that we're such a podcast culture, it's also every single moment is vying for our auditory attention too, right? I find myself wanting to put in AirPods as I'm going to brush my teeth or something. And I'm like, hang on, it's okay. I can have my attention and my consciousness to myself for a few minutes. So we need to be mindful about where we're giving our attention. Even if it might be, you know, unobjectionable, you know, visual input or whatever it be, is it really worth my precious attention in this moment? That's a question we should ask ourselves.

Allred: Definitely agree. Whether you decide to do the podcast while you're doing dishes or not is up to you, but whether that's good, bad, what's the best way to get out of that then? What's the best you can pull from that that you're gonna do if you've decided to engage with that podcast? And I think that's always gonna be helpful. Always gonna be helpful. What's the best I take out of that? And if we're talking about surfaces, it should always be leading into a more sincere and a more care-filled engagement with the world and others. If it's leading the other way where it feels like it's sort of isolating and internalizing only that for its own sake, then that's also problematic and that should be setting off red flags in our bodies and our minds as well. And I think you actually start to feel that on a mental health level, spiritual level, sometimes physical level.

Oftentimes, I think in sort of wellness studies they talk to as like kind of listening to your body. And that's true, you should listen to your body, but you also have to like train it with the best principles so that that feedback loop is actually really healthy and positive. Cause your body can also say like, I really want another Big Mac. And so it has to be taught to crave the right things and have these sort of celestial appetites. And that's why think that thinking celestial needs to become, it should spill over into feeling celestial and craving celestial and that becomes a nice, it's like a spiral that builds on itself and it proves for better and for better.

Welch: Yeah. Ooh, I really like that. Thinking celestial should become seeing celestial and touching celestial and hearing celestial and being embodied in the celestial way. Yeah, that's really powerful.

Something you come back to several times in the book is this wonderful talk by Sister Tracy Browning in 2022, and it's titled, “Seeing More of Christ in Our Lives.” And so, we can see why that was an attractive talk! Tell us a little bit about Sister Browning's talk, why you think it's important, and unpack what you think she's trying to get at in that talk.

Allred: I just remember when she first gave it and it's one of those moments in conference where I was just like, wow, I just love it when it's clear there's an idea here that I've felt, or I've been sort of tinkering with. And then they're articulating in a way where I'm just like, man, I'm with you, I love it, I love what you're doing there. And I think Tracy Browning is so smart and so devoted and the way she articulates this concept in that talk, I just wanted it to definitely show up in the book. And I wanted to give credit there and to build off of it. I really like the way that she sets it up is like trying to see more of him in our lives and that we sort of learn then to also see ourselves as he would see us.

And then she even has this moment that I grabbed from where she talks about sort of the way it would inspire different parts of our bodies. And I brought those all together because it's almost like when you think about like putting on the armor of God when it kind of goes through this little list of different parts. But like if learning to see more of Christ in your life means that you start to see yourself as of worth and fully loved, it also inspires the way that you're then able to turn with your hands and your feet and your direction towards others in this world. I'm pretty convinced, and I think it's sort of in the background of that talk, that seeing him, you feel how much he loves you. And once you've felt that kind of love, I think maybe only then, that's kind of a bold claim, but maybe only then are you actually in a position to fully, fully, fully love others once you've felt that. And you find it through finding him, through seeing him.

And getting that reciprocal relationship you have with him because as you said earlier, he sees us perfectly, which means he sees perfectly everything about us. So if you can fully feel, if you find him and you can fully feel that he loves you perfectly despite and because of every little thing that you love and hate about yourself, it's just so powerful that of course it's gonna change. If you let that wash over you, of course it's gonna change what you do with your feet and with your hands and with your mind and with all of that. And I just, her talk brings that together very nicely. So I kind of wanted to go from that to jump back into the Doctrine and Covenants.

Welch: Yeah. The Doctrine and Covenants is so clear, especially Section 88, that Christ wants to be seen now, right? He doesn't want us to wait for the Second Coming to perceive His presence. In fact, you know, if you take Section 88 at face value, what it tells us is that He's with us now. He's in the world now. The only thing that's going to change when he comes is that we'll be able to look back and comprehend what it was that we were seeing now, right? But that he is with us now and he is in the world now. He has come in a certain sense. And that is so powerful.

I wonder whether you've thought about, and you don't really go here in this book, but I'm just curious for you yourself personally, whether sort of overt and deliberate visualization plays a part in your own spiritual life. There's this really wonderful verse in the book of Jacob, the first chapter, I think it's verse six, where the prophet Jacob urges us to view Christ's death, “view his death and suffer his cross.” And he doesn't explain exactly what he means there, but I've wondered whether it might in part refer to a kind of visual meditation on the cross, right, and on Christ as our Savior. In the Old Testament in Numbers 21, of course, there's this wonderful typological scene of Christ as the brass serpent that Moses holds up and asks his people to look at and says, you know, look at, look up and be saved.

But does visual, specific kind of spiritual visualization of the Savior, does that play any role in your spiritual life or do you think that it could?

Allred: Yeah, it actually does. I mean, I don't want to overstate it, but it actually does. Because on the one hand, I don't want to get too caught up in what I think are my visualizations of things, but I want them to be open, to be modified and revised as I feel the Spirit. But I do, do these things sometimes where, especially because I just helped out with that art book, the Latter-day Saint art book, and a lot of the depictions of Jesus from lots of different traditions, not just Latter-day Saints.

Some have been so inspiring, and some just leave me wanting. And so I do try to visualize these things, and I try to see in my mind's eye, and just the way that revelation works for me oftentimes is I'll feel things, and then I'll come to realization eventually it's more cognitive. And I have a lot of dreams. I don't know why, that's, I dream things. So they visualize in dreams for me a lot of the time. And so in those, and sometimes just laying in bed trying to think through what that would have looked like, how it might've been, how this happened, whether it's a scene from scripture or what something that's supposed to happen in the future, I do actually like to do that. I do it sometimes even about like my kids and their future. And I just sort of see things and I hope for things and I visualize things, partly in the hope maybe that it's leading towards that, but also realizing that maybe not at all. I just like to think through and maybe visualize who they might become and things they might do. And I find that really inspirational or at the very least very comforting sometimes.

Welch: Yeah, I do the same thing in my prayers with my children. I visualize them. I came to a realization, I'll share with you if you'll indulge me, my kids are young adults now and they're going through the bumps as they go out into the world on their own. And often I realized that as I was kind of praying over them and trying to open my mind to the Lord with them in view, I was kind of picturing something like a bubble. Like I was asking for his protection around them, right? I was asking for him to remove the obstacles or to somehow change their environment.

And then I read in the Book of Mormon, it's the last verse of chapter 7 of the Book of Moroni. And I couldn't tell you what verse number that is. But in that, Mormon instructs us to pray to have the love of Christ in our hearts. And that just struck me. Like that is what I should be praying for, for my children. Not that they're somehow protected or that God is gonna come into the world and change everything to make the perfect circumstances for them. I don't even think that's how God works in the world.

Instead, I'm gonna pray for him to put his love in their hearts. And I can sort of see it as this kind of beautiful light that's coming out of their chests, out of their hearts. And it really changed the way that I pray for them. It changed what I want for them. It changed the way that I picture them growing and maturing in faith. So that's been a really powerful change in my own prayer life that has to do with the visual images, kind of the unconscious visual images that maybe we sort of inherit from our culture around us and don't really interrogate. Then the scriptures in a moment can kind of give you a flash of a better way to see something.

Allred: Yeah, I love that. I think that's so beautiful. Because it's easy to do what you did, and I fall for it all the time, just try to like, let me pray enough protection around this person because I love them so much, you know what I mean? Just keep them in the nest and watch over them. But it's actually not what you really want. And the way you're doing it now, I think is a better way to read the scriptures and to pray about your kids, which is like, if they get that love and light of Christ in their heart, they are then equipped and empowered to face whatever comes their way. And God knows better than we do what should come their way. So that's a much better way to do it.

Which is like I'm saying with this full bodied faith, this full bodied sight, rather than tell you like really prescriptive, like don't do this, do this, trying to get that mindset and that body set as a kind of approach towards thinking about it and feeling about it, you're better equipped to deal with whatever it is that you deal with in your life. That's gonna be surfaces that you encounter. And so yeah, I really liked that. Thanks for sharing that.

Welch: Well, you know, I appreciated in the book that you weren't too prescriptive, right? You left a lot of room for people to have their own approaches, their own tight tastes, right? You might like certain kind of art or certain kinds of movies. You might be more into your phone, less into your phone. That's okay. All of those ways of being in the world can be discipled, right?

Nevertheless, it is the case that we have to learn perceptual skills from our environment, right? And from the people around us. We sort of take it for granted and you think, it's just a kind of natural faculty, the sense of sight. And we don't really realize the ways that we are trained to look in certain ways by the media that we interact with themselves, most of all, but also the example of the people around us. We're imitative creatures and we tend to imitate what we see around us.

So, we both learn how to see and how to relate visually to the world around us from those around us. And we teach other people just through our own practices of looking. Whether or not we realize it, we are teaching the people around us something about how to see and how to look. And I think your book does so in a beautifully gentle and yet very wise way. It teaches us to look more deliberately, more intentionally, and especially more spiritually and I need to learn that. So, thank you.

Allred: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for putting it that way. I felt very strongly about it and I've just found a lot of wisdom in that, in being more mindful of it as a practice. And as you say, it is like, you very quickly learn even as a child ways to look and not to look and where to look and where you're not supposed to look and what's polite and what's not. It is a sort of social learning. What's rewarded and what's punished. You're gonna quickly learn what to and not not to. Unfortunately, as you said, oftentimes in media, if it's made for profit, which most is, it's going to often be conditioning practices that aren't the healthiest, that will be more stimulating, entertaining, more constructing a passive consumer. And that is really problematic. So if we do want to be in this situation we find ourselves now, where it's this kind of modern world bombardment of visual stimulation, I think we better get good at this. Like, you're gonna lose sight of Christ if you can't find a way to find that stillness and that peace in the chaos.

Welch: Yeah, yeah. Well, Mason, this has been, I just think, a fascinating conversation. As you can tell, I was just stimulated by your book, and it really did open my eyes to a dimension of our history, an aspect of the Doctrine and Covenants, and a really important aspect of my spiritual life and my everyday life, right? My everyday life at work and at home and at church.

The name of this podcast, or of this season of the podcast, is The Questions We Should Be Asking. So as we're about to wrap up our conversation now, I wanted to give you the last word. What questions should we be asking ourselves and each other about seeing and looking at the world?

Allred: Yeah, I mean, we sort of touched on some of these, but I'd wanna make it clear at the end here that like really being inspired by these scriptures in section 88 about like learning to see his creation so that when you do finally actually see him, you will know that you've already seen him. I think that's so inspirational. So what questions should we ask to pull that off? In other words, when you get to the point where you actually are beholding, you're actually seeing and touching the wounds in his hands and side and knowing that he is the Christ you will know that you've already known that by feeling it and seeing it ahead of time.

So how do we make this happen? Like what questions would I be asking? Certainly in line with Tracy Browning, we need to always be asking ourselves like, how can I see more of God's hand in my life? How can I see more of God's hand in my life? What do I look for to see that? And as we slowly get better at that, I think that the next question needs to be something like, if I'm seeing more of God's hand in my life, how can I commit to my covenants, by then taking him by the hand and acting on it in the right way. What is that gonna look like for you or for me? If we actually do start to feel like, man, now I feel like I am seeing more beauty and truth and divinity in the world around me, I'm noticing his hand in my life, how do I now act on that in line with my covenants?

And then, as I said, I think that we need to be asking, how would Heavenly Mother see this? How would Heavenly Father see this? It sounds like it's so clear out there, I know because they're perfect, but I think it's a really important thought experiment to just practice to think about it because then again, you're gonna not fall for this kind of fallacy or this pitfall of like, that's good, that's bad. How would they see this? And what would be their takeaway from this? How does it change them? How they become better for that?

How do I tune my senses to the will of the Father to receive more truth and light in my life? Those are the questions I think the book is trying to pitch. And while I offer some answers, I really want people to wrestle with those questions for themselves. To actually like go through those and think about what would this look like for me? What kinds of intentional, maybe daily practices can I do to try this out? Because as I've done some of this, I'm just...

It's kind of amazing the way that inspiration would come and the things that would fill in what I would notice about like my skin or the hair on my neck or just internal feelings too, this kind of burning in the bosom. I had quickly, because I know we have to go, but I won't even tell you what the answer was about, but I had one of the most amazing revelatory moments of my life. So I had never had this before, but I was actually like out running, which I don't run tons, but I was out running. And I had been thinking about this thing, but I was just, I was out running. And I don't know if it was just like the level of exhaustion or just being in the sun but whatever was it just boom it was just like light into my body while doing this and it was just so--I must look like such a weirdo because I was like running and then I stopped and I think I was like crying and there was something about that mixture of being open and attuned and looking but also thinking and feeling and being in motion that led to one of my favorite and most poignant spiritual experiences I've had.

So, I'm just thinking, ask these questions, how else can I attune my senses to gain more light? Which senses am I neglecting day to day? And how can I get them in line with the glory of God? And I really feel like we're gonna be open to all kinds of new revelations and new light in our lives.

Welch: Dr. Mason Kamana Allred, thank you so much for joining us today on the Maxwell Institute Podcast.

Allred: Thank you so much for having me. It's great talking to you.

Download the transcript here.