How "Spiritual Eyes" work - personal experience

[Hagoth]

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.

[RubinHighlander]

Shortcut:

[RubinHighlander]

I've been down that road as well, convincing myself that I had received some sort of answer to my sincere and ardent prayers, but mostly I still just felt empty inside if had been honest with myself. I'm embarrassed to say that I even knelt in the sacred grove just a decade ago and convinced myself it was all true. I might even have a few autumn leaves I took home with me from there. Anyone interested? FMML!

[1smartdodog]

I once spent some time on a mountaintop praying like Enos. Gave it everything I had. Closed my eyes, starred into the distance. Nelt, stood, gazed upwards. Not so much as a thought popped into my head.

I did start to hear things however. Mostly very faint sounds that were totally incoherent and nothing you could attach meaning to.

It was all more spooky than gratifying.