Faith Is Not Illusion

While not one of the five senses, spiritual perception is real and a means of gaining understanding.

We each have the capacity to discern on a spiritual level. An ability to learn, understand, and grow through the soul’s communion and communication with God. It is through this capacity that we can detect and feel spiritual outpourings from God. This spiritual acuity is more vibrant and developed in some. In others it is deadened by distractions, cares, wrong behavior, ignorance, or outright rejection of its reality or efficacy.

The basis of faith is in the experience of communicating with the Spirit of God. These experiences are not arrived at through a purely mental process or the working up of an emotional surge, rather, they come through the soul’s capacity to discern, connect, and understand spiritual outpourings from God.

This spiritual acuity and the resultant development of faith can be seen at work in our lives and in the lives of others. Evidence of its reality is demonstrated when the soul is enlarged, the understanding is enlightened, and the word of the Lord becomes delicious. (Alma 32:28) The understanding gained from and through the spirit is clear and certain and may be accompanied by a sense of well-being and reassurance.

Further evidence of the reality of spiritual perception may be seen in an account written by Oliver Sacks. (See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador, 1986) Sacks writes about Jimmie, a patient who suffered from an amnesiac condition known as Korsakov’s syndrome which left him unable to transfer sense experience into his long term memory. As a result, he was lost in a meaningless “now” – disconnected and incapable of connecting with the world around him in any but fleeting instances.

Sacks noted that Jimmie was an intelligent man who was “quick-witted, observant, and logical, and had no difficulty solving complex problems and puzzles – no difficulty, that is, if they could be done quickly. If much time was required, he forgot what he was doing.” (Sacks 25) At one point, Sacks placed items on a table, asked Jimmie to remember them, and then covered them. After a minute’s chat, Sacks asked Jimmie to tell him what was under the cover. Jimmie could not remember the items and could not even remember that Sacks had asked him to remember.

Focusing on Jimmie’s memory, Sacks “found an extreme and extraordinary loss of recent memory – so that whatever was said or shown . . . to him was to apt to be forgotten in a few seconds’ time.” (Sacks 25). “It was not, apparently, that he failed to register in memory, but that the memory traces were fugitive in the extreme, and were apt to be effaced within a minute, often less, . . . while his intellectual and perceptual powers were preserved, and highly superior.” (Sacks 26) For whatever reason, his memory simply stopped about thirty years earlier, was devoid of anything after that point, with no new memories ever added.

As a result of this condition, Sacks noted that Jimmie was “. . . isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat . . . of forgetting all round him . . . He [was] a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.’” (Sacks 28).

Sacks observed that

One tended to speak of him, instinctively, as a spiritual casualty – a ‘lost soul’: was it possible that he had really been ‘de-souled’ by a disease? ‘Do you think he has a soul?’ I once asked the Sisters [ who cared for the patients]. They were outraged by my question, but could see why I asked it. ‘Watch Jimmie in chapel,’ they said, ‘and judge for yourself.’

I did, and I was moved, profoundly moved and impressed, because I saw here an intensity and steadiness of attention and concentration that I had never seen before in him or conceived him capable of. I watched him kneel and take the Sacrament on his tongue, and could not doubt the fullness and totality of Communion, the perfect alignment of his spirit with the spirit of Mass. Fully, intensely, quietly, in the quietude of absolute concentration and attention, he entered and partook of the Holy Communion. He was wholly held, absorbed, by a feeling. There was no forgetting, no Korsakov’s then, . . . for he was no longer at the mercy of a faulty and fallible mechanism – that of meaningless sequences and memory traces – but was absorbed in an act, an act of his whole being, . . .

Clearly Jimmie found himself, found continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention and act. [As the Russian Neuropsychologist Luria wrote,] “A man does not consist of memory alone. He has feeling, will, sensibility, moral being . . . It is here . . . you may touch him, and see a profound change.” Memory, mental activity, mind alone, could not hold him; but moral attention and action could hold him completely.

If Jimmie was briefly ‘held’ by a task or puzzle or game or calculation, held in the purely mental challenge of these, he would fall apart as soon as they were done, into the abyss of his nothingness, his amnesia. But if he were held in emotional and spiritual attention – in the contemplation of nature or art, in listening to music, in taking part in the Mass in chapel – the attention, its ‘mood’, its quietude, would persist for a while, and there would be in him a pensiveness and peace we rarely, if ever, saw during the rest of his life at the Home.

(Sacks 37).

This account demonstrates the human ability to learn and connect on a spiritual basis. The “spiritual or moral attention” (as Sacks puts it) is demonstrably real and is other than a purely mental process, emotional reaction, or perception through the senses. Something in Jimmie allowed him to connect on a level that was not purely or even dependently mental despite of his condition. He found “continuity and reality, in the absoluteness of spiritual attention.”

It is on this experience of spiritual attention that faith is built. Elder Scott in the April 2003 conference spoke of the reality of faith. Even though it is not discerned by the five senses, it is a discerning nonetheless. He stated: “Some feel that any discussion of religion and the guidance one can receive through robust faith have no rational basis. However, faith is not illusion nor magic but a power rooted in eternal principles.”

Elder Scott illustrated this with an example:

Years ago I participated in the measurement of the nuclear characteristics of different materials. The process used an experimental nuclear reactor designed so that high energy particles streamed from a hole in the center of the reactor. These particles were directed into an experimental chamber where measurements were made. The high energy particles could not be seen, but they had to be carefully controlled to avoid harm to others. One day a janitor entered while we were experimenting. In a spirit of disgust he said, “You are all liars, pretending that you are doing something important, but you can’t fool me. I know that if you can’t see, hear, taste, smell, or touch it, it doesn’t exist.” That attitude ruled out the possibility of his learning that there is much of worth that can’t be identified by the five senses. Had that man been willing to open his mind to understand how the presence of nuclear particles is detected, he would have confirmed their existence. In like manner, never doubt the reality of faith.

Faith is developed through the process of learning to hear or sense the spiritual communication from Heavenly Father. Faith increases as we learn to trust that spiritual communication, follow it and act on it even when it may be very difficult. This process is very real and has very real results: Namely, the expansion of our minds and hearts, an increasing capacity for spiritual communication, Divine direction and solutions to problems, and a profound sense of God’s love and purposes for us. Those who open their souls to the presence of the Spirit of the Lord and exercise their spiritual attention, come to see and understand the reality of God and the reality of those things communicated by His Spirit.

This is the message of the restored gospel and a foundational and key principle of the LDS faith: That God communicates directly to us individually, that he gives instruction and comfort, and this spiritual capacity to discern and learn is real. This is demonstrated by Jimmie, who could not connect or maintain anything but a fleeting understanding or connection to the world around him on a mental level, yet, when his spiritual perception or attention was activated, his ability to connect and be sustained from moment to moment was not hampered.

Therefore, the call of the restored gospel is to: Open your mind to the reality of the soul’s interaction and connection with the Spirit of God. Open your heart to experience the effect of faith and communication with the Spirit of God. Open your soul to expanding and enlightening influence of the Spirit of God. Feel His presence, His love, and reassurance. Benefit from His counsel, direction, and wisdom.