what spiritual sight "looks" like

The other day I was looking at this vast Internet and found a picture that really resounded with me. Here it is:

From here, I guess.

Anyway, as soon as I saw it, I was just like--yeah! I've totally seen that, dude! Obviously I don't understand anything from the website it's from, but that picture--yes. Looking at a person and "seeing" the lines and the colors of various things--yes.

Basically, seeing with the spiritual eyes can kind of feel like X-ray vision, or something. It doesn't change what you literally see with your physical eyes, because you're not seeing with your physical eyes. Rather, you are seeing with the mind's eye, through the mechanism of the pineal gland, and so things like skin and bones and space and even time and other obstacles don't get in the way.

For that reason, sometimes when I'm discerning a person's energy, it helps if I close my eyes or stare away from them at a blank patch of wall. Since spiritual sight doesn't use the physical eyes, limitations of space are essentially nonexistent. I've found it very simple to just ask my mind--"Show me so-and-so's energy" or "show me everyone I know with this energetic aspect," and the images spontaneously occur in my mind.

Anyway, this is a short post, but I just found that picture and thought: yes! I have to share it. That is kind of a visual representation of the kind of stuff I "see" on a regular basis.

Prepare: FOLLOW THE PROPHET!!

This has been on my mind so much recently!!

A lot of people have been feeling promptings to prepare--prepare food storage, water storage, clothing storage, all the rest. A lot of people have been feeling prompted to study the Biblical calendar--leading them to study things like the Shemitah and upcoming Jubilee, the Biblical blood moon tetrad, and so forth.

And a lot of people aren't feeling those things.

And that is okay.

The amazing thing about the Restored Gospel is that we have a prophet--a prophet like Moses or Noah or Peter or Abraham, who receives regular communication from the Lord about what the Church needs at any given time. No one has to know about the Hebrew calendar or something; no one even really needs to be prompted specifically to start getting their food storage together. The modern prophets have been urging us to prepare temporally since the Restoration. And we know that before anything gets really bad, the prophets will warn us and take care of us.

I guess the thing that's been on my mind is that temporal preparation is important--it truly is. But even more important is developing a testimony that is strong enough to follow the Prophet no matter what he tells us to do or when.

I was reading in the book The Gift of Giving Life, which is awesome and you should buy it and read it, and it talked about the pioneer women who birthed their children while crossing the plains on foot. This
is what Eliza R. Snow wrote about these women:

Let it be remembered that the mothers of these wilderness born babes were not savages accustomed to roam the forest and brave the storm and tempest--those who had never known the comforts and delicacies of civilization and refinement. They were not those who in the wilds of nature nursed their offspring amid reeds and rushes or in the recesses of rocky caverns. Most of them were born and educated in the eastern states... had gathered with the saints... had lovely homes decorated with flowers and enriched with choice fruit trees just beginning to yield plentifully. 

When I read that, I thought: what faith. Women just like me. Kind of. So they didn't have running water and indoor plumbing. They still gave up their outhouses in favor of peeing on the side of the trail. They still gave up their pretty houses in favor of living in the wilderness. They still gave up birthing their children in a warm home in favor of giving birth in the mud, in the rain, in the desert.

Because the prophet said to.

Do we have that kind of faith?

It doesn't matter if the prophet tells us to gather in the wilderness or not--what matters is that we have the faith to trust him if he does, or if he doesn't. Who knows. Maybe all these promptings to prepare are just to try our faith. Maybe nothing will happen for a year, a decade, a century or more. Who knows.

All I know is: the important thing is our faith. Do we have the faith to follow no matter what? That is the important thing.

Develop your faith! Follow the prophet!!

Keep the commandments and find your life's purpose.

Progressive Prophetess recently blogged about finding your life's purpose--and how it comes down to keeping the commandments. And I quote:

Go to the temple. Image here.

When we are obedient to the basics, God trusts us and he gives us more. If we are obedient to those commandments, then he give us more and more personal commandments which guide us to more joy.
Many people come to me and want to know their life purpose, or what they contracted to do before they came here. I tell them to keep the commandments, keep their covenants and go to the temple and meditate. How can God trust you with something so monumental as your "life purpose" if you still fudge the word of wisdom--or whatever you are fudging.

This is so true. It's so true I had to write my own post to echo it! I wanted to be a second witness.

In my own life, I have found that the more obedient I am to the commandments, the clearer my life path is--AND the more commandments I get. Commandments really are your reward. I live by way more rules now than I used to. More rules than I used to think anyone would really have to. And I grew up in the Church and "kept" all the commandments I knew about--you know. I was a full tithe-payer, didn't murder and didn't steal, etc. But there were things I wasn't doing that I didn't even realize I was supposed to do. And there were things I wasn't supposed to do that I didn't realize I wasn't supposed to do. Those things only were revealed to me when I was ready to bear them.

General Conference.

None of the things I was told, PS, would come as a surprise to anyone who studies the Bible. I had only foolishly assumed that New Testament edicts didn't apply to me, little old me in the modern age. I believe I was wrong. But if God--or anyone--had told me I was wrong before I was humble enough to hear it, the fact is that I wouldn't have heard it. Nothing God told me when I was ready hadn't been also said by the modern prophets. Every single year in General Conference. It was only my own pride and foolishness that kept me from seeing that it was I. I had thought I was so good because I was doing the basics just oh so well, but in reality my own pride and self-righteousness had blinded me to all the things in myself that I needed to improve.

When you are ready for more than you are currently living, God will remove your blind spots and show you your weaknesses--so He can help you make them strong.

But I will say, honest and actual humility has been freeing. I used to live in this horrible bubble of fear--every time my phone rang, I would assume the person on the other end was calling to accuse me of something. If the bishop asked to speak with me--or if anyone asked to speak with me, ever--I would assume it was because they needed to tell me everything I was doing wrong. And those assumptions would fill me with fear. And I was afraid.

Image here.

Now, sometimes I still feel that way, but I've been astonished at how those feelings have been replaced with stalwart acceptance. I find myself praying that if an accusation is coming, that I'll see it accurately and use the experience to change myself for the better. I feel like I finally learned that criticism is actually a blessing--accurate criticism helps us discern the parts of ourselves that need to change, and inaccurate criticism tells more about the criticizer than the actual situation. Either way, it is a blessing for the one being criticized. And it is so much more pleasant to operate out of this understanding than from a place of constant fear of criticism.

I'll leave you with a story from Chapter 12 of Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda Paramahansa (emphasis mine):

The mosquitoes one evening were especially virulent. But Master failed to issue his usual instructions. I listened nervously to the anticipatory hum of the insects. Getting into bed, I threw a propitiatory prayer in their general direction. A half hour later, I coughed pretentiously to attract my guru's attention. I thought I would go mad with the bites and especially the singing drone as the mosquitoes celebrated bloodthirsty rites. 

No responsive stir from Master; I approached him cautiously. He was not breathing. This was my first observation of him in the yogic trance; it filled me with fright. 

"His heart must have failed!" I placed a mirror under his nose; no breath-vapor appeared. To make doubly certain, for minutes I closed his mouth and nostrils with my fingers. His body was cold and motionless. In a daze, I turned toward the door to summon help. 

"So! A budding experimentalist! My poor nose!" Master's voice was shaky with laughter. "Why don't you go to bed? Is the whole world going to change for you? Change yourself: be rid of the mosquito consciousness." 

Meekly I returned to my bed. Not one insect ventured near. I realized that my guru had previously agreed to the curtains only to please me; he had no fear of mosquitoes. His yogic power was such that he either could will them not to bite, or could escape to an inner invulnerability. 

Obey the basics and change yourself.

That is all.

Tao Te Ching: Chapter 19 Commentary

This is part of a series examining the Tao Te Ching from an LDS, Christ-centered perspective. I am not a spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These are only my opinions. 

Chapter 19 of the Tao Te Ching examines the importance of simplicity, plainness, and reducing desires. 

Chapter 19

End sagacity; abandon knowledge
The people benefit a hundred times

End benevolence; abandon righteousness
The people return to piety and charity

End cunning; discard profit
Bandits and thieves no longer exist

These three things are superficial and insufficient
Thus this teaching has its place:
Show plainness; hold simplicity
Reduce selfishness; decrease desires

End sagacity? End benevolence?

This can be a perplexing chapter because it seems to want to end things that are good.... like knowledge, charity, righteousness.

That's not really what this chapter is saying.

As in earlier chapters of the Tao Te Ching, this chapter is using one half of a duality to condemn duality as a concept. If you have benevolence and knowledge, it is only because you also have malevolence and ignorance. End the duality. Without that duality, there is no benevolence and knowledge, because everything is benevolent and wise, and when everything is a certain way, you no longer notice it. When the duality is gone, perception of it changes. Like Syndrome says in the Incredibles: when everyone's super, no one will be.



This chapter isn't arguing against righteousness or goodness; it's arguing against duality.

Reduce selfishness; decrease desires

Image here.

These three things are superficial and insufficient
Thus this teaching has its place:
Show plainness; hold simplicity
Reduce selfishness; decrease desires

The conclusion of this chapter is a list of basic instructions to decrease materialism--a major theme of the Tao Te Ching. When we embrace simplicity and plainness, reduce selfishness, and especially, decrease desires, we are much more capable of being open to the Spirit and much more capable of being open to God's will for us.

As an example, I used to have lots of ambitions and desires--none of them "unrighteous" or anything like that--but one day God told me I needed to give them all up. I cried and cried because those where what I wanted. But when I finally did let go, reduce my selfishness, and decrease my desires, all these miracles started happening in my life, God gave me lots of presents, and life actually got better.

A Biblical warning against materialism:

Ecclesiastes 5:10
10 He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

We are counseled to embrace contentment:

1 Timothy 6:6
6 But godliness with contentment is great gain.

Conclusion

This chapter of the Tao Te Ching encourages us to transcend duality, reduce our own materialism, and embrace plainness and simplicity.

Gall's Law and the healing arts.

 I found this little bit of commentary on a book thread: 

From these books came the principle known as Gall's Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

This explains why the Obamacare enrollment web sites were such unmitigated disasters. They tried to put together this massive system together from ground zero. Meanwhile, the Amazon order web sites, which started out small and grew over time, easily handle thousands of transactions per hour.

I read that and thought: this is so applicable to healing! Yes! I have to blog about it. 

You need a strong foundation

Foundation. Image here.

So as a recap, Gall's law is basically that complex systems can't just be designed from scratch and work: they have to evolve from simple systems that work. 

In my experience, this is why a lot of times you can't just make a major shift in one session. Sometimes you can, but only when the proper foundation is already there. When you can't make the complete shift, it's because you're missing the crucial simple system at the bottom.

The specific instance that comes to mind here is the issue of addiction. I work with addicts a lot on different issues--remember that EVERYONE is an addict to something, please--but many times there is an eventual relapse. In those cases, the problem is not that the energy work was ineffective; the problem is that it was conducted on a shaky foundation. There are underlying problems that need to be healed first.

Example: I need to be sick.

Sometimes finding the base issue feels like
looking for the bottom turtle when it's
turtles all the way down.

As an example, in my own life, I find that I tend to have the subconscious program running of "I need to be sick." Many times I have pulled it and replaced it with "I can be healthy," and so on, but it tends to come right back!

The problem isn't that I didn't effectively remove the program; the problem is that there was another program underneath it: "I can only rest when I'm sick." So when my body needed rest, it would get sick, and defend that sickness under a new program of "I need to be sick"--because it did believe it needed to be sick, because it needed to rest, and if it could only rest when sick... you get the idea.

So I pulled that program, but both programs still came back, and it was because underlying those programs was a subconscious objection, an assumption that if I could no longer rest when I was sick, I could never rest at all. So that caused a body rebellion. Underneath it all was a desperate need to rest, and a fundamental misunderstanding about when it is appropriate to rest and not rest. Getting to the foundation of the issue allowed the remainder of the healing to happen organically.

Cases of addiction

So many times I work with addicts, and we clear up the trapped emotions associated with their relapses, and we change some belief programming, and things are great for a week or two or four or six, and then there's a relapse. The issue, as Gall's law explains, is that complete emotional and spiritual health--i.e., life without addiction--is too complex of a system to be orchestrated from scratch. It has to be built on a strong base. A strong, simple foundation. 

The trouble with many addictions in particular is that the underlying needs going unmet are very powerful. Kind of like my body getting sick over and over again in an attempt to get the rest it needed. 

Addict brain. Image here.

Addictions are chemical in nature--even if you aren't taking drugs as your addiction, the addictive behavior, whatever it is, causes chemical secretions in the brain and body that make you feel good, and those are the chemicals you are truly addicted to. If your body decides it needs more of those chemicals, you're going to act out: it's your drug.

In the world of addiction recovery, it's often the case that there is a big focus on triggers, and identifying the things that make a person act out. Sometimes it's boredom. Or stress. Or anger. I'm reading a book on nicotine addiction right now--smoking--and the guy listed the triggers of boredom and concentration, stress and relaxation. People act out with all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons and there are lots of triggers. A lot of addiction recovery tends to focus on identifying and then avoiding triggers, but the secret is that the triggers are triggers in the first place because of something deeper. So pulling triggers can help--I used to do that a lot--but a new trigger will form or the old trigger will come back when the underlying issue is not met. 

Say the underlying issue for an addict is a feeling of being not good enough. In moments of boredom or stress, that feeling is triggered and the addict acts out. Pulling boredom or stress as a trigger is not good enough because the underlying issue was never stress or boredom in the first place--those were the external factors that set off the internal factor.

The plot thickens

But it's more complex even than that. So we discover that underneath this theoretical addiction is a feeling of not being good enough. Is it enough to just pull the subconscious programs of "not good enough"? Not necessarily. You can pull those programs, but they can come right back if the thing that caused those programs to be built in the first place is not dealt with. Say the program was caused by an early childhood trauma--Baby Addict was left to cry it out on his first night of life and felt it was because he wasn't good enough to be comforted. Or say the program was caused by a premortal trauma that the addict obviously is very unlikely to remember. Or perhaps the program was caused by a perfect storm of events--in middle school there was a bully AND his mom said something mean AND he failed a class AND his crush didn't like him AND he had acne--and all of those events combined and created--or even just reinforced--the original programming. 

So then, if we pull the program but don't heal the original issue that caused the formation of the belief in the first place, and that original trauma is rekindled for whatever reason, then you can have a reformation of the belief system.

Also important is the influence of unseen powers of darkness--unclean spirits can whisper these things in our ears and get into our minds that way. Clearing past trauma and changing the associated subconscious programming can only go so far if the influence of evil spirits goes unchecked. 

The important thing, though, is that we get to the root of the issue: if the very base of the problem gets resolved, if the foundation of the old system is rocked, the whole system can come falling down. 

When a strong, simple, new foundation is in place, the complex system of a life without addiction (or whatever the problem issue is) can be built on top. 

The best foundation

No discussion of foundations would be complete without a discussion of the best foundation! In the Gospel, we know that we're all supposed to build on the foundation of Jesus Christ: 

Image here.

Helaman 5:1212 And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.

Faith in Christ is in so many ways not just the strongest foundation, but the simplest foundation. Perhaps it is the strongest because it is the simplest. Unshakeable faith in Jesus Christ is the simple system that the complex systems are built around as we progress and become more like God.

Ephesians 4:13
13 Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:

A complete foundation

I suspect that one of the problems most people face is that their foundation is not just one thing: a person can have a foundation that is partially Christ and partially pride and partially self-loathing. In those cases, it's important to remove everything from the foundation that shouldn't be there. It isn't enough to have some Jesus in your foundation; He has to be the whole thing. Illusions of the ego, like pride and issues of self-worth, cannot be there at all.

Conclusion

Trying to build a fancy new self on a crap foundation is not going to end well. That is what we can learn from Gall's Law. Clearing up deeply ingrained struggles can take a lot of work in order to get to the root issue: the old foundation needs to be cleared before a new one can be put in place. The complex system of a whole new lifestyle can only be built on the simple system of a strong base. 

discerning music

I mostly just listen to mantra music lately, but yesterday in a moment of--something--I turned on the radio. Before my spiritual awakening I really enjoyed the Top 40, minus the really crude ones and so forth, and my husband has been getting tired of mantras. So I flipped the radio in my car to whatever station my radio is set to and just had that on.

Smoke music. Obviously from Shutterstock. The page
this picture is on has cool pictures of music as smoke, etc.

There was this crazy moment, though, when Lady Gaga's song Paparazzi came on. When that song first came out a few years ago, I had it stuck in my head all the time, and I would sing it ALL THE TIME. I just couldn't get it out of my head.

I haven't even thought about the song in forever, but it came on, and I was shocked. I'd never thought to look at the spiritual energy of music before, but when it came on, I couldn't help it. It was like watching a black filth of smoke seep into my car through the speakers. It looked like tendrils of evil extending from my stereo, filling up my car. I prayed for a shield against it but I will admit I kept watching it. I was just so fascinated to see such a visual witness of the evil of that song.

I've read that the words of a song or book don't even have to be bad in order to carry the negative energy of a negative creator. I suspect this is true.

Be careful what you listen to. You never know what kind of poison it is placing around you--or what kind of protection.

there are no incurable conditions.

I was reading a book the other day and it had the great thought: there are no incurable conditions, only incurable people.

Obviously, as an energy worker, I end up interacting with a lot of skeptics. I recently worked with a client who reached out in desperation and who flat-out asked, "Do I need to believe in this to work? Because let me be honest..."

I was happy to respond to her concern with the explanation that no belief is necessary for what I do to work; the only thing that is necessary is desire.

Which is to say, if you actively desire an energetic solution to fail on you, it will.

Actively desiring an energetic solution to your problems may not guarantee said solution, but it vastly improves its chances of success.

A person who does not wish to be healed is an incurable person. God will not heal us against our wishes. The crowning gift of God is agency--the ability to choose in accordance with our desires.

The role of beliefs

Even though desire is king here, belief still plays an important role. For example, take the person who wants to get well, but doesn't believe himself to be worthy of health. Or the person who wants to get well but believes health is impossible from them to achieve. There are any number of limiting beliefs that can affect a person's desires. For a desire to be effective, the person's belief systems don't necessarily need to support the desire, but they do need to at least get out of the way.

Image here.

Muscle testing is a simple way to identify limiting beliefs, and theta healing is a simple way to alter these belief programs on a subconscious level (circumventing the conscious mind). That sentence may make no sense at all, if you've never heard those terms before, but what it means is that if you have limiting beliefs out there that you don't know how to handle--say, the belief that you are not good enough, or the belief that life should be hard for you, or the belief that you deserve to be punished--there are answers for you that don't require decades of talk therapy. One energy healing session with the right practitioner can set your subconscious and conscious mind on a whole new route when it comes to beliefs like those.

And even if you think you have no bad subconscious programs running, well, you are probably wrong. Most people I work with, even very independent people who are horrified to hear it, have an "I am a victim" program running; even people who like themselves can have an "I am unworthy" program running. In this way, beliefs matter. But altering beliefs won't work if there isn't an accompanying desire to change them.

Faith, Hope, and Charity

1 Corinthians 13:13
13 And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

From here.

 Moroni 10:20
20 Wherefore, there must be faith; and if there must be faith there must also be hope; and if hope there must also be charity.
there must be

 Alma 7:24
24 And see that ye have faith, hope, and charity, and then ye will always abound in good works.

Doctrine and Covenants 18:19
19 And if you have not faith, hope, and charity, you can do nothing.

 Faith, hope, and charity: the triumvirate of righteous attributes. If charity is a principle of love (the pure love of Christ), and faith is a principle of action, hope is a principle of desire (can you believe it? There is literally no entry for Hope in the Bible Dictionary!). If you look up "hope" in the regular dictionary, since the Bible Dictionary apparently has no entry for it, you will see that hope is typically defined as a desire and expectation for something.

Hope is desire.

So when we talk about faith, hope, and charity, what we're really talking about is belief-to-action, desire, and love. You have to love yourself enough to have enough hope or desire for your future to act.

So where does incurability come in?

Incurability comes in where there is a lack of faith, hope, or charity, involving the illness. When a person doesn't love themselves enough to feel worthy to get well; when a person doesn't believe they can get well; when a person doesn't desire to get well.

Not wanting to get well actually comes into play a lot.

Consider the man who is collecting disability payments--if he gets well, he loses his livelihood. I have read accounts of people who have been healed through energy healing and then chosen to revert to previous states of dis-ease, for the sake of collecting a government paycheck.

People can desire illness more than health when:

- there is a financial or otherwise material benefit to remaining unwell
- it gives them the attention they crave from those around them
- they would rather blame an illness than take responsibility for their decisions
- they fear the responsibilities that would come with health
- they're afraid getting well too soon will lead to assumptions of them having made it all up
- they don't want to change their lifestyles as health would require
- the illness fills a need in any way

Image here.

Truly, there are any number of reasons why a person would consciously or subconsciously desire illness more than they desire health at any given time. And while I'm referring to "illness," really this could refer to anything that causes problems in a person's life, including a bad job or unemployment or an addiction or whatever. Faith, hope, and charity all intersect in those cases too, and hope matters far more than most people may necessarily think.

Remedy?

As far as I can tell, there is no real remedy for the person who doesn't want to be healed. That's what makes them incurable. The only remedy is their own choice to change. The most we can do is pray for them.

If they have a desire to have a desire to be healed, that is also something you can work with. It's one of those "help thou mine unbelief" things.

I work a lot with addicts, and this lack of desire, this hopelessness in reference to recovery, is extremely common. For whatever reason, addicts desire addiction more than they desire recovery. As with all illnesses, until there is a true desire to heal, a hope for healing, health and recovery will likely prove elusive.

The only remedy for an incurable person is a shift in desire.

I'll be writing more about how to shift desires in a future post.

Conclusion

There are no incurable conditions; only incurable people. God never heals against a person's will, so if a person desires not to heal, God will respect that desire. An incurable person can be made curable through a shift in desire.

Tao Te Ching: Chapter 18 Commentary

This is part of a series examining the Tao Te Ching from an LDS, Christ-centered perspective. I am not a spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These are only my opinions. 

Chapter 18 of the Tao Te Ching examines the opposites that show up when unity is dismissed in favor of duality. 

Chapter 18

The great Tao fades away
There is benevolence and justice
Intelligence comes forth
There is great deception

The six relations are not harmonious
There is filial piety and kind affection
The country is in confused chaos
There are loyal ministers

The Great Tao Fades Away

The "Tao" means the "way," or "path," and it refers to the way of the Universe. The way of the Universe is non-dual--duality is subsumed within the greater whole of the Tao (as an example, consider the taijitu, the yin-yang symbol, that contains both the masculine and feminine energies in their duality, as a single non-dual whole).

When we abandon the higher, non-dual view of the universe, we are susceptible to feelings of self-righteousness ("benevolence" and "justice"). Think of how Jesus once preached: "There is none good but one, that is, God" (Mark 10:18). Earlier in the verse, Christ even chastises those around Him for calling Him good--and He is the Christ! It can be easy and tempting for us to think of ourselves as benevolent or just, but that is deception: As Jesus said, there is one who is good, and that is God.

The next two lines state that when intelligence comes, so does deception. Alternate translations use the words "cleverness" and "hypocrisy" instead. Both translations build on the idea that when we lose the non-dual mindset and allow what the yogis call "maya," or the "illusion" of duality to set in, we fancy ourselves clever or somehow smarter than those around us--which leads to hypocrisy and deception. Particularly, to me, stands out the idea of self-deception. Thinking we are smarter than anyone else is a form of self-deception that is avoided when we are centered in reality (the Gospel, the "Tao," the reality of the Universe).

Alternate understandings of this stanza indicate that Lao-Tzu means that when people abandon the Tao, they focus more on benevolence and justice and cleverness because those things have largely disappeared--absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that. Because benevolence and justice is part of the Tao, when people abandon the Tao, it makes those things that much harder to find, and therefore that much easier to spot in the rare instances when they show up.

The six relations

These are graphs of the six relations from Confucianism (source). In keeping with the Tao Te Ching's discussion of yin and yang, or dominant and subordinate, that's what these relationships are all about.

	1	2	3
	4	5	6

	4	5	6

What Chapter 18 is saying here is that when the Tao is abandoned, and there is therefore disharmony in the six relationships, filial piety and kind affection are talked about because they are harder to find and easier to spot. It is the same with the country when the Tao is abandoned: all of a sudden, the few loyal ministers stand out.

Conclusion

Chapter 18 discusses the nature of duality: in a dual world, good and bad are illuminated by each other.

In a world that embraces the Tao, there is no distinction between good and bad, because everything is good and everything is well-governed and all relationships are in harmony. By embracing the Tao and shedding the illusion of maya, we cease to be roped into the illusion of duality and begin to live in the world of reality. 

Tao Te Ching: Chapter 17 Commentary

This is part of a series examining the Tao Te Ching from an LDS, Christ-centered perspective. I am not a spokesperson for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These are only my opinions. 

Chapter 17 of the Tao Te Ching examines governance. 

Chapter 17

The highest rulers, people do not know they have them
The next level, people love them and praise them
The next level, people fear them
The next level, people despise them
If the rulers' trust is insufficient
Have no trust in them

Proceeding calmly, valuing their words
Task accomplished, matter settled
The people all say, "We did it naturally"

Types of Rulers

So here we have listed four separate levels of rulers.

The top level of rulers is so efficient, people don't know they even exist. The next three levels inspire people to love them, fear them, and hate them, respectively. I feel like this is pretty self-explanatory. The next line is interesting: "If the rulers' trust is insufficient/ Have no trust in them."

Everyone is a mirror for ourselves. What we see in others is really what we see in ourselves. When a person, or a regime or ruler, sees reason for distrust in others, it is typically because that person is not trustworthy. When you get a ruler who does not trust his people, it is a sign that you should not trust that person.

We did it naturally

The second stanza in this chapter is brief, and kind of goes backwards. When people proceed calmly, valuing their words, tasks are accomplished and matters are settled "naturally."

There is a Biblical precedent for people valuing their words highly:

Matthew 12:36
36 But I say unto you, That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.

Ephesians 4:29
29 Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.

The Bible also teaches that "in quietness and confidence" is our strength (Isaiah 30:15).

Conclusion

Proceeding calmly with measured words is a wise way to accomplish things.

Consistency of spiritual sight

When my gift of discernment of spirits really kicked in, one of the first things I saw was a blue cord extending from one person's heart to another. At first I didn't know what was going on--it wasn't seeing with my natural eyes, but I could still perceive the nature of the cord and its color, and I could discern it every time I looked at or even thought about the people involved. I didn't know what it meant or what it was, just that it was there.

I was shocked and thrilled months later when I read a book, The Lightworker's Way by Doreen Virtue, that included an exact description of the cord I'd seen, along with an explanation of what it did. It was an incredible validation to know that the things I was now perceiving were actually real things, that other people perceived them the same way, and that they had actual functions and were useful to observe.

I have had incredible experiences of validation like this. One notable time, while I was working on someone, I heard the voice of the Holy Spirit whisper to me what to do, in very exact terms I had never heard before, but which I intuitively understood. When I looked the terms up online after the session, it turned out that they were actually real words and related extremely specifically to my client's situation.

I'm writing about this today because I recently had another experience like that and it was mind-blowing to me. 

Tentacles. Awesome. Image here.

I don't really scan people's auras anymore unless they ask me to, because I like to honor their privacy and so on, but sometimes I literally can't help it and what you might call psychic information just flows into my brain. This happened earlier this week: a vision popped into my head of a person's aura, covered in tentacles. Like an octopus. 

This vision very much disconcerted me, because I'd never seen such a thing before. I assumed I was making it up. I prayed for signs that what I had seen was accurate, and also texted a trusted friend who also has the gift of discernment of spirits for verification. She didn't get back to me, but the next day I went to an aquarium and there was an exhibit specifically called "Tentacles." Over the next week multiple people referenced octopi and tentacles in their normal conversations that had nothing to do with either of those things. So I took those as witnesses that what I had seen was accurate.

Today I decided to google "aura tentacles," and see if anything came up. Something did! And the description of what auric tentacles mean match perfectly with what I know of the person who has them in their aura.

It is incredible how this sort of crazy-person spiritual "sight" seems to be consistent from person to person.

Conclusion

People with spiritual sight often see, or discern, similar things, or things of a similar nature. To me, this is a validation that the things perceived in this way are actually legitimate things.