Introduction

He was engaged in his work. Every day was like the last. Saul, the faithful Pharisee, was consummately rooting out the heresy that was sweeping through Judaism. One day, in the midst of his work, he was struck with a vision of God—and in a moment everything was different. A lifetime of accumulated knowledge and familiarity was turned on its head. He was blinded by the light. Rather, the light exposed his blindness, to which he was previously unaware, being blessed by God with a physical witness of his cognitive impairment. Paul—as he would now be known—had encountered an expanded awareness. As always happens, accompanying this awareness was a new vision of who he was (the good and the bad) and how he should act. Though he was contemporarily well known for his zeal, Paul would have been lost to history as yet another unnamed Pharisee had he not encountered and heeded the additional light that he discovered had been all around him the whole time.

Like Paul, you are about to take the next step on your journey to a fuller realization of the light that is available, in its fullness, all around you.

This world and all its trappings are utter refuse compared to the glory and knowledge that God provides to all who love and seek him. Whether you are at the tail end of a life where you have served God to the best of your knowledge, or whether you are fostering a nascent belief in God, he has so much more in store for you than you are presently aware of.

The key to unlocking your unclaimed treasures of wisdom, knowledge, glory, and power lies in obtaining further light and truth. By learning more about what light and truth are, why they are important, and how they are obtained and shared with others, you will be enabled to ascend to a higher degree of awareness. This might sound cliché or New Age, but it is neither. It is the basics; Gospel 101; the previously unseen root of everything you presently believe that is true, and the key to everything you presently lack.

As you will see in the chapters to follow, obtaining a higher degree of awareness is inherently tactile and practical, and is the very purpose for which this entire world was created, and for which you were born.

The question of what truth is and how to obtain it is as old as mankind. Once, many years ago, one particular man asked this very question. Unlike the many others who had done it before and since, the answer to his question was literally right in front of him.

This man was Pilate, and standing before him was the Lord Jesus Christ. We can’t know how sincere Pilate was in the question he offered Jesus, but what we do know is that before him stood a being who had the answer to every question Pilate could have had—in fact, the answer to every question that can be conceived in this world.

The Lord said: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12) The Lord Jesus knows everything pertaining to this creation, but Pilate obviously did not know who it was that stood before him or what he possessed.

Truth is things as they really are (see Jacob 4:13)¹. This is a deceptively simple definition.

Truth is never conveyed in its fullness. God does not reveal all truth at once. It is impossible for limited humans to receive a revelation from God at the level of his perfection. Every message has to be framed according to our limited understanding. Every effort has to be taken to avoid colliding with our many biases and preconceived notions if at all possible.

Just as a parent can oversimplify a complicated concept when explaining something to a child, God simplifies truth to be understandable at our level. This is, for example, why the Lord taught in parables.

To those who are not prepared, God’s light seems like darkness. It must be delivered in pieces or out of focus at first. It takes time and obedience to gain further light and truth; to piece together the pieces received, to receive new pieces, or to focus the blurriness.

As an example, consider that the Master summarized the entire gospel into two simple commandments:

37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. 38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew 22)

While we can see that truth is simple enough to be contained in two brief phrases, we also see that it is at least complicated enough to take up thousands of pages of scriptures in elaboration.

There is, in fact, no limit to the complexity of truth—“...truth abideth and hath no end.” (D&C 88:66) The closer you look at truth, the more complicated it gets. The Apostle John said “the world itself could not contain the books that should be written” about the actions of Jesus, let alone the gospel that dictated those actions (John 21:25).

Understanding that truth is eternally expanding means that it is impossible to know everything about everything. Continual searching will always yield greater truth.

Truth is not absolute—it is an infinite continuum. Think of it as a decimal point number. Any representation of the number will be, at best, a truncation of the actual number because decimals are infinite—you can always add another number to the right hand side.

Truth is infinite and therefore unknowable. Humans cannot deal in truth, because we cannot comprehend, represent, or interrogate the infinite. The best we can do is approximate.

Unlike truth itself, which is infinite, an approximation of it is finite. It is not final, and it is not complete. Approximations have limits and they have rounding errors. How much do these matter? A lot, it turns out. The more complex a system, the more sensitive it is to even the slightest errors in the approximation of its values.

The perceptive notice the effects of these errors, and interpret them as a need to replace certain portions of their understanding of truth with new or more accurate approximations.

Some unfortunate souls don’t bother paying attention to the limitations of their approximation, and die believing the same limited ideas they were taught as a child, in spite of a lifetime of evidences of their inadequacies.

We acquire light and truth by attaining ever-more accurate approximations of truth, informed by things we hear that offer an improvement.

What we regard as truth is not actually truth. It is merely our perception of truth. Our perception of truth is our current noisy discrete approximation of reality. It changes from person to person, and from one moment to the next, depending on the person’s awareness and comprehension of good and evil.

Perception is progressive. Every level of perception allows us to deal with more of reality—either with what was previously unknown to us, or what was previously less known to us.

Our perception, though fatally flawed, can still lead to positive interactions with pseudo-reality. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is able to have a good time in the Emerald City in spite of the fact that its existence is predicated on the fraud of the Wizard having special wisdom or power. The wizard did not have to be real in order for her to experience life as if he was. How we feel is not a result of reality. Instead, it is a result of our perception—how we frame our noisy, limited observations of reality.

If we can experience good things at any level of reality, why bother obtaining a more accurate estimate of it? One reason is that our inability to interact with higher order reality does not prevent it from acting on us!

Unknown dangers can come to us and hurt us whether we know about them ahead of time or not. Believing in the wizard may have enabled Dorothy to frolic in the Emerald City, but it did not kill the wicked witch. To kill the witch, Dorothy first had to come to terms with higher order truth—truth that ripped out the illusion of the wizard. Illusions may be valuable, but they always come at a price. The cost to perpetuate the illusion is always far greater than the benefit.

Perception is the way we interpret our knowledge (experiences) based on our beliefs (which are not based on experience). Perception is completely malleable. No one forces your way of interpreting reality to conform with your experiences, let alone with the truth. Perception is a practice. You can be good, bad, or in between when it comes to your ability to rationally synthesize your observations and beliefs.

We are living in an age when technology can create illusions that are impossible to distinguish from reality. For instance, there are programs that can create undetectable fake videos of real people. Recently, a program was created that creates selfies of undetectable fake people. Just as our perception of a person is independent of what that person actually said and whether they even exist, our perception of reality can be grossly distorted from actuality. Just as you could be genuinely enraged or enamored with what you see in fake media, you can have “real” feelings about perceptions that are totally false.

In scriptural language, beliefs that are ineffectual because they are based on something other than reality are described as vain. Vanity is when we pursue something that does not lead to improvement: “And turn ye not aside: for then should ye go after vain things, which cannot profit nor deliver; for they are vain.” (1 Samuel 12:21) There is no such thing as a neutral belief. Everything leads to improvement or debasement.

Material comfort is not the characteristic outcome of seeking truth. A love of truth is a reward in and of itself. The principles learned create a better you. Your character goes with you no matter the external environment you find yourself in. It can produce peace that is untouchable by your surroundings, and meaning that endures no matter the actions of those around you.

Just as wheat and tares can’t be distinguished until harvest time, those who seek truth for temporal gain are distinguished from those who seek it for itself when a situation arises where the expected benefit doesn’t justify the sacrifice required. Jesus repeatedly commanded that we keep his commandments even if it costs us our lives and everything we know and love.

The cost exceeding the benefit is the constant case when it comes to charity for others. A stronger motive than reciprocation is needed for true discipleship.

To love truth is to love God with all one’s might, mind, and strength, and thus love him more than any cost that might be incurred by obeying him. This love casts out all fear of coming to the light; the light which surely will make painfully aware any shortcoming in the truth seeker. Conversely, a love of God and truth implies a hatred of error and evil.

The truth seeker would rather press forward through the abrasive process of repentance than sojourn in even the slightest amount of darkness. They trust that God alone knows the path to complete happiness, and anything they are asked to abandon in that path is but a small price to pay for the riches of eternity. As the Psalmist said:

127 Therefore I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine gold.
128 Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right; and I hate every false way. (Psalm 119)

Truth seekers must love truth above all things of this world. That includes their time, talents, treasure, loved ones, and lives.

Every one of us could ask ourselves what we would ask Jesus if, like Pilate, we had the chance to stand face to face with him. If you could ask the creator of all we know anything, what would it be? What treasures of knowledge and wisdom would you plead for? What alleviation from pain and suffering might you request? What favors for yourself or those you love would you seek? What burning, existential questions would you ask?

Whether you recognize it or not , the Lord Jesus Christ and all the truth he embodies is before you at all times and in all places. He is the light that shines in the darkness. He is truth. He is glory. He is happiness. He is the knowledge we need to overcome this world.

A tremendous volume of writing has been dedicated to questions regarding what truth is, how to get it, and why it matters, yet none of it contains what the Lord will teach you in this book.

I realize that it takes a great deal of faith to believe that God would transmit such significant information through such an obscure volume and through a no-name writer. The Lord delights in using the weak things of the world to do his work:

27 But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty;
28 And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are:
29 That no flesh should glory in his presence. (1 Corinthians 1)

His use of obscure venues is a door through which those burdened with pride cannot enter; it is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye. Make no mistake; if there is any wisdom or benefit in the words in this book, they are from God. The author takes credit only for the crudeness of expression and any typos that have eluded the volunteer editors.

This book will provide you with the tools he desires you to have. You need them to expand your awareness of the truth that God wants you to obtain. It is dedicated to all those who love truth. May it bring you closer to the Lord Jesus Christ.