What the Spirit is Not

In numerous posts, I've described encounters I've had with the Spirit. I've taken extra care in many of these posts to discuss the nature of these experiences, partly because I regard it as being of primary importance to discern between what is actually the Spirit, what is just my own (for lack of a better term) wishful thinking, and what might be spiritual deception by (for lack of a better term) dark forces.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day, and he was describing some important decisions he has made recently, and his own process of discernment. He has felt guided by the Spirit in these decisions, and I was impressed by his attitude. When he experienced a prompting from the Spirit, he explained to me, he gives it time. He waits long enough to properly discern whether it is a true prompting.

As I have matured in my spiritual journey, I too have learned that if a prompting is a true prompting, it will still be true after I've slept on it and given it some more thought. I have also learned that it is reasonable to seek validation, when possible, that a prompting is true. For example, last year when I felt prompted by the Spirit to bear my testimony in Fast and Testimony Meeting, the Spirit urged me to ask permission from my Bishop. My Bishop gave me permission to bear my testimony, and the following week he volunteered that he felt the Spirit confirming that that was the right thing to do. So the process of asking permission and my Bishop's prompting were validations that my own prompting was true. That makes sense, because the Spirit was essentially prompting me to do something out of harmony with the rules of the Church. Good order is a principle of the Gospel, and the Spirit will never have a problem with fact checking. We can seek more mundane validations as well. Objectivity (though frequently elusive) is a good thing.

There are situations -- urgent situations! -- where the Spirit might prompt us to do something now. We may not have time to sleep on it and think about it or validate beforehand. Or there may be situations where we will be called upon to act in faith, and have our faith be validated later, after we've done what the Lord has asked of us. In my experience, in those situations the prompting is clear enough and strong enough that we will know what is required of us.

It is important for us to learn to recognize the Spirit's unique personality at places like Church, where we know the Spirit is present, so that we can avoid being deceived. The more we listen to and follow the Spirit, the better we become at discerning it and distinguishing it from other influences we may feel, either internal or external. It's like anything else in life. Practice makes perfect.

The ultimate validation of spiritual promptings comes over the course of many years, as the fruits of the Spirit become evident in our lives.

I've seen a couple of statements by Mohohawaii, comparing the Spirit to a "rush of emotion." Whenever I've discussed the Spirit previously, I've tried to be at pains to point out that this is what the Spirit is not.

The best analogy I can think of in terms of how I discern the Spirit is to compare it to how I experience other, mortal personages. Different people have different personalities and project themselves in different ways. My husband has a very different personality from our son. Not only are their personalities different, they are also physically different. They carry themselves differently, they walk differently. If I am sitting at the dining room table with my face away from the stairs, if one of them comes down the stairs I can usually tell who is coming without seeing him just by hearing how the floorboards creak and the pattern of their steps. They walk differently. When I am carrying on a conversation with my husband, the quality of that conversation is different from the quality of the conversation with my son. They have different senses of humor, different approaches to problems, different ways of expressing themselves. If I were blind and deaf, and could only communicate with them in some more abstract manner, I would still be able to -- with enough interaction -- discern who was actually speaking to me, because of the differences between them. In fact, they are different enough that I would probably discern fairly quickly.

OK. I love my husband. My heart often does flutter in his presence. If he has been gone for a long time, I may even feel a "rush of emotion" when he shows up. Interacting with my husband, however, does not produce a single emotion every time I interact with him. Depending on the quality of interaction, I may feel levity, sadness, anger, delight, calm, etc. It all depends on what we are discussing and what is happening between us and around us. The feelings I experience in his presence are different from the quality of his personality, different from his presence itself. Furthermore, very many (though not all) of the feelings I experience in his presence I may experience elsewhere when he is absent. For example, I may see a movie or have a conversation or smell a scent that triggers a memory of him, and that causes me to experience a feeling that I felt in his presence. But all that is different from actually having him present.

It is the same with the Spirit.

Now I went for very many years without the Spirit in my life. During all those years, I would experience art or go to a movie or listen to music that would bring on a "rush of emotion." Frequently these rushes of emotion would trigger memories of spiritual experiences I had as a youth when I was active in the Church. But I now recognize that they were not the same thing as those spiritual experiences.

The reason I know that is because when I finally did feel the presence of the Spirit again in August 2005, I immediately knew A) that what I was experiencing in that moment was utterly distinct from the usual emotions that are often categorized as "spiritual," and B) that I had not experienced it in a very long time, in many, many years. Now people can tell me I did not know what I was experiencing, or I was mistaken, or whatever they want. I know what I experienced. It was as clear and unequivocal to me as any other sensory experience I might have of meeting a particular person at a particular time in a particular locale.

Am I saying it's not possible to doubt that what I experienced was really the Spirit? No, of course doubt is always possible. Doubt is possible about much more mundane things too. I'm so absent-minded, half the time I doubt whether I locked the front door behind me when I'm half-way to the grocery store. But the nature of what I experienced I could not deny. It was not just a "rush of emotion." I'm content to let the rest of my life be the validation of whether or not I did in fact meet the Spirit in at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Salt Lake on that particular August afternoon in 2005.

Of course listening to the Spirit is not a "golden path" to truth in the sense that we don't have to work at it, or in the sense that there's no possibility for human error. Of course people make mistakes and do terrible things in the name of God, claiming to be guided by the Spirit. Of course. That's why I discussed at the outset the importance of training oneself in skills of discernment, and validating whenever possible. But to point out that people can make mistakes in discerning the Spirit doesn't invalidate the principle. Discerning the Spirit has become an essential component of my life path, one that I have validated to my satisfaction time and time again. The Spirit steadies me, comforts me, and gives me vision, insight and strength. It makes no more sense to me to dispense with the Spirit because of human error in discerning the Spirit than it makes to dispense with scientific method because scientists make mistakes.

I have always encouraged (and will continue to encourage) everyone I meet to follow whatever path seems best to them, the only requirement being that they do so with integrity. That's what I've tried to do.