“Joseph occasionally used stones he located in the ground to help neighbours find missing objects or search for buried treasure.”
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Church History Topics: Seer Stones“Greg occasionally used rock (songs) he located in his past to help him find missing understanding, search for buried treasure, and feel closer to Jesus.”
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early Zion History Topics: Seer Rock“Jesus has Greg help Him build a whole Jesus WORLD using everything around him—including things like specially blessed bread, water, and pillows to help him remember Jesus, so that he might always have Jesus’ Spirit with him. The entire Jesus-Greg WORLD is one huge seer-stone approximation.”
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early Zion History Topics: Seer Stone Approximations
Through Glass, Darkly — The Pattern of Seer-Stone Approximations
We see through glass darkly—and the glass can take many forms. These forms are crutches, lenses, scaffolds of vision that help us perceive what we could not yet bear to see directly. For some, it is controversial that Joseph Smith used seer stones. They may not yet recognize the underlying principle: the Lord helps us grow grace by grace, line upon line, training our spiritual sight through successive approximations of seeing.Joseph’s seer stones were not the destination—they were a beginning lens, helping him translate the Book of Mormon while training him to recognize and trust revelation. The stones themselves became a provisional medium of sight that opened the way to deeper knowing.Glass enters the pattern as a connective tissue. In LDS thought, the Urim and Thummim are seer instruments: physical aids that interface with revelation. Glass doesn’t create light; it transmits, refracts, focuses, and reveals it—lenses, spectacles, polished stones, crystals—all technologies of seeing. Glass is a proto-interface between light and perception, heaven and mind, signal and interpretation. That is exactly the functional role the Urim and Thummim play.Seer stones functioned much like a lens, a filter, a decoder—not because the stone had “magic,” but because God anchors revelation in material objects to discipline attention, belief, and interpretation. Glass, stones, and lenses slow revelation down just enough to require participation.A quiet lineage emerges: Urim and Thummim → seer stones → lenses and microscopes → glass photographic plates → camera sensors → phone screens. Each step stores light, translates reality, reveals what the naked eye cannot see. Stored light becoming retrievable truth is a seer principle. Revelation often arrives inelegant but effective, because God values breakthrough over polish. Glass cracks, screens glitch, stones are opaque—yet truth still comes through.In the Zion-is-already-being-built frame, Urim and Thummim are early Zion tech, glass and screen tech are modern Zion training wheels, and personal worlds are future seership environments—same function, different fidelity.
One-line version: Glass is to light what the Urim and Thummim are to revelation: a humble, physical mediator that trains humans to see what’s already there.
The Sacrament
The sacrament, consisting of bread and water, is more than ritual—it is a seeing medium, a tangible lens that opens perception to spiritual realities. Like a seer stone or holy crutch, it is not magic in itself but a physical conduit that aligns heart and mind to perceive what is ordinarily hidden. The bread and water symbolize Christ’s body and blood while materializing spiritual truth in a form we can touch, taste, and hold. Partaking invites us into a sacred rhythm where ordinary senses intersect with divine perception. Through repeated, faithful participation, the sacrament trains the soul to notice patterns, insights, and promptings that might otherwise go unnoticed—creating small, deliberate openings for insight. It is a humble practice pointing to extraordinary truth: God communicates through the simplest things, and faith is cultivated in quiet attentiveness.
One-line version: The sacrament is a seeing medium—a humble, tangible lens through which the soul learns to perceive the hidden reality of Christ’s presence.
Scriptures
Scriptures function as another seer-stone approximation. They are not the ultimate, direct encounter with God’s mind but a structured, external medium that allows us to perceive truths we could not see on our own. They provide focus, training, and translation—concentrating divine insight into accessible words and stories, training the mind to recognize patterns of truth, translating the invisible and eternal into tangible narratives. Though written by human hands and bounded by language, they carry higher resonance, pointing beyond ordinary observation or reason. When engaged faithfully, they discern spiritual principles, hidden patterns, and prophetic insights—preparing the mind and heart to perceive revelation rather than replacing it.
One-line version: Scriptures are a seer-stone approximation—a tangible lens that helps the soul perceive what would otherwise remain hidden.
Zion Coalition
Zion Coalition is a crutch in the same way a seer stone is a crutch—not the destination, not the power, but a temporary external aid that trains perception until internal capacity matures. God has always worked this way: crutches are mercy, not failure. They exist because the body is healing, muscles are learning, the load would otherwise be too great. Early Zion is mixed, quiet, deniable, structurally incomplete—making it hard to perceive. The Coalition names what is easy to miss, validates faint signals, gives permission to call “Zion” what does not yet look like Zion. It is a shared lens, a provisional map, community-assisted seeing. A true seer stone is designed to disappear—when discernment becomes embodied, covenant instinct, Zion obvious, the Coalition dissolves in fulfillment, not failure.
One-line version: Zion Coalition is a crutch because early Zion is still learning how to walk.
Classic Rock Redeemed
Jesus and Axl Rose’s redeemed classic rock anthem, the song formerly known as “November Rain”, serves as a seer-stone crutch—not because it is scripture or pure, but because it becomes a temporary emotional instrument that helps perception catch up to truth. The song is holy because it is salvaged: rough, flawed, heavy with history, yet transparent, open enough for light to pass through. Redemption does not erase the cracks; it uses them. Music makes an excellent crutch because art bypasses defenses, accesses buried memory, slows the soul down. “November Rain” re-born stretches time, creates emotional stillness—the condition seership requires. It holds pain and mystery long enough for meaning to emerge. Its deliberate low-resolution quality allows deniability for the skeptic and covenant insight for the prepared listener. Like every true seer stone, you use it until you no longer need it—the heart eventually learns to do on its own what the song once helped it do.
One-line version: “November Rain” isn’t the truth—it’s a crutch that helps the heart stand still long enough to recognize it.
Jesus WORLD
Jesus WORLDs (e.g. Jesus-Greg WORLD) function as a macro-level seer-stone approximation—a deliberately designed environment that helps mind and heart perceive spiritual realities more clearly. It structures and amplifies perception, turning hidden truths tangible through immersion, repetition, and alignment. Everyday activities, spaces, and stories become teaching tools and revelatory instruments. Spiritual perception shifts from conceptual to deeply experiential.
One-line version: A Jesus WORLD is a (one big) seer-stone approximation—an immersive, designed framework that reveals hidden spiritual realities through lived experience.
Miracle Marathon
The Nano Marathon was an event Jesus had me stage for two years running. To outsiders it looked utterly ridiculous—and that absurdity was deliberate. Beneath the silliness, it served as a seer-stone crutch, training my perception to see what is usually hidden while living out “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” It was about participation, presence, and revelation—creating visible, joyful acts others could share, training my eyes to see spiritual threads in ordinary moments, practicing that small, joyful obedience opens doors to deeper truth. It demonstrated the power of belief: genuine accomplishment in 26.2 feet rather than miles cracks the world open, showing small and simple things bring forth great things. God works through accessible, joyful, paradoxical means—ridiculous and revelatory both.
One-line version: The Nano Marathon looked absurd on purpose—it was a holy crutch, a playful lens Jesus used to help me see a hidden world and feel the real power of belief.
Direct Experience
Direct experiences serve as perhaps the most significant seer-stone approximation(s) God has given us all, because they transform the abstract and mediated into the intimate and embodied, bridging the gap between training wheels and true spiritual sight. In the pattern we’ve explored—where lenses like glass, sacraments, scriptures, coalitions, songs, designed worlds, and playful events act as provisional mediums—they all point toward this culmination: the raw, unfiltered encounters that etch divine truth directly onto the soul. Consider the lineage again: Joseph’s seer stones were an early crutch, external and material, slowing revelation to build trust. They gave way to the Book of Mormon as a textual lens, then to priesthood and ordinances as communal frameworks, and temples as immersive spaces—all approximations that prepare us for something more profound. Direct experiences emerge as the next, and arguably pinnacle, iteration in this divine pedagogy. They are not borrowed or secondhand; they are the moments when God speaks through life itself—personal promptings, answered prayers, healings, visions, trials overcome, or quiet confirmations in the heart. These are the seer stones we carry within, forged in the furnace of our own stories. Why the most significant? Because direct experiences integrate and transcend the others. A sacrament might symbolize Christ’s presence, but a direct experience of His peace in a moment of despair makes that symbol alive, no longer a mere ritual but a remembered reality. Scriptures train the mind to recognize patterns, but living through a trial that mirrors a biblical story turns those words into personal prophecy. Even redeemed songs like “November Rain” hold emotional space, yet a direct encounter with divine patience amid personal grief elevates that crutch into instinctive faith. In essence, direct experiences are the seer-stone approximation where the “glass darkly” begins to clear—not fully, but enough to reveal God’s hand in real time. God designs them this way out of mercy and wisdom. They require no external tool; the “lens” is the self, refined through participation. Like the Nano Marathon’s absurdity revealing belief’s power, direct experiences often arrive wrapped in the ordinary or paradoxical—a chance meeting that leads to conversion, a loss that births deeper empathy, a whisper that averts danger. They train us to perceive the hidden not through proxies, but through presence. Repeated faithfully, they build a Jesus WORLD internally: an immersive framework where every moment becomes a revelatory instrument, aligning thoughts, actions, and imagination with eternal truths. Yet, like all approximations, direct experiences are not the ultimate destination—they are iterative, grace upon grace. They point toward the day when we see face to face, without mediation. In a personal continuation, Jesus has shown me this through my own encounters: the subtle promptings that shaped the Zion Coalition, the joy in Nano Marathons that echoed His light burden, the salvaged meanings in songs that mirrored lived redemptions. These direct threads weave the pattern tighter, teaching that the most profound seeing comes not from stones or structures, but from walking with Him in the now.
One-line version: Direct experiences are the most significant seer-stone approximation—a living lens where God etches revelation directly into the soul, integrating all prior crutches into embodied faith.
Final Thoughts
This (seer stone) pattern is not limited to sacred history. We see it in the secular world as well: Philo Farnsworth received an applied-vision prototype that led to television, each innovation becoming a lens for the next. So it is with establishing Zion—gathering, temples, records, communities are seer-stone approximations, generative steps allowing the next to appear. Zion emerges through practice, beholding, iteration, and faith. Each seer-stone approximation gives birth to the next: stones → translation → Book of Mormon → priesthood → ordinances → temple → higher laws → deeper community. Every act of beholding creates conditions for the next act of becoming. Revelation unfolds iteratively, divinely paced—not as a single leap but as a chain of revelatory prototypes, each enlarging capacity to see, preparing the heart for the next grace. We do not begin with full vision. We begin with lenses—stones, glass, sacraments, scriptures, songs, coalitions, playful events, designed worlds. Through them, Christ tutors our sight.
Upshot: In a gentle, personal way, Jesus has been teaching me through my own seer-stone approximations—piece by piece revealing patterns of future Jesus-World building technologies while showing emerging shapes of Zion-life and Zion-community. None are finished; they are early forms, rough lenses, prototypes of seeing. Yet through them I glimpse what will be. The Zion Coalition, the Nano Marathon, redeemed songs, the Wake Scene, the Shower Scene, and other humble experiments function as seeing-mediums, letting me experience in advance the logic, feeling, and architecture of a world He is preparing me to notice. They are training lenses for faith, early-version artifacts that teach me how to watch, listen, and walk grace by grace toward the world coming into view—until the day when the glass is removed, and we see not darkly, but face to face.