Seeing Through Both Eyes

I haven't blogged about a General Conference talk in ages, and I'm beginning to run out of May, so I'd better get back to the Conference blog posts so I don't fall behind. In his General Conference talk, Elder Mathias Held of the 70 spoke about how we can gain additional clarity by looking at things from multiple perspectives:

Our Father in Heaven has given us not only one but two physical eyes. We can see adequately with only one eye, but the second eye provides us with another perspective. When both perspectives are put together in our brains, they produce a three-dimensional image of our surroundings.

Likewise, we have been given two sources of information, through our physical and spiritual capacities. Our mind produces one perception through our physical senses and through our reasoning. But through the gift of the Holy Ghost, the Father has also provided us with a second perspective, which is really the most important and true one because it comes directly from Him.

With these two perspectives combined, we can see the world more clearly than we would have seen it from either perspective alone. Using only our mortal perspective, many people get bogged down in the details of everyday life and fail to see the bigger picture. Applying only a spiritual perspective, some people completely miss some of the details and complexity in the world and end up with an over-simplified worldview. When we look at the world from both perspectives, we can put the details into their larger context and see the more specific examples of and exceptions to general maxims. Neither eye alone can give us the complete picture. To see both the big picture and the little picture, we have to use both eyes.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Some of us see more clearly through one eye than the other. Most people have trained one eye more than the other. Some have even gone so fare as to say that one eye or the other is wrong because it gives us an image that doesn't perfectly match the image given to us by the other eye. But that's like saying that a person's left eye is misleading or incorrect because it doesn't perfectly match the right eye. We need to use them both together to get an image with any depth.

Logic and Spirit may tell us different things, but that doesn't mean that either of them are necessarily wrong. The Bible teaches us about the creation, and science tells us about evolution and dinosaurs,  but that doesn't mean that either of them are necessarily wrong. It could be that God created the dinosaurs, and all other creatures, using evolution as His tool. When knowledge from one source doesn't perfectly match the knowledge we get from the other eye, we should consider both eyes together to gain a deeper perspective. Neither mortality nor spirituality alone have all the answers. To get the complete picture, we have to use both together.

It's easy to assume that one perspective is more accurate than the other, but it could instead be true that, in order to get an accurate understanding of the world, we need to look through both perspectives at once.