Let’s talk about the gospel paths.  Plural.  There is only one gospel path, but for each of us our path of faith in Jesus Christ, repentance, baptism, the gift of  the Holy Ghost, and enduring to the end, will have its own particular vocations, techniques, callings, and practices.

If you are called to give up a promising career to become a schoolteacher, your family living in a blue collar neighborhood with rough edges, that is your gospel path.  Something you and your family is learning that way is the seed that will blossom into glory.  It is not everyone’s seed.

If obesity or bad skin or lack of confidence or something is hindering your path to eternal marriage, then the particular health regimen or confidence building mindset that works for you is part of your gospel path and may be for life.  But it isn’t everyone’s.

For  most of these particular gospel paths, you don’t have an authoritative source.  The church does not have a handy mega-chart by challenge and personality type where you can find your own particular course to eternity.  You aren’t going to hear the prophet begin his next conference address with the ringing announcement that, “while I invite all to listen to my message today with the aid of the Spirit, my remarks are particularly addressed to INFPs with allergies who are the children of divorce.”

As droll as that would be.

Which means we are cast back on our own resources.  Friends, parents, and family—fallible.  Our society’s conventional wisdom—extremely fallible (this would include getting assistance from professionals).  Finding a book or tradition or techne or practice that seems to address the issue—also fallible, and here you run into the problem Joseph Smith had.  With so many competing thrusts of advice, how do you know which one is right?

There is always Joseph Smith’s solution, but before we talk about it lets discuss why it can be good that we have this multitude of fallible sources to draw from.  Turning to your friends and family is always good.  So is being an agent to yourself.  Our experience with prophetic advice by necessity tends to be pretty supine—the prophet counsels, we listen and obey.  But being an agent is good, and so God has given us a world varied enough that there are large swaths of what we need to know or do that the prophet has left unspecified and where there is no alternative equally authoritative source.  So we are forced to act as agents, using trial and error, and exercising judgment.  And, of course, relying on the guidance of the Holy Ghost.  Seeking answers through prayer like Joseph Smith did.

Unfortunately our access to inspiration isn’t always pure and untrammeled either.  Our inspiration is sometimes just what we really really want.  The Holy Ghost speaks to us though our spirit and heart, so sometimes what’s already in our spirit and heart gets mingled into the message or even is the whole of the message.  Sometimes a genuine response from the Holy Ghost gets interpreted as a clear go ahead when it was merely an affirmation that the course we are looking at is the right one temporarily, or when the affirmation is merely that we are asking the right questions and looking in the right areas.  Our access to the Holy Ghost was neither meant to short circuit our agency nor short circuit our need to repent and become more receptive to the Holy Ghost.  Seeking for inspiration is still the right way.  In fact, it may almost be the point of why we are left to figure some stuff out on our own.  But it is not a magic answer switch.

By your fruits shall ye know them.  Trial and error.  Yes, also good.  Part of the process.  So lets talk about learning to see.

Lets talk about babies learning to see.  If a child has some kind of mechanical eye problem that later gets fixed, they can still learn to see if they are young enough.  If later, they won’t.  The problem is that all that visual sense data is really hard to sort out.  As best as we can tell, young babies hardly process any of it.  They are effectively partly blind.  But their brain is still getting hit with all the information and is slowly sorting it out.  Small improvements build on small improvements until they have full visual acuity.

Now imagine an adult in that situation.  What if we were all the equivalent of babies, trying to learn what babies learn.  This adult discovers they have a need for more sense data, especially at range.  A family member or somebody refers them to this great book or seminar or program called “Open your Eyes: the Untapped Power of Light Perception!”  The adult decides to give it a shot.  The problem is, the first attempts are painful and pointless.  Once the adult finally figures out how to open their eyelids, all they see is bright and extremely meaningless.  The book reassures them that with lots and lots of time its going to get subtly better and then amazing.  The problem is that time is valuable.  There are many things an adult can be doing.  Its hard to invest a lot of time on this without knowing if it will work or not.  And maybe the guy who sells the books or the seminar seems a little scammy (after all, there is nothing that says only people giving you bad advice can be a bit scammy and exploitative).  Of course telling you that the program might take a  year or two is exactly what someone selling snake oil at $14.99/mo would tell you to keep you on the hook for longer.

We know, in this hypothetical, that if the adult sticks it out they will be able to see.  Their life will be transformed.  But at the beginning the adult doesn’t know that.  It could in fact be a waste of time.  Some programs are.

Even some programs that are valid could be a waste of time.  That’s our original point.  Not everyone is on the same version of the path.  What works for one won’t work for another.

It’s a hard problem.  How do you tell apart an improvement that works slowly and subtly before it blooms, from an improvement that is wasting your time or even damaging you?

I don’t have a magic answer.  Maybe the best option is just to be patient and give it more time when the initial results are worthless, and see if anything subtle starts happening.  Use mature judgment about when you’ve reached the point where you are going to bank whatever gains you’ve got and quit.  Balance sources, talk to friends and family, seek inspiration.  And realize that sometimes you will fail.