Hellen Keller, the famed author, activist, and lecturer who was deaf and blind from two years old, wrote of her spiritual life in an autobiographical book titled My Religion, also published as Light in My Darkness. It seems that Keller had significant mystical insights into the nature of her being. Reading another mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, she says that the truths were “to my faculties what light, color and music are to the eye and ear.” Here is one selection from her book:

“As I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity… Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the every-day air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven—immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousand-fold when death sets me free.”

Some comparisons to Joseph Smith’s First Vision could include:

• Wandering through darkness
• Confronting difficulties
• Sensing a holy grace, associated with suns and flames
• A knowing of things heavenly
• Sensing encouraging heavenly voices
• The inner light being a thousand-fold better (brighter?) than mortal vision

If you would like to submit a “First Vision” account, either personal or found, for inclusion on this website, please click here.