The Archetypes in General Conference

I realized something as I began watching last weekend's General Conference: the twelve apostles are basically a pantheon of gods. By that I don't mean that they're perfect or infallible, not at all. But I'm actually not referring to their divinely sanctioned roles, either. Instead, I think that the twelve apostles are so many different facets of a "prism" that God's light shines through, with each one refracting that light just a little bit differently. In that way, they're like the twelve Greek gods: representations of divinity shining through into the many ways we live our lives.

The divine variety in the twelve apostles

Take Dieter F. Uchtdorf, for instance. He's probably the funniest general authority alive today, as he generally gets the audience to laugh at least once in every talk he gives. He also has a knack for explaining deep metaphysical truths in simple language that even children can understand. In these ways, President Uchtdorf reminds me of the archetypal old man who--though unassuming and a apparently foolish--is wiser than all of us. Socrates and Gaston Bachelard (who Foucault once said had the panache of a chess master who sneakily checkmates his opponent only using pawns) are other examples of this archetype.

And who could be more different from Uchtdorf than Dallin H. Oaks? Elder Oaks gives off a stern, no-nonsense countenance, perhaps reflecting his past as a judge, and I don't remember him ever giving a joke in a conference talk. If Uchtdorf is the archetypal Divine Fool, Oaks incarnates the archetype of order itself, bringing the stark lines and organization of eternity into clearer focus.

And Jeffrey R. Holland is different from either of these two. I realized over the weekend that nobody gets closer to the voice of God in the scriptures (especially the Doctrine and Covenants) than Holland; he combines fervor, intelligence, and emotion in ways that reflect heaven's depth more than any other apostle. In a way, his voice also reminds me of the voice of Allah in the Qur'an--a fiery passion that contains beauty, love, and soul. In fact, Jeffrey R. Holland might do more than most apostles to unite "spirit" and "soul"--he doesn't idealize the life of the spirit to where ascension seems easy and direct. Whether in terms of depression, poverty, or the difficulties of same-sex attraction in the Church, he brings out the "lows" of Church life in full relief, never denying that those lows exist. And yet he shows us that these lows too are divine, in a way that President Uchtdorf perhaps never could.

Each of these "styles" are different ways that the plenitude of God's light can incarnate in flesh. God doesn't just show up in one way; He shows up in many ways, each fit to a different type of person. See Him now in President Nelson's heart surgeon garb, now in the residual open-mindedness of Henry B. Eyring, the son of a scientist. They are all windows to divinity, ways by which the divine itself can show itself to us in its diversity.

The apostles as the Senex or "Wise Old Man"

And yet there is another way in which all the apostles embody a single archetype: the "Senex" or Wise Old Man of Jungian psychology. The Senex exists in a complementary dichotomy with the "Puer Aeternus" or "Eternal Child," and so where the Puer shakes things up with new ideas and irruptions from the timeless, the Senex represents the corresponding principle of order, limitation, and temporality. If the Puer is Eternal Youth, the Senex is Father Time. If the Puer questions established truths to "let in the new," the Senex embodies certainty as to that truth. So when an apostle seems stodgy and resistant to change, let's not see that as a bad thing--they're just incarnating the virtues of Senex. In its oft-noted entitlement and its incessant focus on idealistic politics, the rising generation is on Puer "overload," so to speak. We see the eternal ideal, but we don't recognize the value of time-proven truth and established certainties. In our millennial narcissism, we feel ourselves to be primordially perfect, never acknowledging our limitations or our tendency toward weakness. The Senex as embodied in the Apostles reminds us of this certainty. While the idealistic youth might protest the apparently embittered attitude of a Boyd K. Packer or a Dallin H. Oaks, that reminder of our limitation might be the only thing keeping us from, like Icarus, flying too close to the sun in adolescent idealism.

And yet neither Puer nor Senex are complete in themselves. They both need each other, and neither is completely itself without the other. And as James Hillman points out, the union of Senex and Puer, Time and Eternity, Father and Son, etc. can only come with the feminine element as a mediating "third." From this perspective, how glad we should be that the general authorities are increasingly valuing women, motherhood, and other faces of "the feminine!" Whether Russell M. Nelson extolling the succoring power of women or Jeffrey R. Holland explicitly comparing Christ to a mother (!), this attention to the feminine indicates the appearance of an archetype that can heal the split between old and new. The feminine in its own subtle strength can give the Church the perspective it needs--as I pointed out inmy post analyzing the Peter Pan story, the feminine is the bridge between "grown up" and "child," able to contain without being crustily self-enclosed like the negative Senex, to give without being manic like the negative Puer. And as Luce Irigaray said, woman is "the sex which is not one," able to hold the tesnion of opposites together without reducing one to the other.

So if I see any way forward in the Church, it's toward the feminine as a mediator between the old and the new. This doesn't mean elevating women to the apostleship, since that would just be the effect of a perspective that confuses the different authorities of Senex and the feminine. Instead, I can see women progressively taking up the heart of the church, more as the sustaining center than the controlling "top." The feminine is a subtle strengh, which, though hard to see, is far more powerful than anything masculine strength can do. Masculine strength is apparent and thus unsustainable; feminine strength is hidden and long-lasting. Perhaps the best way to explain this principle comes from the Tao Te Ching, which recognizes this feminine strength very well. Here are a few quotes that show what I mean:

"The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is called the Mysterious Female.
The entrance to the Mysterious Female
Is called the root of Heaven and Earth,
Endless flow
Of inexhaustible energy."

"Know the male, maintain the female,
Become the channel of the world..."

"The world has a source: the world's mother.
Once you have the mother,
You know the children.
Once you know the children,
Return to the mother..."

"...The female constantly overcomes the male,
In stillness
Takes the low place."

There you go! I think I'm going to write at least one more General Conference post, but don't hold me to it.

How Reincarnation and an Afterlife could both be True

I'm going to be honest: part of me really hopes I get to be reincarnated someday. Not only does it lessen the anxiety of having only one life to prove myself, but it also means I get to look at the world from a new perspective. Essentially, then, reincarnation would mean that I'm not only me: I'm all sorts of lives from all over time and space. But of course, most think reincarnation would mean that my personality here on earth, as it is now, will eventually vanish to morph into somebody else. If reincarnation is true, tough luck if you want to talk to Abraham Lincoln after you're dead: right now he's just a used car salesman in Seattle with no idea of his former life.

That's what most people think. However, I think I've figured out a way that reincarnation and the idea of an afterlife could both be true at once. And this possibility rests on the answer a simple question: if I reincarnate, what is reincarnating? It's a given that my physical body is going to become dust one day, and there's no getting around it. But I am not that body, since both reincarnation and western religion assume that some spiritual identity survives death. But what if my spiritual identity--that is, my personality as "Christian Swenson," who all my friends and family know and love--has something even "higher" and "realer" living within it? What if that identity is actually more like a mask than a being in itself, meaning that whatever "puts it on" can go on to live other lives?

If this is true, whoever wore that mask wouldn't be "me"--by definition, I am my identity, my sense of being the person I've grown up to be. Rather, that underlying figure would be who is "living me,"the animating presence acting out my life like an actor acts out a role. And who's to say that there aren't multiple such "actors" living out my life? What if I'm complex marionette that needs multiple operators to get it to function right? In that case, my underlying "being" would come from multiple places, multiple centers of activity.

I'm going to take a leap and call these hypothetical actors "archetypes." They would be the living presences acting out my life, and I would be the way they come into actuality. Examples of these archetypes are manifold: the son, the daughter, the mentor, the friend, the jokester, the annoying neighbor, or even the man and the woman. They interlock and interpenetrate, combining and recombining with each other in near-infinite combinations.

So if this is true, the archetypes or combinations of archetypes "living me" could very well come to earth again to "reincarnate." The animating presence behind my life could pick up another body after I die, or even before I die. Heck, this would mean that I could even meet myself! But even if this is true, there's nothing to say that my personality as it is right now wouldn't exist in eternity. My life, my distinct way of living in the world as "me," will always be--its animating presence just goes on to live other lives, all without ever "leaving" me. And who's to say that I can't let in other archetypes into my being in that state? Swedenborg may have alluded to this when he said that angels in heaven often consensually let another angel "step inside" his or her identity, letting the first angel experience "what it's like to be" him or her. And of course it's only temporary--they part as easily as they came together, only enriched by the experience.

Anyway, this was some fun brainstorming. Don't take any of it too literally, though--thoughts like these are best kept loose and malleable. And if you're curious about these, check out Rudolf Steiner's works, where he says something like this. Carl Jung also hints at this possibility in his Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

My Dream about the Book of Mormon and a Wedding

On the night of September 25th, I accidentally fell asleep on the couch in my family's TV room. Though I spent an uncomfortable night on it, the upside about sleeping on this couch is that--for some reason--I always have vivid dreams there. That night I remember a single dream that hit me with a train of spiritual insight, and I want to share it here.

The dream

Here's the dream as I wrote it down immediately afterward. Note that the names have been taken out so as to not embarrass anyone I know who might read this post:

"In my parents' theater, my professor is there, and some peers from college say that they've returned my quadruple combination. I get mad at them, saying that my professor wanted to read the Book of Mormon, but that she couldn't because I didn't have it with me. I give it to her, and she says she's at 2 Nephi 16, and I ask her what she thinks of the first part of 2 Nephi, implicitly referencing the philosophical parts. She's about to talk about the part referencing the Lamanites becoming "as flint," but then she has to go teach a class. I read a passage in a blue James Hillman book where he quotes a non-member scholar about the Book of Mormon: "The Book of Mormon 'exploded' into the world, feeling through the world to where it could best fit, from outside of time." I look up the source for the quote, and he says that the Book of Mormon is like an appetizer (milk/toast) that so enthralls the eater that they don't pay attention to the rest of the meal, even if it's better. This is the atonement/testimony that gets you to stay. I'm so taken with this idea that I try to find my professor to tell her. No such luck. I go upstairs and I see a young woman from my singles ward in a wedding dress about to go onstage for a final performance of The Diary of Anne Frank, where the relatives of the cast can come to the audience if they couldn't at the beginning of the run. I contemplate telling this young woman that we met before this life, that we were together before this marriage, but she already knows this, and it's inappropriate for this situation."

It goes without saying that dreams like this strike the waking mind as odd. But from my perspective, dreams are only odd in this way because of a "translation error" that happens when you try to think of it in waking consciousness. After all, the tired mind isn't abstract and doesn't think in rigid categories--it's instead wholly concrete and associational. A broad principle like "loneliness" will be represented by a particular, concrete instance of that loneliness (like a crying child, for instance), and different instances of the same principle tend to blend and merge into each other.

Knowing this, I've read that it's best to "interpret" the dream while you're tired. That way, you approach that dream in the same state that made it, letting "like" go unto "like." So I'm very lucky that I was able to quickly pull up my iPad and record what the dream's remnants themselves told me about its meaning. I'll paraphrase what I wrote in the rest of this post since I think it's significant not only for me but for anyone who values the Book of Mormon and its spiritual "ground."

What the dream taught me

My dream was about linking together things that are still separate. If the Book of Mormon "exploded" into the world and flowed into its cracks and its crevices, this dream exploded into the subtle fissures in my life--its reality adapted itself to what I needed to hear. The young woman in the wedding dress is thus going to a wedding of times, circumstances, and people, which both the Book of Mormon and my dream are instances of. This is an example of the ajna principle, or that of the Third Eye Chakra, where everything acts as a face of everything else, where all separate things weave together.

This wedding is a way that a pre-perceptual, pre-conceptual unity of time and places can come into my awareness. It brings together the things that were already together pre-existently, letting the invisible togetherness become visible. The Book of Mormon is a major way that this reunion of people, times, and places can come into the visible world. It reveals the ties that already exist between them. The Book of Mormon--as a wedding--concretely actualizes the bonds that had already existed in potential from eternity.

The atonement as it's manifest in the Book of Mormon is then like an appetizer of milk and toast--like "milquetoast," it's unassertive, unassuming, and timid. In other words, the atonement as at-one-meant of separate things presents itself first, but in a way that doesn't demand my attention; it hides in plain sight, waiting to be seen. If you eat it, it captivates because it's primal. As an appetizer, it's what you knew first, primarily, before anything else.It's a priori.

We should be together without having to do anything. I shouldn't try to assert or force that togetherness, since it's already apparent from eternity--as the atonement, as the appetizer of milk and toast, as the Book of Mormon. I am together with them from before I came here. I shouldn't try to force that togetherness on others, since it's already there between us, and that togetherness itself brings about the wedding.

The young woman who got married in the dream had recently (that is, in "real life") talked about how she isn't married yet. This reminds me of the "woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, and a wife of youth, when [she] wast refused" of Isaiah 54, whom I've often felt like. Not only haven't I been the most successful person in romantic encounters, but I feel like I've been "left at the altar" of all sorts of unions with the inhabitants of the world. I've often noted that I've felt separate" from the people and things in the world, almost as if I weren't just romantically single, but left out of all intimacy with the wonders of life itself. But if I'm to believe my dream, the wedding of all things with all things is coming. Maybe it's always here; maybe I just have to recognize it. Maybe I just need to learn not to "force" the issue, meaning that my wedding with the world will happen when I stop trying to make it happen. After all, the groom isn't supposed to see his bride on the wedding day, much less talk to her. I should thus let us (I and any person or thing I want to come together with) each find our way to the altar. This happens at any moment in which I give up the "chase" after union or satisfaction, and let the union come to me. The union comes to me in the very moment I stop seeking it, since it has existed pre-existently and will exist to eternity.

I wrote that the final performance of the play staged here--the "telos" or end-goal of eternity not just at the end of time, but in each moment--will be witnessed by the relatives of the actors there. We as mortal human beings are all actors on a stage, getting ready for the wedding. The wedding of all things with all things is coming, and we're bringing it together from all times and all places. The relatives are those people who have left the stage but are still watching to see how it turns out. These are the Dead--not just the literal dead, but all the people, feelings, thoughts, and ideas that have exited life's stage for the moment. They watch with an eager eye to see how things will turn out--they have a "stake" in the wedding. They too will be wedded to everything else here, since they too are together with them pre-existently.

In this consummation of being, the tangle of relationships that had existed invisibly from eternity becomes visible. In a sudden moment of belonging, I see myself as a part of a whole--continuous, an extension of everything else, loved by all things. I've had these moments before (like this one time on the bus), and though they are few and far between, it isn't just reserved for the "end of the world." The wedding, as the marriage of all things to all things, exists forever in potential and is ready to pop into our awareness as soon as we stop grasping after that union.

How to Get Personal Revelation from Books

So, I have a thing for books. I typically read four to eight books at a time, and the bookshelves in my room are so full that I regularly have to take less essential junk out to make room for new books. Here's a picture of my non-fiction shelf, if you're curious:

I've read so many of these books that I make it a goal to revisit the ones I've already finished. To that end, I'll thoroughly annotate books I read to make sure that I know where my eyes should "fall" when thumbing through them. But a year or two ago, I began noticing an odd pattern: the books I revisited and the insights I remembered from them seemed to be exactly what I needed in that time of my life. It wasn't by deliberate action that this happened, of course; my decision to pick up a book that would later prove helpful came just as a spur of the moment impulse, a thought like "wouldn't it be nice to read that again?"

But as time went on, I started to observe my thoughts and feelings leading up to choosing that helpful book. I discovered that helpful books "call out to me." Whether it's the color of the spine or feelings I associate with the book, my mind will "catch hold" on something it signifies to me and make it seem more interesting that it normally does. It's almost like the book is "glowing" with significance, whereas others just seem the way they are by default.

Experimenting with this process, I discovered something else: if I let my unconscious mind take over when thumbing through the book, I'll usually land on the page that helps me the most. Here my habit for annotating comes in especially useful: if I flip to the right page, the underlines, boxes, and notes in the margins point me to what's most significant in that general area.

Realizing the potential in this phenomenon, I decided to use it consciously. For the past few weeks, I've begun most days by going over to my bookshelves, seeing which books have started "calling to me," and bringing them over to my desk. There, I thumb through the books, glean what it is I'm supposed to learn from them, and write those ideas down in an electronic notebook. To give you an idea of what this process is like, here's a brief excerpt from that journal:

The Qur'an: The alternation of day and night is a lesson to learn from God for those who have eyes to see. Night invariably follows day, but day invariably follows night. Night and day--sadness and happiness, pain and pleasure, etc.--are always together. Reference Heidegger, Hillman and Angels on heaven and hell. / The Crucible of Doubt: This life's uncertainty and estrangement is actually a salvation, one from the eternal stasis of Eden. This life's absurdity is what I need to grow, but not only that--it is what manifests the joy. Reference the above Qur'an quote and the Magician chapter of the Red Book on magic. / Emerson: Nature embosoms us all--she nourishes us and gives a new day to us every time we fall. We are continuallly in her womb. Poetry and philosophy reveal the truth and beauty behind the world, which are really one and the same. Truth and beauty are two sides of the same. / What We Talk about When We Talk about God: God is bigger and better and more awe-inspiring than we can comprehend at any moment. We need steps to open our minds to it. This is the day and the night, alternating so that I can be freed by each night.

What was amazing about this particular use of my technique--and has been happening increasingly often--is that it all centered around a common theme, in this case how opposites and duality clearly manifest the whole. I came to the conclusion that some power is using these books to communicate certain ideas to me that I need to know. And I don't doubt for a minute that this power is God.

The point I'm trying to make is that this practice is really a method of personal revelation. I go to God with a question (either conscious or unconscious), and He uses the means at His disposal to communicate the answer to me. As Nephi says in the Book of Mormon: "the Lord God...speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding," and I can't think of a language I speak better than the one used in the books I love reading! I sometimes wonder if God "led" me to this practice by giving me the impulse to buy all my books and to annotate them. But one thing's for certain: it's now a huge blessing in my life.

In conclusion, I'd encourage you to look for ways God can speak to you, especially those unique to you and your interests. Who knows? Maybe He'll speak to you in the words you pick up from others' conversations as you walk through a public place. Maybe He'll speak to you through the lyrics of songs that get stuck in your head for no apparent reason. I think all of these things and more are possible. Anyway, thanks for reading! I'm off to do some reading of my own.

How Time Unfolds

Recently, I've started to see time in a very different way than I used to. Before, I thought that time was a line, a series of causes and effects that--while perhaps able to go in different directions--is just one-dimensional. But that's not how it is at all. I've come to see that time is more profound than most think it is, since most of time is actually below the surface of our awareness.

Meaningful Coincidences

Let me explain what I mean by appealing to some concrete events as examples. In the past year or so, I slowly began realizing that crucial events in my life--meeting people, encountering books, or learning about opportunities--came at exactly the right point when they needed to come in order for me to get the most benefit out of them. For instance, there's a teacher who I first had in middle school whom I've kept running into, first in high school and then in college, each time without either of us deliberately seeking the other out. It turns out that he's a great friend and that he has become one of the most powerful influences on my personality. Events like these are shocking, and they're happening with increasing frequency in my life. And their frequency got me thinking: how do these events "work?" What is the metaphysics behind these meaningful coincidences, what Jungians call "synchronistic events?"

Events as Seeds

Pondering on this, an intuition slowly dawned on me. I came to the conclusion that these weird coincidences weren't "caused" by past events as if past events determine what will happen in the future. No, I realized instead that it's quite the opposite: the future determines the past. To put it differently, my meeting with this teacher had always been going to happen; the event itself "gathered" the circumstances it needed to happen for it to occur, and the event made them occur so it could come into existence itself. I guess you could say that this process is like the growth of a seed: a seed is planted imperceptibly in the ground, and there it invisibly grows until it reaches the surface of awareness.

This idea has a few interesting consequences: first, it means that the circumstances leading up to a coincidental event like my meeting with my teacher had a goal or a telos in them; they came into being in order to usher yet another event into being. Think of that--if I'm right, the actions you perform today might have a goal in them you yourself aren't aware of! Random impulses to pick up a book, chance meetings with a stranger on the street, or even freak illnesses might be the initial sprouting of a seed which will mature into something magnificent.

Second, it means that there might be any number of "goals" that are unfolding in a situation. My decision to pick up a book on my shelf might be a way that three or four significant events come into fruition (I think my first encounter with Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell in April 2013 was like that). This idea also suggests that future events could "fight" for temporal "real estate" by trying to determine which one of them gets precedence over the other in their unfolding.

Third, my notion of time leads me to think that, just as we know the way a seed unfolds into a plant, we can theoretically figure out the way these event seeds unfold into actual events. Assuming that there are only so many different "species" of event, if you notice the way a situation is beginning to unfold, you could use your knowledge of events' temporal "growth" to discern what will tend to happen in the future. Thus, this notion of time gives a metaphysical foundation for both divination and prophecy. Visions of the future from John the Revelator to Nostradamus to Joseph Smith then don't need to be exact; aside from the heavy use of symbolism inherent in communications with the divine, seeing the seed of an event that's just beginning to grow doesn't rule out any number of variations on how that seed unfolds. Thus, depending on what other events or "seeds" interfere, I imagine that the "end of the world" could turn out in many different ways, despite the fact that the prophecy remains essentially true.

The Science

Finally, I don't think that there's any way this necessarily conflicts with any science. As far as I can tell, most science assumes that time progresses from the past to the future; it doesn't often stop to consider the possibility that the future can affect the past. Though I'm not a physicist, I've heard that some there are some surprising conclusions drawn in quantum physics that support the idea of a past being "caused" by the future.

That's it for this post! If you're curious about these ideas, check out the I Ching, a Chinese oracle text. The theory behind it influenced a lot of my conclusions here.

3-D Truth: A Doctor Who Parable

Guess what, everyone? Doctor Who, my favorite TV show on the air, premieres its ninth series tonight!

Partying aside, I think it's the perfect time for me to write a post I've had stewing in my head for a long time: a blog post about the nature of truth, using an episode from Doctor Who's last season (the one called Flatline) as a metaphor.

Invaders from Flatland

The basic premise of Flatline is that a race of aliens from a two-dimensional universe (think Flatland) has invaded our three-dimensional universe. Though it isn't clear at first, they're pretty nasty, and they mean business.

See that red design on the wall there? The Doctor explains that it's a human nervous system, taken from a human being the 2-D aliens have "sucked" into the floor, "flattened," and dissected. That's not a way I want to go. But ignoring the macabre details of what must have happened, I think that these 2-D aliens have a profound lesson to teach us, and that's because I think they're a metaphor for us.

On 3-D truth

What do I mean? Well, in a way we're two-dimensional beings. When I look at a tree, I can only see a 2-D "snapshot" of one side at a time; I can only ever intuit the tree's 3-D nature by walking around it and looking at all the angles. But here's the thing: that means we never see the tree as it actually is. In fact, we never see anything as it actually is; whether it's a toad, a spoon, or my grandmother, I can only ever see one "face" of a 3-D thing at time, and so its complete nature is hidden from me.

That doesn't stop us, however. Like the aliens in Doctor Who, we stumble into a higher-dimensional world trying to capture it, to dissect it, to "pin it down." Whether in technology, business, or science (especially science), the human protocol for the last few hundred years has been to a) assume that--if we try hard enough--we can know anything, and b) poke, prod, dissect, and disassemble everything in that pursuit. But the whole effort is completely misguided. Like the famous story about blind men examining an elephant, no one perspective of the way things are is ever true. Period. What looks a certain way from one perspective looks completely different from another perspective. So if we try to develop a grand "theory of everything," we're then doing exactly what those 2-D aliens were doing: violently trying to subject three-dimensional reality to our two-dimensional perspective.

What should we do, then? Simply be content to "circumspect" reality, to circle around it enough that you can intuit its nature without ever being able to "say" how it is. And what happens when you do this is amazing--you realize that seemingly contradictory ideas don't have to exclude one another; they can both be true at once. Just as Joseph Smith said, "by proving contraries, truth is made manifest," we can know real truth once we learn to think on both sides of a contradiction, to leap those boundaries with ease.

Anyway, that's it for my epistemological rant. Happy Who-day!

The Scripture in You

A long time ago, I wrote a post that said there are two Books of Mormon--an "outer," literal one, and an "inner" one, closer to both God and your life. I want to expand on that point today, and I'll do it by talking about one of my favorite Book of Mormon chapters, 2 Nephi 27.

Waking up hungry

This chapter is famous for being what Book of Mormon scholars call a "Midrash," a Hebrew literary form that weaves together a sacred text and a commentary on that text. In this chapter, the sacred text is Isaiah's prophecies on the latter days (Isaiah 29, specifically) and Nephi gives the commentary. Isaiah talks about how darkness and apostasy will cover the earth in the last days, giving this poetic description:

"And all the nations that fight against Zion, and that distress her, shall be as a dream of a night vision; yea, it shall be unto them, even as unto a hungry man which dreameth, and behold he eateth but he awaketh and his soul is empty; or like unto a thirsty man which dreameth, and behold he drinketh but he awaketh and behold he is faint, and his soul hath appetite; yea, even so shall the multitude of all the nations be that fight against Mount Zion" (2 Nephi 27:3)

When I came across this verse doing a recent pass-through of the Book of Mormon, I realized that this describes me pretty well, at least at times. But I think it describes all of us to one degree or another--who hasn't wanted something with all their heart, only to find that they didn't feel any better once they got it? I was this way with video games all through junior high, for instance. I would anticipate games like Spore or Fable II for months or even years, only to "wake up" dissatisfied--like a hungry man dreaming of food--when I finally got to play it. You can also see this in politics a lot: people look forward to electing a candidate who they think will solve all the country's problems, but find out when he gets into office that he was average at best.

To put a long story short, the earth isn't heaven, an idol isn't God, and muladhara isn't sahasrara. No matter how much we want an earthly thing or person to satisfy all our desires, it won't make the cut; only God can do that. As I see it, Isaiah is saying in the above verse that many will realize this in the last days, coming to know only after great turmoil that they lusted after something ultimately empty. I think that this idolatry works as a definition for all sin. Whenever we sin, we want infinite satisfaction from a finite source, something that can obviously never happen. The only way to be happy is to see all things as means to God, Who is the source of our being in the first place.

Your inner Book

But Isaiah and Nephi aren't done. Nephi puts a twist on Isaiah's prophecy when he writes what happens after the world has gotten to this idolatrous state:

And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall bring forth unto you the words of a book, and they shall be the words of them which have slumbered.

This passage outwardly talks about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, the book written by those "slumbering in the dust," crying from the ground of the long past. But how can we liken this passage to our lives? Because it talks about a divine book that had been "sealed up" to come forth in the latter days, I'll suggest that we read it as commenting on our divine nature, hidden in us like treasure in the ground. So when Nephi says that the Book--which was also hidden away--will come forth, we can liken it to us by saying that the latent divinity within us will eventually express itself.

This can happen whenever we run into something that touches our hearts and opens our spiritual horizons. When we read a piece of scripture, a book, or even an internet article that "shows forth" more than it literally contains in its text, we can be sure that the Book in us has come out. The physical text in front of us then becomes a mirror in which that Book can see itself, a way for us to "translate" that Book into our everyday awareness. It becomes a window to divinity itself, but not just God; my being as it exists in God--my divine potential--actualizes itself through that process of reflective "translation."

The Book of Mormon breaks through history

When I realized all this, I came to an amazing conclusion: this is what the literal Book of Mormon does best. As a revelation of hidden spiritual wisdom, the Book of Mormon is the perfect mirror for our inner Books to reveal themselves. And that's what we do when we read it: the Book of Mormon transposes itself to our life and circumstances--it becomes the Book of Christian, the Book of Daniel, or the Book of Eliza. Through this translation, the Book's story and my life's story become one. My flight into the wilderness is my flight from comfortable bad habits in dating; my "War Chapters" are my fight against temptation's wiles; Christ's coming is the peace that comes after I've been painfully refined by divine fire.

And then I realized something even more remarkable: if the Book of Mormon is supposed to make its stories "at one" with the stories in my life, then it's really manifesting the spiritual in the physical. Mormon scholar Joseph M. Spencer (whom I once met) wrote perhaps the best possible explanation of this idea:

"Any enclosure of the Book of Mormon within a totalized world history amounts to a denial of the book’s unique claim on the attention of the whole world. In the end, then, to take the Book of Mormon as either historical or unhistorical may be to miss the nature of the book entirely. Both positions in the debate about Book of Mormon historicity—-whether critical or apologetic—-are founded on a common, backwards belief. The historicity of the Book of Mormon is not in question. Rather, as Alma makes clear, it is the Book of Mormon that calls the historicity of the individual into question."

The Book of Mormon isn't enclosed within history, and so it's wrong to say that it's either a history or a fiction. And that's how it should be: when we're bound by our bad habits and our past successes or failures, what we're bound by is history itself. Pure history, in a sense, is Satan's plan--our being entirely determined by the past without hope for an irruption into it from eternity. But that's what is needed, and that's exactly what the Book of Mormon gives. The Book of Mormon acts as a bridge from history to eternity and back again; by likening our lives to it, it shows that our lives aren't just the effects of past choices, but instead grow out of seeds from eternity. To read the Book of Mormon is to follow that seed back to its heavenly tree, where we can finally eat from its fruit. So doing, we bring together history and the eternal, even to the point where they're no longer opposed. In fact, I might dare to say that, by reading and likening from the Book of Mormon, we also accomplish something far greater than personal salvation: we help bring about the redemption of the world.