Chrooth

One of the fundamental tenants of Buddhism is the inevitable nature of suffering.  Every time I face it, I am astounded by it’s power to completely overwhelm any and all measures I’ve taken to avoid it.  I know that those very measures themselves are the seeds of suffering, but my aversion to suffering has created a strong habit of avoidance.  Every time I face it I see it more clearly and I am awestruck, both by it’s poetry and my ignorance.

The story of human suffering is the same story with every stroke of it’s devastating brush.  In Hinduism, the Goddess Kali dances her way through the universe, fulfilling the law of impermanence.  It is not canon, but my heart imagines a story in which a suffering spirit was granted one wish.  Thinking she would find peace in immortality, she wished to be the only being in the universe allowed to exist forever.  Her wish came with a curse, to bear the strength of immortality, she is cursed to fulfill the universal law of entropy.  To any who dare make the same wish, Kali invites their blade into her exposed chest.  However her willingness to surrender her immortality is all the hint we need that it comes with her curse.  The warning is lost on no one, and she is doomed to her fate and having seen it I cannot write off her destructive disposition as one of evil or darkness.

This story connects a second truth of Buddhism, the impermanence of all things, although it so closely intertwined with the first that I find them to be inseparable.  We suffer, we find a way to cope, our coping mechanism is impermanent, and when it is taken from us, we suffer.  We need, we find a way to fulfill the need, the way we find fulfillment is impermanent, and when we lose it, we suffer.  With this reality in mind, it becomes devastatingly clear that there is no way not to suffer, with one exception, to rid ourselves of need, including the need not to suffer.

Not only is there nothing that can’t be taken away.  There is nothing that won’t be taken away.  The pain of this reality is amplified by our propensity for complacence.  “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”  You never realize how much joy something brought you; you never realize how much you allowed yourself to thoughtlessly depend on something and when it’s taken from us, the reality of our dependence is laid bare and our hurt is the only true indicator of worth we ever encounter.

There is a troubling epiphany on the other side of being an insatiable tech nerd…  All my life I have been utterly captivated by our advances in the tech world.  In my lifetime I have watched computers grow from disconnected, command line only heaps.  I remember calculating the number of family pictures I could feasibly store on a 3.5 floppy disk.  I remember the first time I got on our new 14.4 K dial up internet, discovering “WebCrawler”, the excitement I felt when my family bought a computer with a 56 K modem, knowing I’d be able to download my favorite songs in midi format in mere minutes.  And now, here we are, smack dab in the future I dreamed about as a kid. We have self driving electric cars (almost), streaming 4k video, all the music I can handle that I can acquire faster than I could ever listen to it.  The most cost effective hard drive on the market, dollar for dollar is 10 terabytes.

Yet even as I write this, I know that in 5 years time, these impressive statistics will warrant little more than a nostalgic chuckle…

So what the fuck is an Anti-Technologist?  Well, obviously, I don’t hate technology…  But I am beginning to fear it.  You see, the fundamental purpose of technology is that it is meant to solve a problem.  It helps us live longer, it helps us travel farther, in less time.  It makes us safer, corrects our diseases, and so on.  The only problem with all of this is that we have always had a tendency to be so excited about solving the problem that we become blind to the problems we may potentially create.  At best, these techno-miracles have always suffered from a compliment of horrendous near-sightedness.  There is a valid argument that there is no way we could have predicted the consequences of high technology, but now that they are in our faces, the wise can see no justification to continue.

I want to ensure it is stated early on that I make no assertions to any “solution” to the main issues I’d like to point out, only that they are problems.  Things like overpopulation.  One might assume that by pointing to overpopulation as a problem that I may be advocating for some mass murder.  That is absolutely not the case.  None the less the problem exists; and that acts as a perfect transition into the first point.  Medicine was invented to solve a problem.  We wanted to have more control over death.  We wanted to cure disease so that we could stave off the inevitable pain of losing our loved ones.  This was absolutely a noble pursuit, however, it has no less led us to a situation where our planet is approaching a point where it can no longer sustain additional human life.

Cars where an improvement on the horse, and represented a massive leap forward in personal transportation and it worked so well that now, this transportation solution is partially the cause of the dying planet problem.  Same with farming practices.  Farming revolutionized the way we acquire food, and did it so well that we learned how we could support exponentially more people on a given plot of land than ever before, but now, we have mono-culture crops driving animals extinct and a meat production complex that is further degrading our worlds ability to support life.

You see the point here, is that every technology we create, seems to not only cause problems, but the problems the technology is obviously causing seems to be much greater than the problem we initially intended to solve.

At this point I haven’t taken this philosophical branch much further than this.  I’m still trying to understand what it all adds up to… What it all means, but for now, I think we need to slow down and find a way to test these things with much greater attention paid to the potential consequences of mass adoption of any technology.  No, you’re car isn’t ruining the planet, but the billions of cars that there are, are.

If you haven’t read the previous post, titled “The Miracle of Contradiction: Your path to God is Our Path to Peace.”  Go read it now.  It contains important context for this article.

Taking it from the top….

There is a beautiful problem that exists when you have a thousand page plus holy book with multiple authors.  I hope it’s not too difficult a request to ask you to acknowledge the existence of contradiction in your holy text of choice.  I don’t have to know what book you ascribe to, to tell you that it’s there.  This is a problem because it immediately loses credibility as “the holy word of god” as though the creator and sovereign of the universe wrote you an instruction manual itself…

The problem, but also the reason that it is beautiful, is that with so many stories, and so many interpretations of so many directives from so many very different individuals, you essentially end up with a book that effectively says everything!  It says don’t kill, then you get a story about God commanding someone to murder.  You are commanded to stone adulterers to death, but then a story about the son of God himself walking this guidance back, revoking your authority to make that call.  It’s all very confusing, except in one capacity.

I talk about this path, and I believe it so.  I am further seeing this path for it’s parts, and unfortunately I see the majority of the world stuck in part 1.  This part is defined by unquestioning faith and adherence to what you are told to do, with no conscious questioning or analysis of the directives itself.  There is no true inspection of your faith and so your relationship with god is not yours at all.  It is an entirely passive interaction in which your relationship with god is only as deep and thorough as your handlers allow it to be, and unfortunately none of them are good shepherds.

Since the inception of religion, I have only  one example of a religion whereby it’s adherents are encouraged to walk their own path, to find their own truth and reject anyone that would claim to be a central authority, with some manner of monopoly on the interpretation of the will of god.  Just saying that out loud makes it sound completely absurd.  “I am the only man in all the universe that has access to discuss the will and intention of God directly with the source.”

No.  This is an absurd proposition.  Instead I can think of a number of quotes, directly from Christ himself in which he encourages his followers to be their own shepherd.  To be their own master and to claim their own sovereignty over their relationship with God.

That first question, indeed the strength to circumvent your imposed faith, and question the authoritative claims of your religions leadership is the door that leads you into stage 2 of your path.  Stage 2 is that where you refuse to accept external control and dictation.  Where you harness the courage required to take hold of your relationship with God because the facade that you’ve been fed, quite predictably, proved to be just that; a facade!

But I want to go back to stage one, because there’s some poetry there that I’ve only just understood.  When you read from this book that effectively says everything, you are not building your religion.  You are building a mirror.

There is simply no person in all the world that possesses the mental resources that would be required to read, memorize and process every part of every story in the bible in a way that would result in a unified and coherent understanding of it.  It’s just not possible. But it doesn’t need to be.

No, we read this book and we build our perception, unaware that our comprehension and memory are being guided by the invisible hand of our own ego.  We have these biases that we’ve collected over a life time and these sneaky little ideas creep in to every story and cause us to attach ourselves to those stories and directives that resonate most deeply with our already held beliefs.  We are allergic to contradiction, but we are so susceptible to the reinforcement of our beliefs.

And so the pinnacle of stage one is this condition where we are left with a religion of ourselves.  Where our beliefs consist almost exclusively of the notions that only served to reinforce our existing bias.

At stage 1, our religion is a mirror.  You spend an hour telling me everything you know about God, and I can tell you everything about you.

For example, how could the prince of peace have his message distorted for use by hate-groups such as the KKK or the Westboro baptist church, a christian group who would tell the world that “God hates gays” and “Soldiers must die!”?  We don’t understand because when we read the bible, we only heard a message of love and compassion and service.  This is good news for you.  But the creator of that church, no doubt was a hateful man, filled with prejudice, who picked up a holy book, read it’s contents and walked away have only heard and remembered a message of hate and prejudice.

So I ask you to examine your religion.  Make no mistake it is not the same as anyone elses.  But take a good look at your beliefs and know that they likely have no bearing on god.  Only you.  And if you have the power and the courage to then question yourself, there may be some hope of moving on, to truly take the next step in your relationship with God.

You don’t actually believe these things you worship are sacred. You only worship the idea, which is based on a condition that you define. Therefore, your only act of worship, is the worship of your ability to define a divine condition and thus yourself.

Your ideas and definitions are no more divine than you. Inflicting your will on the condition of divine objects is simply an act of self worship.

We once were joined together in the light and then exploded into dust.

The dust came together and exploded into chemicals.

Then chemicals came together and they exploded into acid.

The acid came together and exploded into life. Then life came together and exploded at the top of the spine and that exploded into sensing the divine.

We began creating tools, and then we fixed them to ourselves and kept evolving, getting bigger fitting more into our shells.

As we grew, the tools got smaller till they started to resembles independent forces seeming like they tend to self assemble.

Certain patterns we’re repeated till they learned to work teams and still got smaller, ever smaller as we grew toward our dreams. We grew as Titans, to a thousand stories, power grown in stride, we look the same but now we’re driven by the cosmos we’ve built inside.

Our outermost layer a strong yet flexible hyperdense protein, behold! I name thee skin. We grow until we stretch thin…. We fizzle and collapse upon ourselves again.

And we are gathered to ourselves, from every particle in sight and we implode till once again we’re all together in the light.

I have always loved the seemingly paradoxical statements we hear when Buddhists describe their truths.  And it is with all fervor that I share one with you.

The path to Enlightenment, leads away from enlightenment.

Allow me to explain.  One mistake I have made countless times in my search for ultimate spiritual peace, is to take my understanding of what constitutes enlightenment and try to emulate these constitutions in my own behavior.  Things like wisdom, no stress, no conflict, etc.  The problem is, the best I can do is “fake it till I make it”, but that’s not how enlightenment works.

Yes, it is true that enlightenment may well manifest as these traits, but the difficult thing to understand is that the traits ONLY manifest once you’ve walked the whole path.  The reality is, that stress, mental errors, and conflict are part of the fundamental truth of human nature; the truth that we suffer.

It stands to reason then, that all along the path to enlightenment, we do face these obstacles, and we must work tirelessly to manage them as well as we can.  We go to great lengths to manage stress well to keep it under control.  We work hard to manage conflict in the best way possible.  We engage in logic, and reason and education to make sure our knowledge is conducive to wise choices.

All of this work seems to fly in the face of the effortless nature of enlightenment, however, doing this very work is the only way we can maintain our minds in such a way that creates an environment conducive to spiritual progress.

This is directly relevant to a previous essay, titled “Smile in the Dark”.  If you haven’t read that, this won’t make as much sense.

In that thought, I discussed the mechanisms of death and enlightenment, specifically describing the “life flashing before your eyes” phenomena.

Have peered deeper into that mechanism, I have seen an even deeper piece that has shown me in very clear detail that forgiveness is not just an option.  It’s compulsory.

As a reminder, this is accepting the notion that your connection to your own personal Godhood is what allows you to fill the role of judge, in determining the course of your afterlife.

Here’s how it works.

The day you are born, you are empty, with the exception of a few base instincts and impulses designed by a few million years worth of evolution.  From that point on you start learning, and as you learn, you attach yourself to certain beliefs that come together to form your psychological self.

That self is inevitably faced with a life’s worth of decisions and some of those decisions will be wrong.  Those wrong decisions are what religion refers to as sin.  That sin is what we are told will result in an unfavorable judgement at the end of ourselves.

Trying to rationalize the religious perspective, all I can see is an ideology obsessed with the need to feel some sense of control.  I don’t believe we have much.  I don’t think our psychological self is made in a series of well informed, intentional directives. I think we’re all just flailing around, haplessly attaching our person to whatever we can find that makes us feel safe and important.  More importantly, knowing that any and all decisions we make are the sum of what we have learned, and that everything we have learned has obviously come from outside of us, our own redemption seems to be inherent in our nature as consumers.

Based on this alone, I already have all I need to tell you that you are perfect, but yesterday I realized how I can prove it to you.

When you die, you will see your life.  Not from start to finish, but rather, from finish to start ant that distinction is extremely important.  You start now, and hit the metaphysical rewind button.  You will see all of your actions in reverse order and that’s exactly how the compulsory forgiveness is manifested.

You see someone you hurt, you feel their pain and their anger that gently increases in intensity until the incident occurs.  You understand the effect you had on them, whatever that may have been.  You see this again and again, and the more you see it, the clearer the pattern becomes.  That pattern is distilled into a belief, and then it happens, you witness the moment that belief formed;  the moment that information was absorbed into your being.  Then in a moment, that belief is cast off, back to the void from which it manifested.

My life has been no stranger to hurt.  That hurt has resulted in a lot of subsequent hurt as I lacked the strength to resolve it before it echoed into someone else’s life.  When I die, I will witness the avalanche of hurt I have caused, but I will also watch that hurt, along with every other belief or idea I’ve ever latched on to disappear in a reverse ballet of my metaphysical disassembly.

At the end of the show, I will be left to witness myself as I was at the beginning.  Empty.  I believe that along with that emptiness, I will also witness my innocence.  With innocence comes freedom.

My only question is whether or not we will be faced with the choice of holding on to these ideas.  If so then that weight will be carried into our afterlife, and so the thought concludes with an endorsement of the eastern idea of practicing renunciation.  Practice letting go so that you are able to avoid carrying your fetters into the afterlife.  There is nothing you’ve learned here that you need take into paradise.

I have attained the last piece of divine knowledge necessary to complete my understanding of the spirit.  I have not attained complete enlightenment, or even pre-enlightenment.  I have not practiced the art of meditation enough to achieve the divine state of bliss produced at the end of building the perfect spiritual machine.  I have simply completed the blue print.  I have only taken a few small steps on the path to Nirvana, but I now have a complete map and I understand exactly where I must go.

I will not torture you with any mystery or suspense.  I will tell you the final answer to the highest question at the very outset of this explanation.  I only hope you are not disappointed by it’s simplicity.

Enlightenment.  Complete enlightenment.  The same enlightenment that allowed the Buddha himself to enter into Nirvana consisted of one single choice.  The choice he made, by spending his life preparing to make it, was to simply let go of the self and pass into non-existence.  Non-duality. It is the only place in all of the cosmos where there is no suffering.

I will spend the remainder of this treatise explaining.

The Buddha taught that to exist is to suffer.  He was correct.  In every level of potential existence, suffering occurs.  Even in the Christian Heaven.  Even the Christian God and every other God for that matter, all experience suffering.  All the Bhoddisattvas, Gods, Angels, and all the other heavenly beings suffer endlessly.  Mostly for us.  The heavenly beings are those who have attained compassion as such that they have pledged their existence to alleviating the suffering of lesser beings.  That means that through their compassion, they suffer with us.  Their empathy compels them to share our hurt when we fail, and they feel the weight of their own failure when we hurt.

As for the Hell beings, they have gone the opposite direction, away from compassion and down the spiral of feeding an endlessly ravenous ego.  They all suffer for themselves.  In a progressive hierarchy of beings suffering in every way a being can suffer, all the way up to the king of hell.

The mission of the Buddha was to find a way out of this endless cycle of death and birth; the cycle of existence that leads to this endless cycle of suffering.  What he found I now know.  He found the choice we all make at the end of our mortal lives and he discovered the capacity to simply choose to leave… Everything.

So now, we must discuss death.  I have always used a simple tool to understand spiritual matters.  Given the disparity between the seemingly endless explanations by the endless list of religions, there really are only two logical outcomes.  Either none of them is correct and everyone is crazy or all of them are correct and the various traditions are simply the manifestation of universal truth, subjected to our individual and cultural needs.  The word of god, filtered through what makes sense to our mass consciousness.

It is my undying and greatly relieved testament this day that it is in absolute fact the second.

Another tool I have learned to use in discerning spiritual truth is to use the assault of my own beliefs when subjected to spiritually acquired information.  We are capable of generating new ideas quite rapidly, but it seems that the ideas that come from our own mind tend greatly toward the consideration of our own beliefs.  These beliefs form a box in which we comfortably place ourselves.  Our senses receive information and these beliefs filter that information to shape our interpretation of our world.  I have had the great fortune to experience a number of sensory experiences that defy this mechanism and bare testament to the spiritual world and our ability to interact with it.  Some information, it seems, if we are listening hard enough, comes from within; and instead of being filtered through the shield of our beliefs, it either adds greatly to them, or shatters them completely.  You see these beliefs all too often act as our substitute identity.  We attach to them, and when they are questioned, we hurt very personally.  So what are we to do with information that is so abundantly true, but cannot be connected to any of the beliefs we hold so close to ourselves as to identify with them.  Information so revelatory that we cannot justify citing ourselves as the source?  This for me is how I define divine inspiration.  But how do we KNOW?  For me, the best indicator has always been the occasional piece of divine information that does not agree with my deeply held beliefs.  In fact, it is the greatest testament to the reality of this information when it completely defies my deep beliefs and shatters the box in which I live.

The point I am getting at is that this most recent revelation regarding the nature of enlightenment has completely shattered a great deal of beliefs I have clung to for decades.  The best example will be my relationship with the Mormon Church.  As an inquisitive teenager, my scientific mind grew increasingly dissatisfied with the doctrine I was taught and the answers I wasn’t getting.  I felt betrayed by the repressive culture and developed a serious disdain for the organization that lasted until this morning.  One of the biggest arguments I held against this religion is precisely how they describe their expectations for death and the afterlife.  They break it down into five realms.  The three kingdoms of heaven; Celestial, Telestial and Terrestrial; what they call Outer Darkness, and finally Hell.  My issue was taken with their description of the requirements and rewards of making it to the highest, Celestial kingdom. You must live a clean life according to the gospel, be married in the temple, pay your tithing and maintain weekly repentance of your earthly sins, leveraging the atonement of Christ.  If you fulfill these tasks, you are granted entrance into the kingdom of God where you dwell in his presence, the presence of your deceased family to which you are eternally sealed, and are even granted your own Godhood; given the power to create your own world or worlds.  It sounded utterly absurd to me.

Once I’d left however, my research was plagued with familiarity.  This is actually what resulted in my conclusion that all religions had to be at least partially correct.  Every religion seemed to hold these common themes of compassion, sin, reward, God or Gods, repentance, prayer, meditation, self-discipline, but the most fascinating were how consistent the myriad descriptions of the spiritual transition from life to death were. In summary, you physically die, your life flashes before your eyes, you pass into darkness, you are judged, based on this judgement your next path is determined, we pass through light to arrive in our new life.

This is where the final piece of my spiritual puzzle was placed, more specifically in the judgement process.  I have seen clearly that there is no judge of our behavior but us.  There is no St. Peter and no God to wag their finger or shake their head in disappointment as they review the actions of our lives.  It’s just you.  The catch is that it is just your spirit, unhindered by the psychological errors that arise from our attachment to a physical body and brain.  The trick is that this spirit is no longer solely attached to your own perception or your will to survive.  We know that the ego is anchored at the base of the Limbic System of the brain.  This psychologically rooted ego does not come with you into the afterlife.  For clarity, this ego is quite different from the spiritual attachment to self that keeps us trapped in Samsara.  The psychological ego is only responsible for creating a delusion of individuality and is concerned with preserving our mortal life.  I would be easily convinced that this instinctive structure was built through evolution by the manifestation of the deeper spiritual self-attachment.  In this regard, they are related but different in that the Limbic Ego is unable to consider or process spiritual information.

Why does all this matter?  It’s all to do with judgement.  You see, the reason your life flashes before your eyes after you die isn’t just to give you a chance to reminisce before you lose it forever.  It is your Karma.  As you take the sum of your life’s information to the spirit world, you relive your life with the added capacity to not only abandon your limbic ego impulses, but in leaving that ego behind, your spirit is able to connect with the effect your decisions had on others.

I’m sure so many have caught on by now and had the thought “Oh great! I can just decide to go to heaven!”  It’s not that simple unfortunately. Take a moment to consider the amount of sorrow you have felt.  Now the amount of sorrow you may have caused.  Multiply that by 3 just to be safe.  I promise you have hurt a great deal more people than you know.  The strength they showed in hiding it from you is no excuse.  Imagine facing a lifetime worth of mistakes and feeling every moment of pain you’ve caused to the people in life that were subject to your actions.  Now this is the question.  How would you judge your life?  Would you be able tell God to his face that you deserve celestial glory? Listen to your deepest impulses now.  Don’t attempt to think your way through it.  You will be given no time and no space in which to quell your shame with excuses and justification.  You see your life and everyone in it.  You feel a lifetime of emotion, both yours and the people you’ve effected, all at once.  If, at the end, you are ashamed, at best you come back and try again.  At worst, you descend into the existence of a lower life form, at the very worst, a hell being, but still all are given the opportunity to resolve your karma.  If you endure this test and are honestly proud of your life, you may deem yourself worthy of any manner of heavenly reward.

This I know to be true as this revelation has shattered my disdain for the Mormon Heaven.  My eyes pried open by the truth that it is entirely possible and of no threat or detriment to anything or anyone.  Despite the many holes in their doctrine, they’ve got the essentials of the spirit world as accurate as any other.  My only continuing argument is that with their incomplete doctrine they are left unprepared for this spiritual transition.  Their spirit will find chaos in the lack of familiarity with the process, and that’s where we come to meditation.

Many find meditation to be a mysterious tradition, and just as few understand what the goal is.  I myself began a meditation practice in hopes of acquiring super natural abilities.  I understand now that though these abilities are a side effect of this esoteric practice, they are not the goal.  To clarify, in the most simple terms I can relay, meditation is simply practicing for death.  The methods are many, but most focus on the same goal of quieting the mind and descending through progressively deeper states of consciousness.  As this lengthy process occurs, you will encounter yourself in ways you would never imagine.  At the first levels, you will suffer a barrage of endless random chaotic thoughts.  This is the first witness of what your mind is actually doing.  Like a thousand monkeys screeching and swinging uncontrollably through a tree, the untrained mind is a place of utter chaos.  As you learn to focus, the thoughts quiet, then they slow.  Your mind becomes more like a gently rippling lake; each thought is a wave to be smoothed with deeper focus.  Then in your first months of regular practice, you will find your first experience with a still mind.  Like a lake of perfectly still water on a windless morning, you will find your mind capable of profound peace as you rediscover it’s ability to reflect reality as a perfect mirror.  Over years, the masters of meditation continue to discover ever-deeper states of mind, so deep that one can even pass into the heavenly realms.  One of many stories of the Buddha describes his dedication to self-discipline so much that when passing into these heavenly realms, he would choose to descend into the hell realms and subject himself to immeasurable suffering so as to challenge and chasten his ability to focus his mind beyond the reach of even the most violent torment.  He sat silently observing his thoughts as his flesh was repeatedly ripped from his body, scorched and burned.  His mind was trained to focus so well that he was able to dispel the torment of his senses into complete dismissal as no more than illusory perception to be ignored.  It was this same mind, as he sat in deep meditation beneath a tree that at last discovered that deepest state of mind possible.  He found the darkness we encounter after death, and the place where we make our final judgement.  In the darkness, he perceived a choice that none had before.  He realized that in the complete renunciation of self; in casting away his attachment to his own existence that he had the choice to exit the endless cycle of birth and death.  He perceived this place of non-existence, called Nirvana, the only place in the cosmos untouched by suffering.  In this moment, he committed his spirit to dissolution.  When he returned to consciousness, he brought with him the weight and promise of his decision.  His suffering in his life, dissolved with the knowledge that there was an answer to his greatest question.  Armed with the knowledge of such a facet of existence, the myriad manifestations of the material world were in fact rendered completely immaterial.  In this, his mind and spirit became invincible to suffering.

With this in your mind, I ask you to accept the gravity of your own responsibility to yourself.  I ask that you dedicate your mind to a practice of discipline and compassion.  With your focus on these two attributes, you will realize a life worthy of a smile in the darkness.

“There be those, too, whose knowledge, turned aside
By this desire or that, gives them to serve
Some lower gods, with various rites, constrained
By that which mouldeth them. Unto all such-
Worship what shrine they will, what shapes, in faith-
‘Tis I who give them faith! I am content!
The heart thus asking favour from its God,
Darkened but ardent, hath the end it craves,”

-The Bagavad Gita – Chapter VII “Of Religion by Discernment”

“8 Wherefore murmur ye, because that ye shall receive more of my word? Know ye not that the testimony of two nations is a witness unto you that I am God, that I remember one nation like unto another? Wherefore, I speak the same words unto one nation like unto another. And when the two nations shall run together the testimony of the two nations shall run together also.

9 And I do this that I may prove unto many that I am the same yesterday, today, and forever; and that I speak forth my words according to mine own pleasure. And because that I have spoken one word ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished; neither shall it be until the end of man, neither from that time henceforth and forever.

10 Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written.

11 For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written.

12 For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.

13 And it shall come to pass that the Jews shall have the words of the Nephites, and the Nephites shall have the words of the Jews; and the Nephites and the Jews shall have the words of the lost tribes of Israel; and the lost tribes of Israel shall have the words of the Nephites and the Jews.

14 And it shall come to pass that my people, which are of the house of Israel, shall be gathered home unto the landsof their possessions; and my word also shall be gathered in one. “

-The Book of Mormon – 2 Nephi: 29; v8-14