Free books by Hugh Nibley

[marc]

Abraham in Egypt by Hugh W. Nibley

An Approach to the Book of Mormon by Hugh W. Nibley

The Ancient State by Hugh W. Nibley

Approaching Zion by Hugh W. Nibley

Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints by Hugh W. Nibley

Enoch the Prophet by Hugh W. Nibley

Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites by Hugh W. Nibley

Mormonism and Early Christianity by Hugh W. Nibley

Old Testament and Related Studies by Hugh W. Nibley

The Prophetic Book of Mormon by Hugh W. Nibley

Since Cumorah by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 1 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 2 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 3 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 4 by Hugh W. Nibley

Temple and Cosmos by Hugh W. Nibley

Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass by Hugh W. Nibley

When the Lights Went Out: Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy by Hugh W. Nibley

The World and the Prophets by Hugh W. Nibley

So many books, so little time!! @-) :-B

[SempiternalHarbinger]

Right Coach! Time is short, all to short. My personal favorites are Approaching Zion and One Eternal Round. Here is a great one that you missed.

One Eternal Round
http://deseretbook.com/Collected-Works- ... /i/5033745" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[marc]

Nice! Thanks for sharing that link, Semp--I knew that of all people, you'd be one to have read Temple and Cosmos and because of that, it is one I plan to read soon! In any case, click on any of the above links in the OP to read any of the books FREE. Free is good.

[Rob]

This is a must-read...
Sergeant Nibley, Ph.D.: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle

[Facing East]

.

[Mormon]

thanks for the books

[Original_Intent]

I am reading Approaching Zion now. Very paradigm changing for me, Nibley almost provides an opposing view to Cleon Skousen in many way - both pointing towards Zion but from extremely different viewpoints.

Just from the little I have read, I do understand more of Legion's and Semp's differing points of views regarding gold and so forth. I still disagree that fiat paper currency is better, in fact I am still convinced it is far worse. If anything, Hugh Nibley seems to mostly just encourage people to make their way by the seat of their brow as they go along, and it seems that he thinks that any attempt to build up wealth beyond our needs is evil. And I find myself partially in agreement with him. I certainly think that getting out of debt and doing our best to get by on modest means, and using anything beyond that to build up the kingdom is a worthy goal. I still feel in agreement that having a nest egg for old age and for bad times is not a bad idea, sadly it is almost a necessity in the Babylon system. It does seem that the Zion system, at least as outlined by Nibley, is to focus almost exclusively on building the kingdom and trust that the Lord will provide.

Certainly some good counterpoints to some of the more temporal focused ideas of preparation that I have entertained.

[shestalou]

Thanks so much for the links coach, the best LDS scholar I have read but only own 2, thank you again for these links

[TZONE]

Certainly some good counterpoints to some of the more temporal focused ideas of preparation that I have entertained.

Could you briefly explain? Just interested what he said. Can make it short.

Focus on just having the minimum?
We don't need it much?
Is he talking about our every day life or "preparation" for things to come?

[Original_Intent]

Well, I'd highly recommend the first chapter from Approaching Zion, which is all I have read and what I based it on.

Like all good speakers, he kind of builds up to his point, so it is hard to get the gist of it in a summary.

The core of it is that man is meant to live by the sweat of his brow, and any system that is built up to take advantage of the labors of others (corporations, business management, etc.) are all Babylon constructs. He didn't say that, exactly, but it is the implication.

He DID say that we should just focus on doing what we can to build up Zion, and the Lord will take care of our needs - but again, without reading the entire thing, that doesn't really convey the message very well.

[TZONE]

Ok that makes sense. I have read parts of it. It makes sense don't have time to finish the book though too long.

[ajax]

Could you briefly explain? Just interested what he said. Can make it short.

"Work We Must, But the Lunch is Free"

(This is one of the chapter headings, which pretty much encapsulates it)

[ajax]

Ok that makes sense. I have read parts of it. It makes sense don't have time to finish the book though too long.

One of the best books I've read. I may have to dust it off and give it another go.

[Original_Intent]

Came across this nugget in Chapter 2 (they are LONG chapters!) emphasis mine

First, of course, the work ethic, which is being so strenuously advocated in our day. This is one of those neat magician's tricks in which all our attention is focused on one hand while the other hand does the manipulating. Implicit in the work ethic are the ideas (1) that because one must work to acquire wealth, work equals wealth, and (2) that that is the whole equation. With these go the corollaries that anyone who has wealth must have earned it by hard work and is, therefore, beyond criticism; that anyone who doesn't have it deserves to suffer—thus penalizing any who do not work for money; and (since you have a right to all you earn) that the only real work is for one's self; and, finally, that any limit set to the amount of wealth an individual may acquire is a satanic device to deprive men of their free agency—thus making mockery of the Council of Heaven. These editorial syllogisms we have heard a thousand times, but you will not find them in the scriptures. Even the cornerstone of virtue, "He that is idle shall not eat the bread . . . of the laborer" (D&C 42:42), hailed as the franchise of unbridled capitalism, is rather a rebuke to that system which has allowed idlers to live in luxury and laborers in want throughout the whole course of history. The whole emphasis in the holy writ is not on whether one works or not, but what one works for: "The laborer in Zion shall labor for Zion; for if they labor for money they shall perish" (2 Nephi 26:31). "The people of the church began to wax proud, because of their exceeding riches, . . . precious things, which they had obtained by their industry" (Alma 4:6) and which proved their undoing, for all their hard work.

I've certainly always understood it in the way that Brother Nibley describes as the "wrong" way. A lot to think about, paradigm shifts are HARD!

[marc]

Excellent, OI! This is why I do not regret having closed my business doors in the construction field. My dream was to have a big business and not worry about money, play every weekend, etc. But this goes against that scripture in D&C you quoted. Truly the Lord told Adam that ALL his days he shall eat by the sweat of his brow. I truly understand this to mean that we should understand and value the importance of sowing and reaping as the Lord is sowing and reaping (Jacob 5). And by doing so, we are to rely on HIM for sun, rain, etc for our reaping. This is how we are blessed bountifully--the devourer is rebuked and the windows of heaven opened that we receive so much we cannot possible contain it all. One seed yields one tree. One tree yields an orchard. One orchard yields many more. And the world is fed. And together we prosper laboring in Zion and FOR Zion.

[North_Star]

Nice.

Abraham in Egypt by Hugh W. Nibley

An Approach to the Book of Mormon by Hugh W. Nibley

The Ancient State by Hugh W. Nibley

Approaching Zion by Hugh W. Nibley

Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints by Hugh W. Nibley

Enoch the Prophet by Hugh W. Nibley

Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites by Hugh W. Nibley

Mormonism and Early Christianity by Hugh W. Nibley

Old Testament and Related Studies by Hugh W. Nibley

The Prophetic Book of Mormon by Hugh W. Nibley

Since Cumorah by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 1 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 2 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 3 by Hugh W. Nibley

Teachings of the Book of Mormon: Semester 4 by Hugh W. Nibley

Temple and Cosmos by Hugh W. Nibley

Tinkling Cymbals and Sounding Brass by Hugh W. Nibley

When the Lights Went Out: Three Studies on the Ancient Apostasy by Hugh W. Nibley

The World and the Prophets by Hugh W. Nibley

So many books, so little time!! @-) :-B

[Army Of Truth]

:ymapplause: :ymapplause: :ymapplause: :ymapplause:

Thank you coachmarc! Great books to put on my list now. Now I need a book on speedreading so I can read them all in this lifetime. :))

[marc]

You're welcome!

[marc]

you can still access Nibley's books and a LOT more from this link:

http://publications.maxwellinstitute.by ... gh-nibley/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jeffreyrichardson_]

Excuse me while I wipe this drool of my face...

Thanks, man!

[marc]

You're welcome, brother! May I recommend starting with Approaching Zion? Absolutely priceless. I'm still in awe that he kept his tenure at BYU and was not exed by church leaders of his day. But that's all besides the point. Hugh is one man who, in his time, no doubt wore out sets of scriptures.

[Alighieri]

This is a thread that needs bumping every now and again.

[marc]

For anyone who might be interested: Nibley's brief response to Fawn Brodie's "No man knows my history," a Joseph Smith biography:

No, Ma'am, That's Not History

I love the title he used! :))

[SempiternalHarbinger]

(Posted this in another thread)

Here is a bunch of Hugh Nibley unpublished papers.

The Nibley Pages
http://www.bhporter.com/Nibley%20Pages.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[SempiternalHarbinger]

Just came across this gem thanks to Kevin Taylor. It's a letter dated August 23, 1967, from Hugh Nibley to Sterling McMurrin. Kevin reproduced it for the internet. For some reason this letter has not found it's way on the internet until now. The letter is fully reproduced in Appendix D of the 2002 book "Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life," written by his son-in-law, Boyd Jay Petersen, pages 427-430.

Here is Kevin giving a little background...

The background of the letter's composition is that Sterling McMurrin had written to Hugh Nibley about plans for "a piece on Mormon philosophy" that he was then working on, which was to feature the views of Orson Pratt, W.H. Chamberlin, B.H. Roberts, and others.

McMurrin invited Nibley to do one of two things: Create a list of "those writings which you regard as most effectively representing your position with respect to philosophy matters in general and in particular the philosophy of religion" or "jot down a few paragraphs that epitimize" his [Nibley's] position.

Nibley appears to have chosen the latter option, although McMurrin's intended essay was never ultimately published.

What follows, below, is entirely Nibley's own words (with the exception of a couple of translated sayings placed in brackets), as in the original letter.

Capitalizations in original.]

Dear Sterling,

I have been away--first visit to southern California in 20 years--so here we are back again and forced to think about a religious philosophy. I can see that there would be a place for my peculiar views in your interesting Roman salad if only for contrast: "If a man will compare the richness and variety of the universe," wrote A.E. Housman, "and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and of awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only in its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude." Let that be my passport to your august company while I list, in no particular order, a few propositions that express my religious position at the moment.

Proposition No. 1. We are participating in a vivid little drama being enacted in empty space. If blind chance can set this stage, put the characters on it, and set the plot in motion, then there is nothing that blind chance cannot do, including the staging of innumerable other plays on other worlds; and blind chance may very well have arranged to have this particular world quarantined to provide a testing situation in which we find ourselves--strained and awkward, but just the test for those particular qualities which are going to be needed in the really long run.

Proposition No. 2, etc. Blind chance isn't a force at all, but a term denoting an unknown X. Just as Newton could never bring himself to believe that gravity could be a force operating across a completely empty gap, so I can't believe in a directing force which is itself completely without any sense of direction or an organizing force which itself has no concept of organization. That idea stopped even Darwin, you may recall.

3. From the tiny segment of the play I have studied, I like to think that things have been following the script recommended by Joseph Smith more closely than the other scripts written by scientists and scholars and altered from time to time. I really believe that the unfolding of the human comedy has shown a consistent tendency to adhere to the ancient script, and at present gives every indication of following it out to the bitter and glorious end.

For me religion to be convincing must be nonspeculative. If it were the sort of thing we could figure out for ourselves, I would strongly suspect that we had invented it (C.S. Lewis). Mormonism has the great virtue of being, along with Judaism, early Christianity, and Islam, a nonspeculative religion. It accepts the moral law within and also the starry heavens above, the latter being something we do NOT make up ourselves and yet somehow part of the religious picture.

My present religious mood is an all-out literalism. If the history of Christianity has been one long undignified retreat, one continual process of accommodation to the science of the hour (Whitehead), the time has come to reverse the process, since the science of the hour has brought us to a most dismal slough in which it is no delight to dwell (Kozyrev). If the discussion is to be kept alive, it must move away from its old perennial game of de-mythologizing and de-eschatologizing, in the opposite direction, which I call de-rhetoricizing. So today, just for kicks, I read the Scriptures AS IF everything in them was meant to be taken in the most literal sense, as if no such thing as a symbol, allegory, or type even existed. And in so doing that I find that there begins to build up within my personal computer a mass of data that has a totally different power and thrust from anything I have known before. Granted that the new deposit in its naive literalism will in time need radical correction, still I am convinced that the correction will not have to be nearly so radical as that required by the opposite view--that of the doctors of the church, who insisted on reading the scriptures as if nothing in them was to be taken literally, and instructed their students never to give literal interpretation to a passage if any other interpretation was possible.

I deplore the authoritarian, Baconian structure on which the entire edifice of modern learning is built (the schoolmen are even worse than the churchmen--when they are not actually the same), and have always been a passionate devotee of the openended discussion in which nothing is ever proven except for the individual. Whenever anything is proven, it is because some individual has been convinced, having acquired a personal, noncommunicable testimony of the truth of the proposition (Popper).

A testimony is a gift and a talent (I Cor 12:7ff); man muss ein Organ dafür haben. [A person must have a sense organ for it.] It functions like any of the senses, e.g., like hearing, it is an "absolute" thing. You either have it or you don't; but like hearing, it may be strong at one time and weak at another; it is never in ailing mortals in perfect operating condition (Heraclitus), and may vanish altogether at times, be nonoperative at times, and at times return with astonishing force and vigor. But it does NOT produce the things it hears. It would be hard to explain to one devoid of those senses that seeing and hearing are not functions of the imagination and are only in part self-induced--that there would be no seeing and hearing at all if some sort of stimulus did not come from the outside (Kantish). All this is commonplace enough, but I am trying to say that when I "bear my testimony" I am really talking about something, whether you get it or not.
We are here to use our brains, but the most important impressions that come to us do so directly and without any conscious cerebration. We may work over the data of such experiences in our minds, but we do not produce the impressions in the first place. An interview with John the Baptist led Oliver Cowdery to declare that whatever the doings of men may be, "one ray of glory from the upper world, or one word from the mouth of the Savior, from the bosom of eternity, strikes it all to insignificance, and blots it forever from the mind!" I have not had Oliver Cowdery's experience, but I have had some like it, and this puts any discussion of my religious "philosophy" on a difficult plane. For if I were to tell you that on a particular day I had such and such an experience, you would write me down as a mental case, and rightly so, in case you had not had the same experience or one like it. I see no reason why I should prejudice and offend you by telling you stories you can't believe and have no means of testing. But such experiences as I refer to are bound to affect one's behavior if only in subtle ways, and I find for one thing that there are some things that I simply cannot take seriously, and other things which I must take seriously even at the risk of giving offense to my more rational colleagues. It is surprising how many people have thought me to be merely spoofing--just having a little fun, like Joseph Smith when he got up the Book of Mormon. I wonder if they realize what a price one must pay for that kind of fun? I say to hell with careers and the things of the world; but if I thought there was the remotest possibility that this was my only life and my only world I would most assuredly NOT say it, and I would not throw away invitations to serious accomplishment for the sake of a monotonous series of pranks.

I include acceptance of the Gospel among the basic bodily functions like sleeping, eating, and breathing. They are not rational but spontaneous; without them we would die, but that is not why we engage in them. We eat, breathe, and sleep long before we are in danger of dying of hunger, suffocation, or exhaustion; if we had to have rational explanation for doing those things before we were willing to invest any effort in them we would not be long for this world. The eye it cannot choose but see, l'ame pense toujours, [the soul thinks always], and as far as I can see, faith is inseparable from the awareness of existence. Existence, the Egyptians said, is a marvel compared with which all other marvels pale into insignificance: it is something not to be explained but accepted; and to accept it is to feel a surge of gratitude--to what, for what? We cannot shake off the wonder and delight of being, the indefinite prolongation of which is but a minor problem once we have got over the original obstacle, namely, the enormous odds against existing at all. Our reaction to being here must be a religious one, because the only principle of continued being is holiness. One cannot maintain an even level of folly. Each act is a step downward unless it is a righteous act, and the concept of righteousness cannot be divorced from the idea of holiness.

I have written too much and said too little. This is no religious philosophy at all. It is a situation in which I find myself: I am stuck with the gospel, I know perfectly well that it is true; there may be things about the Church that I find perfectly appalling--but that has nothing to do with it. I KNOW THE GOSPEL IS TRUE.

Yours as ever,

/s/ Hugh Nibley