Dr. Leon James
Professor of Psychology
First published on
the Web: 1999
Updated: 2008
Version 13e
email: leon@hawaii.edu
The Web address of this online book, along with
links to other related documents is:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/moses.html
For copying or use see the Permissions Note at the end of the document.
TOC \o
"1-3" \h \z \u **** Before You
start: Diagnostic Test Your Rational Spirituality ****
0.1 A Brief History of Rational
Spirituality
0.3b Three
Steps in Rational Spirituality
1. The Dawning Age of True
Science
1.2 Salvation by Faith Alone vs. Good Works
1.2.a Diagrams of the Human Mind and Divine
Influx
1.2.b Regeneration -- Shunning Evils As Sins
1.3 Truth Is the Appearance of Love
2. Swedenborg’s Dual
Consciousness
3. Character Reformation By
Means of the Threefold Word of God
God’s Intervention in the
Details of Our Lives
Correspondences -- The Secret Code of
Rational Spirituality
4. The Varieties of Religion
Under One Divine Human Person
The Inner
Spiritual Meaning of the Threefold Word
The
Growth of Rational Consciousness of God
5. Phase 1 – Ritual
Faith or the Moses-Phase (Sectarianism, Fundamentalism)
6. Phase 2 – Mystical
Faith or the Paul-Phase (Personalism, Universalism)
6.2 New Testament Sayings of Jesus and their
Spiritual Meaning
6.3 From Mystifying Faith to Rational
Spirituality
6.4 Sensuous vs. Rational Consciousness
6.5 Anatomical Diagrams of Consciousness
*** Take the Rational Spirituality Test Part 1
7. Phase 3 – Rational
Faith or the Swedenborg-Phase (Particularism, Actualism)
8. Sectarianism: The Old Testament State
(Hebrew Word)
9. Personalism: The New Testament State
(Greek Word)
9.1 New Testament Parables– Doorway to
Rational Spirituality
9.1b Why Jesus Spoke Only in Parables
9.1c To Prevent Profanation, Revelation is
Individual and Progressive
9.1d Can There Be a Scientific Proof that the
Threefold Word is Divine
9.1e The Secret Code of Correspondences
9.1f The Divine Origin and Power of Correspondences
9.1g The Scientific Status of Correspondences
9.1h Perception of The Spiritual Sense of Scientific Revelations
9.1i Natural vs. Spiritual Understanding of Correspondences
9.1j True Science -- Divine Scientific Revelations of Absolute Truth
10. Particularism: The Third Testament State
(Latin Word)
11. Spiritual Development is
Cyclical and Recursive:
11.1a Comparison of Religious Ideas in the
Three Phases
11.1b The Nine Zones of the Ennead Matrix
12. The Moses Mind: Three States of Sectarianism
13. The Pauline Mind: Three
States of Personalism
14. The Swedenborg Mind: Three Phases
of Particularism
14.1 God, Salvation, Sin, Hell, and Devil in
Phase 2 vs. Phase 3
*** Take the Rational Spirituality Test Part 2 ***
15. The Three Levels in the
Mind -- Natural, Spiritual, and Celestial
15.1 Spirituality That is Natural, Not Yet
Spiritual or Celestial
15. 2 True Science Phase 3 Thinking
15.3 Elevation of Consciousness of the Human
Race
15.4 The Two Layers of True Science –
Theoretical and Applied
15.5 Elevation of Spiritual Consciousness in Every
Day Tasks
15.5.a Sensuous and Rational Consciousness of
the Divine
15.5.b Self-Witnessing One’s Thinking and
Willing
15.6 Chart of Mental Characteristics of
Angels and Spirits
15.7 Diagram Showing the Four Windows of the
Mind.
16. Anatomical Diagrams of the Mind in
Relation to God and Universe
16.1 The Inmost Region: God, Infinite,
Uncreate
16.2 The Middle Region: Mind and the
Spiritual World
16.3 The Outermost Region: The Natural
Mind and Hell
17. Recapitulation and Study
Questions and Exercises
17.1 What does the title mean -- Moses, Paul,
and Swedenborg: --
-- The Three Phases of Spiritual
Consciousness
17.2 What is True Science and what is
dualism?
17.3 Why do scientists oppose dualism and
scientific revelations in the Word of
God?
17.4 Why do religious people oppose the idea
that the Word of God is a scientific
revelation?
17.5 What is the relation between the mind
and the spiritual world?
**** Take the Rational Spirituality Test
Part 3 ****
17.7a Why do some people oppose the idea that
hell is forever?
17.7b If God is omnipotent and pure love, why
does he allow evil?
17.8a What are the three phases of
consciousness?
17.8b What is the ennead matrix or the nine
zones of spiritual development?
17.9a What is spiritual enlightenment?
17.9b What is spiritual regeneration?
17.10a What are the laws of space and time in
the spiritual world?
17.10b Are there devils and angels there?
17.11a What’s the difference between
sensuous and rational consciousness?
17.11b Is spirituality closer to mysticism or
to rationality?
17.11c How does True Science view religious
rituals and faith?
17.11d What is the Science of Correspondences?
17.11e Can it be shown that genuine
spirituality is rational and scientific?
The Holy Spirit
-- Rational Consciousness of God’s Co-Presence
Dual
Citizenship -- Horizontal and Vertical Community
As-of
Self – First Fruits of Rational Consciousness
Self-Witnessing
– The Psychology of Cooperation
Forming
the New Church Mind in Ourselves
Characterize the thinking and feeling
levels of every day activities
Explain the level of thinking in each
religious tradition sampled below
18.2.b Charity and Christianity
18.2.f Charity and Secular Humanism
18.2.g Charity and New Christianity (The
Writings)
18.2.a Sample answer for Buddhism
18.2.b Sample Answer for Christianity
18.2.c Sample Answer for Judaism
18.2.e Sample Answer for Hinduism
18.2.f Sample Answer for Secular Humanism
18.2.g Sample Answer for New Christianity (The
Writings)
Use the ennead matrix to characterize
Judaism, Christianity, New Church
**** Take the Rational
Spirituality Test Part 4 ****
19. Selections from the
Writings
19.1 On Swedenborg’s Mission as
Scientific Revelator of the Second Coming
19.2 How Everyone is Resuscitated in the
World of Spirits
19.3 Sexual Love, Marriage, Heaven, Hell
19.4 The Threefold Word and Spiritual
Enlightenment Thereby
19.5 On Being Reborn, Sin, Regeneration, and
Forgiveness
19.6 The Vertical Community and Our
association With Spirits
19.7 On Faith Alone, Good Works, and
Meritoriousness
19.8 On Discrete Degrees and Correspondences
19.9 On Materialistic Science vs. True
Science
Abbreviations to Books by Swedenborg
**** Diagnostic Test of Rational Spirituality 100 Items ****
Before You start:
Diagnostic Test Your Rational Spirituality
It would
be helpful to you to compare the distance between where you are starting from
and where you end up when you complete the study of this book. I created this
test to help you estimate that distance. Each question has three alternatives
and you are to pick one of them that best represents your views on several
spiritual topics. I provide an Answer Key
and an explanation of how to interpret your score.
Please
page through to the Appendix at the end where the 100 questions are located.
Note:
The expression “The Writings” is being used throughout to refer to the books written In Latin by Swedish scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg (1668-1772). These are available online along with collateral works and search engine:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/abbrev.html
Many public and academic libraries also carry one or more Swedenborg books. They can also be ordered from local and online bookstores.
Selections
from the Writings are given in Section 19 and are arranged by topics of
relevance to the discussion.
A person without religion does not become spiritual,
but remains natural (Swedenborg, CL 149)
We know
from the Writings of Swedenborg that the most ancient civilizations on this
earth were pre-industrialized people with the mental ability of communicating
with their departed ancestors. Swedenborg was given the opportunity to talk to
them in their heavens where they live happily to eternity, as will be fully
explained in what follows. While they lived on earth in a physical body they
were able to be in conscious mental contact with those who had departed and
were inhabitants of heaven. This celestial communication between heaven and
earth was the source of their knowledge about the world, heaven, and God. As a
result, their perspective on reality was objective and realistic, hence dualist
and theistic. For them dualism was not a belief or a religion, but a scientific
reality. They did not have to invent philosophies, theologies, and theories
about the source of life, the immortality of human beings, the existence of
heaven and hell, and the laws by which God operated both worlds, the natural
world of earths and the spiritual world of heavens and hells. This was not
mystery to them but science -- clear understanding based on empirical facts.
Whatever information they needed about reality, they were able to access
through the vertical community of their ancestors. They were celestial people,
conscious of the operations in their celestial mind, which gave them a sensuous
consciousness of both this world and the spiritual world. This dual
consciousness was the source of their science.
And where
did the inhabitants of heaven have their scientific knowledge from?
From God.
Such is the character of life in the heavens, that truth and good streams into the
mind from within. Knowledge is not something that needs to be acquired by
learning and discovery. All knowledge is from God. While attached to the
physical body we are compelled to discover some knowledge on our own.
Scientific revelation has the character of being wrapped in endless layers of
appearances of truth. It seems that we have to exert mental effort to read it
and comprehend it. But at some point we are no longer attached to the physical
body and we take over conscious control of the spirit-body during our
resuscitation into the world of spirits. As we enter the uppermost level of our
mind called heaven, there is a radical change in how knowledge comes to us. In
that state our will is in the inmost and our understanding is on the outside of
it. Scientific knowledge or truth streams into consciousness from the spiritual
Sun, which first enters the will with its spiritual heat or love, and then
exits into the understanding with its spiritual light or truth. This inward
source of scientific knowledge is blocked to consciousness while we are
attached to the physical body.
You
can see therefore that the most ancient peoples on this earth did not need an
education and a scientific institution to know the properties and laws of
natural events. Whatever scientific facts they wanted to know came to them from
those in the heavens with whom they were in communication.
An
important component of their knowledge was called the Science of
Correspondences. This involved understanding the rational hierarchy of discrete
degrees into which the two worlds were created, and by which they are
maintained in synchronous action. The spiritual world is the source of all
causes while the natural world is the theater of their effects. Every event or
quality in the natural world is an effect of some prior corresponding spiritual
event or quality, the two being linked as effect and cause. Neither world can
survive without the other for they are locked into synchronous correspondence
by pre-established Laws of Divine Providence. A world of causes (spiritual
world) cannot exist without a world of effects (natural world), and vice versa
of course. Further, all events in the spiritual world are from the same source
which is the spiritual Sun. It is the source of all causes in the spiritual
world, and therefore of all effects in the natural world. Hence all spiritual
and natural phenomena are produced by these laws of correspondences by the
spiritual Sun.
[3] 'It would be too tedious to explain how creation
progressed from its first beginning. But while I was in a state of
enlightenment I perceived that by means of the light and heat from the sun of
your world, one after another spiritual atmospheres were created, which are in
themselves substantial. Because there are three of them, and they therefore
have three degrees, three heavens were made, one for angels in the highest
degree of love and wisdom, one for angels in the second degree, and a third for
angels in the lowest degree. But because this spiritual universe could not come
into being without a natural universe, in which the spiritual one might produce
its effects and perform its services, at the same time the sun which is the
source of all natural things was created; and through this in the same way, by
means of light and heat, three atmospheres were created to surround the first
three, like a shell round a kernel or bark round wood; and it was finally
through these that the globe with its lands and seas was created from the earth
consisting of soil, stones and minerals, to be the home of men, animals, fish,
trees, shrubs and plants. (TCR 76).
The
spiritual Sun is uncreate, which means that it was not created but always
existed. All things that exist were created by means of the uncreate infinite
substances in the spiritual Sun. Its heat and its light are the foundation
substances of all created things. This spiritual heat is nothing else then
Divine Love, and this spiritual light is nothing else than Divine Truth. To
accept this idea you will need to start thinking about love and truth as
substances, and of the will and the understanding as organic receptor organs of
these spiritual substances.
An
analogy might be to compare the Science of Correspondences to the modern day
Human Genome Project, which, upon completion, will yield a database of the
identify of all the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA. The Science of
Correspondences allowed the people of these ancient civilizations to recognize
what spiritual phenomenon was the cause of each natural phenomenon that was detected
by their physical senses. In other words, they possessed dual sensuous
consciousness, at once natural and spiritual. Since natural phenomena are
corresponding effects produced by spiritual causes, dual consciousness
empowered them to sustain a temporary environment of paradise on earth. Our
inability today of living in a paradisal peace is due to the loss of the
science of correspondences so that we sometimes see truth as falsity and
falsity as truth; also, we see good as evil and evil as good. As a result of
this mixed up perception we create an inferno instead of a paradise.
These
ancients may be called celestial minds because the upper portion of their mind
was opened, activated, and fully conscious. This gave them a sensuous celestial
consciousness in addition to sensuous natural consciousness. Their rationality
and science was not based on separated physical observations of correlated
effects, such as is the case with today’s materialistic science. Their
science was a True Science. It was a theistic science because it was true to
their empirical observations of both worlds, not merely the natural world. They
could thus observe that the spiritual world had a spiritual Sun while the
natural world had a natural sun. One Sun was alive, the other dead. They could empirically observe that the
natural world was dead, and that the life of plants, animals, and humans was
not at all in the natural world, but in the spiritual world. The physical
bodies on earth were merely receptor organs of life streaming forth from the
rays of the spiritual Sun. These rays enter our spirit-body in the world of
spirits and thereby descend from the upper to the lower portions where we
become conscious of their corresponding effects. The corresponding effects
consist of a conscious awareness of spiritual light in the form of natural
correspondences or “topics.”. All natural topics in our awareness
all day long are produced by means of such influx and its correspondences. Our
thinking and willing operations would cease instantly without this continuous
influx streaming in from the moment of birth to eternal immortality.
The most
ancient peoples on earth could comprehend from inner rational enlightenment
that the stream of light and heat streaming out of the spiritual Sun was
composed of living uncreate substances identified as love and truth in infinite
quantities and varieties. Plants and animals were created in an outward
physical form, built from within a discrete degree, upon a framework of rational
truth called Divine Wisdom (or Truth). You can see therefore that uncreate
substances of the spiritual Sun form the inmost discrete framework of created
physical organs and objects. Physical organic forms like plants and animals,
are capable of receiving life in various degrees. The chemical and geological
levels receive life in the lowest degree. Then the plants, which have an
organic form that is superior to rocks or liquids. Then animals, at various
levels of receptivity in accordance with their organic forms. And at last,
human beings whose form is an image of God, can receive life in the highest
degreed called angelic or celestial.
The most
ancient celestial civilizations on this earth were able to comprehend that the
human mind was the most perfect creation and the purpose for which all creation
existed. They did not feel the need or motivation to use their knowledge of
True Science to create an industrialized society such as later civilizations
have produced. They were wisely content in a peaceful unhurried environment in
which they could mature as young adults and then make the joyful transition to
heaven. They did not experience death as agony or fear, but as a pleasant
transition into a celestial environment that did not possess the heaviness and
fixedness of a material natural world. Instead, their external environment in
heaven was now a spiritual construction, instantaneously produced, living and
changing constantly, reflecting the inner life of feelings and thoughts of the
inhabitants there. There was no need in heaven to gather stones for their
dwelling places and cut down trees, and nail them together. Their magnificent
palaces sprang up instantaneously under the laws of correspondences, and the
amazing objects within, the rich garments, the delicious foods, the incredible
art work, the striking architecture of gardens and lakes – everything
sprang up instantaneously as constructions of the mind by the power of
correspondences.
Swedenborg
was able to visit with these earliest inhabitants of our planet when he visited
the heavens where they now live. He was amazed at the rationality and
intelligence they have. Their celestial consciousness gives them a
comprehension of reality that is impossible to fathom in our natural mind. They
are full of innocence, in mutual love, ready to share what they have, and they
live in conjugial love, one husband and his wife, the two being soul mates,
yea, united into one soul so that from two they became one. Despite their age
being thousands of years, the appearance of their spiritual body was that of
the flower of adolescence. When you see a couple walking at a distance the two
actually appear as one angel. They were amazed and saddened to hear from
Swedenborg that the people on earth have strayed so much from their path that
all knowledge of correspondences is lost, and that almost no one lives in
conjugial love. They were unwilling to hear details about the scortatory and
adulterous loves that permeate the race now, as it was too shocking to their
innocence.
What
happened in the intervening thousands of years since they had departed earth?
Historically it is known as “the Fall.” This refers to the decline
in innocence, rationality, and knowledge of correspondences, sad events that
were brought about by a gradual and cumulative turning away from rational
spirituality and True Science. At first only a few people entered upon this
nefarious course. They were isolated on earth, kept away from the inhabitations
of the others. When these people entered the world of spirits at their death,
they had to be kept separate from the heavenly inhabitations to prevent them
from causing disturbances in the peaceful and Divinely obedient life that was
part of being in heaven. The places they were kept in was called the hells.
With the course of the generations entering the world of spirits, more and more
people entered the hells as well as the heavens. There thus evolved two sets of
populations in the spiritual world, celestial and infernal. Those still on
earth were now born in an entirely new condition. First, they had no direct
sensuous access to the spiritual world. The only information they were able to
glean from the dual universe was that which came in through the physical
senses. They were now totally ignorant that they were immortal, that there was
an afterlife, a heaven, and a hell. They had become merely natural minds, thus
similar to animals. This is called the Fall of the human race.
As a
result God introduced a new phenomenon in the evolution of the human race
– from sensuous consciousness of Him to rational consciousness. It was
the beginning of rational spirituality in the human race. Henceforth God would
make scientific revelations about Himself, heaven, and hell through the mind of
chosen individuals whom He would put into a state of trance and produce visions
of the spiritual world that they could then describe and record in writings.
These prophetical writings were collected together into a set known as Sacred
Scriptures or the Word of God. Now all the generations were able to read from a
physical book what their dual reality was like. This was the beginning of a new
rationality of the human race. The old spirituality was based on direct
sensuous consciousness of the dual universe. With their outer physical sensory
organs they were able to know the natural order, and with their inner spiritual
sensory organs they were able to know the spiritual order. When this dual
sensuous consciousness ceased with the Fall of the race, knowledge of the
spiritual world and the afterlife was lost. The human race on earth had become
natural. This was reflected by the evolution of a new brain – the
split-brain race.
The early
civilizations on this earth were composed of celestial people, as just discussed.
Their mind was unified so that whatever was in their will, externalized in
their understanding, and ultimated in their physical actions. They were not
capable of thinking one thing and saying another, nor of any deceit or
disinformation. This unity of the mind was reflected by their possessing a
single brain. After the Fall, the mind of the people on this earth was divided.
The unity was broken up by God who provided a new method for the human race to
know Him and the journey of joyous immortality in heaven, which was the purpose
God created the dual universe. This new method was called regeneration of the
mind. Now the will and the understanding were no longer united as they were in
the celestial people. Now people were born with a will filled with tendencies
and loves that were opposite to those of the celestial people. The
understanding however was like a blank slate. Nothing from the spiritual world
could enter the consciousness of the mind, and so it was born totally dark,
turned off. This fundamental mental change was reflected by the action of
correspondences as the brain splitting into two parts, the left brain for the
understanding, the right brain for the will.
As the
infants of this new split-brain race grew and became socialized, their understanding
was gradually filled with both falsities and truths. Falsities are opposites
and denials of truths, while truths are the revelations from Sacred Scriptures.
These revelations were summarized in every society and ethnic group in
accordance with their specific conditions of life and culture. Thus arose
numerous religions that taught doctrine to the children and the adults. These
were called Doctrines of Life and they were acknowledged as Divine Commandments
to be followed now in order to enjoy a blissful eternity in the afterlife.
By
inheritance the will is filled with natural motives for acquiring knowledges.
When we acquire information about spiritual topics our will responds to the
content, testing it whether it agrees with its dominant loves. If the spiritual
information contradicts what the will wants, the information is rejected. But
if the information is compatible with the dominant loves, it is adopted and
expanded in scope and importance. By this method we develop a unified mind that
is mixed with evils, goods, falsities, and truths. This is not a stable
situation since evil fights with good in the will, and falsities fight truths
in the understanding. God participates in the tremendous tug of war struggle in
our daily affairs as we are pulled and pushed by these two opposing forces. If
God were to leave people to themselves, the outcome is predetermined. Inherited
evil in the will gradually and inexorably banishes all good from itself, and
surrounds itself with falsities manufactured by the understanding, so that the
two can make what’s called an “infernal marriage,” which is a
marriage from hell, taking the people to hell in the afterlife. The
inevitability of this awful outcome meant that the human race was doomed and creation
could not survive.
God then
had to assume the role of a Divine Savior. He had to intervene in the mental
operations of every split-brain individual by a supernatural intervention. God
had to break into the natural consciousness of human beings on earth by a
series of steps which took many millennia and centuries to accomplish. The
Writings describe three fundamental steps in this Divine intervention process.
They can be understood in relation to the Word of God or Sacred Scripture. The
first phase of intervention to raise human consciousness covers the period of
the Old Testament civilizations. Human consciousness is raised by means of
Divine Truth. We can receive Divine truths from revelation in Sacred Scripture.
The Old Testament was written through the minds of dozens of authors over
several centuries. In other words, Divine truths had to descend and externalize
in form so that they may be suitable to the genius of the people of those
civilizations. Divine truths are perfectly rational because they originate from
God’s Divine Rational mind. It is by this mind that God creates the dual
universe and manages it. Divine Truth is the acting arm of Divine Love. Love by
itself cannot act, but it can through truth. Truth is therefore the outside
form of love or good. Everything that was created was created by love through
truth. Therefore every created thing or quality contains love and truth at its
essence. And whether you say love or you say good, it is the same. And whether
you say truth or wisdom, it is the same.
By reading,
studying, and reflecting upon Divine truths, our consciousness is raised. This
is how our mind has evolved from creation. We become enlightened from knowing
that there are two worlds, that the two are connected, that God rules all the
details, that we are immortal, that our blissful eternity in heaven or our
miserable fate in hell will be determined by the choices we make in accordance
with the Divine truths in our understanding. Enlightenment brings us to the
edge of salvation. Once again God has placed the human race on this planet into
a position of freedom to choose between evils and goods, and between falsities
and truths. It is called the edge of salvation because we are first given the
rational understanding of our real condition. We can then actualize that
salvation by beginning the mother of all battles – which is our struggle
at character reformation by means of temptations – first natural, then
spiritual, and a t last celestial. The Divine truths in our enlightened
understanding are temporary visions of reality as it is truly. We see God
rationally. We can be filled with rational loves by acknowledging Him as a
Divine Human Person, and loving Him by obeying His Commandments. He can then
intervene in further ways that He could not before. The reason He could not
help us before in this new way is that we were not sufficiently prepared so
that we were unwilling to be helped in this way. Had God insisted on helping us
in this way before our readiness being complete, we would have lost our spiritual
freedom to choose heaven or hell. And without this choice, we cannot be made
human and happy to eternity.
God
supervises every detail of our character reformation or regeneration, or else
it would fail. The extent to which He can intervene in our conscious
understanding is limited by our willingness to learn deeper rational truths
than what we start out with. We cannot rest in the spiritual growth process. We
must progress continually, or retrogress. Our spirituality must become more and
more rational in order to become more and more celestial. Celestial
spirituality is the highest form of rational spirituality that human beings can
attain. We begin our rational development with a natural understanding of
spiritual truths (or Divine truths). We read Sacred Scripture and are
instructed in religious doctrine. This initial phase is a natural understanding
of spiritual truths. This is the Old Testament phase of cultural evolution. We
read about who is God and what God wants from us and why. All our thoughts and
feelings in this regard are natural-rational. In other words we think of God
naturally, as a Divine King who wants us to follow His Commandments and to
worship and to give Him glory. We think of heaven as a place of reward for our
good deeds, and for our origin of birth and the inherited blood we carry. We
think of hell as a place of eternal punishment for sins and misdeeds. We think
of these things in a natural way.
For
instance we think of heaven as something that will be created on this earth, or
some other planet, after the earth is first destroyed. Or we think of hell as
prison where we are tortured and held against our will. We think of angels as a
separately created race to serve God who wants to be praised and gloried all
day long and all night. And other such characteristics that natural kings would
have and natural societies on earth.
The Old
Testament phase brings the mind to a higher level than the natural level ever
could attain by itself. The idea that there are two worlds, natural and spiritual,
is a degree of rationality that the people of the Old Testament could not yet
attain. Those who acknowledged the Old Testament as Divine Truth were raised
above the level of others who had fallen into natural forms of religion called
cults and myths. For example the ancient Greeks, had a culture that transmitted
remnants of truths left over from the celestial civilizations. These remnants
were no longer genuine but filled with falsities. For instance, instead of one
God they had multiple gods. They were locked into this myth, believing it to be
true. As a result they were not able to develop their rational spirituality
having met a dead end in their religious myths. But when the Old Testament was
completed, people were able, if they were willing, to receive rational and
scientific facts about God and the spiritual world, thereby elevating their
mind from primitive superstitions to a rational description of God, who He was,
what He wanted, and what methods we were to use in our regeneration. By adopting
these truths, our spirituality becomes rational, that is, in accordance with
true reality as revealed by God.
But this
level of rational spirituality is but an intermediate step. It is not genuine
rational spirituality but a lower from of it created to allow us to progress
further. For instance, the rational mind rebels against mystery and obscurity.
It desires to attain a scientific understanding of all things, including God
and heaven. This rational is encouraged or empowered by God to begin to see
inconsistencies in Sacred Scripture. For instance, on the one had we are told
that God is perfection itself, omnipotent, and loving. On the other hand we are
told that God is demanding, punishing, and even retaliates out of anger when
people sin or break His Commandments. How can the two facts be reconciled? This
creates a strain in the rational mind. Some people respond to this mental
strain by beginning to doubt that Sacred Scripture is really Divine, and
eventually turn themselves away from the Word, and begin to think with thoughts
that deny God, heaven, and hell.
Others
respond to the inconsistencies by turning the rational mind away from them, and
calling them mysteries of God that the human mind can’t quite comprehend.
Or else, it is said that these mysteries will be understood in the afterlife.
In this way, rational spirituality declines. New doctrines are introduced that
give a false interpretation of Sacred Scripture. Heresies and insanities
abound, making it difficult for those in them to turn back, hence to regenerate
their character. More and more people come into the afterlife with an
unregenerate character. They are unwilling to receive the truths they are given
and taught, and sink down into the hells of their mind from where they are
stubbornly unwilling to return.
It is was
necessary therefore for God to provide new revelations in order to raise the
rational spirituality of the race. Spiritual evolution must progress in
successive steps. When we are regenerating today, you and me, we go through the
same steps that history went through because individual biography recapitulates
racial history. When the Old Testament phase of evolution was completed in the
human race on this earth, the New Testament phase was initiated by the Incarnation
events, and subsequently by the writings that are collected as the New
Testament. The Divine truths are now cast in a higher version of rationality
than ever before. The Old Testament mentality of a natural God gives way to a
new mentality of a spiritual God. Now for the first time the human race is
capable of thinking about a heaven and a hell that is not out there on the
planet, but in here in the mind. This is a discrete and fundamental leap in
rationality. The human race could not have received this Divine Truth prior to
the Incarnation. The Incarnation was a physical intervention in the natural
world. This has never happened before. In Old Testament days God appeared as an
Angel, as Burning Bush, as a Thunderous Living Voice, as a sacred place with
mighty powers like the Ark, or as the invisible force of the universe. These
methods of appearance, or Epiphany, were indirect and distant. Where was God in
the burning bush? Where was God in the Ark or Temple? The mind could not form a
rational description of God that was actual and true.
But with
the Incarnation, the sensuous-rational mind had physical proof of God’s
existence. He was now a historical figure, born a citizen of a country, walking
about making miracles and teaching followers, then dying, resurrecting, and
ascending to heaven again, where He came from. Now He was in this world; now He
is in the spiritual world. This is rational proof of the dual universe. Later
generations who did not see Him nevertheless are able just as well to rationally
confirm His existence by acknowledging the events of the New Testament as true.
This acknowledgment raises our rationality to a new high. Now we are able to
think about spiritual topics in a spiritual way, not merely natural way.
For
instance, heaven is not a place but a state of mind. Hell is not a prison but
an environment created by the mentality of the people who are there. God is not
like a natural king who punished His subjects when he gets angry. God never
gets angry since He is pure love, yet the people who turn against Him become
insane and now begin to see Him as the opposite of what He is. This is why God
talks and appears in the Old Testament as an earthly king, not because He is
that way, but because the Old Testament mentality sees Him that way. He permits
this distortion of Him for the sake of establishing a basis for a higher
spiritual mentality. When we receive the New Testament mentality, and
acknowledge it, and desire to live by it, we ascend to a new level of
enlightenment far above what was possible before.
For
instance, our thoughts and loves become more rational. When we think of sin, we
think of intention, not merely the overt deed. Breaking the marriage vows is
called adultery in Sacred Scripture. In the higher phase of rational spirituality
we can see that if we fantasize adultery, enjoy it, consider it permissible
because it is only in the mind, we are committing a sin just as much as when we
carry it out in deed. This is a higher level of consciousness since it elevates
the significance of mental events to be equal in importance, or more important,
then outward actions. This is more rational because outward actions are nothing
but the automatic expression of inward thoughts and feelings or intentions. We
may hide or inhibit our outward actions to avoid being punished by norms and
laws, but we try to do them secretly if we think we can get away with them.
Thus our character remains inwardly such as it is, and we are not regenerated.
Now with the New Testament mentality we can see more rationally that heaven
cannot be given to us by God as a reward, or else God would, since He is pure
love. But He cannot. God can bring us to heaven only if we have heaven in our
mind, that is, only if our thoughts and feelings are true and good. Thoughts
and feelings must be changed by our struggle to regenerate or else they remain
such as they were. We can also in this new rational spirituality that the human
race is united in God’s eyes and that entering heaven has nothing to do
with the blood of our ancestors or with our standing in society. God is
personal, in addition to being universal.
But this
new rational spirituality is itself still in an intermediary stage as shown by
the fact that it contains many obscurities that are turned into mysteries. For
instance, how does our rational mind explain the Incarnation? If God is
omnipresent, how can He now be this Divine Child, or that Adult Man who died on
the Cross and was Resurrected? And how can God die? The rational mind of the
civilizations of the New Testament came up with various explanations based on
the natural understanding, rather than based on spiritual understanding. One of
these was the idea that there were not one, but two Divine Persons. One was
called the Father, the other the Son. Father God and Son God were in heaven
when the Son God decided to descend and Incarnate so that He might become a
Holy Sacrifice that would placate the Father God and be right again with the
human race, so long as the people accept the idea that their sins are forgiven
by Father God solely on account of the noble and Divine Sacrifice of the Sun
God who Incarnated. And after the Sacrifice, the Son God returned to heaven to
be with Father God again. This explanation fails to satisfy the rational mind.
All sorts
of inconsistencies and irrationalities are detected in the story. First and
foremost, how can there be two Divine Persons “each of whom is God”
(according to the Christian Creed). Realizing this logical impossibility, the
intellectuals of the New Testament Mentality again came up with various
explanations. One is that this one of those mysteries, an answer to which we
shall only know in heaven. Another idea was the that the Son God is Divine but
He is not as high as the Father God whose role is Creation, while the Son
God’s role is Redemption. This idea led to injurious heresies, one called
the Arian heresy, which said that the Son God was the Messiah, and so a lesser
god than the Father God since the Son was born human.
None of
these explanations satisfy the rational mind, and once again the human race was
poised to slide back in consciousness and away from Divine Truth, the only
reality and science there is. The slide backwards was so intense and prolonged
that 20 centuries after the Incarnation and the writing of the New Testament,
our public schools teach materialistic science and are even forbidden by law to
teach the true role of God in every natural phenomenon. The consequences of a
backsliding consciousness were devastating and horrible. The human race on
earth turned spiritually insane since the start of these irrational
explanations of reality. Materialistic science and secular humanism became the
mentality that captured the governance of society.
The new
rules that were formed for human interactions were inhuman and beastly, so that
nations turned against nations, waging war with each other and bringing much
suffering. Similarly, neighbor turned against neighbor as they became
competitors to each other in business, sex partners, politics, sports, traffic,
and humor. Hostility became normal and accepted. Physical, mental, and economic
abuse became commonplace. Entertainment and art became brutal and obscene.
People stood in long lines to get to watch a movie that portrayed violence,
adultery, murder, deception, indecency, pornography, blasphemy – and the
more of these things were portrayed, the more people were willing to pay to see
it. The majority of marriages ended in divorce after much suffering, and it
became normal for children to grow up in single parent homes.
Individual
lives and lifestyles reflected the spiritual insanity within Fallen
materialistic humanity. The consciousness of a spiritual link to heaven died
out. As a result the mechanism was turned off by which goods can be received
from God through influx into the spiritual mind. Prior to materialism, the
human mind operated with a consciousness of heaven so that influx into the
spiritual mind may be effective and could descend into the natural mind where
the individual experienced enlightenment. With this enlightenment in the
understanding, God’s influx of good could enter the will. The Divine good
is within truth just as heat is within sunlight. By retaining a consciousness
of Divine Truth in our understanding, we are able to receive Divine good in the
will. This good is what we need to live the heavenly life. This good is the
good of character and is given in endless variety – the capacity to love,
the desire to conjoin, the motivation to persevere, the love of truth, the
attraction to innocence and purity, the capacity to learn, the strengths and
virtues of character – these are the goods we receive from God that make
us genuine human beings in the image of the Divine Human Person.
Without
consciousness of God, or dualism, this venue of reception for goods is
interrupted. If we are not open to receiving these heavenly goods, there is
only one other alternative available – the reception of evils. There is
no in between, only this absolute duality from creation. No other possibility
exists. Every single thing on this earth and in the spiritual world is either
from heaven or from hell. No other possibility has been created. Therefore
every single thought or emotion we have is either from heaven or from hell.
Either heaven or hell is the source of every particle and content of the mind.
Friend, if you learn to keep in mind this one universal absolute fact, you will
be saved for eternity in heaven, and in the meantime, you will live a joyous
life here on earth.
The
reception of evil in our character is obvious. We are mixed bags of a fallen
humanity. We live a daily life of mental pollution. Inwardly we rage against
everyone. To our loved ones, we are abusive with various intensities, some
brutal and cruel. Our marriages end in divorce. We quarrel with one another. We
overeat, under-exercise. We make many mistakes. We are forgetful. We are
disobedient and selfish, harmful and arrogant. At the same time can show
loyalty, patriotism, friendship, productivity, inventiveness, industriousness,
and many more. We are thus mixed minds with a split-brain without the power to
purify ourselves. What happens to mixed minds with split-brains? Some people
theorize that the good they have done and possess in their character will
outweigh the bad, and a just and merciful God will not keep them from heaven.
This is a
balance theory of Divine equity in judgment. But it is a fantasy. The truth, as
revealed by God in True Science, is that evil and good cannot mix for evil
destroys good by corrupting it and changing into evil. Evil is nothing else
than good changed in that way. The mixed character theory cannot save you for
the evil you actually love will destroy the good you think you love. You will
then realize that the good you thought you loved, you actually hate. It was
just a kind of a put on. God allows this mixed mind operation for the sake of
the individual’s reformation and regeneration, for without allowing mixed
minds on earth, no one could be regenerated and saved for heaven. A way had to
be provided for regenerating the mixed mind of the split-brain race on earth.
God had
to intervene again, for the third time, and now at last He was able to give the
final revelations of the Threefold Word. This had been God’s plan since
the beginning – to give three collections of revelations – the Old
Testament, the New Testament, the Writings -- to allow the new split-brain
humans to be regenerated and to be made whole again, and single brained, like
the celestial people. This is the meaning of the expression the
“Threefold Word.” The re-elevation of the human race to celestial
status was planned in three steps of rational spirituality, in accordance with
the discrete laws of correspondences revealed in the Writings. The first phase
was the collection of scientific revelations called the “Old
Testament” given in Hebrew, which raised the human mind from
pre-scientific thinking -- idol worship, superstition, and barbarism -- to the
first step of a scientific civilization, a first step in rational spirituality.
It established the rational idea that the universe is operated by a rational
Divine intelligence called Jehovah the Creator who is Omnipresent, Omniscient,
and Omnipotent. The idea of one God in relation to the universe raises the
mind’s consciousness from materialistic and sensuous darkness to rational
consciousness. When people think and feel from a perspective of monotheism,
they are operating rationally. This is obvious since all rationality comes from
Divine Truth in our understanding. God is the source of all rationality and
operates everything of the universe by means of rational rules of operation.
Knowing anything about God is therefore operating at a rational level. Denying
God is evidently thinking insanely and irrationally since in actuality God is
the source of all.
The
rational idea of God revealed through the Old Testament, eliminated the insane
and illogical theories that captivated the minds and lives of most people at
the time the Old Testament was given to the human race. This chief rational
idea of one God, became the source of other rational ideas, like the idea of
omniscience. Prior to this, people were captivated by the idea that they could
hide from God, or that they could play one god against another, or that God was
limited in power due to other godly-forces of Destiny. Another idea was that
since we are limited humans, we are always going to be mixed good and bad, but
that what matters is the balance – are we more good than bad. Under this
irrational idea many justifications have been found for not having to
regenerate the character. We can excuse some of the bad with the good, so that
we can keep that bad with us, maybe take it to heaven. Or even that the bad can
be regularly washed away by purification rituals. The result of all these
explanations was to create a culture with arrested spirituality. A second
Divine intervention became necessary. It was time to give humanity the second
portion of the Threefold Word.
The New
Testament got rational spirituality going again by eliminating these irrational
justifications of evil in the self, and placing a brand new focus on the
intentions, not the deeds. It was a higher more logical science. An analogy is
represented by the science of linguistics when considered over the span of my professional
career. Prior to the 1960s, linguistics was in the external behavioral phase,
not unlike ritual religion and superstition. Sentences were analyzed by
breaking them up into functional categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs. In this first phase of linguistic science, there was no consciousness
of what caused a sentence to be what it is. Linguists could only organize
sentences in terms of their surface visible structures like adjectives, nouns,
verbs. Then a paradigm shift took place, largely by means of the ideas of Noam
Chomsky at MIT who proposed that sentences are produced by inward rational
operations and that we need to investigate what they are. “Intentions of
the speaker” became a new scientific concept that led to great new strides
in linguistics. It also had a decisive influence on the course of psychology.
The New
Testament presented a new more advanced paradigm of science. It established
scientific dualism, which is the rational idea that God has created a dual
universe, one natural or physical, the other spiritual or mental. Furthermore,
there is a cause-effect relation between them, so that the spiritual moves the
natural, not the other way around. In other words, the mind moves the physical
body, not the other way around. Therefore when we commit an evil act that is
injurious to others, it is the evil
intention that is the cause of it. Similarly, when we commit a good act
of use to others, it is the good will or good intention that is the cause of
it. Finally, when we commit a good act of use to others, it may not have a
sincere motive, but a hypocritical one, and in that case the good act does not
count as good, but counts as evil. Similarly when we commit an evil act, but
then repent of it, the intention is changed and the evil is shunned and
avoided. The person is then no longer guilty of the former evil.
This type
of reasoning elevated the scientific consciousness of the civilizations that
were influenced by the New Testament. For example, people started thinking
about the causes of the visible things they see around them. In this way a
cause-effect science in general came to be established, razing civilization to
a new rationality.
This
rational approach could have worked in terms of furthering spiritual
development of the race had it not been for the many heresies and mystical
doctrines that obliterated the rational gains in the New Testament. Therefore
the Christian world was warned to expect a Second Coming of the Lord. This was
in everyone’s consciousness for many centuries. All sorts of new heresies
were invented as to how this is going to take place. Absolutely no knowledge of
it was available, only speculation. The Lord prevented any such knowledge from
becoming known. The human race could not receive this last portion of the
Divine Revelation without being harmed by it. When we are exposed to a Divine
truth prior to our ability to comprehend it, we turn the truth into its
opposite, thus harming ourselves. The Lord carefully hid this new knowledge of
the Second Coming until the 18the century when Emanuel Swedenborg began
publishing the Writings. These were completed when the last of about 30 volumes
was published by Swedenborg in 1772. In these volumes the full blown answer is
given about what is the Second Coming and how is it going to take place.
A redemption has also been accomplished by the Lord at
this day, because at this day is His Second Coming according to prophecy; by
which, having been an eye-witness thereof I have been made certain of the truth
of the foregoing arcana. (Coronis 21)
To-day the Second Coming of the Lord is taking place,
and a new church is to be established (TCR 115)
At last
the Lord has revealed Himself in His Divine Rational as a True Scientist. We
now have the answers to all the puzzles of mystery and heresy that plagued all
the prior civilizations since the celestial beginning of the race on earth. Now
it is permitted to go into these mysteries of ages in a rational way, so that
the rational mind can be fully and perfectly satisfied that there is nothing
that can puzzle us that has not been revealed. It is this method that the Lord
has chosen to conjoin Himself to the human race, and to permit the human race
to reciprocate by clinging to Him with our rational mind. The Second Coming marks
the new evolutionary era of celestial consciousness by means of the rational
spirituality of True Science.
This book
is about the journey every individual is embarked on, the journey to heaven or
hell. It is about how to avoid hell and end up in heaven by developing our
rational consciousness of Divine Truth.
Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether
there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were
like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from
other worlds. (Swedenborg, EU 1)
Yes,
because it meets all the standards of science, which is that a scientific
explanation must be rational, must fit in with what’s
already known, and must be verifiable by empirical observation and
capable of being disconfirmed by data gathered by others. Any explanation that
meets these criteria is a scientific explanation.
The
explanations in the Writings are rational. I have gone through the nearly 30
volumes and have been impressed and delighted at its extraordinary rationality
and consistency. There is a substantial literature on Swedenborg, as you can
expect, and it is generally recognized that he was an unusual genius with vast
knowledge of the sciences and the classics. The Writings have been admired for
their strict rationality, sometimes criticized for it by those who would prefer
seeing the expression of more fuzzy passion. The Writings are a model of
rationality for science, theology, and philosophy.
The
explanations in the Writings fit in with everything that’s been known and
understood in Western Christian literature, science, and history. The Writings
are a continuation of the Old and New Testaments, and complete the collection
of Divine revelations called the Threefold Word. The Writings analyze the major
theories of theology, philosophy, and science from Aristotle to
CONCERNING THE RESUSCITATION OF MAN FROM THE DEAD, AND
HIS ENTRANCE INTO ETERNAL LIFE
Being permitted to describe in connected order how man passes from the life of the body into the life of eternity, in order that the way in which he is resuscitated might be known, this has been shown me, not by hearing, but by actual experience. (AC 168)
I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the
bodily senses, thus almost into the state of dying persons, retaining however
my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking, and with
sufficient breathing for life, and finally with a tacit breathing, that I might
perceive and remember what happens to those who have died and are being
resuscitated. (AC 169)
Celestial angels were present who occupied the region
of the heart, so that as to the heart I seemed united with them, and so that at
length scarcely anything was left to me except thought, and the consequent
perception, and this for some hours. (AC 170)
The angels who sat at my head were perfectly silent,
merely communicating their thoughts by the face, so that I could perceive that
another face was as it were induced upon me; indeed two, because there were two
angels. When the angels perceive that their faces are received, they know that
the man is dead. (AC 173)
An aromatic odor was perceived, like that of an
embalmed corpse, for when the celestial angels are present, the cadaverous odor
is perceived as if it were aromatic, which when perceived by evil spirits
prevents their approach. (AC 175)
As soon as the internal parts of the body grow cold,
the vital substances are separated from the man, wherever they may be, even if
enclosed in a thousand labyrinthine interlacings, for such is the efficacy of
the Lord's mercy (which I had previously perceived as a living and mighty
attraction), that nothing vital can remain behind. (AC 179)
When the celestial angels are with a resuscitated
person, they do not leave him, for they love everyone; but when the soul is of
such a character that he can no longer be in the company of the celestial
angels, he is eager to depart from them; and when this takes place the
spiritual angels arrive, and give him the use of light, for previously he had
seen nothing, but had only thought.
(AC 182)
Afterwards there seems to be something gently unrolled
from the face, and perception is communicated to him, the angels being
especially cautious to prevent any idea coming from him but such as is of a
soft and tender nature, as of love; and it is now given him to know that he is
a spirit. (AC 185)
He then commences his life. This at first is happy and
glad, for he seems to himself to have come into eternal life, which is
represented by a bright white light that becomes of a beautiful golden tinge,
by which is signified his first life, to wit, that it is celestial as well as
spiritual. (AC 186)
One of
the most dramatic empirical demonstrations in the Writings is the proof that
the Old and New Testaments are written in the code of correspondences, the same
code that relates spiritual phenomena to natural phenomena generally. This is
most impressive because the dozens of authors of the Old and New Testaments
wrote independently over many centuries. Unbeknownst to them, what they wrote
down was in a code, the same code!!
Isn’t
this impressive? Most impressive? Does it not stand as a historical and scientific
proof of God’s existence and intervention in the minutest details of the
world and the mind?
Finally,
verification. Are the explanations and facts reported in the Writings
verifiable? Yes, they are, and they will be, by every individual approximately
36 hours after death. Swedenborg interviewed many “novitiate
spirits” who are the people who have just gone through resuscitation and
are beginning to figure out where they are. When told by the attending nurses
that they are now in the world of spirits, some are joyous, whether they knew
in advance, or are happily surprised. Others are disbelieving, making up other
explanations, for example, that they have been transported, they don’t
know how, to another place or island, and they need to find their way back
home. But soon everyone is compelled by the events to acknowledge that they are
now spirits in the afterlife of heaven and hell.
Some
scientists reading the above verifiability test would not be impressed, this I
know full well. They want verifiability now, not when they depart forever. But
here is the news straight from heaven: They are not going to get it. There is
no verifiability of the spiritual world while connected to the physical body.
The reasons for this are medical and will be explained in the book. Now the
only question left is this: Is a rational explanation disqualified from science
when it is not verifiable prior to death? Some scientists might say yes, but
some might say no. I’ve been a career scientist for forty years and am still
on the job, and my answer is No, the rational explanation is not disqualified
even though it is verifiable only at the death of each scientist.
The
Writings do not merely give us a grand theory of heaven and hell. Swedenborg
has been admired by many famous authors in the 19th century and some people
consider his writings as important works of literature and philosophy. This is
also true no doubt. But more than that, the Writings make it fit in with what’s
known in history and science, and with pragmatism and behaviorism. And, as I
mentioned, there is the demonstration of the code of correspondences in which
the Old and New Testaments were written in. This alone makes the Writings
completely unique in the history of ideas.
The human
mind has the capacity to operate at different levels. Lower levels of operation
are called “animal” while higher levels are called rational,
spiritual, and celestial. Each of the three discrete levels of the mind –
animal (corporeal, sensuous), rational, and spiritual-celestial – gives
us a different perspective and insight on life and reality. Our perspective of
reality is known as “consciousness” or “conscious awareness.”
Human beings have an innate striving to elevate their consciousness. This is a
genetic built in feature of every human mind. Consciousness is elevated when
our perspective on reality jumps to the next level of operation. The entire
course of human history has been marked by a sequence of civilizations that
rise in human consciousness, from animal, to rational, to spiritual, to
celestial. Individual development recapitulates historical evolution. Every
human being is created with the same human mind marked by a collection of unique
qualities. We are born into the animal level of consciousness. We develop our
mental capacities as we mature, rising as adults to the level of rational
consciousness. As we advance in maturity, our rational consciousness leaps to a
new level of thinking and feeling called celestial-rational consciousness or
rational spirituality.
The link
between animal consciousness and rational spirituality is the rational mind.
This spiritual organic form characterizes humans and distinguishes them from
animals. Animals have a natural mind similar to our natural mind, but only in
its lower portions. The upper portion of the human natural mind is far more
evolved than the highest portion of the minds of animals. This upper portion of
the human natural mind possesses an internal structure that is not formed from
the natural world but from the spiritual world. It is called the
natural-spiritual mind. We thus have access to two orders of information, one
natural, the other spiritual. It is our dual mind that allows this dual access.
Access to
spiritual information is only possible by knowing and understanding Divine
revelations. Divine revelations are given in Sacred Scripture by means of the
mind of individuals who have been prepared by God to fulfill this role. These
Divine revelations cannot be understood by means of thinking and feeling at the
natural level below the rational. By acknowledging and comprehending these
Divine revelations we are elevated in consciousness from the natural level to
the spiritual level. We begin with natural-rational thinking and feeling, then
we rise to spiritual-rational thinking and feeling when we take in the Divine
Truth into our understanding. The Divine Truth in our understanding is what
elevates our consciousness to the enlightened level. We then become aware of
two synchronous orders of reality, natural and spiritual. Natural-rational
thinking reflects the information from our physical senses. This order of
reality denies the existence of something that is not physical. Therefore when
it hears rumors of the spiritual world, it denies it, or else, reinterprets it
in natural terms. On the other hand, spiritual-rational thinking understands
and perceives the spiritual within the natural.
Rational
spirituality is a biological developmental process of closer access to God.
Studying it allows us to elevate our consciousness all the way to the top of
the human mind called “heaven.” This book provides information and
explanations on how we can avoid the bottom of our mind, called
“hell,” and rise to heaven. All the information and its
explanations, are obtained from the Writings of Swedenborg (approximately 30
volumes).
This is a
basic anatomical chart of the human mind. You can see that it has three
discrete levels – natural, rational, spiritual. Looking at the bottom
half, you can see from the arrows that information from the natural world is
captured by the sensory organs of the physical body and transmitted by
corresponding effects to the natural mind. The natural mind has three
sub-levels, to be shown later – corporeal, sensuous, and rational. The
sensuous information is transmitted upward to the rational mind, or more
accurately, the rational mind perceives the activity in the sensuous mind and
creates an abstract representation of it called natural-rational
correspondences.
Looking
at the upper half of the chart, you can see that information from the spiritual
world is captured by the spirit-body, located in the spiritual world. The
spirit-body houses the mind. Information entering the spiritual mind is called
celestial-rational correspondences and spiritual-rational correspondences.
These are ways of thinking about Divine Truth. Note that the rational mind is
pivotal and plays an intermediary role. It receives information from both the
natural world in the form of natural-rational correspondences, and it receives
information from the spiritual world in the form of spiritual-rational
correspondences. Our enlightenment occurs when these three types of rational correspondences
operate synchronously or simultaneously in our mind. This involves the
celestial-rational correspondences to resonate with the spiritual- rational
correspondences and the natural- rational correspondences all at once.
The
Threefold Word is the source of natural-rational, spiritual-rational, and
celestial-rational correspondences.
Without
knowing and comprehending this fundamental duality between the natural and the
spiritual-celestial, one cannot elevate one’s consciousness beyond the
natural-rational level of atheistic science (monism or physicalism).
One’s level of understanding, of thinking, and of feeling, remain at the
natural level. One is incapable of comprehending the reality of the spiritual
world, hence the reality of human beings. Despite this inability, God
intervenes in the minds of every individual and implants rational ideas that
the individual believes is from self. This illusion is necessary to maintain
the motivation for learning and survival while we are still in animal consciousness.
It also insures that society can survive, for it would not, if it were left to
the human natural mind to run it.
The
unconscious tutelage by the Divine, just discussed, ceases or changes in
operation in the afterlife, which starts immediately after the physical body
becomes a corpse. We begin our life in the spiritual world with a spirit-body,
the same we had all along “within” the physical body, which now
drops off, leaving the immortal spirit-body intact and free to live its new
life in the spiritual world. This new life is of two separate forms, heavenly
and hellish. It is necessary therefore to raise our consciousness above the
natural level so that we may be prepared to live a heavenly life to eternity.
If we do not, our thinking and feeling remains at the natural level of
operation. Upon awakening in the other life we will find that we are incapable
of living a heavenly existence. Instead, we sink into the hells of our mind
from which few are willing to return, where we lose any good and truth we once
may have had, and begin an endless progression of evil and falsity, insanity
and unimaginable misery. The stakes are therefore could not be higher –
eternal heavenly happiness and wisdom vs. eternal hellish misery and insanity.
Only if we rise above the natural level of thinking and feeling can our
consciousness comprehend the stark reality of heaven and hell, as it has been
revealed by God.
While the
outside portion of the rational mind is natural, the inside of it is spiritual.
This is the form and function of the human organic mind. It is created with an
outside rational portion that gets its information from the physical world.
Within this natural-rational mind
there is formed a spiritual-rational
mind that gets its information from the spiritual world through Divine
revelations. In other words, we are created and born into a dual existence,
natural and spiritual. This dual existence must be based in organic forms and
structures, or else it would be nothing. The organ of the natural mind and the
organ of the spiritual mind are both constructed physiologically out of
spiritual substances from the spiritual Sun, just like the organs of the
physical body are constructed physiologically out of physical substances from
the natural sun. When we comprehend this dual reality and assimilate it into
our normal thinking, we enjoy a new consciousness of reality that may be called
rational spirituality.
We can
better control our individual spiritual development by knowing how rational
spirituality has developed in the history of Western civilizations since
individual biography recapitulates racial evolution. The Old Testament
civilizations have elevated human consciousness above the animal level by
assimilating the Divine spiritual message given through Moses into their
everyday thinking and feeling. The natural-rational
mind is a discrete level above the natural-animal
mind because of the abstract idea of God which can be formed only by means of
rational thinking. Animals cannot have the idea of God since their cognitive
abilities are restricted to the physical order of the natural world. God is not
part of this physical order. God is absent from the physical detection systems
that have been created for the animal mind. It is not possible to discover
God’s presence physically or by concepts based on physical order. Such
concepts are called “materialistic” and “monist”
because they cannot incorporate the fundamental duality. God is an idea that
originates from the spiritual world, hence any human mind that assimilates this
idea into every day reality, is raised to a higher consciousness of reality, a
higher understanding, a higher operational level of thinking and feeling. Spiritual-rational
thoughts from revelation and spiritual-rational loves from influx, constitute
the content of operation of spiritual rationality.
These
spiritual-rational loves from influx enter the mind of every human being but
they cannot survive in the mind without spiritual-rational truths from
revelations. First we must acquire spiritual-rational truths from revelations,
then we can retain spiritual-rational loves from influx. In this way we become
angelic beings.
Following
the civilizations of the Moses revelations came the Christian civilizations of
the New Testament revelations. These elevated human consciousness to a new
level of thinking and feeling. The Moses revelations were cast in a local,
sectarian frame that was hostile to strangers. The New Testament revelations
were cast in a universal, personalized frame that was inclusive of the entire
human race. The intellectual justification of the New Testament in the form of
Pauline doctrine, dissolved the earlier sectarian forms of spirituality, beginning
a new life of universality and Divine personalism. God is not only Divine but
Human. It is impossible to have a relationship of love with an infinite Divine
force. Divine love is essentially Human, as revealed and demonstrated in the
Incarnation. A giant leap forward in understanding reality takes place when the
infinite God is conceptualized as a Divine Human Person. This new idea of God
cannot be formed in the natural-rational mind, but only in the spiritual mind
within it. The spiritual mind is an organic form that responds to spiritual
ideas from the spiritual world. By assimilating this new spiritual idea of God
into our everyday thinking and feeling, we begin a new order of life immersed
in rational spirituality.
But there
is one more step to ascend. The intellectual justification that Paul forged out
of the New Testament revelations, were contaminated with ideas from lower
civilizations. Similarly, when individuals enter this phase of their spiritual
development, their consciousness will remain somewhat general rather than
particular, and may thus retain elements that are not genuine, leading to false
ideas, even heresies that become a stumbling block to further spiritual
development. Our understanding of reality takes its final step of escalation
when we particularize the Divine Human Person by knowing how and where He
operates in our mind.
This
ultimate level of spiritual rationality has been provided for by means of new
scientific revelations given through the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772),
a renowned and respected scientist in Sweden. The Divine Human Person wants a
reciprocal relationship with each individual in order to become a conscious
co-participant in our thinking and feeling. In order to achieve this
possibility, God had make new scientific revelations never before given. These
new revelations are given in the form of True Science. This makes sense since
materialistic science is the ultimate achievement of the natural-rational mind.
With the beginning of the modern mind in the 17th and 18th
century, the rational understanding of civilization rose to its most abstract
level so that it became capable of incorporating the new scientific revelations
of God’s immediate involvement and co-participation in our thinking and
willing.
Christian
spirituality has undergone three phases of evolution – spiritual-natural,
spiritual-rational, and celestial-rational. These three phases of spiritual
rationality are embedded in the Christian view of the Old Testament, the New
Testament, and the Third Testament (or Writings of Swedenborg). The revelations
of the Writings thus complete the creation of the human race. Now God has at
last revealed all the details of His Rational Mind by which He creates and
manages every detail of the universe. All the mysteries of Christian
spirituality that have been invented by the human intellect can now be
enlightened by the objective and clear facts of theistic science. Mysticism and
spirituality have been connected in the earlier phases of the race’s
spiritual development. Attempts have been made to connect materialistic science
and mystical religion. This attempt was unable to elevate consciousness into
its next higher level. Other attempts involve connecting Eastern philosophies
with Christian mysticism. This too yields no elevation. What is fully effective
however, is connecting science with scientific revelations. This transforms
atheistic science into True Science, theistic science, the science of God.
The mind
is elevated in consciousness by means of Divine revelations. The human mind is
created to operate in this way. These genuine spiritual ideas can be understood
rationally because all spiritual ideas are from God’s Rational Mind.
Christianity has received the scientific truth that God created the universe by
means of Truth. Those outside of the Christian faith, like Gandhi of India,
have also received this new scientific perspective and have incorporated it
into their own religion and culture, as demonstrated by the life of Mahatma
Gandhi who identified God with Truth. Since the universe is created out of
Divine Truth in its infinite variety, it is clear that only a rational
spirituality, that is, theistic science, can be the vehicle for forging our
individual spiritual development. The level of our thinking and feeling can be
raised to the celestial level by means of rational spirituality.
This book
presents the three phases of rational spirituality that every individual needs
to understand in order to elevate the consciousness to the angelic level. This
is the true human level of thinking and feeling. People of all religions and
philosophies can use this understanding to advance themselves in their
consciousness within their culture and lifestyle. Religious traditions and
practices are no barrier to consciousness raising by means of True Science. The
Writings of Swedenborg appear sectarian when viewed from the surface since all
Divine revelations reflect the culture and era of the revelator. But neither
Jews nor Christians have an automatic entry pass to heavenly life and
consciousness just because they acknowledge the Word of God as a Divine
revelation. They must extract from it principles and doctrines for life and
they must overcome the enormous resistance all people experience to the growth
of spiritual rationality in their mind.
To the
extent that these doctrines are applied to our daily thinking and feeling, they
become systematic and effective techniques of self-change. God regenerates
every individual through daily efforts of cooperation with Him. He provides us
with specific experiences and challenges every day that are tailored to every
unique individual in the form of temptations of conscience. God provides us
with a conscience and doctrines of revelation, God provides the daily
temptations, God provides the power for overcoming them, but we must provide
the free choices by which we deny ourselves to love evil and its falsities, and
compel ourselves to love good and its truths. The power is God’s but the
choice is ours. He participates in setting up that choice in our mind and
through the events in our environment. He gives us the power to think truth and
choose good moment by moment, day by day.
This
intimate and close cooperation and co-acting between God and every unique human
being, has been fully revealed by God through the Writings of Swedenborg. This
is the dawning of the age of True Science when all mystery is banished and
rational spirituality furnishes humankind with rational loves and rational
truths.
I am educated
with a Ph.D. (which I obtained in 1962) and am experienced in the behavioral
sciences. I am a successful, practicing, academic scientist, and you can
see my list of publications (www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leonpublish.html) and some of my current activities in the public eye as a
noted expert on aggressive driving issues--see a list of my media interviews
during the past few years (www.DrDriving.org/about ). I am well trained to make a scientific and professional
presentation on many subjects--see a list of articles and book chapters you can read online (www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leonarticles.html ). My purpose in the present article is to connect with
your mind long enough to describe a satisfying rational answer to the all
important questions of “Where am I going?” The answer is rational,
scientific, practical, useful, satisfying, pan-human, non-sectarian, good,
wise, loving, and perfect in all ways. This answer is not from me, which is why
I can use these superlative terms to describe it. It is the answer God gives in
a new Divine scientific revelation that has been made available to the human
race through the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).
Access to all
the books of the Writings and collateral works is available on the Web:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/abbrev.html
In summary, my
presentation tries to establish the following six points--see how many of them
you're interested in:
(1)
The mind and the spiritual world (afterlife, heaven, hell) are one and
the same, yet with a difference. They both have the same overlapping
three-layered levels of structure – natural, spiritual, and celestial.
These are in discrete degrees and relate to each other by the
pre-established Divine Laws of Correspondences revealed in the Writings.
(2)
Our thoughts and feelings are spiritual substances in action within
spiritual organs called the understanding and the will. They are not
"emergent" phenomena or non-entities in so called “pure” consciousness.
These substances stream out of the spiritual Sun, in the midst of which
the Lord can be seen by the inhabitants of the heavens. This infinite Divine
influx enters every created thing and forms its inmost framework.
(3)
The inner character we build up by the way we live is actually the spiritual
body in which we live forever in the afterlife. This spirit-body is not
material and temporary, but substantive and eternal. It is the body people have
in heaven or in hell.
(4)
Our condition or fate in the afterlife is completely determined by the
inner character we bring with us, which thus completely determines the level or
quality of our life in eternity (from varieties of the heavenly to
varieties of the hellish).
(5) If we take conscious, voluntary, and dedicated daily charge of our character reformation, to make it grow good and right, it is guaranteed to grow into a well formed and healthy character, that is, a well formed and healthy spirit-body, which then lives in a blessed and productive state of life forever called "heaven." Character reformation is by means of victories in temptations.
(6)
If we don't take conscious, voluntary, and dedicated charge of our character,
to make it grow good and right, it inevitably grows into a deformed and sick
character, that is, deformed spirit-body, which then lives in a
miserable state of life forever called "hell."
(7)
Character reformation, called “regeneration,” is a lifelong
struggle in preparation for heavenly life. It is the only condition we must
meet in order to enter heaven to eternity. Regeneration requires (a) rational
consciousness or understanding of the scientific revelations in the Threefold
Word; and (b) rearranging our thinking and willing in accordance with this
new understanding.
(8)
Our progression in regeneration goes through three levels of thinking and
willing – ritual, faith, and True Science. In the ritual phase,
our consciousness of God is natural, our salvation is sectarian, and our view
of the world is materialistic. In the faith phase, our consciousness of God
becomes personal and universalist, and our view of the world is dualist. In the
True Science phase, our consciousness of God takes a final step and becomes
particularistic and scientific.
(9)
Each of these three phases has three successive states, yielding nine zones
of rational spirituality, as represented in the “ennead matrix.”
The words that are underlined in these nine items refer to concepts that are repeatedly discussed in this book. Look our for them. They constitute the semantic skeleton you’ll need to build up in your mind to become spiritually enlightened. Here they are again:
(1) mind and the spiritual world; discrete degrees; Laws of Correspondences
(2)
substances in action within spiritual organs; spiritual Sun
(3)
inner character; spiritual body; heaven; hell
(4)
our fate in the afterlife
(5) character reformation; healthy spirit-body; temptations
(6)
deformed spirit-body
(7)
regeneration; rational consciousness; Threefold Word
(8)
ritual, faith, True Science
(9)
nine zones of rational spirituality; ennead matrix
If you're interested in one of these, you will be interested in all nine because they form a logical set. You can also see why I said that the subject of this book is important and vital, don't you agree? What can be more vital? You'll find my e-mail address at the beginning and end of the text. But before you write me, I ask that you read on some more, so you can react to what I say in a deeper sense than your immediate reaction to the introductory remarks. Thanks.
1. The
Dawning Age of True Science
This surpasses all the revelations that have hitherto been made from the creation of the world. (Swedenborg, INV 44)
This book is about the most important and vital question
every one needs to answer in a rational way. It's the
question of “Where am
I going?” -- in the sense of
my life, my future, my death, my afterlife, my immortality, my heaven or hell,
my God. These are endless versions of saying simply: “Where am I
going?” Why is this question so important and vital to you, to me, to
every human being? After all, this is some philosophical stuff, isn't?
Actually, this subject matter is not philosophical, not evangelical, not
spiritistic, or cultist. Neither is it entertainment, fiction, poetry, or
fantasy. This subject is about what is reality, or what is
“my” actuality. So it is practical and scientific.
People acquire the biased thinking that science is not about God, heaven and
hell, and other supernatural things. This bias belongs to materialist science
which denies that the study of the natural world has anything to do with God or
supernatural things. But this is obviously a mistaken view if God intervenes in
natural phenomena, and if our mind is immortal so that heaven and hell are a
continuation of our temporary life of experience and physical phenomena on
earth. The natural and the spiritual are part of one reality or one dual
universe, and to deny this is irrational and harmful to our discovery and
understanding of reality. Hence also our ability to cope and live effective
lives.
I'm going to provide you with a presentation that contains a rational description of an unbiased science that is capable of investigating and understanding the cause-effect relation that exists between natural phenomena and spiritual phenomena. These two are interrelated like cause and effect. Of course, to be acceptable in a rational way, the presentation cannot rely on persuasiveness or dogmatism, or technicalism, these being barriers to the immediate apprehension of truth. My presentation will stick to the rational and empirical, so that the only requirement you have as a reader is to keep going until the end. At that point, expect to have become an enlightened human being -- to some degree. At least in vision or understanding. To actually become the truth that we understand, it is necessary that we live accordingly. The moment we start living according to the truth, as we understand it, we become spiritually enlightened. This is because the inner light of understanding that we call spiritual enlightenment, flows in from within into our spiritual mind at the very instant we execute an act in accordance with and for the sake of the truth that we know. This decision or act according to truth as rationally understood, is called “doing good works.” Heavenly good flows into every good work and gives spiritual enlightenment. And along with spiritual enlightenment comes wisdom, love, celestial bliss, full confidence, and the power and might of angels.
Our modernistic society and permissive social life provide a
laissez faire agnosticism and a relativistic moral norm for every individual to
endorse and internalize. We are content to remain in a lukewarm attitude
towards heaven and hell. A common point of view is to say: “Well, maybe
there is a God, maybe there isn’t. Why do I have to worry about the
afterlife now -- whether there is one or there isn’t one. When I die, I
get to find out anyway. If there is nothing, that’s it, there is nothing.
If there is something, a heaven or a hell or whatever, I’ll see it.
That’s all there is to it. Who is there who has ever come back to tell
us? Let’s just see. For now, we have all of this. Let’s enjoy it.
It won’t last forever.”
What is this attitude but pure foolishness and reckless
self-destructiveness? Here is why.
The only reason such a non-argument is kept in the mind is
that internally, in one’s private cognitive chamber, one believes nothing
about the supernatural and one is ignorant of everything spiritual. Just
consider what we would do if we were given notice that we must vacate our home,
our city, and be taken to a distant island where we will have to survive on our
own. What would we do in the few days we are given as warning? We would prepare
for our impending departure. We would try to find out information about the
destination and bring with us whatever we might need to survive—clothes, money,
utensils, a gun, rope, a fishing rod and tackle, a dictionary of the language
used on that island, a map, etc. Do you see what I’m trying to point out?
The only people who would not do preparations are the people who do not believe
that they will be transported to that island in a few days. Similarly with the
afterlife and its condition of life called heaven or hell to eternity. You can
be lukewarm about it if you do not actually believe that you are being taken
there in just a few years, or unpredictably sooner.
Such disbelief is the most costly mistake one can ever make.
For if you are wrong and there is a heaven and a hell, and you arrive in the
afterlife unprepared for heaven, your lot will be far more miserable than you
can imagine now in your worst fears, and this state of misery is to last with
you forever! Is it possible to make a more costly or injurious mistake?
What then is the rational response to the idea that there is
a heaven and a hell? What would a scientist or engineer do? What would a wise
person do? An intelligent and adaptive response to the question “Where am
I going?” is to investigate and become informed.
We obtain information about the supernatural from religion,
theology, philosophy, and popular writing and culture -- all offer information
and opinion on this vital subject. There is a convergence of thinking that
people who are good, end up in heaven, but people who are evil end up in hell.
There is also general agreement as to what is good vs. evil. For instance, a good
person is engaged in some useful work or activity, can be counted on to be
loyal to duties and obligations, normally obeys laws and social norms, respects
others, owns up to responsibility, is a decent person, and refrains from
hurting others or damaging their property. But an evil person is selfish, takes
advantage of others, doesn’t mind hurting them for gain and convenience,
misleads and abuses people, loves to corrupt innocence, ignores the laws when
inconvenient for self, doesn’t respect social norms, deceives and plots
against others for personal gain, and cannot be counted on to be loyal or
honest. When the physical body dies, people awaken in a spiritual body and
continue life in either heaven or hell, depending on what their mind or
character is like. Those who have a good character are capable of living in
heaven and those who have an evil character are only capable of living in hell.
Heaven and hell merely reflect the two sides of the immortal human character.
Sometimes we like to argue that good and evil is in everyone
and people are generally mixed, possessing good traits and motives, and evil
traits and motives. People sometimes like to quote the New Testament story
where the “teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught
in adultery. And instead of punishing the woman, He said to them: "If any
one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her."
(John 8:7). This passage is sometimes used to justify the idea that in the eyes
of God everyone is guilty of sin, and that we ought to forgive sins instead of
holding against anyone. This interpretations and justification is not in the
original passage. What is the Lord teaching us through that passage in the New
Testament Word? The Lord has revealed it in His Second Coming in the Writings.
And it is this. Heaven and hell are within the human mind but separated, just
like heaven and hell are in the spiritual world, but separated by the world of
spirits. No one can migrate from heaven to hell or from hell to heaven. Once a
person enters either heaven or hell, it is permanent, forever, to eternity.
This vastly important scientific fact has been revealed.
We therefore have a choice whether we are going to love the
hell in us or the heaven in us. Everybody is mixed in the sense that we have
loves that are from our heaven and we have loves that are from hell, the two
types of loves never mixing in our mind, kept separate by the Lord. In other
words, while we desire to love something from hell, we must descend to our hell
by lowering our consciousness, lowering our level of operation in thinking and
feeling. But when we desire to love something from our heaven, we must elevate
our consciousness to heaven, and this can be done through the Threefold Word or
from its influence in our socialization environment. All societies encourage a
life of virtue and health, sometimes hypocritically, but always officially and
idealistically. There are no societies that advocate vice and ill health, again
often hypocritically, by condoning and practicing social evils.
Entry into heaven is not something we do externally, by
credentials and achievements. It is not an external reward for certain deeds.
Heaven is your own mind, the top of it, where your consciousness operates with
celestial-spiritual correspondences of God, that is, of Divine Good and Truth.
We acquire this operational capability by rational spirituality, which is the
ordering of one’s thinking and willing according to the Doctrine of Life
that we extract from the Threefold Word by understanding it rationally and
scientifically. Entry into heaven is a medical decision: Is your mind prepared
to handle the environment of heaven? Can you survive when you’re cut off
completely from any evil love? All the people in hell, which is a very large
number, are incapable of feeling alive if you surgically remove the evil loves
in their consciousness. Hell is a sort of spiritual insane asylum for people
who are unwilling to live in heaven by giving up their evil loves.
When I first reflected on this idea from the Writings, I
felt relieved – O, good. If I end up in hell I can always give up my
evils for the sake of living in heaven. This was a dangerous thought for it has
the potential to lull me into thinking that I do not need to struggle desperately
to get rid of all my evils, and that it’s enough if I get rid of most of
them, or some of them that are really bad, etc. This kind of merit economy is
deadly, that is, leading to hell forever. Later I read in the Writings that all
those who end up in hell are given the opportunity to visit heaven, and some
do. When they are elevated into the heaven in their mind, they respond by
swooning and feeling agony and life leaving them, and they instantly cast
themselves back into their abode in hell where they are revived by the evil
loves they can enjoy there as their very life.
In many circles today, both outside and inside the various
religious and Church organizations, it is not fashionable to talk about hell,
and even less so, about hell forever. The idea goes against the grain of
liberalism, universalism, permissiveness, tolerance, ecumenism. But I will show
that this is a mistaken orientation and ignores what has been revealed in
Sacred Scripture. For instance, the Bible explicitly teaches about hell and it
makes no sense to doubt the existence of hell just because it is politically
incorrect to think that many people, maybe the majority of people, are in hell
rather than in heaven. It may not be politically correct or philosophically
convenient to keep the idea of hell around, but the consequence of ignoring the
revelations of God is to cut oneself off from the knowledge of truth and
consequently, the power to be regenerated in preparation for heaven.
Regeneration is the lifelong progressive process of character reformation, from
evil to good, and involves our daily effort to fight our evils by means of the
Divine Truth from revelation. The scientific rationale of this position is
given in this book. I agree that one can have a knee-jerk reaction to the
distasteful notion of hell, and especially, a hell that is forever. But the
distaste comes from not knowing what it really means scientifically to say that
there is a hell, and how the system works so that some people end up in heaven
while others in hell. When we are told by a priest, minister, teacher, or
parent “Stop doing that or you’ll go to hell,” we learn to
ignore this and later, we evolve the notion that there is no hell.
But I will show that there is a hell, and also, what you
need to do to get there – not much, for we are born with all sorts of
tendencies and preferences that take us to hell unless we reform our character.
So this is the purpose of this presentation and why it is worthwhile for me to
write this, and for you to figure it out: We are on our way to hell, each one
of us, from birth, and therefore we need to change something to avoid that
place, so that we can end up in heaven instead. “A firebrand snatched
from the fire.” That’s what this brief life on earth is for,
namely, to give God the opportunity to snatch each one of us from this easy
downward slide to hell forever. Why the situation is like this, and why God let
it go this far, and many other puzzles, will be explained rationally in what
follows. Read on.
Every person has a conscience and will power to refrain from
doing evil, and thereafter, to learn to do good. This is called regeneration or
character reformation. That’s all that is required for preparation for
the life of heaven. Those who have reformed their character then start an
eternity of happiness as angel couples in heaven, blissfully in love and
growing in higher knowledge daily to eternity. Those who have not reformed
their character then start an eternity of misery as devils, satans, genii, and
sirens in the many hells provided for the endless exploration of the fantasies
and insanities of the deformed human mind. This is then the clear choice.
Nothing could be more clear. And yet, complications have arisen, false beliefs
that oppose the simple truth of salvation and immortality.
For centuries now, in the Western mind and consciousness,
there has been a religious suspicion cast upon “doing good works.”
Generation after generation learns the idea that religious life consists of
“faith alone” and that our salvation has been “bought”
by the sacrificial death of the Son of God on the cross. By this act of
redemption we have been reconciled to God the Father in whose eyes we are clean
once more, despite our evil character and evil loves. All that needs to be
done, according to this view, is to believe that Christ died for you on the
cross. This doctrine becomes ingrained in the mind while we are still children
and unable to judge rationally whether such an idea makes sense. Those who
question the rationality of such an idea are thrown back on another idea,
namely that “faith is blind” and that we shall not fully understand
the mystery of redemption until we live with the Lord in heaven. Afterwards, as
we become young adults, we begin to wonder at this doctrine of sacrifice and
salvation by the blood of Christ.
It appears to the developing rational mind that God would
not have the same sentiments and attitudes as a feudal lord, angry at his
citizens, depriving them of life’s necessities and comforts, having no
pity or compassion for them, keeping them away from himself, his face turned
away, removing his spiritual heat, his love, his truth from us, keeping us in
the pit of darkness and need. Then, all of a sudden, He can turn His face to us
again, He can see us in pristine innocence, ignoring our love of evil and our
arrogance and cruelty to one another, reconciled to us once more, as before.
And what causes this radical and sudden switch? The willingness of the Son of
God to suffer the agony of death by torture, to spill His innocent blood like a
sacrificial lamb, for no other reason than His passionate desire to save us, to
have us be reconciled to His Father, as before.
This rational reaction against the mystery of the doctrine
of sacrifice, is described in the Writings of Swedenborg from both sides of the
great spiritual divide. Swedenborg was well versed with Christian Reformed
Theology, being the son of a Lutheran Bishop and receiving a classic education.
At age 57, at the height of his brilliant scientific career, he was granted
dual consciousness, as will be explained below, so that he became able to speak
with the departed spirits living in the spiritual world. He discovered that
every individual is resuscitated a few hours after the physical body is dead.
One awakens in the spiritual world in a spirit-body with the same feeling of
“me” that one knew in the physical body—all the memories and
all the affections and loves are intact. One then continues life to eternity.
With his dual consciousness, which lasted for 27 years until his passing on at
age 84, Swedenborg had the opportunity to observe and talk to thousands of
people in the spiritual world who were being resuscitated, and many others who
had been in the spiritual world for thousands of years and could still remember
and discuss their life on earth. Swedenborg was particularly interested in
talking to Christians about their faith, and their belief in “faith alone
without good works.” He studied their reasoning process as to how they
justified the idea that good works are not counted for one’s salvation,
but blind faith in the doctrine of salvation by sacrifice.
Following the initial phase of life in the world of spirits,
which may last up to a few months, one grows more and more inward. Our
consciousness and understanding is now determined not by what we had in our
external personality, but what we had in our interior mind or character. Our
interior motives or loves govern our life but we learn to hide them when we
discover ourselves to be selfish, evil, and inclined to irrational judgments
and savage actions. We therefore put on a surface personality that acts as our
agent in the outside world. Our interior self that pulls all the strings and
supplies all the motives, stays hidden, feeling free to be arrogant,
contemptuous, self-righteous, cruel, and stupid. This interior self is the real
self, and not the external personality we put on for show and is just an agent that
will eventually be silenced and laid aside in the world of spirits. Now our
real self emerges to the surface. The external appearance of our spirit-body
reflects this new interior self now come to the fore. Swedenborg observed two
types of loves in these interior places of the mind—heavenly and hellish.
In the spiritual world this becomes easily visible since the outside is forced
to reflect the inside and can no longer be hidden.
The diagram below depicts the relation between God as the
Divine Human Person, and human consciousness.
As depicted in the diagram above, human consciousness has its origin in what proceeds from God as the Divine Human Person. Every individual human being is human (rather than animal or plant) solely from this cause, namely, the influx of humanness into every individual’s mind. This influx of humanness is by means of substances streaming forth from the spiritual Sun and into individual minds. This spiritual influx of living Divine substances is received by organs created for their reception. These organs of reception for Divine influx holed together into a whole which we call the mind of the person, and also, the spirit of the person. The spirit-body is the essential human anatomy and physiology and contains the mind and its organs. The physical body with its brain is an exact replica of the spirit-body and its mind or spirit. The shape and physiology of the physical body is determined by the shape and physiology of the spirit-body, and the two are connected by the synchronous action of correspondences.
The mind is built into three layers or levels of operation.
Each layer or level has an organ called the will, on the interior, and another
organ around it on the exterior, called the understanding. These two organs
operate together by synchronous correspondences. The operation of the
understanding organ is by means of the influx of Divine Truth, which is an
infinite spiritual substance streaming forth endlessly from the spiritual Sun
and proceeding into the created universe, including the minds of human beings.
The reception of this spiritual substance called Divine Truth is in the
understanding of human minds, but not so for animals, plants, and physical
objects or energies. In human minds the reception of truth is called
“mediate influx” and results in human consciousness. But there is
no mediate influx of truth into other created things, but only immediate
influx, and this influx does not result in the phenomenon of consciousness.
Consider the following chart that describes the course of
influx from God.
Divine Human Person |
||||
|
↓ |
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Spiritual Sun
Good and Truth |
||||
IMMEDIATE INFLUX
OF GOOD(unconscious) |
|
MEDIATE INFLUX
OF TRUTH(conscious) |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
celestial will |
(3) ↔ |
celestial understanding |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
spiritual will |
(2) ↔ |
spiritual understanding |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
natural will |
(1) ↔ |
natural understanding |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
========filtering mechanism======== |
||||
|
infernal natural will |
(-1) ↔ |
infernal natural understanding |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
infernal sensuous will |
(-2) ↔ |
infernal sensuous understanding |
||
|
↓ |
|
↓ |
||
|
infernal corporeal will |
(-3) ↔ |
infernal corporeal understanding |
||
Influx originates in the Divine Human Person who is in the
midst of the spiritual Sun. The two infinite substances streaming out of the
spiritual Sun are called good and truth. The heat of the stream is good, and
the light of the stream is truth. These two infinite substances are one in God,
but as they emerge from the spiritual Sun and enter the human sphere, they
separate into the unconscious immediate influx of good and the conscious
mediate influx of truth. The immediate influx of good is received unconsciously
by the organ of the will in the mind, while the mediate influx of truth is
received consciously by the organ of the understanding in the mind. Note that
influx enters the highest portion of the mind called celestial, then descends
into the next lower discrete portion called the spiritual mind, and then into
the lowest portion called the natural mind. Prior to regeneration, we are
conscious of only the natural mind, so that the mediate influx into the
celestial and spiritual mind, is not yet conscious, but it has the potential of
becoming conscious with advancing regeneration. The opening of the spiritual
and celestial mind is by means of revelation which contains celestial truths,
spiritual truths, and natural truths.
The activity of the celestial and spiritual mind becomes
conscious in the natural mind by correspondences. To accomplish this, God
creates an interior portion of the natural mind. This interior organ is
spiritual so that it can reflect by correspondence the ongoing activity in the
spiritual and celestial mind. When we pass into the afterlife, we gain full
conscious awareness of the spiritual and celestial mind that had been gradually
opened by means of regeneration.
Note also that the influx continues into the lowest portion
of the natural mind but goes through a receptor filter that inverts the influx
into its opposites – good into evil, and truth into falsity. The natural
mind has its opposite in the infernal natural mind. The spiritual mind has its
opposite in the infernal spiritual mind. The celestial mind has its opposite in
the infernal celestial mind. This is because every heavenly good and truth is
turned into its opposites, and since there are three discrete degrees of heaven
there must be three discrete degrees of hell.
It is the spiritual organ of the understanding that gives us
the power of experiencing living consciousness. What is consciousness? Few
people even have an opinion, let alone any knowledge of what it is. I’ve
been in the field of Psychology for 40 years and though there are books and
articles on the subject of consciousness, there is no knowledge of it. People
write about theories and speculative, imaginative, and abstract accounts of
what consciousness might be. But now True Science gives us a full scientific
revelation from God the Creator and Manager of every individual’s
consciousness.
So we now know, as just explained, two fundamental things
about consciousness. First, we know that it is a spiritual substance
originating in the infinite spiritual Sun and streaming out into the created
universe, both the spiritual world and the natural world, both into humans and
into animals, plants, and physical objects and energies. Second, we also know
that the quality of this Divine influx exists in two discretely different
modalities, called mediate and immediate influx. Only the mediate influx
creates the phenomenon of consciousness and it is operative only in a
particular created organ of reception called the human understanding.
True Science gives us many more details of this fundamental
process of creation and existence. Creation is out of the substance of
consciousness streaming forth from the spiritual Sun as spiritual light or
Divine Truth itself. Divine Truth is the substance that makes up the inner
framework of every created object or quality. What a tremendous scientific
revelation! It is scientific because it is about the mechanism by which
physical objects are created. Every physical object or quality is brought into
existence by a successive sequence of steps called its “successive
order.” This causative chain of being remains in “simultaneous
order.” If you take any object or quality and analyze its constituent
structure of discrete degrees, you are identifying its simultaneous order. This
simultaneous order is an exact replica of the object’s successive order.
Hence we can say that all successive order in creation is replicated in all
simultaneous order after creation. An analogy might be the rings we can notice
on a slice of a tree trunk. Counting the rings gives an accurate estimate of
the tree’s age. The tree’s successive order of growth produced each
ring with advancing age, and this successive order is replicated in the slice
of the trunk that shows us the rings.
This scientific revelation to the human race globally, will
facilitate new theories in physics in which consciousness becomes the basis of
all matter. True Science as we know it today from the Writings is much more
advanced any current notions in physics which is still weighed down by materialistic
compunctions. One can expect that the early proposals of this new paradigm in
physics will not be dualist and will redefine consciousness in abstract natural
terms, rather than spiritual, as in True Science, where it is recognized that
the consciousness is not abstracted matter but concretized spirit.
Consciousness is a substance which is far superior to matter in that matter is
temporary while substance is permanent or eternal. Matter exists in finited
space-time limits while substance exists in infinite and uncreate states.
Substance is the underlying framework of matter. Every physical object, from
sub-atomic particle-wave to galaxy, has an underlying substantive framework
that gives it body. The outward object is natural while the inward substantive
framework is spiritual. This dual character of all objects is a tremendously
useful scientific revelation. Now we know that the source of all substances is
the spiritual Sun.
Consider the fact that every tree, stone, water molecule, or
protein cell is made of a piece of the sun. Earth is a piece of the sun and so
everything on this earth must be a piece of the sun. You can say therefore that
the sun is the underlying physical framework of every object on the planet. Now
we can another step. Consider the fact that the natural sun also has to have an
underlying framework. Logic tells us that the underlying framework can’t
be the same as the thing itself, or else it is not an underlying framework. So
if the sun is the underlying
framework of every thing on the planet, what is the underlying framework of the
sun? Fair question, but the answer is not known unless we turn to scientific
revelations. True Science describes the spiritual Sun as the underlying
framework of the natural sun. Skipping for now all the details, we can
nevertheless rationally conclude that the spiritual Sun is therefore the
underlying framework of every physical object on the planet.
And what is this underlying framework from the spiritual
Sun? It consists of the spiritual light and spiritual heat that is carried
inside the light. Spiritual light from the spiritual Sun streams out into
creation and begins it as the first step in a successive order by which this
spiritual substance proceeds from the spiritual Sun and creates by successive
steps of layering itself with more and more limits, until it reaches an outer
layer called natural limits. Every object of this outer natural layer will
therefore contain, like the rings of a tree, a replica in simultaneous order of
its steps of creation. Therefore the initiating substance from the spiritual
Sun will be in the inmost or central ring of the object. And what is this
inmost constitutive substance of every physical object or quality? It is
spiritual light within which is spiritual heat. And spiritual light is called
Divine Truth and spiritual heat is called Divine Love. This proves then that
every thing in its inmost is Divine Truth and Love. And Divine Truth is nothing
else then Consciousness Itself, the source of all human consciousness in the
mind. We now have a scientific explanation of why it can be accurately said
that this is fundamentally a Human Universe made of Truth and Love at its core.
The diagram and chart above depict some of these details.
Note that the Divine Human Person, who can be seen by angels in the midst of
the spiritual Sun, is the origin of influx. Whatever is streaming out of the
spiritual Sun is the Divine Truth and the Divine Love of the Divine Human
Person. This is because that’s what the Divine Human Person is in Constitution
or Essence. In His essence or inmost being, He is infinite Divine Love, and in
His outward existence, He is the infinite Divine Truth. These are the two
substances -- celestial and spiritual -- streaming out of Him into the created
universe. Love is a celestial substance while truth is a spiritual substance.
Both come in infinite and inexhaustible varieties. These two infinite
substances are uncreate and have the capability of transforming themselves into
created things by a process of exteriorization, or self-limitation. The light
of the stream of influx is nothing else than actual Divine Truth, and the heat
within this light stream is nothing else than actual Divine Love.
Substance contrasts with matter. All things in the natural
world are constructed out of material elements and compounds. But all things in
the spiritual world are constructed out of the two substances, celestial
(=love) and spiritual (=truth). Substances are not in time and space, while
matter is. For example, a house in the natural world is constructed of
materials like stone and wood, while a house in your dream is constructed out
of substances (thoughts and images). Feelings and thoughts are constructed out
of celestial and spiritual substances (love and truth) streaming into the mind.
A house in heaven is constructed out of celestial and spiritual substances from
the spiritual Sun. Clearly, the house in your dream is more like the house in
your heaven than your house on earth. In the spiritual world a house is
maintained in existence as long as your feelings and thoughts are conscious and
connected to it. There is no time limit or spatial restrictions to your house
in heaven, as there is to your house on earth. In the spiritual world, whatever
thoughts and feelings you have exteriorize by correspondence to create the
specific appearances of the sensory environment. On earth this is not so. Your
house remains fixed as is, no matter what your thoughts and feelings are.
Material houses are partially independent of your mind, but substantive houses
are completely dependent on your mind. Those who are in hell have thoughts and
feelings that exteriorize as dark caverns and huts rather than magnificent
houses or palaces.
It takes a high level of abstraction to be able to
comprehend the idea that truth and love are substances. The mental effort it
takes to understand how truth and love can be substances, produces a more
abstract and rational intelligence or wisdom. Our consciousness operates from
influx at three discrete levels, and the resultant conscious awareness and
perception is different at each level, so different, that a lower level can
never comprehend a higher level no matter how much it improves at its own
level. It is like a staircase having three steps separated from each other by
several hundred feet. How are you going to get to the top? No matter how much
you walk and shuffle at one step, you will never get to the next step. The only
way is to find a way of being transported up by some entirely new method that
is radically different from walking and shuffling. Similarly with
consciousness, which is like walking and being transported.
The three discrete levels of the organic physiological mind
are called natural or natural-rational (lowest), spiritual or
spiritual-rational (intermediate), and celestial or celestial-rational
(uppermost). Consequently we experience the phenomenon of consciousness at
these three steps or discrete levels of operation. The thoughts and feelings we
have when the natural consciousness alone is operative, are at the level of
animals, though at a more advanced stage. In other words the physiology of the
natural mind is more advanced with humans than it is with animals. This is the
reason that humans use a natural language for communicating at a distance and
for abstract thinking, while animals have only crude signaling systems in
comparison. But in addition to having a more advanced natural mind, humans also
have two additional organs of a higher construction which animals do not
possess and can never possess from creation. These two higher organs are called
the spiritual mind and the celestial mind.
The
state of a person's mind in the natural world determines its state in the
spiritual world. (Swedenborg, TCR 816)
When we are born, our physical body is born in the physical
world and our spirit-body is born in the world of spirits. The two are
connected by the laws of synchronous correspondences. When the physical body is
disconnected by its death, the spirit-body continues its immortal life in
heaven or hell. This spirit-body is what houses the natural mind, the spiritual
mind, and the celestial mind. Therefore when we appear to ourselves to
“awaken” in the world of spirits, our consciousness of self and our
memories are all present because they were located all along in the natural
mind, which was born in the spirit-body and remains there forever. The natural
mind is formed by the information we obtain from sensory input through the
physical body. The physical body and the natural world are therefore necessary
to form the natural mind, but this formation is not in the physical world but
in the world of spirits where the spirit-body is.
As the natural mind develops and grows, so does our natural
consciousness. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us influx is reaching the natural mind
by correspondence with the operations that go on in the spiritual and celestial
mind. These operations of influx in our higher mind are unconscious. We become
conscious of them only when they reach the natural mind. What reaches the
natural mind is not the influx itself, which is spiritual, but the action of
synchronous correspondence of the spiritual upon the natural. Our natural
consciousness is therefore the result of the activity of the natural mind. This
activity is nothing but a correspondential effect of the activity in the higher
mind (spiritual and celestial). Of course the natural mind cannot see or be
aware of the higher mind and when we read in scientific revelation of the
existence of the higher mind, we do not comprehend it except in a natural way.
Natural level consciousness consists of thoughts and feelings that reflect the
order of the natural world. Everything in this order is different from the
order of the spiritual world. The lower cannot comprehend the higher
consciousness.
Clearly then, the natural mind is capable of replicating
representatively and consciously, the activity of the spiritual mind, which is
unconscious while we are earthlings. The natural mind has therefore the
capacity to grow into more advanced phases that can represent the higher stages
in a conscious mode. This is accomplished physiologically by the growth of a
new organ in the interior of the natural mind. This new interior portion of the
natural mind is called the interior-natural mind or the natural-spiritual mind.
This interior-natural mind is a discrete degree within the natural mind proper,
which is why it has the capacity to represent consciously the spiritual and
celestial operations of the higher mind. The opening and growth of the
interior-natural mind is effected by God in proportion to our willingness to be
regenerated, that is, our willingness to undergo spiritual and celestial
temptations.
The diagram above shows the proceeding of influx as it
descends into human consciousness. Note the line of descent or exteriorization
from the Divine. First reception is heaven. After going through the three
discrete layers of heaven, in sequential order, the influx of Divine Truth has
been changed by the minds of the people in the three heavens. By the time
Divine influx has filtered through the lowest heaven, it is discretely
different from what it was on its descent, because a lower heaven cannot
recognize anything directly from an upper heaven, but only indirectly by means of correspondential reaction.
Finally, when the mediate influx exits the lowest heaven, it enters the world
of spirits. This is where are located the spirit-bodies of all the humanity alive
on the many earths in the natural world. They are all on their way to eternal
life in the same spiritual world. Now the course of mediate influx as it enters
each sprit-body, replicates the course of influx across the heavens because the
structure of the human mind is the same as the structure of the spiritual
world, and in fact, overlaps with it completely since there is no extension or
spatial location in the spiritual world.
The influx from the highest or celestial heaven enters the
highest or celestial portion of the mind in the spirit-body. Of course we have
no consciousness of this operation or action. Next, influx enters the middle
heaven below (called the spiritual heaven) at the same time that it enters the
mid-level mind called the spiritual mind. Next, mediate influx from the Divine
enters the lowest heaven (called the natural heaven) at the same time that it
enters into the lowest mind, called the natural mind. At this point the influx
becomes conscious by means of the correspondences to it in our natural mind.
These correspondences are the conscious thoughts and feelings in our natural
mind.
Note from the diagram above that the beginnings of Divine
mediate influx with humans are in the heavens, and this is called human higher
consciousness. The content of this influx is truth and good, which are the
substances of the spiritual Sun. These substances make up the stream of influx
that is received by the organs of the mind. Influx therefore is a physiological
process of the mental organs which are created as organs of reception for
spiritual and celestial influx. The organ of the understanding receives the
light of the stream, which is actually nothing else than Divine Truth, and the
organ of the will receives the heat of the stream, which is actually nothing
else than Divine Love. The reception of this stream creates the phenomenon of
consciousness, or conscious experience, in every individual. The content of
this consciousness is therefore fixed, embedded, and recorded by physiological
synapses that are made of spiritual fibers in the spirit-body. Since spiritual
fibers or substances are uncreate and immortal, the form and character of the
mind is permanent and immortal, indestructible. Whatever we once felt or
thought, remains part of us to eternity.
As portrayed in the diagram above, the good and truth
substances stream into the world of spirits from the lowest heavens. From this
the influx enters the lowest or natural mind. Since the Fall of the human race
on this earth, the natural mind automatically filters the influx of good and
truth and converts it into evil and falsity, as portrayed in the diagram above.
The content of evils and falsities are opposite to the content of goods and
truths, hence the consciousness of evils and falsities is called lower
consciousness. The lowest form of consciousness is the content of thoughts and
feelings in the corporeal mind when separated from all upper portions of the
mind above it. That is called the hells.
You can see from these True Science revelations that
spiritual development is no less physiological than physical development. Also,
that consciousness raising is the process of receiving truths and loves from
influx without distorting them or changing them into the opposites. By changing
inflowing Divine truths and loves into their opposites, we keep our
consciousness at the animal level, trapped in the natural mind of understanding
and willing. When, at the death of the physical body, we make the consciousness
transition into the spirit-body, our quality of experience and life is
determined by how high our mind is operative. If we arrive with the celestial
mind operative, we experience the life of eternal heaven, but if we arrive with
only the natural mind operative, we experience the life of eternal hell. What
determines how high our mind becomes operative, is the process of regeneration.
This refers to the lifelong struggle to change our inherited character into a
new one arranged in the order of heaven by means of revelations which we study,
take to heart, and use to guide our daily thinking and willing.
In the spiritual world there is perfect correlation between
beauty and wisdom, between good and truth. Those whose interior self is filled
with good loves and true ideas appear beautiful as angels. But those whose
interior self is filled with evil loves and false ideas appear ugly and
monstrous as devils. Angels and devils cannot be together in the same sphere
because the good and truth in the angels obliterates and destroys the evil and
falsity in the devils. As a result, the spiritual world is divided into heaven
and hell, where people have their permanent abode, and there is an impassable
barrier between these two.
Swedenborg discovered that many who believed themselves to
be devout believers with a strong faith, found themselves with an interior self
that was the opposite of what they believed on the outside of their conscious
awareness. They now laughed at their former faith and believed nothing. They
saw their own evil loves, their own hatreds, their own arrogance, their own
cruelty, their own hatred of monogamy and charity, their own disdain for the
very idea of Lord and God—when they saw all this in themselves, they did
not judge it and condemn it. Instead, they defended these things and they
associated with others who were like minded, who loved gossip and slander, who
were amused by the misfortune of others, who were openly envious, scortatory,
adulterous, blasphemous. These things are the things they loved in their
interior self.
The Writings are the revealed Divine Truth that the Lord has
given humanity in His Second Coming. He wants to open the eyes of humanity, to
raise our consciousness and loves to the heavenly state of bliss. He has
provided this new revelation to open our eyes of understanding so that we are
able to understand in a rational and scientific way, what it takes to get to
heaven. Not the sacrifice of someone else, not even God, can change the
interior self, and its loves and ideas. If God were to change our interior self
without our awareness, what would happen? Our annihilation as human beings
forever. This is too much of a fate to endure or to impose. Even life in hell
is better than annihilation. If we are annihilated, we can no longer be human,
but if we are devils, we still can become angels, the moment we want to. All it
takes is the willingness to abandon evil loves and to acquire good loves.
That’s all it takes to change a devil into an angel. It is not an act of
God that can do this, for this would result in annihilation. Clearly then, we
must change our character voluntarily here on earth, or else we cannot be saved
for eternal happiness in heaven.
The Writings use the expression “doing good
works” to refer to the work of uses in life. This means that we must live
our life for the sake of others at least as much as for the sake of self. In
other words, all the daily choices we make could be either for self or for
others as well as for self. For example, we can let the television or music
blare from our room, or we can think of the room mates and neighbors. We can
drive dangerously and think of ourselves, or we can drive carefully and think
of other drivers and pedestrians. We can let ourselves go and be overweight, or
we can reign in the appetite and increase our physical workout. Etc. There is
no mystery here, no great complication. Everyone can understand this. Everyone
knows what is good or bad, decent or selfish, and we all have ideas about God
from culture and education. God gives us all a conscience as well. You can see
therefore that every human being, regardless of background, can work at
becoming a good person according to the truth one possesses. That’s all
it takes to develop an interior self that is filled with good loves and true
ideas. And with these, we can enter heaven and grow in intelligence and love
endlessly, in company with others, but especially with one’s soul mate or
spouse.
Note this very important fact: only those people who tried to be good on account of God or the afterlife, had a good interior self, one that is capable of heavenly life. All those who tried to be good on account of some other reason, did not have a good interior self, but an evil one. What were these other reasons? Some put on a good personality for reputation and honor, others for gain or influence. Others did it out of fear or shyness. But with these motives only the external behavior and personality are good, that is, appear to be good, but the interior self is not changed. It is filled with contempt for others and religion. The interior self can be totally insane spiritually, but show none of this externally, while maintaining an appearance of sanity and normalcy. External motives cannot change interior loves and ideas, but interior loves can change external ones. The motive to be good on account of God, the afterlife, heaven and hell, is an interior motive, and in fact, it is the highest motive in the human mind, as explained in the Writings. This motive has the power to change the interior self, to transform it from loves that concern only the self, with which we are born, for loves that concern others, thus mutual love for the sake of unity with God.
The idea that we are saved by faith alone rather than by
character change for the sake of faith, has therefore become a major stumbling
block in the mind that opposes the new truths revealed by the Lord in His
Second Coming. Nevertheless, every individual can see from reason that blind
faith without character change is not a realistic or true idea of religion, but
a distortion and misunderstanding of Scripture. And every individual has a
reason by which to be able to inspect these new truths that the Lord has now
revealed through the Writings of Swedenborg. Since they are completely rational
revelations, everyone can judge for themselves. There is no persuasion
involved. No mystery. No data that we do not have access to ourselves.
The truth I discuss is not my truth but God's truth.
God's truth is beamed into every mind from within, yet few can see it or
understand it. This is because few listen to it and value it. The only truth
there is, is God's truth. No truth exists that is not God's truth, which is the
truth given to us by God. When you begin to see God's truth, or simply, truth,
you will experience an extraordinary desire, even compulsion, to tell others of
this truth. This compelling feeling of sharing truth is built into the truth we
receive. The reason is that genuine truth can only be received within good. In
other words, when we strive to be good by doing the right thing, truth is
implanted by God in this striving to be good. The effort we exert is called a
motive, purpose, love, or affection. When we act right from the desire to be
good, God then strengthens and extends this desire for good within our
character. The desire to be good has tremendous power in it. And one of its
powers is to receive truth from God as the earth receives a gestating seed.
There is no other way of receiving spiritual truth from God but in the effort
of being good or acting right.
Good and truth do not exist separately but act only in
unison, just like the lungs and the heart act together for the body’s
survival and well being. When we discuss truth, we do not yet possess actual
truth. The truth is then only in our memory, which is external to our actual
self of feeling and existing. The actual self is our life of love and feeling,
while thinking and knowing truth is merely a reflection of our love and
feeling. But acting or behaving according to the truth in our understanding, is
our life, for it is love that acts by means of truth. Truth therefore is not
within us until it is in our will to act right. Once truth is implanted by God
as a seed in our understanding, it begins to multiply astronomically as we
continue to strive to be good and to act according to the truth we understand.
Good is the origin of all love, and truth is the origin for all wisdom. Love
and wisdom are inseparable since good and truth are inseparable. Truth is the
outside form of love. Love appears in the world by means of truth. Love does
not act by itself but my means of truth. Truth does not act from itself but
from love. Love is the Divine Essence and truth is the Divine Existere. In the
Divine Human Person, love and truth are united as one. Love is His Divine
Essence while truth is His Human Essence. These verities sound abstract before
we fully comprehend them. The better we comprehend them, the higher our consciousness
is elevated. When we operate from a higher consciousness of truth, our thinking
and feeling about everything is raised to a new operational level.
God also gives us the power to transform or distort good
into evil, and at the same time, to change truth into falsity. Similarly, we
can transform love into hatred and other infernal lusts, and at the same time,
we can distort wisdom and intelligence into insanity and foolishness. The same
good and truth, or love and wisdom, flows in from God into every person, and it
is the individual who then has the spiritual freedom to filter and transform
them into either something that is compatible with love and wisdom, or into
something that is contrary to them. If we change truth to its opposite we
become spiritually insane and forfeit the capability of heavenly life.
The desire to share the truth is not present when we seek
truth as part of our strategy to get ahead of others or to compete with them.
Spiritual truth can be seen only by those who desire to see it for the purpose
of becoming a better person, because as we improve our character we grow closer
to God from whom we can then receive love and wisdom, or what is the same,
genuine good and genuine truth. To be a good person and to act right according
to truth, is not possible from ourselves but only from God. From our own self
we can only remain an evil person filled with falsities that we believe to be
truths. This is how we are born, namely, spiritually inverted and morally
perverted, so that when Divine good and truth flow into us from within through
the soul, we disperse them and transfix them into their opposite. If we do not
love God but ignore or deny Him, we cannot be genuinely good, because good is
from God only, along with genuine truth. We may act as if we are good, but this
is only an outward put on. We may even believe that we are good, but this is
only a convenient persuasion or self-serving fantasy. Neither is truth from any
person, but from God alone. Both truth and good are from God alone and an
individual can have truth and good only from God, that is, when we acknowledge
God and affirm our love for Him out of free choice. Therefore, to receive good
and truth, we must first acknowledge God.
Every individual who possesses genuine truth, possesses
God's truth received from Him. Truth is received by the mind in accordance with
one's ability to understand rational ideas. There are simple truths that are
rationally simple, and they can be understood by all, even the uneducated.
These simple truths are enough in themselves to allow one to love God and to
live a life of conscience that prepares the mind for heaven, to the extent that
one uses the truth to shun inherited evils. There are also more complex truths
that demand a mind trained in rational thinking. This training can be
intellectual, artistic, or scientific. Truth in itself, as it flows down from
God, is absolute and Divine, but it is received with variation depending on
each individual's mental state and preparation. The more we shun our known
evils as sins against God, the further we are regenerated by God from within,
as a result of which we also grow in understanding and enlightenment.
One
day I had been meditating on the creation of the universe. This was noticed by
the angels above me to the right, where there were some who had several times
meditated and reasoned about the same matter; so one of them came down and
invited me to join them. I passed into the spirit and accompanied him; on my
arrival I was brought to the prince, in whose hall I saw as many as a hundred
assembled with the prince in their midst. . (Swedenborg, TCR 76).
2. Swedenborg’s Dual Consciousness
The name I use for the approach in this book is “True
Science,” and also “theistic science”
and “ scientific dualism”
(see the articles available from this directory: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss.html
I have included only rational concepts and scientific or empirical methods.
By "scientific" I mean any rational explanatory account that is tied to empirical facts verifiable through observation by anyone under the appropriate test conditions.
It is known that rational is universal, and is a property of the human mind with which we are born and which we can exercise as part of our racial evolution. Societal activities are governed by the rational to the extent that they are effective. We have lawyers, accountants, legislators, and judges to see to it that rational methods of evidence presentation and conclusion are followed. We have engineers and economists who plan our environment and are required to write rational reports and justifications for their planning. In science, every method and approach, every school of thought and specialization, is governed by rational steps of operation and evaluation. Architecture and art are based on rational principles of harmony and interrelationships. Survival is a function of adaptation, and in humans, adaptation is the outcome of rational principles.
I have been trained as a practicing scientist for several
decades to learn what is rational reasoning and how to operate within its scope
to give meaning to facts, data, evidence, logic, inner consistency, outer
harmony, specificity, and unitary coherence. This is possible for me only
because Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1771) was a superb and honest scientist and
the Writings he left us are thoroughly and consistently rational, empirical and
scientific. He is the only writer in all of human history that has been able to
retain this high quality of scientific standards on this topic of "What is
real? Where am I going?", and includes scientific explanations of the
afterlife, the mind, Sacred Scripture, heaven, hell, and God.
Quoting Swedenborg at the beginning of the book titled Heaven and Hell:
The
arcana revealed in the following pages relate to heaven and hell, and also to
the life of man after death. The man of the church at this date knows scarcely
anything about heaven and hell or about his life after death, although all
these matters are set forth and described in the Word; and yet many of those
born within the church refuse to believe in them, saying in their hearts,
"Who has come from that world and told us?" Lest, therefore, such a
spirit of denial, which especially prevails with those who have much worldly
wisdom, should also infect and corrupt the simple in heart and the simple in
faith, it has been granted me to associate with angels and to talk with them as
man with man, also to see what is in the heavens and what is in the hells, and
this for thirteen years; so now from what I have seen and heard it has been
granted me to describe these, in the hope that ignorance may thus be
enlightened and unbelief dissipated. Such immediate revelation is granted at this
day because this is what is meant by the Coming of the Lord. (HH 1)
The principal reason why Swedenborg is absolutely unique is
that he was given access to the spiritual world in full wakefulness for 27
years. His Writings are empirical in that they are based on this daily
experience, which included various experiments he was allowed to conduct to
investigate various phenomena and properties of the spiritual world. His
contemporaries were well aware of Swedenborg's intellectual commitment to
science in all matters of human understanding, including the understanding of
the spiritual. He wrote only as a scientist about phenomena and observations no
other individual in human history has had access to. Though Swedenborg was well
known to many key writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, he has been
systematically kept out of the history of science literature in the 20th
century. This is why he is not known among scientists today. And the fact is
that most scientists today would still vote to keep his writings out of the
scientific literature. No one in science today is allowed to talk to Aristotle
or Newton in the spiritual world, and to angels and devils, and call it part of
science. No one in science today is allowed to cite Swedenborg’s Writings
and call them science, as I have done. I am therefore defying science as it is
today, attempting to stimulate change towards what will be called the True
Science.
Sometimes as scientists we are troubled when we must
evaluate an experiment for which we have inadequate equipment to verify the
observations that have been reported to prove the hypothesis. We rely in that
case on reputation of the researcher and the publication venue, which is often
a scientific journal containing only articles that have been peer reviewed and
approved as meeting the usual standards of scientific method. In the case of
Swedenborg’s observations of the spiritual world, the verifiability issue
becomes even more difficult since no one has the equipment he possessed, namely
dual consciousness, or the ability to observe the phenomena of the spiritual
world.
Nevertheless, this is not an absolute caveat since there is
the certainty that everyone will possess this equipment when passing from this
world to the spiritual world. Swedenborg only did what everyone can do, except
in a special order, not given to anyone else. He was given sensuous
consciousness of the spiritual world while he was still a man in a physical
body on earth. But what he reports is verifiable by anyone who reaches that
world. The experimental conditions to be met to verify Swedenborg’s
observations are available to anyone who attains that condition. An analogy
might be to consider the special insight that mature people have compared to
their earlier years. Younger people cannot verify the insights of the mature
people, yet they will be able to verify those observations when they meet the
conditions of maturity. What Swedenborg reports is not secret or subjective,
but public and objective. More people can verify Swedenborg’s
observations than people who cannot, because more people live in the spiritual
world than on this earth.
Furthermore, copies of Swedenborg’s Writings exist in
heaven, are read by angels as Divine Truth. They do not associate the Writings
with Swedenborg, whom they have no knowledge of. When they read it they are not
conscious of the literal meanings and descriptions in the sentences. They are
conscious only of the inner spiritual sense of the Threefold Word, which deals
with celestial ideas only, ideas incomprehensible to us while still on earth.
(See this article on Overcoming Objections to Swedenborg's
Writings Through the Development of Scientific Dualism.
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/np98.html )
Note that my presentation of “true science”
(which is theistic) is not a response to a wish to unify science and religion,
as this has been attempted many times from many fields of scholarship and persuasion.
Instead, I ask rational questions about the mind, God, heaven, and hell, as a
scientist or lawyer might ask when investigating an event or claim: Is the mind
something real? If yes, then it is part of science and rational inquiry. Is God
real? If yes, then it is part of science and rational inquiry. Is the afterlife
real? Then it too is part of what science wants to investigate. Science,
through rationality and empiricism, investigates whatever has reality. Just
because we want to investigate the reality of God or heaven doesn't mean that
we are into religion--we are still in science, investigating something real. No
one has ever convinced me that science has any limitations in the rational and
empirical investigation of real things. Nevertheless, given that science has
been distinctly atheistic and monistic for a couple of centuries, it may be
less confusing for now to use the expression "theistic science" by
which I mean the scientific and rational inquiry of God's reality and relationship
to humans, including afterlife, heaven, hell, and Sacred Scripture or Divine
revelations.
There are two ways of approaching God as a scientific issue,
one negative, the other affirmative. Both involve making a premise that cannot
be independently proven. The negative approach allows scientists to remain
materialistic, monistic, and atheistic by saying: “We start with the
premise of atheism and monism. We will give up this premise if there is proof
of God’s reality. The proof must be by means of materialistic methods.”
You can see that this position insures the retention of the atheistic premise,
which itself is not provable. On the other hand, the affirmative approach
allows scientists to abandon the unproven and unprovable atheistic premise.
This is what I did. First, I had to realize that the atheistic premise of
science is not provable. This reduced its persuasive hold on my mind. Second, I
had to find out from Divine revelation, or Sacred Scripture, the rational
explanation of why God does not appear in the physical world and put an end to
the mistaken premise of atheistic science. This question can only be considered
or investigated from the affirmative approach. One must first grant that God
exists and manages the universe by means of rational principles. Then one is in
a position to investigate these rational laws or principles of reality.
The Writings of Swedenborg are a Divine revelation about
reality, about God, the human mind, heaven, and hell. The Writings present a
full and coherent rational explanation of the interaction between the natural
and spiritual world, and the laws by means of which phenomena in both worlds
can be understood and interrelated. It is revealed that God has created the
human mind to consist of several levels or layers of functioning, the lowest
being called hell, and the highest being called heaven. In the lower regions we
function at the corporeal and sensuous level of operation. This level is
similar to that of animals. At the next higher level in our mind, we function
at the natural-rational level, which marks the progress of civilized life on
earth. At the next higher level, we function at the spiritual-rational level,
and at the highest level possible, we function at the celestial-rational level
of operation, consciousness, and understanding. We are born at the lowest level
with the capacity to reach the highest level.
The journey for becoming human, then angelic, is the journey
of our loves and their quality. Our animal loves are corporeal and
pre-civilized, not yet rational and human. Next, our natural-rational loves
take us to feelings of community and thoughts of science and art. Next, our
spiritual-rational loves take us to feelings of mutual love, love of God, and
understanding of Divine Truth. Finally, our celestial-rational loves take us to
feelings of unity and oneness with God and with each other, and the interior
perception of Divine Truth. Note that this journey of elevation and evolution
of the human mind is achieved by means of the rational—at first in a natural
version, next in a spiritual version, and at last in a celestial version.
The celestial-rational is the highest and inmost of the mind
where the true human begins. Not until then do we have truly human feelings and
perceptions. When we are separated from the corpse, we awaken in our
spirit-body in the world of spirits. Our fate to eternity is then determined by
this spirit-body, that is, the feelings and thoughts it contains. Remember that
feelings and thoughts are immortal organic substances that gradually build up
our spirit body as we live our life in the physical body. Such as are the loves
we bring with us, such is our fate in eternity. If we arrive with feelings and
thoughts below the rational level, we sink down into the corporeal level of the
mind, and life there is called hell. But if we arrive with rational feelings
and thoughts, we rise to the spiritual and celestial levels of the mind, and
life there is called heaven.
God cannot appear in the physical world today to settle the
matter of His existence for science. Why not? Because, as the Writings reveal,
such an event would destroy science, and society, and will result in preventing
anyone from acquiring spiritual-rational and celestial-rational loves. This
would condemn the entire future human race to hell. This terrible result would
obtain because God’s appearance in the physical world violates and tears
apart the fabric of the natural world as it is conjoined to the spiritual
world. The details of this explanation are rationally and fully justified in
the Writings. It makes complete sense to me, and would to anyone who is
motivated to read it with rational understanding and consistency. The human
mind as two modalities or organic venues for consciousness: sensuous and
rational. Understanding this difference is the key to understanding why God
cannot physically appear to science to settle the matter of His existence.
God has appeared twice to the consciousness of the human
race on earth. The first, at the Incarnation, when God appeared as a Divine
Child in a physical body, and grew to adulthood, then exited the natural world
to dwell in the spiritual world where He can be seen by the inhabitants of
heaven. While God was on earth, He had a dual role, called Father and Son. The
Father role did not change and continued to manage the details of the universe.
But the Son role was new in human evolution. It was a new creation of God in
relation to humanity. Whereas before God in the Father role was invisible in
His infinity, now in His newly created Son role, He was visible to all
humanity, both on earth and in heaven. This new visibility allowed the human
race to evolve much further and higher in the human mind since God’s
visibility enhances contact, communication, and conjunction. God in the Son
role can therefore bestow on every individual the celestial-rational loves that
make us truly human, truly like God, because more from God. God’s
appearance again in the physical world would reverse this evolution, so that
from rational consciousness the human race would slip back into sensuous
consciousness of an earlier and lower phase or level of operation.
The way science can progress now is not by obtaining
physical proof of God’s existence, but by strengthening the rational
consciousness of God through theistic science. Science can now accept God by
rational understanding, not by sensuous demonstrations. God’s infinity
and omnipresence cannot be understood sensually, but only rationally. From the
sensual perspective, omnipresence is impossible, but from the rational
perspective, it is clear and comprehensible. The Writings are a Divine
revelation given for the building up the rational consciousness of humanity.
Hence it is that God made a Second Appearance on earth to the rational mind
within the pages of the Writings of Swedenborg. Now the human race can have a
clear view of God, and science can become the True Science, theistic and
rational, through and through. Now science can lay hold on true and genuine
reality, on benign control of the environment, on human happiness, knowledge,
and mutual love, on the present and the future. This is the new age of the
Second Coming which marks the evolutionary completion of the human race, the
human mind, human consciousness. No mystery has been left about God, the universe,
life, and the afterlife. The final and last revelation has been given. Within
the literal meaning of the Writings there is hidden an infinite amount of new
knowledge for humanity. The Writings give us the methods we are to apply to
extract this vast knowledge for all time to come. Though this is not yet known
generally, a few people already know it, and I am one of them. You can be too.
Quoting from Swedenborg:
Once,
when the interior heaven was opened to me, and I was conversing with the angels
there, I was permitted to observe the following phenomena. Be it known that
although I was in heaven, I was nevertheless not out of myself, but in the
body, for heaven is within man, wherever he may be, so that when it pleases the
Lord, a man may be in heaven and yet not be withdrawn from the body. In this
way it was given me to perceive the general workings of heaven as plainly as an
object is perceived by any of the senses. (AC 3884)
True Science based on the scientific revelations in the
Writings is not divisive, sectarian, or limited by history or culture. God as a
subject of discussion is divisive only in the outward form of religion and
politics, since religion has an animated externalized life at the edge of
culture and nationalism. Divisive sectarian religion is based
on corporeal and sensuous feelings and thoughts. These are in the lowest
portion of the mind’s operation. Sectarianism is not yet fully human
because it is based on exclusion and division, while the genuine human is based
on acceptance and unity. Within all external natural religious behaviors and
beliefs, there lives an internal. This internal is the rational mind, and it
operates at the three levels mentioned above: natural-rational feelings and
thoughts, spiritual-rational feelings and thoughts, and ultimately,
celestial-rational feelings and thoughts, which is the genuine human that leads
to mutual and unity.
When you bypass external forms of religious behavior, and go
to what is within it, you find the levels of the rational mind. This is the
same mind that studies universal laws of reality, thus science. Science is a
universal explanation of all events, including religious behavior. Science is
at a higher rationality in the human mind than external religions. If external
religion looks at science, it sees nothing except something below itself. But
if science looks at religion, it sees religion and politics below itself as
cultural phenomena. What is below cannot look at what is above, for it sees
nothing, but what is above in the mind can look at what is below, and see
everything in detail. Religion cannot explain science, but science can explain
religion. Note well: atheistic science such as we have today cannot explain
religion because religion is above it in the mind. Religion is the
understanding of rational concepts like God and mutual love, while atheistic
science is so low in rationality that it cannot give a meaning for rational
concepts like God and the spiritual world. But True Science is based on Divine
revelations, therefore it is in the highest portions of the human mind called
spiritual-rational and celestial-rational. Knowledge of God based on True
Science is higher in the mind than knowledge of God based on religion. The
religious knowledge one possesses may be entirely true, yet this truth is at a
lower level than the truth of True Science.
3. Character Reformation By Means of the Threefold Word of God
Understanding the ideas in True Science, as based in the
Divine revelations of the Writings, gives us a closer position from which to
view God and our relationship to Him. This greater closeness is due to the more
interior rational understanding that is provided by Divine revelation. God is
the highest rational from whom all other rational comes from and is embedded
in. God has two infinite substances within Himself that is His very life,
namely, love and wisdom. From this Divine Love and Wisdom God creates a
universal aura called the Spiritual Sun. Infinite amounts of spiritual heat and
spiritual light emanate from this Sun. This Divine emanation goes forth from
the Spiritual Sun, and as it does, it creates distance between God and the
emanations. These distances are fixed by means of atmospheres or levels of
division and separation in the emanations. Each fixed atmosphere has particular
properties and creates specific phenomena according to these properties. As the
atmospheres multiply and create more and more distance from the Spiritual Sun,
the properties, events, and phenomena become less and less rational, more and
more physicalized or materialized. At last, in the ultimate of atmospheres
emanating from the Spiritual Sun, is the physical universe or the natural
world.
Human beings are born with dual existence. Their mind is in
the rational atmospheres called the spiritual world, while their physical body
is in the lowest atmosphere called earth or planet. Our mind, which is in the
spiritual world, is still asleep to the spiritual environment and is not receptive
to incoming spiritual phenomena. In this first phase, the mind is conscious
only of what comes from the sensory information streaming in from the physical
body. The mind is unconscious of the spiritual world that surrounds it as long
as it is tied to a physical body. When this body becomes a corpse and can no
longer transmit sensations, the mind is separated and suddenly becomes
receptive to the spiritual environment where it had been all along.
Subjectively this feels like an awakening. Hence it is said that novitiate
spirits, or new arrivals in the afterlife, appear to themselves to be awakened
from a sleep.
Since the fabric of the universe is made of the emanations
and atmospheres of the Spiritual Sun, and since the Spiritual Sun is Divine
Love and Divine Truth, therefore everything in the universe has a rational
basis. Truth is the rational substance out of which the emanations from the
Spiritual Sun are created. At the ultimate atmosphere furthest removed from the
Spiritual Sun, is the material world of atoms, electrons, protein, and
minerals. An atom is therefore a piece of truth. A physical law or number is
therefore a piece of truth. A rose, a rock, a river, a planet, the mind of a
human being, heaven and hell, all are pieces of truth. Nothing else exists
except pieces of truth from the Spiritual Sun. You can see from this the
supreme importance of the rational at its various levels. In fact the human
mind is an exact map of the spiritual world, so that all the layers of the
universe created by the emanations are exactly reproduced and imaged in the
human mind. Hence we can say that the journey from birth on earth to eternity
in heaven is a journey from the lower portions of the mind to its highest
portion. This journey is made by truth, within which is love, for truth is
nothing but the outside form of love. Love and truth are the constituent blocks
of reality.
Religion is the first step for opening the human mind and
starting the journey upward, back to God where our soul is. As you read on, you
will come across diagrams and tables that will help you to visualize the
patterned observations I make about our religious life. Religious life has an
external cultural aspect that might feel threatened by my presentation. But if
you're willing to go deeper into the foundations of your religion, you will
find mutual agreement between all of us. This is the value of theistic
science. It leaves the surface culture-based disagreements behind, and
constructs a scientific platform of agreement and pan-human understanding. You
will not have to leave your religion behind, only enrich it with inner meaning
in your own life and future.
To say that atheistic science can validate or enhance
religion is not true since atheistic science is below the rational while
religion has rational ideas from revelations. But it is accurate to say that
theistic science, or True Science, validates and enhances religion because both
are based on revelations. True Science is the most specific and advanced of the
Divine revelations ever given to humanity. The Writings of Swedenborg are this
Divine revelation called the Second Coming, which opens the new evolutionary
age of celestial-rational understanding and consciousness, the final frontier
in human creation that leaves behind ignorance and mystery.
True theistic science can also be
called “scientific dualism,” an expression that
contrasts with “scientific monism.” Atheism and monism are central
elements of nonduality, which is the philosophical perspective that all
dualities or categorical contrasts are illusions of the human mind. Nonduality
sees a unity between material and spiritual substance, between human and
Divine, between evil and good.
(See Volume 3 of A Man of the Field: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/v1ch1-nonduality.html )
Nonduality is based on the negative principle and the denial
of every duality. Atheistic science denies that there is a spiritual world,
denies that there is a God who creates and manages the details of the universe,
denies that the building blocks of the world are spiritual and
celestial—namely, love and truth. In contrast, theistic science is a
scientific dualism because it bases itself on the Divine revelations given in
the Writings, and every concept so given is a duality, never a nonduality.
Divine rational truth is presented in the form of dualities, and therefore
also, every detail of the universe. Scientific dualism is rational while monism
is pre-rational. Every human mind develops by an orderly process and monism is
the first phase of self-intelligence by which we develop our rational mind,
first the lower external rational, but later, the upper internal rational that
is of spiritual and celestial origin, hence from God’s Intelligence and
not from self. The Writings declare that scientific dualism is spiritually sane
while monism is spiritually insane. We begin our young adulthood in a state of
mind that is spiritually insane because we rely on self-intelligence or on the
intelligence of other human beings more than on God’s Intelligence given
to us in revelations. Atheistic science, being based on monism and nonduality,
is a phase of pre-rational thinking that is replaced later in development, by
rational thinking based on dualism found in the Divine scientific revelations
of the Writings.
In the dualism of True Science, God is real, and both the
natural and the spiritual worlds are real. The external natural mind gets its
data from the natural world, while the internal rational or spiritual mind gets
its data from the spiritual world. We are thus born dual citizens--our
natural mind connected to the physical body in the natural world, and our
spiritual mind within a spirit-body in the spiritual world. The natural mind
and the spiritual mind are interconnected and operate together though we are
only aware of things within our natural mind. The physical body and its natural
mind are connected to the spirit-body and its spiritual mind by the laws of correspondence.
At the death of the physical body, the spirit-body along with its rational mind
becomes conscious of itself, and we awaken in full conscious life in the
spiritual world. This process of awakening, or resuscitation, has been
described in detail by Swedenborg who was able to observe the process hundreds
of times (see especially his work titled Arcana Coelestia,
Volume 1).
There is an additional puzzle that must be cleared up before
going along with the ideas I’m presenting. One may wonder how atheistic
science could be responsible for modern civilization, which would not be
possible without the advances of science and engineering over the centuries of
evolving knowledge and industry. If atheistic science is based on a false
premise about the universe, so that its explanations are spiritually insane,
how could scientists continue to cumulate scientific discoveries and theories
able to bring about and maintain the modern world we live in? The answer from
the perspective of theistic science is that modern civilization is brought
about by God, not by the scientists. While we operate within the premises of
atheistic science, we are immersed in spiritual insanity in our lower
mind—the natural-rational level of operation. The upper portions of the
mind are not spiritually insane. This spiritual rationality is unconscious and
protected by God from being influenced by the lower natural mind built on
self-intelligence. The rationality of scientific operations and experiments is
to be attributed to the unconscious spiritual-rational mind and not to the
conscious natural-rational mind. The conscious portion is spiritually insane,
because from self-intelligence, but the unconscious portion is spiritually
sane, because from the spiritual world and God. With True Science, the
conscious natural-rational mind and the unconscious spiritual-rational mind are
realigned in harmony with each other.
You can see from many facts in our society that there is an
obvious discrepancy between the general rationality of civilization and
science, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the irrationality that is
rampant with individuals. Crime and abuse are rampant and the divorce rate is over
fifty percent. Current surveys indicate the majority of people are depressed at
least once a day, that their daily round of activities is full of negativity
and unpleasant emotions, that they are overweight, constipated, addicted to
pain killers and sex performance drugs, and beset with anxieties, hostilities,
resentment, and unfulfilled lives. Surely this is not the syndrome that goes
with rational people and rational communities. Most evidently, people are not
yet at the human rational level of operation where the peace of heaven is
sensed, where rational loves arrange things in harmonious order, and where
Divine Truth is understood and loved. The conclusion therefore must be that the
apparent rational progression of civilized societies and science, is to be
attributed entirely to God’s rationality at work within the unconscious
portions of the human mind, and nothing of it can be attributed to the
rationality of humans.
One important question must be answered here, if the
discussion is to satisfy the rational mind that reads this and reflects on it:
“If God can exert his omnipotence
to keep civilization progressing in a rational direction, as just said, what
keeps Him from exerting that same power to keep individuals rational and
positive in their daily lives, instead of the opposite?”
Consider this quote from the Writings:
CONCERNING PROVIDENCE AND
FATE.
I spoke with spirits concerning Providence, and some also were present who believed somewhat in fate; and it was shown them how the case stood. They supposed that all things were accomplished out of absolute necessity; and, thus, that the whole life was the unavoidable force of circumstance; consequently, that the Lord was bound by necessity; therefore, that there was nothing except this to keep things in existence; and that this is the Divine. But they were shown that they have entire freedom; and if freedom, then there is not necessity, because there are so many contingencies which bear man, in freedom, to opposites. This was exhibited by means of pebbles, which were so placed as to form a certain figure: then, if necessity required that one pebble should be placed in order after another, and thus that man [should arrange them] from necessity, nothing further would follow; but [it was shown] that the case is this: that the pebbles are put, now here, now there, so as to appear dispersedly; and this according to freedom; and the Lord foresees the form, namely, that in which man, from freedom, wills [to arrange his life]; but He determines for him, from other considerations, and so foresees the form, and permits him to go hither and thither, so that the moments of his life appear like scattered pebbles. But the Lord then sees whether he fills up that space between them; He sees what is lacking and where; and, then, continually, what is next in order, after a hundred or a thousand years; and so forth.) (SEM 4692)
The answer, found in the Writings, is that God does all
things necessary and loving, and withholds Himself from doing certain other
things that humans can imagine could be done. God avoids doing things which are
detrimental to our preparation for heaven. This goal is the highest in
God’s Mind. He creates each individual soul on some earth in the physical
universe, and this soul has the capacity to live in conjugial bliss increasing
daily to eternity. Conjugial bliss is what a husband and a wife feel in heaven
as they live in such perfect unity that it is unimaginable. This is the
marvelous goal, almost beyond belief, that God has with each individual. It is
now revealed to humanity that God created the physical universe to fill it with
planets, and to increase their number at an explosive rate to endless time.
Each planet is created to be the birthplace of immortal spirits, temporarily
clothed in a mortal physical body. After a few decades of preparation, the
individual’s mind is ready to abandon the physical body, to assume the
spirit-body and to continue heavenly life to eternity. God’s Divine
loving purpose is therefore to increase the population of the vast heavens from
numberless planets with spirits and angels who are capable of receiving
God’s love and truth in purity and innocence. What an amazing revelation!
It is full of warmth and love, wisdom and power. How reassuring it is to find
out that God is so close and so involved in the minutest detail of our day, of
our thinking and reasoning, and of our loves and attractions. Moment by moment
God not only knows about these micro-details of every human being, but
participates in a determinative way, interferes with its course and progress,
keeping things from being remembered while bringing other things to the fore,
and so on. God is more intimate with each of us than any two beings can be,
even soul mates in heaven.
It is therefore puzzling to rational reflection why God
doesn’t intervene to get rid of the plagues of evil and falsity that has
gotten hold of the fallen human psyche. Generation after generation these evils
and falsities are transmitted by heredity and by culture. The Writings explain
that God ceaselessly strives to bend the thinking of the human race, to guide
people’s involvements with good things, and to withhold them from much
worse evil than they already are in. God already does everything that is
Divinely possible. So there is only rational conclusion: human beings have been
given by God the capacity to resist Him. Humans have zero power, and whatever
they do is powered entirely by a cooperating God who knows what the individual
is attempting to do and supplies the power in the background. This is a
necessary conclusion if you want to remain rational. The assertion “God
is omnipotent” has this necessary meaning. “Omni” means all,
and “omnipotent” means all power. Logic tells you therefore that we
have zero power, or that nature has zero power, etc. All power is God’s
power and ceases instantly when God ceases to apply that power, whether it is
the power of a whirling electron in an atom, the power of a heartbeat, or the
power of the mind to have a rational thought or to remember some information.
God also gives us the power to resist Him, to oppose Him, to turn His truth
into its opposite falsity, and to adulterate His good into its opposite evil.
The Writings explain that God gives us the power to deny and reject Him in order to give us the power to acknowledge Him and to love Him.
This is a rational idea that needs to be thought through
carefully and studied for full understanding. But you can already see no doubt
that these two things must go together. If we are given the power to
acknowledge God we must also have the power to deny God. To acknowledge God
means that we do so voluntarily, as of self and in complete freedom. Freedom
means that we can choose either way, or else it is not freedom. The nature of
love is such that it only exists in freedom. Not so hatred, which exists in
slavishness or spiritual slavery, also called in the Writings “infernal
freedom,” such as devils have in hell. But good spirits and angels have
freedom to love God and acknowledge Him, His Divine Truth, His omnipotence in
their lives. Swedenborg talked to many angels in their heavens and they
declared to him that their greatest experience of freedom is when they recall
that they have zero power and the Lord has all power in their willing,
thinking, and doing moment by moment. And so the inhabitants of heaven have no
worries or negative emotions of any kind ever, because they live in “the
peace of truth,” in the “current of Divine Providence,” in
which moment by moment their thoughts and feelings are formed by the
Lord’s Proprium or Persona, whom they love with the greatest intensity.
Since the heavens are formed by love and truth from the
Lord, the hells are formed by people who destroy the love that flows in from
God and falsify the truth that also flows in. Therefore every heaven has a
counterpart hell in which the same loves and truths that forms that particular,
are adulterated and falsified to form that particular hell. While we are on
earth our mind is an image of heaven and hell, containing both, so that we have
the freedom of choice at every moment to follow heaven or to follow hell. There
is no other choice that God allows. It is obvious that today in our society
people choose hell over heaven the majority of time. God cannot prevent this
and still maintain spiritual freedom in every person. Therefore God creates for
every individual all sorts of opportunities to reverse the trend in oneself, to
reject hellish things and to choose heavenly things. This is called
regeneration or character reformation. The Threefold Word has been given by God
to insure than humans have the Divine Truth to choose in their lives. This
Divine Truth has been revealed in infinite plenitude in the Threefold Word,
hidden in its exterior meanings but available for extraction by means of the
methods prescribed in the Writings.
Correspondences
have all force, so that what is done on earth according to correspondences has
power in heaven; for correspondences are from the Divine. Those who are in the
good of love and of faith are in correspondences, and the Divine effects all
things with them... All miracles in the Word were effected through correspondences.
The Word is so written that every minute thing therein corresponds to the
things in heaven; hence the Word has Divine force, and conjoins heaven and
earth. (AC 8615)
Therefore
in order to remove all doubt as to such being the character of the Word, the
Lord has revealed to me the Word's internal sense. In its essence this sense is
spiritual, and in relation to the external sense, which is natural, is as soul
is to body. This sense is the spirit which gives life to the letter; it can
therefore bear witness to the divinity and holiness of the Word, and convince
even the natural man, if he is willing to be convinced. (SS 4)
My presentation relies on three sets of scientific
revelations: the Old Testament (Hebrew Word), the New Testament (Greek Word),
and the Third Testament (Latin Word), which refers to the Writings of
Swedenborg. Together, the Three Testaments are called the Threefold Word, and
constitute a direct open line of communication between God and the individual
who is reading the Word with the acknowledgement and belief that it is the Word
of God given by means of human minds as intermediaries. Such were the prophets
of Israel, the Gospel writers, and Swedenborg. The Hebrew Word was a revelation
for the natural-corporeal mind and is written at that level of reception,
relying on physical demonstrations of God’s presence. The Greek Word was
a revelation for the natural-sensuous mind, relying on the sensuous existence
of the Incarnation. The Latin Word is a revelation for the natural-rational
mind, relying on the modern scientific level of thinking. What is most
unexpected and almost incredible to the natural mind, is what the Writings
reveal about the Old and New Testaments.
This is the revelation that the literal sentences of
the Old and New Testaments are written in a secret code not known to the
writers themselves who had their attention focused the historical and
descriptive account they were giving, which was interpreted by commentators as
visionary and poetic language, by no means always clear, and containing strange
metaphors and seeming repetitions and exaggerations, especially in the Old
Testament. What is marvelous is that Swedenborg goes through a verse by verse
and word by word analysis of the Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations,
along with thousands of passages from the rest of the Bible. This word by word
and phrase by phrase analysis proves beyond the shadow of any doubt, that the
Threefold Word is written in a Divine language that no other human writings
compare to. The literal meaning of the Threefold Word can be decoded by
applying the knowledge of correspondences. This translation changes the message
from the literal-historical to the spiritual-rational. The spiritual-rational
meaning contained within the literal meaning can be understood only at the
spiritual-rational level of thinking (zone 6 and above). Examples will be given
in what follows. If you read Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, you will have a full knowledge of these
correspondences and of the spiritual topics that the Word addresses and teaches
in its “internal sense” (or “spiritual sense”).
Section 19.8 below presents
several passages from the Writings relevant to correspondences.
Note: The Writings are available online along with
collateral books at this Web address:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/abbrev.html
When these facts become known to scientists and scholars
generally, it is bound to be seen as a proof of God’s direct intervention
in the smallest details of individuals and nations. The historical events,
names, places, objects, and numbers discussed in the Word were written
independently by dozens of authors over hundreds of years who had no idea of
the fact that they were writing in a code. Every historical event and detail
described in the Bible is accurate, according to the Writings, and yet it is
not the reason the details have been recorded. Only those details are recorded
that add up to a coherent sequence of the spiritual-rational things being
discussed in the underlying or inner sense of every verse and chapter. For
instance, when details of the journeyings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph
are decoded through the knowledge of correspondences, what emerges is a
scientific treatise on the human mind, how it must go through stages of
development from the corporeal-sensuous level, to the natural-rational level,
and at last to the spiritual-rational and celestial-rational levels. The
details of the adventures of the patriarchs and other characters mentioned, add
up to an internal spiritual series that is rational and descriptive of the
human mind, of our relation to God, of heaven and hell, of angels and devils,
of love and wisdom, good and truth. These are the topics of the Word when the
literal is decoded.
Anyone
who does not know that the Word has an internal sense which is not visible in
the letter will be utterly astonished by the idea that spiritual realities too
are meant by the numbers used in the Word. The specific reason for his
astonishment is his inability to use numbers to give shape to any spiritual
idea, when yet the spiritual ideas known to angels present themselves as
numbers, see AC 5265. The identity of those ideas or spiritual realities to
which numbers correspond can, it is true, be known; but the origin of such
correspondence remains hidden, such as the origin of the correspondence of 'twelve'
to all aspects of faith, the correspondence of 'seven' to things that are holy,
as well as that of 'ten' and also 'five' to forms of good and truth stored up
by the Lord within the interior man, and so on. Even so, it is enough if people
know simply that such a correspondence does exist and that by virtue of that
correspondence each number used in the Word denotes something present in the
spiritual world, consequently that what is Divine has been inspired into them
and so lies concealed within them. (AC 5291)
And equally amazing is one more detail. The correspondences
between the literal meaning of the Word and its coded inner spiritual meaning,
are not arbitrary like some human code but generic to reality. Correspondences
reflect the universal laws that cause spiritual and natural events to occur in
synchronous relation to each other. Every natural event or quality exists by
means of a corresponding spiritual event or quality. Neither can exist alone.
For instance, a horse in the Word is a coded term for intelligence. Different
types of horses are mentioned, as well as donkeys, assess, camels, and other
animals that carry riders. Each type of horse refers to some aspect of human
intelligence and the level of thinking operations in the human mind. Further,
Swedenborg observed this thousands of times, that whenever he was discussing
human intelligence with someone in the spiritual world, horses of various types
appeared in the environment. Similarly with other correspondences that decode
the Word. When he was talking to evil spirits, the environment turned into
deserts or swamps, and noxious animals could be seen like snakes, dragons, and
scorpions, while foul smells reached his nose. In other words, there is close
connection between the secret code of the Word and the external phenomena that
are routinely observed in the spiritual world. Quoting Swedenborg:
In
hell every lust of evil when visually represented appears like a noxious
creature, as a dragon, or a cockatrice, or a viper, or a bird of night, or an
owl, and so on; and similarly do the lusts of evil appear in a wicked man when
he is viewed by angels.
All
these forms of lusts must be changed one by one; and the man himself, who with
respect to his spirit appears as a human monster or devil, must be changed to
become like a beautiful angel; and every lust of evil must be changed to appear
like a lamb, or a sheep, or a pigeon, or a turtle dove, as the affections of
good in the angels appear in heaven when visually represented; and to change a
dragon into a lamb, a cockatrice into a sheep, and an owl into a dove can only
be effected step by step, by rooting out evil from its very seed and implanting
good seed in its stead. (DP 296)
The natural meaning of the Word and its corresponding
spiritual meaning show exactly the same relation as there is between the
spiritual world and the natural. There is therefore objective evidence that the
knowledge of correspondences unveiled in the Writings are actual laws of
interconnection between the spiritual and the natural. Quoting Swedenborg:
A
knowledge of degrees is like a key for opening the causes of things, and for
entering into them. Without that knowledge, scarcely anything of cause can be
known. For without it, the objects and subjects of both worlds appear so simple
as though there were nothing in them beyond that which meets the eye, when yet
the things that appear are as one to thousands, indeed, to myriads, compared
with the things which lie hidden within. The interiors which do not lie open
can by no means be disclosed except by a knowledge of degrees. (DLW 184)
Miracles
have not been done from causes sought out from nature ... Miracles related in
the Word were done by means of influx from that prior world into this posterior
one, ... by means of bringing such things as are in the spiritual world, into
corresponding things in the natural world, so that the things which come forth
actually in the spiritual world are actually brought into such things in the
natural world as correspond. (Invitation 60)
Correspondences
have all power ... what is done on earth according to correspondence, avails in
heaven, because they are from the Divine. All miracles recorded in the Word
were done by means of correspondences. (AC 8615.3)
There
is a correspondence of sensuous with natural things, a correspondence of
natural with spiritual things, a correspondence of spiritual with celestial
things, and finally a correspondence of celestial things with the Divine of the
Lord; thus there is a succession of correspondences from the Divine down to the
ultimate natural.
[2]
But as an idea of the nature of correspondences can with difficulty be formed
by those who have never thought about them before, it may be well to say a few
words on the subject. It is known from philosophy that the end is the first of
the cause, and that the cause is the first of the effect. That the end, the
cause, and the effect may follow in order, and act as a one, it is needful that
the effect should correspond to the cause, and the cause to the end. But still
the end does not appear as the cause, nor the cause as the effect; for in order
that the end may produce the cause, it must take to itself administrant means
from the region where the cause is, by which means the end may produce the
cause; and in order that the cause may produce the effect, it also must take to
itself administrant means from the region where the effect is, by which means
the cause may produce the effect. These administrant means are what correspond;
and because they correspond, the end can be in the cause and can actuate the
cause, and the cause can be in the effect and can actuate the effect;
consequently the end through the cause can actuate the effect. It is otherwise
when there is no correspondence; for then the end has no cause in which it may
be, still less an effect in which it may be, but is changed and varied in the
cause, and finally in the effect, according to the form made by the
administrant means. (AC 5131)
From all this, once you spend the effort of studying it, you
gain a complete rational understanding of reality, the connection between the
spiritual and the natural, the Laws of Divine Providence by which the universe
is managed, and the regeneration and evolution of the mind, the spirit-body,
and eternity.
If you are still thinking, “But where is the
proof?” you need to continue reading this book and it will become clear
to you that no other explanation can be given for the facts presented, namely,
that the code of correspondences in which the Threefold Word was written is the
same code by which natural phenomena on the planet are effects produced by
spiritual causes. The cause-effect relation in the universe follows the same
code as that which relates the natural meaning of the Threefold Word to its
spiritual meaning. And finally, that Swedenborg visually observed the natural
appearances as effects produced by spiritual loves as causes (e.g., evil and
hostile intentions of a spirit in the world of spirits, produce or project an
environmental appearance of caves, deserts, and noxious animals and stenches).
4. The Varieties of Religion Under One Divine Human Person
Rational spirituality tends away from religious sectarianism, prejudice, or irreverence for other religions who have their own form of Sacred Scripture, handed down from their ancestors. The rational approach of True Science insures that sectarianism and fundamentalism are understood in terms of their mental mechanism in relation to spirituality and salvation. Most readers will not be familiar with all Three Testaments of the Threefold Word, and some may not be familiar with any. This is not a necessary stumbling block to acquiring knowledge from True Science. Just translate the ethnic names like Moses, David, Jehovah, Jesus, Adam, Jacob, Jerusalem, and so forth, to your own historical events. These names are local names for global concepts. All people, nations, or races each have their own religious history, and their own prophets and leaders. They all have a name for God. These are external names. Internally, there is one true name that is revealed to all at some point.
The Threefold Word was given for all of humanity and will last endlessly in the natural world. To people in the modern age, the literal of the Old and New Testaments appear sectarian and exclusionary rather than universal and inclusive like the Writings. But this is only an external, historical appearance. When the literal meaning of the Three Testaments is decoded, what is left is the spiritual sense, and this sense is devoid of historical names, places, and nations. These names and events are given not for their own sake but for the sake of their representative meaning in relation to correspondences. The referents that are signified by these representative names and events – what are they?
They are mental states of the human mind being regenerated. Every human being must be regenerated to enter heaven. Therefore the inner spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word has been given by God to assist us in regeneration. Regeneration is a spiritual medical process performed by God on every human being. God’s performance is limited by our willing cooperation expressed as willingness to struggle as-of self in temptations. There is no other way for any human being born on this planet to reach heaven but by this process of regeneration. This is a question of spiritual medics, not theology or religion. True Science has now been given to humankind which details this crucial process of spiritual medics in regeneration. These crucial scientific revelations clearly appear in the Threefold Word when one applies the Laws of Correspondences to the words and concepts in which the Three Testaments are composed. When this process of extraction or “scrutation” is applied, the names of people and places, and the natural events in the narrations, all disappear in consciousness, and what is perceived is the mental state that the representatives designate.
This is how the inhabitants of the heavens perceive the Threefold Word when they read it there. They see nothing of the natural things being mentioned such as names, places, numbers, battles, time, possessions, weddings, garments, floods, animals, harvesting, journeying, eating, sleeping, dying, being born, being sick, getting old, etc. These details about the natural things in the Threefold Word are not seen by spiritual eyes. Instead, they see the “representatives, significatives, and correspondences” that these natural things have within them, in their spiritual plane or degree. This spiritual plane contains only what is Divine since the inmost framework of every physical object is the spiritual Sun, as already discussed.
There exists a crucial difference between the literal meaning of the Threefold Word and its spiritual meaning. The literal meaning appears culture-bound and time-bound rather than universal and all inclusive. This is why the literal meaning of the Threefold Word is claimed by three different incompatible religions – the Old Testament by Judaism, the New Testament by Christianity, and the Writings by the New Church or New Christianity. But the spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word does not have this external appearance tied to cultures and times. The spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word is pan-human, on this earth, on the other earths, and in the heavens of all the humanity from the distant galaxies. The societies of the heavens do not have religion as part of their identity. But the have True Science based on their reading of the Threefold Word in its inner spiritual meaning. The Threefold Word is an instrument of consciousness for all humanity because, in its inner spiritual meaning, it is Divine Truth Itself in infinite and endless variety prepared from creation to be the vehicle of rational spirituality upon which the human mind is carried to endless and eternally increasing joy.
Clearly then, the inner spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word is for all humanity, and when it is acknowledged and recognized as the revelations of True Science, sectarianism of religi