A Guide to Spiritual Self-examination

Please note that you can find explanations for many concepts mentioned here by clicking on the word links in the text (they are always underlined text). These linked documents have many quotations from Swedenborg's Writings that are relevant to these concepts. We recommend that you read through the essay once, then go back and click on the links, or else it will be difficult to keep track of the main argument.

Religious Psychology is not at all the same as the Psychology of Religion. The latter is a well established academic program and a long standing Division of the American Psychological Association. It is the study of religion from the point of view of monism, which is part of the materialistic science that dominated the twentieth century. In contrast, religious psychology is the study of human development from the perspective of dualist science, as exemplified in the Writings of Swedenborg (1688-1772). Our argument for dualism in science are presented in these articles:

A science of religious psychology must be universal and cannot be pre-empted by any sectarian belief system or doctrine. Science is the product of pan-human logic and rationality as we attempt to make sense of reality. There is only one reality, one logic, one rationality, namely truth or trues, which are universal, absolute, uncreate, eternal, and Divine. Religious psychology has two basic premises. One is dualism; the other is revelation. Dualism in science is the premise that there are two universes, one natural, the other spiritual. We are dual citizens, since our physical body is material, natural, and temporal, while the mind or self, is substantive, spiritual, and immortal. The relation or contrast between material and substantive was known and accepted by all the major Western philosophers and scientists up to the twentieth century, when the substantive was no longer seen as the basis for the material. This gave rise to a materialistic science that denies the possibility, the relevance, the reality and the rationality of God, revelation, and the spiritual world. Dualism in science restores the knowledge and perspective that science has evolved for thousands of years, and restores the imbalance and excesses of ideological materialism. In our view, dualism in science and religious psychology will prevail in the next millennium as it gradually replaces the old paradigm of anti-theistic ideological materialism.

This essay is an attempt to translate the ideas in Swedenborg's Writings into the language of modern science and psychology. To the extent that we succeed, the effort should make it easier for others to see how a positive science can view their cherished religious certainties: God, the Word, the Lord, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Messiah, evil, sin, regeneration, Holy Communion, Heaven, hell, eternal life. It is awkward, perhaps even schizoid, for all of us to be educated in a science that denies these realities. Church is for Sunday, and science is for weekdays, has been a denigrating alternative we are supposed to accept and be quiet about. Praying is superstition, according to Skinner, and those who are the experts in the psychology of religion look for God, like Freud, Jung, Sartre, and Karl Marx, in the depths of the human psyche rather than in the idea of the Creator for the universe. We hope to show that science has the intellectual tools for dualism and religious psychology. Sin is real. Heaven is real. Hell is real. Regeneration is real. Love is real. Wisdom is real. Baptism is real. Praying is real. Revelation is real. And so on.

But beyond asserting their reality, our task is to show how they can have empirical meaning in a scientific system. But this no one can do without the knowledge given in revelation since the external natural senses cannot access the requisite data. So we must first show the existence of the inner senses that do have access to the relevant data through revelation, but not without it. This inner sense is the true human rational that can see spiritual reality and fact. This interior rational is far above the external rational that is built up through the external senses. This interior rational can be developed until it becomes so commonplace that one wonders how it used to be before its opening to consciousness. This we have achieved through the application of Swedenborg's Writings to our daily moment by moment life transactions. This achievement does not make us superior or special, but the vision it affords us is superior and special, and it never fails us. Anyone can do what we have, and we hope that this record of our journey, painstakingly kept track of and digested, will make it useful to your journey. We could not have done this without our daily study of the Writings of Swedenborg.

The second premise of revelation is that spiritual knowledge, that is, knowledge about the spiritual world of the mind, cannot be obtained directly by the natural senses, and therefore the mechanism of revelation exists. A modern and favorable examination of this issue in relation to Swedenborg's access to revelation, may be found in Christen Blom Dahl's book The Third Source: Swedenborg: A Physical & Metaphysical Revelation (available here full text). Also of relevance to the issue of revelation and Swedenborg's scientific empiricism and behaviorism, is the article quoted above: Overcoming Objections.

Religious psychology is non-sectarian, universal, and dualist. One issue that may trouble some is reflected in this question: How can you have a religious psychology that is scientific when each religion claims to have its own God and its own revelation, while denying the God and the revelation of other religions? This crucial issue is dealt with in the first section specifically, and throughout the essay. Your comments are welcome.

Religious psychology is the study of how the Church grows within us. The Church is the operation itself of religion. All religions operate through a church. There are many external churches but only one internal Church. External churches are cultural institutions, hence they are variegated and contrastive. External churches on this earth are related by history and ideology (or theology) . Every external church operates through Sacred Writings from which religious doctrines are drawn as guides to religious practices, traditions, laws, norms, rituals, worship, and commandments of living.

Because the external churches bicker among each other they give an appearance of disagreement, antagonism, enmity, and strife. The Writings they hold as sacred vary and the history of the world they give (or their eschatology) often contradict each other. Many believers hold that their version only is correct and genuine and doubt the salvation of others. This external appearance of varieties of religions and their doctrinaire contradictions vanishes in the internal operation of the Church within every person on this earth. The inner Church is universal and absolute though it grows and develops in stages within each person. All human beings belong to the internal Church and there are no human beings who are devoid of it irrespective of their beliefs or awareness. Individuals of all denominations and individuals who deny any religious affiliation all belong to the inner Church by Divine order. The inner Church grows within each person under the careful and constant supervision of God. It is an organic relationship of the spirit of each person. Religious psychology explores this universal inner Church.

There are three stages of growth of the Church within each person. We may refer to them in order as first, the Old Church state of mind, second, the New Church state of mind, and third, the Ultimate Church state of mind. The three Churches develop within us in that order. The Old Church is the basis and containant of the internal Church upon which the other two rest. The Old Church is born within each child when the child is told about God, sin, and the life after death. The New Church is added when the individual returns to religious life as an adult. This happens because adolescence and early maturity turns off the operation of the Church within us. When we return to religious life as an adult we do so from our own reason and free will, from rational decision and personal confirmation of the importance of God in our life. While the Old Church state of mind appears to us severe and restrictive in its Commandments, the New Church state of mind is experienced with positive affections and freedom; its New Commandment is more rational and inviting, more to our liking and philosophical inclinations. We fear the Old Church while we love the New Church.

After the New Church state of mind is established within us on top of the Old Church, the Third Church then develops and grows on top of the other two. This is the crown of all Churches and brings wisdom. This happens in maturity and old age.

To grasp these ideas better we may illustrate them by reviewing the historical development of the Judeo-Christian religion. The Jewish or Israelitish Church was established around 3,500 B.C. with the life of Abraham in Asia Minor. Its sacred Writings are known as the Old Testament and are made up of books written by prophets from about 1,500 B.C. to about 400 B.C. The Christian Church was established in the first century A.D. and is based on Sacred Writings called the New Testament.

This second Testament was added on top of the Old Testament and the two together make up the Holy Bible of the Christian Church. In the eighteenth century A.D. the Church of the New Jerusalem, or New Church, came into existence. Its Sacred Writings are the Old Testament and the New Testament in conjunction with the theological Writings of Swedenborg (1688-1772), the Swedish revelator. Around the middle of the twentieth century A.D. the Lord's New Church which is Nova Hierosolyma came into existence. This third Christian church added the Writings of Swedenborg to the Old and New Testaments considering them as the Third Testament. The Three Testaments acknowledge each other in series: the New Testament quotes and upholds the Old Testament; the Third Testament quotes and upholds the Old and New Testaments.

This relationship of the Three Testaments may not appear as clearly in all religious Writings. Still, since the Sacred Writings always deal with regeneration, the members of all religions undergo the three stages represented by the Three Testaments. This is because the inner Church is universal and not dependent upon the details of the external cultural churches. Without this proviso people would be prevented from being regenerated in all churches but one, a situation clearly not allowable by a fair and universal God. This book will appeal to those of any religion who are interested in knowing about the growth of the three Churches within themselves. The following diagram summarizes what has been presented:

We may inquire as to what determines the growth of the Church within us. We will discuss the answer in terms of what may be called confirmation theory, which is the idea that the successive Churches are established within us when we confirm the trues of religion in our life. Thus, after the doctrines drawn from the Old Testament state of mind are confirmed in our life, the spiritual concepts of the New Testament state present themselves to our mind; then, when we succeed in confirming these doctrines, the spiritual concepts of the Third Testament state present themselves to the mind. When trues of the Third Testament state can be confirmed in our life, the Church within us is in its completed stage, though not complete in that ultimate stage. Indeed, the completion of the ultimate Church within us proceeds to eternity. In this third state we come into the image and likeness of God, an eternal and endless progression. This is the Angelic state of the mind.

We need to examine how doctrines drawn from the Three Testaments are confirmed in our life. This may be illustrated by considering the successive doctrines of the Three Testaments. The chief doctrine of the Old Testament is that God reveals Himself to us as a Human Divine Person Who created us and Who requires us to obey His Commandments under penalty of death and all sorts of inescapable punishments. His Divine omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are absolute, infinite, and incomprehensible to us. As children we accept this doctrine with innocence and perfect faith. The Old Church then grows within us and produces thoughts, intentions, and feelings that harmonize with this doctrine. For instance, though we rather lie, steal, and commit adultery we strive not to do these things out of fear of God and a hope of reward. When we mess up and violate these Commandments, we feel guilty and uneasy; our happiness vanishes. But as soon as we repent and sincerely resolve not to continue in our sin, we can be happy again. This is the operation of the Old Church within us. Our living conscience, built up by the Old Church within us, is the confirmation in our life of the doctrine of the Old Testament.

As this operation is well established within us we come to the doctrine of the New Testament which is that God is present with each individual in an intimate relation and Personally labors to bring us to eternal happiness and fruition in His Kingdom of the afterlife. This New doctrine is more difficult to confirm in our life than the Old doctrine and requires many years to be completed. For example, whereas the Old Testament requires us to love our neighbor, the New Testament commands that we love our enemy as well. Or, while the Old Testament commands us to not commit adultery, the New Testament informs us that even the mental enjoyment of unchaste thoughts and emotions is a damnable sin, if confirmed. However, as we strive to live according to this New doctrine we find that we begin to think and feel more purely towards others. What seemed impossible before now is accomplished on a regular or routine basis. We discover that we can love the good part of our enemy, and we find that we no longer enjoy thoughts of revenge or emotions that are unchaste, but find them repulsive and aversive. We have then confirmed the doctrine of the New Testament in our life.

We then come to the doctrine of the Third Testament which says that God is the Divine Human Who alone is alive within us. This is even more difficult to confirm in our life and takes all of eternity. The reason this third doctrine is so difficult to confirm is that it takes away our selfhood. With the New Testament doctrine we are still partly in charge of our lives though we depend on God for victory and success in overcoming the selfish nature we are born with. But with the Third Testament doctrine we have totally lost our selfhood: we are not in charge of ourselves any more; in fact we are dead, we have never had life, and never will have. We are merely a vessel for God's Life within us. This is the most difficult doctrine to confirm in our life since it is difficult for us to rid ourselves of the delusional appearance that we have life of our own. We appear to think, and feel, and decide; it looks to us that God can influence us rather than being us. Yet the Third Testament informs us that our thoughts are not our thoughts but the thoughts of spirits with us, and the thoughts of spirits are not their thoughts but the reception of God's thoughts. Individual vessels receive God's thoughts, intentions, and feelings in accordance with the state of the Church in their mind or spirit, hence there is an appearance of individual variety or personality. But this variety is due to the variation in vessels as God Himself is One, Unchanging and Absolute.

It may seem at first that the doctrine of the Third Testament is abstract and impossible to confirm in one's life. Yet as we strive to observe our inner life through the study and application of the Third Testament, we begin to see how it is true. Our thoughts and feelings are not our own. They are inspired into us. They enter by an inner route from the soul and spirit and come out into our mind's awareness where we can see them. Our life is as-if our own. In this realization we suddenly feel very close to God, the Divine Human. We see that all along there was no other life but His Life. God has become the Divine Human, the only Human Who is the Very Human Itself pulsating in us. We are human vessels to His Divine Human Life. This realization becomes love into God from God, and leads to all true wisdom and blessedness.

Religious psychology attempts to uncover these steps of the growth of the Church within us. It is a discipline of study based on the successive doctrines of the Three Testaments in our mind. This book will appeal to those who want to reach in this life on earth the state of blessedness and wisdom which is promised through the Third Testament. We may gain a better comprehension of the development of the Church within us by reviewing some details of the developmental steps in the historical (external) churches.

After the Fall of the human race on this earth the process of being regenerated by the Lord evolved in three successive phases or epochs. The history of the external church is the same as the history of the internal Church within each individual. By reviewing the epochs of the external church we gain a view of the three phases of our own regeneration. The interior Church within each of us is built up by the Lord in three phases, that is in three successive degrees. The interior sense of the successive historical churches is the representation of the successive stages of evolution of the inner Church within us. This relation is pictured in the following table:

The upper part of the table reviews some features of the history of the external church since the spiritual Fall of the human race on this earth. The bottom part views the corresponding interior sense of this history. By studying and meditating upon the relation between these two, many additional entries or illustrations might be given.

We may examine this correspondence by considering first the progression of the periods of the church. Insight into the Old Church may be gained through a review of the Judeo-Christian commentaries to the Holy Bible. In this view, the Old Testament and the New Testament present the literal sense of the Word, and in this sense the God of the Old Testament is invisible and incomprehensible. In order to have contact with people on earth this unreachable God is transformed in the external sense of the Word into a Divine Personality called by various Names: Jehovah, I AM, Heavenly Father, the Most High, King of Kings, and many others. The character of this Divine Personality is not the character of God since this is impossible for people to understand. The character of this Divine Personality is only a gross and imperfect appearance. It is human in its nature since Jehovah in the Old Testament talks as a human does about His anger, His frustration, His gladness, His changing His mind, and so on. So we may refer to the Old Testament God as the God in human character, that is, as the Human Divine.

The Human Divine, called by the Name of Jehovah, is not God per Se, but God as initially presentable to humans who are in the state of the Fall. The child is in such a state when first instructed about God, sin, and the afterlife. The modern scientists are in this state when they separate their science from religion. The philosophers and secular humanists are in this state when they acknowledge the existence of God but insist that humans are to work out their own destiny. The Jews are in this state as they deny the Coming of the Messiah. The Christians are in this state as they pray to the Father in the Name of His Son.

In this state of the Old Church, worshippers address an invisible God out of fear. Though they believe that God is infinitely merciful, yet they also ascribe to Him the role of Judge, and Punisher. Their image of God is mixed. They accept contradictions as Divine paradoxes that will remain forever incomprehensible to the human mind. Faith is mystical and blind, not rational and crystal clear.

There are many varieties within this Old Church mentality. For example, the New Testament divides Christian from Jew. To the Jew, God remains distant and incomprehensible and He leaves us to fend for ourselves as best we can. To the Christian, God is incomprehensible in one way but comprehensible in another way. In effect, God becomes two Divine Persons (or three Divine Persons). The idea of One God Who is Two (or Three) Persons is not an idea that can be rationally grasped. Therefore this is a blind faith, not rational.

This then is the first period of the external church and the first degree of the internal Church. The second period called the New Church was born historically (that is, externally), when people became capable of gaining a rational understanding of the New Testament in relation to the Old Testament. This occurred in the eighteenth century when some Christians began to read the Third Testament, that is, the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. In this second phase, the doctrines of the Church explain and clarify the relation between the invisible and visible God. In this state, called the New Church, the One-God-in-Two-Persons (or in Three Persons) is seen to be an irrational formula. There is no prayer or worship offered to "the Father in the Name of the Son." Rather, the Son is the visible Heavenly Father, Who is invisible as He is in Himself. He therefore has to present Himself in a visible form called the Son of God. This is not meant in the sense of a biological offspring, but a spiritual manifestation. There are thus not two Divine Persons (or Three Persons), but only One Person. And this One Person, called the Father in His invisible state, makes Himself visible as the Son. The Father and the Son are One Person in two states, one invisible as He is in Himself, and the other visible, as the Son. The Father made Himself visible as the Son by the process of Incarnation. There is not a blind faith in this but a rational one.

When we have the New Church within us, our sinful nature can at last be conquered. In this New Church state within us we proceed into mature life with a rational character and conscience by which we can learn to hate our own nature and love the Divine Truth. At last this exalted human-rational frees us from the bondage of sin. Yet the transformation is not complete. Again and again we fail in our attempt to banish selfish thoughts and wicked feelings. The ideal of purity still escapes us and we continue to suffer from anger, impatience, prejudice, harshness, and guilt. It appears to us in this state that as long as we live in this sinful body and world, we are not going to taste of the paradise of Eden. Conjugial love becomes an ideal for the future life.

However this is only an appearance to the rational self which still holds on to the actuality of self-life though it recognizes in theory that the self has no true life of its own. But when we are ultimately willing to step up to the bullock, and slay it, we eradicate the natural remnant of our former life of the flesh. Thus we enter into the Third and Ultimate Church within us. We are now willing to call the Writings by a new Name; they become the Works of the Third Testament. Now the visible Divine Human enters into intimate relations with our daily transactions. This is the crown of the inner Church. It is the true activity of regeneration that begins on this earth and continues to eternity. It is the marriage feast to which we are invited by the Lord Who clothes us in sumptuous garments fit for angelic life on earth.

The three external churches now exist on earth. Every individual irrespective of the external church one belongs to must needs undergo the steps of the Three Churches within. Whether we are born Christian, Jew, Moslem, Buddhist, agnostic, or New Church, we still must undergo the same development of the inner Church in its three successive degrees. At some point in adulthood we are reborn from the Old Church within us into the New Church, and after that we are initiated by the Lord into the Third or Ultimate Church. Throughout this process the individual may retain membership in the external church of the family. Life circumstances may seem to determine whether we also change external churches as the inner Church develops but it is clear that all external churches will have members who are at different stages of development with regards to the inner Church. Our inner state may not be visible to others but to ourselves the change is always visible. An individual who is in the third degree of life in the inner Church may worship together with co-religionists who are in the second and in the first degree without necessary strife or disharmony. Of course the actual experience of their communal worship is going to be very different depending on their different inner states. But at the external level there need be no antagonism between them.

The transformation from the New Church to the Ultimate Church occurs when we have applied sufficiently the Divine Truth we come to love in the New Church state of mind. We apply the Divine Truth to our daily life, in our transactions with others, and see it confirmed there. This happens within our efforts at repentance during religious self-inspection. In this state we begin to perceive the interior sense of the Third Testament. This sense is mirrored in our inner life, our approval or disapproval of the transactions we are given to perform by the Lord. After death we can see this interior sense mirrored in our external environment as well, as our Heaven brings forth the fruits of our regeneration.

In the state of the Old Church within us we are sinful and evil in our transactions but we do not perceive this. To ourselves in that state we appear good when we act out of obedience to the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament or to the dictates of our conscience. When we act badly in this state we recognize our sinfulness, but if we act well out of conscience we are convinced that we are good. It is a delusional state since our acting well is not from the Lord but from ourselves, and is meritorious. In this state of the Old Church within us God necessarily appears as distant, invisible, and severe. Without a punishing omnipotent and omniscient God, whether Jehovah, Allah, or Buddha-Karma, the individual degenerates into libertinage, cruelty, and irrationality. In this state the individual recognizes One God in Two or more Divine Persons. When God became flesh, the Christians and Jews insisted on Two Divine Persons in the "Godhead"; this made them feel secure, sane, and happy. The Lord's Jewish apostles in the world had to see Him as the Son of God even though they were compelled by external miracles to recognize that the Father and the Son were equal in Divinity, though not yet in their mind, One in Personhood.

But so that our conscience may evolve from fear to reason, this Old Church state within us is succeeded by a New Church state in which God is restored to the status of One Divine Person. The Son is now the external, visible life of the Father. God is One and He loves us: His external (visible to us) part is called the Son and His internal part (not visible to us) is called the Father. In this New Church state within us the miracles and parables of the New Testament are comprehended in their interior sense through the doctrines drawn from the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. However, in this second phase of our Church development, only the literal sense of the Writings are perceived, hence acknowledged. The interior sense is not perceived, hence it is denied or doubted.

But when we enter the Third Church within us we acknowledge-ledge the interior sense of the Writings and call them the Third Testament because we can perceive it. Though we knew from before that the Lord is the visible Divine Human we did not perceive this directly but accepted it on faith. Now in the ultimate Church within us we perceive the interior sense of this Name. We see it in ourselves, in our daily transactions where this Name dwells in a living and immediate way. In this state we worship the visible Divine Human from love; that is, we are given to have love into Him from Him. A little later in this text, we will discuss the practical details of how we can confirm the Divine Human in our daily living choices and acts of conscience that we bring to our thoughts, feelings, and actions, moment by moment through every day, and without letup.

Those who study the Writings of Swedenborg as the Word of the Lord sense strongly the attraction in the ideal of Conjugial Love given there. This attraction comes from their love of knowledge and truth. This is the affection of the rational self. Our rational self experiences great inner delight when we apprehend the meaning of a sentence or number in the Writings. We feel illuminated and we see an aspect of life which is helpful to our living. The sense of the letter of the Writings of Swedenborg has that quality of satisfying our desire to know and understand. Therefore it has the greatest of spiritual value.

We may now inquire about how this happens. In what way do the explanations in the Writings provide us with such delight? To answer this question we need to go to a second degree of meaning contained within these Writings. The only way available to this interior sense is through the Third Testament state of mind. Therefore in order to make the inquiry we must enter the third or Ultimate Church within us. After the realization occurs, for which we are supremely grateful, there is provided perception of this inner sense within the Word and illustration of their actuality in daily living. This perception is called the spiritual sense of the Third Testament.

With this preparation we may now inquire as to the interior sense of this conjugial love to whose literal sense we feel such a strong attraction.

Our daily living consists of transactions with others. Each day brings thousands of individual transactions. A look is a transaction. A smile, or being late, or keeping a person in one's mind, or a name -- all these are transactions. These transactions are provided by the Lord. There is no transaction which is random or fortuitous or pre-determined; each and every transaction is provided for a specific good. It may astonish the rational self to think of this operation, of its gigantic size, of its improbability, etc., but the external rational is not to be consulted in spiritual meanings, because it is natural, not spiritual. We must rely on the interior rational, which is purely spiritual and celestial. The external rational excludes any information that is not natural. So it is obvious that it excludes the spiritual and the celestial. But the interior rational is built up not by ideas based on the natural senses, but by ideas based on spiritual senses. These are the senses of the mind or spirit and can receive or detect information that flow in from the spiritual world.

The interior sense of conjugial love relates to these transactions of daily living. Thus in order to perceive the interior sense of the Third Testament we must see it in relation to our transactions in every day life. However there may be several ways of doing this task of relating trues of the Word to daily situations. For example, in the Old Church state we also attempt to apply the Bible to our lives but without success since what we did came from the natural self and not the spiritual self. Similarly, in the New Church state we attempt to apply the Writings to our daily living with others, to our education and counseling, and to our science. But this too lead to no ultimate success since we did it with the rational self of its own; like mighty mountains, our puny attempts were dwarfed by the stars of heaven. It's never quite enough. We're never quite there. We sense a veil, a glass ceiling of unattainable saintlihood. But as we enter the third Church within us, our rational holds still and listens with reverence to the spiritual perception that is unfolded to it from above.

With this sense or approach to the meaning of conjugial love we can begin to perceive through illustrations the Lord provides in these daily transactions. Religious psychology is the study for better managing our transactions from our perspective of the Word. The practice of religious psychology involves a constant striving to understand and discipline ourselves. The diagrams and methods used in this book represent aids or tools in better self-management in accordance with each concept of the Word. These intellectual tools may be used by a person from any religious denomination as long as the person is willing to accept the premiss that the Word is Divine and that it has an interior spiritual sense. We may call this approach, adopting a positive bias. Note carefully: we are not saying that people have to give up their native or adopted religion before they can practice religious psychology. People of all religion can read the Three Testaments in their native language, as God has provided for their universal translation and dissemination. If they read these Three Testaments thinking that they are or may be Divine Works, because they say so about themselves, then they can enter fully in all three states of development of their inner Church, without having to convert to another religion.

If we thus adopt a positive bias towards the concept of conjugial love in its interior sense, we may begin to perceive in this new mode, the mode of perception characteristic of the Third or Ultimate Church. To make this living experience clearer to our external rational (which is natural, not spiritual), we may consider illustrations. Illustrations are case histories viewed in relation to doctrine from the Word. In this case, conjugial love in its inner sense is a doctrine we want to view in relation to our daily transactions. Every person is born for heaven with a unique and specific angelic character to be attained. This character to be attained corresponds exactly to our geographic location in Heaven. Of course we will remember that "geographic location" in the spiritual world is according to our goods and trues, hence we call it spiritual geography.

The Lord supervises our transactions in order to govern our way to this angelic status. This is called regeneration. Religious self-inspection is a tool to help us discipline our daily transactions so that we may co-operate with our regeneration by the Lord. Self-management is thus a necessary activity in the state of the Third Church. The interior sense of conjugial love provides us with definitive guides to our temptations. The Lord uncovers deeper and wider areas of our evil by illustrating the meaning of the Word in these transactions. How we choose rationales to justify ourselves, for instance. How we are totally blind to trues except when immediately illustrated by the Lord. How the Lord repeatedly takes us to the top of the world with promises and then plummets us down to our shame and horror. How we are bestial except under direct and continual enlightenment and encouragement from Him. The concept of conjugial love is given us in the sense of the letter of the Third Testament so that we may, if we will, enter into its interior sense and thereby perceive our marriage.

Marital transactions are representatives of spiritual realities. By witnessing these transactions we perceive the Lord's labor with us. We perceive God's Creation itself. The entire universe is merely for this purpose that God can turn our marital transactions into conjugial love. This is the interior sense of the doctrine of conjugial love. Religious self-inspection allows us to become more adept at perceiving the Lord's work within us, of seeing the way by which we are led to our Heavenly Society. It ought not to be thought that conjugial love is a doctrine only for those who are married since preparation for marital relations goes on since birth. Individuals are born men or women, with specific spiritual genes that represent the angelic character we become. The external rational (which is not yet spiritual) ought not to be consulted here since it evokes the detested idea of predestination. Rather, we wait patiently to be illustrated with further temptations. The Lord arranges our transactions in wonderful ways to bring us together as marital partners. Marital partners may perceive such similarities in their childhood affections that it is wonderful to contemplate the way the Lord managed our experiences to yield this similarity. And it is wonderful to behold how the Lord leads us from the perception of similarity to mutuality through an identity of thoughts, intentions and reasonings. In other words, we first perceive that we apparently think alike, and under this impress, we are led to feel alike; at last, when we feel alike, we are led to mutuality, where we truly think alike as a result of feeling alike.. This is the state of conjugial love.

This process may be apprehended by our external rational self. The activity goes on above the external rational, in our spiritual self, which is also our internal rational, but the external rational self can perceive it through immediate and direct illustration by the Lord of our daily transactions with others. Pre-marital transactions are not perceived since most of us are not willing to enter our Third Church until long after we’ve been married.

The subject matter of temptations in marriage is treated of in Conjugial Love when studied in the inner sense and applied to our daily transactions with others. The Work also throws light on pre-marital transactions since it explains the origin and development of scortatory loves within us. All the loves of the natural self and of the rational self prior to regeneration are scortatory or unchaste and delusional. There is no part of us, no thought, intention, or sentiment, that is good. Whatever good there is in us is exclusively the Lord's Own with us. The good is not our own.

We co-operate in our regeneration when we perceive how the Lord manages and governs our transactions. This perception is our own. It is a magnificent gift from the Lord for which we are supremely grateful. It is our very consciousness, our very awareness as a human self, without which we are inanimate as a stone. When we perceive one of our transactions as a temptation we are given to see an element of our evil. It is the greatest of all opportunities because we are given thereby another chance to be redeemed: we can approve or disapprove of the representation in our deed. As we approve when the Lord gives us to act well we are illustrated from doctrine. We experience our heavenly calling.

In preparation for our willingness to enter the interior sense of the doctrine of conjugial love we may consider and discuss the developmental steps we underwent as the Three Churches were established in us by the Lord through the Word.

	OLD TESTAMENT	NEW TESTAMENT	THIRD TESTAMENT
INMOST SENSE (CELESTIAL)	A description of the Lord's glorification and of the Heavens; taught through correspondences, doctrines, & memorable relations. (PARTIALLY OPENED)	A description of the workings out of Divine Providence & Love; taught through as yet unknown ways. (UNOPENED)	An explanation of how to confirm the marriage of good & truth within us; taught through as yet unknown ways. (UNOPENED)
INTERMEDIATE SENSE (SPIRITUAL)	A description of the rise & fall of the successive external churches on earth; taught through a knowledge of correspondences, doctrines, & memorable relations. (OPENED)	An explanation of what is Divine Truth; taught through the order & series of miracles & parables. (UNOPENED)	A description of how the inner Church develops within us (regeneration); taught through perception & illustration during religious self-inspection. (PARTIALLY OPENED)
EXTERNAL LITERAL SENSE (NATURAL)	A description of the delights & uses (and their adulteration ) of external life; taught through historicals, allegories, & hymns.	An explanation of the morality of human relationships; taught through the content of mircales & parables.	A description of how our thoughts & feelings originate from the spiritual world; taught through rational exposition of the subject matter.

This table summarizes certain features of what we may have perceived in the Word thus far. Naturally there are going to be individual differences and peculiar obscurities to each one of us. Nevertheless a communal grasping of the doctrine is possible through our rational self. The chart may be read for greater comprehension from bottom up. The following discussion illustrates specifics which may be related to the chart in order to see the representatives of doctrine in our life.

Upon reflection and instruction we become aware that the Three Testaments contain a progressively more ideal religious ethics that govern our daily transactions. The Old Testament's Ten Commandments are blunt and proscriptive: only a barbarous nation would allow its citizens to murder, rob, libel, and commit adultery. Only individuals in a grossly degenerate state would try to justify violations of the Ten Commandments as good and decent. The New Testament's Commandment is infinitely more sophisticated, civilized, subtle: only a few individuals have been able to adhere to it in a consistent way -- the angelic spirits among us, the saints and heroes, the genuine altruists. Even so, the Third Testament's Commandments appear infinitely more radical and subtle than the New Testament Commandment for few people can stand to even read them! The Commandments of the Word are thus arranged in three successive degrees of apparent difficulty so that the Second appears infinitely more difficult to obey than the First, and the Third is infinitely more difficult to obey than the Second. This is an external appearance of the Word and represents the impossibility of fulfilling the commandments of the Word of our own efforts.

A person who appears to be fulfilling the Commandments of the Old Testament is yet infinitely far from fulfilling the Commandment of the New Testament, which is that we have love and goodwill towards others. We all know the truth that our intentions and emotional reactions come and go within us at their pleasure: our understanding and reasoning has merely a veto power over them so that they do not break out in overt deeds. Yet the New Commandment asserts in its literal sense that we are evil and damnable because of these involuntary impulses within us. Our will is helpless to prevent evil thoughts and emotions and yet we are guilty for them. If our external rational be consulted here it would say that this is unfair; but the rational is not to be consulted. Rather we must wait patiently for illustration from the Lord. Then we can see that far from being unfair, it is Divine Love and Wisdom having us in sight and providence. You may like to read Rev. Ray Silverman's application of the Ten Commandments to one's daily interactions with others. Please click back to continue here.

When we consider all Three Testaments together, in a series, so that after our journey from Old, to New, to Third, we now are given to journey back from Third, to New, to Old, we at last are given to fulfill the Commandments of the Word to its fullest. In order to prepare ourselves for this holy journey, back to the East, as it were, it is necessary to study the sense of the letter of the Third Testament so as to draw out spiritual doctrines to guide us in our approval or disapproval of our daily transactions. Afterwards, we need to strive to understand the interior sense of these doctrines by confirming them in our religious self-inspection. Then at last we will have fulfilled the Commandments of the Word. In this journey we reproduce, as in an image, the Lord's Own glorification. His Journey as the Word of God, and as the Word made flesh, and as the Word transfigured and uplifted, is the pattern we are given to follow in our own regeneration by the Lord. The arena for our journey of regeneration is our mind -- our changing thoughts, reasonings, reactions, emotions, strivings, affections, and perceptions, in short, our daily transactional exchanges with others.

Religious ethics is a branch of religious psychology that helps us become objective and practical about our inner life with the motive to judge our transactions. It requires the method of self-exploration and self-investigation. Forensic tools must be used to unmask our pretenses and catch our deceits. We are helped by the knowledge in faith that we are guilty in every case that comes up! Our task is to prove it, to confirm it as-if of our own free will. We may prepare for this task by studying the methodology of religious ethics given us in the sense of the letter of the Third Testament.

We may illustrate this process by considering the manner in which the will and the understanding relate to each other. This topic is treated of everywhere in the Third Testament. For this example we may consider Numbers 478-500 in Conjugial Love where we are given a spiritual-psychological analysis of the kinds and degrees of adulteries we perform. As we study these numbers we are not only given a list of the adulteries but also a method of reasoning by which to identify them in us. It is required that we strive to understand this legalese language even so far as to be able to use it against ourselves so as to better convict. Under the impulse of this motivation we can learn to understand this language and experience the delights attendant to the acquisition of such mastery. To aid in this task we may use models and diagrams, lists, tables, and charts.

By way of illustration we may take Number 490 which reveals some of the operations of the will and understanding in the domain of our adulteries. It is written:

There follows a list of four things, but this Number is marked as the tenth in a series of eighteen things. We may first draw an outline of the eighteen propositions and sub-propositions, as is given in the Table of Contents to Conjugal Love drawn up by the translator or editor. A related activity for study is to extract propositions wherever they can be noticed and to transform them into a language of our own thinking and reasoning, so as to better to insure that we understand them with our own intelligence and are able to instruct others concerning them. As an illustration of this activity let us take up the four sub-propositions presented in Number 490 which regard the nature of the interaction between our will and our understanding. In this exercise it is helpful to remember that the will represents the affective domain: that is, the good of love and its attendant affections, strivings, and motives, while the understanding represents the cognitive domain: that is, the truth of faith and its attendant thoughts, reasonings, principles, and value ideals.

The external, physical body of the Word is finite and appears to us today in the form of ordinary printed books. As we read a chapter, verse, or phrase in the positive bias attitude, we are presented with a natural-historical content that we can picture with material ideas in our natural imagination or automatic self. For instance, a verse in the New Testament says that "He send the rain upon the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). From the physical content of this verse we can derive material ideas such as: that God is a He; that He is the Giver of rain; that there is rain; that we get rain because He sends it; that we all get rain from Him even when we are unjust in our dealings with others; that we can be either just or unjust. These are material ideas or implications drawn from the physical sense of the verse. Through the method of correspondence revealed and taught in the Third Testaments (that is, the Writings of Swedenborg) our rational is empowered to see through the external-natural sense of the verse, and into its spiritual interiors. This occurs when we are told what the spiritual meaning is of "rain," "God sending rain," and "the unjust and the just."

When we read the Word our natural, automatic self sees its historical, physical things; but our rational-spiritual self sees its spiritual things. Whenever water is mentioned in the Word (and there are hundreds of passages) it is mentioned in some particular form: rain, river, ocean, ice, flood, spring rain, autumn rain, well, fountain, and so on, as well as specific activities in connection with water: drinking it, washing with it, not having enough of it, changing it into wine, gathering it into one place, and so on. In all these passages the Word is actually discussing Divine Truth and the influx of Divine Truth into people where it shows as understanding, intelligence, thinking, reasoning, and all the other cognitive operations of our mind. Each specific reference to water in some form and associated with some specific activity, signifies some specific intellectual operation. By collecting all the passages of the Word that discuss water, and interpreting them in accordance with revealed correspondences, we are gaining many details regarding the true but hidden operations of our intellectual apparatus. The verse we are considering thus means, spiritually, that God is the source of all truth in our understanding, in our ability to reason, and that all people receive this ability, both those who have religion and those who deny it.

We shall quote from a number of passages illustrating this principle of analysis. The passages were culled from Potts' well known Concordance of the Writings of Swedenborg: (the numbers refer to the location of the paragraphs in the Arcana Coelestia, a 12 vol. work by Swedenborg)

"These passages are only a few of the many listed and it is not possible to fully understand them without reading the explanations that go with them; nevertheless, the reader may have an idea from these as to the amazing details that the method of correspondences allows us to extract from the Word on any one subject. It is evident to anyone who studies the Writings of Swedenborg that in the Word is to be found an unlimited source of information concerning the self in our dual citizenship, that is, our external-natural self and our internal-spiritual self-. It is also evident that these correspondences are not arbitrary but derive from the organic connection between the two worlds of our citizenship. The Writings of Swedenborg teach a method of rational picturing so that phrases and words of the Old and New Testaments can be seen in their interiors. Through this method the phrases and words of the Word become windows and doors into the other world we also live in. The interiors we see in the Word are also the interiors of ourselves. The de tails we see there constitute the science and knowledge of of ourselves and our life situation.

Religious psychology is the psychology in the positive bias which the Writings of Swedenborg unfold for our rational understanding. The religious psychologist acknowledges that though we must be empiricists, yet we cannot discover the spiritual facts about ourselves by ourselves. Instead, we must revive them through revelation in the Word. Swedenborg reports that Through his spiritual communications he was able to discover that the most ancient cultures on this planet were in conscious communication with their departed ancestors who came to them as angels in their meditations and dreams. Their ancestors from the afterlife appeared to them in their spiritual bodies, which resembled their former physical bodies in outward appearance. In this way they were instructed by them regarding their ideas of nature, God, heaven, hell, and the inner life of memory, morality, and feeling. These ancient wise people were thus able to read in natural events their spiritual significance and origin. They did this through a perception of correspondences which came to them by intuition. They thus had the law inscribed in their hearts; that is, they did not have to accumulate knowledges by education and science. Instead, they knew by instinct anything they wanted to know. Subsequent cultures gradually lost this inner ability as people insisted more and more to know from the external senses alone. Eventually all direct, conscious connection with the other world was lost. As a result, a written Word had to be given to humankind and all knowledges had to be learned through education and the accumulation of scientific discoveries. Nevertheless, the science of correspondences was retained in shredded form in many subsequent religions, Sacred Scriptures, and mythologies. Today, some of this knowledge is still evident in poetic and metaphoric language.

Religious psychology offers the possibility of a partial return to that state in which we can once again understand the natural in terms of the spiritual. This return is now possible because the Writings of Swedenborg give us a complete rational system of correspondences of the Word. The religious psychologist now has the new ability of investigating and researching the facts of our dual citizenship. Because we acknowledge that we cannot discover these facts by ourselves, we need to be given a method by which these facts can be discovered and applied to human welfare. Yet we must remain empiricists: we cannot merely accept the authority of a "seer" or "prophet." We need to confirm every fact through our own confirmations.

This is Good News, indeed, for the scientist! See our work on Scientific Dualism.

Religious psychology works through the methodology the positive bias. This approach was meticulously practiced by Emanuel Swedenborg in all his scientific, philosophic, theological, and personal literature. These are available in English translation of his many published and unpublished writings, including letters, drafts, and personal diaries not meant for publication by the author. We estimate from public libraries records in the United States that he must be among the top five all time writers in the history of the world with several hundred titles to his name. His books, though not in entirety, appear in the holdings of most public libraries in the English speaking world. These books for the most part have been published and sold or donated to the libraries by the Swedenborg Foundation of New York, established in 1850 by a few people who felt strongly that Swedenborg's books ought to be made available to anyone who was willing to accept them as serious scientific and theological writings by an enlightened man. The Foundation also produces multi-media works in films, television productions, art, and so on) which strive to bring to the public's attention that in Swedenborg's ideas the world may draw influences which are positive, creative, and altruistic. The Foundation has gathered historical documents and literature extracts from many famous literary and political figures who have declared to be greatly influenced by Swedenborg's writings. Selecting from that list, we may mention here the following: Honore de Balzac, Charles Baudelaaire, Hector Berlioz, Hon. John Bigelow, William Blake, Robert Browning, Elisabeth Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir. A. Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Elbert Hubbard, Victor Hugo, all three James's, Abraham Lincoln, J. Ramsay MacDonald, Maurice Maeterlinck, Horace Mann, Czeslaw Milosz, John Frederick Oberlin, Sir Isaac Pitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Ezra Pound, George Sand, Friedrich Schelling, George Bernard Shaw, Sundar Singh, August Sdrindberg, Daisetz Suzuki, Henry D. Thoreau, H.G. Wells, John Wesley, William Butler Yeats.

This partial list is sufficient to show that the documentation of Swedenborgian biographers and scholars establish the fact that the positive bias in scientific and literary thinking has been steadily forming within the rational of the English speaking peoples since 1757, the year identified by Swedenborg as marking a new beginning for humankind. This was the year during which he was given by Divine intervention to be the wit ness from earth to this mind-shattering event. In that year took place the long awaited Christian hope of the Second Coming of Christ. Only, it was missed by everybody on this planet -except Baron Swedenborg, Swedish Nobleman and reputed European Scientist-Engineer.

Swedenborg then took down on paper everything he witnessed. Being an impeccably honest and intellectually meticulous genius, Swedenborg produced several hundred titles, or about 50 volumes in modern English print, telling of what he saw and experienced during 27 years of conscious dual citizenship; that is, he was living simultaneously in both this world and the world of the afterlife. These volumes demonstrate to the rationally inquisitive person that the Second Coming of Christ was meant to be in the rational of each human being on earth. The Second Advent begins a new organic evolution in the consciousness of the human race. This new organic growth of the mind will undoubtedly be discovered by future researchers in neurosciences. A similar new beginning had occurred before in the history of civilization, when the separation of the organ of the will and the organ of the understanding took place: this spiritual event in the formation of the human mind was followed by the growth of a new brain called the cortex, which in humans, now outweighs the old brain called the cerebellum. The cortex is the new seat for human rationality and freedom. Since the Second Coming of Christ is a rational new organ of the mind, it is likely that the changes in the human brain will not be as gross as before, but will take biochemical and genetic forms that adequately represent the subtlety and mathematical complexity of this new spiritual organ in our mind.

Whatever the case may be as to its physical symptoms, the psychological significance of this new era is immediately obvious and capable of being utilized for creative and altruistic purposes. Because our human destiny was carried out by this eminent ambassador, the writings of Swedenborg constitute a common property to all mankind. The historical and intellectual preparation has now been going on for more than two centuries. Many of our most influential thinkers have confessed being tremendously influenced by these writings and have used the ideas contained in them for personal understanding, creativity, and hope. Their ideas have filtered down and across the echelons of society. And so it is inevitable that ideas from the writings of this man are bringing about a complete and total revolution in all fields and departments of human endeavor.

Religious psychology is another instance of the effect of this new rational self which each of us is given by the infinite grace of God. Until this rational was granted, there was no possible way of forging a unity between science and religion in the modern world. This modern world was made possible through the First Coming of Christ which liberated humankind from spiritual infestations or disease. As history instructs, the nations of the world at the time of the Roman Empire were moral barbarians. Civilization was destroying itself through the capacity of men to make greater wars. This cruelty and materialistic outlook were the result of spiritual insanity caused by possessions and ii stations from the hells. The Bible is a record of such possessions, though this was not known except for a few openly mentioned cases in the New Testament. But in fact, once the secret code of "correspondences" is revealed in the new rational, it becomes apparent that the Bible for the most part was written in a double language: one for the natural intelligence, and another for the new rational. In other words, the historical events and sceneries depicted in the Bible were inspired and preserved by Divine intervention; this minute selection or Divine editing, was accomplished for the specific purpose of creating a written-historical record of spiritual events.

This could not be believed logically if it had been an arbitrary code revealed to or by one person. Such personal revelations have been advanced by many people and will no doubt continue to be. These personal claims at revelation are believed only by those who are willing to be persuaded by something less than one's own authority Swedenborg explains that we cannot use anything that has not been personally acquired for oneself. The only ideas and ideals that we appropriate internally are those which serve our loves or affections. This means that whatever we experience as a result of external stimulus is not our own, does not penetrate, will be lost; external stimulus means that we do things out of gain, reputation, or fear; internal stimulus means that we do things out of desire, love, worship, adoration, affection, striving, and so on.

The self-actualized people are those who live mostly from inner stimulus; hence they report that their lives are full, worth-while, happy, hopeful, and successful. By contrast, in their earlier stages of maturity they were anxious, worried, insecure, and conformist. Through normal mental growth, we act and experience more and more from inner impulse. What has been merely surface style and family habit now become personal expression. We come to discard many old beliefs, many old ways of doing things; but as well, we come to like more and more of the old things that we do retain. And so, these old things, which at first were external, now become inner impulse, inner habit, inner life. More and more of the unique genetic pattern of every individual comes outward and is expressed. Life in us bubbles with ever increasing force and wonderment.

When we accept a revelation or life perspective out of another's authority we cannot really honor it. We are just false witnesses and eventually we will go whoring after someone else's authority and cult. But when we accept some new idea from our own authority we can confirm it over and over again: we can prove it, we can support it, we don't have hesitancies about it, we can teach it to others, we can discover new places it applies to, and so on. This in other words, is the approach of science, engineering, and arts and crafts. From apprentice we must evolve into master; we have our own authority to rely on on matters of decision. The Christian Church established by the First Coming of Christ nurtured a belief system that has been called "blind faith." But this blind faith has now been healed through the Second Coming of Christ in the rational, so that we may have a rational faith rather than merely a blind one.

In the positive bias we admit that without this new rational we cannot break out from this world and must continue to be ignorant of our dual citizenship. However, with the positive bias freely adopted as a good method of procedure, we can experience and witness the birth and growth of rational faith, with its many benefits for individuals and communities. This rational faith is yet rational; that is, it proceeds like a scientist and scholar, on its own authority relying on logic, research, and evidence. From this cumulative perspective we easily discard false prophets and falsities that come to our attention. And so, this is the significance of the writings of Swedenborg, that they teach a system of ideas that turns everyone into a scientist-scholar-engineer-practitioner. There is no cultism or blind faith permitted.

Rational faith, as found in the writings of Swedenborg, is therefore the unification of science, morality, and religion. It is thus a faith universal, for all humankind, such as there once existed on this planet, and still exists on other "earths in the universe." It is satisfying to those who are in rational faith that the Bible is the source of it, rather than some entirely new and alien system. Besides its harmony with our moral and aesthetic sensibilities and standards, the Bible is an old familiar object to many many generations. Its histories and allegories, its poems and aphorisms, its proverbs and drama, are all familiar to numerous people over thousands of years. And so we have evolved complex affections that tie us to the Bible, each of us in slightly different ways. So it is satisfying now to discover that these familiar people, places, and events are allegoric representatives of the great immensity of our own mind. We have a Land of Canaan in our mind. We have a river Jordan. We have deserts and cities in our mind. We are at one time Abraham, at one time Ishmael, at one time Joseph sold into slavery and at another time Joseph made king. We are also Nicodemus, and Thomas, and Peter, and Gabriel, and the Devil. We are all these things because these things are really about the spiritual world. The historical events that have been-recorded in the-Bible occurred and were historicalized so that they can serve as a source of authority for our new rational, a new organ foreseen by God Who prepared for its reception.

One may wonder at such a grandioze drama: God preparing daily, historical events for many centuries in far away lands so that prophets may be inspired to record them * so that blind faith can develop, so that later, rational faith could be built upon it by opening up the secret code in which it was written all along, unbeknownst to the prophets or the believers! Yes, one may wonder at the fantastic nature of this. Yet after we study the matter and develop our new rational a little bit, the matter no longer looks improbable or fantastic. Consider how improbable and fantastic moonwalks, television, and hot showers would be to ancient philosophers and scientists. We can see that these artifacts are not improbable and fantastic, suddenly come upon, like in a fairy story. We can see that our technical advances have been "advances" and we can confidently retrace the steps of our discoveries. There is no hocus pocus or denus ex machine: by the sweat of our brow did we arrive at them, communally. So we feel that we own our technologies: they were not given to us by revelators, magicians, and ells. This feeling of ownership is essential for our freedom and rationality, for our very humanness. And so this is precisely what God is again accomplishing in our new growth, our new powers: we need to feel that they are ours, that we developed them cumulatively and communally.

It is not fantastic and improbable that the Bible be the foundation for the new rational intellect since the Bible is unique in that so many of us are tied to it through our inner affections, our standards for what is good and true and desirable. As well, we soon begin to realize that this secret code in which the Bible was written is not an arbitrary code God picked to give us as a strange new system of thought, feeling, and reasoning. Rather, this secret code is in actuality the origin and source of our long derived system of thinking throughout the nations on this planet. When this secret, universal code is not known the Bible cannot be acceptable to all peoples. Every people has its own culture and system of ideas and traditions. Those who have evolved from a cousin stock feel themselves independently secure; they don't wish to be told that God selected some other set of traditions and truths and their own is to be discarded, having been a fake all along. This is both unfair and irrational. And so, the Bible has not become universal, only international and cross-cultural. Those who hope from blind faith that the Bible be accepted by all, do so from ignorance of its secret code. Those who have studied this secret code through the writings of Swedenhorg can see clearly that the code it is written in is universal, not historical and national. The importance of the Bible is not that there was a people called Israel, that Abraham was its patriarch, that they had a land and kings, that they were dispersed among the nations, and so on. This is merely local history. But it becomes universal science when it is discovered that the "people of Israel" is a secret name for the "Church within us", that "Abraham" is a secret name for "our inner self", that "patriarch" is a secret name for "religion", that "land" is a secret name for "doctrines" or "teachings" or "knowledge", that "king" is a secret name for "truths", that "being dispersed among the nations" is a secret name for "having false religious beliefs", and so on. Viewed from this perspective the Bible is not at all sectarian, not even religious, if by that one means some denomination. Rather, the Bible is now a source of knowledge, a source of facts about the inner world of every human being, without ever an exception.

The Bible along with the writings of Swedenborg constitute the textbooks of religious psychology. It is not possible to discover a single fact about the inner world of the afterlife except from these sources. This is not a matter of authority. We are not elevating the authority of the Bible or of Swedenborg over some other person such as the prophets of Islam or the sages of Buddhism. It's just that no other books in the history of the world exist that were written in this secret code. This is a matter that can easily be proven once the code is known. This secret code is called "correspondences" because it is the code that the most ancient cultures on this planet were given when learning the ancient science of correspondences. This code and knowledge was subsequently forgotten or taken away by Divine intervention for reasons that can be made clear and are made clear in the writings of Swedenborg.

Through his specialty given travels in the afterlife, Swedenborg was able to converse with those in the afterlife. He discovered that all those in the afterlife are the people who depart from their physical bodies upon death`: end find themselves resuscitated a few hours later in the spirit world, possessing to their surprise, a spiritual body that appears externally to be very similar to the physical body. The resuscitated people then undergo various growth experiences which by the law and order of the spirit world takes them eventually to a final residence in a society of happiness called Heaven or a society of bestiality called hell. Those who end up in one of the many heavenly societies do so by discarding all things of falsity and evil; this discarding process is slow and painful and involves much personal struggle in the company of others. However, when the process is complete, there remains in the individual personality only those loves and pleasures that are permitted by law in the heavenly societies. Those who end up in the hellish societies do so by willingly and insistently discarding heavenly pleasures and powers, and willingly and insistently confirming as desirable only those pleasures and powers that are in accordance to the law of the hellish societies. These two loves and pleasures are antagonistic to each other, hence they are separated in our final development. God provides for the law and reality on both sides. These matters are clearly and precisely explained in all the Writings of Swedenborg.

The most ancient peoples had a conscious relation to the heavenly inhabitants through their ancestors who appeared to them in their dreams, their meditations, and their observations of nature through the secret code of correspondences. This code allowed the ancients to observe a natural event in their environment and see the spiritual or real cause of it. If a bird suddenly appeared, they could tell from the flight and from the type of bird what was happening in the spiritual regions of their own minds. They thus saw a unity between the external world and their inner world of thoughts and feelings. They instantly knew what anything meant through this code. Swedenborg reports that this code is a practical reality for everyone in the afterlife. For instance, the inhabitants of heaven do not have to labor in the fields, grow food, build houses, invent transportation devices. These things are instantaneously there whenever they feel a need or desire for it. The inhabitants of hell cannot make or invent anything on their own: no matter how hard they labor on their own they cannot build a single house or make a wearable garment. This is not because they have no intelligence but because intelligence cannot be used materially in the afterlife. People in the hellish societies use their intelligence in spiritual or irrational ways. For instance, they may plot, they may harangue, they may travel, they may discuss, they may seduce, persuade, mentally torture, fantasize, and so and so on. These are their actual occupations and daily strivings and pleasures; the external world around them then grows automatically into the correspondences of whatever moral, psychological, spiritual acts they perform on the inside. If they stop to plot revenge in their mind against someone they hate, suddenly they find themselves in dark caves with others who have a similar desire; bats and snakes and disgusting crawling things appear and form the external world. If then they stop plotting and feel they want to raise an army, they find themselves in some vaguely familiar city, with some vaguely familiar people, or strangers, sitting in some dark, dirty room and engaging in disgusting activities. This is the science of correspondences in the afterlife: it is the creation of one's external world through the confirmed loves of our heart and imagination. Similarly, the inhabitants of heaven are surrounded by gorgeous natural correspondences to their pure moral altruistic loves for the whole human race. As they are engaged in pleasing one another, they find themselves in pleasant gardens, in fabulous jeweled cities, in horseless carriages that take them quickly to where they want to see others. When they study the Word, which is the inner meaning of-the Bible (not the historical events), they experience great revelations, wonderful discoveries, new perspectives; these types of feelings instantly transform their external environment into lush gardens, sumptuously set tables with delicious foods harmonious performances of song and dance, new books and schools, non-competitive games and exhibits, new techniques and sciences, and many many more, to infinity.

This is then the truly great significance of the fact that the Bible was written in the language of correspondences. This knowledge is now newly made available once again to-humankind on this earth. That is the birth of the new rational faith which is available to all in the Writings of Swedenborg.

Now we may wonder, first, why did the human race lose the knowledge of correspondences, and second, what can we-do with it now. The answer as to why we lost correspondences is told through the code in the story of the Fall in the Old Testament, through the story of the Flood, through the story of the dispersion of Israel, through the story of Daniel's visions and adventures, through the story of John's visions in the New Testament, and through many more events described in the Bible. The secret code taught in the Writings of Swedenborg allows us to decode and interpret exactly what each element in the stories indicate about the evolution of our mind, that is, the state of our dual citizenship. The Fall, the Flood, the Dispersion, the destructions -- these are natural correspondences or resultants of inner spiritual events. The-natural events occurred by Divine law and order since they signified the spiritual reality; nothing ever happened except what represented and corresponded with the people's inner reality of thoughts and feelings.

The disclosures to be found in the Writings of Swedenborg are thus not religious disclosures but rational-scientific. The new rational in the positive bias method may discover the real nature of the universe. God is not a religion but a fact; God's Will and Power is not a philosophy but the truths of actuality in nature, and in mind.

How can we make use of this new knowledge? Religious psychology is the study of how this new rational understanding and knowledge may be harnessed in accordance with God's law and order. Its promise is infinite.

Now we may give a few related transformations each of which express a similar meaning in the sense of the letter:

Some paraphrastic transformations of this in the sense of the letter are as follows:

The third sub-proposition may be paraphrased in the sense of the letter as follows:

(3a) The affective inflows into the cognitive, that is, the affective selects its appropriate cognitive response.

The fourth sub-proposition can be given the following paraphrase in its literal sense:

(4) Will and understanding conjoin in two ways: will within the understanding is more interior than understanding within the will.

(4a) The affective and the cognitive are connected in two modes: affective within the cognitive, which is higher in the control hierarchy than the secondary mode, namely, the cognitive within the affective.

(4b) Intentions and justifications have two relations: the stronger relation occurs when intentions rule the justifications; a weaker relation occurs when justifications appear to rule the intentions.

(4c) When our desires govern our methods we are more confirmed in that way than when our methods appear to govern our desires.

(4d) When our ends govern the means we are more committed than when our means appear to govern our ends.

(4f) If our motives seduce our reason we are more confirmed in our guilt than if our reason seduces our motives.

(4g) If our intention leads us to compromise our principle we are more guilty than if our principle leads us to compromise our intention.

(4h) If our goods lead to our trues we are in a more advanced state of regeneration than the reverse situation.

(4i) It is more confirming to adjust our principles to our loves than the other way round.

Additional study of these and other relations may be found in these two documents:

As we are undergoing regeneration by the Lord we repeatedly enter into and regress from more advanced states. Hence our vision or perception is at times relatively elevated and sublime and at other times it is uninspired and obscure. These are appearances provided by the Lord in which we may learn to confirm matters in the interior sense of the Third Testament.

This activity of confirming the inner senses of the Word is carried out during religious self-inspection. In our marital transactions we perceive our distance from conjugial love. The size of this distance informs us in a specific way what our temptations are so that we may disapprove of them and thereby perceive ourselves as freely co-operating with the Lord. Herein lie our rationality and our freedom.

Religious self-inspection in marital transactions provides illustrations of the meaning of the matters which the Third Testament deals with in its inner senses. As an example let us take the concept of marriage and the idea we have of it in the three successive degrees of the Church within us. In the state of the Old Church we are affected by the Word of the Lord declaring that the twain shall be one flesh. We see this as an instruction to be loyal partners to one another and a promise of happiness together. This ideal spurns us on to resist infidelity and to expect the benefits of a lifelong association with each other. We see ourselves as pulling together for the same goals and, in hours of anger or disappointment with each other, we pray to the Lord to have mercy upon us. This is the marital condition in the state of the Old Church within us and the sense of the letter of the Old Testament confirms this view.

Now as we are given by the Lord to enter the state of the New Church within our marital transactions, we experience a different view. We now know about the concepts of conjugial and scortatory love. We strive to dissociate ourselves from quarrels and disharmonies, attributing them to evil spirits that haunt us. We long for the day when the Lord will deliver us of spirit infestations so that we may no longer have to suffer strife and discord. With the knowledge of correspondences, and memorable relations, we search out the meaning of marriage the Lord gave when He was on earth as it is recorded in the New Testament. We now see that "the twain shall be one flesh" in a new sense and we have full confidence that the Lord will manage us to conjugial love when we get to our Heaven.

We strengthen ourselves in this expectation and resolve not to complain about imperfections down here below. Eventually we receive an altogether different view from the Lord when we are ready to enter the third degree of the Ultimate church within us. There is no longer a distance between the Lord and us so that He ceases to be in our mind a Busybody governing a gigantic estate, and we see Him instead working our marriage transactions in an interior way. He is the One, not us, to improve our marriage. He it is Who labors and fights discords; He is the General and the Soldiers on both sides of the apparent conflict. He manages our guardian angles from Heaven and our evil spirits from hell. There is not a single transaction which He does not initiate and complete. We are self-witnessing puppets affected with the delusion of Self. But note: not mere puppets, but self-witnessing puppets. We are called upon to approve or disapprove of the appearances in the Works. Each approval or disapproval is to be purified by the Word. This is the state in which we can perceive the sense of conjugial love. This sense regards the appearances that are given by the Lord in our daily marital transaction as a representation of the Lord's Grand Master Plan, that He operates. It is a blueprint of how the Lord intends the universe to be, how angels from Heaven and spirits from Hell play out the serious drama in our marital transactions, and how our marital transactions fit into God's Plan. This is a vision of the endless song which the universe signifies.

Without specific illustrations the character of this endless song remains in obscurity, embedded in generalities that are quite theoretical and insubstantial. But with the perception of actual cases in our own transactions, the interior sense and life of these generalities shine through. This is not a retrospective perception such as that we have when we are in the New Church state. Rather, it is an ongoing self-witnessing during religious self-inspection. When we are together as marital partners we observe with our external rational self that, within the time span of an hour, we exchange thousands of transactions. Thoughts, gestures, emotions, expectations, habitual sequences -- all succeed one another at a rate too fast to record in our external memory. Yet not one of them in all eternity is without some specific significance, brought about by the Lord to represent to us some aspect of our actuality, our being, and the way to our future angelic character and placement in the Grand Human.

The sequence of our transactions represents an Order into which we are uniquely created; each married pair is unique, and is being created to eternity for a unique and particular locus or spot in the Grand Human. In our transactions there is reproduced a spiritual geography, our unique road to Heaven. By witnessing our daily transactions with others we perceive the map of Heaven and our way to it as long as our self-witnessing is a religious self-inspection based on doctrine from the Word. Any other motive for self-observation and self-exploration would not uncover this map. Instead, unbeknownst to the person, one would construct fantastic maps that serve to represent the dreamer’s associations with the Hells rather than the way to the Heaven for which we were created. And so, by the Lord's infinite Love and Wisdom, the Cheruvim now guard the entrance to the interior sense of the Third Testament as they once guarded the interior sense of the Old Testament.

Our intention in this essay is to outline the psychology of religious life as viewed from self-inspection. These contain observations of the inner life of self as viewed through the light of the Word. All of us have an inner life which is personal, intimate, familiar; yet it is not as readily available to observation as the interpersonal environment is. Think of the objects around us we can all see and the sounds we can all hear entering us through our external senses. These we can easily describe or communicate or agree upon. Even some rational things which cannot be seen with the external senses are easily communicable and discussible. Think of our many exchanges on abstract topics like politics, or sports, or literary criticism, or scientific writings, or relationship stages in the biography of a couple: none of these is physical or material that can penetrate through the external senses. They are beliefs, opinions, roles, expectations, approval and disapproval. These are rational things and they make up part of the interpersonal world. Though they are abstract, non-physical, or rational, we readily observe them and can discuss them. Language allows us to discuss rational ideas not observable through the external senses, because they are not physical.

But there is also a category of rational things that is not easily observable or discussible. These are not from the inter-personal world, but from the personal and intimate world of the individual's inner life. This inner life is made up of our sensations, emotions, thoughts, reasonings, ideas, feelings, desires, attractions, affections, and loves. This inner life has content and it has dynamics.

The content of inner life is describable or knowable through titles we readily give to any event in our experience, or to any quality we observe. Think of what you are doing now, or were doing a few seconds ago. One might say, for instance, that "I was writing," or that “I was listening to the sound of cars going by outside," or that "I was readjusting my body position on the chair," or that "I was wondering where this line of reasoning will lead me," and so on. One may intuitively grasp this idea of the content of inner life by thinking of a library. It is not only stacked with books and periodicals but it is also arranged in a certain order. This order is describable or knowable through a catalogue. As we search through the catalogue of a modern academic library we are faced with a definite order of topics and their interconnections or cross-references. By getting to know this order, or cataloguing system, we can find any book or periodical we want; we can find any article on any topic, and thus we come into contact with the intellectual history and culture of our nation and of the human race.

We can say therefore that in order to get to know our inner life we need to study the available information, that is, its content. But this content may not be available in the books or periodicals of a library. To get to know the content of our own intentions, reasonings, and emotions, we need to observe them directly. This is an empirical scientific issue of methodology, objectivity and validity. In the language of modern psychology, we need to observe our motives (affective behavior), our thoughts (cognitive behavior), and our sensations and motor actions (sensorimotor behavior) in everyday living. By observing and taxonomizing, or cataloguing, this living information on our inner life we can construct theories and models that can explain the interconnections in this inner life. For example, a theory can show that the thoughts we have are aroused and guided by the feelings we have, and it can further investigate the origins of these feelings, perhaps relating the feelings to deeper affections of character or personality. At this point, with the help of theory, we begin to perceive a new content not seen before. This is a higher content, still more rational, yet real and perhaps more crucial. We may think of this deeper content of inner life as the dynamics of it, pictured as follows:

On the left, the content of inner life is held together by its dynamics. The deeper part of content, namely dynamics, plays a more crucial function in the sense of. control or self-management. This primacy is pictured on the right of the diagram by placing dynamics above content. The two parts of the diagram together portray the idea that there is a depth or height to inner life. What is deeper is also higher and more interior, while what is external is also lower. (For more discussion on the "height" and "breath" of discourse, consult this article: Ethnographic Discourse Methodology)

As we begin to observe the content of our motivational life, cognitive life, and sensorimotor life we develop theories or explanations for this life, and through these theories we can see the dynamics of this life. This greater understanding of our inner life leads to new rational insights, new visions of ourselves, which then come back down to us as creative solutions to problems or a more effective conduct of our external life. Here, inner study pays off not only in greater inner contentment and enjoyment but in outer gain as well. We not only become better to ourselves but more useful to others. This double gain makes the study of inner life useful to society and may eventually develop in the future as a science and field of community service. (For a description of this rational society and how to build it, see our efforts in creating a community-classroom in social psychology.)

It may be pointed out that modern psychology is still in its beginning phase from the point of view of history. Think of what the science of psychology may be like five or ten thousand years from now! The experimental science of psychology has greatly advanced in the first two or three centuries since its inception. But this gain has occurred mainly in the field of inter-personal environment. There are now hundreds of sub-fields in psychology each specializing in the knowledge and control of some area of the interpersonal environment. For example, there is a "social psychology" which studies family and city life; there is "educational psychology" which tries to advance our ability to teach in public schools; there is "psychopharmacology" which investigates how drugs affect people; there is "sports psychology" and so on.

All these modern "psychologies" share the method of interpersonal observation as the sole source of information for their theories. In "clinical psychology," for instance, which studies how a therapist might best influence our thoughts and behaviors, the source of all information is the therapist or the experimenter. Various methods are employed by the clinical psychologist to attempt to see or infer the thoughts and feelings of clients and subjects. Note that in this approach it is not permitted for the experimenter or therapist to offer their own inner life as the source of the data. Within such a restriction, good or effective theories of inner life have not yet emerged in modern psychology. This is plainly evidenced by the fact that clinical psychologists are not capable to readily modify the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of their clients. Whatever influence they may have is slight and of uncertain duration and extent. The reason is that clinical, social, and educational psychologists are faced with individuals who refuse to

A Guide to Spiritual Self-examination part 1

A Guide to Spiritual Self-examination
part 1