Marriage begins in the natural world with the physical body in a socio-legal society. Husband and wife can remain in the natural dimension of marriage as they make a living, raise children, and become old together. They can respect each other for their dedication and loyalty. They may even feel deep “companionate love” for each other. But they never think of each other as a biological new entity that we will call “conjoint self.” Interestingly, when I searched the Web for this expression it only appears in my own work online. Search engines pick up things like” adaptive conjoint analysis”, choice-based conjoint, self explicated conjoint” or “conjoint self-deception” and “conjoint self-determination”, but not “conjoint self” (or conjoint-self). Why do you think that “conjoint self” is a neologism, a new expression in science?

The reason is that discussion only occurs on topics and issues that people are aware exist. You can talk about something you don’t know exists to talk about. You can fantasize and imagine new inventions and situations but these are not considered real. All people on this earth are strongly and compellingly influenced by materialism (layer 9, 8). When we become educated and intellectually sophisticated we can all discuss abstract topics and issues based on material-rational meanings and principles (layer 7eC). We can be scientists and marriage counselors and discuss things with thousands of clients and couples, and yet keep everything within material-rational bounds of what exists in marriage and what is real in marriage interactions.

Our materialism comes from the fact that we are restricting our thinking to the physical body and the socio-legal physical world that is the life context for the physical body. At one unexpected point we suddenly allow ourselves to admit dualist ideas and meanings into our awareness of what is real. We say to ourselves that our mind (or “spirit” or “soul”) exists in its own “realm” or world or reality. This “spiritual” existence is not in time and space, not on earth, not in the physical world, but in a world of eternity where we continue our “afterlife” in immortal existence. Some people are also aware of the existence of a “heavenly” life in that immortality, while others have a life in hell. These ideas and meanings destroy materialism in our rational mind and from being materialist we become dualist. This changeover is called reformation (see Diagram 17). When that process is completed (which might take weeks and months of intense involvement), we are ready to receive into our thinking celestial-rational meanings and concepts (layer 7iC). We can then understand and realize the anatomical reality of the conjoint self in a marriage that has an organic living spiritual dimension of growth and maturation.

In order therefore to understand the spiritual marriage we need to work with anatomical descriptions of it. Understanding the natural component of marriage involves the use of concepts and principles derived from the environment of the physical body and the interactions of the couple through the physical body. Understanding the spiritual component of marriage involves the use of concepts and principles derived from the mental body and the interactions of the couple through the mental body. The contrast here is between physical body (natural marriage) and mental body (spiritual marriage).

So the beginning of understanding the anatomy of “best friends in love and together forever” or “soulmates in eternity”, is to adopt a positive bias and without “proof” allow the possibility of dualism, which is the principle that every human being is born simultaneously into two worlds with two bodies, each adapted for life in that world. When we think about two married partners interacting with each other we need to consider what happens with their physical body and what happens with their mental body.

Symbiosis in marriage refers to anatomical interdependence of their mental body. This gradually growing interdependence leads to internal unity, which means interdependence and synergy of the two mental bodies. Anatomical interdependence means that neither mental body (of husband and wife) can function normally on its own. For couples to be together in the afterlife of eternity they need to grow anatomically interdependent systems in the mental body (not physical body). The affective-circulatory system of one must become dependent on the cognitive-respiratory system of the other. This is the spiritual dimension of marriage. Her feelings must connect to his thoughts, and his feelings must connect to her thoughts. In the natural marriage his thoughts are connected to his feelings, and her feelings are connected to her thoughts. In the spiritual marriage there is a crossover of mutual interdependence in mental functioning. The husband’s thinking is directed by his wife’s intentions, and his loves are united to her ideas.

The spiritual marriage is possible when both partners think of the marriage as never ending and continuing in the afterlife. Without this motivation the marriage remains natural. The spiritual marriage creates the conjoint self. This book explains how any couple can create this eternal unity and become soulmates, together as best friends in love forever.

Note: These Lecture Notes are intended for senior college majors in psychology and therefore address the issue of the scientific standing of the spiritual dimension of marriage, including God as a scientific concept, and heaven vs. hell as a medical anatomical concept. This book is an application to marriage of prior work on mental psychology.

Definition of Spiritual

An easy way of remembering what is spiritual is to think of the popular movie and book title From Here to Eternity.

“Here” refers to here on earth in the physical body. “Eternity” refers to the afterlife, which is often called the “spiritual world.” The afterlife is in eternity in contrast to this life which is in time. That which is in time is called “temporary” and that which is outside time, or apart from time, or independent of time, is called spiritual.

Spiritual refers to the connection between “here” and “eternity.” Every object or event “here” is called natural while every object and event in “eternity” is called spiritual. Every natural object or event has a spiritual object or event to which it corresponds. Through the laws of correspondences the natural and spiritual worlds are mirror images of each other, but made of different construction materials.

Body-mind correspondences have been known for thousands of years and they are studied scientifically today in linguistics, neuroscience, psycholinguistics, and related fields. Everyday thinking and speech are filled with body-mind correspondences. For instance the physical “heart” corresponds to mental “love” and the physical “face” corresponds to our mental character or emotional state. The expression “Don’t sweat the small stuff” mentions something physical (sweat, small), but is actually referring to its mental correspondence of being over concerned with details. (See below the discussion on correspondences)

It is not yet generally known that the spiritual world of eternity that is outside time is nothing else than the mental world of eternity.

Spiritual world of eternity and mental world of eternity are equivalent expressions referring to the same world or reality. The easiest way to understand this equality is to remember that the mental world is not in time, not in physical space, not made of physical elements.

It is not yet generally known that there is only one mental world.

Most people believe the appearance that they are alone in their own mental world. Before we discover the knowledge of mental anatomy we are unable to figure out that there is only one mental world for the human race. An easy way to understand this is to think of individual atoms moving in physical space. There is only one physical space in the world. All physical space forms a unit or whole. Space cannot be divided or eliminated. Space contains galaxies, chairs, and atoms. It is the same space between stars as between atoms. Now think of mental space in corresponding terms.

Mental space is a unitary organic expanse of mental substance or “ether” that is formed around the mental sun of eternity by means of spiritual substance that flows out of the mental sun. All human beings are born in this mental expanse or space. Our mental body is born and located in mental space and is constructed out of mental substance from the Mental Sun, while our physical body is located in physical space and is constructed out of physical substance (“matter”) from the Mother Sun (“Big Bang”). When we undergo the dying/resuscitation process, which takes about 33 hours, our physical body is detached and we continue life in the mental world of eternity with our mental body that was born there.

Our consciousness identifies with the physical body while we are still attached to it. This is the reason that we cannot see the other people and objects in the mental world of eternity. When we are cut off from the physical body and world, we become conscious of the mental body and world of eternity. From birth onward our sensations, thoughts, and feelings have been located anatomically in the mental body, though we believed them to be in the physical body. Hence when we continue life after dropping the physical body we are exactly the same person an d the same personality that we were “on earth.” We have all our memories, all our experiences, all our loves, thus, all of our self.

The appearance of our mental body is identical to that of the physical body so that the people who knew us in this life and pass on, can recognize and interact with us as before. This is what makes spiritual marriage possible. The two partners who have become connected by internal anatomy through their unity interactions and relationship, now find each other in their mental body after death, and form a conjugial unity of soulmates that lives as a conjoint self in heaven to eternity.

The mental world of eternity is the mental world in which we all live as human beings. Our sensations, thoughts, and feelings make up our mental world. Mental objects like thoughts or sensations are not made of physical elements from the Mother Star of the natural world. Because science and psychology have remained materialistic and reductionist, people today believe that our thoughts and sensations are in the physical body and brain. But in the positive bias science there is a dualist answer that is different. Mind and brain are separate even though acting together.

Although this dualist attitude has existed for thousands of years in Western literature it was eventually eliminated from modern science for this one and only reason: namely, that the spiritual body that lives in eternity cannot be measured or detected with physical instruments. It is illogical for anyone to want to measure physically that which is not physical.

If things exist that are not physical then it is illogical to deny that things exist that are not physical. Materialism is illogical if dualism is real.

Since this dispute cannot be settled empirically or rationally it makes sense to examine the dualist solution in order to assess whether it is rational and useful in our understanding of the world. The claim is that dualism gives us better scientific explanations than monism alone. If this claim is accurate then dualism ought to provide us with a more effective science and psychology. If we apply dualism to marriage we ought to be able to gain insights that otherwise would not be available.

In order to fully understand the spiritual dimension of marriage it is necessary to have some knowledge of anatomical dualism.

Definition of Anatomical Dualism

I felt it necessary to coin a new phrase that identifies the type of dualism involved in mental psychology. Anatomical dualism involves the idea that God is in the Divine Human Form and that everything God creates is necessarily in the human form, though with endless variation and completeness. Everything within God has the Human form, individually and globally. God uses the Human substance within God in an externalized form to create the world and its objects. Hence all the created objects have the human form, reflecting their interior which is Human.

For instance, a planet has a top corresponding to the head and a bottom corresponding to the legs. It has exterior harder and colder layers and interior softer and warmer layers This corresponds to the human body’s neuroskeletal system of skin, membrane, and cartilage, surrounded by the more interior and warmer circulatory, digestive, and endocrine system. If you analyze various geological features known in the earth sciences you will certainly discover that every geophysical detail corresponds to a specific anatomical detail in the physical body, and a particular anatomical detail in the mental body. Earth, body, and mind are models of one form and correspond perfectly to each other in every detail.

A tree has roots corresponding to the mouth by which we eat or drink, the skin by which we take in chemicals from the environment, and the pleura or lining of the lungs which takes in nourishment or poisonous substances in the air we breathe. The trunk of the tree and its branches corresponds to the backbone and pelvis, and the entire skeletal frame that supports and encases the internal organs, including the limbs that are attached to the skeletal frame. The leaves correspond to the sensory organs that receive sunlight, heat, sound, taste, and smell. The flowers and fruit of the tree, including the seeds within them, correspond to the body’s abilities and virtues, such as beauty, symmetry, reproduction, intelligent action, inventiveness, adaptability, usefulness, etc..

The little pebble under your shoe is also tending to represent the human form. Its interior structure is held together as a unique individual pebble by the bonding forces operating at the atomic and molecular layers. The force of interior gravity and electro-chemical bonds in the pebble corresponds to the DNA structure that drives organic growth and aging.

The human body exists at distinct levels of existence and reality.

At the individual level the immortal mental body is in the perfect human anatomical shape outwardly and internally. Even the three systems that make up the body are each in the human form. The circulatory system extends its arteries, capillaries, and veins into every portion of the body so that it takes on the shape of the entire body. Similarly, the neuroskeletal system extends its nerve fibers to every portion of the body, so that it is also in the human shape. At the dyadic level the conjugial couple’s mental synergy is reflected outwardly as the appearance of one human body (as seen by Swedenborg).

At the societal level in the Grand Human, each society appears as one body, externally and internally, and at the Grand Human level, which includes the entire human race in the heavenly regions of the afterlife, people and societies are arranged in the human body form. Swedenborg confirms by repeated visual inspection, outside and inside of the Grand Human, that the arrangement is that of the body anatomy. Because of this he often identified the spiritual society he was visiting by its anatomical location in the Grand Human, as for example, “in the province of the eye” or “in the region of the right ventricle of the heart”, etc.

What is even more amazing is that the personality or mental “genius” of the people in each location corresponded to the anatomical or physiological function of the particular organ or body part. For instance, the people who live in the region of the lungs are focused primarily on cognitive lifestyle issues relating to meanings, rationality, truth, science, knowledge, understanding, or reasoning. But the people in the region of the heart are focused primarily on issues relating to affective lifestyle issues such as love, conjunction, relationships, happiness, good, altruism, sociality, children, romance, marriage, and community. Every anatomical structure and physiological function in the body is a correspondence to a mental function. By studying the anatomy and physiology of the physical body we are also learning about our mental life in the mental body, since the two bodies correspond in every respect and detail.

Anatomical dualism expresses the details of the idea that the human form is the embodiment of the marriage between love and truth. This marriage is embodied as human consciousness at the individual, dyadic, and community levels of life. The human form or body contains and recapitulates both individual development and human biological evolution. By knowing body anatomy and physiology we can understand how we grow, develop, conjoin with a spouse, and form an endless spiritual marriage that evolves forever. Knowing body anatomy reveals the secrets of romance, love, mental intimacy, and conjugial unity.

Definition of Spiritual Marriage

Spiritual marriage, or internal unity between spouses, cannot be understood without (a) dualism and (b) anatomy.

When we think in the context of monism or materialism we have the idea of “natural marriage”, which is symbolized by the wedding promise “’till death do us part.” When we think in the context of dualism we have the idea of “spiritual marriage”, which is symbolized by the wedding promise “’till endless eternity.” To be in agreement on this critical and central point is the first step towards internal unity that the partners can take. But symbolizing by itself is not real enough. Merely believing something without understanding it leaves many people in a state of uncertainty and a desire for clarity.

Understanding some anatomy in the context of body-mind correspondences allows us to see spiritual marriage in its anatomical actuality. Sex or sexuality at the physical level corresponds to internal unity and intimacy at the mental level. The physical body’s anatomy and physiology in sexual interaction corresponds to the mental body’s anatomy and physiology in mental conjunction, which refers to anatomical interdependence of functioning of the mental body of each. This internal anatomical unity produces the mental synergy between the partners in their feeling, thinking, noticing, acting, and talking. They thus have a “conjoint life

Without the idea of mental anatomy, sexual interactions remain at the outward social, legal, physical, and temporary level. These outward interactions are not going to last forever in the afterlife of eternity. On the other hand, mental anatomy introduces the two worlds of dualism, with the idea that for partners to be together forever, they must be mentally united and functioning as one symbiotic unit called the conjoint self.

The Spiritual Anatomy of Touching Each Other

Whatever we do in the physical body we also do at the same time in the mental body. This is called body-mind correspondences. For instance, when you are ingesting an apple with your physical body, you perform a series of actions like biting off, chewing, salivating, tasting, swallowing, digesting. Meanwhile your mental body performs a series of parallel or corresponding actions. “Eating” physical food corresponds with “appropriating” ideas or concepts, which are sometimes called “mental nourishment” or “spiritual food.” The mental body “incorporates” new ideas into the “body” of knowledge that is already collected in the mental body. All our sensations, thoughts, and feelings are stored in the mental body, and none of it is stored in the physical brain or body.

Hence what happens in the afterlife of eternity is not at all related with what the physical body does since this is not present in the mental body. Only mental things can exist in the mental body. No mental things can exist in the physical body.

When the husband touches his wife, the physical act corresponds to mental unity, which refers to the anatomical interdependence in the functioning of the mental body. This includes all our cumulative sensations, thoughts, and feelings from birth onward to endless immortality. In all correspondences there is a good representation and a bad. This is because every good and true thing can be corrupted or devolved into something bad and false. This is the embodiment of human freedom. People can hear something true and contradict it. Every truth has its contradiction and every good has its evil. At the most universal level this dualism is reflected in the Grand Human and the Grand Monster, which are exact opposites of each other in every detail.

Conjunctive Interactions: The Spiritual Anatomy of Mental Intimacy

Disjunctive interactions between husband and wife correspond to what is corrupt, evil, hurtful, selfish, destructive, hostile. Conjunctive interactions between them correspond to what is healthy, constructive, altruistic, friendly, and good. There are hundreds of interactions that married partners have each day. Every interaction is either disjunctive or conjunctive.

Disjunctive interactions include

having a disagreement
getting mad at each other
feeling resentful
attempting to manipulate
refusing to go along
hiding something for deception
thinking disrespectful thoughts about the other
wanting to please the other in order to get something back for oneself
etc.

Conjunctive interactions include

coming to each other’s assistance
resolving a disagreement
feeling grateful
harmonizing and coordinating
being open, honest, and sincere
feeling attraction, liking, and love
avoiding thoughts that are disrespectful
wanting to please the other for the sake of his or her happiness
etc.

Mental intimacy refers to mental interdependence, which is the anatomical symbiosis of their two mental bodies. The affective-circulatory system of feelings, loves, and intentions (or “the will”) are ordinarily connected to the cognitive-respiratory system of thoughts, memories, images, meanings (or “the understanding”). This interdependence within the mental body allows us to be a whole person with unique individual consciousness and self. This is the condition prior to the process of conjugial unification. Once this unification process has begun through the initiation of the spiritual marriage, there is an anatomical modification in the two mental bodies of the partners.

The affective-circulatory system of one now connects with the cognitive-respiratory system of the other (see Diagrams 13 and 15). This new anatomy creates the conjoint self. His masculine intelligence and thinking are connected to her feminine loves and intentions, while her feminine intelligence and thinking are connected to his masculine loves and intentions. This conjoint anatomy is the perfected human state that gives us the life of heaven. Bringing every human being to this state is God’s final purpose for all creation. The more couples come into this state the more the human race evolves and the more each couple is further enriched to endless eternity.

Three Anatomical Phases of Growing Into the Conjoint Self: Male Dominance, External Equity, Internal Unity

The conjoint self that lives in heavenly eternity is produced by an anatomical growth process that is gradual and interactive with its environment. This is true for the growth of all organs, both in the physical body (like the maturation of the brain), and in the mental (like the regeneration of the self). There are three distinct phases of anatomical development and growth in the mental body of married partners. The three phases are called

(1) male dominance interactions

(2) equity interactions

(3) unity interactions

Male dominance interactions tend to be disjunctive and separative. In these interactions the partners play the role that man’s status is higher than the woman’s status. This male superiority attitude is embodied in the prerogatives that men have in our society and is portrayed and maintained by the practices of the sub-culture with which the couple identifies.

The male dominant attitude is constantly expressed in their interactions:

the way the man talks to the woman
the way he disrespects women and thinks of the intelligence of women as lower
the way the man tries to control the woman and restrict her freedom

The equity attitude is constantly expressed in their interactions:

They play the role of negotiating

The Swedenborg Reports

However, it is not merely body anatomy that will provide this understanding, but the body-mind correspondences that tie together our body and our mind. The events of the body are correspondences to the events in the mind. The new understanding comes from the knowledge of correspondences regarding the body’s anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry.

A critical source for the knowledge of correspondences is the collection of books called the Swedenborg Reports.

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was in the midst of his brilliant career as an inventive engineer working for the developing Swedish heavy metal industry when at age 57, God appeared to him while he was eating lunch and working on his publications. God told Swedenborg that his mind had been prepared for a special mission since his childhood and that he was now ready to begin his new scientific career in dual consciousness. Swedenborg was given the task of living in both worlds simultaneously, to investigate the “spiritual world” of the afterlife, and to publish scientific books about the conditions in the afterlife, including a description of the dying/resuscitation process and life in the Grand Human and Grand Monster.

Swedenborg faithfully fulfilled his obligation for the next 27 years. He made daily records of his experiences and experiments in the mental world of eternity, which is the spiritual world of the afterlife. He published more than 30 volumes which have been translated in various languages and have been studied and commented on by various well known writers in the literature. Today much discussion continues to surround Swedenborg. You can search the Web to see the thousands of sights about him. His books are usually discussed as the Writings of Swedenborg, but in mental psychology they are known as the Swedenborg Reports. (See also various online books and articles on Swedenborg by Leon James: http://web.archive.org/web/20161031210444/http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/booklist.htm )

In the Swedenborg Reports you will find confirmation of every fact and principle stated in mental psychology. Swedenborg went through the dying/resuscitation process dozens of times in order to be able to describe it better. He provides details about the process of resuscitation and the critical use of breathing and induction by “gyres” and related medical procedures we go through in our second death before entering our final destination state of mind. Swedenborg interviewed hundreds of couples in various societies of the Grand Human, confirming that conjugial soulmates live together as a conjoint self in quasi-omniscient states at the highest levels of the Grand Human. He also witnessed the atrocious misery and insane hatred for each other of people who live in the Grand Monster.

The Swedenborg Reports are unique in the history of science. Never before has a modern reputable scientist been given the opportunity to interview couples in heaven and hell, or to describe the human race in the afterlife. Swedenborg was able to interview people he had known by name only from history and literature who had lived centuries before him. He was also able to talk to friends and family that had passed on, and in one case, he was attending a neighbor’s funeral and talking with him at the same time. The man expressed amazement that people thought he was dead. He could not see anything in the physical world, of course, but he was relying on Swedenborg’s descriptions. Swedenborg was conscious in his physical body through his material mental body, and at the same time conscious in his celestial mental body with which he was appearing and acting in the Grand Human and Grand Monster. You can read all of Swedenborg’s books in English online on the Web (e.g.: at the Sacred Texts Web site: http://www.sacred-texts.com/swd/index.htm )

It is common for people to react with derision or doubt when first hearing about the Swedenborg Reports. Many people have written about Swedenborg (see the Web), some positively and with deep admiration, others negatively and accusing him of either fraud or insanity. People who have not made a study of the Swedenborg Reports have to rely on what other people say about him. This leaves a sense of doubt because it is not based on anything. As scientists and scholars we do not want to believe a report merely because it was written by a reputable person. We have two choices in the attempt to assess the value of the report. We can try to replicate the observations and verify that they are accurate. When this is not possible for various reasons, we can analyze the report to see if it has internal consistency and whether it fits with the facts already known. If so, then we can try to extend and apply the principles in the report. If this can be done usefully and new observations gathered, then our assessment of the report will be positive.

There is of course no committee that can make the above assessment for the Swedenborg Reports. Few scientist would be willing to take a few years out of their professional life just to analyze the consistency of 30 volumes of observations reported by an 18^th century Swede. But there have been a few scholars and scientists that are willing to make this examination, and afterwards to publish their assessment. I have read a number of these assessments and they were all very positive. It was time for me to examine the evidence myself. I started reading the Swedenborg Reports 28 years ago in 1981. Several years later I was ready to make my conclusions. In 1995 I published on the Web the multi-volume Swedenborg Encyclopedia of Theistic Psychology, and in 2000 I published my Theistic Psychology in 18 volumes. In these and subsequent volumes I demonstrated that Swedenborg presents a rational scientific account that is internally consistent and extensive. The observations and experiments he presents about the mental world of eternity are fully coherent and integrated. What’s more, he shows that the observations he made about correspondences between the physical world and the mental world are also to be found described in the Old and New Testaments. This is not in the literal meaning of the verses but in their “spiritual” or correspondential meaning. I have demonstrated that the method of correspondences described by Swedenborg can also be applied to other Sacred Scriptures of the past few thousand years in the world’s literature.

Mental psychology and mental anatomy as described in this book and related works is an application of the laws of correspondences as described in the Swedenborg Reports. My interest is to present to people a fully articulated psychology and mental anatomy that is understandable to the modern educated mind today. Given what is at stake it makes sense for people to inquire into this field with a view to assess whether this could be a useful perspective to study and acquire. It is still rare today to have this topic discussed in a scientific and professional context. My effort consists in presenting a mental psychology and anatomy that is complete on its own and can be assessed on its own without having to have recourse the Swedenborg Reports. Most people reading this book will not have read the Swedenborg Reports and I cannot ask anyone to accept them merely on authority. Hence this book must stand on its own legs and readers must be given the entire account from beginning to end.

Although you will see references and quotes from the Swedenborg Reports they are given as illustrations and confirmations of the theory and its principles. The argument, the theory, the justification, the details—all must stand in their own right, and readers are to evaluate it in its terms. The Swedenborg confirmations of these principles and details are not presented as proof but as illustration. They help fill in some of the content which otherwise would be empty. Of course every reader and evaluator of this theory and anatomy will be able to personally confirm it immediately after their resuscitation (which is just a few years away, more or less for everyone reading this).

The Positive and Negative Bias in Science

This book presents a theory about marriage. For us, the theory of internal unity is a reality because we have confirmed its truth through our marriage of several decades. We believe that others can benefit by examining this theory. Because it is based on human mental anatomy the theory of spiritual unity is biological and universal, and is therefore independent of culture, religion, or race. We are presenting it as a scientific theory of the human biology of marriage, and introducing a view of mental life that is integrated through rational explanations and anatomical charts. The events and environment of mental life are observable in various ways so that the reality of the spiritual marriage is verifiable by others.

We are aware that the theory of spiritual marriage may not be considered scientific by those who uphold a theoretical negative bias towards mental anatomy or the existence of a mental world in its own right. The negative bias in science denies the existence or reality of anything that is not physically measurable, or anything that is ultimately not definable by physical measurement. The acceptance of this negative premise is called a “bias” because it is not provable empirically or rationally. Within this negative bias the theory of spiritual marriage that we present would not be considered a scientific theory, nor its components such as the mental anatomy charts, the co-presence of God, or the conditions of heaven and hell in the afterlife of eternity.

The theory of spiritual marriage and mental anatomy is theistic, dualist, and biological.

In terms of theory and methodology, the positive bias in science refers to the approach known historically as “dualism.” The negative bias in science refers to the approach known historically as “monism.” According to monism no concept should be introduced in science that does not have a physical or “natural” basis. All concepts must have an operational definition that connects each to a physical measurement or abstract concept derived from it. For instance, the concept of “emotion” is operationally defined by physical measurements such as blood pressure, temperature, respiration, brain scans, recordable facial and verbal expressions, placing a check mark on an “emotions questionnaire,” etc. In other words, emotions, feelings, thoughts, and sensory experience are not real beyond what is happening in the physical body. Take away the physical body and those emotions and thoughts cease to exist. According to the negative bias of monism, when the physical body dies the life of the individual ends. This idea is called a bias in science because it is an assumption that has never been validated and confirmed.

In terms of the scientific understanding of marriage the negative bias restricts the scientist’s focus and knowledge to its external physical reality. All legal, social, and psychological ideas involving marriage are defined solely in physical terms, indications, and measurements.

For instance, “intimacy” between partners is defined, measured, analyzed, and assessed by physical means such as how often they report arguing or are observed to argue, what kind of secrets they say they keep from each other, what information they reveal to each other about themselves, how they score on knowledge quizzes about each other, how close others perceive them to be, whether they declare similar religious feelings, whether they agree on how to manage children and family, etc. These are outwardly observable behavioral interactions and there is nothing else to “intimacy” than these measures, plus whatever additional such measures can be accumulated in the future. Left out of this reductionist perspective and definition is the actuality of intimacy in the mental world and subjective experience of the two partners.

Without ignoring the usefulness of assessing behavioral interactions, the perspective of mental psychology provides a definition of mental intimacy other than the outward behavioral interactions.

It focuses on the reality of the spiritual mental world and the activity that is going on there simultaneously with the outward behavioral interactions of the couple. The negative bias reductionist view says that nothing exists between the married partners beyond those physical behavioral interactions that measure their intimacy levels. The positive bias dualist view says that two realities or worlds exist and are going on simultaneously in relation to each other, namely, the physical world and physical body in time and space, and the mental world and mental body in eternity. This is called the spiritual world of eternity because mental events and mental objects exist outside physical time and space.

Sensations, thoughts, and feelings are mental events and objects, hence they cannot exist in the brain of the physical body where only chemical and electrical things exist.

To equate sensations, thoughts, and feelings with electrical and chemical things and operations is called reductionism in science because it reduces two worlds to just one. Hence the mental world is eliminated as something that is real in its own right and existence. Dualism in science restores the perspective that the mental world is real, though not in matter, time and space, but outside of time and space in another world in which there is no time and no physical space. Instead of physical matter there is mental substance.

This “super-natural” or” spiritual” world has been discussed for thousands of years in the literature of the ancients. However it was gradually eliminated from science beginning with the 19th century under the ideological forces of positivism, naturalism, and materialism.

When the negative bias research is applied to marriage, or to love and intimacy, scientists and professional marriage counselors do not admit to the reality of the couple’s “spiritual” dimension or to the reality of their mental anatomical unity. There is no vehicle for them to do this because professional counseling or therapy cannot define what is spiritual. Monism cannot define the afterlife or God or the client’s relationship to God. Even when the negative bias therapist respects the client’s “theistic belief system”, God’s co-presence in the client’s mind and in the therapy process, cannot be validated or treated as real by the therapist.

To the trained counselor and psychologist the client’s “belief system” about something (e.g., God, heaven, hell) is not treated as reality. Having beliefs about God is psychologically real for the client, but God itself is not real to the therapist. In the professional practice of marriage counselors trained in the negative bias science of monism, God is not to be considered a causative factor in the client’s problem or treatment. When the client talks about the consequences of current behavior for their afterlife in heaven or hell, the counselor has no scientific interpretation or understanding of the actual conflict facing the client.

Instead, the counselor can only think of the heaven and hell reference as the client’s self-defined conceptual system, with the fears and anxieties that are aroused when the client is trying to cope with conflicting emotions. For the mental health care professionals who are trained in the positive bias science, the client’s anxieties and concerns about the afterlife are an opportunity to introduce scientific ideas and anatomical explanations about heaven and hell, and how the client can manage that reality more effectively.

Public polls indicate that the majority of people in the world today are dualist and are aware of the reality of God, the afterlife, and heaven and hell. But people’s knowledge about the afterlife is practically nonexistent. The Swedenborg Reports (explained below) are the only source of scientific facts about the dying/resuscitation process and the conditions of life in heaven and hell. Mental psychology incorporates Swedenborg’s observations and experiments gathered during his 27 years of dual consciousness in both the physical and spiritual worlds.

The monist perspective in marriage counseling prevents an approach that can accept the spiritual reality and eternity of marriage. However some counselors could understand it and accept it if it were shown to them that spiritual reality can be anatomically defined.

The positive bias approach in science grants without physical proof, the reality of the spiritual world and of the afterlife in eternity. The negative bias approach in science denies without physical proof the reality of the spiritual world and the afterlife of eternity.

“Natural” marriage is external and refers to the couple’s socio-legal status and the accompanying psychological dependency, when it is there. The symbolism of external marriage is reflected in the saying “Until death do us part”, a phrase that is often associated with wedding ceremonies. Couples who wish to symbolize their “spiritual” marriage would use the phrase “Until the end of eternity”—which means “never ending.”

A “never ending” marriage is also known as “spiritual marriage” and is based on internal anatomical conjunction and unity. “Internal anatomy” refers to the anatomy of the mental body of the partners, as depicted in the Anatomical Diagrams, and discussed throughout.

To the negative bias psychologist or counselor the internal unity or spiritual marriage is the couple’s personal belief. The fact that they believe this is the reality. The act of believing is the reality. But the meaning or content of the belief, namely, marriage in eternity and the afterlife, is itself a belief of the client and not a reality to the psychologist or counselor. Psychological health professionals are committed to accepting the legitimacy of their clients believing whatever they want. But they themselves do not have to believe that there is an afterlife or marriage in eternity. In fact they deny such a reality because it is contrary to the science they practice, which is in the negative bias mode of monism and materialism.

In contrast, the positive bias approach in science starts with the unproven assumption that there is a dual reality, and that we survive death and continue life in another world that is not in time and space, but in eternity and the “spiritual world.” This assumption by itself is not scientific. Many people have believed this over the ages, and many scientists today believe it personally even if it has no place in their science.

Hence we need to become aware of the distinctive difference between holding a personal belief or faith about the afterlife and God, on the one hand, and on the other, constructing a scientific theory about the afterlife and God.

God as a Scientific Concept

Thinking of God in scientific terms makes good sense as soon as we approach God and creation from an anatomical perspective. The concept of God must be logically tied into the details of reality. It is necessary to show that God operates by logical mechanisms of cause-effect laws arranged in a sequence from first to last. In a rational and scientific account nothing can exist on its own and everything must be tied into the integrated system.

The following series of assumptions and principles illustrate how the concept of God can be worked into the details of human life through an integrated set of explanations using the anatomical framework of body-mind correspondences.

Every concept in mental psychology has an operational definition grounded in anatomical terms and charts.
God is defined as infinite, omnipotent, and Divine Human, constructing the objects in the universe out of the mental substance that exists within God and is called “good with truth.” This is an uncreate living substance in which resides God’s consciousness in full. Through this conscious substance God is present from within as the primary cause of the object’s properties and its behavior.
This anatomical perspective provides an objective definition of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience.
God builds all objects and manages the details of their operation and lifespan through cause-effects laws called correspondences. These laws operate invariably across the downward and externalizing outward construction of the discrete layers of the universe. These laws of correspondences have been known to the first generations of people on this planet at a time when they still had direct perception of the afterlife and of those called “the departed” who were already there. The knowledge of correspondences have been preserved in various ways including Greek mythology, Egyptian hieroglyphics, some children’s stories like Aesop’s Fables, the New Testament parables, other Sacred Texts around the world, and most importantly, the way we think with body-mind correspondences in daily life.
The laws of correspondences are empirically discoverable by analyzing the use of body-mind correspondences in human thinking and speech. The same laws of correspondences can be discovered and confirmed in the world’s literature called Sacred Scriptures and Texts. Knowing correspondences allows us to verify and confirm the internal unity of all Holy Books and the universality of the One God.
God is present with every individual immediately and unconsciously through the substance of good with truth that forms and activates the fibers and cells of our mental organs, our physical organs, and all that exists in the physical world.

God is also present mediately and consciously as intersubjectivity or mental co-presence through mutual acknowledgment and rational dialog. The conscious mediate co-presence of God varies in proportion to the individual’s willingness to undergo the process of regeneration. This is done by resisting hellish temptations when we’re exposed to them, and fixing inherited character weaknesses that we practice in daily life.

Through immediate presence from within the inmost, God predisposes and recalibrates all our mental organs, moment by moment. God exerts full and total control over all details and the outcome, such as what we remember at any moment and what we forget, what we notice and what we ignore, what emotions fill our consciousness, what we run away from and what we feel attracted to, what talents we love to practice and what activities we hate, etc. God’s immediate engagement and intervention in every detail of every operation, mental and physical, is absolutely necessary, or else all would devolve into chaos, insanity, and ultimate non-existence. But this cannot happen. Only that can happen which promotes God’s agenda and purpose in creation.
God’s purpose in creating and managing the dual universe (time and eternity) is to evolve the human race in the Grand Human. This is a perfect world in the rational sense that only that can exist or happen in it which promotes God’s agenda. No love, intention, or thought by any individual can exist unless it promotes the welfare and evolution of the Grand Human. No catastrophe or accident or random error can occur unless it promotes God’s agenda.
God cannot directly bestow on people the celestial mental body needed to end up living in the heavenly conjugial eternity of the Grand Human. To be enjoyed, heavenly life must be loved. Human beings can love only when they are free to choose the object of their love and affection. Life on earth gives us the ability to develop a mature human rational mind. This forms the basis for the celestial mental body in heaven. Birth and life on earth cannot be avoided.

In the early generations this process was flawless and without suffering. But afterwards the generations used their knowledge of correspondences for selfish purposes. In this way they created the content and consciousness of the mental hells of humanity. This was an evolutionary process of anatomical modification that took many generations to complete. For thousands of years now all human beings are born with heaven and hell personally active in their mind. Hence it is that voluntary regeneration is required to correct this inherited anatomy.

Regeneration of our character weaknesses cannot be performed by God for the individual without the person’s cooperation out of a desire to acquire heavenly loves and truths from God. The temptations that God presents to each person can be resisted only through this motive, which is the desire to acquire heavenly loves and truths from God. Only God can be the source of heavenly loves and truths. Heavenly loves and truths are nothing else than good with truth substance appearing in infinite variety and quality in the celestial conjugial environment of the Grand Human.
Studying Sacred Scriptures and Texts through correspondences gives access to what God wants humanity to know about mental anatomy and spiritual development. Sacred Scripture is Divine Speech in correspondences. All speech by God is necessarily in correspondences. This is how it descends from God’s mind into the mental world of humanity where each individual mind exists. Correspondences are embodied and represented in meanings, which the ancients called “Logos” or “the Word.” When God speaks the words and meanings are addressed to all humanity and they enter into every human being’s mind through a vertical cascade of correspondences.

God’s words, and the meanings or consciousness that is within them, first appears in the highest celestial zone called the Third Heaven (layer 4). Those whose consciousness exists in this region of the Grand Human are able to see and understand celestial-rational correspondences of Divine Speech. These meanings form their understanding and thinking. Understanding celestial-rational meanings gives us quasi-omniscience, capable of understanding everything about anything we think about.

When the celestial zone reverberates with the correspondences of God’s Word, the rational zone which is anatomically beneath it begins reverberating with material-rational correspondences of God’s meanings. These meanings are not pure, not as they are in the celestial zone. The meanings have been altered by giving them a material context in relation to our daily life on earth. All Sacred Texts are written in a natural language using historical events and places as a venue for its culture, style, content, and literal expression. Most of the literal meaning of Sacred Scriptures deals with earthly conditions and consequences. Few details are given about the afterlife, except in a few little known texts.

But as soon as you translate the literal expressions into their correspondential meaning, we recover the celestial-rational correspondences that lie hidden within. In simultaneous order of discrete anatomical layers what came earlier lies within what comes later in sequential order. Hence the literal meaning of the verses of Sacred Texts hides a celestial or spiritual meaning within it, and this interior meaning can be extracted through the knowledge of correspondences.

If you do a Web search on God you get more than 500 million “hits” or sites and documents that use that word. There has always been a huge and intense interest in God in every generation on this planet. The modern mind socialized in science and technology is still strongly interested in God. More than half of scientists say they believe in the existence of God and more than three quarters of people acknowledge a higher power. However when it comes to God as a scientific concept, almost all scientists and people in general, oppose the idea. Why? Because people associate God with religion, and they oppose religion being brought into science.

But what if God and religion are separate and independent? From a rational and scientific perspective it is necessary to discuss God independently of religion.

Throughout Western literature across the centuries we find evidence that God was discussed and conceptualized as independent of religion. The academic discipline of Philosophy has discussed the metaphysics of existence and reality. God has been part of that discourse. For many centuries philosophy and “natural science” were considered the same academic field. Some departments of psychology were still called Department of Philosophy well into the 20^th century. However in the 19^th and 20^th centuries there was a gradual intellectual “purging” of God in both philosophy and science. Today in the Western democracies people receive a public education that forbids the discussion of God in science courses. This is justified on the ground that “religion and state” ought not to mix. This avoids social conflict between people of different religions and spiritual belief systems.

But what if God is introduced as a scientific concept independently of religion or faith?

From the rational perspective God is introduced as a scientific concept through the scientific inquiry of cause-effect mechanisms in the universe. God determines every cause-effect event and property that can be measured in science.

The scientific definition of God is

that in God infinite things make one,
that God has always existed, and
that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.

The implications drawn from this definition are discussed in the list of principles and assumptions just above. God as a scientific concept in psychology requires that we specify to some extent the cause-effect mechanisms that God has in place now and is running the show of events and reality.

Those in science who promote so called positivism restrict the conditions of observation to physical measurement. This may also be called monism and materialism. Within this frame of mind God and immortality are unscientific and untestable propositions. But those in science who promote dualism define observation in dual mode, namely observation in the physical world and observation in the mental world (see section above). For instance, the Swedenborg Reports (discussed below) provides Swedenborg’s daily observations for 27 years of events in the mental world of eternity. Those who want to examine the scientific merit of these non-physical observations must grant that the Swedenborg Reports are potentially accurate. If they are not, then the observation of others can provide falsifiability data. Swedenborg presents what he saw in the mental world of eternity, including heaven and hell, as an objective description in an environment where there are large populations living in various conditions which visitors can observe.

Some scientists argue that it’s a mistake to extend the definition of scientific observation to non-physical or mental observations. The reason given is that mental observations are subjective rather than objective, so that a dualist science would invite all sorts of crazy proposals about different worlds, and the we would lose the difference between science and science fiction, possibly with catastrophic consequences.

The way to take care of this fear or concern is to specify that in a dualist science mental observations must be tied operationally to mental anatomy.

This is the very same solution that made psychology scientific starting in the 18^th century with the experiments in mental chronometry. In the early 20^th century mental measurement led to the widespread use of intelligence tests. Later in the 20^th century electrical potential and brain tomography have led to today’s perspective in cognitive neuroscience. This shows that for psychology to become a science it had to be based on body-mind correspondences. Observations about thinking and feeling as mental events could not be treated as scientific until these mental events were shown to correspond to anatomical and physiological properties and functions of the body. The psychology of mental events (thoughts and feelings) is scientific as long as it remains grounded in body anatomy.

In monism or materialism “body anatomy” is referenced to the physical body.

In dualism “body anatomy” is referenced to the mental body (or “mind”).

Monism is reductionist. It says that the mental body or “mind” does not really exist but is a “subjective” or “emergent” phenomenon that is based on the physical body. All that exists is the physical body, hence mind relates to the physical body.

Dualism accepts the reality of two worlds that are distinct, one in time and physical space and matter, the other outside time called eternity, which is in its own real world called the mental world of eternity. We are born with two bodies, each suitable for living in its own world. The physical body and the mental body are connected to each other by operational co-action through the laws of correspondences. By definition, correspondences act across discrete layers of mental anatomy and physiology. The mental world is a world created from mental substance (or “spiritual substance”) just as the natural world is created from physical substance or matter.

Scientific observations in dualist science must define every hypothesis, proposal, or principle in terms of anatomical features shared by the two bodies and the two worlds. This is what keeps it scientific.

Anatomical Dualism

For instance, one proposal in mental psychology is that God is part of the cause-effect events in our moment by moment thinking and feeling, influencing the outcome of all mental events. In order for this to be a scientific proposal for actual mental therapy we must provide an anatomical definition of God, heaven, hell, regeneration, love, spiritual bonding, good and bad. Mental psychology provides this through anatomical charts and descriptions of mental physiology in relation to God and the Mental Sun that supplies the construction materials for mental organs and events.

The immortal mental body is born into the mental world at our birth with the physical body. The physical body is a part of the physical world, made of the elements and chemicals that originate from the Mother Sun or star galaxies.

The scientific concept of the physical body must include an explanation of how it is formed out of the chemical elements from the Mother Star or stars, and how it functions through the natural biology and physiology of those chemical materials. Hence we have notions about genes that direct the compounding of the chemicals into larger entities called cells and organs, and these form interacting physiological systems, namely,

the circulatory system that distributes nourishment,
the respiratory system that brings oxygen to the blood and vibrates our talking organs, and
the neuro-skeletal system of the brain, nerves, spine, muscles, and senses.

Similarly, the scientific concept of the mental body (or “mind”) must include an explanation of how it is formed out of the spiritual elements from the Mental Sun from God, and how it functions through the spiritual biology and spiritual physiology of those mental substances. To be considered scientific the explanation must specify what those mental substances are and how they combine into larger units that make up the organs and systems of the mental body. The p[proposal must also specify how the physical body obeys the mental body in voluntary motion, and how the physical body operates all its motions and functions in relation to the mental body. All this must be done with body-mind correspondences that remain consistent throughout every explanation in mental psychology since these are fixed universal laws linking the natural and mental worlds. The three systems in the mental body that correspond to those in the physical are specified as follows:

the affective-circulatory system that embodies the person’s motivational loves and psychological needs
the cognitive-respiratory system that embodies the person’s thoughts, intelligence, rationality, imagination, memories
the sensorimotor-neuroskeletal system that embodies the person’s consciousness, awareness, attention, readiness, vigilance

Everything in the psychology of monism and materialism is grounded in the physical body since the mind on its own does not exist. But everything in the psychology of dualism is grounded in the mental body which exists in its own world that is distinct and separate from the physical. Some people use the term “super-natural body” while others use “spiritual body.” In mental psychology the expression “mental body” is used and defined in a scientific network of propositions, as explained above and illustrated throughout this book.

Psychology in the monist or materialist mode cannot provide a scientific explanation for the components of mental states. For instance “being in love” is described as a particular physical state of the body involving hormones, blood circulation, breathing, and the sense organs. But these physical operations are not what is “being in love.” This is a mental state composed of feelings, desires, needs along with their thoughts and sensations, anticipations, intentions, and involvements. Psychology in the dualist mode restores the scientific status of mental states, defining them in terms of the mental body. This is why all the knowledge accumulated in monist psychology and neuroscience on the physical body can be transferred and applied to the mental body, with many advantages and benefits. The secret of this transfer lies in an understanding of body-mind correspondences within a mental anatomical system.

Mental anatomy is defined by the Mental Sun of eternity from God. This visible bright orb at the center of our mind is the source of the substance that forms both our mental body and the mental space or environment in which our immortal mental body is born and lives. This substance is good with truth in infinite variety. Our mind is therefore an anatomical component of the mental world itself. All concepts and proposals in mental psychology must be consistent with this anatomical reality, and must fit rationally into an organic system.

The physical body is a copy or model of the mental body, and hence it provides science with an objective methodology for deriving body-mind correspondences in the construction of explanation and theory. Swedenborg in the 18^th century was the first of the anatomical dualists in psychology. He has recorded amazing observations of the Grand Human conglomerate of spiritual societies in the celestial region of the human mind. At age 57 he found himself with dual consciousness in his physical and in his celestial mental bodies. For 27 years he was able to write his daily records in Latin and Swedish with his physical body what he was doing in his celestial mental body as he was walking around in a “heavenly city” interviewing conjugial couples who lived there.

Swedenborg discovered that the cognitive-respiratory system of the mental body of each couple was in synchrony with each other, and with the other couples who resided in that society. There was a general breathing rhythm over the entire society which corresponded to the coherence of their individual thinking arranged in an overarching meaning. In other words, what each couple in a mental society was thinking privately to themselves fit with what other couples were thinking into a rational jig-saw puzzle made of meanings. This integrated and coherent complex series of celestial-rational meanings was then communicated back to each couple, vastly enhancing and enriching their individual thoughts and meanings.

Swedenborg further discovered that the entire massive conglomerate of mental societies in the Grand Human has a unified breathing pattern that is communicated back to each society, and thence to each couple and individual. The Grand Human is in the shape and internal structure of the human body. While he was traveling to each mental society in the Grand Human, Swedenborg was able to describe his location relative to the body anatomy, with which he was quite familiar having published several advanced texts on his research in human anatomy and its related psychology. The implication of these amazing discoveries is that God maintains the mental life of the human race as a unitary system.

In other words what I think about through the course of the day, and what you think about, and what others around us think about, is maintained by God as part of a larger human organic operation of the entire human race as it is progressing and evolving day by day since the beginning of the race in the physical world. Human beings are born with an immortal body that continues life in its realm after the physical is detached. There population of the human race has been accumulating since the first generation on this planet, and on all the other countless planets that support human life. After a few years in the physical body, human beings keep accumulating in the Grand Human and the Grand Monster, these two being opposite regions of the human mind. Since the beginning of time numberless human beings have chosen to exist in both of these human spheres of consciousness.

The thoughts of numberless human beings coalesce together into a rational whole because thinking is the activity of an anatomical organ and physiological system of operation in interaction with the affective-circulatory system of loves and intentions. One might think of the human race as a giant mental plant that grows in mental spaces wherever we are conscious and experience sensations, thoughts, and feelings, thus living consciousness. We are this plant. Each of us is an organic functioning portion of this giant mental plant. Thinking is the respiration of that plant and so the plant as a whole has a global respiration that is made up of the individual respiration of each cell.

As each of us in our daily work and play deal with our feelings, thoughts, and actions we are co-constructing through our individual thinking, a larger human thought-framework that adds up to something deeply meaningful that is then passed back to each individual. In this way God evolves the thinking of the human race through itself, bringing each human being to ever deeper and higher understandings of celestial-rational meanings. These meanings have within them celestial loves that enter our affective-circulatory system and bring us to ever higher human potential and experience. (For additional discussion on spiritual evolution through the vertical community, see my discussion the Perizonius Thesis.)

The Medical Definition of Heaven and Hell

In a science that is materialistic, moral codes of thinking, speaking, and behaving cannot be justified by scientific criteria. As a result there is effective and organized social pressure on scientists to refrain from taking sides on moral and religious issues. This has created dilemmas about what to say when the conduct is clearly reprehensible or irrational, but has been shrouded in a context of religious or cultural expression. Examples applied to marriage include male dominance, infidelity, mental abuse, male prerogatives, pornography, email romance, children before wife, sexual blackmail, and others. In anatomical dualism we have the opportunity to apply a scientific medical criterion to human conduct and intention.

In mental psychology the source of evaluation and assessment of human conduct is the anatomical framework of the mind—not the moral or intellectual doctrine that supplies people’s lifestyle justifications. Anatomy can be scientific while doctrine cannot. In medical terms the practice of excessive alcohol consumption gradually destroys the body’s organs until death ensues from liver failure. Harming the physical body by deliberate choice or neglect is bad. In the same way, harming the mental body by deliberate choice or neglect is bad.

Mental anatomy helps us determine what it means to harm the mental body. Our mental body is constructed by mental genes composed of good with truth substance that streams abundantly from the Mental Sun from God. Good with truth is a Human substance with fixed mental characteristics or properties. The physiology of the mental body is nourished and maintained by good with truth substance, just as the physiology of the physical body is nourished by chemical matter such as oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon supplied by the Mother Star or stars. The Mother Star is an epithet for inert matter in large quantities in physical space. The Mental Sun is living substance from God. Good with truth substance is uncreate, infinite, living, and Human. If has always been and it anatomically and physiologically defines what is real, what is good, what is rational. Whatever created object or characteristic corresponds to good with truth substance is good and true. Anything else is bad and irrational.

This is the medical or anatomical definition of heaven and hell. What corresponds to good with truth is called heavenly, and what opposes good with truth is hellish.

The heavenly order of good with truth provides the bonding forces that hold together the anatomical operations at each layer of the mental world:

Within the individual mental body, the affective-circulatory and cognitive-respiratory systems unite in synergy to create consciousness, sensation, and movement.
Within the conjugial couple, the conjoint self held together by the good in the affective system of one bonding with the truth in the cognitive system of the other.
Within the Grand Human, each society is held together by maintaining peaceful relationships of mutual respect and good will toward one another (affective good) through the sharing of new meanings (cognitive truth) with which they can enrich each other’s wisdom and rationality, and thereby be in the consciousness of their delight.
Within the Grand Monster, a society is held together by its opposition to the Grand Human, point by point in every detail. Anatomically considered, the Grand Monster is a deformed enantiomorph of the Grand Human. This mirror-image relationship is absolutely oppositional, like matter and anti-matter, or like Superman’s world and Bizarro world in American popular comics.

The physical electro-magnetic force that holds together atomic particles, and the force of gravity that holds together a planetary system, correspond to the mental-spiritual force that holds together good with truth substance at all levels—within the individual, between married partners, between a population, between the societies of the human race in the mental world, and the mental world itself. This anatomical reality defines what is good and true in the mental body.

If we apply this principle to marriage we can examine any interaction between partners as heavenly or hellish. Conjunctive interactions are heavenly (good, healthy, promotes bonding through respect), while disjunctive interactions are hellish (bad, unhealthy, disruptive, injurious). Heavenly interactions are anatomically conjunctive, which means that the mental body of the husband and wife become organically intertwined in normal functioning. The cumulative build up of conjunctive interactions allow the growth and creation of the conjoint self that can live in the celestial zone of the mental world called “conjugial heaven” in the Grand Human. Conjunctive interactions between the couples who are internally united in this way create a society in the Grand Human. The breathing of each couple and each individual is synchronized and mutually coordinated in response to the global breathing of the Grand Human, which is the summative breathing of all the societies, couples, and individuals there. Medically and scientifically considered, intentions, feelings, thoughts, and acts that promote this anatomical conjunctive process of the human race are all defined as “heavenly” and all correspond to “good with truth” substance.

But all disjunctive interactions between husband and wife oppose the formation, growth, and evolution of the Grand Human in their mind.

Disjunctive interactions sever the anatomical connections and synergistic interdependence. Medically and psychologically disjunctive interactions in marriage are anatomically hurtful, unhealthy, bad, evil, demonic, infernal, sub-human, anti-human, deformed, corrupt, oppositional, destructive, devolving into worse and worse experiences and savage insanities. This is hell in the human mind and is rooted in the societies and individuals of the Grand Monster. “Hellish” is a word referring to the collection, inventory, and catalogue of all the anatomically disjunctive interactions that people have had in the history of the human race.

There is a shyness or hesitation in the psychology literature today to use the terms “hellish” and “heavenly” because of an inability to escape relativism in basic human moral issues, and as well, because of a lack of knowledge of mental anatomy in eternity. Without mental anatomy, the terms heavenly and hellish may appear judgmental and religious—but they are not, when defined anatomically and medically. The terms are useful because they have been used for thousands of years and are part of people’s beliefs everywhere. It is useful for science to re-align popular psychological ideas and to give them a more rigorous and scientific meanings, especially when we are considering very basic ideas that have been with humanity since the beginning.

Conjunctive Interactions Produce Intersubjective Consciousness

Anatomical dualism recognizes God’s intended goal of creation and reality in terms of anatomical conjunction of the human race. The spiritual substance of good with truth is the source and determination of this process of human evolution into one anatomical Grand Human. The Grand Monster is anatomically separate from the Grand Human but functionally connected as a point by point opposite framework called disjunction. Nothing disjunctive is allowed to enter the Grand Human so that its evolution remains perfect forever.

However, human conjunction cannot exist without the possibility of human disjunction. This is because God maintains and manages human freedom and all instances of individual freedom. Freedom is not a vacuum or the absence of something. Freedom is not the idea of “anything goes.” To have or to be in freedom requires that God create and maintain a psychological balance between choosing a conjunctive or a disjunctive interaction. We make choices through the determination of the vertical community. God connects us with those specific societies where are anatomically rooted the loves that we cling to. Since in our daily life on earth we choose with our material mental body, God connects it with societies of the Grand Human and societies of the Grand Monster that have the loves to which an individual clings to during the moment of making a choice in daily life. This is human freedom: to be balanced or poised on a thin edge being pulled equally in opposite direction for that choice.

When set up this way, the choice is ours, in total and perfect freedom. We do not need “willpower” or “virtuousness” to make a good or conjunctive choice, but only to cling to the heavenly love for a good choice that is congruent with truth. Similarly, we do not need “corruption” or “vices” to make a bad or disjunctive choice, but only to cling to the hellish love for a bad choice that is opposed to truth and conjunction, and allied to falsity and insanity. “Good” vs. “evil” are terms that refer to “heavenly loves” and “hellish loves” in our mind. Heavenly is conjunctive and evolving, while hellish is disjunctive and devolving. Heaven gets progressively better, more beautiful, grander, while hell gets progressively worse, more ugly, less and less in touch with reality and more and more embroiled with insanity and permanent inner rage against all that is heavenly.

Intersubjectivity is a term referring to joint interactive consciousness.

The two mental bodies of a conjugial couple are gradually growing into anatomically interdependent systems (see Diagram 15). The result is called the conjoint self. Human evolution does not proceed fully with single individuals. The Grand Human evolves through the conjunction of conjugial couples in the first place. Each spiritual couple is united anatomically, which means that the consciousness of each partner is produced jointly, not singly.

Human evolution proceeds on the unit of the conjoint self, not the single self.

The primary experience of consciousness in the heavenly region of the mind is therefore dyadic. The consciousness of single persons cannot enter the sphere of heaven. Life in heaven requires anatomical conjunction between soulmates. Partners who are united in a spiritual marriage wait for one another in a mental holding zone just outside the Grand Human proper. They are content and comfortable, knowing their beloved will soon pass on and join them, so that the two together can enter their home waiting for them in one of the heavenly societies. Each couple is inducted by gyres and breathing procedures into the society that is most compatible to their ruling love. By entering that society the new couple brings with it the partners’ own unique loves and meanings, enriching that society and in turn being enriched by them. The arrival of a new couple in a heavenly society is greeted there with significance and delight.

The consciousness of the spiritually united couple is called dyadic intersubjectivity. The consciousness of a spiritual society is called group intersubjectivity and also community intersubjectivity. Each of us also has a universal intersubjectivity that we share with all human beings by virtue of our humanity or human form. Universal intersubjectivity is created through the Grand Human anatomy. Community intersubjectivity and group intersubjectivity is created through global breathing synergy. Dyadic intersubjectivity is created through conjunctive interactions between husband and wife.

The consciousness in the Grand Monster is also a global intersubjectivity held together by the correspondence of evil loves with insane thoughts and fantasies. See unreal neos here zzzz

Correspondences in Physical and Mental Anatomy

Physical things in time and place are constructed out of physical matter or chemical elements. The physical body is constructed out of organic protein cells and fibers, which themselves are constructed out of the chemical elements. Scientists have formulated the Big Bang theory that explains how the elements of matter which make up things in the physical world, were all collected in one clump as an extremely dense star. This original star or “Mother Star” suddenly exploded with what must have been a massive explosion, sending all its elements into space where they formed new clumps or galaxies, stars, and planets. When the surface of planets cool down over billions of years still new clumps of elements can form, this time allowing the formation of organic living molecules that clump together to form organs and bodies of animals and human beings. Our physical body is therefore constructed out of the elements that originate from the Mother Star. And this is the scientific story of the natural world.

The scientific story of the spiritual world is identical in steps because of the laws of correspondences that connect the natural world and the spiritual world. The Mother Star corresponds to the Spiritual Sun or the Mental Sun of Eternity. The natural sun in time is inert or “dead” while the Mental Sun in eternity is organic and living. In other words, the natural world is inert made of chemical matter, while the mental world is alive and made of living spiritual matter called substance.

Inert physical matter and energy require physical space and time, while living mental substance does not require, nor can exist, in physical matter and space or time.

The easiest way to see this dualist contrast between physical/natural on the one hand, and mental/spiritual on the other, is to think about your dreams, daydreams, and fantasies. In our dreams we can see places, objects, and people. We can ride a horse on the beach or have a sumptuous dinner in a restaurant with one’s friend. In scary dreams we can run from an attacker or be captured and tortured. We experience our life in the dream world and there appears to be in our dreams all the things that we have in the natural world through our physical body.

The objects and places in our dream world are experienced through our mental sensorimotor system. We can see, hear, touch, taste, and experience emotions of pleasure or fear. The dream world and its objects that appear in our sensorimotor consciousness while we are asleep are mental objects, mental spaces, and mental events. Note that the spaces and objects in our dreams are manufactured instantaneously by our loves through our thoughts. In other words, a love or desire in the affective system can direct our thoughts and imagination in the cognitive system, to produce the appearance of mental spaces and objects in our sensorimotor system.

The environment of our mental world contains the embodied objects of our loves. Our thoughts and imagination, directed by our love, can produce sensorimotor appearances.

The following chart specifies some specific correspondences between the mental body and the physical body.

Anatomical Correspondences Between Physical and Mental Body

PHYSICAL BODY

MENTAL BODY

Circulatory system

heart, vessels, blood, lymphatic, bone marrow, fat, liver, pancreas, kidney, reproductive organs

Affective system

loves, desires, intentions, motivation, satisfactions, value attachments

Respiratory system

lungs, diaphragm, chest, larynx, mouth, tongue, lips, nasal cavity, teeth

Cognitive system

meanings, thoughts, ideas, interpretations, understandings, reasonings, images, fantasies, imagination

Neuro-skeletal system

brain, nerves, neuropeptides, hormones, spine, bones, cartilage, muscle, skin, sensory organs

Sensorimotor system

sensations, pleasure, pain, motor readiness, vigilance, attention, focus, noticings

Many correspondences are familiar to everyone from everyday thinking, language, and literature. Regarding the affective and circulatory systems, people know that love is symbolized by the heart and that the color of love is red. Since the heart is the central component in blood circulation it is known to symbolize intense passion or “ruling love.” People say that something is the “heart of the matter” when that thing is central or critical to the whole. People who are cruel and lack compassion are called “heartless” and “cold at heart,” while their opposites are called “good hearted,” “kind hearted” and “soft hearted.”

Other words relating to the correspondence between circulatory and affective systems include bloodline, bad blood, hot blood, heart break, broken heart, cold blooded, inoculate against certain ideas, raising my blood pressure, etc. “I need time to digest that” announces that one wants to think more about the topic. “I hate his guts” refers to dislike for someone. “I won’t swallow that” is a refusal to accept something.

Regarding correspondences between the cognitive and respiratory systems, people know that “breathing faster” and “shallow breathing” are associated with certain types of thoughts and images. “Taking a breather” is used to indicate relief from cognitive effort. “Coughing” is associated with mental embarrassment. “Spitting” on an idea means to disdain it. “Eating it all up” refers to being gullible.

Regarding correspondences between the neuro-skeletal and sensorimotor systems, people know that “touching a nerve” refers to a sensitive topic, while “don’t rub it in” means stop teasing me about that topic. “Skeletons in the closet” are kept secrets, and “burying the hatchet” is to forget about a former conflict. “Remaining deaf to it” is to ignore a plea, and “are you not hearing me” is an injunction to heed a warning.

The rational layer of the mental world of eternity (7) is anatomically situated below the celestial layer (6, 5, 4) and above the material layer (8, 9). The lower or external portion of the rational (7e) identifies with the material world and its order, while the more interior portion of the rational (7i) identifies with the celestial world and its order. There is therefore a split or anatomical fissure between the lower material-rational (7e) and the higher celestial-rational (7i).

In mental anatomy what is external is lower, and what is interior is higher. The higher/lower dimension in sequential order of discrete degrees becomes the inward/outward dimension in simultaneous order of discrete degrees. The sequential order is the cause effect sequence from first to last. Hence higher degrees come first and initiate operations in the lower degrees. There is therefore a permanent chain of causation sequence from God to the final event, which is the event or object itself.

This entire anatomical structure is completely integrated into units, parts, and portions that act synergistically as one functioning unit.

Our mental body and our physical body correspond to each other and are adapted to their respective environments, namely, the mental and the physical worlds. Both bodies are nourished by their environment through the circulatory system that carries food to every organ and to billions of cells. Eating food with the physical body corresponds to ingesting information with the mental body. Physical food or nourishment and mental information or meaning are body-mind correspondences to each other. Meaning to the mental body functions like food to the physical body.

In the mental world of eternity good with truth substance streams out of the mental sun which is at the center of the world. The center in simultaneous order also means the top or first in successive order. The mental sun is the first cause in creation. All causes in the mental and physical worlds are tied to this first cause, just as a giant tree is tied to its roots beneath the earth. From the mental sun issues a continuous supply of good with truth substance. When this substance leaves the mental sun and streams into creation all around itself, it creates a mental expanse or mental ether that is made of that substance and provides the building blocks for mental genes and cells out of which our mental organs are constructed.

The good with truth substance that leaves the Mental Sun divides itself into two elemental building blocks called good substance and truth substance. Good substance is also called mental heat, and sometimes “love substance.” Truth substance is also called mental light, and sometimes rationality substance. These two substances have a built in propensity to reunite so they become one substance again called good with truth, or love with rationality. Two kinds of arrangements or bonds are then formed. One is the truth-from-good arrangement, and the other is the good-from-truth arrangement. The truth-from-good array is called the masculine mental gene, while the good-from-truth is the feminine arrangement.

Women’s organs are formed solely out of good-from-truth genes, while men’s mental organs are formed solely out of truth-from-good genes. The result is that the mental anatomy of men and women are reciprocals of each other. No single cell or process in a woman’s mind is like anything in a man’s mind. This total, absolute, and eternal anatomical distinction insures that a conjugial couple can be formed into a perfect synergistic anatomical unity that can endure and evolve to eternity. Masculine intelligence perfects itself when it is united with feminine love, and feminine intelligence perfects itself when it is united with masculine loves. The good which is in love substance unites with the intelligence which is in truth substance. They are united as in a marriage and produce mental offspring called consciousness.

Consciousness is the sensorimotor embodiment of love operating through intelligence.

Quoting from the Swedenborg Reports on Anatomical Dualism

Although Swedenborg (1688-1772) did not use the term “anatomical dualism” it is very clear that his system of explanations and his empirical observations exemplify the approach of anatomical dualism as described and illustrated in mental psychology. The Writings of Swedenborg fall into two categories, according to his biographers and “Swedenborgian scholars.” His “philosophical” and “scientific” publications up to the start of his dual consciousness at age 57, and his “theological” publications after that until his passing at age 84 in 1772. Since then Swedenborg’s Writings have been influential with intellectuals and writers, but he has remained unknown and excluded in the history of psychology, despite his significant contributions in “rational psychology”, mental psychology, and anatomical dualism. All dualist science has been carefully excluded from the scientific literature in psychology throughout the 20^th century, and currently.

Mental psychology in its modern form, as applied in this book on marriage, is based on the totality of Swedenborg’s works, seeing them as a unified scientific presentation on anatomical dualism. To distinguish this scientific perspective from the religious and theological perspective, I use the term Swedenborg Reports to cover all of his publications, as well as other posthumous works later published by his biographers. The Swedenborg Reports contain his observations and experiments during the 27 years that he lived with dual consciousness. He was able to write notes and records with his physical body of what he could simultaneously observe and do with his mental body. This amazing phenomenon is a unique opportunity for science. Never before has a reputable and well published scientist been given the opportunity of using a conscious mental body to explore the mental world of eternity, what Swedenborg called “the spiritual world” of the afterlife.

The following selections indicate his focus on anatomical dualism in psychology. The original text has been somewhat adapted by replacing specific religious references with theistic terms enclosed in square brackets. Three dots indicate skipped text.

SE 499 [God] … governs the universe as if it were His body, thus without any difficulty; … the universe would be dispersed if all and the least things did not relate to His body and were not controlled by Him.

In His body are two kingdoms, so to speak, just as in the human body; one pertains to the heart and the other to the lungs. The one pertaining to the heart is called heavenly, and the one pertaining to the lungs is called spiritual. These two kingdoms are united in a wonderful manner; and the one and the other govern in every single region [of the body], though each in its distinct way.

499 1/2. I have been told that the generative members compose by themselves a distinct kingdom, just as in the human also they are distinct or separated from the rest. (SE 499)

The above passage (SE 499) shows Swedenborg’s definition of the universe in terms of human anatomy. The whole universe is kept together by God in the form of the human body, as if the universe was God’s Body. The management of the universe for God is spontaneous, like we manage our billions of cells as one, moving freely and without thinking about it.

In this passage two systems (“kingdoms”) are identified in the human body: affective-circulatory system (“heart”) and cognitive-respiratory system (“lungs”). In other places the third system is described: the neuroskeletal-sensorimotor system, which is the consciousness of sensation and movement in endless variety and complexity. The affective system of feelings and intentions is called “the will” which defines the voluntary intentions we have moment by moment in the course of the day and over our entire biography. The will is also known as the person’s “character” since our intentionality (affective) determines our conduct (sensorimotor). The reproductive system constitutes a distinct sub-system of the overall affective system, just as the uterus or the testes are distinct sub-systems of the overall circulatory system pumped by the heart.

The passage below (AC 9281) contrasts the breathing of the material mental body (“outward breathing”) with that of the celestial mental body (“inward breathing”). Outward breathing is called material (“from the world”) because the material mental body identifies completely with the physical body until the dying/resuscitation process when the physical is abandoned. Hence the breathing of our material mental body is the same as the breathing of the physical body. After the dying/resuscitation process our mental health and rationality depends on the inward breathing of our celestial mental body. We are then in heaven. But if our celestial mental body has not been matured through regeneration of the material mental body prior to dying, then we have only the material mental body to breathe with, which is outward breathing. In the mental world of eternity these two become total opposites so that they cannot coexist.

AC 9281. … And from the signification of "breathing," as being the state of life in respect to the truths and goods of faith. The reason why "breathing" signifies this state of life, is that the lungs, whose office it is to breathe, correspond to the life of faith from charity, which is spiritual life.

Man has an outward and an inward breathing; the outward breathing is from the world, but the inward is from heaven. When a man dies, the outward breathing ceases; but the inward breathing, which during his life in the world is tacit and imperceptible to him, continues. This breathing is altogether according to the affection of truth, thus according to the life of his faith. But those who are in no faith, as is the case with those who are in hell, do not draw their breathing from within, but from without, thus in a contrary manner; and therefore when they approach an angelic society, where there is breathing from within, they begin to be suffocated, and become like images of death (n. 3894). Therefore they cast themselves down headlong into their hell, where they resume their former breathing, which is contrary to that of heaven.

[3] As the breathing corresponds to the life of faith, therefore the life of faith is also signified by the "soul" [anima] (n. 9050), from "animation," which denotes the breathing; and therefore also the breath is called the "spirit," as in the expressions "drawing the breath" [spiritus], and "letting out the breath" [spiritus]….(AC 9281)

The passage above shows Swedenborg’s anatomical dualism based on body-mind correspondences, specifically the correspondence between breathing and “the affection of truth”, also called “the life of faith” because affection is of the will (affective) and “truth” leads to faith, by which Swedenborg meant “rational faith” to distinguish it from “blind faith.” Rational faith is nothing else then rational thinking about God and the afterlife. Breathing is the physical action of the physical body and it corresponds to the mental action of the mental body in which we think with truth, that is, rationally with correspondences. This is called celestial-rational thinking to distinguish it from material-rational thinking.

Those in hell avoid those in heaven. There is an impassable gulf between them. There is an impassable gulf between our conclusions based on material-rational thinking and those based on celestial-rational thinking. Material-rational thinking is opposite to celestial-rational thinking. For instance, certain lifestyle beliefs such as selfism, racism, machiavellism, addiction, abuse of children, wife beating, infidelity, discrimination, terrorism, nazism, fascism, black magic, voodoo, and many others, involve hurtful and cruel practices that are justified intellectually through a network of arguments that may be called material-rational thinking. It is possible through cleverness to make an argument appear rational, when it is not. For instance, the denial of God and the reality of the mental world of eternity have been justified by many different types of arguments that are based on purely material thinking. They will allow absolutely nothing about reality that is not physical in origin.

The following is an entry in Swedenborg’s record book that amplifies the anatomical significance of breathing and relating it to the physiological induction process by which individuals are brought into the interior mental states of their destination society in the Grand Human where their personal conjugial dwelling awaits them.

SE 3399. … when breathing takes place in a person, the senses and perceptions come alive, as well as actions, and when there is inward breathing, that the inward senses and perceptions come alive, as I have been shown by actual experience. For I was driven into inward gyres also, which were kinds of breathing.

So the first inauguration is only into types of breathing, and when these have been given, then the spirit is introduced into inward perceptions, and so further, for as shown before, ideas are the intervals and variations of the types of respirations, as is obvious from the operation of the will into the muscles by means of the action of the lungs, spoken of earlier. 1748, 28 Sept.(SE 3399)

The above passage (SE 3399) identifies “gyres” as a type of breathing rhythm that is induced upon the individual’s celestial mental body during the entry point to their destination society. The inward breathing of the celestial mental body is physiologically complex and requires several phases of consciousness each with more and more interior perceptions, meanings, and correspondences to celestial good with truth substance from the Mental Sun.

In the physical body respiration is necessary to allow the heart to pump nourishment to all the parts of the body. In the celestial mental body nourishment corresponds to celestial-rational loves and their affections, which are supplied by the mental heat entering the affective-circulatory system of the mental body. Celestial-rational loves require a higher or more inward type of breathing, that is, of interior celestial-rational meanings with which those loves can conjoin, and thereby produce the consciousness and life of conjugial heaven in eternity.

The following passage (AC 3889) presents certain observations Swedenborg made about gyres and the correspondence between love in the mental body and the heart in the physical body, and the correspondence between truth in the mental body and the lungs in the physical body.

AC 3889. In order that I might know not only that there is a correspondence of the celestial things which are of love with the motions of the heart, and of the spiritual things which are of faith from love with the motions of the lungs, but also how the case is with this correspondence, it was given me for a considerable space of time to be among the angels, who showed it me to the life. By a wonderful and indescribable flowing into gyres they formed a semblance of a heart and another semblance of lungs, together with all the interior and exterior contextures that are in them. They then followed the flow of heaven in a free way; for heaven is in the endeavor toward such a form, from the influx of love from … [God].

Thus they presented the several parts that are in the heart; and afterwards the union between the heart and the lungs, which they also represented by the marriage of good and truth. From this it was evident that the heart corresponds to the celestial which is of good, and the lungs to the spiritual which is of truth; and that the conjunction of these two in a material form is precisely as is that of the heart and the lungs. I was also told that the case is similar in the body throughout (that is, in its several members, organs, and viscera) in regard to the things therein which are of the heart, and those which are of the lungs; for where both do not act, and each distinctly take its turn, there cannot be any motion of life from any principle of the will, nor any feeling of life from any principle of the understanding. (AC 3889)

The passage above (AC 3889) identifies the correspondence between the “marriage of good and truth” in the mental body, and “the union between the heart and the lungs” in the physical body. “there is a correspondence of the celestial things which are of love with the motions of the heart, and of the spiritual things which are of faith from love with the motions of the lungs”. The beating or pulse of the heart (systolic and diastolic) is the organic motor that drives blood circulation in the physical body. This motion of the heart is the physical “effect” that is “caused” by the mental circulation of love in the affective system of the mental body, which is therefore also called the affective-circulatory system of the mental body. “Heart” in the physical body corresponds to “love” in the mental body (mind). Everything the heart does in the physical body is a reflection of what love does in the mental body.

This general correspondence also holds true in specific and particular details involving “parts of the heart” in the physical body and “varieties of good” in the mental body. Similarly, there is a correspondence between “parts of the lungs” and “varieties of truths”. The heart and the lungs of the physical body correspond to the will, which is the affective-circulatory system of the mental body, and the understanding, which is the cognitive-respiratory system of the mental body—both the material mental body (layers 9, 8, 7) and the celestial mental body (layers 6, 5, 4).

Note the beginning of the passage above: “In order that I might know…” which appears frequently in the Swedenborg Reports. He explains that God sent him on his extraordinary scientific mission to allow him to observe, record, describe, explain and publish to the scientific world the unprecedented zzzzzzzzzz

The Anatomical Layers of the Mental World

The Mental Sun of eternity, also called the “Spiritual Sun”, is the beginning, center, and top of all that exists because it is the source of good with truth substance, and this substance provides the building blocks for the mental world, the mental organs and mental body, the physical body, and the physical world. You can picture all reality or creation as an expanse around the Mental Sun created by mental ether composed of this substance. Now picture human beings each with their mental body all around the Mental Sun. Finally picture the physical world with stars and planets all round this as the outward shell.

Now to fill in things a little more. Picture the mental world of ether filled with lands, mountains, rivers, plants, deserts, caves, oceans—just like these things exist on earth. The people with their immortal (or “eternal”) mental body are dispersed as populations in this mental geography. Some people cling to loves that are compatible with the good and truth substance that is streaming in from the Mental Sun. They live in the mental layer immediately surrounding the Mental Sun. In a circle more distant from the center live those who cling to loves that are compatible as well as to loves that are opposed. The more that people cling to opposed loves the further they live from the Mental Sun. Finally, the people who cling to only loves that are opposed, live the furthest.

The further one lives from the Mental Sun, the more the mental geography deteriorates. The mental cities that are built close to the Mental Sun make up the “heavens” in the human mind. Those who raise their consciousness to this level by clinging to “heavenly” loves live as conjugial couples between soulmates in a celestial environment of beauty unimaginable on earth. The mental geographic environment in the heavenly regions of the human mind is a sensorimotor appearance produced by the positive loves married to rational thinking.

The mental body we obtain at birth is immortal. It lives in the mental layer of the mind called resuscitation zone. This is the layer where the dying/resuscitation process takes place, consequently the awakening and beginning of our conscious life in the afterlife of eternity. Only physical matter is temporary, that is in time. No object in the physical world lasts forever. All physical material objects fall apart with time and disintegrate into its component materials and chemicals. But immaterial or mental objects are made of good with truth substance that is not in time, not temporary, but in eternity, thus eternal and forever. A human being’s mental body houses the person’s life of sensations, thoughts, and feelings. These are organic anatomical objects in the mental world, thus made of the good with truth substance that inundates the mental world from the Mental Sun.

The organs of the mental body and its mental physiology require mental nourishment to operate. The good with truth substance is available all around the mental body and its receptors. Specifically, the affective-circulatory system receives the good portion of the good with truth substance, while the cognitive-respiratory system receives the truth portion of good with truth substance. Good substance in the affective organs is the nourishment of the mental body. Subjectively we experience the circulation of this spiritual food substance from the Mental Sun as feelings or loves in endless variety and intensity. Our life is our will, and our will is our love.

A fundamental anatomical fact of the mental world is its vertical or concentric orientation. The highest is at the center (see diagram 1 and diagram 2). The highest layer is also the most superior or advanced in human functions. Layer 4, which is constructed anatomically out of celestial-rational loves, meanings, and consciousness, is the closest to the Mental Sun, while layer 12, which is the physical body and its world, is lowest or furthest away from the Mental Sun. Because of this anatomical structure there are sometimes odd relationships that Swedenborg observed. The anatomical orientation of the mental body in the Grand Human societies and cities is to always face the Mental Sun, which is in the East sky (as it is for the physical body with the natural sun). But with our physical body we can turn away from the sun and face the west or north.

But once we enter the Grand Human at our second death (layers 6, 5, 4), we will always appear to face east towards the Mental Sun. This is an outward appearance due to the fact that facial orientation corresponds to character orientation. Once people are in the Grand Human, their mental life concords completely with the order of the Mental Sun. All their feelings, intentions, thoughts, fantasies, and dreams are in the celestial-rational order of meanings. This result is directly from genuine reception of good with truth substance from the Mental Sun. No matter which way our celestial mental body turns or walks towards, the Mental Sun will always remain in front of our vision. “To walk” and “to turn” correspond to mental orientation, which involves the quality and content of our loves and thoughts.

But those who lower their consciousness to the loves that oppose good and truth live an “infernal” mental environment called “hell” where they experience and cling to negative loves known to us as the love of self only, the love of being cruel and of making others suffer, the love of dominating, the love of deceiving, the love of depriving others of all they own, the hatred for marriage and children, the hatred of heavenly loves, the hatred of God and truth. The mental geographic environment of the hells reflects this negativity and insanity by providing an appearance of dungeons, caves, dragons, scorpions, vultures, vipers, sulfur, darkness, torches, howling, stench, and ugly repelling deformed faces and bodies.

The mental geographic environment in the hellish regions of the human mind is a sensorimotor appearance produced by the negative loves married to insane thinking. The deeper the negativity and lack of compassion, the more insane the thinking is, and the more inhuman and deformed the appearance. This is because mental ether from the Mental Sun is made of good and truth substance. When this enters the affective-circulatory system of the mental body, it reacts according to the loves that the person is clinging to. Clinging to positive loves such as altruism and sincerity, enhances the person’s rationality and raises the consciousness and life to a heavenly environment.

Clinging to negative loves such as deception and cruelty, enhances the person’s insanity and lowers the consciousness and life to a hellish environment. These choices cumulate over a lifetime with the physical body, and upon awakening from the dying/resuscitation process people incline towards their strongest attachment as developed over the prior years. They then gleefully and foolishly follow the path to one of the mental societies in the Grand Monster, or else, they engage wisely upon the path of induction in one of the mental societies of the Grand Human. There they find their spouse and soulmate waiting for them to be reunited.

Heaven and hell are therefore anatomical processes in the human mind. Every human being has heaven and hell in their mind because there is only one mental world of eternity, and everyone is in it from birth with the immortal mental body. Swedenborg was able to “visit” both heaven and hell in the human mind. His observations confirm the fact that there is only mental world of eternity and everyone from earth and elsewhere, ends up there at death. This means that we can look forward to meeting our favorite authors from history, should we want to, and should they want to meet with you.

The anatomical layers around the Mental Sun are specified in Diagram 2.

Love as Nourishment for the Mental Body

Loves and affections make up the mental food that enters the affective-circulatory system of our mental body as it is immersed in the expanse of rational ether around the mental sun of eternity. Our subjective experience of this reception affords three types of reactions or engagement procedures in our mental body:

Turning toward or clinging to an incoming love
Turning away from or rejecting it
Neither turning toward it nor turning away from it

Type 1 reaction is called consuming the love, and thus appropriating that love to oneself.

Type 2 reaction is called rejecting the love, or having an aversion for that love, and thus being separated from it.

Type 3 reaction is neither clinging to the love nor rejecting it, and is sometimes referred to as being lukewarm in love.

The above three types of reactions to an incoming love in the mental body correspond to the three types of physiological operations of the physical body when food or chemicals are introduced into it:

Type 1 operation is called consuming the food, and thus digesting, breaking down, assimilating, and incorporating it.

Type 2 operation is called rejecting the food through coughing up, vomiting, spitting out, or passing out without digesting.

Type 3 operation is neither digesting nor vomiting the food, which then continues decomposing until it poisons the entire body or kills it.

Compare the corresponding types of operations in the mental and physical body in relation to the affective and circulatory systems, as shown above. Type 1 reaction for both bodies involves being willing to receive the food substance, adapting it to self, and making some use of it. For instance you may be doing something that you want to keep private and secret from others. When you do it you are experiencing an enjoyment that you don’t want to give up. You are experiencing the enjoyment in your sensorimotor system. The consciousness of this specific pleasure or delight comes to you through the sensorimotor experience you have while doing it. This pleasure or delight in the sensorimotor system is the embodiment of the love when it is consummated or appropriated to self.

People are sharply aware of their enjoyment, delight, pleasure, or bliss because these are happening in the sensorimotor system of the mental body. People are not as clearly aware of the love in the affective system that is being consummated while experiencing the enjoyment in the sensorimotor system. Sensations are visible up front in consciousness while loves are hidden in the back somewhere. Because of this people can go on to enjoy all sorts of pleasures and enjoyments for many years without realizing the type of love they are appropriating to themselves by continuing to enjoy and consummate that particular love.

For instance, you show up late for places. You are making people wait for you when doing things together. You are not aware of why you are doing it. You have no clue about what love you are consummating whenever you are making others wait for you. You are aware of a certain delight or relief when others are waiting for you. It seems right to you that they should be OK with waiting for you, especially since there is usually a good reason for why you are late. What is actually happening here?

In the material mental body (layer 9, 8) everyone inherits anatomical connections to particular societies in the Grand Monster. These connections are anatomical fibers made of substances available in mental ether from the mental sun of eternity. Through these connections loves from each society are being transmitted and received in our affective system where they circulate and provide mental nourishment to our mind. There are three types of affective operations in relation to these loves, as discussed above. Type 1 reaction is to consummate the loves that are circulating in our affective system. This involves a marriage or synergic operation between the affective-circulatory system and the cognitive-respiratory system. The breathing, and through that, the verbalizing operations of the physical body, correspond in the mental body to the plan of operation that will optimize and consummate the love in its execution in the sensorimotor system.

The synergistic operation of thoughts of planning with loves for consummating brings on the consciousness of its enjoyment during the execution or performance. Being habitually late is the performance or execution within which is embodied the love of being habitually late. The cycle of embodiment of this love is maintained by the enjoyment that is experienced when making people wait for you. The love is not yours, hence the enjoyments is not yours but you think it is. You cannot experience enjoyment through someone else’s love. The love must be circulating in your affective system before you can experience the enjoyment of its consummation when you perform it.

All loves that we optimize in repeated consummation through the enjoyment of performing it, become anatomically a permanent part of our mental body.

This is a most import medical fact to be aware of! Since we are not clearly aware of the origin of the loves that circulate in our affective system we call them all “good” when we enjoy their consummation. As a result, people cling to loves from the Grand Monster just as much as they cling to loves from the Grand Human, and maybe more so due to the inheritance of predispositions, inclinations, and preferences. Due to these inherent affective biases people experience differential attraction to particular ideas, interests, attitudes, and lifestyle justifications. Our personality is an expression of the loves circulating in the affective system of our mental body. These loves enter there through the built in inherited anatomical connections. The life of individuals in daily activities is thus animated by the societies in the Grand Monster. This explains the presence of mental sickness and moral devolution that are responsible for humans being a source of hostility to each other, as expressed in societal breakdown, crime, divorce, abused children, and personal maladaptation shown in psychological problems and the lack of enthusiasm and motivation. These mental conditions of suffering are precipitated upon people when they cling to loves from the Grand Monster.

These societal and personal problems can be diminished and even arrested when people acquire the cognitive ability to distinguish between loves from the Grand Monster and loves from the Grand Human. Anatomically, the heavenly loves from the Grand Human are received through our rational mental body from the top or interior (layer 7i), while the hellish loves from the Grand Monster are received through our material mental body (layer 8, 9) which lies below the rational and next to the physical (layer 12). The material mental body is not capable of distinguishing between heavenly and hellish loves circulating in its affective system. Good blood and bad blood are mixed, which leads to mental problems such as playing out a hurtful lifestyle or playing the role of an abusive employer, spouse, or roommate.

In our material mental consciousness we are not able to distinguish between good vs. bad because we call good whatever seems to us good through our sensation of attraction to that idea, and the sensation of enjoyment when we perform it. Our behavior seems good to us because it feels good and it seems right. And whatever does not feel good or seem right, we call bad. But in our rational mental body we are able to rise above the material consciousness using ideas and meanings that are celestial-rational (layer 7i), and excluding everything that is material-rational (layer 7e). The knowledge of mental psychology and mental anatomy provides the ability of thinking with celestial-rational meanings (7iC). When we reflect on loves and enjoyments we clearly see the anatomical framework by which loves rule our destiny in eternity.

Some of our loves are embodied in hellish enjoyments when doing things hurtful to self and others. Other loves are embodied in heavenly enjoyments when doing things useful to self and others. We recognize the presence in our affective system of a hidden hellish love by our enjoyment of it when we put self first and others next, if at all. Enjoying doing things for the sake of self alone is the sign that it is the embodiment of a hellish love.

For instance, suppose that you treat people with fairness and respect as long as they express agreement with you, whether you are wrong or right on an issue. You begin disrespecting them and discriminating against them when they express disagreement with you on an issue. In this situation the respect and fairness that you performed earlier was not genuine respect. It was conditional on personal support of you, regardless of the merit of your own position. This is respect of others for the sake of self alone. A hellish love lies within it. But respect of others for the sake of self and others comes from a heavenly love. Such respect is genuine and does not change with personal support. A genuine heavenly love associates with respect for truth as being above respect for self or reputation. If others stop supporting your idea, you still owe them your respect. This is heavenly. It brings a heavenly enjoyment to you when you perform such genuine respect.

Celestial-rational ideas, meanings, and reasoning can cause the rearrangement of meanings and conclusions in our material consciousness. Even though we can’t distinguish between genuine good and corrupt good we can rely on our rational consciousness to indicate the way and the path for us in our daily choices. There has to be a willingness of the material mind to submit to the rational mind’s vision of what is ahead and what is around. The celestial-rational meanings in our rational mind (layer 7i) are in perfect and genuine correspondence with the celestial-rational correspondences in our celestial mind (layer 6, 5, 4), which is in the Grand Human. Through this anatomical interdependence our conscious material mind then corresponds to our rational mind, which corresponds to our celestial mind, which corresponds to God’s mind through the mental sun of eternity. The descent and the ascent is completed. We become angels living on earth and earth becomes a paradise in nature. When this comes about in the future the conditions on earth will return to the original state when the first generations were born. Life on earth will thus become once again a pleasant and brief stay before passing on permanently to the real life of our celestial mental body.

The switchover from a material consciousness (layer 9, 8, 7e) to a rational consciousness (layer 7i) is called “inversion” because the path of our life reverses itself and continues in the opposite mental direction (see Diagrams). This new path is called reformation and regeneration. This is a lifelong physiological process in the mental body, starting with the cognitive-respiratory system (reformation) and continuing with temptations and spiritual combat in the affective-circulatory system (regeneration). God in the role of the “Divine Psychologist” provides the regenerating person with outward events and inward temptations. Outwardly an opportunity can suddenly presents itself in our daily round of activities, and this provides the occasion for experiencing a particular temptation inwardly. These specific temptations are arranged by God in a developmental series so that we may take care of the difficult ones later in the process. The pacing of the process is dependent on the person’s willingness to cling to the love of celestial-rational meanings of truth.

To the extent that people cling to the love of genuine rational truth (Type 1 consummation) to that extent can the Divine Psychologist connect them with heavenly societies in the Grand Human. Through these new anatomical connections their affective-circulatory system is immersed in heavenly loves pouring in. Now they are in the circulatory system of the mental body and they can provide mental food for new celestial-rational truths. This process brings us gradually to higher and higher consciousness.

The Scientific Idea of God as the Divine Psychologist

Theistic anatomical dualism in psychology (see Diagrams) presents proposals for considering God as a scientific concept. The success of the proposal will depend on how effectively and realistically the concept of God can be tied into the observational framework of body-mind correspondences. It is critical that the proposal for theistic anatomical dualism provide sufficient cause-effect operational mechanisms showing how God intervenes in the moment by moment functionality of our mental and physical life.

The concept of “God in the role of Divine Psychologist” is necessary to provide critical details of the mechanisms that God has in place in order to manage the mental and physical life of an individual from birth to endless immortality. From a rational perspective it is clear that a human biography could not hold together with the endless details that involve the life of a person living to eternity. From a scientific perspective all explanatory systems must eventually cumulate into a coherent whole. The coherence of each unique individual biography of endless length and complexity is an accomplishment of God through omnipotence and omniscience. God manages all the details of physical and mental life so that they may add up to a coherent and functional human person. The challenge is to explicate how God manages the steps of biography in our moment to moment living.

To aid in the this attempt to reconstruct God’s management of cause-effect events in the mental world, it is useful to introduce the concept of the Divine Psychologist to reflect the nature of the psychological transactions that take place in our relationship with God as psychologist. The therapy work that the Divine Psychologist accomplishes is called “regeneration” which indicates that it is an organic anatomical process in the mental body that corresponds to the physiological growth of new body components that have been destroyed. Every human being is born with a mental body that has anatomical connections to the mental body of people in specific societies of the Grand Monster (see Diagram 9). These mental fibers inundate our affective-circulatory system with destructive loves that we spontaneously and irresistibly cling to. By the time we are a mature adult we have accumulated a major anatomical network of fibers connecting us to destructive loves. We are each bound to a life in the Grand Monster hells, which we attain right after the dying/resuscitation process of a few hours. It is our own choice to fulfill this negative life. Our choice merely reflects our past choices in daily life.

It is for this reason of inheritance of mental traits that God the Divine Psychologist is a necessary concept for explaining how the process of regeneration takes place through mental temptations arranged and timed through physical events. A temptation is the spiritual therapeutic occasion that the Divine Psychologist provides to allow the individual to freely and voluntarily reject the temptation by clinging to a rational or altruistic choice. The mental physiological process of resisting temptation is called engaging in “spiritual combat” and has been recognized and known in the literature of the ancients.

The concept of the Divine Psychologist allows us to discuss in a scientific manner the psychological details of regeneration. God gives people the ability to refuse cooperation with the Divine Psychologist by allowing them to give in to their temptations and to continue developing a lifestyle philosophy that justifies the self-destruction of selfism, and foolishly ridicules the rationality of heaven and hell. Some people proudly and insanely announce “I’ll see you in hell”, showing that hell is where they think they will end up. But others strive toward the goodness and mutual love of those in heaven. The Divine Psychologist works with both, promoting those who set their sights on heaven, and unconsciously holding back those who throw themselves gleefully into the mental quagmire of hell.

It is not necessary to assume that the work of the Divine Psychologist in each person’s mind must be conscious to the person. Many people deny or ridicule the idea of God managing their mind, and believe that everything in their mind happens through their own management. This belief system does not in any way reduce the necessity of the Divine Psychologist from managing their mind. Belief in God is not a condition for God to exercise control in the mind of an individual. This Divine control must be there continuously to insure that the mind remains a coherent entity. However, there are vast benefits to acknowledge consciously the co-presence of the Divine Psychologist.

One illustration of this is given by the highly successful Twelve-step Program for recovering alcoholics.

These are the original Twelve Steps as published by Alcoholics Anonymous:^[10]

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Note that there are seven references to God as a “Power greater than ourselves” with whom we need “to improve our conscious contact” so that we may have available the willpower to defeat the drug dependency that is killing the body and destroying lives and relationships. People over the ages have known that their lives are better and more in control when they maintain a relationship of contact and co-presence with God as a Divine Psychologist, who is assisting us in solving our emotional problems and intellectual puzzles about the goals and destination of our lives. Now a scientific perspective can confirm these truths by means of anatomical dualism.

The Anatomical Process of Regeneration

Consider another illustration from daily life. As you are looking around you, at work, in school, in a restaurant, at a party, etc., you make comments to yourself about people there. This is normal. But consider that there is a heavenly order and a hellish order in which this activity can be performed. The hellish order gives you hellish enjoyments, and the heavenly order gives you heavenly enjoyments. You can choose to perform each individual daily activity in a way that conforms to the heavenly order, and thereby promote the growth and maturation of your celestial mental body. This promotes the growth of the happiness and evolution of all those who live in the Grand Human since there is an anatomical connection between all heavenly loves, hence all truths, and all heavenly reality in the human race.

We can choose to resist the temptation of the hellish enjoyment by editing the natural process of mentally ridiculing and criticizing others in our mind. We can install attentional checks for monitoring the stream of our thinking in public and private situations. When we notice that we are performing a hellish style of thinking about others, we have the opportunity to edit the stream by thinking: “No, that’s not right!” or “Wait, I take that back” or “The Divine Psychologist is horrified that I am thinking this, and enjoying it!” etc. One can think of this as an application of the 12-step program to hellish enjoyments and thinking other than drug addiction. The habit if mental cynicism and criticism of others in our mind is an addiction! It is part of the inherited loves in our material mental body.

The Divine Psychologist arranges events around people so that their stream of thinking may be excited by the hidden hellish loves. When we become aware of our hellish thinking we receive a clue about our hellish loves. These negative disjunctive loves are embodied in the enjoyment we experience when bringing judgment down on others. We can express our disagreement with this hellish enjoyment by focusing on the co-presence of the Divine Psychologist. Through this co-presence we are connected to the societies in the Grand Human whose celestial-rational loves is infused in our mental body.

The hellish order of thinking about other people as you look around you is to enjoy putting them down in the privacy of your mind, judging them, ridiculing them in a way you would not want them to know about, resenting them, wanting vengeance on them for various ways they ticked you off, wishing bad things to happen to them, wanting to take away what they have and to give them to yourself, etc. etc. Doing these hellish mental acts gives us infernal delights, pleasures, enjoyments, and a global hellish happiness, which is the consciousness of hell in the human mind.

The heavenly order of thinking about people is to think of both the good and the bad that exist in every person by inheritance, and to honor or love the good in them, and to ignore or not love the bad in them, hoping and wishing that they strengthen their resolve for the good, and weaken or abandon their attachment to the bad. This is the heavenly order of thinking about others. It creates a heaven for you, if you think this way, and it does not punish the other person. The heavenly order honors the humanity and right to dignity of every human being. This includes the heavenly order of loving not the person, but the good in every person. The idea of “unconditional love” is the opposite of this since it involves loving the person, both the good and the bad. To love the bad in a person is a hellish enjoyment contrary to heaven. The heavenly order grants the protection of human rights to all human beings, even those who are fiendish and destructive. This is illustrated by the fact that civilized nations sign an agreement to treat prisoners of war humanely and to respect their human rights. This does not mean to free them from incarceration, which would be a hellish act since it would leave innocent people to be harmed by them.

The purpose of our daily lives here on earth is to prepare for our life in eternity. This preparation requires regeneration. Without regeneration our celestial mental body cannot grow and mature. Hence after the dying/resuscitation process only the material mental body is available for functioning in eternity. The celestial mental body is not in operation. It is the body we need to enter conjugial life in the Grand Human. Failing this people must rely on existing with their material mental body which has not been regenerated from inherited evil enjoyments and loves. Now these interior loves show themselves and at the top of the hierarchy is the unregenerate ruling love that is sourced somewhere in a Grand Monster society. We are inducted there to a life of hell in our immortality. The hellish loves we inherit are also the loves that we practice and cling to.

We do not go to hell because of what we inherit—which would be grossly unfair and irrational. We enter the life of hell in our mind only because of the loves that we cling to after the dying/resuscitation process. These are the loves that take us to hell, and we do so with agreement and enjoyment since we have made those loves our very own by practicing them and accepting them as allowable. Once we are separated from our physical body, these are the loves that we have and make up what we are. Without them we would fall into a coma with no loves to live by. It is necessary therefore for God to provide a suitable dwelling place for hellish loves. These are organized into a catalogue of evils that correspond to the opposition to the Grand Human anatomy. These corrupted human forms and its consequent deformities make up the Grand Monster.

Swedenborg visited with those people and found them devoid of any sanity and compassion. When he brought up ideas of a heavenly order such as the goodness of God, faithfulness in marriage, innocence of children, altruism and the love of doing good to others, and other such heavenly topics, they became anatomically convulsive, enraged, frothing from the mouth with the anticipation and desire of destroying these heavenly things.

As we know from experience in learning skills, we go through intermediate learning stages. So we can’t expect to regenerate our natural mind (or material mental body) by going from hellish motives and enjoyments directly to heavenly motives and enjoyments. There are transitional states of mediate good that is not yet genuine good, but is compatible with genuine good, and eventually leads to good. For example, consider how we learn to be successful in our jobs when we first enter the workforce as a teenager, or later. At first we learn to do things so that we don’t get fired. This is not a hellish or selfish motive, but it is not our ultimate goal, which is to love to do a good job for the satisfactions it brings us, as we are thinking about how we benefit others in one way or another by the way we do our job.

There are two anatomical stages here:

(1) doing our job so we can satisfy our love for not getting fired

(2) doing our job so we can satisfy our love for being useful.

The first love is not yet heavenly. The second love is heavenly because the ruling love it belongs to is the love of being useful to others, and this is one of the chief heavenly loves.

Consider another example. Since gas at the pump has become more expensive, more drivers are now learning to save gas by what they drive how they drive. Newspaper stories and Web discussion groups have been discussing the practice of “hypermiling” which involves using a collection of strategies, each of which saves gas. The motivation to save gas can be heavenly or hellish, and the difference is observable in how drivers are performing the activity of saving gas.

Hellish hypermiling techniques include “drafting” (following illegally close behind another vehicle), “pulse & glide” (moving up to wanted speed, then letting the vehicle coast on its own back down, then giving it enough gas back to the wanted speed, and so on – while motorists following behind are subjected to this pattern), turning the engine off and coasting when other vehicles are around, etc. These bad hypermiling strategies increase the risk and inconvenience on others who are being subjected to these illegal driving methods. Heavenly hypermiling techniques include keeping tire pressure up, using higher quality engine oil, carrying less load, avoiding unnecessary acceleration, avoiding the emotional use of the gas pedal, maintaining proper car maintenance schedules, driving less when possible. From these consequences of their actions you can see that the motive or love to save gas can be either a hellish motive (“It’s good for me, and too bad for the cars around me.”), or a heavenly motive or love (“It’s good for everyone, and no one is punished through it.”).

Here is another common instance of an intermediate good that leads eventually to more genuine good and to heaven. It is the idea many people have that heaven is a reward from God for the good deeds we accomplished, and hell Is a place of punishment from God for the bad deeds we accomplished. This intermediate good is not fully compatible with the rational understanding of Sacred Scripture and God, from which we realize that God is pure love and cannot punish people for something they did in the past, especially in such a horrific way as what we imagine happens in hell as a form of punishment and torture. We rationally understand that God is good and omnipotent, hence does not have such loves that involve the satisfaction of punishing people who have evil loves and hurt others. Instead, God makes a way of isolating the acts of such people and keeping others safe from the consequences.

Another prominent example of what is intermediate good with intermediate truth is the consciousness of science in the negative bias mode of materialism and monism. Most scientists are trained to think within restricted parameters that exclude the “super-natural,” the “non-material” or “spiritual” and “mental.” These restrictions also exclude God and the afterlife. Religion is not excluded from research because it is redefined as “religious behavior,” and this can be studied the usual way by observing samples of people with regard to their religious behaviors such as frequency of going to church, sending children to a private parochial school, frequency of reading the Bible and praying, beliefs about sin and the afterlife, etc. These religious behaviors can be studied by materialistic science since it does not require acknowledging God as real but only that these people say they believe in what they call “God.” And in this way materialistic psychology makes a claim to discuss religion. Similarly, the current modern materialistic neuroscience and cognitive science makes a claim to discuss the mind, having redefined it as patterns of electro-chemical operations in the brain of the physical body.

From the perspective of anatomical dualism as presented throughout this book materialism is a necessary step towards dualism, reflecting the mental development of an individual—see Diagrams 10 and 17. Since our material mental body identifies with the physical body, our survival appears to depend on physical conditions and outcomes. Our ideas and modes of thinking are completely adapted to work well in the physical world. This is called material-rational thinking. Science today is an expression of material-rational thinking. It feels compelled to reject dualism because only this world exists to science and to scientific reality. Through this material-rational thinking monist science has progressed with notable successes like technology and medicine, and with notable failures where the intervention of science has not been effective, seen in such symptoms as divorce, alcoholism, obesity, infant mortality, Alzheimer’s, social breakdown, relationship failures, development of full potential, etc.

At the same time, materialistic science provides a solid base and stepping stone towards a dualist science that is based on celestial-rational concepts and principles.

The switch in thinking mode from the external material-rational layer (7eC) to the interior celestial-rational layer (7iC) is variously called inversion, reformation, thinking spiritually, and thinking in correspondences (see Diagrams 9 and 10). In the Preface above I connect the definition of spiritual to the phrase “from here to eternity.” In our celestial-rational mind we think with correspondences. We connect the physical “here in time” to the spiritual “in eternity.” We modify the respiratory anatomy of the material mental body when we connect the physical body in time to the mental body in eternity. This is called thinking in correspondences.

Raising our Consciousness by Thinking in Correspondences

The pre-modern person was unable to think in correspondences. The wisest of the ancients were able to immerse their mind in the knowledge of correspondences, but it took a lifetime of harsh spiritual discipline. Only a few people in each generation could master this intellectual effort, and pass the “secret” esoteric knowledge on to the next generation of disciples. But today’s modern mind can easily handle the complexity and rationality of thinking in correspondences. The study of mental psychology gives every human being the ability to acquire the mental skill of thinking in correspondences. In the future, thinking in correspondences will be taught in public schools to children as part of the general literacy curriculum. It will greatly enhance the interest and receptivity of physical subjects such as biology, farming, husbandry, art, dance, sports, hand craft, etc.

Thinking in correspondences is to consider the connection of two things that are in discrete order: e.g.,

the moment here and its significance in eternity (see this section above)
physical anatomy and mental anatomy (see this section above)
literal meaning of Sacred Scripture and its spiritual meaning (see this separate article)
a physical object or activity and its mental reference (see “body-mind correspondences”)
an operation in the affective system and an operation in the cognitive system (see above)
an operation in the affective system and an operation in the sensorimotor system (see above)
an operation in the cognitive system and an operation in the sensorimotor system (see above)
a spiritual cause and its physical effect
good or love and truth or rationality

This list may not be complete. Each pair of items mentioned on the left and on the right of “and” are in different discrete degrees. The anatomical framework constructed around the Mental Sun of eternity is organically arranged by layers. Each layer is distinct in terms of substance and property. It is not possible for anything in one layer to exist in another layer. All things exist in their own layer, and the layers are distinct or separate. However, they are in correspondence with each other.

This means that every operation or object in one anatomical layer is functionally tied to a particular operation or object in the anatomical layer just above itself. This tie or connection is direct but indirect. It si built into the infrastructure of every object or property. No object is created just in one layer, but must have its equivalent in the layer just below. The same applies to an operation, process, activity, or event. Events in the physical world (“natural world”) are effects produced by corresponding events in the mental world (“spiritual world”). To think with meanings that connect them is to think in correspondences.

For example, while you are talking to friend you notice that his face appears pained and tense. You immediately think about your friend’s feelings and that he must be upset about something. So you say, “Is everything all right?” or something like that. This simple normal event shows that we think in correspondences without necessarily realizing it. Facial expressions are physical effects or consequences of the feelings we are having. There is an anatomical correspondence between the affective-circulatory system of the mental body (“feelings”) and the neuro-skeletal system of the physical body (“facial expression”).

If your friend answers, “I’m fed up with my co-worker. He totally blew me off when I tried to soften the punch for getting ahead of him in the race to the top”, you know that he is talking about feeling annoyed (“fed up”) with a co-worker who was rude and rejecting (“blew me off”) when he tried to be nice to his co-worker (“tried to soften the punch”) for getting a promotion ahead of him (“race to the top”). How did you know that your friend was talking about his feelings about his promotion situation, and not about feeding, blowing, punching, or racing? It is because both of you are thinking in body-mind correspondences, sometimes called metonymy. This is a spontaneous and innate capacity possessed by everyone. It is a fundamental feature of human language and thought. (See also my discussion in Avatar Psychology).

The duality of reality is expressed in the dualism of the material-rational thinking (“external-natural”) (layer 7eC) and the celestial-rational thinking (“interior-natural”) (layer 7iC) (see diagrams on layers). This has been called the point of “inversion” when the thinking changing from material (or “natural”) to celestial (or “spiritual”). This change in thinking is called reformation. After that, regeneration can begin. This requires interior-natural meanings and truths (“celestial-rational correspondences”) in order to acquire the loves that can resist inherited evils during temptations. Our prior material-rational ideas cannot do this. This is why the 12-step program against drug addiction involves acknowledging and appealing to God for help (as discussed above).

Thinking in correspondences as an analytic tool is not spontaneous but can easily be acquired as a literacy skill. It allows us to see the interior-natural of a physical event, quality, or object. In other words, we see its cause, its spiritual origin in the mental world of eternity. But when we analyze only the exterior-natural feature of an event or object (7e), as is done in materialism, we see only the effects, the mere appearance in representation of its true reality in the mental world of eternity. The content and meanings in our exterior-rational thinking (7eC) is limited to the material appearances of reality as seen through the sensory organs of the physical body and its world. Imagine someone buying a large plot of land for just a few hundred dollars. Hard to believe – until you find out that the plot of land is a reflection in a mirror, or a painting on the wall, or just a video of the real thing. Now you can see that the person who bought this for a few hundred dollars got fleeced. If you take the appearances of reality to be reality, then your analytical consciousness and thinking will be limited to layer 7eC, which consists of materialistic abstractions of physical appearances.

According to the Swedenborg Reports, God has revealed the analytic knowledge of correspondences to the modern mind of humanity in order to allow science and education to be the vehicle for its transmission to the new generations. There are critical benefits available to people who have been prepared for post-resuscitation life through the skill of thinking in correspondences. Regeneration of the inherited natural-material mind progresses to the degree that people are willing to think in correspondences about the eternal significance of their daily choices. The more the natural mind is regenerated, the more the celestial mind is enabled. There is therefore a direct relation between thinking in correspondences and the quality of our life in eternity.

When God speaks the entire human race is being spoken to. All genuine Sacred Scripture given by God anywhere anytime to some culture or people is addressed to the entire human race. Its literal-historical sense is addressed to the material-natural mind, to a geographic location and its people, while the extracted correspondential sense is addressed to the rational mind and to science. Mental psychology is a dualist theistic science whose concepts and principles were extracted from the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture (see Theistic Psychology). Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

spiritual mind when considered in the correspondential sense. In the new millennium of 2000, when I first published theistic psychology on the World Wide Web, another landmark step was taken in the history of research on human consciousness. Theistic psychology is defined as the scientific knowledge of God that is extracted from the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture. This new way of thinking in science (interior-natural layer 7i), begins a new age in science, leaving behind the monism of materialism, and immersing itself in the new methodology of theistic science.

The dualist thinking in science (layers 7e and 7i together), integrates into a rational unity the physical and the mental, the temporal and the eternal. At last, science can explore cause-effect relations between the rational and the sensory, the universal and the local, the spiritual and the natural, the mental and the physical. God has created a dual reality which we can now recognize and make part of our literacy, our culture, our government and industry. Every detail of society is a representative of some eternal reality in the mental world of eternity. Managing society will be far more successful and effective when we understand how every detail is caused by some mental love that is sourced either in the Grand Human (mental layers 4, 5, 6) or in the Grand Monster (mental layers -7, -8, -9). Similarly, managing ourselves will be far more effective if we understand how our loves today create our future in eternity.

The powers of a new scientific thinking in the interior-natural mind is awesome to behold. Every human being possesses all the anatomical layers of the human mind. Nothing whatsoever prevents us from operating our life from the interior-natural layer (7i) instead of the exterior-natural layer (7e). Nothing prevents us – except our own ruling love. Love prevents thinking that is contrary to love’s fulfillment. Such as our love is, such is our thinking. When we love materialistic loves more than we love spiritual loves, our natural mind is called a “little hell.” This is our daily consciousness, the meanings and thoughts with which we operate our conscious life and manage our identity as a person. But when we love spiritual loves more than we love natural loves, our natural mind is called a “little heaven.”

When we begin our regeneration in young adulthood, we turn our natural mind more and more into a little heaven. This means that our feelings (A), thoughts (C), and actions (S) are conjoined and arranged in a heavenly order, that is, in the order of layers 6, 5, and 4 (the “Grand Human”). Until then our natural mind was a little hell activated by thoughts and feelings sourced in the Grand Monster (layers -7, -8, -9). The people in these mental layers who are connected to us in our unregenerate states, are collectively a hell as a spiritual society, and each member’s mind is a little hell. The negative marker indicates that these layers were not regenerated prior to resuscitation. As discussed earlier, people after resuscitation who imagine that they live in a physical world are insane, and live out a delusional life in eternity based on fantasy and make-believe.

One striking example is given by the people in the hellish layers that Swedenborg observed who live in a collective and mutual fantasy of owning a fortune of gold. By various means and laborious efforts over a long period, each member is able to acquire a few tiny pieces of gold. At regular intervals they all gather together in one room, each placing their few pieces on the table. When these grow into a large heap of gold, they sit around it in silence, watching it, and imagining that this is their own gold. One man that Swedenborg interviewed said that they do this when they begin to experience an interior compulsion to see a large heap of gold that they can imagine is their own. He said that they know rationally that the gold they own is actually a tiny fraction of the large heap. And yet, they are able to fantasize that all of it is their own.

The fantasy is actually created by their ruling love. They are obsessively slavish to this love. The rational thoughts they can think remain on the outside of themselves. The ruling love will allow one thought that it keeps close by – the thought of “All this is mine, mine alone.” This false sensory reality (S) appearing in the cognitive organ (C) is constructed there by the love in the affective organ (A). It is their love for such a fantasy that is so extreme, so much more intense than any other love they can have. This is the top rank in their hierarch of satisfaction and enthusiasm. This is the way they can experience life again, or being alive again – like after a long sickness. He said that this state lasts for awhile, and then they all experience the irresistible need for a ‘recharge’ session. If they are prevented from it, they begin to feel depressed, as if all enthusiasm of living has departed from them. Then they are revived again after the fantasy recharge session.

The awful thing about this, I think, is that in between the fantasy recharge sessions, their folly does not diminish. The recharge experience works only on their affective organ, where the ruling love sits and commands. Their cognitive reality remains insane and unreal, filled with un-neos of everything. The mad ruling love (A) turns their mind and their society (C) into a mad, mad world (S). There is no consistency of growth and mental development. The people in that mental state become progressively more mad, less capable of having human feelings and rational thoughts. They are in a degraded form of sub-human life in terms of their emotions, their reasoning, and their interactions with each other.

The Mental Sun of Eternity

God always existed as Divine Human Good and Truth Substance in infinite variety integrated as one unit within God. Good is also known as love substance, which is the basis for the anatomical bonding force that holds created things together at each level of composition. Truth substance is the basis for rationality, wisdom, and intelligence.

Love and truth are called substance because they flow out of the Mental Sun from God into the layers of the mental world, and from there into the organs of the mental body in order of succession (celestial, rational, material). Spiritual substance can flow and be received by mental organs. Mental substance has quality and properties that anatomically affect the mental organs that receive the substance. These mental events have their exact correspondence in the physical events associated with physical substance or matter flowing out of the sun into space and inundating the atmosphere and surface of earth with heat and light. This physical matter or energy enters the receptor organs of plants where the properties of heat and light influence and act upon the plant’s cells and its operations.

If sunlight were not matter or energy flowing out of the sun and into receptors on earth that can react to it, there would be no life on earth. This result is by correspondence with the situation in the mental world of eternity, where mental life is possible only because mental heat substance and mental light substance flow out of the Mental Sun from God and into receptors in our mental body that can react to the mental properties of the spiritual substance. For instance, as you are reading this you are figuring out the meaning of sentences and paragraphs even though you never read anything like this before, or never thought about these things in such detail. Your ability to figure out the meaning of an explanation or description written by someone else indicates you are using your intelligence to put pieces together into a coherent structure. It is the same when you are reading instructions for using an appliance or assemble a lawn mower. Communicating meanings involves the use of intelligence and putting mental pieces together in a rational and coherent order.

While you are figuring something out with your intelligence and rationality, spiritual/mental substance must be flowing into your mental body which is always exposed to the rays of the Mental Sun. The spiritual ray substance from the Mental Sun is received by the affective-circulatory system as mental heat or love, and by the cognitive-respiratory system as mental light or rationality. In order to figure out some meaning, you have to have the motivation to figure it out, to want to know what it is. The source and initiation of this affective optimizing intention is the mental heat substance that was received by the affective system and circulated throughout the mental body. The mental heat in the affective system activates and directs the cognitive-respiratory system that is under the influence of mental light substance that flowed in synchrony with the mental heat in the affective system. Together, the motivational intention and the rational thinking sequence, produce the sensorimotor consciousness of the meaning.

This anatomical and physiological process goes on ceaselessly in the mental body. We would fall into a coma or a static stupor the instant that mental substance stops activating our mental organs.

God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. God is also Love substance because love is pure good, as good is pure love. God is Human (capitalized) because love with rationality is Human, and therefore all creation and all created objects have some Human property, most especially human beings who are created in the direct Image and Likeness of the Divine Human. We are human because God is Divine Human. Since something cannot issue from nothing, God supplies the substance out of which all things are created. God’s substance of love with truth issues from the Mental Sun of eternity in endless supply and variety from the beginning of creation to endless immortality.

Everything in existence is constructed out of this Divine Human mental substance, good with truth, or love with wisdom, or spiritual heat with spiritual light, which in God are united into a unity, as in a Divine Marriage within God. But outside of God and in creation, the substance of good with truth appears outwardly as two divided substances that are ceaselessly striving to reunite and bond again within the objects of creation. The spiritual heat or love received in the affective organs with the spiritual light received in the cognitive organs strive to reunite as in a Spiritual Marriage within the individual’s mental body. This constant endeavor of our loves to unite with suitable ideas is the basis for all human and animal action and life.

We can have ideas, such as the idea of apologizing to a friend we insulted, but it goes nowhere and is replace by other ideas unless we have a motive to apologize. This motive resides in a love, such as the love of wanting to make up and be friends again. Without this love, the idea of apologizing remains an idea without actuality. The love of setting things right with an apology now gets hold of and marries the idea and plan of apologizing. The result of this affective-cognitive marriage is the sensorimotor consciousness of performing an apology to your friend. This is called the “fruit” of the marriage, and the offspring. People have many ideas, plans, and resolutions, but only those come to fruition which are married to an appropriate love. Without the built in spiritual force binding loves to suitable thoughts, there would be no action, no learning, no humanity, and consequently no mental world and no physical world, and no existence.

Good with truth substance appearing as divided into two, can now combine to form the two fundamental building blocks of creation, of existence, of the world, and of reality. These building blocks are organic, biological, mental, living, Divine, and immortal. Good (or love) and truth (or rationality) appearing in creation as two separate substances now form two reciprocal units whose organic form will allow them to reunite into an anatomical unity. This anatomical unity replicates in an image and likeness, the Divine Marriage within God. This principle of male/female bonding recapitulates at every level of creative construction, and most especially in the conjugial couple or angelic soulmates in heaven. This is the intended destination for every human being, and the purpose for which the universe was created. The entire universe is nothing but a means to this end. In this sense the universe is a perfect world because God allows to come into existence only that which contributes fully to this purpose. Nothing can ever occur which does not form part of this plan and purpose.

Male and Female Building Blocks

One genetic formation unit is love surrounding itself with truth—this is the masculine unit of life. We will symbolize it as love à truth. Love is within, truth is on the outside of it. You can see truth on the outside, but you can’t see love on the inside.

The masculine gene is truth within which love lies hidden. [love à truth]

The feminine gene is love within which truth lies hidden. [truth à love]

The feminine organic gene is the reciprocal of the masculine.

The masculine gene symbol [love à truth] shows love substance to be first in sequence, indicating that masculine love is higher or more interior, and is the cause of masculine truth, which is relatively lower and more external.

The feminine gene symbol [truth à love] shows truth substance to be first in sequence, indicating that feminine truth is higher or more interior, and is the cause of feminine love, which is relatively lower and more external.

These two reciprocal anatomical units of substance form the basis of all objects and events in creation or existence. Since love or good substance, with truth or rationality substance, is living, human, and mental, it is clear that the universe and all things in it are constructed out of male and female mental units issuing from God.

God is infinite, omnipotent and integrated as one. God cannot be divided, and hence God must be omnipresent. God is present everywhere and in everything through the substance of love and truth substance which form the building blocks of all things. This substance of good with truth remains part of God even though it is in creation outside of God. It is in this anatomical and organic sense that one can say that “God is in us” and “we are in God.”

Diagram 1 (leonpsy30/creation-anatomy.jpg) shows the anatomy of creation from good with truth substance. If we make an anatomical analysis of any physical object, such as a rock or a pencil, we can see that a discrete degree within the rock or pencil there exists a material layer, which is a mental layer that is based on physical objects. Within the material layer there exists a rational layer, and within that, a celestial layer. Within the celestial layer is the sun of eternity, hence also God. Clearly then, God and the mental world of eternity are within the rock and the pencil, or any other physical object. It is the same with physical properties, forces, and propensities. The Divine, the human, and the mental form the infrastructure for the physical world. This organic fact has been known for thousands of years and appears in the Sacred Texts of early religions and sciences. But now it is possible to see this fact in modern scientific terms as the biological operations of the living substance good with truth.

The physical layer consists of the mental elements of good with truth whose outermost organic layer has been constricted or restricted to time and space, and matter fitting into them. The first layer within time/space/matter is the material mental layer. Though this is not a physical layer yet its mental units or meanings are restricted to abstractions and symbols of what is in the physical layer. Within this is the rational mental layer whose elements and meanings are independent of material ideas and meanings. The rational layer is a representation of the celestial layer, for which reason it is also called the celestial-rational layer. However the lower portion is called the material-rational layer because its meanings are based on material layer principles.

Diagram 4 [formation.jpg] shows

Diagram 2 (male and female anatomy)

Diagram 3 (two stages of unity)

Diagram 6 (vertical community)

Human Sexuality and Spiritual Marriage

Evidence in literature shows that people have known about the fundamental nature of human sexuality for thousands of years. Because this knowledge is in the dualist/theistic tradition almost none of it is known today to modern science and to professional counselors on sexuality and relationships. The negative bias in materialistic science strictly excludes knowledge on sexuality that involves spiritual forces and the anatomy and physiology of the “mental body,” also known by various other expressions such as spirit body, astral body, ether body, uncorrupted body, glory body, avatar body, etc. These expressions refer to the mental body which is born along with the physical body and continues life in another realm after the physical body is detached from it.

The anatomy of the mental body was discussed in the section on anatomy (see also Diagrams).

Mental psychology gives an account of the centrality of sexuality in creation—see Diagram NN. All things are created out of love/truth substance arranged in masculine and feminine order. Masculine-feminine reciprocity is the essential duality of all existence. All things that exist in the universe are constructed out of these spiritual and Divine units of Human life called good with truth substance, or love with rationality substance. Since nothing exists but what is created or constructed it is obvious that whatever exists must be constructed out of substance that flows out of the Mental Sun from God. All things are constructed out of this substance.

The sequential order of construction in creation can be described as follows:

Mental Sun of eternity from God, source of good with truth substance in infinite variety and united as One
Mental world of eternity around the Mental Sun, composed of an expanse of mental ether of good with truth substance
Mental genes in two arrangements, male and female (love surrounded by truth, truth surrounded by love). Male genes arrange themselves into larger units called the male soul, and female genes arrange themselves into the female soul.
A mental physiology of organs develops from each soul, forming themselves into three interacting systems (affective-circulatory, cognitive-respiratory, neuroskeletal-sensorimotor) held together in an immortal mental body that is human in form and in the corresponding image and likeness of God’s Divine Human Mental Body (sometimes called Spirit Body or Glorified Body). This creates a conscious unique immortal human individual. Female souls create a woman’s mental body composed of feminine loves, feminine intelligence, and feminine consciousness of sensations. Male souls create a man’s mental body composed of masculine loves, masculine intelligence, and masculine consciousness of sensations.
Through conjugial unity between a husband and a wife there is formed a conjoint anatomical physiology. The two independent individual mental bodies form a conjoint self functioning as one. Woman’s external affective-circulatory system flows into the man’s external cognitive-respiratory system, while man’s internal affective-circulatory system flows into the woman’s internal cognitive-respiratory system. Her outward loves are conjoined to his outward thinking, and his internal loves are conjoined to her internal thinking. The conjoint self is capable of receiving the Omniproprium or God’s Own, and this capacity bestows angelic qualities and powers. This human conjugial end goal is God’s purpose in creating and managing the universe.
Conjugial couples form themselves into spiritual societies where they live together in peace and happiness, enhancing each other’s lives by mutually sharing their never ending evolution of new feelings and thoughts. Loves that correspond to good with truth from the Mental Sun live together in the spiritual societies of the Grand Human. Loves that are contrary, such as selfism and hatred, live in the spiritual societies of the Grand Monster.
The galaxies of stars united as a Mother Sun, make up the physical world, supplying it with physical matter in space and time. Physical matter is an outward shell of chemical elements and energy flowing out of stars into space. The individual physical elements and particles of matter in stars are an outward “material” cover or shell over the same mental ether that forms human souls and bodies (see 2 above). Love with truth substance from the Mental Sun of eternity remains the substance and infrastructure out of which every existing object is constructed and maintained in existence. Gravity in the physical world, or gravitational forces and fields, corresponds to love in the mental world. Without the natural bonding force of gravity the physical world falls apart, and without the spiritual bonding force of love, the mental world falls apart.

Every object in mental or physical existence, singly and in collections, is held together by the bonding force between good and truth existing as one uncreate and infinite Divine substance in God.

The bonding force between good and truth holds together the souls and organs of men and women. It is the origin of sexuality.

The Divine Marriage of Good with Truth substance in God creates the universal bonding force of sexuality in creation. Good with truth substance is received separately in split form in the affective and cognitive systems of the mental body. This is the source of the bonding force of sexuality that forms male and female organs, and creates unified conjugial couples. The separateness of good and truth in humans and objects carries a built in propensity or irresistible tendency to reunite into one.

You can see from the above discussion in what way we can say that human sexuality is the basis of all existing objects, mental and physical, singly and in groups or clumps. The male and female arrangement of love with truth substance is the bonding force of all forms and objects. Without this bonding force nothing can form and stay together as an object or entity.

Human sexuality in marriage is the highest anatomical form of the spiritual bonding force of conjunction between masculine and feminine. This bonding force operates at different levels of quality and function, as described in the list above.

The Theory of Internal Unity in Marriage

The theory of internal unity in marriage is placed within the context of theism and dualism. Theism means that an omnipotent God directly controls and manages every detail in the world, the body, and the mind. Dualism means that we are born into two worlds with two bodies that are interconnected; one is the temporary physical body, while the other is the immortal mental body (also known as “spiritual body”). The dying/resuscitation process separates the “dead” physical body and we continue life in the mental world through our mental body. The “afterlife” is the consciousness of the immortal mental body. When we awaken in consciousness we have with us everything that we had prior to the dying/resuscitation process. This is because everything mental is in the mental body. For instance, the familiar sensations of sitting or walking with our physical body are not located in the physical body. This would be impossible!

A sensation is a mental event that is accompanied by a physical event, e.g., sitting or walking on the ground or floor. Our mental body spontaneously and irresistibly identifies with our physical body. We would feel schizoid if we had dual consciousness simultaneously (though this has happened—see the Swedenborg Reports). Until the dying/resuscitation process our mental body thinks it is the physical body. This is why we have the fear of death or dying. We think that when the physical body dies, we die, because we are it.

It is logically impossible for thoughts or mental states such as emotions, to exist in a physical medium such as the brain and its neuro-chemical pathways. The organized neuronal patterns of operation have absolutely zero content in meaning, culture, or consciousness. All culture, language, knowledge, art, philosophy is located in meanings, and these cannot exist in the physical world. Meanings and emotions are mental world objects.

The theory of the internal unity in marriage is based on the knowledge of correspondences applied to mental anatomy. It is desirable to have some understanding of the anatomy of the mental body since it is the actual body we use in our immortal life in the mental world of eternity. Our current day to day consciousness is located in our mental body so that knowledge of its anatomy may help us manage our lives more effectively and productively.

An understanding of mental anatomy is challenging at first because we need to think in purely rational terms. This requires us to leave behind the concepts of daily life which are based on physical conditions. The conditions in the mental world are distinctively different since there is no physical space, hence distance, and there is no need for money, food, shelter, etc., since you merely instantiate around you whatever environment and objects you want—just like we do in our dreams. But now it is the real mental world of eternity that has no physical things in it. How sad you might think! An empty world. This is what awaits us in eternity?

Of course not! The opposite is the case. In the mental world of eternity our mental body is finally in its own true element. Our mental body houses our loves, our thoughts, and our sensorimotor consciousness. Not a single one of them has been lost since the moment of your first birth cry. A physical database would have enormous problems containing such information on a single human being (every sensation, every thought, every insight, every emotion, every love, every interest, etc.). This limitation is due to physical space, heat, cost, safety, etc. But there is no limitation of space, heat, cost, safety, etc., in the organs of the mental body. They are constructed out of mental elements that have no limits in any of their properties or functions. This is at it should be given that life in eternity is endless and for human beings to perfectly happy and content, they need to experience continuous progression in goals and projects.

The environment and lifestyle of the mental world of eternity must surely be absolutely fabulous, when they are “heavenly” or positive in content, or absolutely horrendous when they are “hellish” or negative in content. A scientific or medical/anatomical definition of heavenly is needed. This is provided by the details of human mental anatomy. Heavenly is the order that is produced by good and truth issuing from the mental sun of eternity as heat and light. The anatomical theory of the mind is based on the empirical methodology that everything in the physical body is a correspondence point by point of everything in the mental body. The two bodies we are born with are perfect copies of each other, but one is embodied in the physical body, while the other is embodied in the mental body. Hence we can discover everything about the mental body by finding the correspondences between it and the physical body.

A lot of knowledge about the physical body has been accumulated in the negative bias approach in psychology, medicine, neuroscience, psychobiology, and biochemistry. This rich detailed map of the physical body and its operation can be used to chart the details of the mental body and its operations. For instance, at a general level of operation, there is a perfect correspondence between the three principal systems of the human form.

Displacement in the Mental World of Eternity

The mental expanse formed around itself by the mental sun of eternity is not like the physical space that is formed around a star, planet or atom—thought the two are correspondences of each other and act together in simultaneous order. Objects in physical space move through time and place. In the physical world, object, place, time, and distance are independent entities that act on each other to produce displacement of the objects. But in the mental world of eternity the outward appearance of time and space is not physical, but mental as in a dream or in the memory of an object left at home. Mental distance is an appearance instantiated or “rezzed” by the loves of people. Two people sitting next to each other in a room with their physical body are close in physical distance but can be far in mental distance. After the dying/resuscitation process that separates us from our physical body, we carry on with our mental body, feeling relieved and liberated from the constrictions and restrictions of the physical body and world.

We start feeling a new way of being. There is no longer the concern and labor of getting places, of the cost of traveling by means of transportation vehicles, of being unable to cross a desert, a mountain, or an ocean. The geography of the mental world is instantiated by loves, and is not independent of the people. Each variety of love creates its own mental landscapes and communities of mental cities and houses filled with mental art and diverse affordances that help us to consummate our loves, and thus to be happy as in a heaven forever. There are two sub-worlds in the mental world of eternity. One is the sub-world of heavenly loves arranged in a variety of numberless societies, each having the geographic shape of the human body. The entire collection of heavenly societies is also arranged in the form of the human body and is called the “Grand Human.” The other sub-world is the collection of societies formed around a numberless variety of hellish loves and is called the “Grand Monster” to reflect the deformed and corrupted modifications to the human shape and appearance.

While we are still “on earth” with our physical body our mental body is unaware of the people in these societies. We remain unaware of them until we awaken from the dying/resuscitation process fully separated from the physical body and its world. Until then we have the compulsive belief that the physical body is our life and that without the physical body we would have no sensation, no awareness, no actual life with people in a world. Those who believe in an afterlife imagine that they will be in some unconscious holding place without the body and that at some point in the future, they will be getting a physical body back and be able to continue life on earth as before. These views exist because we are compelled by our anatomy to identify with our physical body from birth until the dying/resuscitation process.

However we can also think above our material ideas by reflecting on dualism, the anatomy of the mental body, God, and how our now is tied to our eternity and those who are already there. These ideas are purely rational since they are not based on anything physical or abstract principle based on the physical (called “material-rational concepts”). The purely human rational is untainted by the material, physical, or natural, and hence it is called the celestial-rational. We can connect our now to our eternity by reflecting and reasoning with celestial-rational concepts.

For instance, when we can take a quiet moment of reflection, with reduced sensory input, we can review some event or choice we made that hour or day, and try to identify its significance for our eternity. It helps to teach ourselves some knowledge of correspondences, which everyone can do by monitoring how we think in daily life, using physical properties to describe mental events. We say that we have a soft spot in our heart for someone, by which we mean that we like them or love them. “Heart” is used to refer to “love” because they correspond. The heart in the physical body corresponds to the love in the mental body. Or we say that we are breathing it all in, by which we mean that we are learning a lot. The “lungs” and “breathing” in the physical body correspond to “thinking” and “learning” in the mental body. By becoming aware of body-mind correspondences in our everyday thinking we are learning to think in celestial-rational concepts and principles.

Knowing correspondences gives us the ability of connecting the now to our eternity if we combine correspondences with mental anatomy. The discrete sequential layers of creation (Diagram 1) are integrated into simultaneous and synergistic co-action controlled entirely by correspondences. Mental anatomy gives you the awareness that you are not this physical body, which is inert, and merely reacts by correspondence to the mental body. When the mental body is disconnected from it, the physical body falls apart by its own inert chemical forces. When I decide to pick up the phone to make a call it is the mental body that decides while the physical body executes by correspondence—the arm moves and the hand grasps the object. The mental body does not need to move its arm and hand since it identifies with the physical body. In fact, to the people in the mental world looking on, our mental body appears to be asleep. We are not aware that our mental body appears to be asleep to others who are there since we are focused totally on the physical body, believing ourselves to be it.

It is similar to our experience in virtual world. We identify with the digital avatar on the screen rather than with physical body. While our virtual avatar is moving around in virtual shops and buildings, our physical body is relatively inert, restricted to sitting in a chair with eyes focused on a small screen and hands restricted to operating mouse and keyboard.

Mental anatomy gives us celestial-rational concepts by which we can diagram or chart our entire self as a human being in relation to all other human beings (see Diagrams). There is a “here and now” actuality of every choice we make through the course of a day, as for example, not picking up the phone when it rings, lowering or raising the volume on the radio or television, saying No to unsafe sex or addiction, etc. Mental anatomy gives us a way of tracing the connection of this ‘here and now’ choice to our eternity by following the sequential order of discrete correspondences in the origin of our choice. Every choice we make is an outward act that originates in an inward love. It is our love that makes the choice. Loves are arranged in a top down anatomical control hierarchy. At the very top of the hierarchy is the ruling love. It is assisted by a few sub-loves, each of which control numberless sub-sub-loves called “affections” and “desires.” No affection can make a choice unless it is approved by a higher love in the anatomical affective hierarchy. Ultimately every choice we make is controlled by either of two ruling loves, one heavenly, the other hellish.

Ruling loves do not originate in the individual. All ruling loves and their sub-loves are sourced in the people who live in the Grand Human and the Grand Monster. It is the vertical community that brings us the loves by which we make our choices in daily life. Making a choice consists of clinging to some love that anatomically flows by correspondence into the affective circulatory system of our mental body. Both heavenly and hellish loves flow in and are consummated by the mental blood nutrients of the affective system. When this biological consummation process occurs we subjectively experience the consciousness of those loves. When we cling to a love sourced in the Grand Human we make a good choice, one that corresponds to the celestial-rational order. But when we cling to a love sourced in the Grand Monster we make a bad or evil choice, one that corresponds to the corrupted material-rational order (or disorder). Clinging to heavenly loves allows us to develop a heavenly personality that can be happy in the heavenly order of eternity. But clinging to hellish loves makes us develop a hellish personality that cannot be happy in the heavenly order of eternity, and must live forever in the disorderliness and mental illness of hell in eternity.

When we awaken from the dying/resuscitation process we are faced with our final choice: to cling to the heavenly personality and let go of the hellish, or else, to cling to the hellish personality and let go of the heavenly. Nothing can influence the outcome of this final choice except the ruling love that we decide to cling to. This is our “second death” when we are stripped of the other personality we don’t prefer to cling to. We then become “all good” or “all bad” and live our eternity with others who are also all good or all evil.

It makes sense therefore that we should want to learn how to connect the here and now choices to our eternal fate so that we can manage that fate to our preference. Much is at stake in terms of our happiness or our suffering. Living with people in the Grand Human who cling to sociality, mutuality, altruism, rationality, sanity, health, beauty, integrity, etc., is a life of joy and expansion into greater joy, while living with people in the Grand Monster is a life of selfishness, egotism, cruelty, insanity, mental illness, ugliness, deception, etc. Managing our daily choices from the perspective of mental anatomy becomes an imperative in the light of this knowledge.

Daily choice making is therefore a vehicle of transportation in the mental world of eternity.

All day long we tend to oscillate between good moods and bad moods, good loves and bad loves, leading to good choices and evil choices through the intermediary of rational and irrational thinking based on intelligent or stupid assumptions and conclusions. If we don’t consciously manage this accumulation process there is an irresistible tendency to “go downhill” with our loves and consequent choices. This is because we inherit strong attachments to hellish loves and enjoyments such as the love to advance self at the expense of others, or the love to deceive others in order to steal what is theirs and to gain what Is not rightfully ours, or the love to destroy one’s goodness and health through dangerous and unsafe practices, etc.

When we awaken from the dying/resuscitation process (which takes about 33 hours), we begin our new life in the activity of the mental body. We spontaneously discover that in order to displace ourselves in the mental world we need to cling to specific loves. Each particular love gives us a destination, a path, and an arrival—all instantaneously. If we cling to a dark mood of vengeance against someone that we resent, we find ourselves teleported to dark ugly place in company with people who cling to the same love of vengeance and resentment. This has real consequences since we are now interacting with people who are behaving on their own behalf without feeling or compassion for us. We begin by being tormented by them, and following that, we enjoy the love of tormenting them, for awhile, and then turns switch. What an unenviable life!

How different is our immortal consciousness in the mental body of eternity when we make a final choice at our second death that allows us to let go of any and all hellish traits we have ever clung to with our love. Now liberated from our hellish inheritance plus our own personality acquisitions, we feel ourselves in the true being of God, openly receiving the mental heat of love for what is good and true in ourselves and in others. This pure love creates a new super-human understanding and intelligence that may be called quasi-omniscience. In this pure celestial-rational state of reception from the mental sun, we know absolutely everything there is to know about anything we think of or wonder about. This highest potential mental state can only be achieved anatomically through forming the conjoint self.

The conjoint self refers to the anatomical unity of functioning between a husband and a wife who live together as soulmates in the celestial mental body along with others in the Grand Human.

Consider a hypothetical case history. Anthony and Charity met in college and eventually were married and had children. From the period they first fell in love to a few months following the wedding, they behaved and felt like people who are in love. They felt an affective intimacy and an intense inner bond of trust with the irresistible desire to conjoin and share everything. This was their celestial honeymoon phase. After that there followed the male dominance and equity phase in which the wife felt like the husband was no longer in love with her. He began to show a male dominant attitude which he used to impose his will over hers regardless of fairness. He was abusive when she did not obey him and please him. But because this did not bring him happiness, and because he did not want to cheat and give up on the marriage, the husband moves into the equity phase and begins to negotiate with his wife about the things that he previously merely dictated to her.

Charity was now happier. Anthony has started allowing her to fight back and to express her wants. Her life improved as he began to temper and counterbalance his dominance in the relationship, letting their life reflect their mutual enhancement. But Anthony could not maintain himself at this level of equity and fairness between them. Whenever Charity insisted on her way in an area he considered “off limits” to her, he would fell back on his male dominant attitude and refuse to continue negotiating with her and acting like he wants to work out. Instead, he would raise his voice, get abusive, dig in, walk out, maintain the silence. These male dominant strategies coming at critical times in the progression of their relationship became a serious obstacle to their happiness and intimacy. The disaster of divorce threatened at the door of their home. This went on for awhile.

Then Anthony began to be interested in God and dualism. He became spiritually enlightened and began to understand that he must undergo character regeneration before he can achieve a unity of love with Charity that would be eternal and endless. The process of undergoing regeneration involves willingness to cooperate with God who acts as our Divine Psychologist during the process, holding our hand, sitting with us, and behind the scenes managing events and thoughts to give us the freedom to make choices according to heavenly loves with celestial-rational correspondences. Regeneration progresses through temptations in “spiritual combat” during which the Divine Psychologist arranges external events and internal moods to coincide in our feeling and consciousness. We experience this subjectively as an emotional conflict called a “temptation.”

The anatomy of being tempted involves people from the Grand Human and the Grand Monster, lined up in two arrays around our sleeping mental body. These people are summoned by the Divine Psychologist and as willing volunteers come out and down into the resuscitation zones where are located the sleeping mental bodies of everyone who is still attached to a physical body. Now the Grand Monster people surrounding our mental body, inflow with their loves into the affective system of our sleeping mental body. We experience this in our consciousness as a strong inclination and desire to give in to the tempting behavior and to consummate the desire and love for it. For instance, Charity told Anthony to phone her before coming home from work in case she needs something picked up. Anthony felt disturbed when she made that request. He hated her guts in that moment. He hated being told by her what to do when he is not home. This hatred for her was of course disjunctive and separative. It threatened their happiness and the health of their marriage. This love of hating her when she interferes with him was inspired in Anthony’s consciousness by the company of evil people around his mental body in the resuscitation zone.

Carefully following this hostile action, the people from the Grand Human come nearer Anthony’s mental body and inspire it with the love of conjunction and compassion for Charity. Anthony who is identifying with his physical body, is unaware of the spiritual battle that is going on around his mental body, but he is subjectively experiencing an intense conflict between two opposing emotional forces. He hates her guts with passion, and, he loves her courage, intelligence, and desire for affective intimacy with him. This is his temptation. In that moment he can go either way. The decision and choice hangs in balance on a single thin thread. This thread is Anthony’s commitment to his changed life, his reformation, his regeneration, his unity with Charity forever. The stronger he makes this commitment to be by clinging to it, the more he can vanquish all the temptations that he experiences while moving into the unity phase of their relationship.

The unity phase of marriage is the process of anatomical interconnection between the affective and cognitive systems of the husband and wife. Diagram 3 depicts this process of evolving a conjoint self. When a marriage reaches this phase it is called a spiritual marriage. Once a couple is well along this phase they have an understanding and vision of their eternal togetherness. This vision and understanding can be greatly clarified and specified through the knowledge of correspondences and mental anatomy.

Couples who have grown into the conjoint self anatomy while still here on earth act towards one another by calculating the significance of each interaction to their perfect married life in the Grand Human. Nothing is ever disconnected. The slightest feeling of annoyance or selfishness of the husband can become an obstacle to the unity, if he fails to reject the disjunctive thought and feeling that led to the separative act or word. The anatomical cumulation and maturation of the their unity makes disjunctive behaviors and loves less and less frequent. After the second death of each, they together enter their celestial domicile somewhere in a Grand Human society where people enjoy similar conjugial loves. No disjunctive love or act can exist in that mental region. The couple can be joyful and happy continuously forever.

The Making of the Conjoint Self

The unity model of marriage includes the idea of conjugial accommodation.

There is a rational need for the husband to act like he loves and honors his wife regardless of how he feels momentarily when he is disturbed or angry with her.

Conjugial accommodation strategies

Women in coupled relationships feel pressured to have sex without being mentally prepared by the man for sexual intimacy. Every time she gives in to that kind of objectified role expectancy sexual blackmail pressure, the woman’s capacity to conjoin fully to that man is injured. She loses some of her ability to be mentally united to him. Until this injury is repaired by the man, the couple’s sexuality will remain at a plateau well below their potential. Ultimately this puts their eternal future together in jeopardy.

When the man in a couple disagrees with the woman, he is hurting their sex life. A woman wants the man to give her his opinion on everything that involves them as a couple or unit. She wants his advice, his knowledge, and his masculine perspective. But she doesn’t want him to disagree with her opinion, knowledge, and feminine perspective. She forms her opinion, knowledge, and feminine perspective by taking him into account. He is the center of her concern. She wants him to feel comfortable following her feminine perspective. She wants him to adjust his masculine perspective so that it is compatible with her feminine perspective. Organically and anatomically her sense is correct. Genuine masculine and feminine intelligence have organic properties to allow them to fit together as reciprocals, making a unit of one.

When the woman in a romantic relationship commits to being a couple her feminine intelligence accommodates and makes itself fit to the man’s. For instance, she learns his sense of humor so that she can laugh at his jokes. She learns the details of his life, what he likes and dislikes, how he thinks about certain issues. The woman moulds herself to his masculine consciousness using her own feminine intelligence to achieve this. Now she waits for the man to do the same. In order for them to fit as a unit he has to mould his masculine intelligence to her feminine perspective. For instance, he avoids contradicting her or disagreeing with her when she gives her opinion or advice on what he should do and how he should do it.

The woman may have to wait a long time, even to desperation, because the man is unwilling to mould himself to her. Instead he insists on remaining rigid and unaccommodating. I am who I am, says the man. Foolishness of mind and dishonesty of the heart make it difficult for him to compel himself to mould his masculinity to fit into her femininity. The man often remains unwilling to suffer himself to do this anatomical bonding labor with his wife or partner. He foolishly tells himself that masculinity and manhood are as they are, and that a good woman is one who moulds herself to her man, not the other way round.

But the fact is that they each need to mould themselves mutually to each other in order for anatomical conjunction to occur.

Anatomical conjunction of the two mental bodies is the spiritual marriage that forms the conjoint self, the final unit of life that gives human beings their true super-human or “angelic” potential.

A man becomes spiritually enlightened when he begins to compel himself to undergo character regeneration from his normal self-centered masculine perspective to the new woman-centered masculine perspective. The difference between self-centered masculine intelligence and woman-centered masculine intelligence is like the difference between the dry sandy desert and a garden oasis by a river, or the like the difference between a hunting gun and a toy gun made of plastic. The spiritually enlightened man compels himself to think and behave in accordance with the woman-centered masculine perspective. This is the enriched masculine, the true man who sets his thoughts and actions to the order of his created anatomy. The man united to the woman as one is true to his anatomy. To be united in this way requires that the man modify the inherited masculine intelligence that justifies male dominance over women (cf. “This is a man’s world.”). By adopting the logic of male dominance in his thinking and behaving the husband or partner retains the masculine intelligence that is unwilling to enter into a unity relationship. The alternative is a permanent oscillation between the equity phase and the male dominance phase.

The progression of marriage is from being merely natural to its growing anatomically into a spiritual marriage. The merely natural marriage adjoins the physical bodies of the man and woman in partnership. There is no mental conjunction with this socio-legal collocation. Adjunction occurs with physical bodies while conjunction occurs with mental bodies. Adjunction refers to laying physical things near each other, like the flowers are adjoined to the vase, or like the clothes we put on that are adjoined to our body. Adjunction is a natural thing and is done with physical objects and bodies. But conjunction is spiritual, mental, and anatomically synergistic. The mental body of the woman and the mental body of the man grow into each other like two overlapping vines that later cannot be ripped apart without injuring both.

This description needs to be taken literally and medically. The mental body is composed of three functionally interdependent organic systems, which are identified in Diagram zz and zz as the affective-circulatory system, the cognitive-respiratory system, and the neuro-muscular sensorimotor system. In the merely natural marriage phase the man and the woman mentally are like single persons. They are like roommates whose intimacy comes from external interactions with co-managing domestic life and children. In their mental body the husband and wife each stay single unless they grow into the interior spiritual marriage and develop a joint mental body system. The interior spiritual conjunction is determined by the mental anatomy of the man the woman, which are reciprocals of each other (Diagram zz). The conjoint self of the couple begins to form when the man is willing to let the woman’s cognitive-respiratory system tie into his affective-circulatory system. (See Diagram zz).

This means that the woman’s feminine intelligence is loved by the man.

Man is born with the irresistible inclination to love masculine intelligence. When young boys are faced with the feminine intelligence of young girls they have to urge to squash it, to torture it, to tease it, to contradict it, to ridicule it. To the husband, or the boyfriend, boss, or co-worker, the woman’s opinion and explanations are not as weighty as his own, not as logical, not as well thought out, not as competent and expert. Men don’t respect feminine intelligence. This continues for life unless the man becomes spiritually enlightened and starts thinking on the basis of their eternal future and their mental anatomy and mutual formation or conjunction. Rationally enlightened masculine intelligence is informed by knowledge of God, eternity, mental anatomy, and correspondences. When this scientific knowledge is unavailable (as is the usual case), man can still be spiritually enlightened if he loves feminine intelligence.

After the dying/resuscitation process every awakening person is instructed in mental anatomy, the second death, conjugial love or the conjoint self, and the Grand Human/Grand Monster societies. In the afterlife of eternity no mental growth and health are possible without this knowledge. Those who can accept and love this knowledge have regenerated loves and are capable to live in the Grand Human complex. Those who reject this knowledge and cannot love it, are inducted into the Grand Monster societies and way of life.

By anatomical form women have a more interior intelligence while men have a more interior love. In daily life women are associated with the affective, that is, with love and emotion, while men are associated with the cognitive, that is, with thinking and reasoning. This is accurate in terms of the external anatomy of their mental bodies. In external anatomy men are masculine ideas while women are feminine loves, but in internal anatomy it is the reciprocal of that, so that men are masculine loves while women are feminine ideas. (See diagrams zz, zz).

By mental anatomy masculine loves are higher than feminine loves, while feminine ideas are higher than masculine ideas.

The mental world of eternity is arranged top down so that what is higher is closer to God and thus in perfection of human potential. Masculine love grows higher anatomically while feminine intelligence grows higher by anatomy. As Diagram xx shows, the anatomical maturation of the conjoint self within the interior spiritual marriage progresses in two distinct phases of growth, namely, external first, then internal. The external conjunction is between the lower love of the woman and the lower thinking of the man. This first external and lower conjunction of their mental body takes care of the natural environment and the management requirements of their physical bodies. Then proceeds the interior conjunction through the higher love of the man conjoined with the higher reasoning of the woman. This takes care of the spiritual environment and the management requirements of their celestial (or “angelic”) bodies.

The reciprocity of anatomical conjunction, both external and interior, creates the conjugial couple in heaven. This is the conjoint self that is made up by the two anatomically interdependent celestial bodies. It puts the man and the woman into the final phase of evolution of human potential. This begins at the second death when people are inducted into one of the numerous Grand Human societies, each specializing in some particular ruling love of heaven. Swedenborg observed this organic physiological induction process and describes it in detail. It corresponds to the way in which food is incorporated by the functions of the physical body (see Worcester’s book). Swedenborg observed the use of “gyres” involving a multitude of people in the air moving together in rhythm and direction. This gyrating communal action involving particular societies and communities induce upon the inducted individuals a specific breathing pattern that matches and conjoins with the circadian communal breathing rhythm of that society.

Swedenborg’s careful observations over a 27-year period indicate that every society in the Grand Human has its particular unique breathing rhythm. The operation of the cognitive-respiratory system of the celestial body is subjectively experienced by each conjoint couple as their conscious life of thinking and being, each being aware of self as a unique human being. The individual is unique, hence each couple is unique, and thus each society in the Grand Human. Each individual is in the human form of their own celestial body. Swedenborg was amazed when he noticed that from a visual distance each conjugial couple appears as one individual—which is an outward correspondence to their internal anatomical oneness or synergy. In the same way, every society of the Grand Human, when viewed from an appearance of visual distance, appears as one comely and angelic looking person, a sort of composite of all the beautiful people who love to live in the angelic consciousness.

On one occasion Swedenborg was given the ability to mentally view the entire Grand Human from an appearance of distance. It appeared as one person, and hence the name “Grand Human” (some people translate his Latin as the “Grand Man”). The same metonymical series holds for the people in the Grand Monster, which as seen by Swedenborg, appears as a deformed person. This inhuman appearance corresponds to their anti-human loves or hellish lusts that deform the human character, corrupt its humanity, and debase the level of consciousness to the sub-human or sub-rational level of thinking. By mental anatomy every variety of mental heat can be turned by the receiving individual into a love that corresponds with it or a love that is opposed to it.

The inversion of mental heat into anti-social motives and intentions creates evil and hell. This inversion process is a natural consequence of the conditions we experience on earth through the physical body. We inherit a mental anatomy that is filled with propensities and inclinations that favor the option of self as against others who are in competition with us for scarce goods such as pleasure, dominion, rewards, riches, beauty, health, physical skills, in elections, politics, business, love, comforts, fame, etc. These are the goods of living, what gives us enjoyments and happiness through external socio-legal benefits and personal gains. This is how evil was actually introduced into the mental world of eternity, and hence into the entire human race.

The consciousness of good vs. evil has been at the center of focus and concern in every generation of the human race on earth. Mental psychology describes the details of this battle going on in every individual alive today. The process of reformation and regeneration of our inherited mental anatomy is the purpose for which God maintains a person alive on earth. If circumstances no longer allow a person to continue this anatomical regeneration process, God instantly removes that individual through the dying/resuscitation process. The moment regeneration stops for a person there is no need or use for the person to remain attached to the physical body.

Given that the anatomical conjunction of man woman is the highest phase of evolution our true and genuine human life experience does not begin until the second death and our induction into a society of the Grand Human. The induction process to be completed requires the presence of both partners, each conscious in their own celestial body. Since partners pass on at different times there is a physiological holding mechanism by which the induction process is slowed or halted, and then resumed and completed when the other partner shows up. Subjectively this might feel like we are waiting for our loved one to arrive while we are maintaining residence in the wonderful gardens just outside conjugial heaven. When the other partner shows up they suddenly feel irresistibly attracted to one another as their joy and sense of completion is consummated in actuality. From that moment on they will be never separate even when they do not appear to be present.

Swedenborg received a demonstration of this when he was interviewing two celestial couples in the highest heavenly society (layer 4, third Heaven). He was seemingly to himself talking to two husbands who were discussing their marital life and its wonders. The men informed him that they each had their wife present. Swedenborg was somewhat doubtful about whether they were speaking literally or figuratively. They were amused at his doubt, and as soon as they raised their arm the wife of each was seen by Swedenborg standing next to each man. It seemed to him that the women were behind a transparent screen that hid them from his view. The men were demonstrating by outward correspondential appearance that they were each united anatomically to their wife and that this conjointness did not cease when they were apparently each busy doing things on their own.

This anatomical conjointness of couples in the Grand Human corresponds to the mental intimacy of couples on earth who have opted to live in the unity phase with each other. Husbands who are growing in the spiritual marriage each hears his wife asking them to call from work to check on her. Earlier attitudes from the male dominant and equity phases may trigger in him an instant of rebellion when he hears his wife tell him what to do, especially when he is away from home. But now that he is spiritually enlightened he immediately reacts to his annoyance or resentment by disapproving of it, and by rejecting it as illegitimate within his unity framework of marriage. He tells himself that his resentment is from hell and if he accepts it or approves it in his mind, he attaches himself anatomically to the hell where it comes from. This gives him the motivation to stop, to reverse himself, and to acknowledge his external masculine intelligence as being lower in rationality to his wife’s interior feminine intelligence. So if she says “Call me from work to check on me”, his masculine intelligence is to take notice and know that she understand the relationship situation better than he does. He finally compels himself to love this feminine intelligence in his wife more than his own masculine intelligence. He calls her and discovers how wise she has been all along in her various numerous requests to him. Happy is that couple!

Husbands and boyfriends who practice interior unity through their daily exchanges with their partner are the happiest and luckiest people alive, as a popular Barbara Streisand song asserts. It does not take luck, but relationship work. The happiness of a couple is an achievement the partners gain through conjoint mental work that persists for years and decades of relationship. Unity husbands are happy and fulfilled in all ways. They live a mental environment with their wife that fosters the organic anatomical growth of their human potential. What they do tends to become progressively better, more effective, and more useful to others. What they think tends to be rational and in the service of their altruistic goals. What they feel and intend is good will and sincerity towards all. The unity husband in the spiritual marriage is gradually growing and evolving mentally, by character and intelligence, into the handsome form and strength of an angel. Together forever as best friends in love, they live their never ending, always improving life of conjugial bliss.

Maturation with organic and physiological processes in the physical body takes years, as for instance, growing teeth and achieving functional reproductive organs. The brain continues to grow in mass until the third decade of life. Decades later, aging arrives with cell oxidizing and diminishment in organ function. The mental body however does not age and continues to mature or grow forever. Mental functioning and sensory acuity continue to increase under the determination of celestial loves that enter our affective-circulatory system in endlessly variety. Our celestial body reflects outwardly this endless interior improvement by its beauty and grace, its virtues and skills. The celestial environment that is instantiated by the loves in our affective system is indescribable in beauty and wisdom, according to Swedenborg who had years to observe the heavenly societies and cities in the Grand Human. He saw buildings with amazing architecture unknown on earth, filled with sculpture and art of a celestial order, surrounded by large gardens where trees grow in rational and aesthetic arrays that correspondentially express the character of the people who live there.

All this external appearance is nothing but the correspondential expression of the loves and thoughts of the people there. Loving good with truth gives the power to create when it is received from God, acknowledged, loved, and practiced in choices and intentions. But when good with truth is received and immediately inverted to self-love, it turns into corrupted good and falsified truth.

What is the essence or character of good with truth that flows into humans from the mental sun of eternity? It is love of good with truth in others, in self, and in the useful properties in objects or events.

When we are being selfish we do not love good with truth, but rather its opposite, which is corrupted good with falsified truth.

For instance, consider a neighbor called “Henry” who loves his two dogs. During the hours he is away at work his two dogs bark their heads off for hours at a time. You and your wife are retired and at home all day. The constant barking interferes with your normal life of quiet, peace, and happiness. You talk to Henry about it but he is not very receptive. He just says he is sorry. You tell him about a training collar that discourages dogs from barking. Henry is not responsive. Just says OK, thanks. This continues for months. What is going on?

Henry generally acts polite and is considered to be a decent person. He knows about the barking problem but whenever he thinks about it his mind is filled with various reasonings that justify the idea that the neighbors should just adjust to it. He thinks that the neighbors should not complain but try to live with the problem. This is what they would if they were good neighbors, Henry thinks. Since they are not good neighbors, Henry concludes, he does not have to do what they want. He is waiting for his new job when he can spend more time at home with the dogs. Besides, the neighbors have a bamboo chime that Henry hates, and they refused to take it down after he asked them to.

What is actually happening here is a little mental hell created by neighbors who are selfish and without compassion for one another. Neither neighbor loves good with truth. This would mean that they sit together and solve the problem through mutual help. To love good with truth means that they refuse to maintain any situation that the other is plagued by. For instance if one neighbor’s low lying yard and basement overflows during heavy rain season, then the other neighbor should help out by rerouting with pipes some of the water than flows from his property and roof top. Decent neighbors do this for each other even when they don’t get along or don’t like each other personally.

Loving good with truth in the neighbor and in the neighborhood does not mean loving the neighbor or the neighborhood.

There is much confusion about what it means to love the neighbor. God’s commandment that we love the neighbor means that we must love the good with truth in the neighbor. This is self-evident since God could not command us to love the bad with the false in anyone. Loving the neighbor means loving the good with truth in the neighbor, and this means everything in the neighbor that is useful to others rather than harmful. Whatever is harmful in the neighbor should not be loved. For instance, if my neighbor practices a harmful addiction, I am not to love that practice. Instead I should try to help my neighbor get over it. Or if a thief comes into the house and gets caught by the police, I am to love good with truth in the thief that I can notice. For instance, if the thief shows remorse and genuinely wants to change his character, I can love that because it is good. I should not hate the thief and try to deny his genuine recovery. Even though he stole from me I should wish him well so he can pursue a changed life.

Some parents love their children in person, rather than loving the good with truth in their children. They then excuse the corrupted good or selfishness that the children exhibit. Instead they should not love or accept good that has been corrupted to selfish ends without regard to the comfort or rights of others. Some pet owners love their dogs in person, rather than loving the good with truth in their pet. For instance, they should not love the barking of their pet when it is annoying to neighbors. The pet owners should hate the idea that their pet’s barking is causing distress to the neighbor. It is the same with other sources of noise people make like music, tv, partying, talking on the phone, playing an instrument, etc. Loving the neighbor means loving the good with truth in the neighbor since these are God in the neighbor (see Diagram zz). Only God ought to be loved, and everyone else for the sake of God in them.

To love others for the sake of self is hellish, not heavenly. For instance, to love friends for the sake of self-aggrandizement or popularity and reward, is to appear to love them outwardly, while inwardly hating them. This manifests itself when some friends turn against you and you instantly feel the hatred you have for them. You don’t care for them or for their welfare, but only appear to do so for personal gain. This shows that to love others for the sake of self is hellish, and is not true love but fake love. People can love good with truth when they are in a self-confident successful situation. But when the cards change and they feel vulnerable and unsuccessful, they no longer love good with truth. They go off on their own with corruptions of that good, such as the enjoyment of hurting someone through gossip. The genuine love of good with truth is persistent and does not change with negative mood or apparent bad luck. Bad luck is rationally perceived as God’s work behind the scenes to bring out good with truth. A negative mood is perceived as an influence coming from hellish connections through falsified ideas I am maintaining. Changing those false assumptions or conclusions by rethinking the situation, allows new celestial-rational loves to flow in from the heavenly connections.

Anatomically we have inherited hellish connections with our material mental body (layer 8, 9) and inherited heavenly connections with our rational mental body (layer 7). The hellish connections work directly into the material mental body and are therefore subjectively experienced as an intense liking or dislike for a variety of sensations, ideas, and loves. All day long we are experiencing the battle or conflict between these two types of connections through which flow in opposing loves. For instance, consider a wife who is feeling conjugial indicates to her husband that she wants him to spend some time with her. He responds that it’s a good idea and they could get together for lunch later. She tells him that she had meant now. He then initiates a series of disjunctive acts which express his displeasure that she should want him to drop everything just to be together right then and then. What’s wrong with later when he has had a chance to make some progress on his project which is on his mind. She knew what his project was and that there was no real need for it to be done now. She feels hurt. She says OK, and walks away.

He is left with himself feeling disturbed. He feels bad about saying those disjunctive things to her, like “You know honey, aren’t you being a little insistent here. What’s the big deal” or, “Look, can’t you see I really want to finish this” and also “Stop accusing me that I am yelling at you. What’s gotten into you, baby?” etc. Disjunctive speech acts are the bane of marriage. Only recently he talked with her about how he is going to cut out the hurtful disjunctive things he says to her. Darkness invades his heart with a sense of gloom. Now he is feeling the hellish mental states that flow in through his inherited connections to the Grand Monster societies. He feels hatred for himself for his inability to stick to his word. He feels that he doesn’t deserve heaven because he is just a fake. He hates his marriage for putting him in this position. He hates her for being who she is.

This downward spiraling of hellism is interrupted by the angels coming to the rescue through the heavenly connections in his rational mental body. He experiences this subjectively as the voice of reason within, the voice of conscience, the voice of obedience and innocence to the good with truth. He feels a horror for his coldness of heart towards his conjugial love and soulmate. He wants to be with her as best friends in love. This is not how you treat your best friend. He leaps up and runs after her, catching her in his arms, and profusely saying apologetic speech acts to sooth her feminine intelligence and her delicate love for togetherness. He resolves to be a chivalrous husband and man. The oath of chivalry is to hate and defeat in himself disjunctive acts towards his lady.

Anatomical Diagrams

Diagram 1: Sequential and Simultaneous Relationship

Diagram 2: The Twelve Layers of Mental Anatomy in Successive and Simultaneous Order

Diagram 3: Table Listing the Mental Bodies

Name	Discrete Layer	Description
CELESTIAL MENTAL BODY VII	4	Celestial—interior rational
	5	Celestial--external-rational
	6	Celestial--interior-material
RATIONAL MENTAL BODY VI	7i	Rational—interior or celestial
RATIONAL MENTAL BODY VI	7e	Rational—external or materialized
MATERIAL MENTAL BODY V, III, II, IV	8	Material--abstract
	9	Material--corporeal
	10	“Spiritual body”
PHYSICAL BODY I	11	“Limbus”
PHYSICAL BODY I	12	Physical body

Diagram 4: The Twelve Anatomical Layers of Existence and Reality

ANATOMICAL LAYERS	DISCRETE DEGREES OF LOVE	ACCOMPANYING DEGREES OF MEANING	CONSCIOUSNESS
1, 2, 3	Divine Love (mental heat)	Divine Wisdom (mental light)	God (Divine-Human)
4, 5, 6	Celestial loves	Celestial-rational meanings	Heavenly (Grand Human)
7	Rational loves	Rational meanings	Rational
8, 9	Material loves	Material or natural meanings	Material or natural
10, 11, 12	temporary and permanent body coverings)

Diagram 5: Male and Female Anatomy

Diagram 6: Anatomy of the Mental Body

Diagram 7: Formation of Male and Female Mental Genes

Diagram 8: Male and Female Human Anatomy

Diagram 9: The Vertical Community

Diagram 10: Maturation and Regeneration of the Natural Mind

Diagram 11: Birth, Dying/Resuscitation, Second Death, Heaven, Hell

Diagram 12: Anatomical Conjunction of Husband and Wife in Three Phases of Marriage:

Sensorimotor, Cognitive, and Affective

Diagram 13: Degrees of Conjunction with Mental Body of Husband and Wife

Diagram 14: Masculine and Feminine Love and Wisdom

Diagram 15: Anatomical Conjunction of Husband and Wife in Three Layers and Phases

Diagram 16: Anatomy of Natural and Spiritual Marriage

Diagram 17: Lifespan Development and Spiritual Growth

Diagram 18: External and Internal Unity in Marriage

Diagram 19: Diaphragm and Lungs

~~[lj1]~~

Diagram 20: The Heart Outside and Inside Cavity

Notes on Diagram 19: Diaphragm and Lungs

The diaphragm forms a partition between the thorax and the abdomen. Its upper side consists of the lower part of the pleura, its lower side of the upper part of the peritoneum.

Thorax: the middle region of the body between the head and the abdomen

Abdomen: the region of the body between the thorax and the pelvis

Pelvis: the structure of the skeleton supporting the lower limbs

Pleura: the thin serous membrane around the lungs and inner walls of the chest

Peritoneum: a transparent membrane that lines the abdominal cavity covers most of the viscera

Conjunctive and Disjunctive Dialog in Couples

There are three things in a man that a woman wants more than all other things—friendship, cooperation, and wisdom.

A wife wants friendship from her husband because she needs to feel stimulated and free. These are the feelings that come from being the best of friends. This includes intimacy and sexuality as an eternal couple.

A wife wants cooperation from her husband because her life is miserable and hard when he resists her in this or that, following his own mind.

A wife wants wisdom in her husband so that she could admire him and feel safe and protected from false perspectives and dangerous involvements which otherwise she might fall prey to.

Unity couples who live the spiritual marriage are internally bound to each other.

(1) They always have fun in each other’s company. Thus, they are best friends.

(2) The husband never disagrees with his wife because he is dedicated to support her feelings ahead of his own feelings. Thus, he is spiritually enlightened and has wisdom.

(3) They feel complete freedom in their intimacy because their sexuality is complete, being the ultimate expression of their unity, here, and in heaven to eternity.

As women become wives they are propelled by an inward drive to conjoin to their husband, and they are in their inmost joy of being when their husband is willing to go along in this progressive anatomical conjoining process within marriage.

The wife’s passion and spiritual sweetness extends as a conjugial sphere all around her, enveloping the husband and all that he considers his own—his personal space, his money and schedule, his belongings and friends, his appearance and affections, his preferences and prerogatives as a man, his attitudes and opinions, judgments, in short, nothing of the man is left for himself, but everything about him is conjoined, co-appropriated by his wife.

He at first feels this process as a gradual invasion of his external and internal being. He either resists, or gives in to the wife’s sphere, even though it appears at first like an objectionable mental invasion. Mostly he resists—to the wife’s pain, suffering, chagrin, desperation, and inward desolation.

But at last he gets hold of the unity model in his rational mind. Now he mostly gives in to his wife’s sphere. The wife’s sphere begins to rule his outward and inward being. He allows it, desires it, and prefers it—because he is thinking of the final goal and destination, which is that of being one with his wife in conjugial unity in heaven, endlessly to eternity.

Instructional Marriage Soap: Generation 1

Sexual Blackmail

The Influence of Anti-Unity Values in the Media

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