It would be helpful to you to compare the distance between where you are starting from and where you end up when you complete the study of this book. I created this test to help you estimate that distance. Each question has three alternatives and you are to pick one of them that best represents your views on several spiritual topics. I provide an Answer Key and an explanation of how to interpret your score.

Please page through to the Appendix at the end where the 100 questions are located.

0. Introduction

Note:

The expression “The Writings” is being used throughout to refer to the books written In Latin by Swedish scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg (1668-1772). These are available online along with collateral works and search engine:

www.theisticpsychology.org/writings.html

Many public and academic libraries also carry one or more Swedenborg books. They can also be ordered from local and online bookstores.

Selections from the Writings are given in Section 19 and are arranged by topics of relevance to the discussion.

0.1 A Brief History of Rational Spirituality

A person without religion does not become spiritual, but remains natural (Swedenborg, CL 149)

We know from the Writings of Swedenborg that the most ancient civilizations on this earth were pre-industrialized people with the mental ability of communicating with their departed ancestors. Swedenborg was given the opportunity to talk to them in their heavens where they live happily to eternity, as will be fully explained in what follows. While they lived on earth in a physical body they were able to be in conscious mental contact with those who had departed and were inhabitants of heaven. This celestial communication between heaven and earth was the source of their knowledge about the world, heaven, and God. As a result, their perspective on reality was objective and realistic, hence dualist and theistic. For them dualism was not a belief or a religion, but a scientific reality. They did not have to invent philosophies, theologies, and theories about the source of life, the immortality of human beings, the existence of heaven and hell, and the laws by which God operated both worlds, the natural world of earths and the spiritual world of heavens and hells. This was not mystery to them but science -- clear understanding based on empirical facts. Whatever information they needed about reality, they were able to access through the vertical community of their ancestors. They were celestial people, conscious of the operations in their celestial mind, which gave them a sensuous consciousness of both this world and the spiritual world. This dual consciousness was the source of their science.

And where did the inhabitants of heaven have their scientific knowledge from?

From God. Such is the character of life in the heavens, that truth and good streams into the mind from within. Knowledge is not something that needs to be acquired by learning and discovery. All knowledge is from God. While attached to the physical body we are compelled to discover some knowledge on our own. Scientific revelation has the character of being wrapped in endless layers of appearances of truth. It seems that we have to exert mental effort to read it and comprehend it. But at some point we are no longer attached to the physical body and we take over conscious control of the spirit-body during our resuscitation into the world of spirits. As we enter the uppermost level of our mind called heaven, there is a radical change in how knowledge comes to us. In that state our will is in the inmost and our understanding is on the outside of it. Scientific knowledge or truth streams into consciousness from the spiritual Sun, which first enters the will with its spiritual heat or love, and then exits into the understanding with its spiritual light or truth. This inward source of scientific knowledge is blocked to consciousness while we are attached to the physical body.

You can see therefore that the most ancient peoples on this earth did not need an education and a scientific institution to know the properties and laws of natural events. Whatever scientific facts they wanted to know came to them from those in the heavens with whom they were in communication.

An important component of their knowledge was called the Science of Correspondences. This involved understanding the rational hierarchy of discrete degrees into which the two worlds were created, and by which they are maintained in synchronous action. The spiritual world is the source of all causes while the natural world is the theater of their effects. Every event or quality in the natural world is an effect of some prior corresponding spiritual event or quality, the two being linked as effect and cause. Neither world can survive without the other for they are locked into synchronous correspondence by pre-established Laws of Divine Providence. A world of causes (spiritual world) cannot exist without a world of effects (natural world), and vice versa of course. Further, all events in the spiritual world are from the same source which is the spiritual Sun. It is the source of all causes in the spiritual world, and therefore of all effects in the natural world. Hence all spiritual and natural phenomena are produced by these laws of correspondences by the spiritual Sun.

[3] 'It would be too tedious to explain how creation progressed from its first beginning. But while I was in a state of enlightenment I perceived that by means of the light and heat from the sun of your world, one after another spiritual atmospheres were created, which are in themselves substantial. Because there are three of them, and they therefore have three degrees, three heavens were made, one for angels in the highest degree of love and wisdom, one for angels in the second degree, and a third for angels in the lowest degree. But because this spiritual universe could not come into being without a natural universe, in which the spiritual one might produce its effects and perform its services, at the same time the sun which is the source of all natural things was created; and through this in the same way, by means of light and heat, three atmospheres were created to surround the first three, like a shell round a kernel or bark round wood; and it was finally through these that the globe with its lands and seas was created from the earth consisting of soil, stones and minerals, to be the home of men, animals, fish, trees, shrubs and plants. (TCR 76).

The spiritual Sun is uncreate, which means that it was not created but always existed. All things that exist were created by means of the uncreate infinite substances in the spiritual Sun. Its heat and its light are the foundation substances of all created things. This spiritual heat is nothing else then Divine Love, and this spiritual light is nothing else than Divine Truth. To accept this idea you will need to start thinking about love and truth as substances, and of the will and the understanding as organic receptor organs of these spiritual substances.

An analogy might be to compare the Science of Correspondences to the modern day Human Genome Project, which, upon completion, will yield a database of the identify of all the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA. The Science of Correspondences allowed the people of these ancient civilizations to recognize what spiritual phenomenon was the cause of each natural phenomenon that was detected by their physical senses. In other words, they possessed dual sensuous consciousness, at once natural and spiritual. Since natural phenomena are corresponding effects produced by spiritual causes, dual consciousness empowered them to sustain a temporary environment of paradise on earth. Our inability today of living in a paradisal peace is due to the loss of the science of correspondences so that we sometimes see truth as falsity and falsity as truth; also, we see good as evil and evil as good. As a result of this mixed up perception we create an inferno instead of a paradise.

These ancients may be called celestial minds because the upper portion of their mind was opened, activated, and fully conscious. This gave them a sensuous celestial consciousness in addition to sensuous natural consciousness. Their rationality and science was not based on separated physical observations of correlated effects, such as is the case with today’s materialistic science. Their science was a True Science. It was a theistic science because it was true to their empirical observations of both worlds, not merely the natural world. They could thus observe that the spiritual world had a spiritual Sun while the natural world had a natural sun. One Sun was alive, the other dead. They could empirically observe that the natural world was dead, and that the life of plants, animals, and humans was not at all in the natural world, but in the spiritual world. The physical bodies on earth were merely receptor organs of life streaming forth from the rays of the spiritual Sun. These rays enter our spirit-body in the world of spirits and thereby descend from the upper to the lower portions where we become conscious of their corresponding effects. The corresponding effects consist of a conscious awareness of spiritual light in the form of natural correspondences or “topics.”. All natural topics in our awareness all day long are produced by means of such influx and its correspondences. Our thinking and willing operations would cease instantly without this continuous influx streaming in from the moment of birth to eternal immortality.

The most ancient peoples on earth could comprehend from inner rational enlightenment that the stream of light and heat streaming out of the spiritual Sun was composed of living uncreate substances identified as love and truth in infinite quantities and varieties. Plants and animals were created in an outward physical form, built from within a discrete degree, upon a framework of rational truth called Divine Wisdom (or Truth). You can see therefore that uncreate substances of the spiritual Sun form the inmost discrete framework of created physical organs and objects. Physical organic forms like plants and animals, are capable of receiving life in various degrees. The chemical and geological levels receive life in the lowest degree. Then the plants, which have an organic form that is superior to rocks or liquids. Then animals, at various levels of receptivity in accordance with their organic forms. And at last, human beings whose form is an image of God, can receive life in the highest degreed called angelic or celestial.

The most ancient celestial civilizations on this earth were able to comprehend that the human mind was the most perfect creation and the purpose for which all creation existed. They did not feel the need or motivation to use their knowledge of True Science to create an industrialized society such as later civilizations have produced. They were wisely content in a peaceful unhurried environment in which they could mature as young adults and then make the joyful transition to heaven. They did not experience death as agony or fear, but as a pleasant transition into a celestial environment that did not possess the heaviness and fixedness of a material natural world. Instead, their external environment in heaven was now a spiritual construction, instantaneously produced, living and changing constantly, reflecting the inner life of feelings and thoughts of the inhabitants there. There was no need in heaven to gather stones for their dwelling places and cut down trees, and nail them together. Their magnificent palaces sprang up instantaneously under the laws of correspondences, and the amazing objects within, the rich garments, the delicious foods, the incredible art work, the striking architecture of gardens and lakes – everything sprang up instantaneously as constructions of the mind by the power of correspondences.

Swedenborg was able to visit with these earliest inhabitants of our planet when he visited the heavens where they now live. He was amazed at the rationality and intelligence they have. Their celestial consciousness gives them a comprehension of reality that is impossible to fathom in our natural mind. They are full of innocence, in mutual love, ready to share what they have, and they live in conjugial love, one husband and his wife, the two being soul mates, yea, united into one soul so that from two they became one. Despite their age being thousands of years, the appearance of their spiritual body was that of the flower of adolescence. When you see a couple walking at a distance the two actually appear as one angel. They were amazed and saddened to hear from Swedenborg that the people on earth have strayed so much from their path that all knowledge of correspondences is lost, and that almost no one lives in conjugial love. They were unwilling to hear details about the scortatory and adulterous loves that permeate the race now, as it was too shocking to their innocence.

What happened in the intervening thousands of years since they had departed earth? Historically it is known as “the Fall.” This refers to the decline in innocence, rationality, and knowledge of correspondences, sad events that were brought about by a gradual and cumulative turning away from rational spirituality and True Science. At first only a few people entered upon this nefarious course. They were isolated on earth, kept away from the inhabitations of the others. When these people entered the world of spirits at their death, they had to be kept separate from the heavenly inhabitations to prevent them from causing disturbances in the peaceful and Divinely obedient life that was part of being in heaven. The places they were kept in was called the hells. With the course of the generations entering the world of spirits, more and more people entered the hells as well as the heavens. There thus evolved two sets of populations in the spiritual world, celestial and infernal. Those still on earth were now born in an entirely new condition. First, they had no direct sensuous access to the spiritual world. The only information they were able to glean from the dual universe was that which came in through the physical senses. They were now totally ignorant that they were immortal, that there was an afterlife, a heaven, and a hell. They had become merely natural minds, thus similar to animals. This is called the Fall of the human race.

As a result God introduced a new phenomenon in the evolution of the human race – from sensuous consciousness of Him to rational consciousness. It was the beginning of rational spirituality in the human race. Henceforth God would make scientific revelations about Himself, heaven, and hell through the mind of chosen individuals whom He would put into a state of trance and produce visions of the spiritual world that they could then describe and record in writings. These prophetical writings were collected together into a set known as Sacred Scriptures or the Word of God. Now all the generations were able to read from a physical book what their dual reality was like. This was the beginning of a new rationality of the human race. The old spirituality was based on direct sensuous consciousness of the dual universe. With their outer physical sensory organs they were able to know the natural order, and with their inner spiritual sensory organs they were able to know the spiritual order. When this dual sensuous consciousness ceased with the Fall of the race, knowledge of the spiritual world and the afterlife was lost. The human race on earth had become natural. This was reflected by the evolution of a new brain – the split-brain race.

0.1a The New Split-brain Race

The early civilizations on this earth were composed of celestial people, as just discussed. Their mind was unified so that whatever was in their will, externalized in their understanding, and ultimated in their physical actions. They were not capable of thinking one thing and saying another, nor of any deceit or disinformation. This unity of the mind was reflected by their possessing a single brain. After the Fall, the mind of the people on this earth was divided. The unity was broken up by God who provided a new method for the human race to know Him and the journey of joyous immortality in heaven, which was the purpose God created the dual universe. This new method was called regeneration of the mind. Now the will and the understanding were no longer united as they were in the celestial people. Now people were born with a will filled with tendencies and loves that were opposite to those of the celestial people. The understanding however was like a blank slate. Nothing from the spiritual world could enter the consciousness of the mind, and so it was born totally dark, turned off. This fundamental mental change was reflected by the action of correspondences as the brain splitting into two parts, the left brain for the understanding, the right brain for the will.

As the infants of this new split-brain race grew and became socialized, their understanding was gradually filled with both falsities and truths. Falsities are opposites and denials of truths, while truths are the revelations from Sacred Scriptures. These revelations were summarized in every society and ethnic group in accordance with their specific conditions of life and culture. Thus arose numerous religions that taught doctrine to the children and the adults. These were called Doctrines of Life and they were acknowledged as Divine Commandments to be followed now in order to enjoy a blissful eternity in the afterlife.

By inheritance the will is filled with natural motives for acquiring knowledges. When we acquire information about spiritual topics our will responds to the content, testing it whether it agrees with its dominant loves. If the spiritual information contradicts what the will wants, the information is rejected. But if the information is compatible with the dominant loves, it is adopted and expanded in scope and importance. By this method we develop a unified mind that is mixed with evils, goods, falsities, and truths. This is not a stable situation since evil fights with good in the will, and falsities fight truths in the understanding. God participates in the tremendous tug of war struggle in our daily affairs as we are pulled and pushed by these two opposing forces. If God were to leave people to themselves, the outcome is predetermined. Inherited evil in the will gradually and inexorably banishes all good from itself, and surrounds itself with falsities manufactured by the understanding, so that the two can make what’s called an “infernal marriage,” which is a marriage from hell, taking the people to hell in the afterlife. The inevitability of this awful outcome meant that the human race was doomed and creation could not survive.

God then had to assume the role of a Divine Savior. He had to intervene in the mental operations of every split-brain individual by a supernatural intervention. God had to break into the natural consciousness of human beings on earth by a series of steps which took many millennia and centuries to accomplish. The Writings describe three fundamental steps in this Divine intervention process. They can be understood in relation to the Word of God or Sacred Scripture. The first phase of intervention to raise human consciousness covers the period of the Old Testament civilizations. Human consciousness is raised by means of Divine Truth. We can receive Divine truths from revelation in Sacred Scripture. The Old Testament was written through the minds of dozens of authors over several centuries. In other words, Divine truths had to descend and externalize in form so that they may be suitable to the genius of the people of those civilizations. Divine truths are perfectly rational because they originate from God’s Divine Rational mind. It is by this mind that God creates the dual universe and manages it. Divine Truth is the acting arm of Divine Love. Love by itself cannot act, but it can through truth. Truth is therefore the outside form of love or good. Everything that was created was created by love through truth. Therefore every created thing or quality contains love and truth at its essence. And whether you say love or you say good, it is the same. And whether you say truth or wisdom, it is the same.

By reading, studying, and reflecting upon Divine truths, our consciousness is raised. This is how our mind has evolved from creation. We become enlightened from knowing that there are two worlds, that the two are connected, that God rules all the details, that we are immortal, that our blissful eternity in heaven or our miserable fate in hell will be determined by the choices we make in accordance with the Divine truths in our understanding. Enlightenment brings us to the edge of salvation. Once again God has placed the human race on this planet into a position of freedom to choose between evils and goods, and between falsities and truths. It is called the edge of salvation because we are first given the rational understanding of our real condition. We can then actualize that salvation by beginning the mother of all battles – which is our struggle at character reformation by means of temptations – first natural, then spiritual, and a t last celestial. The Divine truths in our enlightened understanding are temporary visions of reality as it is truly. We see God rationally. We can be filled with rational loves by acknowledging Him as a Divine Human Person, and loving Him by obeying His Commandments. He can then intervene in further ways that He could not before. The reason He could not help us before in this new way is that we were not sufficiently prepared so that we were unwilling to be helped in this way. Had God insisted on helping us in this way before our readiness being complete, we would have lost our spiritual freedom to choose heaven or hell. And without this choice, we cannot be made human and happy to eternity.

God supervises every detail of our character reformation or regeneration, or else it would fail. The extent to which He can intervene in our conscious understanding is limited by our willingness to learn deeper rational truths than what we start out with. We cannot rest in the spiritual growth process. We must progress continually, or retrogress. Our spirituality must become more and more rational in order to become more and more celestial. Celestial spirituality is the highest form of rational spirituality that human beings can attain. We begin our rational development with a natural understanding of spiritual truths (or Divine truths). We read Sacred Scripture and are instructed in religious doctrine. This initial phase is a natural understanding of spiritual truths. This is the Old Testament phase of cultural evolution. We read about who is God and what God wants from us and why. All our thoughts and feelings in this regard are natural-rational. In other words we think of God naturally, as a Divine King who wants us to follow His Commandments and to worship and to give Him glory. We think of heaven as a place of reward for our good deeds, and for our origin of birth and the inherited blood we carry. We think of hell as a place of eternal punishment for sins and misdeeds. We think of these things in a natural way.

For instance we think of heaven as something that will be created on this earth, or some other planet, after the earth is first destroyed. Or we think of hell as prison where we are tortured and held against our will. We think of angels as a separately created race to serve God who wants to be praised and gloried all day long and all night. And other such characteristics that natural kings would have and natural societies on earth.

The Old Testament phase brings the mind to a higher level than the natural level ever could attain by itself. The idea that there are two worlds, natural and spiritual, is a degree of rationality that the people of the Old Testament could not yet attain. Those who acknowledged the Old Testament as Divine Truth were raised above the level of others who had fallen into natural forms of religion called cults and myths. For example the ancient Greeks, had a culture that transmitted remnants of truths left over from the celestial civilizations. These remnants were no longer genuine but filled with falsities. For instance, instead of one God they had multiple gods. They were locked into this myth, believing it to be true. As a result they were not able to develop their rational spirituality having met a dead end in their religious myths. But when the Old Testament was completed, people were able, if they were willing, to receive rational and scientific facts about God and the spiritual world, thereby elevating their mind from primitive superstitions to a rational description of God, who He was, what He wanted, and what methods we were to use in our regeneration. By adopting these truths, our spirituality becomes rational, that is, in accordance with true reality as revealed by God.

But this level of rational spirituality is but an intermediate step. It is not genuine rational spirituality but a lower from of it created to allow us to progress further. For instance, the rational mind rebels against mystery and obscurity. It desires to attain a scientific understanding of all things, including God and heaven. This rational is encouraged or empowered by God to begin to see inconsistencies in Sacred Scripture. For instance, on the one had we are told that God is perfection itself, omnipotent, and loving. On the other hand we are told that God is demanding, punishing, and even retaliates out of anger when people sin or break His Commandments. How can the two facts be reconciled? This creates a strain in the rational mind. Some people respond to this mental strain by beginning to doubt that Sacred Scripture is really Divine, and eventually turn themselves away from the Word, and begin to think with thoughts that deny God, heaven, and hell.

Others respond to the inconsistencies by turning the rational mind away form them, and calling them mysteries of God that the human mind can’t quite comprehend. Or else, it is said that these mysteries will be understood in the afterlife. In this way, rational spirituality declines. New doctrines are introduced that give a false interpretation of Sacred Scripture. Heresies and insanities abound, making it difficult for those in them to turn back, hence to regenerate their character. More and more people come into the afterlife with an unregenerate character. They are unwilling to receive the truths they are given and taught, and sink down into the hells of their mind from where they are stubbornly unwilling to return.

It is was necessary therefore for God to provide new revelations in order to raise the rational spirituality of the race. Spiritual evolution must progress in successive steps. When we are regenerating today, you and me, we go through the same steps that history went through because individual biography recapitulates racial history. When the Old Testament phase of evolution was completed in the human race on this earth, the New Testament phase was initiated by the Incarnation events, and subsequently by the writings that are collected as the New Testament. The Divine truths are now cast in a higher version of rationality than ever before. The Old Testament mentality of a natural God gives way to a new mentality of a spiritual God. Now for the first time the human race is capable of thinking about a heaven and a hell that is not out there on the planet, but in here in the mind. This is a discrete and fundamental leap in rationality. The human race could not have received this Divine Truth prior to the Incarnation. The Incarnation was a physical intervention in the natural world. This has never happened before. In Old Testament days God appeared as an Angel, as Burning Bush, as a Thunderous Living Voice, as a sacred place with mighty powers like the Ark, or as the invisible force of the universe. These methods of appearance, or Epiphany, were indirect and distant. Where was God in the burning bush? Where was God in the Ark or Temple? The mind could not form a rational description of God that was actual and true.

But with the Incarnation, the sensuous-rational mind had physical proof of God’s existence. He was now a historical figure, born a citizen of a country, walking about making miracles and teaching followers, then dying, resurrecting, and ascending to heaven again, where He came from. Now He was in this world; now He is in the spiritual world. This is rational proof of the dual universe. Later generations who did not see Him nevertheless are able just as well to rationally confirm His existence by acknowledging the events of the New Testament as true. This acknowledgment raises our rationality to a new high. Now we are able to think about spiritual topics in a spiritual way, not merely natural way.

For instance, heaven is not a place but a state of mind. Hell is not a prison but an environment created by the mentality of the people who are there. God is not like a natural king who punished His subjects when he gets angry. God never gets angry since He is pure love, yet the people who turn against Him become insane and now begin to see Him as the opposite of what He is. This is why God talks and appears in the Old Testament as an earthly king, not because He is that way, but because the Old Testament mentality sees Him that way. He permits this distortion of Him for the sake of establishing a basis for a higher spiritual mentality. When we receive the New Testament mentality, and acknowledge it, and desire to live by it, we ascend to a new level of enlightenment far above what was possible before.

For instance, our thoughts and loves become more rational. When we think of sin, we think of intention, not merely the overt deed. Breaking the marriage vows is called adultery in Sacred Scripture. In the higher phase of rational spirituality we can see that if we fantasize adultery, enjoy it, consider it permissible because it is only in the mind, we are committing a sin just as much as when we carry it out in deed. This is a higher level of consciousness since it elevates the significance of mental events to be equal in importance, or more important, then outward actions. This is more rational because outward actions are nothing but the automatic expression of inward thoughts and feelings or intentions. We may hide or inhibit our outward actions to avoid being punished by norms and laws, but we try to them secretly if we think we can get away with them. Thus our character remains inwardly such as it is, and we are not regenerated. Now with the New Testament mentality we can see more rationally that heaven cannot be given to us by God as a reward, or else God would, since He is pure love. But He cannot. God can bring us to heaven only if we have heaven in our mind, that is, only if our thoughts and feelings are true and good. Thoughts and feelings must be changed by our struggle to regenerate or else they remain such as they were. We can also in this new rational spirituality that the human race is united in God’s eyes and that entering heaven has nothing to do with the blood of our ancestors or with our standing in society. God is personal, in addition to being universal.

But this new rational spirituality is itself still in an intermediary stage as shown by the fact that it contains many obscurities that are turned into mysteries. For instance, how does our rational mind explain the Incarnation? If God is omnipresent, how can He now be this Divine Child, or that Adult Man who died on the Cross and was Resurrected? And how can God die? The rational mind of the civilizations of the New Testament came up with various explanations based on the natural understanding, rather than based on spiritual understanding. One of these was the idea that there were not one, but two Divine Persons. One was called the Father, the other the Son. Father God and Son God were in heaven when the Son God decided to descend and Incarnate so that He might become a Holy Sacrifice that would placate the Father God and be right again with the human race, so long as the people accept the idea that their sins are forgiven by Father God solely on account of the noble and Divine Sacrifice of the Sun God who Incarnated. And after the Sacrifice, the Son God returned to heaven to be with Father God again. This explanation fails to satisfy the rational mind.

All sorts of inconsistencies and irrationalities are detected in the story. First and foremost, how can there be two Divine Persons “each of whom is God” (according to the Christian Creed). Realizing this logical impossibility, the intellectuals of the New Testament Mentality again came up with various explanations. One is that this one of those mysteries, an answer to which we shall only know in heaven. Another idea was the that the Son God is Divine but He is not as high as the Father God whose role is Creation, while the Son God’s role is Redemption. This idea led to injurious heresies, one called the Arian heresy, which said that the Son God was the Messiah, and so a lesser god than the Father God since the Son was born human.

None of these explanations satisfy the rational mind, and once again the human race was poised to slide back in consciousness and away from Divine Truth, the only reality and science there is. The slide backwards was so intense and prolonged that 20 centuries after the Incarnation and the writing of the New Testament, our public schools teach materialistic science and are even forbidden by law to teach the true role of God in every natural phenomenon. The consequences of a backsliding consciousness were devastating and horrible. The human race on earth turned spiritually insane since the start of these irrational explanations of reality. Materialistic science and secular humanism became the mentality that captured the governance of society.

The new rules that were formed for human interactions were inhuman and beastly, so that nations turned against nations, waging war with each other and bringing much suffering. Similarly, neighbor turned against neighbor as they became competitors to each other in business, sex partners, politics, sports, traffic, and humor. Hostility became normal and accepted. Physical, mental, and economic abuse became commonplace. Entertainment and art became brutal and obscene. People stood in long lines to get to watch a movie that portrayed violence, adultery, murder, deception, indecency, pornography, blasphemy – and the more of these things were portrayed, the more people were willing to pay to see it. The majority of marriages ended in divorce after much suffering, and it became normal for children to grow up in single parent homes.

Individual lives and lifestyles reflected the spiritual insanity within Fallen materialistic humanity. The consciousness of a spiritual link to heaven died out. As a result the mechanism was turned off by which goods can be received from God through influx into the spiritual mind. Prior to materialism, the human mind operated with a consciousness of heaven so that influx into the spiritual mind may be effective and could descend into the natural mind where the individual experienced enlightenment. With this enlightenment in the understanding, God’s influx of good could enter the will. The Divine good is within truth just as heat is within sunlight. By retaining a consciousness of Divine Truth in our understanding, we are able to receive Divine good in the will. This good is what we need to live the heavenly life. This good is the good of character and is given in endless variety – the capacity to love, the desire to conjoin, the motivation to persevere, the love of truth, the attraction to innocence and purity, the capacity to learn, the strengths and virtues of character – these are the goods we receive from God that make us genuine human beings in the image of the Divine Human Person.

Without consciousness of God, or dualism, this venue of reception for goods is interrupted. If we are not open to receiving these heavenly goods, there is only one other alternative available – the reception of evils. There is no in between, only this absolute duality from creation. No other possibility exists. Every single thing on this earth and in the spiritual world is either from heaven or form hell. No other possibility has been created. Therefore every single thought or emotion we have is either form heaven or from hell. Either heaven or hell is the source of every particle and content of the mind. Friend, if you learn to keep in mind this one universal absolute fact, you will be saved for eternity in heaven, and in the meantime, you will live a joyous life here on earth.

The reception of evil in our character is obvious. We are mixed bags of a fallen humanity. We live a daily life of mental pollution. Inwardly we rage against everyone. To our loved ones, we are abusive with various intensities, some brutal and cruel. Our marriages end in divorce. We quarrel with one another. We overeat, under-exercise. We make many mistakes. We are forgetful. We are disobedient and selfish, harmful and arrogant. At the same time can show loyalty, patriotism, friendship, productivity, inventiveness, industriousness, and many more. We are thus mixed minds with a split-brain without the power to purify ourselves. What happens to mixed minds with split-brains? Some people theorize that the good they have done and possess in their character will outweigh the bad, and a just and merciful God will not keep them from heaven.

This is a balance theory of Divine equity in judgment. But it is a fantasy. The truth, as revealed by God in True Science, is that evil and good cannot mix for evil destroys good by corrupting it and changing into evil. Evil is nothing else than good changed in that way. The mixed character theory cannot save you for the evil you actually love will destroy the good you think you love. You will then realize that the good you thought you loved, you actually hate. It was just a kind of a put on. God allows this mixed mind operation for the sake of the individual’s reformation and regeneration, for without allowing mixed minds on earth, no one could be regenerated and saved for heaven. A way had to be provided for regenerating the mixed mind of the split-brain race on earth.

God had to intervene again, for the third time, and now at last He was able to give the final revelations of the Threefold Word. This had been God’s plan since the beginning – to give three collections of revelations – the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Writings -- to allow the new split-brain humans to be regenerated and to be made whole again, and single brained, like the celestial people. This is the meaning of the expression the “Threefold Word.” The re-elevation of the human race to celestial status was planned in three steps of rational spirituality, in accordance with the discrete laws of correspondences revealed in the Writings. The first phase was the collection of scientific revelations called the “Old Testament” given in Hebrew, which raised the human mind from pre-scientific thinking -- idol worship, superstition, and barbarism -- to the first step of a scientific civilization, a first step in rational spirituality. It established the rational idea that the universe is operated by a rational Divine intelligence called Jehovah the Creator who is Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent. The idea of one God in relation to the universe raises the mind’s consciousness from materialistic and sensuous darkness to rational consciousness. When people think and feel from a perspective of monotheism, they are operating rationally. This is obvious since all rationality comes from Divine Truth in our understanding. God is the source of all rationality and operates everything of the universe by means of rational rules of operation. Knowing anything about God is therefore operating at a rational level. Denying God is evidently thinking insanely and irrationally since in actuality God is the source of all.

The rational idea of God revealed through the Old Testament, eliminated the insane and illogical theories that captivated the minds and lives of most people at the time the Old Testament was given to the human race. This chief rational idea of one God, became the source of other rational ideas, like the idea of omniscience. Prior to this, people were captivated by the idea that they could hide from God, or that they could play one god against another, or that God was limited in power due to other godly-forces of Destiny. Another idea was that since we are limited humans, we are always going to be mixed good and bad, but that what matters is the balance – are we more good than bad. Under this irrational idea many justifications have been found for not having to regenerate the character. We can excuse some of the bad with the good, so that we can keep that bad with us, maybe take it to heaven. Or even that the bad can be regularly washed away by purification rituals. The result of all these explanations was to create a culture with arrested spirituality. A second Divine intervention became necessary. It was time to give humanity the second portion of the Threefold Word.

The New Testament got rational spirituality going again by eliminating these irrational justifications of evil in the self, and placing a brand new focus on the intentions, not the deeds. It was a higher more logical science. An analogy is represented by the science of linguistics when considered over the span of my professional career. Prior to the 1960s, linguistics was in the external behavioral phase, not unlike ritual religion and superstition. Sentences were analyzed by breaking them up into functional categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. In this first phase of linguistic science, there was no consciousness of what caused a sentence to be what it is. Linguists could only organize sentences in terms of their surface visible structures like adjectives, nouns, verbs. Then a paradigm shift took place, largely by means of the ideas of Noam Chomsky at MIT who proposed that sentences are produced by inward rational operations and that we need to investigate what they are. “Intentions of the speaker” became a new scientific concept that led to great new strides in linguistics. It also had a decisive influence on the course of psychology.

The New Testament presented a new more advanced paradigm of science. It established scientific dualism, which is the rational idea that God has created a dual universe, one natural or physical, the other spiritual or mental. Furthermore, there is a cause-effect relation between them, so that the spiritual moves the natural, not the other way around. In other words, the mind moves the physical body, not the other way around. Therefore when we commit an evil act that is injurious to others, it is the evil intention that is the cause of it. Similarly, when we commit a good act of use to others, it is the good will or good intention that is the cause of it. Finally, when we commit a good act of use to others, it may not have a sincere motive, but a hypocritical one, and in that case the good act does not count as good, but counts as evil. Similarly when we commit an evil act, but then repent of it, the intention is changed and the evil is shunned and avoided. The person is then no longer guilty of the former evil.

This type of reasoning elevated the scientific consciousness of the civilizations that were influenced by the New Testament. For example, people started thinking about the causes of the visible things they see around them. In this way a cause-effect science in general came to be established, razing civilization to a new rationality.

This rational approach could have worked in terms of furthering spiritual development of the race had it not been for the many heresies and mystical doctrines that obliterated the rational gains in the New Testament. Therefore the Christian world was warned to expect a Second Coming of the Lord. This was in everyone’s consciousness for many centuries. All sorts of new heresies were invented as to how this is going to take place. Absolutely no knowledge of it was available, only speculation. The Lord prevented any such knowledge from becoming known. The human race could not receive this last portion of the Divine Revelation without being harmed by it. When we are exposed to a Divine truth prior to our ability to comprehend it, we turn the truth into its opposite, thus harming ourselves. The Lord carefully hid this new knowledge of the Second Coming until the 18the century when Emanuel Swedenborg began publishing the Writings. These were completed when the last of about 30 volumes was published by Swedenborg in 1772. In these volumes the full blown answer is given about what is the Second Coming and how is it going to take place.

A redemption has also been accomplished by the Lord at this day, because at this day is His Second Coming according to prophecy; by which, having been an eye-witness thereof I have been made certain of the truth of the foregoing arcana. (Coronis 21)

To-day the Second Coming of the Lord is taking place, and a new church is to be established (TCR 115)

At last the Lord has revealed Himself in His Divine Rational as a True Scientist. We now have the answers to all the puzzles of mystery and heresy that plagued all the prior civilizations since the celestial beginning of the race on earth. Now it is permitted to go into these mysteries of ages in a rational way, so that the rational mind can be fully and perfectly satisfied that there is nothing that can puzzle us that has not been revealed. It is this method that the Lord has chosen to conjoin Himself to the human race, and to permit the human race to reciprocate by clinging to Him with our rational mind. The Second Coming marks the new evolutionary era of celestial consciousness by means of the rational spirituality of True Science.

This book is about the journey every individual is embarked on, the journey to heaven or hell. It is about how to avoid hell and end up in heaven by developing our rational consciousness of Divine Truth.

Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from other worlds. (Swedenborg, EU 1)

0.2 But is this Scientific?

Yes, because it meets all the standards of science, which is that a scientific explanation must be rational, must fit in with what’s already known, and must be verifiable by empirical observation and capable of being disconfirmed by data gathered by others. Any explanation that meets these criteria is a scientific explanation.

The explanations in the Writings are rational. I have gone through the nearly 30 volumes and have been impressed and delighted at its extraordinary rationality and consistency. There is a substantial literature on Swedenborg, as you can expect, and it is generally recognized that he was an unusual genius with vast knowledge of the sciences and the classics. The Writings have been admired for their strict rationality, sometimes criticized for it by those who would prefer seeing the expression of more fuzzy passion. The Writings are a model of rationality for science, theology, and philosophy.

The explanations in the Writings fit in with everything that’s been known and understood in Western Christian literature, science, and history. The Writings are a continuation of the Old and New Testaments, and complete the collection of Divine revelations called the Threefold Word. The Writings analyze the major theories of theology, philosophy, and science from Aristotle to Newton. Topics include the structure of physics, the evolution of biology, human development, mental influences, navigation and geography of the spiritual world, psychological experiments in the spiritual world, interviews of witnesses now in the spiritual world who recalled their life on earth with accurate detail, observation and description of the resuscitation process which takes place 36 hours after death, exploration of societies on other planets, medical details relating the action of correspondences on the activity of organs in the body, and much more.

CONCERNING THE RESUSCITATION OF MAN FROM THE DEAD, AND HIS ENTRANCE INTO ETERNAL LIFE

Being permitted to describe in connected order how man passes from the life of the body into the life of eternity, in order that the way in which he is resuscitated might be known, this has been shown me, not by hearing, but by actual experience. (AC 168)

I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the bodily senses, thus almost into the state of dying persons, retaining however my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking, and with sufficient breathing for life, and finally with a tacit breathing, that I might perceive and remember what happens to those who have died and are being resuscitated. (AC 169)