Let’s talk about one of the biggest questions out there. What is the real origin of evil? Where does it come from? It’s something we’ve all wondered about, right? Well, today we’re diving into a pretty radical answer that comes from the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity and fair warning, it’s going to take us on a journey right into the heart of the self, into our self concept. And that may mean putting us a little bit in front of our our own darkness. But it’s an important topic because once we better understand the origin and nature of evil, as it relates to us, we can then begin to be set free from its influence in our life. For if we don’t see what we’re imprisoned by, we can’t move out from it.

So, from the perspective of the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity, this centres on understanding two key concepts – proprium and influx.

In Arcana Coelestia 7181 we read,

Nothing is more important to a person than to know whether he has heaven within him or hell, for he is going to live forever in one or the other. And to know this it is necessary for him to know what good is and what evil is, for good constitutes heaven and evil constitutes hell. Teachings about charity show what both are.

And then from Arcana Coelestia 7178,

Consequently no one can examine himself unless he knows what good from its two loves is, and what truth from good is; and unless he knows what evil from its two loves is, and what falsity from evil is.

Now, just to highlight the main point here, there is nothing more important that to know what good and what evil are because in being able to recognise this we are then able to see the presence of heaven and hell within our own minds.

So clearly, the terms heaven and hell don’t refer to physical places but to states of mind*. States arising from how our minds with their patterns of thoughts and affections, and beliefs and attitudes are organised to form our sense of self. Heaven or hell within us depends upon what sits at the centre of our sense of self; whether our mind is oriented toward love for the Lord and neighbour, or alternatively toward a belief in a self, grounded in the loves of self and the world. And so how we live with our sense of self determines how things are organised at the level of our experience. (*Note, we’re talking about what constitutes the natural or the natural level of the mind, that’s where our work is because that is where we are so far as our awareness is concerned).

The practise of the Word guides us by building our understanding of what good and evil truly are, including their origins and effects on our lives. Without this foundational knowledge, we will not feel a need to examine what we take for our self. And just to point out, when we speak of our lives or life, we are not referring our outer actions but to the quality of our inner world – that is where our real life is. That is the world that we live in and it is largely hidden from outer observation. The Lord in the Gospels speaks to this in Luke 12:2-3,

And there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, neither secret that shall not be known. Therefore whatever things you have said in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which you have spoken in the ear in bedrooms shall be preached on the housetops.

And also in Matthew 12:36,

I tell you, every idle word people have spoken, they will give an account of it on the day of judgment.

The first of charity, according to the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity, is to shun evils as sins against the Lord. So the first and primary aspect of charity is an inner work and out of that follows the outer aspects of life, but without a clear understanding of what we are looking to shun, this is impossible. Shunning evils as sins is the core aspect of what constitutes a genuine spiritual life and the shunning of evils as sins is the only practice with eternal significance according to what the Word teaches us.

So it’s important to understand that no amount of external good deeds—or even a perfect moral or upright life—can substitute for the inner work of examining the self with a view to renouncing evils as sins against the Lord. In Logopraxis, this inner work of self-examination involves not only evaluating our actions and intentions, thoughts and feelings, but also deeply questioning the very concept of the nature of what we take for our self. Through making an examination of the self we are put in front of the reality that truths teach; that what we take to be our sense of self, or refer to as “I“, is not as substantial as we might believe; that our self as something substantial is, in fact, an appearance or illusion – and probably more to the point, a delusion. This fact is something that we are put in front of continually so far as the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity are concerned as almost every page deals with either who the Lord is or what the self is. And we are constantly being asked to pay attention to these two things because we constantly seek to avoid having to confront the nature of the self.

So where does evil really come from?

This is a question that human beings have been asking forever. Is it some kind of external force that just gets into us? Or is it a bug, a fundamental flaw in our programming? Or, and this is the big one, could it be something we’ve just totally, completely misunderstood about who we are? Spiritual Christianity provides us with the most coherent explanation there is to understanding the nature and origin of evil. Knowing the difference between good and evil, truth and falsity is critical because it shapes our connection to others, to the Lord and to eternal life; so this isn’t just an intellectual knowledge; it’s highly practical so far as our eternal life is concerned.

Now when you hear the word evil, your mind probably jumps to the big stuff, right? Huge monstrous figures from history and acts of atrocity that are almost impossible to get your head around, and that makes total sense. But the material we’re digging into today says, hold on,  that’s not the whole picture! This isn’t about large-scale historical atrocities, but something far more subtle and personal. It’s about the potential for evil residing within each of us: in everyday experiential terms it’s that constant internal pull towards self-centredness. It’s about the stuff we don’t see – or don’t want to see.

The word evil is, of course, emotionally charged and it’s not a word we like to attribute to what we call our self despite the fact that it appears as a major running theme throughout the Word. We tend to want to avoid the issue where our own lives are concerned, largely because it’s uncomfortable and cuts to the core of our self image, of who we like to see ourselves as.  So, rather than examine our self, we deflect. We project onto others what we think constitutes evil, the bigger the better because then we can look at our own lives and comfort ourselves in the knowledge that we wouldn’t do that!! That we aren’t capable of that; whatever that is?

Another strategy of avoidance and denial is to frame evils purely in moral and civil terms – in outward behaviours that others are involved in that blur the lines of what society expects or that don’t align with whatever moral code we might subscribe to. But moral and civil evils, while they may be symptomatic of spiritual evil, are not in themselves spiritual evils. And it is spiritual evil that we are concerned with today. Spiritual evil is less about external behaviour and more about how our minds are organised. It’s a condition every human being is subject to because it is inherent in the very structure of our sense of self when it is organised around the loves of self and the world. Believing in our self as an autonomous, independent being is the central fallacy from which all evil flows. And the shocking thing is that prior to examining our self to discover its true nature, which is what a spiritual life entails, hidden evil forms the very basis for the natural level of human identity.

So the real issue is not that evil forms our external sense of self, this is unavoidable, but that we are blind to it and call it good. And this goes back to the instruction in the garden of Eden and what’s written there about the serpent who ends up calling evil good and good evil. And it’s called the most subtle of the beast of the field for a reason. And the reason is that the kind of spiritual evil that we’re talking about is not always that obvious. It’s subtle and it remains as a hidden stream of consciousness, organising things in a way whereby it can protect itself. And while it remains hidden or what we take for our self goes unexamined, there is little the Lord can do. So Divine revelation is provided so that we can better understand our situation and look to the Lord to be set free…

 And if any man hear my words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world. (John 12:47)

Let’s unpack what all of this might mean…

The Illusion Of A Self

As we said at the start, here are two key ideas that are integral to this framework which are proprium and influx.

Proprium– The feeling that ‘I am me‘

 So first up, there’s this word proprium. It sounds a little academic, it’s a strange word for most people, but it’s actually super simple. It’s a term that refers to our sense of me, the “I” that we think we are. It’s the identity that we’ve built up over the course of our life and have fallen in love with, and it will protect itself against anything that seeks to expose it. Prior to entering into a life of self examination and repentance, our whole sense of self has been built up out of the love of this self and a love for the world that it lives in. This sense of self is actually opposed to heaven and constitutes hell in us. It incorporates a whole narrative that we constantly tell ourself about who we are. It projects itself into the world and onto others looking to affirm itself as something substantive and the very fact it has to do this says something about it – that it’s probably not substantive at all. It’s that core feeling that says, I am my own person, separate and independent. And particularly, we in the West have a very strong sense of individualism. And so this teaching goes against a lot of what we find very comfortable so far as our cultural understanding of things is concerned.

Now there’s a few things we need to get clear around this term proprium. For the most part we experience our sense of self as something fixed and rigid, but this is an appearance. Creation is a constant coming into being, we are being remade moment to moment and this is an important point for what we take to be our self has no substantive reality in itself. It’s purely an appearance and it’s maintained first and foremost by the Lord. But when in a disordered state, the proprium expends huge amounts of energy to appropriate to itself what it needs to maintain the illusion that it is something substantial. So as far as our natural thinking and feeling is concerned, we really believe it to be substantial despite all the teaching we find to the contrary in the Word.

So it’s a critical point, so far as the spiritual life is concerned, that we come to see that what we experience as our sense of self isn’t something fixed. And because it isn’t something fixed it means that change is possible. If it was fixed, change would not be possible and we would have no hope. So our sense of self is something being brought into being moment to moment which means that every moment opens up a possibility to move toward a more genuine, expansive self. And this is reflected in what’s called the heavenly proprium, that sense of self that the Lord seeks to give us.

So the proprium that believes in itself as something fixed, separate and independent and holds that its life is self-generated is what is called the infernal or hellish proprium. And as we shall see it is this that forms the hell from which we all need saving, if we are willing to take hold of what the Lord offers as the way of escape.

What is the proprium? The human proprium consists of everything evil and false that gushes out of self-love and love of the world. It involves people believing not in the Lord or in the Word but in themselves, and their imagining that what they do not grasp through sensory evidence or through facts does not exist at all. They become as a consequence nothing but evil and falsity and so have a warped view of everything. Things that are evil they see as good, and those that are good as evil; things that are false they see as true, and those that are true as false. Realities they imagine to be nothing, and things that are nothing they imagine to be everything. They call hatred love, thick darkness light, death life, and vice versa. In the Word such people are called ‘the lame and the blind’. This then is the human proprium which in itself is hellish and condemned. (Arcana Coelestia 210)

Influx – All life flows in

The second concept that flips everything on its head is that of influx, and the concept is this – that we are not the generators of our own thoughts and feelings, or the author of our life. So every thought that we have, every feeling we feel, every spark of creativity… none of it starts with us. All of our thinking, our intentions and willing, it all flows into us from a source outside of our self. And this flies in the face of the dominant mode of thinking that our culture emphasises, the idea that we are autonomous and self made – the preciousness of identity and the drive towards the improvement of self. Everything in our culture emphasises the importance of me or my self, independent agency. But it simply just reinforces the spiritual problem where my self is placed above all else.

So all of the ideas of our culture around the self that feel so right for us because we’ve been raised in it – they push us in the wrong direction, away from the Lord as the source of our life. We are not the power plants; we are simply receivers or vessels for a life that streams from one single Divine source. Mediated yes, but always, life is sourced in the Lord. But everything we are told by the world closes us off to that reality and puts our self in the place of the Lord.

However, we can’t know this unless we have another source of knowledge and that’s why Divine revelation in the form of sacred text is so so important. Without it we remain imprisoned in the idea that we are Divine or have life in our self, which is the definition of what it means to be Divine or Infinite for to receive life from another is what it means to be finite. Not that we would express things in those terms outwardly but inwardly it is the core belief out of which the love of our self operates. For when our love for self dominates it underpins and molds our life into a hellish form. It is this belief in one’s self that turns all things to evil. A state that sees itself as the source of its life can only produce what is evil and false because it is a claim that it is God, even it it looks and feels like what is good and true. Such a self is incapable of anything good and true because it has appropriated what is the Lord to itself and claimed it as its own.

No man, spirit, or angel possesses any life that originates within himself. That being so, there is nothing he thinks or wills that can originate in himself; for a person’s life consists in his thinking and willing, and his words and actions are the life that springs from them. There is only one life, the Lord’s. It flows into everyone but is received in varying ways, its reception being determined by the character a person has given his soul through the life he leads…While a person lives in the world he is providing an outward form for the most pure substances that constitute his interiors, so that one may speak of him bringing form to his own soul, that is, fashioning its character. This form determines how the Lord’s life, flowing from His love towards the entire human race, is received. (Arcana Coelestia 5847)

This is a remarkable passage holding a pretty profound idea so far as our purpose for being here in the world. There is only one life, the Lord’s, and the task for human beings in this world is to bring form to their own souls. It is to bring what is higher into what is lower, so that the higher can be held within the lower. The means by which that can be done is through acquiring vessels in the form of truths, principles and concepts from the Word and living from them.

At this point, we might be asking ourselves, if evil is so pervasive then how is any change possible? Well the concept of influx helps here. Yes, it’s true that the belief in one’s self draws in hellish influences but we can, if we choose to, open our minds up to higher, angelic influences as well. But we first have to know that this is possible and it’s the Word that provides us with that knowing. It does it in a gentle, freedom-loving and respectful way honouring human rationality as opposed to hellish influences which flow in that have no concept of honouring the freedom and rationality of another. So it’s when we respond to true ideas that this heavenly influence becomes amplified making it possible to move away from our natural mode of being toward something more aligned with who we are meant to be.

The Lord arranges things so that this possibility is always open to us. But this new mode of being requires that we respond to what the Word asks of us so that we can fashion a kind of soul in the natural mind which is receptive of heavenly life and influence. So, we can perhaps begin to see now that the issue isn’t in having a sense of self – for without this our regeneration wouldn’t be possible but rather it’s in believing that this sense of self is something it is not. We are here in the world to give form to our soul, that’s what we are responsible for, and it has eternal consequences.

This formation is tied up with our everyday responses to life: what we identify with, how we react to things, what we choose to embrace – it all makes a difference. Our responsibility isn’t so much concerned with what’s flowing in, we can’t do anything about that, but it’s all about how we respond to what’s appearing in our mental landscape. That is where we can work. We can assess what we see: Do we cherish the impulse? Act on it? Entertain it? Where are our thoughts taking us? etc. Truths from the Word provide the power to choose life over death, to reject those things that aren’t life affirming. So spiritual life isn’t about stopping the input – its about shaping the mechanism of reception and we do that through engaging with the Word.

This is the central conflict that reflects a disconnect between how things feel and what the Word says is real. The feeling is powerful. The life I experience feels as if it arises from me as its source. These are my thoughts and feelings. It feels completely real, but the reality according to Divine revelation, is the total opposite – life inflows and gives rise to thoughts and affections that are experienced as self generated. We are just vessels; receivers of life.

So the origin of evil is mistaking the feeling of selfhood for the ultimate reality.

There it is! The main event, according to this way of thinking, the origin of all evil, is simply this mistaking the feeling for the reality. That’s it. It’s not some monster from the outside, it’s an inside job. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding that we all get caught in. This misattribution of the feeling of life arising in my self to be the reality, is to believe the appearances of the senses over what the Word says is true. This struggle to believe the Word over what our senses communicate to us as real is captured in the imagery of the serpent in the garden of Eden. Spiritually, this isn’t an event in time but a symbolic representation of the choice that faces us all at every moment. Will I trust in the Lord (the Word)? Or in myself (the voice of the serpent)? Do I love the Lord? Or do I love the feeling of being an autonomous, independent being who is able assess for itself what is good and true? This is really what that story is all about – it’s the story of our life – as it plays out in every moment of our existence.

Three States of Development – A Developmental Journey

 Okay, so if that’s the problem, what’s the solution? How do we get past that misunderstanding? Well, the material we’re looking at lays it out as a kind of developmental journey. It’s a path with three distinct stages of self-awareness that we can move through and they are captured in the following quote from Arcana Coelestia 141,

With the bodily-minded and worldly man, the proprium is his all. He is unaware of anything else but the proprium. And, as has been stated, if he were to lose his proprium he would think that he was dying.

With the spiritual man, the proprium takes on a similar appearance, for although he knows that the Lord is the life of all, and that He confers wisdom and intelligence, and consequently the ability to think and to act, it is more a matter of something he says and not so much something he believes.

The celestial man however acknowledges that the Lord is the life of all, who confers the ability to think and act, because he perceives that this is so. Nor does he ever desire the proprium. Nevertheless even though he does not desire it the Lord grants him a proprium which is joined to him with a complete perception of what is good and true, and with complete happiness. Angels possess a proprium such as this, and at the same time utmost peace and tranquillity, for their proprium has within it things that are the Lord’s, who is governing their proprium, that is, governing them by means of their proprium.

This proprium is utterly heavenly,

whereas the proprium of the bodily-minded man is hellish.

There are three forms of proprium mentioned here. The first, being that of the bodily-minded and worldly, or natural man or mind is in GREEN. The second highlighted in BLUE is that of what is called the spiritual man or mind and the third highlighted in RED is that of the celestial man or mind.

So it’s important to understand that there simply isn’t an “I” that is created to possesses life or consciousness in itself. The Lord alone is Life and so Has life in Himself. Rather, there is an inflow of life that gives rise to the experience of “I.” We tend to think that there is a self that is doing, a self at the centre that does, but the “I” or proprium is not primary – it is secondary, a byproduct of the influx of life. For instance, the statement that I have life is actually a fallacy. It’s simply not true, and any mind structured around this belief is organised in a way that aligns it more with a hellish form than it does a heavenly one. There is no “I” that is conscious, but rather consciousness gives rise to a sense of “I” or an “I-sense” – a sense of self. This appearance of an independent self is what makes us other than the Divine and provides us with the basis for loving the Lord and our neighbour freely, which is where a true sense of life is able to be experienced.

Phases of Growth

• The natural self
• The spiritual self
• The celestial self

This quote from Arcana Coelestia 141 is not just about fixed states of being, it also illustrates a process. And there are many other such passages in the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity that show this but the key element here is not to think of these as permanent boxes that we get stuck in. Think of it more like a map. It’s a map showing a potential journey from being totally trapped in that little ‘I’ to finding this incredible, profound connection to the source of Life Itself. This is what the spiritual journey is about; passing through these phases so that we can be set free from the belief in our self and grounded instead in a belief in the Lord as the only self.

The Development of the Sense of Self

• Natural Sense of Self: Believes life is its own. Losing this ‘self’ feels like dying.
• Spiritual Sense of Self: Intellectually knows life is received but is still feels and acts believing it is its own.
• Celestial Sense of Self: Perceives life is received and doesn’t desire a separate sense of self yet is gifted this by the Lord.

The natural sense of self is where we all start. It believes life is its own and it also believes that to lose the sense of self is death; it is just so grounded in its belief in itself that anything that seeks to undermine that is regarded as a threat. So any teaching that this natural sense of self is confronted with which suggests that the self is an appearance, is going to be resisted. There might be an intellectual compliance and acknowledgement but intrinsically, deep down, all ideas of the kind that we are exploring here will be unconsciously, if not consciously, resisted. For when we come across such passages as this, and we read them and pay attention to our responses, our emotional responses, we can often see this. So for this natural self, the very idea that a spiritual life involves inner examination is incomprehensible. For this self, spiritual life is purely defined in natural terms: external behaviours like going to church, listening to sermons, spiritual rituals, social activism, good works, they all fall into the realm of external activity. What is not seen is that all this reinforces the self as something substantial. This isn’t to say that these things shouldn’t be done – but they are no substitute for inner work. For it is only when the inner is being attended to that the outer becomes a extension of true work.

Then we move to the spiritual sense of self, and this is a really interesting place to be. And it is what the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity mostly speak to. This state of mind is similar to the natural sense of self in a lot of ways; there is an intellectual acknowledgement that all life flows in from the Lord but there is still the feeling that I am my own self and so what sits active underneath everything is the idea that life is mine. So there’s a perpetual sense of tension existing in the spiritual sense of self. And this state only comes into being for those who are actively engaged with truths with a view to examining their inner life. So this is where genuine spiritual temptations begin to arise as the old self concept is being laid down so that the new can be established.

And finally, there’s the celestial sense of self. This is a state of mind where one doesn’t just know but it is perceived, felt within the bones – that life flows in. Consequently, there is a full acknowledgment that the Lord is the only life, and that He alone has proprium and so there is no longer any ownership of or need to possess or defend a sense of self. This state of mind lives from the Lord as its life and this is what constitutes its sense of being. And so the celestial sense of self is often described as a state of rest and tranquillity because when the need to preserve one’s self is given up, there is nothing to defend or fight for.

Salvation Involves Being Saved From Your Self – The Great Reversal

So this movement from a natural self concept through a spiritual self concept to a celestial self concept constitutes a total reversal in how the self is regarded. The difference in how the sense of self is conceptualised comes down to the quality of the loves that give rise to it. The natural sense of self is a product of the loves of self and the world, these loves serving as the ground it draws its life from whereas, the spiritual sense of self is grounded in love towards the neighbour or charity as the ground for its life. It is primarily in a love for what is true. The celestial sense of self arises out of love of the Lord and so has for its ground the good of love. Each self concept depicts a different quality of relationship to the Word itself.

We also need to again highlight here that these are changes and developments within the Natural. We’re not talking about the Celestial or the Spiritual heavens of the Most Ancient and Ancient Churches, we’re talking about the building up of the Natural mind to reflect that reality. So, there is a natural, spiritual and celestial level within the Natural that has to be developed over the course of our regeneration and that’s what this transition through these different senses of self refers to.

 And this whole journey, this whole path, leads to what might be the most challenging and powerful idea of them all – that salvation is not about saving the self that we habitually live from, we are instead being saved from this self. So its a total 180, a complete reversal, of how we normally think about things like salvation or even just self-improvement.  

Think about this statement for a second:

We try to be a better person, feel good, fail, then fall into self-loathing. The ‘I’ is always at the centre.

Does this sound familiar to you?

The Merit-Guilt Cycle

When we begin our spiritual and religious life and this developmental process we’ve just looked at, this describes a common experience. In Logopraxis, this is what we term the merit guilt cycle. It’s the treadmill I think we all end up on as we define spiritual life in terms of making ourselves better. We try so hard to be a better person. And the question is, what is that self that we’re trying to make better? We do good. We feel proud. That’s the merit part. But then we mess up and we’re crushed by guilt and self-loathing. So we have this vicious cycle that moves between self-righteousness and self-loathing.

When the sense of self is regarded as something real it drives a constant cycle of feeling good – then feeling guilty – then feeling good again. This is the trap of self-improvement masquerading as spiritual life. And so it comes back to the question, What is the self that we’re trying to improve? The whole problem is that I, that sense of self, that proprium is always the star of the show, trying to be the hero who fixes itself. Whereas the Lord Himself teaches us that it can’t save itself, nor does the Lord seek to save it, it has to die.

This statement from the Gospel of Luke captures this,

Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. (Luke 9:24)

This points directly at this great reversal. It’s basically saying that the more desperately we try to save that little self, that natural sense of self, that identity we’ve built up – the more we lose our connection what is actually real life. Spiritual Christianity lays if out pretty plainly for us.

Views Of Salvation

The default natural view is that we’re looking to have our identity saved, of who we take our self to be. And so the goal is to try and fix it or improve it or make it better. But the spiritual view flips this and it says that the goal is not to save our identity but to be saved from it; we’re not trying to polish the cage we’re in, we’re trying to be set free from the cage itself.

Finding Our True Life

So the traditional view is that the Lord comes into the world to save ‘me‘ and everything hinges on what we understand by that ‘me‘. We want that ‘me‘ to go to heaven but in fact the Lord comes into the world to save us from that, because that ‘me‘ is hell. And that is what the spiritual life is about and why the Word is so important, for it points out the very things that we cannot see for ourselves because we are so immersed in what is opposed to what the Lord is seeking to do.

 So what does being saved from “our self” look like, how is it achieved?

To grasp this we need to be introduced to a self concept that is, so far as I’m aware, unique to Spiritual Christianity.

The As-Of Self

This self concept is the secret key that unlocks the whole thing. It’s this beautiful idea called the as of self. The idea is that we are given this feeling of being independent for a very, very good reason. It’s a gift. It gives us a sense of agency, of free will, so we can choose to love, to connect, to give back. We get to act as if our life is our own, while always remembering in our hearts that it’s an appearance, but when ordered it is a beautiful appearance created for the sake of love and relationship.

The… contents of the proprium which have been given life by the Lord look beautiful and attractive, varying according to the life to which a celestial quality that is the Lord’s can be added. (Arcana Coelestia 154)

So it is not in having a sense of self that is the problem, it’s what we do with it and how we interpret it that becomes the issue. The sense of self is absolutely critical to give us a sense of otherness. It also means that it gives us a sense of freedom by which we can use our rationality to move toward loving the Lord and the neighbour.

One of the interesting things about this is that if you look at Eastern religions, they don’t have the concept of an as of self. They instead carry the idea that we all are just part of the Divine being and that the ultimate goal is becoming merged with it. In the West, where this idea is not available, we become little God’s unto ourselves and we relish the idea that we are individual, autonomous beings separate from all else, ruling over the domain of our own sphere of influence. So this beautiful truth that the Lord has brought through the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity in this concept of an as of self, balances all of that out. It offers us a middle path in the way that maintains an experience of agency but also establishes a sense of connection to the Lord and to others.

The False Self Versus the True Sense of Self

We can think of the belief in our self as the source of our life and the belief in the Word that I am not the source of my life like two doors or two completely different ways to live. On the one side, we have the false sense of self and on the other we have the true sense of self. The false sense of self claims I AM the Source and so is in the constant need to find ways of confirming the falsehood as something true. It’s driven to using others to gain affirmation, manipulating situations and trying to control outcomes; essentially it lives in constant fear and anxiety of being exposed for fallacy that it is. It can’t but produce what is evil and false because its not aligned with reality. The fruit of this is defensiveness and isolation. This is the hell the Lord seeks to save us from. Contrast this with that sense of self, the as of self, that aligns itself with reality. When the false self concept is let go of and it is seen that the Lord is the only life, that “I am not the source” then ones experience of life is transformed into a heavenly life of freedom, peace and connection.

All these truths might sound very simple but they make huge difference in terms of our quality of life when remembered.

 So I’m just going to leave you with this final thought to chew on, to digest. And its a question we can particularly ask in any given moment of internal unrest. After all the work, all the striving, all of the self-improvement…

What if that very self that we seek to have saved, is what the Lord is seeking to save us from?

Hope.

Hope, from the perspective of Spiritual Christianity, is not the same kind of hope that is spoken of in day-to-day life. It is not the hope that we have grown accustomed to.

For the hope that we mostly have knowledge of brings with it the promise, or at least the suggestion, of something better – of something better than this. An improvement on our current circumstances. A change in how we are feeling. A turnaround in our situation.

And whilst this may look the same as hope from a Spiritual Christianity point of view, the places that each type of hope leads us to are quite different.

The Bible sows the idea of hope throughout its text but here is the passage we will be working with today.

“Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah — not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband to them, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34 & Hebrews 8:8-12)

It sounds wonderful doesn’t it. A promise of redemption, of clarity and of belonging. Of a time where there is no conflict, just security and peace.  And most of all – of a deep union with the Lord, with Love.

Now we will get to the differences in where a natural hope and spiritual hope lead us to, but firstly let’s look at what they have in common. For a state of hope arises out of a state of its opposite – of a lack of hope.  And this can include feelings of despair, despondency, helplessness, anxiety, of there being no possibility of change, of an inability to have any effect, and of being completely and utterly alone and uncared for. And at the root of all these feelings is the idea that we have lost something that we feel we should have. Or once did have. So hope is always preceded by grief.

And here is where natural hope starts to become distinct from spiritual hope because if we look to apply the principles that the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity teach then we start to form a very different relationship to our grief and what it is we are grieving the loss of. Hence the hope that arises in the equilibrium as its opposite is also different.

Let’s look at the passage from Scripture again but this time with a more literal translation from Jonathan Mitchell’s New Testament.

For continuously blaming (finding fault and being dissatisfied with) them, He is saying, “‘Consider! Days are progressively coming,’ says the Lord [=Yahweh], ‘and I shall progressively bring an end together (a conclusion of its destiny; or: a joint-goal) upon the house of Israel and upon the house of Judah with a new arrangement (covenant; disposition),  “‘not down from nor in accord with the arrangement (covenant) which I made with their fathers, in a day of My taking hold upon their hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt, because they did not remain (abide; dwell) in My arrangement (covenant) and, for my part, I cared not for (was unconcerned about; neglected) them,’ says the Lord [= Yahweh].  “‘Because this is the arrangement (covenant; disposition) which I shall continue arranging for the house of Israel, after those days,’ says the Lord: ‘progressively giving My Laws into their thought (into that which goes through their mind; into their perception and comprehension), and I shall progressively imprint them (write or inscribe marks) upon their hearts, and I shall continue being in and among them ([in relation] to them; for them), into [the position of] a God, and they shall continue being (exist being) in Me ([in relation] to Me; for Me), into [the position of] a people.  “‘And they may by no means teach each one his fellow-citizen, and each one his brother, saying, “Know the Lord (or: You must be intimate with [Yahweh]),“ because everyone (all) shall progressively perceive and thus understand and be acquainted with Me, from a little one even to a large one of them,  “‘because I shall continue being (existing) merciful with a cleansing covering for their injustices (behaviours contrary to the Way pointed out; inequities) and acts of lawlessness, and then I would by no means be reminded further of their mistakes and failures (errors and falling short of the target; sins).‘”

Now one of the key principles of Spiritual Christianity is that all life flows in. The implications of this being that anything which identifies with what is flowing in as its own life is in contradiction to this principle and is therefore an activity that is in opposition to the Divine Law, and hence in opposition to the Divine, to the Lord. So it is in opposition to what truth teaches.  The teachings for Spiritual Christianity refer to this sense of self which owns Divine life as the hellish own or proprium and says that the natural man, which in other places is substituted with the term natural mind, is governed by this proprium.  It also says that the natural mind is where this own or proprium lives and that this sense of self is the default setting for everyone of us. In fact, the doctrines further inform that it is only the Word, the Logos, Divine truth, that can open the spiritual mind which is the mind that is instead governed by the heavenly own or proprium.  So essentially, the spiritual mind is the presence of Divine truth offering us a new way of thinking that is different from our default mode and so is the experience of the Divine Being, the true owner of life, actively at work in our life. 

… when the spiritual man does not flow in, knowledges in the natural man are turned into mere falsities, and its thoughts into confirmations of falsity and into reasonings from them against truths. … Such, therefore, seek truths from no other source than themselves, for each one’s own [proprium] has its seat in the natural man, and what is not his own has its seat in the spiritual; they therefore seize upon falsities instead of truths, and upon evils instead of goods, calling evils goods and falsities truths, and trusting in themselves, because they trust in what is their own [proprium]. (Apocalypse Explained 355{36})

So, in this passage from Scripture, the new covenant that is referred to, or the new arrangement, is the new form of mind that the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity offers us.  It is what Divine revelation in the form of truths about the nature of the Divine and the self, offer us. And as these principles about the Lord and about the nature of reality enter into our mind and we start to apply them to examine the sense of self, the own /proprium, they start to form a new default mode.  A new core of being that we can live and think and act from. A new heart in the human…

‘progressively giving My Laws into their thought (into that which goes through their mind; into their perception and comprehension), and I shall progressively imprint them (write or inscribe marks) upon their hearts,

Now if we come back to our grief and examine it a little more closely we can see that all grief is a lament that the situation isn’t what we desire it to be because of some other idea that we have of what it should be.  Therefore, we are grieving the loss of what we feel is missing or has been removed which then gives rise to states of wanting things to change and be different. But at the core of this thinking is the idea that we are owed something, that we deserve or are owed a certain state of being, a certain state of life.  And then hope is consequently a promise that offers to rectify this or return the desired state of life to us. This is natural hope for it is based on the illusion that we are the life that flows in and hence we identify with it as being something that belongs to us, as something that we have ownership of.  What follows from this thinking is that therefore our objections are valid when the state of life is not agreeable with what we want. The kind of promise that natural hope offers then actually just reinforces our sense of ownership of Divine life.  It ends up being a repeating cycle or endless loop of dissatisfaction with life, then fixation on what will make us feel better, striving to achieve it and then dissatisfaction again when it doesn’t hold up to its promise.

And why doesn’t it?

Because the natural mind identifies with the feelings and thoughts that flow into it as itself.  It therefore feels everything as its own.  It feels the states of satisfaction and happiness when life goes according to what it wants but it also deeply feels the states of dissatisfaction when there is conflict. So, it feels all the fluctuations of the thoughts and feelings as its own. And the ones that challenge the ideas that are most central to the identity that it has of itself, are the ones that it will feel more intensely as negative states than others.  

The house of Israel and the house of Judah each represent the spiritual and celestial states of thinking and feeling that the Word offers us in what it teaches and, when applied, it can transform our life. Now the Lord can lead these potential states of the house of Israel and the house of Judah out of Egypt, out of the natural mind, out of the proprium’s love of itself, for Egypt represents the natural (Arcana Coelestia 5406, Apocalypse Explained 355{36}), but unless the arrangement of truths and the new ways of thinking that the Word offers us is adhered to … then we fall back into that revolving cycle where natural hope is all that is available. And part of that cycle is the state of no hope: of despair, despondency helplessness, of there being no possibility of change, of an inability to have any effect, and a feeling of being lost, alone and uncared for.

because they did not remain (abide; dwell) in My arrangement (covenant) and, for my part, I cared not for (was unconcerned about; neglected) them,’ says the Lord [= Yahweh]. “

So, what is spiritual hope then and how is it different? As we have already seen, the spiritual mind is formed by truths, by the new ways of thinking and thus feeling, that the Word offers us. It is the new default mode that is slowly being formed as we take the principles of Spiritual Christianity and use them to examine the sense of self, the own/proprium, and its activity. So spiritual hope then is the hope that arises from applying these principles when we experience the states of grief and no hope.

Now take note – we aren’t expecting there to be no negative states, or states of no conflict or loss, or states of no despair, hopeless and feeling alone.  The hellish own/proprium exists, it is our normal default mode and has been so for a very long time.  Its influence isn’t going to go away overnight and in fact, it won’t ever go away – it is part of what it means to be finite, of being a receiver of Divine life.  And because of this, it is a part of the process of working with truths and spiritual work.  However, Divine revelation offers us a new way of being in relationship with the hellish own/proprium – and this is spiritual hope.

Because what the spiritual mind can do, that is, what truths about the nature of the Divine and the proprium can do, is influence and govern the natural mind. It can rein it in when it sees that it is starting to want to take control, or when it has taken over.  And it can do this by offering reminders of spiritual principles when the states of grief and despair arrive or take over.  And it can be a very simple reminder like,

All life flows in …

Because the thoughts that can follow from this might be:

• Therefore, these feelings are the proprium cycling over and over in itself.
• Therefore, these big and strong feelings are not ‘me’, not ‘mine’.
• Therefore, these negative states are the sense of self owning what is Divine.
• Therefore, this will pass as something else will soon flow in.
• Therefore, I just need to try and flow with this without owning it and let it take its course.
• Therefore, even though I feel awful, I can also acknowledge this as the proprium and the Lord showing me its nature.

The possibilities of responses to this one simple truth are infinite. The point is, is that the spiritual mind is the arrangement of thinking and feeling that adheres to the covenant with the Lord. And because it does this, even if the natural mind initially falls into ownership of the feelings and thoughts that are flowing in and consequently moves into states of grief and despair, it doesn’t progress into or continue in condemnation once the spiritual mind acknowledges the presence of this proprium and its activity.

because everyone (all) shall progressively perceive and thus understand and be acquainted with Me, from a little one even to a large one of them,  “‘because I shall continue being (existing) merciful with a cleansing covering for their injustices (behaviours contrary to the Way pointed out; inequities) and acts of lawlessness, and then I would by no means be reminded further of their mistakes and failures (errors and falling short of the target; sins). (JMNT)

… for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. (NKJV)

This is the inner peace that spiritual hope inspires us into.

What simple statement of truth will you work with today?

And Moses said unto God , Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel , and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name ? what shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel , I AM hath sent me unto you. (Exodus 3: 13 – 14)

YeHoWaH, is an attempt at pronouncing the Hebrew four letter name of the One who spoke to Moses from the burning bush. In Hebrew the letter-names are Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey, the corresponding letters (Y-H-W-H) are the English equivalents of the Hebrew letters and are capitalised in the opening word of this paragraph. These letter-names are telling for, taken as a whole, the One reveals Its Name simply as ‘to Be’ or ‘I AM,’ ‘to Exist‘. Now the name Moses means what is drawn out which is a reference to the fact that he was drawn out from the river of Egypt (Ex. 2:10). So the full statement given to what is drawn out is I-Will-Become-What-I-Will-Become.

Essentially, the revelation of the name given to Moses describes what arises in the perceptive faculties of every human mind that has been prepared for its reception. Genuine spiritual development runs parallel with an increasing awareness of the nature of the Divine Being which is the revealing of Its name. This is captured in the image or symbol of the burning bush. This symbol reveals the name or quality of God and it is that, Being Itself, as to its very nature, is love. The burning bush represents the faculty of spiritual perception that develops within receptive minds and into which the Divine can speak Its name and reveal Itself. It speaks or inflows continuously into every human mind but Its name is only received directly by that which has been drawn out of Egypt’s river, this river being the great stream of spiritual knowledge that gives life to the natural plane of the human mind. So Moses is the name that describes genuine spiritual teaching which when embodied in the human mind, takes the human form, being represented in the Word by a man named Moses.

Genuine forms of spiritual teaching are truths or principles that have been elevated or drawn out of the lower stream of memory knowledges through a desire to make them the basis for our life. It is these that are able to form a higher plane of understanding within the mind. Moses represents that higher spiritual understanding or plane within the human mind that can bring to conscious awareness the name of the Divine. Now a name describes the spiritual quality of a thing and the Divine Name describes the Divine Nature of that Being that is continuously seeking to reveal Itself to human consciousness. Moses is that to whom and, through whom, the Divine Esse is revealed. Spiritually understood he is the Divine Truth drawn from Egypt’s river of life. This river of Egypt is found within the human mind and is the flow of knowledges received through the letter of the Word. These course their way through the natural plane of the human mind as that rudimentary understanding of spiritual realities which can be received through the sense of the letter of the Word.

Coming to the letters of the name Itself, more is revealed. The first letter is named Yod but Yod is also the Hebrew word for hand. The hand, due to it being the principle anatomical structure through which consciousness expresses itself spiritually symbolises the power to put into effect what is desired. In the Cabbalahistic mystical tradition this letter of the Hebrew aleph-bet symbolises what is universally human. This is because the human hand gives expression to the content of the human mind and so as a symbol, carries a powerful representation of what is uniquely Human in an Infinite and Eternal or Divine sense.

The teachings for Spiritual Christianity are centred on the supreme theological truth that the Divine and Human are One in the Lord, that He is the Divine Human. This reference to what is Human carries nothing of a finite quality within it and is to be understood only in an Infinite and Eternal, or Divine sense. The Yod in the Tetragrammaton therefore symbolises this Divine Human in its power or omnipotence. It is the power of Divine Being or Divine Love given form through the Human or Divine Wisdom. Spiritual Christianity also teaches that the Lord is Divine Love and Divine Wisdom and that these respectively are Divine Substance and Form. And while these can be thought of as two, in the Lord they are a ONE and cannot be separated. So, Divine Love and Divine Wisdom is what constitutes the Divine­ Human and this is the Universal Human that powers every finite form of human consciousness which, when in its order of life reflects the Divine as Its image and likeness. What follows from this then is that a human being is only truly human to the degree that their sense of life is grounded in the conscious acknowledgement of the Divine Human as the source of its life. That what is of love and wisdom within the human heart and mind is the Lord present with a human being. What this shows is that a human being is only human to the degree they consciously acknowledge and are in an effort to make the Lord’s love and wisdom the basis for their life.

This now brings us to the remaining letter-names of the name of God, these being Hey-Vav-Hey. These can be usefully examined together as a whole in the light of what has just been said regarding love and wisdom and their relationship. The letter-name Hey occurs twice with an instance being found either side of the letter-name Vav. The letter-name Vav means a pin or nail or that which affixes things together. In the Hebrew language this letter also serves the same function as the English word and, that is, as a conjunction. The word Hey in Hebrew means breath and as pointed out, occurs twice in the Tetragrammaton. Breath is life; consciousness. In Spiritual Christianity, the teaching is that a human being receives its life from the Lord into the inmost part of the mind that stands above conscious perception and this is called the soul. This inflowing life is found in the book of Genesis where it is called, the breath of lives,

And the LORD God formed the human of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and the human became a living soul …. (Genesis 2: 7)

The life that is received into the human mind from the Divine Human is love and wisdom. While the life that flows from the LORD into the soul of a human being is One, when it is received more exteriorly so as to be consciously perceived, it becomes as if it were two distinct streams of life.

This is captured in the use of the plural form of the Hebrew word for life, lives, and also in the reference to nostrils which being dual, represent the two perceptive faculties that make up the human mind. The One life, as it becomes conscious within the receiving mind, is felt to be the receiver’s very own inner life manifesting as their thoughts and affections. We see then that this life is not felt to be something flowing in from another but is experienced as two seemingly distinct streams of mental activity arising from within oneself as the source. These streams being the life of the heart or will with its affections, and the other being the life of the understanding with its intellectual functions. For it is the Divine Love as received into the faculty of the will that animates all that belongs to the affectional life within the human mind. Similarly it is the Divine Wisdom that is received into the understanding faculty and this gives it its life through animating all that belongs to its intellectual functions.

In the pictorial image of the last three letter-names of the Tetragrammaton this arrangement of the human mind is wonderfully depicted. Of course the life that the Divine Human Is, is One and not two. Yet this life of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom can be conceptually distinguished as if it were two, for love and wisdom can be spoken of as if they are separate. This quality of distinguishable Oneness is symbolically represented in the name through there being two Heys. That they can’t be separated and so shouldn’t be thought of as separate in the Lord is illustrated by the conjunctive function of the letter-name Vav found in between the Heys which effectively binds them together so that their actual Oneness stands forth to view in the symbol of the letter-names.

As for the image’s application to the human mind, it speaks to the spiritual work every human being is called to. Genuine spiritual work seeks to bring the two streams that make up the life of the human mind together whereby the will and understanding form a whole, or one mind. This is achieved through the marriage of those goods and truths that have been drawn out of the Word and made one with the life through their practice. These goods form a new will and its truths, a new understanding which, when united through life of charity gives birth to a genuine human being whose mind is in the form of heaven. Such a mind, a mind in which heaven is reflected, is only possible where there is a willingness to go to the letter of the Word to draw out spiritual truths that can be used to examine the quality of the affectional and intellectual lives of the mind. This work of self examination and repentance to which every human being is called, involves identifying evils so that they may be shunned as sins against the Lord. It is this work that facilitates the heavenly marriage and is depicted in the meaning of the letter-names found in, YeHoWaH, the Name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush.

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM : and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel , I AM hath sent me unto you.

“Elephants all the way down.” What is that about? This is a title drawn from what I think is an ancient Indian tale or, maybe it’s just a philosophical story. But, the idea is that a young adept comes to an Indian sage and asks the question, “What holds up the world?” And the Indian sage replies to his adept.

“Little one, what holds the world up are four elephants, each facing out from each other with the globe upon their backs.” And the adept thinks about that for a little while. And then he says, “Master, what holds those elephants up?” And the sage replies and says, “Well, little one, what holds those elephants up are much bigger elephants. These elephants hold up the four original elephants and the globe that is upon those elephant’s backs.” The adept thinks for a little bit longer and then he says, “But master what holds those elephants up?” And the sage replies, “Well, little one, it’s elephants all the way down.”

So we’re going to look at the nature of reality of what holds everything together from a spiritual point of view. And I’d like to open with a few quotes, two from the works of the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity and one from Scripture.

Since God is human, therefore the whole angelic heaven in its entirety resembles a single person. It is moreover divided into regions and provinces corresponding to the members, viscera and organs of the human anatomy. For there are societies in heaven which constitute the province of all the components of the brain, societies which constitute the province of all the organs of the face, and societies which constitute the province of all the viscera of the body; and these provinces are differentiated from each other just as the components in the human anatomy are. Angels also know in what province of the human anatomy they are. The whole of heaven is in this image because God is human. God, moreover, is heaven, because the angels who constitute heaven are recipients of love and wisdom from the Lord, and recipients are images.(Divine Love and Wisdom 288)

It has been granted me to know from much experience, that man has communication with heaven by means of the Word. When I was reading through the Word from the first chapter of Isaiah to the last of Malachi, and the Psalms of David, keeping my thought fixed on the spiritual sense, it was granted me to perceive clearly that every verse communicated with some society in heaven, and that in this way the entire Word communicated with the whole of heaven. Thus it was evident that as the Lord is the Word, so also heaven is the Word, since heaven is heaven from the Lord, and the Lord by means of the Word is the All in all of heaven. (True Christian Religion 272; see also Arcana Coelestia 9406.2)

Wherefore do thoughts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; handle Me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see Me have. And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet (Luke 24:38-40).

The Word is the Divine Human. It is the Lord. The Word is in the Human form which can be seen in that it has an internal and and external aspect to it. Its external is its letter which serves as the basis, support and foundation for its spirit which is its spiritual sense, its internal. The letter of the Word is the Lord’s body within which is the Lord Himself or the Divine Love and Wisdom. So, when the Word speaks of body parts such as hands and feet, it does not mean the hands and feet of a physical body but spiritual hands and feet belonging to the Word which are functions of mind. The Scripture quoted above in directing the reader’s attention to its “hands” and “feet,” points to the internal and external meaning of the Word that deals directly with what is needed for the salvation of man or the regeneration of the human mind. By the hands are meant the power of the Word to regenerate the human mind by means of spiritual truths and by feet are meant the letter of the Word that lends support to those truths by making them available to the perceptive faculties of the natural mind via the senses.

By “flesh” and “bones” is meant the good and truth of the Word. The flesh of the Word is the good of love and its bones are the truths of faith through which we are able to perceive celestial and spiritual realities on the level of our natural comprehension. We can see this when we consider the correspondence of bones and flesh and their relationship. Bones support and give form to flesh just as truths give support and form to good. Again, the Gospel here is speaking of what belongs to the Word or Logos as Sacred Text and not of material flesh and bones belonging to a physical body. The doctrines for Spiritual Christianity indicate that this is the case in stating that after the Lord’s resurrection those who saw Him did so due to having had their spiritual eyes opened. This is an important point to grasp. The resurrection of the Lord involves seeing Him not in the physical flesh and bones of bodily sight but in the corresponding goods and truths of spiritual sight. From a Logopraxis perspective spiritual sight is the ability to reconceptualise the Word anew, anatomically, as the Lord or the Divine Human. To see the Word as the Lord is what it means to have one’s spiritual eyes opened.

The reason why the disciples saw Him was that their spiritual eyes were at that time opened; and when these are opened, the objects in the spiritual world are seen as clearly as those in the natural world. (True Christian Religion 793)

Now we might ask what are these spiritual eyes that enabled the resurrected Lord to be perceived?

It is said that “God opens the eyes” when He opens the interior sight or understanding; which is effected by an influx into man’s rational, or rather into the spiritual of his rational. This is done by the way of the soul, or the internal way, unknown to the man. This influx is his state of enlightenment, in which the truths which he hears or reads are confirmed to him by a kind of perception interiorly within his intellectual.

That the “eye” signifies the understanding is because the sight of the body corresponds to the sight of its spirit, which is the understanding; and because it corresponds, in the Word the understanding is signified by the “eye” in almost every place where it is mentioned, even where it is believed to be otherwise…(Arcana Coelestia 2701{1&2})

So to summarise this: Spiritual sight is a state of enlightenment where truths are confirmed by a kind of perception interiorly within the intellectual faculty.

If this is the case then spiritual eyes must be mental structures by which an awareness of spiritual or mental objects i.e., spiritual ideas, concepts, truths or principles is made possible. Spiritual eyes, as is the case with every other organ that forms a spiritual body, are composed of spiritual substances which are organised into a form suited to the performance of the required mental or spiritual functions related to our psychological life. If we hold that spiritual substance is mental or psychological then it follows that goods and truths from the Word are that substance or is that which is truly substantial. In the doctrines doe Spiritual Christianity, the term substantial is used in contrast to what is deemed non-substantial or material. The only things that are substantial from a spiritual perspective are organised (organic/living) forms (minds) made up of goods and truths from the Word. These forms of mind are what angels are. Substantial things are also called real things in the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity suggestive that the things of the world are not “real things.”

That all things that are real have come into existence and do come into existence through the Divine truth that is from the Lord, and thus through the Word, is a secret that has not yet been disclosed…. The Divine truth proceeding from the Divine good [the Word] is the veriest reality and the veriest essential in the universe, and it is this that makes and creates …it is the Divine truth proceeding from the Lord, the veriest reality and essential, that is the source of all things, and from which are the forms of good and of truth.(Arcana Coelestia 5272{2})

When the Word speaks of creating or creation it isn’t talking about the physical universe we see with our physical eyes, it’s referring to the psychological universe that is brought into being through regeneration of the human mind by means of the Word. Everything that is real in that mental universe is created from what is good and true. In other words it is a universe composed of mental substances that are organised so that they present to view to the awareness of spirits and angels as their sensory world. Now, if everything in the spiritual world is composed of spiritual or mental substances then this must also be true of spiritual bodies and their organs. Spiritual organs are composed of specialised goods and truths that are adapted to a specific use or function in the spiritual body in the same way that the organs of a physical body are composed of specialised cells organised and adapted to the functions of a material body. A spiritual body differs from a physical body in that it is a substantial body which means that it is composed of goods and truths. As such, a spiritual body can only be perceived with spiritual eyes or specialised goods and truths organised into concepts in the understanding that form an organ of perception (in other words spiritual “eyes”) adapted to bringing the mental objects of spiritual sight to conscious awareness.

This organ of spiritual perception corresponds to physical eyes and like them is composed of many complementary structures, only these structures are mental or spiritual and not physical or material. The physical eye’s components are made up of cells formed into structures that are necessary for sight. These structures include the cornea, lens, retina, and optic nerve, each playing a crucial role in capturing, focusing, and transmitting visual information to the occipital lobe of the brain where vision is processed. These physiological structures and their associated biochemical processes offer a corresponding representative image of the structures and processes involved in mental perception or spiritual (in)sight.

As has been said, spiritual structures are not composed of cells but of goods and truths. A spiritual organ is the form that supports the operation of psychological functions or processes. Spiritual sight has for its organ things that belong to the mind. In general we know by direct experience that how we see or understand things is governed by such things as the beliefs and attitudes we hold to, the mood or disposition that is active, the social and cultural influences that shape our sense of the world and our sense of place within it, our family of origin, our education and memories and so much more. The point is that all this has a bearing on how we see or understand things; it all goes into forming the complexity of cognition as the basis for our spiritual eyes. And what’s true for the formation of spiritual eyes is also true for every other spiritual organ that makes up a spiritual body as well as its limbs including spiritual hands and feet and, spiritual flesh and bones. All of this is substantial i.e., non-material, so is composed of goods and truths organised into forms tailored to perform essential spiritual or cognitive functions.

If we acknowledge that every element of a spiritual body consists of mental substances, it becomes apparent that a spiritual body is essentially a mental or psychological body. In this context, it is made up of affections and thoughts organised in a way that gives rise to various psychological activities that we experience as our thinking and feeling functions, i.e., our spiritual life. The doctrines for Spiritual Christianity are clear that all the biological structures and processes in the human body are representative of, and correspond to, spiritual or psychological structures and processes.

…as there is an invariable correspondence of all things of the mind with all things of the body the human mind is evidently formed in like ways. And from this it follows that the human mind is organised inwardly of spiritual substances, and outwardly of natural substances, and lastly of material substances.(True Christian Religion 38)

So where those physical structures and processes serve the life of the body so the spiritual body supports the functioning of our mental and emotional life. Given this perspective, we can ask what is being referred to when the Word employs anatomical language? We can certainly get a sense of what it might be in those teachings that deal with the Grand Human (Lat. Homo Maximus). In these teachings we have an image of heaven in the human form composed of countless numbers of societies also organised into the human form, with these societies being composed of angels who are also human in form. These angels, societies, and the Grand Human taken as a whole are in the human form because the whole and every part of the whole consists of goods and truths organised to perform specific cognitive and emotional functions that correspond to the anatomical structures and biological processes found in the human body. And regardless of the scale, whether it’s an individual angel or a single heavenly society or a collection of societies of supporting functions or the Grand Human taken as a whole each and every form is a complete human form with nothing missing. And this makes sense when we consider that every good and truth of which this spiritual universe is created traces its origin back to the Lord Himself. And so we have this from the work Heaven and Hell 460.

…every good and truth that goes forth from the Lord and makes heaven is in the human form; and this not only as a whole and in what is greatest, but also in every part and what is least; also that this form affects everyone who receives good and truth from the Lord, and causes everyone who is in heaven to be in the human form in accordance with his reception of good and truth. It is in consequence of this that heaven is like itself in general and in particular, and that the human form is the form of the whole, of every society, and of every angel to which let it be added that it is the form of the least things of thought derived from heavenly love with the angels.

This number presents us with a holographic conceptualisation of the human form. The leading idea being that every part contains the whole thus is fully human in its form without anything missing. We are conditioned to think of wholes as the product of component parts which would seem to foster an underlying potential for fragmentation, perhaps this way of thinking is what underpins aspects of what the doctrines for Spiritual Christianity refers to as “faith alone.” But whether that’s the case or not this number suggests a very different way of conceiving of wholeness and what it means to be human and it has to do with how closely any given part is also the whole. The basis for this structure is the Lord Himself which can be seen in the following number from the work True Christian Religion 364(3)…

…the Lord is omnipresent, and where He is present, there He is with His whole essence. It is impossible for Him to take anything away from that essence, so as to give a part to one and another part to another, but He gives it in its entirety, enabling a person to take a little or much.

Every good and truth is in the human form because every good and truth is from the Lord who is the Divine Human or Word. Every good with its truths holds within it the Lord in fulness and so is in the human form. There is no such thing as disembodied goods and truths, in other words there are no goods and truths that exist outside of human minds. Goods and truths are celestial and spiritual realities, they are real things, and as such are organised into celestial and spiritual forms of minds i.e., all goods and truths in the heavens are organic living human forms that present to view as angels within which heavenly qualities, reflective of the Lord, shine forth to view.

Now heaven understood as the Grand Human is composed of goods and truths from the Word that are formed into angelic minds or angels, who are in communities related to each other on the basis of the similarities of loves. These loves find expression through innumerable functions that constitute the operation of the collect human mind, the Grand Human. That same mind is found in all in heaven and gives rise to every angel’s experience of heavenly states of mind with all its objects. The objects that make up an angel’s sensory world, whether landscapes, houses, paths, trees, birds, animals etc., are all mental objects formed from goods and truths from the Word. The are substantial or metal objects in a representative sensory form. They are also called true appearances because the world angels experience without in their senses accurately represents the organisation of their interior world that brings this exterior spiritual world into being.

It is a spiritual law that no finite being is capable of generating a single thought and affection from themselves but that all receive their mental life through influx from spirits and angels present with them. Every thought and affection we experience arising in our minds is due to the presence of spirits and angels. The mental objects we experience as our thoughts and emotions are spirits with us that we experience as the psychological activity that constitutes our mental life. In the “other life,” once we are freed from the bodily senses, these spirits are experienced directly and form the representative world we perceive around us. This is why the work of self-examination and repentance in relation to our thought and affectional life is so important. Through this inner world the Lord as the Word creates our mental world which takes form as sensory objects when we are no longer attached to a physical body.

So, coming back to this idea of holographic wholeness and its relationship to the human form. If goods and truths are in the human form and these goods and truths are the substance and form of all that exists in the heavens then it is quite possible that that world and everything in it consists of nothing else but angels and spirits for angels and spirits are goods and truths. A similar idea to holographic wholeness is found in the world of fractals. The term fractal-wholeness describes a structure in which the pattern of the whole is repeated in all its parts, potentially without end as parts within parts are unfolded. This structure seems to be repeated endlessly in nature from the form of galaxies all the way down to the humble fern as can be seen in the following video.

While the fern exhibits a relatively simple fractal structure fractals are not limited to just simple patterns. In computer simulations of fractals the sequence can lead to very complex patterns before there’s a return to the form the pattern began with as can be seen in this next video that uses a fractal pattern called the Mandelbrot set…

If we imagine the Mandelbrot image to be the Grand Human/Heaven or, the Word or, a single society of angels or, a single angel or, for that matter, a single good or truth we can perhaps get a sense of fractal-wholeness. Of how every part is within the whole and the whole is in each and every part. Now this gets really interesting if we take the image as a representation of you, more specifically a representation of your mind or you as a spirit or angel. It was mentioned previously that no finite being is the source of the thoughts and feelings they experience – it’s all the result of influx due to the presence of spirits with us. But it is also true that those spirits with us that we experience as our psychological or mental life are also not the source of the affections and thoughts they experience as their mental life – no finite being is; in fact the very definition of finiteness is that which receives its life from another. The whole of the spiritual world which is made up of the mental life of angels, spirits, and human beings is structured so that each has a sense of self independent from others while being dependent on the whole for their mental life. The whole of course is not the sum of the parts but the Lord who, as the Divine Human, imparts the human form or pattern to each and every part.

The mind of man is his spirit and the spirit is the man because by mind are understood all the things of man’s will and understanding,… life is in the whole from every part, and in every part from the whole (Divine Love and Wisdom 387)

I want to take this a step further and expand on the idea that everything in the spiritual world i.e., the human mind, has as its substance what is of love and this is given form through wisdom. Or we could say that what is substantial is of the will and the form or quality of the will is expressed as the understanding. But essentially a human being is nothing other than their will and understanding; we are, each and every one of us as to our spirit or essential self, the good and truth we make our own while in the world.

…when man is viewed in himself he is nothing but his own good and truth, because good is of his will and truth of his understanding, and man is such as his will and understanding are. (Heaven and Hell 350)

We have already seen that spirits are in the human form and have a body that is fully human in every aspect. The difference is that a spiritual body is a substantial body not a material body. A substantial or mental body has all the organs and systems of a physical human body only they are spiritual, which means that each organ or spiritual body system is composed of goods and truths or, affections and thoughts given to specific psychological functions needed for the life of the mind. Now goods and truths are angels and spirits. If you recall it was pointed out that there are no disembodied good and truths because all goods and truths, being from the Lord, are human forms, they are angels and spirits. Spiritual organs are ideas formed around specific loves to produce a use or function of the mind which, is to say that every spiritual body of every “individual” angel and spirit is made up of angels and spirits, whose spiritual bodies in turn are also made up of angels and spirits, whose bodies are also made up of angels and spirits and so on and so on, so that the whole is in every part reflective of fractal-wholeness.

…all spirits and angels are affections, the entire angelic heaven is evidently nothing but the love of all affections of good, and the consequent wisdom of all perceptions of truth. And as every good and truth is from the Lord, and the Lord is love itself and wisdom itself, it follows that the angelic heaven is His image. And as the Divine love and the Divine wisdom in their form are Man, it also follows that the angelic heaven cannot be otherwise than in such a form. (Divine Providence 61)

This presentation is entitled, It’s Elephants all the Way Down. In fact, its clearly not elephants but angels and spirits or, goods and truths organised into human forms, all the way down. The whole is present in every part, because the Lord is in every part in fulness in every good and truth preceding from Him.

In the work Apocalypse Revealed 273 we have the following

(Revelation 5:7). And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him that sat upon the throne, signifies that the Lord as to His Divine Human is the Word, and this is from His Divine in Himself

For the Word to be the Lord means that the Word is the Divine Human. As the Divine Human it clearly must be Human in form which means, at the very least, that it has every anatomical structure found in any other complete human form. One of the numbers we opened with stated that…

…just as the Word is the Lord, so too the Word is heaven, since heaven’s being heaven comes from the Lord, and the Lord by means of the Word is the all in all of heaven. (True Christian Religion 272)

Heaven is formed from the Word or, put another way, to be in heaven is to be in the Word and to have the Word in you. Truths and goods from the Word reorder the mind into a form that can receive the Lord. The Word becomes flesh when it is integrated into our lives – its goods and truths unite and develop to provide a new mind or a new will with new affections that generate a new understanding filled with heavenly forms of thought. This is what it means to be reborn spiritually and it all culminates in a deep set appreciation for the deeper meanings the Word offers in support of this “other” life.

So, where the Word uses anatomical language, it is seeking to direct the attention to the psychological structures and processes of the mind. And where it uses this language in relation to the Lord it is directing the mind to the Word Itself and, depending on the subject, whether hands or feet or flesh or bone, to those specific forms of goods and truths in the Word that are designed to fulfil the spiritual functions that correspond to the material hands and feet, or flesh and bone. The aim of all this is to provide the basis for the integration of these functions or organs into the fabric of our being so that we can be given a new mind that derives its sense of self from the goods and truths the Word offers as opposed to that sense of self that has been acquired from our contact with the world that takes the fallacies of the senses as the last word on what is real.

Perhaps we should now come back to the Luke account where we see in the narrative the Word working to redirect our attention in an effort to free our minds from a sense based understanding of the Lord’s Human tied to the historical person of Jesus Christ to a deeper spiritual apprehension of the Word Itself as the Lord God Jesus Christ in His Divine Human.

Wherefore do thoughts arise in your hearts? See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; handle Me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see Me have. And when He had said this, He showed them His hands and His feet (Luke 24:38-40).

The movement from a more external understanding of the Word into a more internal understanding of things always comes with a level of doubt and questioning. So, we see here the Word addressing this vulnerable state with tenderness. It asks us, “Wherefore do thoughts arise in your hearts?” and then invites us to engage with it to see that the new meanings arising have substance to them. In some way this pattern of interaction plays out each time we come to the Word over the course of a Logopraxis session cycle.

Just by way of example, if you remove the historical frame from the quote from Luke’s gospel you come closer to the level of meaning that can be applied to our spiritual life. A key Logopraxis practice for engaging with the Word is to work to shift our thinking away from ideas of person, place, time and space. The spiritual meaning of the words of divine revelation have nothing to do with people or events in time. To read this particular quote historically or naturally is to understand it in terms of the person Jesus speaking to other persons (His disciples) in the past (time) in a particular place. None of that is helpful spiritually speaking because the attention is pulled outward into historical events and the more historicals occupy the mind the less what is spiritual or, the meaning related to our mental life is able to be grasped. This historical literal understanding of the Word entombs the Lord or the spiritual goods and truths that are needed to sustain the spiritual life. But how much richer and sustaining does the Word become when things of a historical nature drop away. What we see then is the Lord rising from the Word as a new understanding that describes how to deal with things belonging to our mental or psychological life. We come to see the Lord as the Word Itself.

It also needs to restated that when the Word uses anatomical language is not referring to the physical limbs, organs or bodies of historical figures. It’s referring to psychological or spiritual realities of the mind. If we remove the idea of person so that the name Jesus refers to the Word then clearly we have to make the same shift in meaning where His hands and feet or bones and flesh are concerned. These terms simply don’t refer to physical limbs or to material bone and flesh.

To switch our frame of reference from historical events to a psychological state when reading the Text can be helped by applying the pronouns in this verse to the Word Itself as that which is speaking to us. The Word, the Logos, is always reaching out and saying what’s stated here. It’s inviting its reader to perceive the true nature of its “hands” and “feet.” It urges the reader to let go of thinking of the hands and feet of a person in time; to see that the things spoken of in the Word relate to spiritual or psychological realities that apply in the here and now. That nothing in the Word of a spiritual nature relates to memories of past events. Such a reading merely entombs the spirit of the Lord.

The Word is speaking to those who have (spiritual) ears to hear; and it is saying that its hands and feet, the spirit and the letter of the Word is Divine. It states that “it is I Myself,” i.e., it is the Lord Himself and it invites the reader to, “handle Me and see,” where by “handle” is meant to engage with, to verify through first-hand experience (in LP terms to practise), for only then will one “see” or know for oneself the substantial nature of the inner world that engaging with the Word opens up. There are two Greek words in this passage translated into English using the word see. The first is used twice. It is found in the statement, “See my hands and feet” and again where it says “handle me and see.” A different word is used in the phrase “as ye see Me have“. The Greek word for the first two usages is a word that carries the idea of having first-hand experience of a thing. This last instance of “see” is a Greek word that means, “seeing as an observer or spectator” without personal engagement. This all describes the change in perception that arises when the Word is engaged with as the basis for spiritual life as opposed to being something held at a distance. Only through engaging with the Text with a view to self examination and repentance where ones thoughts and affections are concerned can its life-giving meanings be elevated out of the historical tomb of a literal reading to become a river of life in ones life. May it be so for us all.

The Text Is The Means Given For Our Regeneration

For anyone who enters this work there is a level of acknowledgement that the Word is the text that has been provided by the Lord to support the regeneration of the human mind. With this as our starting principle we can then surmise that the Text is what is given for us to hear what the Lord needs us to hear with regards to His Divine truth and in how to apply it to our life. In this way the Text can be seen as the meeting place where our outer self which is reading it, is able to meet with the Lord’s inflowing life in what is of His church within us. So, the Text is the means by which we can become more conscious of the thoughts and affections that are present for us that are heavenly, that is, of the Lord, and in consequence of that, of those thoughts and affections that are in opposition to what is heavenly, that are of the hellish proprium.

If we can approach the Text with an openness to receiving what it is the Lord has to say to us in this way, then what we observe, what is reflected back, what catches our attention, what we are drawn to… will give us an indication about where our specific work lies in terms of our spiritual regeneration.

We open then to the idea that instead of it being a one-way dialogue of us studying the Text – we find that the Text is in fact studying us and is the means by which we may study ourselves.

Centre Yourself Before You Start

If possible, spend a little time (5 or 10 minutes) centring yourself. There is no set way of doing this, but whatever you do, it should be something that steadies the inner activity of your mind and lifts your awareness out of external life concerns.

Meditation, reading some favourite pieces of Scripture, focused breathing, playing quiet music are some examples that might do this for you.

Learning To Observe The Two Competing Authorities

1st State – Truths

Listen for what the Text is saying with regards to principles or truths or ideas about the spiritual life.

2nd State – What Seeks To Distract

Watch for thoughts in your mind that seek to distract you from listening to what the Text is saying and thoughts that try to judge:

• seek to distract or pull your attention away from what’s being said
• that seek to analyse the Text or insist on you making sense of it or understanding it
• that seek to judge you when you struggle to pay attention or struggle to understand or just criticise you in general
• that seek to affirm or praise you – another form of judging
• any other thoughts that feel like they are making it difficult for you to hear what the Text is saying with regards to Divine truth and spiritual life

To begin with . . .

You could try reading your chosen piece of Text twice. The first time watching your thoughts for truths that are heard and the second time watching for thoughts that seek to distract you from hearing these truths.

You may want to read the Text in this way for a while so that you can learn to make distinctions between the two different types of information that are being offered to you as you observe your thoughts. ( ie. thoughts that are about the Lord and of spiritual life and alternatively those that seek to distract you from this.).

But over time. . .

Like any skill that is practised, you’ll find that you’ll learn to read these two states of minds within you simultaneously in that your ability to move back and forth between them will become more fluid.

Why Should We Practise This Way Of Reading The Text?

It frees us from the idea that we must understand everything
Approaching the Text in this way offers a different type of experience to the traditional way of approaching it where we have read to understand it intellectually. If we approach the Text reading it instead to understand our own spiritual states – the thoughts and affections that are being brought into awareness when we engage with the Text, then this frees us from the need to have to understand every single thing that we read. And so in this way whether we’re drawn to a whole chapter, or a few pages or simply one paragraph, it loosens us from thought that we must gather as much information as possible and instead draws us into trusting in the idea that what we’ve been offered is what the Lord needed us to hear. As little as little is needed or as much as much is needed. It thus builds trust in the Text.

It offers us revelation about where our specific work lies
Approaching the Text in this way also affirms the idea that the Text is given for the revelation of our own internal spiritual processes and the specific work that the Lord requires of us in regards to the regeneration of our mind. It offers a real life application of seeing the Text as something that is relevant specifically to the reformation of how we engage in our day to day life because it seeks to challenge the structures of how our sense of self thinks. It seeks to change what ‘truth authority’ our sense of self turns to and thinks from. For example, It asks our sense of self – Does it believe that the Text can offer to highlight states that need to be looked at or does it think from the idea that it is its own authority of truth? For this is the very function of Divine truth… it seeks to show us what isn’t of the Lord so that we may know the truth that counters it more deeply.

It shows us what must be seen and called out and named
To read and listen consciously is about watching for the thoughts and affections that want to judge, condemn, criticise, praise, analyse and solve rather than simply listening for spiritual principles or truths found within what’s being described. When these self crediting qualities and condemning tendencies of the proprium are observed and acknowledged it affirms that what the Text teaches us about the nature of the hellish proprium is true. We see it as something active in our direct experience. In the moment that we truly recognise that what the Text has called out and named is the hellish proprium, it is effectively shunned. The act of shunning the evils of this infernal proprium as sins against the Lord is the true meaning of charity.

It will extend out into all aspects of our daily life
You will find that eventually you will start to pay attention to your inner chatter not just when you are reading the Text but in your interactions with others too. This is a natural progression that occurs when any skill is practised frequently – it starts to become part of our baseline thinking. As the truth about what the Text says about the nature of the hellish proprium becomes more and more seen as real in application to our own mind, then it also more often acts as a reminder to us to watch for the two competing states of mind or authorities of truth within.

It allows us to know the truth more deeply and hence the Lord more deeply
It’s not that the sense of self or proprium is destroyed … but it instead becomes vivified or made living when it is seen as a function of use. This is because it is the presence of the obstructions that it is to the Lord’s light which allows the varieties of colour to be seen. As finite beings we will never be able to see the Lord as He is in Himself in its pure white light but we may eternally grow in the discovery of the unlimited variations of colours.

Every substance that I have made will I destroy from off the faces of the ground.

That this signifies man’s proprium, which is as if destroyed when vivified, is evident from what has been said before respecting this proprium.

Man’s proprium is entirely evil and falsity. So long as this continues, the man is dead; but when he comes into temptations it is dispersed, that is, loosened and tempered by truths and goods from the Lord, and thus is vivified and appears as if it were not present.

That it does not appear and is no longer hurtful, is signified by “destroyed;” and yet it is not destroyed, but remains.

It is almost as with black and white, which when variously modified by the rays of light are turned into beautiful colours—such as blue, yellow, and purple—whereby, according to their arrangement are presented lovely and agreeable tints, as in flowers, yet remaining radically and fundamentally black and white.

(Arcana Coelestia 731)

Now as was [their] custom, His parents regularly went their way – year by year – into Jerusalem during the Feast (or: festival) of the Passover. 

So when He came to be twelve years [old], after their finishing going up – according to the custom of the Feast (or: festival) –

and upon finishing the days, during their process of returning, the Boy Jesus continued to remain in Jerusalem.

Yet, inferring from custom for Him to be within the group journeying together (= in the caravan; company of fellow travelers), they went a day’s way (= a day’s journey on the road) and then began seeking Him back among the relatives and acquaintances.

Then upon not finding Him, they returned into Jerusalem, continuing in searching again for Him.

Later, after three days, it happened [that] they found Him within the Temple courts (or: grounds), continuing in sitting within the midst of the teachers, constantly listening to them, as well as repeatedly making inquiries and putting question to them.

Now all the folks continuing to listen to and hear Him began ‘standing outside themselves’ in amazement and were repeatedly astonished at His understanding (His ability to make things flow together) and discerning responses (or: decided answers).

(Luke 2:41- 47 Jonathan Mitchell translation) 

The image before us is delightful in its innocence. Of the young boy Jesus, twelve years of age, on the cusp of moving out of childhood and into manhood. The age of twelve was a time in the Jewish tradition when a young boy would be being prepared for his coming of age in his thirteenth year. In fact, Jesus had likely been instructed in the proceedings of the Passover on this visit to Jerusalem, in preparation for his partaking of it fully in the following year.  As part of a young boy’s instruction, it was also customary for the teachers to sit with him and to teach him, by encouraging him to ask questions and then responding to these, with his questions serving as a way of opening up a dialogue. However, we know that what happened next was unexpected; that the church elders were astonished at the wisdom in this young boy of twelve years and were left stunned and amazed. It is with delight that we look upon this image and see this boy in his love of the Word and of learning its truths and in a state of what seems like unconscious enlightenment, without self-awareness in it, as he offers his understanding and insights to his teachers.  

And so, the Text and its imagery draws us in initially, with a soft, sweet affection. But we can move in deeper by remembering that the Word is a text about the life of our mind, of our thoughts and affections. That it is a Text that is psycho-spiritual in its nature because it describes the experiences of the Word unfolding in our awareness. We can remind ourselves that to think spiritually is to think above person, place, time and space and to look to what these represent as spiritual states within our mind instead. 

Before us, we have the young boy, Jesus, who is the Word made flesh. The Word in our mind in this state is no longer an infant but a boy, so it is an experience of the Word that is becoming more self-aware, more conscious for us. This boy, is twelve years of age and twelve denoting all the goods and truths of the church, indicates this state of the Word is on the cusp of moving into the maturity of a more adult state, a state where it is ready to be in the fullness of its use. It is a state of the Word in us in a transition or on the threshold of an entry. It is ready to be educated in things of the church more deeply, to receive doctrine and instruction and to take responsibility for them. This is further supported by the fact that it has ascended into Jerusalem, it being a city that is high above the surrounding landscape, and so a higher or more interior spiritual state. The word Jerusalem itself means ‘dual peace shall be taught’ and it signifies the church in respect to its teachings. So, everything about this state points to the idea that it is a stage in which the understanding of the Word in us is ready to be instructed to bring it into its maturity, into its fullness of use. 

We see that Jesus has been separated from his father and mother, the father and mother representing the goods and truths that have raised and nourished the young state of the Word but at some point, have to be separated from, so that the boy can become a man and find a wife and raise his own family. Spiritual life is a continual cycle of unions and separations as one church within us ends and another begins or as one cycle of regeneration comes to a completion and another commences. At the ending of the cycle, the goods and truths that have served us to a certain point are seen to have elements of evil and falsity in them and so that which is no longer identified to be of the Lord, is sloughed off. That which remains is what acts as the impetus substance for the forming of the new man, the new church, the new human.  

So, separations occur so that distinctions can be seen and vice versa but then we look to join with what remains, which of course can only be reunited with the Lord in a state of instruction in the Word. The original goods and truths of the church, the father and mother, notice that the Word is missing, can’t find it in the lower states of the mind and so ascend again into Jerusalem. After a state of completion in this seeking, as is signified by the three days of searching for the boy Jesus, they find him…. in the temple, in the house of the Lord because where else but, can the Word be found. And this state of the Word in us has been drawn there to meet with the established men of the church, the established truths in us, so that it may be taught.    

Or has it? 

One of the recognised phenomena in Logopraxis is that we start out with the Text with the intent of reading and studying it, only to find that it is in the fact the Text that is reading and studying us. That it is the Text that is teaching us, teaching the established truths of the church, challenging the truths that we claim are truths, inquiring and questioning them and asking us to validate them. We claim that they are true but the Text, the Word, asks us how they are true in our life, how we know them to be true.  It sits, 

 within the midst of the teachers, constantly listening to them, as well as repeatedly making inquiries and putting question to them. 

We can draw other parallels in this story to our experiences of the Logopraxis process. We journey to Jerusalem in a state of willingness to be instructed as we read the set reading, identify spiritual principles and form a task to work with over the week.  We find that the work with our task is similar to the state of seeking that the father and mother are doing in this story, in that the goods and truths that have nourished us until now, are in a state of seeking the truth of the Word in its application to life. The effort to sit down and summarise our work into a submission also speaks to the state of this seeking, as we look to find the Lord in what we have worked with and in what we might share with others in the sphere of our Logopraxis Life Group.   

And so, we enter our Life Group as one might enter into the court of the temple; eager to exchange our knowledge and experiences of the Word, eager to share them. Perhaps there is even a state in the sense of self that is eager to teach others. But instead, like the teachers in the temple, we find that we have been gathered to be questioned and to have the work we have done with our task in the Word, to be inquired of. In short, we find that our ‘truths’ that we have brought, like these teachers, have been gathered around the Word to be taught. To be taught by the innocent young boy states of the truth that are focused in the delight of the love of the Lord and that are present without self-attribution.  

But how does this young boy state of the Word teach us? How does truth that the self takes no credit for, teach us? How do the questions it asks us to consider, teach us? 

There is a memorable relation in Conjugial Love about the sports of wisdom, in other translations referred to as the ‘contests of wisdom’ or ‘schools of wisdom’.  The description of this contest and the way it unfolds also offers us principles in how the Lord as the Word works to teach us in our midst. This memorable relation can be found in Conjugial Love 132-136 but the specific section of 132, which is about to be explored here, can be found at the end of this presentation. 

What we find described in the opening passages is a scene similar to Jesus arriving at the temple and to us arriving at our Life Group meeting. There is an ascent into a higher part of the land, a deliberate movement to looking to things of the Word and a desire to gather with others to share in the love of wisdom: 

I once had a talk with two angels, one from the eastern and one from the southern heaven.  

When they noticed that I was pondering the mysteries of wisdom on the subject of conjugial love, they said: ‘Don’t you know anything about the contests of wisdom in our world?’ ‘No, not yet,’ I replied.  

‘There are many of them,’ they said, adding that those whose love of truth comes from a spiritual affection, that is to say, they love truths because they are true and because they are the way to wisdom, meet when the signal is given, to discuss matters requiring profound understanding and to reach conclusions about them. Then they took me by the hand, saying: ‘Come with us and you will see and hear. The signal has been given for a meeting today.’  

I was taken across a plain to a hill, and there at the foot of the hill was an avenue of palm-trees extending all the way to the top. We went in and climbed the hill.  

(Conjugial Love 132) 

A prepared document with a seal is then set on a table in the centre of the meeting. The document holds questions for the consideration for those who are present, in much the same way as the young boy Jesus sits in the middle of the teachers in the temple, asking them questions. And in much the same way as the Word raises questions for us about what we think we know, when we read it or hear it read.  

No one challenges the origin or authority of the document just as no one in the temple questions the validity of the Word. For anyone entering into the Logopraxis approach, there is some form of acknowledgement that the text is divine and we are reminded of this again when we gather in our Life Groups to meet and work with the Word as our central focus. This is a foundational premise in the work of Logopraxis and hence in one’s ability to enter into it. It comes from an inner perception that is linked to our willingness to bring truths into life. This willingness allows for an inner witness, an inner perception that something is true. This is not to say that we are not allowed to question the authority of the Text, this is a natural part of our development as we come to terms with the implications of what the Word and doctrines for Spiritual Christianity teach for our life.  But to even just enter into this work, there is a recognition within ourselves that we are willing to submit to being taught and to have our sense of self-reformed by the Word. Our trust in its authority is something that will continue to be both challenged and deepened eternally. In this way, there will always be a young boy sitting in the midst of the teachers in the temple, asking questions. 

The discussions in the contests of wisdom takes place in three rounds. The first question begins with a reading from Sacred Scripture and the men answer in the order with those from the north, west, south and then east.  Each group that speaks looks to what it can expand on and add to, from what has been shared by the previous group.  Finally, after each group has spoken, a conclusion is reached that incorporates the ideas offered from all four of the regions.   

How we listen is such an important factor in the creation of a sphere within which the Lord can be experienced. Just as each of the four regional groups spoke and built on what the previous group offered, we also are asked to cultivate this skill in our Logopraxis Life Group. As each member’s experience of the Word working in their life is brought forth, the degree to which each practitioner is able to elevate their thoughts so that the Lord is recognised in what is shared, is the degree to which the potential for a collective experience of recognising the Lord as the Word in our midst may be present. We therefore are asked to work to develop a sensitivity to hearing in what another shares of the Text in relation to their life, with what also resonates with our own work or experience of the Text and to share from that, seeking to draw positive connections. This form of dialogue contributes to the growth of wisdom because it forms our connections with one another on the basis of the good of life being the end in view.  

But being awake to another person when they are sharing (written or verbal) takes effort. As with reading the Text itself, we are easily lulled into a waking sleep as our thoughts drift away from being awake to the Lord in the other person and fall instead into our sense of self or proprium. The proprium, when removed from the Lord as its overseer, believes that what it sees and thinks is true to the point where it will disregard and defend, sometimes aggressively, anything that disagrees with it.  It quickly grabs hold of what it finds agreeable in another and is just as quick to attack that which is opposed to its own view, seeking to pull down what it finds objectionable to bring the other into submission to, and therefore an image of, itself. What it believes to be a dialogue is really nothing more than a dressed-up monologue, in which self-interest takes the leading role. It cannot, and will not hear another, for it is too much in love with the sound of its own voice. It can often frame ‘advice giving’ as something good it is offering to another, when in fact it flows from a sense of thinking that it knows best – and is one of the many forms that pride in one’s own intelligence can take.  

So, whenever we see in ourselves the need to correct, chastise and criticise what another shares in our Life Group, this is the young boy state of the Word in us that is seeing and questioning and challenging the ‘truths’ that are listening. It is the Word that is seeing this need in our ‘self’ and it asks us to stop and consider; to step back and observe our responses in the light of the truths of the Word and to practice this as consciously as we are able to. For it is the light of what truths teach that allows us to see what the proprium works to do when it is separated from the Lord. To be able to observe this hellish sense of self is how the Word saves us as it is in the seeing of it, that allows us to be removed from our engagement with it and its hold over us and hence to also know more deeply, the peace and freedom that is the Lord Himself.   

The purpose of a Logopraxis Life Group is to create conditions in which the Lord’s presence might be more fully experienced in what passes between group members when they share their accounts of the Word working in their lives. Our work as Logopractitioners is therefore to seek to be awake to the Lord in each other, or more accurately, to be awake to His presence in the experiences shared of the Word working in each other’s lives. If we are to have any hope of the Lord becoming visible for us in this way then we must seek to practice in the work of genuine participation with conscious listening and reading of the spiritual states that are being presented to us in our mind and making distinctions between those that are of the Lord and those that are not. Essentially, being able to hear and read the questions that the Word is asking us and to step away from, or outside of, our sense of self or proprium, is a spiritual literacy skill we must cultivate if we wish to see the Lord as the Word in our midst. If we can practice this type of conscious listening and attending to the Lord in our Logopraxis Life Groups, then we will find, like those in the contests of wisdom found, that the variety and diversity of the many forms of His life that are offered as each member shares, may be gathered together into an even richer and deeper experience of the Lord for all. When we are open to the experience of being shown the ‘self’, then just as for those listening to the young boy Jesus, the wisdom that is the Lord will shine through into our understanding, bringing amazement and astonishment. 

Now all the folks continuing to listen to and hear Him began ‘standing outside themselves’ in amazement and were repeatedly astonished at His understanding (His ability to make things flow together) and discerning responses (or: decided answers). (Luke 2:47)

Visit here for The Teacher in the Temple (Part 2)

Conjugial Love 132

To the above, I will add two Memorable Relations. First this:

I once conversed with two angels, one from the eastern heaven, the other from the southern heaven. When they perceived that I was meditating on the arcana of wisdom concerning conjugial love, they said, “Do you know anything about the sports of wisdom in our world?” When I answered, “Not as yet,” they said: “There are many. Those who love truths from spiritual affection, that is, who love truths because they are truths and because they are the means to wisdom, come together at a given signal to discuss matters requiring a deeper understanding, and to form conclusions.” They then took me by the hand, saying, “Follow us and you shall see and hear. Today the signal has been given for a meeting.”

I was led across a plain to a hill; and lo, at the foot of the hill an avenue of palm trees stretching all the way to the summit. We entered it and ascended; and on the top or crown of the hill was seen a grove, the trees of which, growing on an elevated piece of ground, formed a kind of theatre. Within this theatre was a level space paved with small stones of various colors, around which, arranged in the form of a square, were chairs of state on which sat the lovers of wisdom. In the center of the theatre was a table whereon lay a paper sealed with a seal.

[2] The men who were sitting on the chairs invited us to seats still vacant; but I answered them, “I have been led hither by two angels to see and hear, not to sit down.” The two angels then went to the table in the center of the level area, and in the presence of those who were seated they broke the seal of the paper and read the arcana of wisdom inscribed thereon which they were now to discuss and unfold. They had been written and let down upon the table by angels of the third heaven. There were three arcana: FIRST, What is the image of God and what the likeness of God into which man was created? SECOND, Why is man not born into the science of any love, when yet beasts and birds, the noble as well as the ignoble, are born into the sciences of all their loves? THIRD, What is signified by the tree of life, what by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and what by the eating of them? Underneath was written: “Combine these three into one statement, write it on a fresh sheet of paper, and place the paper on the table and we shall see. If the statement appears well balanced and just, there shall be given to each of you a reward of wisdom.” After reading this, the two angels withdrew and were taken up into their heavens.

[3] Those who were sitting on the chairs then began to discuss and unfold the arcana proposed to them. They spoke in order, first those who sat at the north, then those at the west, after them those at the south, and finally those at the east. They took up the first subject of discussion, namely, WHAT IS THE IMAGE OF GOD AND WHAT THE LIKENESS OF GOD INTO WHICH MAN WAS CREATED? To begin with, the following from the Book of Genesis was then read out in the presence of all:

God said, Let us make man in OUR IMAGE, after OUR LIKENESS. And God created man in HIS OWN IMAGE, in the IMAGE OF GOD created he him. Genesis 1:26, 27.

In the day that God created man, in the LIKENESS OF GOD made he him. Genesis 5:1.

Those who sat at the north spoke first, saying, “The image of God and the likeness of God are the two lives breathed into man by God, being the life of his will and the life of his understanding. for we read that Jehovah God breathed into the nostrils of Adam the breath of lives; and man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). Into his nostrils means into the perception that within him was the will of good and the understanding of truth and thus the breath of lives; and because life was breathed into him by God, the image and likeness of God signify the integrity that was in him from wisdom and love, and from righteousness and judgment.”

Those who sat at the west favored these views, but they added the following, “This state of integrity breathed into Adam by God is being continually breathed into every man after him; but it is in man as a receptacle, and man is an image and likeness of God according as he is a receptacle.”

[4] The third in order, being those who sat at the south, then said: “The image of God and the likeness of God are two distinct things, but in man they are united from creation; and we see, as from interior light, that the image of God may be destroyed by man but not the likeness of God. This is seen as through a lattice, from the fact that Adam retained the likeness of God after he had lost the image of God; for after the curse it is said:

Behold the man is as one of us, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:22.

And later he is called the likeness of God and is not called the image of God (Genesis 5:1). But let us leave it to our associates who sit at the east, and thus are in superior light, to say what the image of God properly is, and what the likeness of God.” 

[5] Then, after a period of silence, those sitting at the east rose from their seats and looked up to the Lord. Resuming their seats, they then said: “An image of God is a receptacle of God; and because God is Love itself and Wisdom itself, the image of God in man is the receptacle in him of love and wisdom from God. But the likeness of God is the perfect likeness and full appearance as though the love and wisdom were in the man and so were his own; for man feels no other than that he loves from himself and is wise from himself, or that it is from himself that he wills good and understands truth, when yet it is not in the least from himself but from God. God alone loves from Himself and is wise from Himself because God is Love itself and Wisdom itself. The likeness or appearance that love and wisdom or good and truth are in man as his own, makes man a man and able to be conjoined to God and so to live to eternity. Hence it follows that man is man from the fact that he can will good and understand truth altogether as if from himself, and yet can know and believe that it is from God; for, according as man knows and believes this, God puts His image in him; not so if he believed that it is from himself and not from God.”

[6] Having said this, a zeal from the love of truth came over them, and from this they spoke as follows: “How can man receive anything of love and wisdom and retain and reproduce it, unless he feel it as his own? And how can there be conjunction with God through love and wisdom unless there be given man some reciprocal of conjunction? Without a reciprocal, there can be no conjunction; and the reciprocal of conjunction is this: Man loves God, and is wise in the things which are of God, as if from himself, and yet believes that it is from God. Moreover, how can man live to eternity unless he is conjoined with the eternal God? Consequently, how can man be man without this likeness of God within him?”

[7] On hearing these words, all expressed their approval. They then said: “Let the conclusion from this discussion be as follows: Man is a receptacle of God, and a receptacle of God is an image of God; and as God is Love itself and Wisdom itself, it is of these that man is a receptacle; and the receptacle becomes an image of God according as it receives. Man is a likeness of God from the fact that he feels in himself that the things which are from God are in him as his own; but from this likeness he is an image of God only so far as he acknowledges that the love and wisdom or the good and truth in him are not his own and thus are not from himself, but are solely in God and thus from God.” 

Now as was [their] custom, His parents regularly went their way – year by year – into Jerusalem during the Feast (or: festival) of the Passover. 

So when He came to be twelve years [old], after their finishing going up – according to the custom of the Feast (or: festival) –

and upon finishing the days, during their process of returning, the Boy Jesus continued to remain in Jerusalem.

Yet, inferring from custom for Him to be within the group journeying together (= in the caravan; company of fellow travelers), they went a day’s way (= a day’s journey on the road) and then began seeking Him back among the relatives and acquaintances.

Then upon not finding Him, they returned into Jerusalem, continuing in searching again for Him.

Later, after three days, it happened [that] they found Him within the Temple courts (or: grounds), continuing in sitting within the midst of the teachers, constantly listening to them, as well as repeatedly making inquiries and putting question to them.

Now all the folks continuing to listen to and hear Him began ‘standing outside themselves’ in amazement and were repeatedly astonished at His understanding (His ability to make things flow together) and discerning responses (or: decided answers).

And so, upon seeing Him, [His parents] were bewildered and overwhelmed (or: struck out [of their wits]), then His mother said to Him, “Child, why did you treat us in this manner?  Look, and consider, your father and I were caused constant pain as we continued searching for you.”

So He said to them, “Why [is it] that you were trying to find Me?  Had you not seen so as to now know that it continues binding and necessary for Me to be within the midst of the men belonging to My Father (or: to constantly be among the things that pertain to My Father; or: to continue being in union with those things which are My Father)?”

And yet they, themselves, did not understand (make flow together) the result of the flow (declaration; gush-effect) which He spoke to them.

And so He walked back down with them and came into Nazareth, and continued being set in a supportive arrangement for them (or: kept on being subject to and under them). 

His mother also continued carefully watching, noting and keeping all these sayings (gush-effects; results of the flows; declarations; matters) within her heart. 

And so Jesus kept on cutting a passage forward, making progress in (or: by; with) the Wisdom – as well as in maturity and physical stature – and in (or: by; with) grace and favor, beside God and mankind (or: in the presence of God as well as people).   

(Luke 2:41-52 Jonathan Mitchell Translation)

In Part 1 of The Teacher in the Temple, we explored the need to develop conscious listening as a core spiritual literacy skill for participating in Logopraxis group life. To listen to one another in a conscious way involves making an effort to be aware of our own state as we listen to what is being shared. In Part 1 we saw that the ability to step outside of the ‘self’ or proprium, to observe what it strives to direct us towards when left to its own rule, is what allows us to see what is of the Lord. To be in the effort to hear the Lord in another is one aspect of what it means to love the neighbour or what is of the Lord in another. To listen consciously is not about judging whether another’s state is of the Lord or not. It is instead about attending to the thoughts and affections arising within our own state as we respond to what we are hearing in what is being shared. We are watching for the thoughts and affections that want to judge, condemn, criticise, praise, analyse and solve rather than simply listening for spiritual principles or truths found within what’s being shared.

When these self-crediting qualities and condemning tendencies of the proprium are observed and acknowledged it affirms that what the Word teaches us about the nature of the hellish proprium is true. We see it as something active in our direct experience. It also affirms the Word’s presence in our mind as the Lord Himself, as truth that communicates His good that is always working to expose what is opposed to the life of heaven so that what is of heaven might become the basis for our life. In the moment that we truly recognise that what the Word has called out and named is the hellish proprium, it is effectively shunned. The act of shunning the evils of this infernal proprium as sins against the Lord is the true meaning of charity, for then the Word is acknowledged to be the Lord. From a Logopraxis perspective, this is what it means to seek the Lord and make affirmative connections in another’s work in the Word with that of our own work in the Word. 

When this type of spiritual literacy skill is practised then every individual’s work with the Word when shared, contributes to creating a unique expression of spiritual community for each receiver; the sum of the parts contributing to a deepening sense of the whole, the whole being the Lord as the Word, as the Divine Human within our midst. The ground that we meet on then becomes holy and sacred and filled with awe.  

Now all the folks continuing to listen to and hear Him began ‘standing outside themselves’ in amazement and were repeatedly astonished at His understanding (His ability to make things flow together) and discerning responses (or: decided answers).   

In Part 1 of The Teacher in the Temple we also began to explore the memorable relation referred to as the “contests of wisdom” found in Conjugial Love 132-136. The men who met together for the first question (see Conjugial Love 132) also demonstrated this idea that in spiritual life each state builds upon what was of the Lord in the previous one and also that each unique contribution, when woven together, offers a richer experience of the whole.

The second question in this meeting in heaven begins with the men seeking to first find the truth of the proposition of the question being asked and so each puts forward ideas to corroborate it.    

The truth of the proposition thus being established, they then direct their minds to investigate and discover the ends and causes whereby they might unfold and disclose this arcanum.  (Conjugial Love 133)

Each region in the order of north, west, south and east then offer their rationale as to why the truth is true and the purpose of its good. Each group speaks in turn, as they did with first question, building on what the previous group offered. A conclusion is then drawn that incorporates the ideas from each of the four regions. (Conjugial Love 133-134).

This seeking to first establish the truth of the question before moving into why or how it is true requires a deeper level of both the individual and group work than that of the first question where the men simply moved straight into attempting to answer the question. This movement towards a more collaborative approach in finding a common first principle from which to work from, parallels the change in our work from Round One to Round Two of our Logopraxis Life Group. Like the men in the first question, Round One of a Logopraxis Life Group is mostly about each practitioner having an opportunity to share their work whilst the rest of the group listens, working to attend to their state, so that they might hear spiritual principles in what is being shared. In Round Two however, we are seeking to somehow draw all that has been heard in Round One together, into a collective of spiritual principles that are universal in nature in that they have the elements of person, place, time and space removed. By removing these external elements each practitioner is then more easily able to resonate with what is shared in relation to their own experience of the Word, of its process within them. So, the common first principle that is agreed upon, the “truth of the proposition that is established”, is that in order to find the Lord in the midst we must remove the external elements of the material world in our thinking, that is, we must remove person, place, time and space so that we might think spiritually to hear and see what is shared as spiritual states and realities. If we can do this in Round Two then what is placed before the group becomes a collective of spiritual truths for all because each practitioner can more easily see how it is true in relation to their own experiences of the Word. When this is seen it more fully supports the Lord’s end which is the regeneration of the human mind. Thus, the good of the Word as the Lord is made more visible in our midst, He is the end, the “purpose of its good” that the men in the contests of wisdom were seeking.  

The need to understand why the truth is true and the purpose of its good is also captured in arrival of the father and mother at the temple as they finally find their son Jesus and start to question him.  They had been searching for him for three days so we can imagine the sense of relief they must have felt on finding him but then their surprise, given his age, at seeing how deeply engaged he was in the discussions with the religious leaders and teachers of the day.   

And so, upon seeing Him, [His parents] were bewildered and overwhelmed (or: struck out [of their wits]).  

What we see taking place here, in this change of the relationship between Jesus and his parents, is an illustration of a change of state in us as we seek to practise the newly developing spiritual literacy skills of removing person, place, time and space whilst simultaneously also shunning the thoughts and affections that are of the hellish proprium that attempt to prevent us hearing spiritual principles. The interior states or truths we are attempting to access in doing this begin to assert themselves and challenge those that are more exterior, that have the material world elements attached to them.  And as with the parents, we too can feel unsettled within ourselves as we seek to integrate these newly developing spiritual literacy skills that are grounded in more interior truths of what it means to think spiritually and be present to the Lord in another. So, the parents can be likened to the historical goods and truths that have carried and supported us to a certain point but being more external, that they do not enter the temple or the discussions and must be placed in their proper order in relation to the more interior truths of the Word that are developing and emerging. The parent’s questions mirror this effort to work with others and the Word in this new way.   

Then His mother said to Him, “Child, why did you treat us in this manner?  Look, and consider, your father and I were caused constant pain as we continued searching for you.”  

Learning to read the Text and what others share in our Life Group as spiritual states and realities rather than hearing and reading them literally as descriptive of places and people and events, is difficult. The latter is the mode of hearing and reading we have been accustomed to for most of our life and to read and hear language in an entirely new way requires a complete change of mind in how we think or more importantly – what we think from. To think from the Word, to think from it as our heart and love is to learn to think from what is celestial and spiritual because the Word as the Lord is good and truth itself. It is the human form of the marriage of good and truth when it is received in us and it is the Divine Human for us when it is recognised as the Lord. The young boy state of Jesus as the developing states of the Word in us, recognises this. 

So He said to them, “Why [is it] that you were trying to find Me?  Had you not seen so as to now know that it continues binding and necessary for Me to be within the midst of the men belonging to My Father (or: to constantly be among the things that pertain to My Father; or: to continue being in union with those things which are My Father)?”  

To think from the Word, we must firstly accept that what it says is true but then work to see how it is true in our own experiences of what it describes with regards to the operation of the Divine in the life of our thoughts and affections, in the life of our mind. But even once we’ve done this and have illustrations of it in our own life and have shared it with our Life Group and have made connections with others’ experiences as being illustrative of our own experiences too – there is still the work of needing to acknowledge that all that is received and seen, both individually and as a collective life group, belongs to the Lord because it is the Lord.  

We see this sphere of acknowledgement of the Lord being the all and all reflected in the third question in the contests of wisdom (Conjugial Love 135-136). On the matter of this question, all defer to those from the region of the east, it being unanimously acknowledged that the question requires deeper insight and that therefore those from the east should unfold it, since they are in the “wisdom of love”. And so, they do, offering a conclusive statement at the end.  

And then as a final gathering of wisdom, all three conclusions from each of the three questions that were placed before the group of men, are combined into a single statement by those from the east.  

Man was created to receive love and wisdom from God, and yet in all likeness as if it were from himself, and this for the sake of reception and conjunction. For this reason he is not born into any love or into any knowledge or even into any power of loving or of being wise from himself. Therefore, if he ascribes all the good of love and all the truth of wisdom to God, he becomes a living man; but if he ascribes them to himself, he becomes a dead man. 

(Conjugial Love 136)

The movements in the contests of wisdom from: all answering the first question, to all needing a principle from which to agree upon in the second question, to only those from the “wisdom of love” answering the third question and then to a final conclusive statement drawn from all three discussions – seems to mirror the movement of how a Life Group unfolds when it meets over the course of its three-round structure. All offer their work in Round One. All look to find a way of drawing together what has been offered into an enhanced image of the Lord, of what is human, in Round Two. And then there is a movement into seeing how what has come to light can be integrated into a better understanding of the experience of the Logopraxis process in Round Three. This process is the Word as the Lord as it moves us through what it offers us over the two-week cycle. It would appear that this final conclusive statement from the contests of wisdom describes the state in which we move out from the group back into daily life. It isn’t something we can often qualify or articulate but there is a shift that has occurred for us and it is in that, that we move back out to practise with and in.  

But like all new skills and modes of thinking there is resistance to change both in our will and loves and also in our understanding.   

And yet they, themselves, did not understand (make flow together) the result of the flow (declaration; gush-effect) which He spoke to them.  

It therefore takes self-compulsion, time and a lot of repetition and hence practise, for it to become integrated and part of a way of being. There is also a benefit to having a space set aside in which we may consciously attempt to practise the spiritual literacy skills and this is one of the purposes of the Logopraxis Life Group. It offers a supportive, closed group environment in which all present are seeking to practise the same skills and it is thus a very different experience when we are attempting to practise these spiritual literacy skills in our day-to-day life. The hope however, is that the ‘muscle memory’ in our minds of what it felt like to practise in our Life Group, will carry through out into our life with others in all that we are engaged in. In other words, we practise remembering to seek the Lord in our Life Group so that we might remember to practise seeking Him throughout the two-week cycle when we are not in our Life Group. And this is the renewed state that we exit our Life Group in. There is a trust that we have been fed and given what we need for the next two weeks and that structures have been put in place to support the ongoing work of the reordering of our thinking and the regeneration of our love and the shift to the Word as the self that we live from. And so, the newly emerging skills accompany us back out into day-to-day life to practise …    

And so He walked back down with them and came into Nazareth, and continued being set in a supportive arrangement for them (or: kept on being subject to and under them).  

His mother also continued carefully watching, noting and keeping all these sayings (gush-effects; results of the flows; declarations; matters) within her heart.

As the final conclusive statement is placed on the table in the contests of wisdom, angels appear and carry the paper to heaven. An affirmation from heaven of the rightness of what was arrived at from the discussion is heard, repeated three times. The men from each of the four regional areas are then given awards presented to them by an angel in the order that they spoke; an opal robe for those in the north, a scarlet robe for those in the west, a hat adorned with gold, pearls and diamonds for those in the south and a wreath of laurel in which are rubies and sapphires for those in the east. The men in heaven then return home to their wives, who come out to meet them. The men are surprised to find that the wives also are adorned with gifts from heaven.  

Adorned with these awards, they all went home from the sport of wisdom; and when they would show themselves to their wives, the latter came out to meet them, they also being distinguished with adornments given them from heaven, whereat the men wondered.

(Conjugial Love 136)

If we, like Jesus’s mother and these men, can place the new truths which we have been gifted with close to our heart and married to our affections for truth in an acknowledgment that they are the Lord, then as we continue to consciously seek to practise the new ways of hearing and reading the Lord in our life, the Word will walk with us in this. If we engage with the Word in this way, with the love of allowing it to speak into our life to direct our daily practice, then the Word will reach out to us with what’s required. 

It is in this way that the living Word as the Lord will continually renew and reform us, drawing us evermore into His goodness and grace. 

And so Jesus kept on cutting a passage forward, making progress in (or: by; with) the Wisdom – as well as in maturity and physical stature – and in (or: by; with) grace and favor, beside God and mankind (or: in the presence of God as well as people).  

 Visit here for The Teacher in the Temple (Part 1)

Conjugial Love 133-136

Second Question 

133. After this they took up the second subject of discussion: WHY IS MAN NOT BORN INTO THE SCIENCE OF ANY LOVE, WHEN YET BEASTS AND BIRDS, BOTH THE NOBLE AND THE IGNOBLE, ARE BORN INTO THE SCIENCES OF ALL THEIR LOVES? First they confirmed the truth of the proposition by various considerations, as, with respect to man, that he is born into no knowledge, not even into the knowledge of conjugial love. And making inquiry, they heard from investigators that an infant cannot apply itself to the mother’s breast from any connate knowledge but must be applied to it by the mother or nurse; that it knows only how to suck, and that it has acquired this from continual suction in the womb; that later, it does not know how to walk; nor how to articulate sound into any human word, nay, nor even how to express by sound the affections of its love, as do beasts; and further, that it does not know any food suitable to itself as do all beasts, but seizes upon whatever is before it, clean or unclean, and puts it into its mouth. The investigators said, that without instruction man does not know even the distinction of sex, and knows absolutely nothing of the modes of loving the sex; and that even maidens and young men, though educated in various sciences, are ignorant of these modes unless they have learned them from others. In a word, that man is born corporeal like a worm, and remains corporeal unless he learns from others how to know, to understand, and to become wise.

[2] They then confirmed the statement that beasts, noble and ignoble, such as animals of the earth, birds of the air, reptiles, fishes, grubs which are called insects, are born into all the sciences of their life’s loves, thus into all that pertain to nourishment, into all that pertain to habitation, into all that pertain to love of the sex and procreation, and into all that pertain to the rearing of their young. This they confirmed by the marvels which they recalled to memory from what they had seen, heard, and read in the natural world–so they called our world in which they had formerly lived–where the beasts are not representative but real.

The truth of the proposition being thus established, they then directed their minds to investigate and discover the ends and causes whereby they might unfold and disclose this arcanum. They all said that such things must needs come from Divine Wisdom, to the end that man may be man and beast; thus that man’s imperfection at birth becomes his perfection, and the beast’s perfection at birth is its imperfection. 

134. Then first, those on the NORTH began to express their mind. They said: “Man is born without knowledges that he may be able to receive knowledges. Were he born into knowledges, he could receive none but those into which he was born, and then he could not himself appropriate any.” This they illustrated by the following comparison: “A man just born is like ground wherein no seeds have been planted but which yet can receive all kinds of seed and bring them forth and make them fruitful; but a beast is like ground already sown, and which, being filled with grasses and herbs, will not receive other seeds than those which have been sown; and if it did, it would choke them. Hence it is that man’s growth to maturity extends through many years, and during these years he can be cultivated like ground and can bring forth, as it were, grains and flowers and trees of every kind; while a beast’s growth extends through but few years, and during these years no other knowledge can be cultivated than that which was connate.”

[2] Those at the WEST spoke next. They said: “Man is not born with knowledge like a beast, but is born an ability and an inclination–an ability to learn and an inclination to love. And he is born an ability, not merely to learn but also to understand and be wise. He is also born a most perfect inclination to love, not only things which are of self and the world, but also those which are of God and of heaven. Consequently, from his parents man is born an organ which at first lives in the external senses alone and in none that are internal; and this, that he may successively become a man, first natural, then rational, and finally spiritual. This he would not become were he born into knowledges and loves like the beasts; for connate knowledges and affections limit that progress, but connate ability and inclination limit nothing. Therefore man can be perfected in science, intelligence, and wisdom to eternity.”
 

[3] Those on the SOUTH then took up the subject and expressed their opinion, saying: “Man cannot possibly acquire any knowledge from himself but must acquire it from others; and being unable to acquire any knowledge from himself, he is also unable to acquire any love, for where there is no knowledge, there is no love. Knowledge and love are inseparable companions and can no more be separated than can will and understanding or affection and thought, yea, no more than essence and form. Therefore, as man acquires knowledge from others, love adjoins itself thereto as its companion. The universal love which adjoins itself is the love of knowing, of understanding, and of being wise. This love, man alone has, and no beast; and it flows in from God.
 

[4] We agree with our companions on the west, that man is not born into any love and thence not into any knowledge, but that he is born only into an inclination to love and thence into an ability to receive knowledge, not from himself but from others, that is, through others. It is said through others because neither have they received any knowledge from themselves but from God. We agree also with our companions on the north, that when first born, man is like ground wherein no seeds have been planted but in which may be planted all kinds of seed, noble as well as ignoble. To this we add, that beasts are born into natural loves and thence into the sciences corresponding thereto. Yet, from these sciences, they do not learn anything, do not think, understand and become wise, but by their means they are carried along by their loves, almost like blind men led through the streets by dogs. As to understanding, they are blind, or rather are like somnambulists who, with their understanding asleep, do what they do from blind science.”
 

[5] Lastly spoke those on the EAST. They said: “We assent to what our brothers have said, that man knows nothing from himself but from others and through others, and this to the end that he may learn and acknowledge that all that he knows, understands, and is wise in, is from God; also that in no other way can man be conceived, born, and brought forth by the Lord and become His image and likeness. For he becomes an image of the Lord by acknowledging and believing that he has received and does receive every good of love and charity, and every truth of wisdom and faith from the Lord, and not the least thing thereof from himself; and he becomes a likeness of the Lord by sensating them in himself as if they were from himself. He has this sensation because he is not born into knowledges but receives them, and what he receives appears to him as if it were from himself. Moreover, it is granted man by the Lord so to sensate, in order that he may be a man and not a beast; for it is by the fact that he wills, thinks, loves, knows, understands, and is wise, as if from himself, that man receives knowledges and exalts them into intelligence and by their uses into wisdom. In this way the Lord conjoins man to Himself and man conjoins himself to the Lord. All this would not be possible had it not been provided by the Lord that man should be born in total ignorance.”
 

[6] After this speech, it was the desire of all that some conclusion be formed from the discussion, and the following was formed: “Man is born into no knowledge, that he may come into all knowledge and may advance into intelligence and by means of intelligence into wisdom. And he is born into no love, that by applications of knowledges from intelligence, he may come into all love, and by love towards the neighbor, into love to the Lord, and so may be conjoined to the Lord, and by this conjunction become a man and live to eternity.” 

Third Question 

135. They then took the paper and read the third subject of discussion, which was, WHAT IS SIGNIFIED BY THE TREE OF LIFE, WHAT BY THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL, AND WHAT BY THE EATING OF THEM? Because this was an arcanum requiring a more profound understanding, they all requested that those who were at the east would unfold it; for those who are at the east are in flamy light, that is, in the wisdom of love, which wisdom is meant by the garden in Eden wherein those two trees were placed. The men at the east then answered, “We will speak; but because man cannot acquire anything whatever from himself but receives all from the Lord, we will speak from Him, but still from ourselves as if of ourselves.”They then said: “A tree signifies man, and its fruit signifies the good of life. By the tree of life, therefore, is meant man living from God, or God living in man. And because love and wisdom, and charity and faith, or good and truth, make the life of God in man, it is these that are signified by the tree of life, and from them man has life eternal. The like is signified by the tree of life in the Apocalypse of which it will be granted man to eat (Revelation 2:7; 22: 2,14).
 

[2] By the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is signified the man who believes that he lives from himself and not from God; thus that love and wisdom, charity and faith, or good and truth, are his own in man and not God’s, believing this because he thinks and wills, and speaks and acts, in all likeness and appearance as if from himself. And because from this belief he persuades himself that God has implanted in him, that is, has infused into him, His own Divine, therefore the serpent said:

God doth know that in the day that ye eat of the fruit of that tree your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:5.
 

[3] By eating of those trees is signified reception and appropriation–by eating of the tree of life, the reception of life eternal, and by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the reception of damnation. Therefore both Adam and his wife were accursed together with the serpent. By the serpent is meant the devil, as to the love of self and the pride of self-intelligence. This love is the possessor of that tree; and men who are in pride from this love are such trees. They, therefore, are in enormous error who believe that Adam was wise and did good from himself, and that this was his state of integrity, when yet Adam was himself accursed on account of that very belief, this being what is signified by his eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, he then fell from the state of integrity in which he had been by virtue of believing that he was wise and did good from God and not at all from himself, this being meant by eating of the tree of life. The Lord alone, when He was in the world, was wise of Himself and did good from Himself, because the Divine itself was in Him and was His from birth. Therefore He became the Redeemer and Savior by His own power.”
 

[4] From this and the preceding discussions, they then formed the following conclusion: “By the tree of life, and by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and by eating from them, is signified that for man life is God in him, and he then has heaven and eternal life; but that death for man is the persuasion and belief that life in man is not God but is himself; whence he has hell and eternal death, which is damnation!” 

136. After this, they looked at the paper left on the table by the angels and saw written at the bottom, “COMBINE YOUR THREE CONCLUSIONS INTO A SINGLE STATEMENT.” They then put the three together and saw that they were in one coherent series, and that this series or statement was as follows: “Man was created to receive love and wisdom from God, and yet in all likeness as if it were from himself, and this for the sake of reception and conjunction. For this reason he is not born into any love or into any knowledge or even into any power of loving or of being wise from himself. Therefore, if he ascribes all the good of love and all the truth of wisdom to God, he becomes a living man; but if he ascribes them to himself, he becomes a dead man.”These words they wrote upon a fresh sheet of paper which they placed upon the table. And lo, suddenly angels were present in a bright white light, and they carried the paper to heaven. After it had been read there, those who were sitting on the seats heard thence the words, thrice repeated, “Well said.” And immediately an angel therefrom was seen as though flying. He had two wings about his feet, and two about his temples, and in his hand he held the awards, which consisted of robes, caps, and wreaths of laurel. After alighting, he gave to those sitting at the north, robes of the color of opal; to those at the west, robes of scarlet; to those at the south, hats, the brims of which were adorned with fillets of gold and pearls, and the risings at the left side with diamonds cut in the form of flowers; and to those at the east, wreaths of laurel in which were rubies and sapphires. Adorned with these awards, they all went home from the sport of wisdom; and when they would show themselves to their wives, the latter came out to meet them, they also being distinguished with adornments given them from heaven, whereat the men wondered. 

As with all spiritual material, the work Heaven and Hell deals with mental structures and processes that we experience as states of mind, that is, our states of thinking and feeling. The term “spirit,” when used by Swedenborg in his writing, means the mind. So, by extension the term “spiritual world” refers to the world of the mind, specifically, to the collective world of the human mind. What Swedenborg wrote is a descriptive account of his direct experience of mental realities as he perceived them through his spiritual senses. We find that the content of these descriptions is not too dissimilar to what we experience through our physical senses in the natural world. The difference between a description of the spiritual or mental world and that of the physical world, is that all things in the Spiritual World are spiritual or mental while those of the physical world are material. To the spiritual senses, the spiritual objects display qualities that are as tangible and real as the material qualities of material objects are to the physical senses.

This is such an important concept to grasp to set the frame for working with the Heaven and Hell text using the Logopraxis approach. Our starting point, from a Logopraxis perspective, is that the world being described in Heaven and Hell is the inner world of our mind. The work we do in Logopraxis is a work that looks to affirm the truth of this through experiencing directly what’s described in the Text for ourselves.

Swedenborg entered the inner landscape of the collective human mind through having his spiritual eyes opened. His entry was by way of changes in his own states of consciousness affirming the truth that everyone, as to their spirit or mind, is in the spiritual world while, as to the body, they are in the natural world. In recounting the “things heard and seen” Swedenborg offers us a psycho-spiritual map that can guide us on our own inner journey. Using the Logopraxis approach we can come to appreciate the Heaven and Hell text in a way that opens up profound insights into the evolution of human consciousness and the laws that govern its organisation and development.

Spiritual work, Logopraxis work, is psychological work in the true sense of the word. It invites us to enter the spiritual world, the world of the psyche or soul and to examine the quality of what passes for our mental life. It is reflective work that involves making what is largely unconscious for us, in our normal everyday functioning, conscious. This requires a new way of looking at things. It requires spiritual sight, or ‘in-sight’. This kind of sight isn’t something mystical but is something highly practical. It is the capacity given to all by the Lord to reflect on the quality of their states of mind with a view to shunning evils as sins against Him.

A key aspect for Swedenborg in having his spiritual eyes opened was that this occurred as he read and studied the Word. When he talks about his spiritual eyes being opened, he’s talking about his understanding and its ability to conceptually grasp spiritual realities. The basis for that kind of in-sight is found in being able to think from spiritual principles offered through the Texts of Divine revelation. When these principles are integrated into the mind, they provide the kind of in-sight that penetrates beyond the natural objects, people and scenes found in a literal reading of the text into what these things represent spiritually within us.

Through the practice of spiritual principles or truths we gain an understanding of spiritual concepts. These re-orientate the mind to seeing natural objects as symbolic representations of spiritual or mental realities. But what do we mean by spiritual or mental realities? These are things like: the structures of our thinking, the beliefs we live from, what we hold to be true and false, what we judge to be good and evil, what we believe ‘love’ to be, what we love, where our affections direct our attention etc. All this belongs to the will and understanding or states of consciousness that constitutes the spiritual dimension of life. And all of this has a much greater impact on our quality of life than the conditions of our external environment have. It is the quality of this spiritual dimension of life and the degree to which it aligns with reality at any given moment, that determines whether our mental life with its thoughts and affections, draws its quality from what is hellish or heavenly.

What we see through Logopraxis, is that this ability to enter the spiritual world described by Swedenborg, is now open to all who are willing to engage with the Word with a view to practicing its principles or truths as the basis for their life. Through their practice, spiritual truths or principles begin to give greater definition to the inner landscape of the mind. We find that these truths shine a light on our states of mind and so give us the ability to discriminate between those thoughts and affections that are beneficial to, and those that are destructive of, our spiritual well-being. This light that truths provide is a conceptual light or a new way of seeing and understanding things that comes from assimilating spiritual concepts through their application to the life of the mind, to our states of mind. When this light is active within our minds it provides in-sight into the state or quality of our affections and thoughts. This light is from the Word or Logos and constitutes the spiritual life of all who willingly receive it. The Word or Logos is spiritual light, it is the Lord, it is how He is experienced by human beings. So, when Swedenborg speaks of his spiritual eyes being opened by the Lord, he is speaking of the impact spiritual concepts, principles, truths and ideas drawn from the Texts of Divine revelation have upon a receptive mind.

Swedenborg describes mental or spiritual realities using the language and imagery that is familiar to what people experience in everyday life in the world. But the imagery with its objects and features is not meant to be taken literally, nor is it meant to be thought of materially. What Swedenborg experienced within his perceptive field and subsequently described in the work Heaven and Hell, he perceived through shifts in his own states of consciousness as he engaged with the Word. Swedenborg, being motivated by love for the Lord from the Lord and the spiritual well-being of humanity, delved deeply into the Word which led him beyond its literal meaning into what is called its spiritual sense.

Logopraxis invites us to engage with Texts of Divine revelation to experience their power to open our awareness to our own states of consciousness – to the spiritual world, here and now. This is the remarkable nature of Divine revelation in the form of Sacred Texts. It has the power to open the mind and direct its course on a journey that leads to our rebirth into a whole new sense of self. The Texts themselves provide the materials into which a new sense of our self can be born if we are willing to engage with them to direct our inner life. Without freely choosing to engage with the Texts to examine the quality of our life in the light of their truths, our minds will remain closed to perceiving their deeper inner contents. But when the Texts are engaged with, with a view to self-examination and the amendment of our life, then they open up more and more to support the processes involved in the regeneration of the human mind.

Through working with the Logopraxis approach we discover that the Texts of Divine revelation are psycho-active. What this means is that the processes described within the Text become active within our own experience and field of perception as we look to apply spiritual principles to the life of our mind. We experience the Text coming alive in us, re-forming our beliefs, and opening new affections through the direct experience of its truths or principles working in our minds. As the structure of our thinking is transformed so too are our values and perspectives. We find that spiritual realities start to take priority over the things of natural life. This change in priorities marks a change in our affections. These kinds of changes, leading to the transformation of our sense of self and so our life, are what the Gospel of John refers to as, “being born again” or “born from above.” (John 3:16) This work of the Text, of the Word within the human mind, is what is meant by the Coming of the Lord – for the Word is the Lord.

This one comes to Him by night, and says to Him, “Rabbi, we have seen and thus know that You are a Teacher having come, and are here, from God, for no one is able to constantly be doing these signs which You are constantly doing, unless God would continue being with him”.  Jesus considered, and replies to him, saying, “Certainly it is so, I am saying to you, unless anyone may be born back up again to a higher place he continues having no power to see or perceive God’s reign, sovereign influence/activity, or kingdom.

John 3: 2-3  (Jonathan Mitchell New Testament)

Here is the full paper titled: The Consummation Of The Age

Yet the Lord said to him

“Go, for he is a choice instrument of Mine,
to bear My name
before both the nations and kings,
besides the sons of Israel,

for I shall be intimating to him how much he must be suffering for My name’s sake.”

(Acts 9:15-16 Concordant Literal Version)

We can’t always produce in the instrument what it is that we are audiating. Sometimes in our mind we can hear the song we want to play but we can’t get our fingers around the instrument quickly enough. Or we can’t seem to find the pitch with our vocal cords to sing it the way it sounds in our head. Or we can’t make our body dance like it’s dancing in the image in our minds.

Sometimes the external life circumstance just isn’t conducive to expressing what the inner life is experiencing in a way that feels congruent.

Sometimes we hear thoughts in our head that we know that we cant express in the moment for various reasons. Sometimes we have feelings that we struggle to even generate thoughts for, let alone words to speak.

I myself have had many times the experience of being in a conversation with another that feels delightful and have had an image in my mind of the bodies dancing. But of course it never quite fits to suddenly stand up and start dancing happily when the two of us are actually sitting quietly and talking.

So whilst the corporeal body is an instrument that allows the spirit to perform its functions in the natural material world, it doesn’t always allow them to perform them as an exact replica of what the inner world within us is experiencing.

Here is a passage from Arcana Coelestia 5146(2) that speaks to this experience:

Nevertheless no one can have a mental grasp of the relationship of what is interior to what is exterior unless he knows about degrees, regarding which see 3691, 4154, 5114, 5145.

Man has no other notion of what is interior and consequently more perfect than the ever increasing purity of something the more one breaks it down. But greater purity and greater grossness can exist simultaneously in one and the same degree, owing not only to the expanding and condensing of it but also to the limitation of it and to the introduction of similar or else dissimilar elements into it.

With an idea such as that regarding his interiors, man cannot possibly do other than think that exterior things are attached in a continuous manner to interior ones, and so act entirely as one with them.

But if a proper idea regarding degrees is formed, one may grasp how interior and exterior things are distinct and separate from one another,

so distinct that interior things can come into being and remain in being without exterior ones,

whereas exterior things can never do so without interior ones.

One may also grasp the nature of the correspondence of interior things within exterior ones, as well as the way in which the exterior things can represent interior ones.

This explains why, other than hypothetically, the learned are unable to examine the question regarding the interaction of the soul and the body. Indeed it also explains why many of them believe that life belongs intrinsically to the body, and thus that when their body dies their interiors will die too since these are closely attached to the body.

But in actual fact only the exterior degree dies; the interior degree survives and goes on living.

I pondered for quite a while on one of the statements that was imbedded in this passage…

that interior things can come into being and remain in being without exterior ones, whereas exterior things can never do so without interior ones.

It brought up so many questions for me. It sounded like it was saying that a good could exist without a truth but the truth couldn’t exist without it’s good because the truth is that which the expresses what is interior  … the truth is the manifestation of its good.

But how can we have an experience of there being good present but no truth?

And then I realised that this is a state that we do experience in spiritual work. When we are in states of devastation and temptations it’s like having the truth stripped away from its good. Because the truth that we have been believing or living in up until now, is suddenly on shaky ground and in question.

And then I also realised that this was describing the same state of incongruence that I was thinking about earlier in relation to the body being the instrument for the spirit. And we see this beautifully represented in the death of the material body as it passes over into the spiritual world. And that idea was also referenced in the passage above.

Indeed it also explains why many of them believe that life belongs intrinsically to the body, and thus that when their body dies their interiors will die too since these are closely attached to the body.

But in actual fact only the exterior degree dies; the interior degree survives and goes on living.

Our physical material body dies and then when we awaken in the spiritual world we find that we have a spiritual body there instead. And all the while the interiors of our spirits have remained and survived and continue to go on living.

This in itself is a beautiful presentation of spiritual process. The passing of the physical body into the spiritual world and the taking on of a spiritual exterior body with the spirit remaining the same, is a beautiful presentation or re-presentation or if you like representation, of how spiritual processes work. Of how the Word works in our mind as it reforms us, as it reforms our mind and offers us a new ‘mind’ in which to see the expressions of our thoughts and affections. It offers us a new body in which the spirit can live.

In respect to his interiors every man is a spirit.

Whoever duly considers the subject can see that as the body is material it is not the body that thinks, but the soul, which is spiritual.

The soul of man, upon the immortality of which many have written, is his spirit, for this as to everything belonging to it is immortal.

This also is what thinks in the body, for it is spiritual, and what is spiritual receives what is spiritual and lives spiritually, which is to think and to will. Therefore, all rational life that appears in the body belongs to the soul, and nothing of it to the body; for the body, as just said, is material, and the material, which is the property of the body, is added to and apparently almost joined to the spirit, in order that the spirit of man may be able to live and perform uses in the natural world, all things of which are material and in themselves devoid of life.

And as it is the spiritual only that lives and not the material, it can be seen that whatever lives in man is his spirit, and that the body merely serves it, just as what is instrumental serves a moving living force.

An instrument is said indeed to act, to move, or to strike; but to believe that these are acts of the instrument, and not of him who acts, moves, or strikes by means of the instrument, is a fallacy. (Heaven and Hell 432)

And who is responsible for the acting, moving or striking? The Lord is. He is life Itself.

So what about the incongruence? What about the states of incongruence or if you like the states of ”not real” correspondences.

We say they aren’t ‘real’ because what we are experiencing internally doesn’t seem to be finding a meaningful expression in our exterior day-to-day life of speech and movement in the material world. The reality of what is inner is seemingly incongruent to what is outer. And I think that the states of when we experience real delight are those rare moments of congruence – of real correspondences for us. Of when we feel like there is a marriage between what we are experiencing within our spirit and what is being expressed in the exterior material body, whether it’s through speech or song or body movement or something that we are creating.

However, this can be twofold because when we are in moments of expressing a negative emotion like anger or sorrow it is still in congruence with what is within but we then identify it as a delight that doesn’t belong to the Lord. But it is still a state of what we would call a real correspondence because it’s congruent, as what is within is being truly re-presented in an external body expression.

Of course the desire is to be in states of delight that are of the Lord. And the desire is to be in states that feel congruent – that feel real. More often than not in spiritual work though we are being led into facing states of incongruence and then being asked to stay in the tension of seeing that. Of seeing that what we are thinking or feeling isn’t in a marriage or in a real correspondence with what we are expressing or moving with in the natural material world manifestations.

But I’m reminded again of the principle that was stated earlier. That it is the Lord who is the one who does the seeing, the acting, the moving and striking. It has to be if we are to have any hope of seeing things clearly because we are also reminded that the light of the material physical world is not the light of truth but that it instead needs to be viewed and ruled by it. It needs to be ruled by spiritual principles, from Divine truth that is not us. From something other than ourselves.

In the human being there exist derivatives from the understanding part that dwells in the light of heaven; and they extend to the senses which dwell in the light of the world. Unless these derivatives existed the senses could not possess any life of a human quality. A person does not owe the life which his senses possess to what he sees by the light of the world, for the light of the world holds no life within it; he owes it to what he sees by the light of heaven, for this light does hold life within it.

When the light of heaven falls on the perceptions a person has gained by the light of the world, it brings life to them and enables him to see objects in an intelligent manner, and thus as a human being. In this way a person possessing factual knowledge born from things which he has seen and heard in the world, and therefore from those which have entered in through the senses, comes to possess intelligence and wisdom, on which in turn he bases his public, private, and spiritual life. (Arcana Coelestia 5114[2])

So what does this mean in terms of our states of feeling incongruence between what is inner and what is outer? Well it says here that what is lower needs to be viewed from what is higher. That it is the light of heaven, which is the Lord, that is able to offer us perceptions and true intelligence on what it is we are seeing in the material world because the material world understanding is based in the senses, it is based in what is one’s own rather than what is the Lord.

We are reminded that the work is to seek the Lord. To look for the Lord in every moment and every situation and especially so in states that don’t make sense to us. In states were there is dissonance and incongruence. And where there is a struggle to live with that conflict.

Traditionally, if I had asked this question the answer I would have been given would be something along the lines of…. “The Lord always has the end in view. Just remember that His plan for you is that you will be an angel in heaven one day and that despite how difficult things seem for you now, it is all part of his plan.  You need to have faith in that and keep moving forward.”

And whilst this is true, there are states present with me that jump up and down and get frustrated at this answer. These states want application NOW in the work. They want to see the Lord NOW, not to be told to wait; to be told to put my faith in an outcome that is somewhere far off in the future.

And so it seems as though there needs to be a re-forming of the way things are viewed, of the framework in which things are being looked at – because this answer doesn’t make sense to me any more.

Let’s start with the end in view … what is the end?

The end isn’t an outcome; the end is always the Lord.

Holding the end in view isn’t about holding where we are going in a linear time-based fashion, it’s about holding the Lord in our view in all that we do. It’s about seeing that the process that we are in is actually the Lord. It’s about seeing that everything that we are in, is the experience of the Lord, whether it be struggle or delight or sorrow or anger or states of congruence or states of incongruence.

A gentle and thoughtful spirit recently reached out and offered me a little book containing the thoughts of a Carmelite monk, Brother Lawrence, written all the way back in the seventeenth century. It is tilted The Practice of the Presence of God.  And he speaks about this “end in view” idea too…

“We must, during all our labour and in all else we do, even in our reading and writing, holy though both may be – I say more, even during our formal devotions, and spoken prayers – pause for some short moment, as often indeed as we can, to worship God in the depth of our heart, to savour him, though it be but in passing, and as it were by stealth.

Since you are not unaware that God is present before you whatever you are doing, that he is at the depth and centre of your soul why not then pause from time to time at least from that which occupies you outwardly even from your spoken prayers, to worship him inwardly, to praise him, petition him, to offer him your heart and thank him?” (page 69).

“Give your attention to keeping your mind in the presence of the Lord. If it wanders and withdraws at times, do not be disturbed. To trouble the mind serves more often to distract than to recall it. The will must call it back quietly.” (page 50).

It is seemingly simple advice. If we notice that there are states that aren’t of the Lord present, then notice them …. and move on. The longer we linger with them, the more ownership we give to them. And no amount of lament and anxiety about the fact that we have been in those states is going to change the states as they are. The hellish proprium is evil and falsity and that cannot be changed. Brother Lawrence knew this too:

When we undertake the spiritual life, we must bear in mind who we are, and we shall realise that we are worthy of all scorn, unworthy of the name of Christian, subject to all manner of tribulations, to troublesome circumstances beyond number, which make us uneven in health, moods and disposition of heart and of behaviour, in a word people whom God desires to bring low by countless trials and travail as much within as without. (page 67).

Again, this is a seemingly simple acknowledgement of what we would be without the Lord in our life, without goodness and truth. But even Brother Lawrence submits that stepping back from the ownership of the states that present as dissonant is difficult, that it is indeed work.

In the matter of this inner gaze, special care must be taken that it comes out before, be it but momentarily, your outer actions, that at times it goes with them, and that you end them all in like manner. Since it takes time and much toil to acquire this practice, so one must not be disturbed when one fails, for the habit does not form save with trouble, so when it is established it can give great joy.

Is it not right that the heart, which comes first to life, which is lord over the rest of the body’s members, should be both the first and the last to love and worship God, both in beginning and ending what we do in the spirit and the flesh, and generally throughout all the processes of life?

And it is here that we must take care to ensure this small looking within, an exercise, as I have said, not without the toil and trouble which facilitates it. (page 75).

In many ways it is a practice…. that we just need to practise. That we just need to put ourselves in the situations of having to apply truths, to apply the Word in our life, because even just by doing that, things will shift. He points out the obvious … that we can’t expect to know the Lord unless we make an attempt to get to know Him.

You would tell me that I am always saying the same thing to you. It is true, and I do not know a better and easier means than that. And since I practice no other, I urge it upon everybody.

We must know before we love, and to know God we must often think of him. And when we love him we shall think of him all the more, for our heart is where our treasure is. Let us often think about it, and think about it well.(page 52).

So it’s about being in the work, in the practice of truth, in the practice of the Word and coming to see that that is the Lord.  That being in the process of the work, of the practice of the Word, is how we come to know the Lord. That every moment we are conscious of being in the process is a moment of being conscious of the Lord, and hence the end then, the Lord…  is in our view.

Ask yourself …

What am I being offered here?

What am I being asked to see?

What am I being asked to know?

The answer won’t necessarily take away the struggle or the pain of being in the tension of states of incongruence, or even move us through them more quickly, but it will open up new ways to hold them.  And that is the transformation. That is the reformation of our mind that the Word offers us. If everything is seen as process then things become fluid rather than static.  And every moment then is an opportunity to celebrate the Lord, even if the state isn’t one of rejoicing or one that feels harmonious.

If we are willing to lose our exterior understanding of the Lord and be offered a new way of understanding Him, then the spirit that is within, that loves the Lord in abundance and grace from the depths of its soul, will be offered a new body to live in.

One that is eternal and lives forever,
One that rests in the transformative love of His Word,
One that lives as an instrument of His truth.

But we all with our face having been unveiled,

having beheld the glory of the Lord in a mirror,

are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory,

as from the Lord Spirit.

(2 Corinthians 3:18 CLV)

Extra References

Conjugial Love 310

It is evident, therefore, that as the mind is, such are the words of the mouth and such the deeds of the body.

From this the conclusion follows, that by continual influx, the mind instigates the body to activities conformable and synchronous with itself.

Therefore, inwardly regarded, the bodies of men  are nothing else than forms of their minds organized outwardly to effect the behests of the soul.

The above is premised that it may be perceived whence it is that minds or spirits must first be united with each other as in a marriage before there is unition as to the body  also;

and this, in order that marriages may be marriages of the spirit when they become marriages of the body; consequently, that married partners may love each other from the spirit and thence in the body .

[2] With these premises, let us now look at marriage. When conjugial love conjoins the minds of two and forms them into a marriage, it also conjoins and forms their bodies for that marriage; for, as was said, the form of the mind is also interiorly the form of the body, with the sole difference that the latter is outwardly organized for bringing into effect that to which the interior form of the body is determined by the mind. But the mind which has been formed by reason of conjugial love is not only inwardly present in the whole body USE and its every part, but in addition is inwardly present in the organs devoted to generation , which are situated in their own region below the other regions of the body.

With those who are united in conjugial love, the forms of their minds terminate in these organs; consequently, the affections and thoughts of their minds are determined thither. In this respect, it is different with the activities of minds arising from other loves, for these do not reach thus far. From this comes the conclusion, that according to the nature of the conjugial love in the minds or spirits of two, such is it interiorly in these its organs. That after the wedding the marriage of the spirit becomes also a marriage of the body  and thus complete, is self-evident.

Consequently, that if the marriage in the spirit is chaste and partakes of the holiness of marriage, it is likewise chaste when in its fullness in the body; and the reverse, if the marriage in the spirit is unchaste.

Conjugial Love 148

Implanted in every man from creation and thence by birth is an internal conjugial and an external conjugial. The internal is spiritual and the external natural. Man comes first into the latter, and he comes into the former as he becomes spiritual. If therefore he remains in the external or natural conjugial, the internal or spiritual conjugial is being veiled over until at last he knows nothing of it, yea, and calls it a vain idea.

But if man becomes spiritual, then he begins to know something of it, and later to have some perception of its nature, and successively to feel its pleasantness, its delights, and its delightsomeness; and as this takes place, the above-mentioned veiling between the external and the internal begins to grow thin, then, as it were, to melt away, and finally, to dissolve and disappear.

When this comes to pass, the external conjugial does indeed remain, but it is being continually purged and purified of its dregs by the internal, and this until the external becomes, as it were, the face of the internal and derives its delight and at the same time its life and the delights of its potency from the blessedness which is in the internal. Such is the renunciation of whoredoms by which the chastity of marriage comes into existence.

[2] It may be thought that the external conjugial which remains after the internal has separated itself from it, or it from itself, is the same as the external not separated. But I have heard from angels that they are so entirely unlike, that the external from the internal, which they called the external of the internal, is devoid of all lasciviousness, inasmuch as the internal cannot be lascivious but can be delighted only chastely; and that it carries the like into its external wherein it feels its own delights.

It is wholly otherwise with the external separated from the internal. This, they said, is lascivious in its whole and in every part. They compared the external conjugial from the internal to a noble fruit whose pleasant savor and fragrance insinuate themselves into its surface and form this into correspondence with themselves.

[3] They also compared the external conjugial from the internal to a granary whose store never diminishes, what is taken from it being constantly restored anew.

But the external separated from the internal, they compared to wheat in a winnower, which, if it is scattered about, there remains only chaff, which is dissipated by the wind. Such is the case with conjugial love unless what is scortatory is renounced.

Doctrine Of Life 10

Goods from God, and goods from self, may be compared to gold.

Gold that is gold from the inmost, called pure gold, is good gold.

Gold alloyed with silver is also gold, but is good according to the amount of the alloy.

Less good still is gold that is alloyed with copper.

But a gold made by art, and resembling gold only from its color, is not good at all, for there is no substance of gold in it.
There is also what is gilded, such as gilded silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, and also

gilded wood and gilded stone, which on the surface may appear like gold; but not being such, they are valued either according to the workmanship, the value of the gilded material, or that of the gold which can be scraped off.

In goodness these differ from real gold as a garment differs from a man.

Moreover rotten wood, dross, or even ordure, may be overlaid with gold; and such is the gold to which pharisaic good may be likened.