The Lord’s Designs On Our Life

And I Myself, indeed, will discipline you sevenfold for your sins.

You will eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters shall you eat.

I will exterminate your fane heights, cut down your incense stands and bestow your corpses upon the corpses of your idol clods;

thus My soul will loathe you.

I will turn your cities into a desert and make your sanctuary desolate; I shall not smell your fragrant odour.

I will make the land so desolate, that your enemies, the ones dwelling in it, will be dejected over it.

(Leviticus 26:28-32)

Spiritual freedom isn’t dependent on our external life conditions. In fact, the external life conditions are what offer an opportunity for spiritual freedom to be known because it is the external landscape that we live in which provides grounding for us in which to experience the Divine. When seen like this, it isn’t the life circumstances themselves that are what the focus is but rather what our responses are and what arises from the responses. These are an opportunity to become more conscious of what our internal or our true loves are and to become more open to the truths that we are working with in the Word.

However, if the external life conditions are what we have been provided with, this does then raise the question as to whether they have been specifically chosen for us by the Lord. What then flows from this is the idea that everything that happens to us must therefore be part of the Lord’s plan or secret design in bringing us into the unique use that we are to become in the Grand Man, in heaven.

And if we take this line of thought to be an absolute truth, then everything that we experience in life is coming from the hand of a conscious God that is calculating and measuring our spiritual states and adjusting what is provided for us accordingly. In this sense, the Lord then becomes the manager of our life.

And if this is an absolute truth then do we actually have any say or control of our life at all?

Are we not then just mechanically or robotically being moved in and out of different spiritual states but with the sensation that we are doing it ourselves and the feeling that we are experiencing the states ‘as if of self’?

Herein lies the trouble with the finite mind.

It tries to understand the Lord within its finite concepts. If the experience is that we are moving in an out of states of desolation and despair and feeling like there is no hope; that the land that we have built our beliefs on has been destroyed, whilst at the same time we are living in the belief that the Lord is managing our spiritual states, then it begs the question….

Why are we being put through these awful experiences?
Why is He asking us to endure them?

And likewise why are we at other times being given land that is blossoming and fruitful and full of joy when our neighbour is experiencing the opposite?

I will give peace in the land, and you will lie down with no one making you tremble;

I will eradicate the vicious animal from the land, and no sword shall pass through your land. You will pursue your enemies, and they will fall before you by the sword;”  five of you will pursue a hundred, and a hundred of you shall pursue a myriad, and your enemies will fall before you by the sword.

I will countenance you, make you fruitful, increase you and confirm My covenant with you. You will eat stored stores and bring forth the stores in view of the new.

I will put My tabernacle in your midst,

and My soul shall not loathe you.

I will walk about in your midst and will be your Elohim and you, you shall be My people.

(Leviticus 26:6-12)

And so we fall back to the faith that we have all been given as a child or in a child-like state; that it’s all within the Lord’s Providence and he has it in hand. Our job isn’t to question, our job is to do our best to work with what we are given and stay open to what the Lord is asking of us. To trust and have faith and believe.

So, we do our best but inevitably we have states that are challenging and although it may not feel like the Lord has completely left us, it certainly becomes difficult to reconcile what our hearts know of the Lord and what we are understanding in regards to what is in front of us. Sometimes finding the connection between our heart and mind, between our affections and thoughts, our loves and the truth … feels insurmountable.

But this is part of the process of the new will and the new life it brings, trying to find a place to make its home in us as the old will and its life are pushed to the periphery or if you like, fall away…

But they who are being regenerated do not learn such truths simply as memory-knowledges, but as life, for they do these truths; but that they do them is from the beginning of the new will which the Lord insinuates entirely without their knowledge; and insofar as they receive of this new will, so far they receive of these knowledges, and bring them into act, and believe them;
but insofar as they do not receive of the new will, so far they are indeed capable of learning such things, but not of bringing them into act, because they care merely for memory-knowledge, and not for life.
This is the state of infancy and childhood in respect to the new life which is about to succeed in place of the former life; (Arcana Coelestia 3701{5,6})

Sometimes we just don’t want to wait for childhood to pass into adulthood. We don’t want to wait for the time of peace that we have been promised. We want it now. We don’t want to endure missing those people that we love, we don’t want to see others being hurt and we don’t want to see the nasty presence of the hellish proprium, with it’s unpleasant thoughts and intent to harm what is of the Lord. They don’t feel nice and they don’t look nice and they are an anti-delight to experience.

Sometimes it’s subtle and sometimes it’s outrageously evil and the greater the delight of the Lord that is present, the more offensive and hurtful the opposite seems. And quite rightly so…

In the degree that he feels delight in this good, and pleasantness in these truths, he has a feeling of what is undelightful in the evils of his former life, and of what is unpleasing in its falsities;

and the result is that a separation takes place of the things which are of the former will and the former understanding from the things that are of the new will and the new understanding; and this not in accordance with the affection of knowing such things, but in accordance with the affection of doing them. (Arcana Coelestia 3701{7})

There’s nothing robotic or mechanical or non-life like about feelings of delight and undelight…

But the Divine doesn’t have feelings and doesn’t have thoughts and isn’t a conscious being that is moving us like chess pieces across the board to make sure we align with the ‘right’ path. That’s our finite mind trying to make sense of it when we forget that nothing about the Divine can be said except what it isn’t.

It isn’t finite.
It isn’t a conscious being having to make decisions and weigh up possibilities.
It doesn’t manage us.

Because inherent in all of those ideas is the implication that to manage us consciously would require the Lord having to withhold according to assessments and judgements.
But influx doesn’t withhold.
Influx is all.
It just IS.
It IS Inflow.
It flows as THE consciousness.

The only reason it appears to self-reference is that this appearance appears when our finite minds look to it. It offers us a something in which to approach what is not nothing.

Communication, and the consequent conjunction, cannot be predicated of the Lord’s Divine Itself, and of His Divine Human, unless at the same time they are said to be infinite and eternal;

for in the Lord all is infinite and eternal;
infinite in respect to being,
and eternal in respect to manifestation.

(Arcana Coelestia 3701)

And hence we, as finite receptions, are expressions of being and manifestation which is why we are a gift to each other…  because we each allow an expression and manifestation of His life for the other and of course an opportunity to see what isn’t His life too.

So the experience is that the Lord is sometimes providing more and sometimes providing less. And sometimes offering us a land that is plentiful and fruitful and other times unleashing His wrath and destroying it.

For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed;

but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed,

saith the LORD that hath mercy on thee.

(Isaiah 54:10)

…. but these are all just spiritual states. The Word describes the myriads of spiritual states for us, like a series of affections and thoughts being expressed through the correspondences of the words that have been chosen. Yet even those words that have been chosen and the way they are received in the spiritual associations with them, are dependent on the finite vessel that is reading the Word and experiencing it in the moment. We all know how a passage can feel and be heard differently from one day to another or from one moment to another.

For the mountains shall remove, and the hills shall slip,

yet My kindness from you shall not remove, and the covenant of My welfare shall not slip,

says your Compassionate One, Yahweh.”

(Isaiah 54:10 Concordant Literal Version)

So it’s not that we are being managed or really truly even guided but these are concepts that allow us to express the experience of the process of having our life in the Lord unfold. And it’s important to have the words, to have a grounding for this, just as it’s important to have the experiences in our life that inspire the words in us to express it. Because it manifests life through us, it manifests the Lord for others.

That sounds like heaven to me…
Each of us offering a unique use of an expression of His love.

So yes the soul of the Lord will destroy and loathe you.
And then It will not.

And you may know that it may feel this way at times but truth be told, it’s just the resistance of self that loathes what it is not and can never be. That in actuality the soul is the Lord and it is not nothing, it is Being and Manifestation.

And in finite terms, I think that means it’s the delight of life and its expression.

Jubilate, O heavens!
And exult, O earth!
Crash, O mountains, into jubilation!
And the hills into righteousness!

For Yahweh is comforting His people,
and on His humble is He having compassion.”

(Isaiah 49:13 CLV)

Consequently the man then sees that the truths of his infancy were relatively inverted, and that the same had been by little and little brought back into a different order, namely, to be inversely subordinate, so that those which at first were in the prior place are now in the posterior place;
thus that by those truths which were the truths of his infancy and childhood, the angels of God had ascended as by a ladder from earth to heaven;

but afterwards, by the truths of his adult age, the angels of God descended as by a ladder from heaven to earth.

(Arcana Coelstia 3701)