Selections from Theistic
Psychology by Leon James
Which is online at:
www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic
That I Summarized in My
Report 2
Which is online at: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leon/459s2006/jones/jones-459-g24-report2.htm
Selections for Question 1:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#new-will-ds
(a.) evolution of consciousness: Eventually everyone born in that race inherited this tendency and involvement with cults and all sorts of false obsessions. This celestial race was therefore extinguished and a new evolution of consciousness began with a new race which was spiritual, not celestial. That's us. The celestial race had a unitary mind so that the affective and cognitive organs could not operate separately. This was reflected by correspondence in the structure of their brain which was unitary, while our race has split-brain--right and left. This physical structure reflects the new split in function between the affective and cognitive organs of the mind. People born with the old inherited racial will now were required to undergo a process called "regeneration." Through this process God slowly and progressively builds a "new will" by means of temptations in which we battle against old loves by using the weapons of the understanding. God gives us a conscience, which is an inner voice in our consciousness that flows in from Divine Speech. Along with the inner oral voice of Divine Speech through conscience, God also gives an external written voice of Divine Speech through Sacred Scripture in a natural language. God does not speak to us directly, either in an inner voice or an external voice, as took place with the celestial race. With our spiritual race direct communication with God is shut down, except in the case of a few people, as recorded in the Old and New Testaments, and in the case of Swedenborg. The reason has been discussed in several places in relation to sensuous vs. rational consciousness. To summarize: If God were to talk to us in our mind directly, we would no longer be able to maintain the as-of self appearance and we would lose all spiritual freedom, hence all salvation and all heaven. Instead, the only road upward to our heaven is a rational consciousness because heaven is a rational destination or state of mind. Sometimes pious or evangelical people say that God spoke to them and said this or that. We are not to interpret this as God speaking to them directly and saying words that you can quote.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#(VIII)Divine-Speech-Descends
(b.) discrete degrees: All this is to indicate that God orders the universe by discrete degrees. The existence of this order was revealed for the first time in the Writings Sacred Scripture. It is the foundation stone for theistic science in general, not just for theistic psychology. God manages all events through a downward series of discrete degrees that correspond. In Diagram A above several discrete degrees are shown: (1) Divine Human, (2) Spiritual Sun (heat and light as one), (3) Divine Love going forth (Good, Power), (4) Divine Truth going forth (Rationality, Wisdom), (5) Affective organ in spiritual mind, (6) Cognitive organ in spiritual mind, (7) Affective organ in natural mind, (8) Cognitive organ in natural mind and (9) Physical body and world. Each higher discrete degree is "within" the next lower discrete degree. From this you can see that God is "within" all the subsequent discrete degrees. God is "within" your mind, and "within" your body, and "within" every natural object or cause-effect event. From this non-spatial meaning of "within" you can see that God is "within" every thing, though He is not in anything spatially. If you think of god being spatially everywhere, then you must think of God as some force or energy. Force, energy, space, God -- would be all physical. One force within another, as we are used to with natural objects and their constituents. To retain a rational idea of the Divine Human Person's omnipotence and omnipresence, we must think of discrete degrees, and that God determines and manages events from "within" them. Just as you determine and manage events in your dream or novel from "within" the dream, or "within" the novel, namely, by causation and intention. God is omnipresent by being "within" each degree. The rational concept of discrete degrees allows to see how a Person can be "within" another person, as when people say that God is "within" you. Without discrete degrees to think of, the expression "God is within me" can only be taken as metaphorical. If taken in reality, then God cannot be a Person in our mind. Hence we need the concept of discrete degrees to allow God to be a Person, and omnipresent.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#Need_God
(c.) substantive dualism: God is defined as the Supreme Being who is the perfect, omniscient, omnipotent, good, wise, Creator of the universe, and further, that He is the object of worship in all religions. A Being who is good and wise must be a Person, which the dictionary defines as "human individual." This shows that since God is a Person, He must be Human, in other words, Divine Human. God is the Divine Human Person in whose "image" human beings have been created by God. We are called humans, while animals are not. What's the difference? Human beings are born dual citizens. At birth our mind or spirit is born in the world os spirits while our physical body is born in the natural world. The two are interconnected by the functional laws of correspondences (see Section xx). The physical body in the natural world grows along with the mental body in the world of spirits. The two are perfectly connected by interdependent action. The mind contains the affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor organs constructed out of spiritual substances from the Spiritual Sun shining forth in the world of spirits. The physical body contains the corresponding circulatory system (affective), respiratory system (cognitive), and nervous system (sensorimotor) constructed out of physical substances from the natural sun shining forth in our galaxy. This perspective is called substantive dualism. At birth we come into possession of two bodies, one temporary, the other permanent and eternal. The temporary body is the physical body made of matter that is tied to time and space. The eternal body is the mind or spirit made of spiritual ether which contains substances from the Spiritual Sun. The physical body is made of matter originating in the natural sun or star, while the spiritual body or spirits is made of substance originating in the Sun of the spiritual world. This perspective is called substantive dualism.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#(I)_Mental_Biology_
(d.) Mental Biology: The reality of mental biology can be observed when you consider how you move your eyes to look around, or your legs to stand and walk. Let’s say you are reading this and at one point you decide to reread the sentence, and your eyes spontaneously move back to the beginning of the sentence, then move forward again. What controls these eye movements?
We can say in a general way that it is you, the person, the self, who is moving the eyes. True. But more specifically, we can say that it is our thinking operations in the cognitive organ and our motivational operations in the affective organ, when acting together, that are then moving the eyes, or the legs, hands, or throat and tongue while talking. There is therefore a connection that must exist between our mental operations of thinking or intending, and the operations of the physical body. This operational connection between the mental and the physical worlds can be called symbiosis. The symbiotic connection between mental states and the physical world is part of human biology. Swedenborg reports that a single idea, when we are in our mental heavens, would take volumes to describe with the ideas and words we have in our natural mind. As soon as we are resuscitated, we begin conscious life in the eternity of our spiritual mind (see Section xx). At that moment we automatically and spontaneously talk like all "spirits" who already inhabit eternity. This is a thought-language rather than a word-language such as we use with natural languages. You've heard the expression "a picture is worth a thousand words." Now you can say that an expression or concept in our spiritual mind is worth a trillion words in our natural mind. In a similar way Diagram A creates a single spiritual-natural concept, and it would take many pages of theistic psychology to write this spiritual concept out in the words of English."
But because we are capable of thinking rationally and abstractly in our conscious natural mind, we can study the Diagram and gradually piece together an understanding of it. Once you have this knowledge organized in a coherent and personally meaningful way, you can look at the Diagram and encompass it in its entirety in one spiritual-natural concept that you could call "mental biology."
Level 1 is to be able to replicate the diagram in its essential features so that you have it in long term memory, and then to be able to create a rational explanation or account of its elements and how they fit together. This level is achieved by students in theistic psychology after a course of study and reading, and are able to pass a quiz or exam on it. Or by any reader of theistic psychology who studies it as an academic or scientific discipline. At this level it is difficult to tell whether a person is approaching this with the negative or positive bias. Level 2 progresses to the positive bias, but not yet at the scientific level. In other words, in relation to the elements in Diagram A, we believe that there is a God, that we have an affective organ and a cognitive organ, that there is heaven and hell and eternity, but we are not yet sure that this diagram, representing Swedenborg's version of things, is necessarily it, and we feel that this may just be another opinion or belief, even if interesting and possibly inspired and accurate. Level 3 progresses to the theistic psychology phase of thinking about the Diagram. This thinking about Diagram A operates by seeing the diagram as a natural-rational representation of Divine Speech (see Section xx). The instant that you make this idea real in your mind, you will experience its spiritual-natural meaning. You will then be able to see the expression "mental biology" and see its spiritual meaning with full conscious awareness.
All concepts in theistic psychology are understood at these three levels, and only the third level is actually the level of theistic psychology thinking and reasoning. This third level is genuine and holy, because it is spiritually online, so to speak, not natural. Hence it is Divine, and everything that is of the Divine, is called holy. In other words, it is the Divine Psychologist that has to give you the spiritual-natural perception of Divine Speech, as it is encapsulated or represented in Diagram A. This is why I say that it is "online" as it were, since the spiritual-natural perception of Divine Speech is an influx from the Spiritual Sun into our natural mind, passing through layers of intermediate states.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#new-will-ds
(e.) Divine Speech: Now that the Divine Human has revealed the secrets of Divine Speech through the Writings, humanity has entered its fully adult state of evolution (see Section xx). This means that we now have the scientific rationality and empiricism to be able to discuss the true reality of the universe, why God has created it, what our special individual roles are in it, how it all works together, by what principles they are managed through Divine Providence and infinite Love and Wisdom (see Section xx). These are just some of the endless things that have been revealed are being revealed ceaselessly through Divine Speech. Theistic psychology is one of the first new disciplines to emerge from it, but there are others (see for instance the theistic physics developed by Dr. Ian Thompson and available at his TheisticScience.org Web site. Specific references to his articles will be found in the Readings Section (Volume 18). Divine Speech is tied to mental biology. Our affective and cognitive organs are constructed out of the substances of the Spiritual Sun, which are love (spiritual heat) and truth (spiritual light). They are therefore receptor organs for spiritual heat and light. They are activated by this Divine influx from the Spiritual Sun and it is this that forms their rationality and immortality, hence their humanness. By rationality is meant both the affective and the cognitive organs working together as one unit or system. This is what forms heaven and hell in the mind
Selections for Question 3:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#reformation
(a.) Regeneration: Regeneration is the central issue in theistic psychology. Without regeneration there is eternal hell and with regeneration there is eternal heaven. Given that we are born immortal human beings what can be more important to us than regeneration? We discussed above that regeneration begins in adulthood and continues lifelong, and beyond. Regeneration is a word frequently used in Sacred Scripture, especially in the New Testament and the Writings. Little details are offered in the literal sense of the New Testament and the bulk of what has been revealed about it is in the literal meaning of the Writings. In the future much more will be known about regeneration when extractive research recovers the scientific revelations that lay hidden in the literal sense of Divine Speech. And so the Divine Psychologist uses wanderings to cure us of our inherited obsessions until He can bring us to Himself, through His Divine Speech or Sacred Scripture. In this we find the absolute dualities we have been running away from, and now we can accept them, and wonder of wonder, begin to love them. This insures that our regeneration will be successful since when we love the truth of Sacred Scripture we are restored to state of innocence, hence obedience with gladness. We are then willingly induced to cooperate with the Divine Psychologist. Our mission: To learn to reject the evil enjoyments and to abhor them. As we do this, and to the extent that we do, the Divine Psychologist implants the new proprium, the good will, the fresh thoughts, the good of blessedness and charity.
This transformation process is called regeneration and involves temptations (see Section xx). Temptations bring our ruling love out of the background command into the foreground executor. We cannot deny it or ignore it. It's in our face and putting tremendous pressure on us to act in accordance with its satisfaction. This mental stress or conflict can sometimes be experienced as extreme and devastating. The deeper the hellish love that comes out in the temptation experience, the more we are shocked and challenged to approve or disapprove, and to go along or to fight like hell to resist it. This is a subjective experience. In fact, as revealed in the Writings, we have zero power to oppose the furious hells attacking us, grabbing hold of us, wanting desperately to make us part of them. They succeed if we give in, stop resisting, and let ourselves enjoy the evil, and finally loving it so that we look for it again, anticipate it, and are willing to abuse self and others in order to keep getting it. But when we resist in the Name of God, we are given as-if our own power to resist, and desist, and finally to hold the experience in aversion and disgust.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#new-will
(b.) New will: If you have a "new will" you are quite pleased at this point to give up altogether any love that is in the old will. Giving up any love and every love in it, without exception, like--selfishness, pride, unfaithfulness in marriage, love of disobedience, hatred of innocence, etc. etc. With the new will we are happy to give every one of the loves in our old will, so that now, upon our second death, we are resuscitated into the heaven in our mind. The "will" refers to the operation of the affective organ. These operations vary by categories which we are all familiar with--intentions, motivations, goals, purposes, impulses, propensities, inborn preferences, enjoyments, satisfactions, affections, loves. All these sub-categories of the affective operations are referred to globally in Sacred Scripture as "love" and the "will." In theistic psychology we use the term "character" to refer to the hierarchy of our loves in every day life. We discussed above the word "propirum" which means "our own self" or that which we feel is our own. In order for something to feel our own we must choose it in freedom. If we choose it by necessity or threat we are not choosing it in freedom and therefore it is not our love, and finally, it is not our own. It remains outside of our own loves. Our immortality consists only of those things that our own. Other things that belong to our personality or appearance and reputation, do not transfer across our second death (see Section xx). Our eternal state of mind can be composed only of our loves, and anything that our loves want around, which means thoughts of a certain kind.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#new-will
(c.) Old will: We discover ourselves truly for the first time. We cannot resist the intense urges of loves that have been held cooped up by social personality, reputation, or the law. Like a genie out of the bottle, we rush into all sorts of frantic behavior and new conduct of great passion and intensity. Now is your eternal destiny sealed. Your second death is quickly approaching and you are compelled from within, by your ruling dominant supreme love, to act to please that love, to satisfy yourself, to enjoy life in its most. This is the moment of destiny for which we all must prepare. If the ruling love is the "old will" we were born with, we are compelled at this point to immerse our consciousness completely and fully into the loves of the old will. This is called descending into the hell of your mind. If you have a "new will" you are quite pleased at this point to give up altogether any love that is in the old will. Giving up any love and every love in it, without exception, like--selfishness, pride, unfaithfulness in marriage, love of disobedience, hatred of innocence, etc. etc. (see Section xx). With the new will we are happy to give every one of the loves in our old will, so that now, upon our second death, we are resuscitated into the heaven in our mind. Which is our immortality, whether in heaven or in hell, is determined completely by our daily choices. Theistic psychology gives us a scientific understanding of how God creates the new will in an individual. It is a process that requires our cooperation, which involves the willingness to resist temptations brought to us by the Divine Psychologist as our character is being rebuilt, day by day, and hour by hour.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#self
(d.) Heavenly and hellish traits: With the cultivation and love of heavenly traits we set up a mind that is capable of living in conjugial love in heaven to eternity. If we arrive into the afterlife with the old unregenerate proprium, we automatically sink into the hells of the mind where we live forever with others in a sorry state. The essence of the inversion from a heavenly to a hellish proprium is that we are unwilling to be guided by God and prefer to be guided by self. There is therefore an opposition between our self and God. This perspective is a turn around from how the human race was created and lived prior to this event in history and evolution. In Sacred Scripture it is described in the scientific meaning of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. As long as people were well disposed toward God they were able to have a sane and healthy proprium. They lived every day with the feeling of an as-of self so that they could arrange their lives and activates as they saw fit, consistent with God's Commandments. They knew rationally from revelation that it is God who has the power to move their loves and thoughts, but were content to experience as-if they had that power from themselves and in themselves. But when people began pursuing loves and imaginations that were not consistent with conscience and Divine Commandment, the proprium or as-of self, turned itself away from God and good, inverting truth into falsity, and pursuing corrupted forms of love, thus creating hell in the human mind. This is called the Fall of the race.
Selections for Question 4:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch2.htm#Q1
(a.) Sacred Scripture: Theistic psychology is therefore based exclusively on Divine scientific revelations. Nothing is added to it that is from another source. Theistic psychology was created by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) who was given the unique ability in modern history to be conscious simultaneously in this world and in the spiritual world. This special ability, which he had between the ages of 57 and 84, was given to him by God who elevated his rational consciousness all the way to the highest level of thinking possible called the "third heaven" in the human mind. He was thus given the unique task of authoring the third component of Sacred Scripture which took several thousand years of human evolution to deliver to our conscious mind (see Preface). Today the Western tradition has received the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Writings of Swedenborg. These three components of Sacred Scripture have been given to humankind in order to allow us to have a rational consciousness of God. Theistic psychology is based exclusively on these three collections of revelations, also known as the "Threefold Word." The Writings reveal and demonstrate that all Sacred Scripture is Divine Speech transformed into a natural language.
The Writings reveal a rational method of reconstructing the original content of Divine Speech before it was transformed and written down in a natural language. We need to do be able to do this reconstruction or recovery, since the natural version of Divine Speech in Sacred Scripture is mostly natural in content and appears as history and prophecy. The spiritual information about God, the afterlife, or God's management laws of the universe, are hidden from the literal sense of Sacred Scripture. And yet it is the spiritual information that we need in order to form a rational understanding of God and how God runs the universe. We cannot invent hypothetical interpretations and hope to be fully right. Then we won't know when we are right and when wrong, and our spiritual progress will end in contradiction and conflict. Therefore God must reveal to us a rational method for recovering from Divine Speech what He tells us about the spiritual world and the rational laws He uses to manage the universe.
The Writings of Swedenborg are therefore a scientific revelation because they give us rational methods for discovering what God has been telling us through Divine Speech encoded and transformed into a natural language. Theistic psychology is the knowledge we can extract from these scientific revelations. Whatever is thus extracted must follow the laws of extraction set forth in Divine revelation. If we use other methods of extraction we get nowhere towards the truth. This is why God revealed to us precisely what methods of extraction must be followed. Sacred Scripture must therefore be viewed in both its literal historical meaning and its correspondential or universal meaning. This is the meaning we extract or recover when we apply the method of correspondences as specified in the Writings. When viewed in its literal meaning, Sacred Scripture discusses religion and history. But when viewed in its universal meaning derived from the science of correspondences, Sacred Scripture is science. Both positions--religious and scientific-- are legitimate and do not contradict each other. Literally, the Writings appear to be written for the New Christian Church prophesied in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament of the Bible. The Writings are therefore a continuation of that revelation but at a more rational level of presentation as suitable to the modern scientific mind.
Religion is always bound up with culture and history, while theistic psychology is universal, of relevance to all religions and cultures and times. Different religions have different and contradictory explanations for the same phenomenon, while there is only one theistic psychology. Within theistic psychology there cannot be any disagreement or contradictory scientific theories since its knowledge base consists solely and exclusively of the scientific revelations given in the Writings of Swedenborg--a one time event in history that cannot repeat itself. The reasons why there cannot be new additional revelations in the future are fully explained and established in the Writings. Therefore the giving of these scientific revelations mark the beginning of a new evolutionary path for the human race. This new state of development is made possible because of these Divine rational revelations. A biological analogy might be this: when a new breed of dogs or species of flowers is engineered, the new breed is permanently altered and is different from all previous breeds. Similarly, the new comprehensive scientific revelations in the Writings of Swedenborg create a new elevated state for the human mind since the revelations give us knowledge of causes of the events in this world. Our consciousness and awareness are therefore permanently altered allowing for new lives, new lifestyles, new societies, and also, new heavens and hells in the continuation of our lives after the death of the physical body. This is most important since our life in the spiritual body is eternal and immeasurably longer than our relatively short life in the physical body.
Theistic psychology is possible only when one can read the Writings of Swedenborg and understand them rationally. That rational understanding gives readers the perspective that it is a true account of what Swedenborg saw and heard. Readers who doubt the validity of Swedenborg's reports and analyses give themselves no other choice but to reject them as delusional or made up. As scientists we cannot accept the observational reports of another scientist unless we can fit them into a rational and coherent structure that is not contradicted by what we ourselves can observe.
In the table above, the first phase is marked by the Hebrew Old Testament Sacred Scripture which was written in a style and mentality called "natural-corporeal" correspondences of Divine Speech. The meaning of Divine Speech in Sacred Scripture was cast in a mentality that corresponded to the level and style of thinking of the civilization of the Old Testament in the Middle East and surrounding regions. The prophets through whose mind these Sacred Scriptures were written down, had this mentality and they wrote down the Divine Speech that came to their natural mind at the level of their own mentality, which was natural-corporeal. Hence the Old Testament Sacred Scripture had to be written in natural-corporeal correspondences of Divine Speech.
The second phase is marked by the Greek New Testament Sacred Scripture, which is written in a higher mentality level called "natural-sensuous" correspondences of Divine Speech. When you contrast the numbered entries in the table which describe that mentality, you can see that Divine Speech in correspondences at the natural-sensuous level, comes through and speaks to a more universal level of the human mind, less sectarian and ethnic. From a general or distant relationship to God, humanity could now develop a personal and close relationship. God as a Divine Human has a relationship directly to the individual (phase 2 consciousness), not just collectively to a nation or religion (phase 1 consciousness).
The third phase is marked by the Writings Sacred Scripture which are written with the highest level of natural correspondences called "natural-rational" correspondences of divine Speech. At this level of thinking Divine Speech describes the particulars of our relationship to God in universal scientific ideas, such as we have in theistic psychology based on the Writings Sacred Scripture. Theistic psychology is based on the systematic methodical activity of extracting layers of correspondences in the Writings Sacred Scripture. This extraction process must follow the procedures specified in the Writings regarding how to extract higher order correspondences from all Sacred Scripture. Theistic psychology was made possible when the Divine Child during the Incarnation Event created the interior-natural organ in Himself, and consequently in every human being’s mind (see Section xx).
Considered in its literal meaning, the Old and New Testament Sacred Scripture appears to be historical, ethnic, and religious, and sometimes even sectarian and sexist. This literal content has been used in history to wage cruel wars against other religions and ethnic groups. Even within one religion that is based on the same historical Sacred Scripture, there are sub-varieties of interpretations that have fueled passions and aroused discrimination, disagreement, cruelty, and bitterness. All this negativity and dogmatism associated with religion and Sacred Scripture disappear totally when we go below the surface literal meaning to the inner level of correspondences, as is illustrated and demonstrated in the Writings Sacred Scripture.
Selections for Question 5:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#vertical
What is always surprising about this identity is the experience we all have that we are alone in our mind. It feels absolutely private and it cannot be measured, detected, or copied. This is accurate -- but only for physical privacy, physical measuring devices, physical attempts at detection. It is the opposite in the spiritual world where our spiritual body is born and located. Our spiritual body is our mind and contains the affective organ, the cognitive organ, and the sensorimotor organ, each operating at three non-overlapping levels. But what does the spiritual body look like -- surely not like a walking brain! How funny. People have imagined all sorts of shapes for the soul, or ghosts and spirits. Even the word "spirit" gives us a feeling of airiness and unreality in comparison to the body or a tree. But Swedenborg verified the fact that spirits look like solid, clothed, earthlings. The mind that undergoes the resuscitation phase, a few hours following the cessation of the brain's functioning, is already housed in a spiritual body, since birth. There is no death or change in the spiritual body when the physical body disintegrates. Nothing can die in the mind because nothing mental exists in the physical body that dies. All along the brain did not house our feelings, thoughts, and sensations. These were in the mind all along, not on earth but in the world of spirits.
So our shape as spirits is the same shape as the spiritual body which is the same shape as the physical body. In fact the physical body has its shape only because it is a copy of the spiritual body. But whereas the physical body can be born damaged or undergo damage later, there is no damage or blemish on the spiritual body, nor can there be to eternity, for it is made of eternal substances in an eternal arrangement. The spiritual body can be seen, heard, touched by other spiritual bodies in the spiritual world. Swedenborg confirms the fact that spirits can see the spiritual body of anyone who is still tied to the physical body. Our spiritual body appears to them like the physical body appears to us when it is in a coma. Swedenborg observed that there is a special aromatic aura that surrounds the area around each of those spiritual bodies, serving as a warning for the spirits not to come closer, and also as a protective shield from unwanted communication and influence. Swedenborg observed these phenomena daily for 27 years as he was writing his notes.
Diagram B below gives a general account of the vertical community and its function in creating heaven and hell in the human mind. The spiritual mind is the organ in which are located the human heavens, as shown in the earlier diagram. While we are attached to a physical body on earth, our spiritual mind is unconscious. Our awareness and conscious knowledge is located in the natural mind which is built up by ideas and experiences we have through the physical body, such as our social exchanges and life as a citizen. It is not suspected that this mental life in our natural mind could not be built up without the unconscious interactions we have with the vertical community through our spiritual mind. In other words, the abilities we have through the natural mind's affective and cognitive organs could not function at all without the mediate influx from both the heavens and the hells into our natural mind, as depicted in diagram B.
Selections for Question 6:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch6.htm#self
(a.) as-of self: When people began pursuing loves and imaginations that were not consistent with conscience and Divine Commandment, the proprium or as-of self, turned itself away from God and good, inverting truth into falsity, and pursuing corrupted forms of love, thus creating hell in the human mind. This is called the Fall of the race. The essence of the inversion from a heavenly to a hellish proprium is that we are unwilling to be guided by God and prefer to be guided by self. There is therefore an opposition between our self and God. This perspective is a turn around from how the human race was created and lived prior to this event in history and evolution. In Sacred Scripture it is described in the scientific meaning of the Adam and Eve story in Genesis. As long as people were well disposed toward God they were able to have a sane and healthy proprium. They lived every day with the feeling of an as-of self so that they could arrange their lives and activates as they saw fit, consistent with God's Commandments. They knew rationally from revelation that it is God who has the power to move their loves and thoughts, but were content to experience as-if they had that power from themselves and in themselves. But when people began pursuing loves and imaginations that were not consistent with conscience and Divine Commandment, the proprium or as-of self, turned itself away from God and good, inverting truth into falsity, and pursuing corrupted forms of love, thus creating hell in the human mind. This is called the Fall of the race. The as-of self effort we are willing to put up is the containant of God's power for organic surgery in our old character or affective organ.
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/ch2.htm#Q6
(b.) God's omnipotence: Therefore it's a rational necessity to say that God's omnipotence means that He controls every detail. And also, that there is no such thing as something that runs by itself. For instance, what controls the pattern of a wind current? It's not a random motion but the resultant of many separate contributing factors. Each contributing factor must be controlled by God since nothing can run by itself from itself. What causes the electrons to flow between two points that vary in potential? One can say that it's a natural law, or one can say that every electron must be kept in flow by God's omnipotence and omniscience. If God is omniscient, there cannot be a single electron flow that is not known to Him, and if God is omnipotent, there cannot be a single electron flow that i snot controlled by Him.
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