What is consciousness?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood[a] it. 14The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only,[d] who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
EU 1. Since, from the Divine mercy of the Lord, the interiors, which are of my spirit, have been opened to me, and thereby it has been granted me to speak with spirits and angels, not only with those who are near our earth, but also with those who are near other earths; because I had a desire to know whether there are other earths, and what their nature is, and the quality of their inhabitants, therefore it has been granted me by the Lord to speak and converse with spirits and angels who are from other earths, with some for a day, with some for a week, and with some for months; and to be instructed by them concerning the earths, from which and near which they were; and concerning the lives, customs, and worship of the inhabitants thereof, and of various other things worthy to be related: and because in this manner it has been granted me to know these things, it is permitted to describe them from what has been heard and seen. (…) (EU 1)
EU 6. There are spirits [ = people after their resuscitation ] whose sole study is to acquire to themselves knowledges, because they are delighted only with knowledges. Therefore these spirits are permitted to wander about, and even to pass out of this solar system into others, and to procure for themselves knowledges. They have declared that there are earths inhabited by men, not only in this solar system, but also out of it in the starry heaven, to an immense number. These spirits are from the planet Mercury. (EU 6)
EU 50. My long continued association with the spirits of Jupiter proved to me that they are more upright than the spirits of many other worlds. When they arrived, their coming, their stay and the influence they exerted were so gentle and sweet as to defy expression. In the next life the character of each spirit reveals itself in his influence, which is a sharing of his affection. Uprightness is revealed by gentleness and sweetness, by gentleness because he is fearful of doing harm, and by sweetness because he loves to do good. I could very clearly tell apart the gentleness and sweetness of good spirits from our world from that of theirs. They said that when any mild dispute arises between them, there is to be seen a kind of thin shaft of light, such as lightning often produces, or a band filled with flashing and moving stars. But a dispute among them is quickly settled. Stars which flash and at the same time move indicate falsity; flashing stars which are fixed indicate truth. So the former type indicates a dispute. (EU 50)
EU 55. I was further informed by the spirits from that world [EU 50] about various matters concerning its inhabitants, such as their way of moving, and their food and houses. When moving, they do not walk upright like the inhabitants of this and many other worlds; nor do they go on all fours like animals, but when they walk they help themselves with the flat of their hands, at every other pace half rising to their feet. As they move, at every third pace they turn their faces to one side and look behind them, making a slight twist, quickly accomplished, of the body. This is because they think it impolite to be seen by others except face to face.
[2] While they walk in this fashion, they always keep their faces up, as we do, so that they can see the sky as well as the ground. They do not keep their gaze fixed on the ground, a practice they call reprehensible. The worst sort of people among them do this, and if they do not become used to lifting up their faces, they are banished from their community.
[3] When, however, they sit down, they look erect like people in our world as far as the upper part of the body is concerned, but they squat cross-legged. They take great care, not only when walking, but also when sitting, to avoid being seen from behind, but only in the face. In fact, they rather like to be seen face to face, since this displays their mind. They never display a facial expression which does not match their mind, something they find impossible. Those present can by this means see quite plainly what another's intentions towards them are, since they do not hide them, especially whether their apparent friendliness is genuine or forced. The spirits from there demonstrated this to me and their angels confirmed it. As a result their spirits too do not appear to walk upright, but rather like swimmers to assist their progress with their hands, looking around them from time to time. (EU 55)
EU 102. The spirits of the earth Saturn came from afar into view, and there was then opened a living communication between them and such spirits of our earth. The latter, on thus perceiving the former, became as if insane, and began to infest them, by infusing unworthy suggestions concerning faith, and also concerning the Lord; and whilst abusing them with these invectives and insults, they also cast themselves into the midst of them, and from the insanity in which they were, they endeavored to do evil to them. But the spirits of Saturn feared nothing, because they were secure and in tranquility; whereas the spirits of our earth, when they were in the midst of them, began to be tortured, and to respire with difficulty, and so they cast themselves out, one in this way and another that, till they all disappeared.
The spirits who were present perceived from this, what is the quality of the natural man when separate from the spiritual, and when he comes into a spiritual sphere, namely, that he is insane; for the natural man separate from the spiritual is wise only from the world, and not from heaven; and he who is wise only from the world, believes nothing but what be can apprehend with his senses, and the things which he believes he believes from the fallacies of the senses, which, unless they are removed by an influx from the spiritual world, produce falsities. Hence it is that spiritual things to him are not anything, insomuch that he can scarcely bear to hear mention made of anything spiritual; wherefore such become insane when they are kept in a spiritual sphere. It is otherwise during their abode in the world, where they either think naturally concerning spiritual things, or avert their ears that they may not hear them; that is, they hear and do not attend.
It was also manifest from this experience, that the natural man cannot introduce himself into the spiritual, that is, ascend; but when man is in faith, and thereby in spiritual life, in this case the spiritual man flows into the natural, and thinks therein. For there is given a spiritual influx, that is, an influx from the spiritual world into the natural, but not the reverse. (EU 102)
EU 148. A THIRD EARTH IN THE STARRY HEAVEN, ITS SPIRITS AND INHABITANTS.
Some spirits appeared at a distance who were not willing to come near. The reason was that they could not be with the spirits of our earth who were then around me. From this I perceived that they were from another earth, and afterward I was told that they were from a certain earth in the universe; but where that earth is, I was not informed. These spirits were altogether unwilling to think of their body, and indeed of anything corporeal and material, differently from the spirits from our earth. This was why they were not willing to come near. But still after the removal of some of the spirits of our earth, they came nearer and spoke with me. But then anxiety was felt, arising from the collision of spheres; for spiritual spheres encompass all spirits and societies of spirits; and because they flow forth from the life of the affections and of the thoughts therefrom, therefore where there are opposing affections there arises collision, and thence anxiety. The spirits of our earth said that they did not dare to approach them, since when they were approaching, they not only were seized with anxiety, but also appeared to themselves as if bound hand and foot with serpents, from which they could not be loosed until they withdrew. This appearance had its origin from correspondence; for the spirits of our earth have reference in the Greatest Man to the external sense, thus to the corporeal sensual, and this sensual is represented in the other life by serpents.
# Man's external sensual is represented in the spiritual world by serpents, because it is in the lowest things, and in comparison with the interiors with man, lies on the ground and as it were creeps; and that they were thence called serpents, who reasoned from that sensual (n. 195-197, 6398, 6949). (EU 148)
EU 149. Because the nature of the spirits of that earth is such, they appear before the eyes of other spirits, not like others, in a manifest human form, but like clouds, and for the most part like a dark cloud, in which is mingled something of a bright human appearance. But they said that they are white within, and that when they become angels, the dark color is turned into a beautiful blue, as was also shown to me. I asked whether they had such an idea of their body, when they lived as men in the world. They said that the men of their earth make no account of their bodies, but only of the spirit in the body, because they know that this is to live to eternity, but the body to perish. They also said that many on their earth believe that the spirit of the body has been from eternity, and was infused into the body at conception. But they added that they now know it is not so, and that they repent having been in such a false opinion. (EU 149)
EU 150. When I asked whether they wished to see anything on our earth, and said that this could be done through my eyes (see above n. 135), they answered at first that they could not, and then that they did not wish it; since they would see only earthly and material things, from which they remove their thoughts as far as possible. But still there were represented before them magnificent palaces, like those of kings and princes on our earth, for such things can be represented before spirits, and when represented, they appear altogether as if they were there. But the spirits from that earth set no value upon them, calling them marble images; and then they told me that they had more magnificent ones, which are their sanctuaries, not of stone, but of wood. When it was said to them that these were still earthly, they answered that they were not, but heavenly; because when they look upon them, they have not an earthly, but a heavenly idea, believing that they will also see similar ones in heaven after death. (EU 150)
EU 168. A FIFTH EARTH IN THE STARRY HEAVEN, ITS SPIRITS AND INHABITANTS.
I was led again to another earth which is in the universe out of our solar system, and this also by changes of state, continued for nearly twelve hours. There were in company with me several spirits and angels from our earth, with whom I discoursed in the way or in that progression. I was carried at times obliquely upwards and obliquely downwards, continually towards the right, which in the other life is towards the south. In only two places I saw spirits, and in one I spoke with them. In the way or progression I was enabled to observe how immense is the Lord's heaven, which is for angels and spirits; for from the parts uninhabited I was led to conclude that it was so immense, that if there were many myriads of earths, and on each earth a multitude of men as great as in ours, there would still be a place of abode for them to eternity, and it would never be filled. This I was enabled to conclude from a comparison made with the extent of the heaven which is about our earth and designed for it, which extent was respectively so small, that it did not equal a hundred millionth part of the extent uninhabited. (EU 168)
EU 170. The spirits with whom I now discoursed were from the northern part of their earth. I was afterwards led to others who were on the western part. These also, wishing to discover who and what I was, immediately said that there was nothing in me but evil, thinking thus to deter me from approaching nearer. It was perceived that this was their manner of accosting all who came to them; but it was granted me to reply that I well knew it to be so, and that with them also there was nothing but evil, by reason that every one is born in evil, and therefore whatever comes from man, spirit, and angel, as from what is his own, or his proprium, is nothing but evil, inasmuch as all good with every one is from the Lord. Hence they perceived that I was in the truth, and I was admitted to speak with them. They then showed me their idea concerning evil with man, and concerning good from the Lord, how they are separated from each other.
They placed one near the other, almost contiguous, but still distinct, yet as it were bound together in a manner inexpressible, so that the good led the evil, and restrained it, insomuch that it was not allowed it to act at pleasure; and thus the good bent the evil in whatever direction desired, without the evil knowing it. In this manner they exhibited the dominion of good over evil, and at the same time a state of freedom. They then asked how the Lord appeared with the angels from our earth. I said that He appears in the sun as Man, encompassed therein with solar fire, whence the angels in the heavens have all light; and that the heat which proceeds thence is the Divine good, and that the light which proceeds thence is the Divine truth, each from the Divine love, which is the fire appearing around the Lord in that sun.
That sun, however, appears only to the angels in heaven, and not to the spirits who are beneath, since they are more removed from the reception of the good of love and of the truth of faith, than the angels who are in the heavens (see above, n. 40). It was granted them thus to inquire concerning the Lord, and concerning His appearance before the angels from our earth, because it then pleased the Lord to present Himself before them, and to reduce into order the things which had been disturbed by the evil spirits of whom they complained. This also was the reason why I was led thither, that I might see these things. (EU 170)
EU 176. To an inquiry concerning their houses, they said that they are low, of wood, with a flat roof, around which project caves sloping downward; and that in the front part dwell the husband and wife, in the next adjoining part the children, and after them the maid-servants and men-servants. Of their food they said that they drink milk with water, and that they have the milk from cows, which are woolly like sheep. Of their life they said that they walk naked, and that to them nakedness is not a cause of shame; also that their social interaction is with those who are within their families. (EU 176)
AC 1648. There is a speech of good spirits, and also of angelic spirits, which is a simultaneous speech of many, especially in circles or choirs, concerning which of the Lord's Divine mercy hereafter. The speech in choirs has often been heard by me; it has a cadence, as if in rhythm. They have no thought about the words or ideas, for into these their sentiments flow spontaneously. No words or ideas flow in which multiply the sense, or draw it away to something else, or to which anything artificial adheres, or that seems to them elegant from self, or from self-love, for such things would at once cause disturbance. They do not inhere in any word; they think of the sense; the words follow spontaneously from the sense itself. They come to a close in unities, for the most part simple; but when in those which are compound, they turn by an accent to the next. These things are the result of their thinking and speaking in society; hence the form of the speech has a cadence in accordance with the connection and unanimity of the society. Such was once the form of songs; and such is that of the Psalms of David. (AC 1648)
AC 1649. Wonderful to say, this kind of speech, possessing the rhythmical or harmonic cadence of songs, is natural to spirits. They speak so among themselves, although they are not aware of it. Immediately after death souls come into the habit of speaking in this way. I have been initiated into the same, and it has at last become familiar. The reason their speech is of this nature, is that they speak in society, which for the most part they are not aware of: a very clear proof that they are all distinguished into societies, and that consequently all things fall into the forms of the societies. (AC 1649)
AC 3889. In order that I might know not only that there is a correspondence of the celestial things which are of love with the motions of the heart, and of the spiritual things which are of faith from love with the motions of the lungs, but also how the case is with this correspondence, it was given me for a considerable space of time to be among the angels, who showed it me to the life. By a wonderful and indescribable flowing into gyres they formed a semblance of a heart and another semblance of lungs, together with all the interior and exterior contextures that are in them. They then followed the flow of heaven in a free way; for heaven is in the endeavor toward such a form, from the influx of love from the Lord. Thus they presented the several parts that are in the heart; and afterwards the union between the heart and the lungs, which they also represented by the marriage of good and truth.
From this it was evident that the heart corresponds to the celestial which is of good, and the lungs to the spiritual which is of truth; and that the conjunction of these two in a material form is precisely as is that of the heart and the lungs. I was also told that the case is similar in the body throughout (that is, in its several members, organs, and viscera) in regard to the things therein which are of the heart, and those which are of the lungs; for where both do not act, and each distinctly take its turn, there cannot be any motion of life from any principle of the will, nor any feeling of life from any principle of the understanding. (AC 3889)
What is consciousness?nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you.(Luke 17:21)
Constructing
a neologism is a “performative speech act” (Austin and Searle come to mind).
There are three types of constructed neologisms: affective, cognitive, and
sensorimotor. These constitute the threefold self or mental anatomy of every
human being. Affective organs produce affective neologisms. Cognitive organs
produce cognitive neologisms. Sensorimotor organs produce sensorimotor
neologisms. God produces Divine Neologisms. In terms of the sequence of
production of neologisms in the universe we have the following sequence: (see
the
Chart of Mental Anatomy)Divine Rational Neologisms (Layer 1)
Celestial-rational neologisms (layer 4)
Spiritual-rational neologisms (layer 5)
Spiritual-natural neologisms (layer 6)
Interior-natural neologisms (or natural-rational neologisms) (layer 7)
Exterior-natural neologisms (or materialistic neologisms) (layer 8)
Corporeal-natural neologisms (layer 9)
“…He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: "I am the LORD, the God of…”
You are producing an affective neo when you have a new love, intention, or motive.
You are producing a cognitive neo when you have a new thought, plan, or principle.
You are producing a sensorimotor neo when you have a new sensation, movement pattern, or verbal expression.
God’s Divine Love is within every affective neo.
God’s Divine Wisdom is within every cognitive neo.
God’s Divine Proceeding is within every sensorimotor neo.
God’s Affective Organ comprises an integrated whole in which infinite loves and purposes are present to eternity.
God’s Cognitive Organ comprises an integrated whole in which infinite truths and principles are present to eternity.
God’s Sensorimotor Organ comprises an integrated whole in which infinite sensations and motor determinations
are present to eternity.
Influx à sudden memory à short term memory à discourse thinking à long term memory
TCR 63. (5) God is omnipresent from the firsts to the lasts of His order. God is omnipresent from the firsts to the lasts of His order by means of the heat and light of the spiritual sun, in the midst of which He is. It was by means of that sun that order was produced; and from it He sends forth a heat and a light which pervade the universe from firsts to lasts, and produce the life that is in man and in every animal, and also the vegetative soul that is in every germ upon the earth; and these two flow into each thing and all things, and cause every subject to live and grow according to the order implanted in it by creation. And as God, though not extended, fills every extense in the universe, He is omnipresent. It has been shown elsewhere that God is in all space without space, and in all time without time, and consequently that the universe in its essence and order is the plenitude of God; and this being so, by His omnipresence He perceives all things, by His omniscience He provides all things, and by His omnipotence He effects all things. From this it is clear that omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence make one, or that one implies the others; and thus that they cannot be separated. (TCR 63) (Swedenborg Reports)
Layer 4: celestial-rational neologisms
Layer 5: spiritual-rational neologisms
Layer 6: spiritual-natural neologisms
Layer 7i: interior-natural neologisms
===========================
Layer 7e: external-rational neologisms
Layer 8: external-natural neologisms
Layer 9: corporeal-natural neologisms
TCR 63. (5) God is omnipresent from the firsts to the lasts of His order. God is omnipresent from the firsts to the lasts of His order by means of the heat and light of the spiritual sun, in the midst of which He is. It was by means of that sun that order was produced; and from it He sends forth a heat and a light which pervade the universe from firsts to lasts, and produce the life that is in man and in every animal, and also the vegetative soul that is in every germ upon the earth; and these two flow into each thing and all things, and cause every subject to live and grow according to the order implanted in it by creation. And as God, though not extended, fills every extense in the universe, He is omnipresent. It has been shown elsewhere that God is in all space without space, and in all time without time, and consequently that the universe in its essence and order is the plenitude of God; and this being so, by His omnipresence He perceives all things, by His omniscience He provides all things, and by His omnipotence He effects all things. From this it is clear that omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence make one, or that one implies the others; and thus that they cannot be separated.(TCR 63) (Swedenborg Reports)
Old Testament Sacred Scripture (second millennium BC)
New Testament Sacred Scripture (first century AD)
Swedenborg Reports Sacred Scripture (18th century)
civilization in the days of the Old Testament (the Age of Antiquity)
civilization in the days of the New Testament (the Age of philosophy and pre-modern rationality), and
civilization in the days of the Swedenborg Reports (18th century, the Age of Enlightenment and beginning of modern science).
· the love of self for the sake of self alone vs. the love of self for the sake of others as well as self
· the love of things for the sake of self alone vs. the love of things for the sake of others as well as self
· the love of ruling over others for the sake of self alone vs. the love of ruling over others for the sake of others as well as self
· The fulfillment of each unique heavenly love is to see itself in another human being.
· Love (A) perceives through the senses (S) what is usable for its fulfillment, and sharpens their power (S) of detecting or locating what is usable by that love to fulfill itself.
· Love directs cognitive operations (C) to formulate a plan or method of attaining its fulfillment.
· Heavenly love is fulfilled when it can see its own good in another person, by recognizing the good of that love when it appears in the other person.
I. What to notice in the environment, on a screen or page – and what to ignore or overlook
II. What to make of something, what sense we are to make of it, what interpretation are we to construct
III. How to evaluate it, what are appropriate emotions we can have with it, what falls outside the range of
acceptability
IV. Whether to do something about it, whether to act on it, whether to optimize it
V. How to engage it, what options are available, how to carry it out to the goal
VI. How to execute it, to perform it, to do what it takes to achieve it
(A) affective organ – operations felt subjectively as feelings, intentions, motives, desires for specific things or outcomes
(C) cognitive organ -- operations felt subjectively as thoughts, imaginings, reasonings, ideas about specific things or events
(S) sensorimotor organ -- operations felt subjectively as sensations and motor determinations (seeing, tasting, moving)
Affective love for making sense à cognitive procedures of sense-making à neo production by sensorimotor operations
In layer 9-consciousness (corporeal mind), our neo-construction is sensorimotor and concrete in focus and significance.
In layer 8-consciousness (materialistic mind), our neo-construction is cognitive and abstract in focus and meaning.
In layer 7-consciousness (rational mind), our neo-construction is affective and spiritual in focus and meaning.
Spiritual Sun (layer 1)
Celestial- rational neologisms (layer 4)
Spiritual-rational neologisms (layer 5)
Spiritual-natural neologisms (layer 6)
Interior-natural neologisms (layer 7i)
==============================
Natural-rational neologisms (layer 7e)
Natural-sensual neologisms (layer 8)
Natural-corporeal neologisms (layer 9)
Exercise Homework 1: The Visible Body
The Dual Universe:
Time and Eternity
The Spiritual Dimension of Neologisms
The Evolution of Neo Consciousness
Raising our
Consciousness by Thinking in Correspondences
The Battle of Heaven
and Hell in Our Mind
The Mental Zone of
Resuscitation
Spiritual Garfinkeling
-- Engineering Our Mental States on the Daily Round
Taxonomy of Unregenerate and Regenerate Loves in the Natural Mind
The Anatomy of
Spiritual Combat in Temptation
Quotes From the Swedenborg Reports on the Organic Basis of Mind
Related Spiritual
Ideas on the Organic Basis of Consciousness
This electronic book published in 2008 is a kind of 'executive summary' of my efforts to build a foundation for theistic psychology, which I began in its current approach in 2000, after 20 years of studying the Swedenborg Reports. Its most recent expression, prior to this one, is available from my Lecture Notes.
If I had heard this sentence prior to 1981 I would have thought "O yeah, sure. What does that mean?" My education as a Ph.D. and as a scientist in psychology, did not prepare me for an answer, did not give me an answer to this all important subject of what happens to me when I die. This is a subject that intensely interests me, so much so, that it took me decades to learn that only some people would show real interest in the answer to this question. This book provides the definitive and scientific answer to what happens to us at death, and also provides the answer to why and how it is that the majority of people are not intensely interested in the answer.
Our first hurdle may be the biggest for some, but only small for others. We have been educated to think about science within the negative mode of science, rather than the positive bias mode of science. The negative bias mode is called monism or materialism, while the positive bias mode is called dualism and theism. When we, as scientists or scientists in training, now hear about the new concepts and ideas called "theistic psychology," we react with rejection, aversion, and spiritual venting. These affective or emotional reactions call forth thoughts of disconfirmation and ridicule, at first, and later, thoughts of how to prove these concepts wrong for science and in science.
But the new field of theistic psychology puts these concepts right in front of our focus, and challenges us to comprehend it rationally. In order to do that, readers or students are asked to switch from the negative bias mode in science to the positive bias mode in science. The challenge includes the promise or intention to lay out the empirical scientific facts and the integrated rational explanations, that will permit the average reader or student to decide whether it makes rational sense to them, or not. This is the challenge that must be faced at the start. Further, there is also the intentionality and claim in theistic psychology, that it does not contain explanations of religions or their doctrinal beliefs. This has been excluded from the methodology of theistic psychology. Some people may be puzzled by this claim, in view of the fact that theistic psychology is knowledge "extracted from the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture."
The difficulty is resolved when you consider that all religions are based on the literal sense of the Sacred Scripture that they call their own. No religion is based on the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture. But theistic psychology is. It is based on the correspondential sense exclusively. This methodology insures a discrete and complete separation between religion and theistic psychology.
I invite you to step out of the negative bias mode of thinking about science and God, and to step into the positive bias thinking of theistic science. You are not giving up anything, and you stand to gain a lot, as I have when I first started reading the Swedenborg Reports -- the only existing fully scientific and empirical account of the spiritual world and the afterlife of eternity.
I will share my greatest discovery on this topic, namely, that we are born into eternity, and that we have already been in eternity since our birth. We are therefore immortal beings. To be born into eternity means immortality, since what is born into eternity is eternal, by definition, and what is eternal is immortal.
What about "eternal" makes us immortal?
The concept of "eternal" contains two components: one is "outside time"; the other is "mental."
Phenomena that exist "outside time," by definition, exist in eternity. And what has been generally unknown in science until the Swedenborg Reports in the 18th century, is the empirical fact discovered by him, that "eternity" is the mental world that is familiar to every human being since birth.
That's right. It's an awesome discovery that will shake the modern mind from its current historical trend of materialism in science. Today, under the philosophy of the negative bias materialism, psychology cannot learn anything from the Swedenborg Reports, even though these 37 volumes have been around in several languages for the past 200 years. Swedenborg in Sweden published his book Rational Psychology (1743) more than a century before German psychologist Wundt opened the first modern laboratory of psychology in Germany. Swedenborg published several books on the physiology of sensation and on brain neurology. He was the first in history to conclude correctly that the left hemisphere of the brain functions in correspondence with the cognitive organ (thinking, reasoning), and the right brain with the affective organ (intention, perception).
Swedenborg discovered by direct observation that the mental world of eternity, where every person's mind resides since birth, is a large expanse in the shape of the human body. This expanse is filled with the human race. Every individual's mind resides somewhere in this Grand Human expanse. The location of each person can be specified by the anatomical structure relative to others. For instance, Swedenborg would indicate where his mental travels took him across the expanse of the Grand Human, by saying that he was "in the province of the right eye," or, "under the foot," or "in the gall bladder," etc. In each mental place, Swedenborg was able to talk to the people that lived there in full conscious awareness. He discovered that there was a perfect and exact correspondence between the quality of the ruling love of each person and the function of the organ in the anatomical region of the Grand Human in which they were living. The people living in the region of the gall bladder had an entirely different personality than the people who lived in the heart or lungs of the Grand Human. "Mental harshness" corresponds to the "harsh" chemical treatment of digested food in the gall bladder, where it is stripped and separated of non-digestibles. "Mental conjunction" or "spiritual love" corresponds to the "nourishing" and life-giving action of the heart and its circulatory system, which feeds every cell in the body.
Swedenborg's discovery is critical for the continued scientific development of psychology. The Swedenborg Reports provide us with an empirical methodology for the study of mind through its correspondences with the body.
The reason Swedenborg has been completely omitted from the history of psychology is that all his science is theistic, and there is no room for theistic science in non-theistic science.
This is not the idea that Swedenborg believed in God. Half or more of all scientists alive today say that they believe in God. The problem is not that scientists believe or don't believe in God. The problem has to do with scientific methodology. There are two varieties: the non-theistic methodologies and the theistic methodologies.
Swedenborg discovered by direct observation that the mental world of eternity contains a Spiritual Sun, only one. In the physical world of time, the star or "natural sun" of a solar system, is the origin of the planets in that system. All the physical objects on our earth, including our physical body, is made of materials from the natural sun. This natural phenomenon corresponds exactly to the phenomenon of the Spiritual Sun in the mental world of eternity. Everything in eternity is made of substances from the Spiritual Sun. Our mind is made of these substances. These spiritual substances are living and immortal. There are two broad categories of spiritual substances radiating out of the Spiritual Sun and filling the entire mental world of humanity. One is called "spiritual heat" and the other "spiritual light." This corresponds to the "natural heat" and "natural light" that streams out of the natural sun to create objects, energy, movement, and life on the planet.
Our mental life is an organic process that begins at birth and continues endlessly in eternity. Life must have an organic basis. Mental life is carried out by mental organs. These organs are made of the substances from the Spiritual Sun. At birth, every human being lives in two bodies simultaneously that are connected together by correspondence. We have a physical body that is temporary and is made of natural substances from the physical sun. And we have a spiritual body that is permanent and is made of spiritual substances from the Spiritual Sun. Our spiritual body contains our mental organs.
We have three systems of mental organs, corresponding to the three systems of physical organs.
|
PHYSICAL BODY natural anatomy and physiology |
SPIRITUAL BODY
mental anatomy and physiology |
| CIRCULATORY SYSTEM heart, blood vessels, blood, lymphatic, digestive, reproductive, endocrine, biochemical, genetic |
AFFECTIVE ORGAN reception of spiritual heat, loves, motives, intentions, enjoyment, pleasure, fun, perceptions, impulses, preferences, conscience, attachments, relationships, togetherness, conjunction, marriage, socialization of feelings and emotions, value-attachment and ranking, goal-directedness |
| RESPIRATORY SYSTEM lungs, bronchial, larynx, mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, vocal cords |
COGNITIVE ORGAN reception of spiritual light, thoughts, imagination, variety of intelligences, inventiveness, understanding of truth, rationality, language, abstract reasoning, morality, science, socialization of thinking |
| NEURAL-SKELETAL SYSTEM brain, sensory organs, bones, joints, muscles, skin, hair, nails |
SENSORIMOTOR ORGAN receptivity to sensory information, experiencing sensations, maintaining situational vigilance, variety of motor readiness, motor skills and habits of performance, speaking and listening, writing and texting |
The above is a general classification of mind-body correspondences.
The above indicates that the circulatory system in the spiritual body is nothing but the affective organ. Further, the respiratory system in the spiritual body is nothing but the cognitive organ. Finally, the neural-skeletal system in the spiritual body is nothing but the sensorimotor organ. This relationship of correspondence is an important research method for discovering and charting mental anatomy. The physical body is the window to the mind. The body is the visible mind. The temporary physical body is a perfect copy or model in physical matter, of the spiritual body which is permanent and eternal. By studying the anatomy of the physical body we are enabled to chart the development and evolution of the mind and its consciousness.
Go to http://www.visiblebody.com/ and register. Then learn to use the Visible Body application. It takes several hours to explore all that it can do. While learning the anatomy of the body, keep thinking that these anatomical structures and interrelations are the visible mind.
Explore the circulatory system (Hide Others). See how it is in the shape of the body. You are seeing the affective organ, whose operations are the source of your feelings, loves, and motives -- hence our very life. Our very life is nothing but our loves, and your loves are the operations of the affective organ, which is the circulatory system of the spiritual body. The circulatory system or affective organ, is the central lifeline of everything human and living. The other systems of the mind are derivative of this and dependent on this for mental nourishment and consciousness. Explore the heart. You are seeing the ruling loves of a person, or of humanity as a whole. The ruling love disposes all other loves, and the loves together dispose all thinking and intelligence that belong to the cognitive organ or respiratory system.
Explore the respiratory system by itself (Hide Others). You are seeing the cognitive organ of thinking and reasoning, imagining and knowing. Explore how the heart and the lungs are connected and how they act together. You are seeing the interdependence between the affective (A) and cognitive organs (C), between how our thinking and reasoning (C) are influenced or determined by our motives and needs (A). Note that the heart in the spiritual body (our loves) could not live or survive on their own. If the blood is prevented from flowing through the lungs it cannot be oxygenated, and in that case all its nutrients are useless to the cells and everything dies. This is in exact correspondence to the interdependence between our loves (A) and our thoughts (C). Our loves (A) act upon our thoughts (C) in order to produce our sensations and motor determinations (S). The circulatory system acts upon the respiratory system to produce or enable sensory perception and motor action.
Moving your finger in the physical body (layer 12), requires a determination from your sensorimotor system (9S) in the spiritual body (layer 10). This sensorimotor determination to move your finger (layer 9S) is produced by the conjunction or co-action of your affective organ (9A) with your cognitive organ (9C). This may be expressed as:
9A --> 9C --> 9S --> 12 (finger moves)
There must first be a motive (A) in the circulatory system of the spiritual body in layer 9. For instance, you are typing at the keyboard and coming to the end of your sentence. Now your finger moves over to the period key and presses it. You had to have a motivation (A) to press that particular key. Your motivation was to end the sentence you were typing. This connects with the love (A) you have of communicating with someone or finishing writing something. This love you have is nothing else than the operation of your affective organ, which is the circulatory system of your spiritual body.
The love of communicating or completing your sentence, cannot exist on its own, cannot be anything on its own. In order for this love to have an existence in your affective organ, it must connect with thinks in your memory or knowledge that are in your cognitive organ (C). In the Swedenborg Reports this is called the connection between "the will and the understanding." or, the connection between "good and truth." This connection or conjunction is called the "spiritual marriage." It is the spiritual force in eternity that corresponds to the natural force of gravity in time. All movement and relative position in the physical world is ultimately determined by gravity. This corresponds to the mental world of eternity where the quality and level of all human consciousness is given by people's relative position in the Grand Human (S), which is the product of their love (A) conjoined with their understanding (C). The AC connection, or spiritual marriage, engenders the totality of our living (S). What we call "heaven" (Grand Human) or "hell" (Grand Monster) are the externalized sensorimotor (S) appearances produced by the internal marriage between our loves (A) and our thoughts (C). Love produces everything in eternity; in eternity everything is produced by our loves.
Here are some additional body-mind correspondences:
Beating the chest = feeling sorry, repenting or: being proud of oneself
Beating the chest = feeling sorry, repenting or: being proud of
Burning, boiling = feeling angry, passionate
Covered = secret, having a plan to deal with it ("I've got it covered")
Drinking = learning, believing ("He is drinking it all in")
Eating bread = to nourish the mind
Food = operations in the affective organ, love, affection, charity
Left hand = mentally incapable ("He's got two left hands")
Paying taxes in a democracy = the effort we are willing to put into our
character reformation
Ruminating = thinking about it, reflecting, considering
She's the pupil of his eye = cares a lot for her
Standing on the head = thinking and believing the opposite of truth
Taste = choices ("He has good taste in clothes")
Teeth = power ("that amendment has no teeth in it")
Tied up in knots = feeling disturbed or conflictual
To be hitched = to be married, mentally conjoined
Washing the body = repenting, cleansing or purifying the mind from evil traits
Wine = "faith", rational faith, positive bias in science, affirmative principle
towards Sacred Scripture
More at: Correspondences in Our Thinking and Language
Now here are more specific mind-body anatomical correspondences.
| LAYER |
CIRCULATORY SYSTEM
AFFECTIVE |
RESPIRATORY SYSTEM
COGNITIVE |
NERVOUS AND
SKELETAL SYSTEM SENSORI-MOTOR |
MENTALITY THEMES IN THE HEAVENLY ORDER |
MENTALITY THEMES IN THE HELLISH ORDER |
| 4 CELESTIAL-RATIONAL |
A4 HEART, ARTERIES, REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS |
C4 LUNGS, BREATHING, LIPS, CHEEKS |
S4 HANDS, EYES, RIGHT BRAIN, CEREBELLUM, RIB CAGE, THIGHS |
Receiving
conjugial love from God. Conjunction with God through His Divine Human Omniproprium. Love of innocence and children. Love of fidelity. Altruism. Perceiving interior rational truths. Inspiring in people good thoughts and dreams. Inspiring in people the love of good. |
(SEE LAYER 9) |
| 5 SPIRITUAL-RATIONAL |
A5 STOMACH, LIVER, MASTICATION, ASSIMILATION |
C5 ESOPHAGUS, MOUTH CAVITY, SMELL, TONGUE, TASTE |
S5 INTERIOR OF NOSTRILS , EARS, LEFT BRAIN |
Discussing and
reasoning about truths and doctrines. Inspiring people who are seeking to understand truths and strengthen conscience. Helping people in spiritual combat during regeneration efforts. |
(SEE LAYER 8) |
| 6 SPIRITUAL-NATURAL |
A6 NUTRITIONAL EXCHANGE IN CELLS |
C6 RESPIRATION, OXYGENATION, AIR SACS |
S6
|
Practicing the
human virtues in community life. Inspiring people with being useful. Inspiring people to acquire motor skills. Inspiring in people the rational foundations for aesthetics, art, sports, civics. |
(SEE LAYER 7) |
| 7 INTERIOR-NATURAL |
A7 SPLEEN, PANCREAS, BLOOD, ARTERIES, VEINS, CAPILLARIES |
C7 DIAPHRAGM |
S7 HANDS, OUTWARD SKIN OR LINING OF ALL INTERNAL ORGANS |
Practicing the
unity model of marriage and striving to attain eternal conjugial love. Motivated to master the mental environment. Religious or spiritual views based on what is rationally understandable. Puts importance on cooperating with God in one's regeneration for eternity. Values thinking from scientific dualism and theistic psychology. Values sincerity, spiritual responsibility, rationality, diligence, altruism. |
Hating conjugial love and
desiring to pervert the institution of marriage. Opposing and subverting moral virtues in community life and engaging in hurtful practices as a lifestyle. Inspiring people with the enjoyment of selfish traits. Inspiring people to dislike healthy activity and eating habits. Inspiring in people the desire and enjoyment of tearing down the rational foundations for aesthetics, art, sports, civics, etc., in order to pervert or destroy their goodness and rationality. |
| 8 EXTERIOR-NATURAL |
A8 GALL BLADDER, KIDNEYS, URETHRA, BLADDER |
C8 TEETH |
S8 NEURONS, FEET, SKIN, BONES, CARTILAGE, MUSCLES, TENDONS |
Practicing the
equity model of marriage. Motivated to master the social environment. Abstract thinking from materialism and negative bias in science. Religious or spiritual views based on mystery, blind faith, authority, history, tradition. Love of legalism, egalitarianism, symbolism, idealism. Concerned with parity, duty, honor, recognition, glory, achievement. Valuing honesty, social responsibility, patriotism. |
Practicing the male
dominance model under the guise of equity. Love of reasoning about spiritual ideas in order to justify their chosen persuasions which consist of falsified truths and hurtful practices. Love of inspiring people to deny or falsify Sacred Scripture, and to kill the conscience by attacking it and ignoring it. Love of influencing people who are in spiritual combat during regeneration in order to get them to give in to their temptation. |
| 9 NATURAL-CORPOREAL |
A9 INTESTINES |
C9
|
S9 SOLES OF THE FEET, HEEL |
Practicing the
male dominance model of marriage. Motivated to master the physical environment. Desire to punish and suppress individual freedoms. Spirituality based on ancestor worship, saints and holy objects, miracles supernatural events, and on persuasive teachings. Authoritarian and strict parenting and schooling. |
Perverting conjugial love to promiscuity
and infidelity. |
Note that this chart gives the correspondential connection between organs in the spiritual body and our sensations (S), thoughts (C), and feelings (A). Note that we have a threefold self at each of the six layers. When you look at the mentality themes at each layer you can notice that they arrange themselves so as to match the physiological functions of each body part or zone.
See if you can use this chart to locate your mental states in the course of a normal day. What proportion of time do you spend in the three heavenly mentality zones and in the three hellish mentality zones. Study the characteristics of the heavenly and hellish order in layers 7, 8, 9. (More discussion on this in the Mental anatomy Lecture Notes)
One might think that so far, Swedenborg's dualist psychology might have been acceptable enough to receive mention in the history of psychology textbooks taught to psychology majors and graduate students today. But that is not the case. The reason becomes clear when you consider what is the Spiritual Sun, and what are its spiritual substances out of which our mental organs are constructed.
Swedenborg observed that every person goes through a dying-resuscitation process that separates the connection between our physical body and our spiritual body. The process lasts about 30 hours starting from the complete cessation of all life in the physical body either by medical death, or violent and accidental death. Swedenborg himself underwent the dying-resuscitation process so that he could describe it as an eye-witness. He interviewed thousands of people immediately after they were awakened from the resuscitation process. These included strangers and people he was acquainted with personally. Everyone awakened in the spiritual body remembers their identity and life, but they now speak a universal thought-language that spontaneously comes out as they think or desire to communicate with others. Everyone can also see the Spiritual Sun.
The spiritual body contains the mental organs at several discrete layers of anatomy, as will be discussed next in detail. In summary, the spiritual body contains the natural mind and the spiritual mind. The natural mind is conscious until the dying-resuscitation process begins, and then the spiritual mind takes over at resuscitation. Until resuscitation, the spiritual mind is unconscious, so that all our consciousness is focused on the natural mind. But after resuscitation there is a physiological change so that the natural mind and our outward social personality is gradually being "decommissioned" or "put out of circulation." We then continue our life of immortality in eternity by means of our conscious life in the spiritual mind.
Our mental organs are not only constructed out of spiritual heat and light from the Spiritual Sun, but they are also activated by them. This corresponds to the phenomenon in the physical world that if you prevent sunlight and heat from the natural sun from reaching the planet, everything perishes and the planet becomes a dead planet. All plant life depends on continuous radiation from the physical sun, and the weather system that it causes in the atmosphere. This corresponds to the phenomenon in the mental world of eternity, whereby our mental organs and their operations of feelings, thoughts, and sensations, would cease and disappear if the radiation from the Spiritual Sun stopped.
Now the final point: What is this endless stream of spiritual heat and light coming out of the Spiritual Sun?
Spiritual heat is nothing else than Divine Love or Good, and spiritual light is nothing else than Divine Truth or Wisdom.
Now you can see the fundamental and unavoidable theistic aspect of the Swedenborg Reports.
This is one of the most astonishing facts of science that has ever come to human knowledge. Our mental organs are constructed, activated, and directed by God through God's Divine Love as spiritual heat, and through Divine Truth as spiritual light. The mental world of eternity is an expanse created, activated, and directed by God through love and truth substances.
This is a difficult rational concept to understand at first, because we think of love and truth as conditions or states of the body, or the mind, but not as substances like heat or light. After our resuscitation we will be able to look straight at the Spiritual Sun and experience the actuality of good and truth streaming into our spiritual body and activating our loves, thoughts, and sensations. Swedenborg found out that the people who dwell in the highest layer of the mental world, which is closest to the Spiritual Sun (layer 4), are conscious of the "influx" of heat and light as they gaze at the Spiritual Sun. Swedenborg also looked at Spiritual Sun and describes it as thousands of times brighter than the noon day sun in summer we experience here. The physical sun rays blind our eyes, but the rays of the Spiritual Sun have the opposite effect -- they clarify one's thinking and warm our heart with happiness from its heat of love and good. The spiritual light, which is Divine Truth exiting from God, is received by the people in layer 4 as quasi-omniscience, that is, whatever you think about while in that light, you can understand rationally and scientifically, spontaneously knowing everything that is knowable about it.
The reality described in the Swedenborg Reports show that God is at the center of every phenomenon in both worlds. The two worlds are connected, point by point, by means of the laws of correspondences that are a central part of creation. It is not possible for science to discuss reality without describing the direct hands on role of God in that reality. Every existing physical object, and every existing mental operation, are directed or managed by God from within their inmost structure and substance, which is spiritual heat and light from the Spiritual Sun. God's feelings and thinking are therefore at the center of every phenomenon, that is, the origin and cause of every phenomenon. In terms of reality and existence, God's love and truth first enter the mental world of eternity in its highest layer (4), then descend or exteriorize through all the mental layers, and finally exist into the natural world of time where it creates every object and makes it to come into existence in a way and pattern that follows and brings about God's order and purpose.
In the Swedenborg Reports God reveals that His purpose for creating and maintaining the universe is
(1) to arrange for human beings to develop a natural mind on planets in the physical world,
(2) which allows their spiritual mind to be opened and activated after resuscitation,
(3) so that they can lead an endless life of conjugial happiness with a soul mate,
(4) which is communicated mutually to all who live in the Grand Human,
(5) so that the overall happiness of the human race continues to increase endlessly to eternity.
God's purpose is activated by God's Divine Love, which is to create people and make them evolve to ever grander happiness and intelligence, endlessly, forever. And all this is accomplished through God's Divine Truth, which is the source of human rationality and intelligence. The more we are in order with God's purpose and order, the more we experience this grand life, and the sooner. We can solve the problems of society and mind that non-theistic psychology has been unable to do so far. The positive-bias in science and the Swedenborg Reports have been made available to all people to further this Divine purpose for the world and humankind.
Even if traditional non-theistic psychology were to admit and accept the mind-body dualism of the Swedenborg Reports, it would encounter the other intellectual barrier, which is the barrier of "God" as a concept in science.
To by-pass this intellectual barrier we need to adopt the positive-bias in science.
The negative-bias in science is called a "bias" because it is not dependent on the proof that God does not exist, or that the concept of God cannot function in science. The negative-bias science is materialistic in its foundations, hence it rejects dualism (eternity outside time) and God. Both are rejected without proof, hence we can call it the negative-bias of materialism in science. Similarly, the positive-bias in theistic psychology is not dependent on any proof that God exists, or that Swedenborg's reports of resuscitation are correct and valid. No such proof is possible within a materialistic perspective. Hence it is called the positive-bias of theistic dualism.
However, thought there is no proof either way, there are many empirical facts reported by Swedenborg, thanks to his ability to be conscious in his spiritual mind, simultaneously with his normal consciousness in his natural mind. This was the first time in human history that a modern scientist was given the opportunity of collecting observational evidence of the dying process, and of the life immortal that begins at resuscitation. At age 57, in the middle of an active and successful scientific and engineering career in Sweden, Swedenborg awoke one day feeling very strange, hearing and seeing things, being confused. After a few days however, he realized that his spiritual consciousness was present along with his natural consciousness. He was able to see and observe people in the afterlife, even as he was carrying on his busy life as a government engineer, prominent legislator, and publisher of scientific works and inventions.
He found himself with dual consciousness -- aware of his natural world surroundings as before, but in addition, aware of the surroundings of those who pass on, resuscitate, and continue their life in the spiritual mind and body. When each of us are resuscitated, we will be able to confirm all of Swedenborg's observations. Until then we need to approach the Swedenborg Reports without proof, in the positive-bias orientation, so that we can give it a serious examination (positive-bias in science), rather than reject it out of hand as impossible (negative-bias in science).
The examination of the Swedenborg Reports in the positive-bias mode does not mean that we are going to merely accept uncritically what they describe.
We must apply the tools of rational and scientific thinking as we examine the Swedenborg evidence.
Do the descriptions and their explanations make rational sense
Do they hold together consistently into an overall integrated system of scientific explanation
Do any of the descriptions or explanations contradict each other
Are the explanations usable for the phenomena and events we can observe around us in the physical and social world
Are there any philosophers and scientists who have read these reports and accepted them
Did Swedenborg have a good reputation as a man and scientist
Did any of his contemporaries read him and agree with him
How scientific are the explanations of mental phenomena, how detailed, how mechanistic and functional
Are the cause-effect interactions explained rationally
Can the knowledge be applied to current issues and problems
Is research possible
Are there factual data, or experimental set ups with variables being manipulated
Empirically specific enough to be testable with data and observations
Organic (like biology, anatomy, physiology), so that every piece can be isolated and studied on its own as well as its structural part and role in the functioning of the whole
I have studied the Swedenborg Reports since 1981 and have made available several of my articles and books online, showing that they fundamentally meet the rational and scientific standards specified above. To review this evidence you can consult these sources, where you will also find collateral literature (some online), by various authors who have also studied the Writings of Swedenborg.
The fact is that there is no precedent in the history of psychology for a theory as global and all encompassing as the presentation in the Swedenborg Reports. The theories and accounts in psychology are generally addressed to a small zone of human behavior or thinking. There is no theory or presentation tying together the most common issues of relevance to everyday life and society into one integrated account. For the first time in science history, the Swedenborg Reports present such a unified presentation of everyday life issues – birth, development, social life, death, resuscitation, life in eternity. If we apply the above assessment grid to a number of well known and accepted theories in psychology, none of them would pass the test.
The fact is that theories in psychology change rapidly. One of my graduate school professor at McGill University in 1960, the famed physiological psychologist Donald Hebb, insisted that a “good” theory in psychology lasts about ten years. It takes a few years to test a theory and develop new data that the theory cannot handle. The theory must be changed. And so on. This is what has been called the regular “revolution” in “normal science” (Kuhn comes to mind). If a theory in psychology lasts a long time, like that of Freud, it is not a good theory, according to this view, because it means it is not specific enough to be disproven by new data.
Hebb’s perspective may be accurate for non-theistic psychology. But it does not apply to the the theistic psychology extracted from the Swedenborg Reports. Here we have a theoretical account that is totally rational and so successful that it does both things that other theories have never done before:
(1) It is empirically specific, so that it can be tested with data and observations
(2) It is totally organic, holistic, or synergistic so that it is able to account for new data
Given all this, it makes sense for you to lay aside the negative-bias materialism in the study of these reports, and to examine them with a positive-bias. This means that you are accepting the possibility that the Swedenborg Reports might be scientific and valid. You are not saying that they are scientific and valid, but only that you acknowledge that they might be, if you lay aside the usual negative-bias materialism.
Duality
encompasses two worlds, one physical in time, and the other mental in eternity.
This is also called the spiritual world or the afterlife. Born into eternity
through a dual body, one in each world, we ‘pass on’ at death and resuscitate a
few hours later in the spiritual body and our own familiar mind and identity of
self. To say that we “pass on” is to speak according to the appearance,
especially to those still “on earth.” The scientific specifics revealed in the
Swedenborg Reports indicate that our mind and self are in the spiritual body
only, and therefore we are born into eternity and stay there. We are merely not
conscious that our spiritual body is functioning in the mental world of
eternity. Our thoughts and feelings are in that immortal spiritual body in
eternity. So instead of actually “passing on” from “this side to that side”, we
are merely becoming conscious that we are already in the mental world of
eternity from birth.
This new spiritual consciousness is made possible by the dying and resuscitation process. It is something we look forward to with anticipation, though we also know from Sacred Scripture that we are responsible for preparing ourselves before that process of consciousness transition. If we awaken unprepared, we follow our inherited ruling love of doing everything for the sake of self only. This love exists in the Grand Monster, in the hells of the human mind. But if we awaken from resuscitation being prepared, we have undergone character reformation and regeneration through resisting temptations. Then we have a heavenly ruling love that pulls us irresistibly to conjugial life in the Grand Human.
The two worlds are tied together in an integral coordination. Every event in the physical world of time and nature is called an effect, and every event in the mental world of eternity and the Spiritual Sun, is called a cause. The effect once it comes about, cannot exist by itself but must have the cause within itself. This is the Divine Law of Correspondence between the natural and the spiritual, between physical and mental. In the discourse of many people, including scientists, the word “natural” is normally opposed to “spiritual,” and the word “physical” is normally opposed to “mental.” Few people have suspected or known that these two sets refer to each other. “Natural” refers to “physical,” and “mental” refers to “spiritual.” Consequently, natural and physical refer to phenomena in time, and these are effects, while spiritual and mental refer to phenomena in eternity (not in time), and these are causes.
These two, the physical and the mental, or in other words, the natural and the spiritual, are correspondences and are fully determined by the laws of correspondences. These are revealed in the Swedenborg Reports. Correspondences apply only across discrete degrees. The physical and the mental are in discrete degrees. This means that nothing from the physical can come into contact with the mental – they are separate universes. But they are tied to each other, point by point, phenomenon by phenomenon, object by object. A mental object is in the world of causes, thus the spiritual world. That particular mental object has an effect in the physical, and the two are functionally tied and determined by each other.
For
instance, the existence of the substance of water in the physical world is an
effect whose cause is the existence of the substance of truth in the mental
world. The mental world of eternity is a rational ether or expanse or field
created by the Spiritual Sun. This phenomenon was visually observed by
Swedenborg over the course of 27 years of daily dual consciousness, from age 57
to 84 when he was separated from his physical body in 1772. In his spiritual
consciousness he was able to see the sensorimotor neos appearing in the various
layers of the mental world of eternity, which is shaped overall into the
appearance of the Grand Human. Every person he talked to in that spiritual
consciousness (layer 4, Third Heaven) was able to see the Spiritual Sun.
The Swedenborg Report describe the Spiritual Sun as an aura that localizes the point of interchange between God and creation. God As He is in Himself, infinite, unknowable, unapproachable created mental and physical existence by means of this Divine Aura or Substance that flows out of Him and into His creation. The Spiritual Sun is therefore called Layer 1 of the mental world of eternity. From the Spiritual Sun issue an endless variety of mental substances out of which human minds are organically constructed. There are two types of spiritual substances, each infinite in their own. One type is spiritual light coming from the Spiritual Sun, and the other type is spiritual heat that is within the light. What is amazing is that the mental substance of spiritual light is nothing else than truth upon which is based rationality and the functioning purposeful order of reality. Further, the mental substance of spiritual heat is nothing else than love from which is constructed our will to live and survive.
When we are conceived and born God forms a spiritual body that contains the three systems of mental organs we call affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor. These organs are constructed out of the substances of spiritual heat and light. Since spiritual heat (Divine Love) and spiritual light (Divine Truth) are Divine substances they are living and immortal. Anything constructed out of the substances of the Spiritual Sun is therefore indestructible and permanent. Our spiritual body and its mental organs are born into eternity and remain immortal and eternal. Our self and identity as a unique person remains forever and is indestructible. That’s nice to know, right? I thought so myself when I first found out, in 1981, having found the Swedenborg Reports in our university library on the campus of the University of Hawaii. My wife and I were searching for Bible Commentaries and came across a shelf of 40 books written by one man, E. Swedenborg. We each took a volume home and have kept reading, studying, and researching those volumes since then.
The order of reality has therefore been created with the Spiritual Sun creating the mental world of eternity, and then, outside of that by a discrete degree, creating the physical world in time. This is the sequential order of phenomenal existence in creation –
Spiritual Sun à mental world of eternity à physical world in time
Source à cause à effect
Quoting from the Swedenborg Reports:
SS 28. It will be comprehended by the learned that these three may be called end, cause and effect; also being, becoming and existing: the end is being, the cause is becoming and the effect is existing. Consequently, in everything that is complete there is a trine, called the first, the middle and the last; also, the end, the cause and the effect; and also being (esse) becoming, (fieri), and existing (existere). When one understands these things then also does one understand that every Divine work is complete and perfect in its last; and also that the whole is in the last, which is a trine, because the prior things are simultaneously therein. (SS 28)
It is similar with what is mental in relation to the physical. The mental is prior and is the cause, while the physical is posterior and is the effect. The cause cannot mix with the effect but they correspond to each other and act together, and live together. When the Source is within the cause and the two together are in the effect, the sequence is completed in simultaneous order. This is the order of reality. Here are some diagrams that depict and discuss simultaneous order of a variety of things in discrete degrees:
diagram 1 || diagram 2 || diagram 3 || diagram 4 || diagram 5 || diagram 6 || diagram 7 ||
God chose our planet earth to effect the Divine Incarnation. The reason is that of all the myriad of inhabited planets across the billions of galaxies, this earth is the only one that has supported a scientific civilization based on rational methods of thinking. In order for God to complete the creation of the human race, He had to acquire for Himself a Natural Body in the physical world. He had prepared this momentous event since the beginning of the generations of people on this earth. God’s Natural Body contained a Spiritual Body in which was a natural mind with its three layers (corporeal (9), scientific (8), external rational (7e). It also contained a spiritual mind with its three layers (First Heaven (6), Second Heaven (5), and third Heaven (4).
Just as it is with all people born on this planet, God’s Natural Mind was connected by inheritance to the societies of the Grand Monster. In order to disconnect this inherited natural mind from the hell societies, God-Man had to regenerate His inherited natural mind before He could make it Divine, and hence, truly His Own. To accomplish this God-Man had to do what no human being could, before Him. This was the very purpose for which He wanted to be Incarnated and acquire for Himself a Divine Natural Body that He could take to Himself in eternity, so that those in the afterlife of eternity could see Him visually, and touch Him with their hands. This visible touchable God is called The Divine Human. There is only One God. Until the Incarnation God could only be seen as the Spiritual Sun. This is because He had not acquired for Himself a Sensorimotor Body, which is the ultimate of human life. Swedenborg was told by those who live in layer 4 consciousness (Third Heaven) that the Divine Human sometimes appears to them face to face and talks with them.
The method that God-Man created to regenerate His Natural Mind is the method that every human being after that, must use to regenerate his or her natural mind. This method involves three steps:
(I) God-Man creates a new evolutionary layer in His natural mind. This is layer 7i or the interior-natural layer. This organ never existed in the current split-brain spiritual race, though it did exist in the earlier whole-brain celestial race that first lived on this earth (“the Most Ancient Church”). The interior-natural layer (7i) that God-Man constructed in the human natural mind actually completes the full evolution of the human race. With this new interior organic system in our rational mind (layer 7i) we are able to raise our consciousness to the spiritual and celestial level, almost as if our spiritual mind became conscious. Through this entirely new ability our rational mind has been able to evolve progressively for two thousand years and to produce modern science, society, and a global civilization.
This evolution could not have occurred on any other planet in the universe, and it is on this account that God was Incarnated on this earth. Hence it is that viewed spiritually, this earth is the center of the universe. All other human generations have been benefitted by the organic evolution that took place on this earth. The entire human race is kept by God as one organic unit called the Grand Human, and its opposite, the Grand Monster. These organic entities operate as one so that whatever changes occur in one place, affect all the other places, each in its own unique way.
You can see from this that neo production is the basis upon which human evolution depends. Layer 7i neos are the higher correspondences of Sacred Scripture that we can extract and organize into a science called theistic psychology.
Our
soul at conception and birth (layers 2, 3) is imprinted with a spiritual bar
code that contains the unique traits and abilities of the person's mental layers
(4 to 9). This spiritual gene contains the entire future states of the person.
Every mental layer contains its own portion of the spiritual barcode, which
gives the person a unique spiritual identity in all states of consciousness.
Spiritual barcodes are organic. They are made of a mixture of lighter and darker stripes or bars. Each stripe is a spiritual address located in one of the numberless societies of the Grand Human (layers 4, 5, 6) and the Grand Monster (layers -7, -8, -9). As each layer grows and develops in the course of our daily life, the operations taking place in each layer are determined by the barcode addresses organically stamped on that layer. Each spiritual address is actually an open connection or channel of communication between the loves of the people in the society at that address, and the loves that the individual is attached to.
For example, suppose you feel depressed because your supervisor criticized your for the way you are doing your work. Feeling depressed is a hellish love sourced in the Grand Monster. There is an address in your spiritual barcode in layer 9A that connects your feeling of being depressed with a society in the Grand Monster populated with people whose chief passion is to enjoy people's depressive thoughts and emotions about themselves. It's a kind of sadistic enjoyment, as when you and your friends enjoy teasing someone. This kind of bullying happens frequently in school, at work, with friends. Some people feel enjoyment when they see someone's misfortunes. These people also feel depression when others gain something or have something that you want, but can't have. There is a large collection of loves and sub-loves around feeling depressed. As long you the spiritual address with that society remains open for communication, you are going to experience these loves at various times (depression when losing, elation when winning, etc.).
Your emotion of depression when your boss criticizes you, or when a friend rejects you, or when you don't win the contest, etc., is produced by this connection that you keep open in your "vertical community" or mental world. Although we are all born with an inherited spiritual bar code that determines our heavenly and hellish loves, we are not part of the spiritual society where our loves originate from. We do not own these loves, nor are they within us. They are merely open channels that transmit this love to our affective organ in layers 7, 8, 9. They become our own only when we develop a love for that inflowing affective operation. For instance, one way we can react to our depression is to satisfy our love for retaliation. We enjoy thinking bad thoughts about the person who offended or rejected us. This enjoyment of retaliating, punishing, denigrating is a hellish enjoyment coming from a hellish love (layer -9, -8). Each time we experience the enjoyment of vengeance, the satisfaction of seeing someone suffer, even if it goes no further than in our imagination, we are making that love our own. And once a love is made our own, we can get rid of it only through regeneration, only by spiritual combat against temptations brought to us by the Divine Psychologist.
The process of regeneration by temptation is an organic process managed entirely by the Divine Psychologist within every person who is still active in the natural mind prior to dying and resuscitation. The cumulative activity of regeneration over days, months, years, and decades, consists of disowning our hellish loves, and owning our heavenly loves. We inherit both loves through the spiritual barcode connection in our vertical community. The lighter and darker stripes insure that we oscillate all day between heavenly and hellish emotions and thoughts. This regular and frequent alternation process of our consciousness is necessary for the ability to undergo regeneration. We inherit connections to the Grand Human (lighter stripes) and the Grand Monster (darker stripes) but the loves that come through the connections do not become our own loves until we decide to practice them and allow ourselves to enjoy them without opposition.
We can practice inherited heavenly impulses like curiosity, studying, cooperation, sincerity, conscience, etc., and they become our own loves, our abilities, our own good. But if we don't practice sincerity by preferring to lie and get away with deception, then we make the love of fraud and thievery to be our own love. The Divine Psychologist faces us with temptations in daily life in order to allow us to choose to love the hellish trait and enjoyment, or to refuse to love it, and to try to reject it, and even hate it. By refusing to practice an evil enjoyment, we are making it possible for the Divine Psychologist to remove that inherited connection in the spiritual barcode.
The more we regenerate a mental layer, the more the lighter and darker stripes are separated into two camps. Eventually all the heavenly stripes will be in one camp, and all the hellish ones in an opposing camp.
Today the neuroscience of consciousness has human awareness located in the physical brain. This may be called reductionist neuroscience because it reduces two dimensions into one. It views physical brain and mental consciousness as one material substance in time and place. Non-reductionist neuroscience allows for a dualism of substances. Physical substance is in time and place, and composes the brain of the physical body. Mental substance is not in time and place, and composes the brain of the spiritual body. There are therefore two bodies to consider at our birth, one made of temporary physical substances, the other made of eternal mental substances. The physical substances originate in the sun or star systems, while the spiritual substances originate in the Spiritual Sun, which is the center of the mental world of eternity. The two bodies grow up together in correspondence, and when the physical body dies, our conscious life continues as before through the spiritual body.
In other words our feelings, thoughts, and sensations are not events located in the physical brain and body. They are events located in the mental organs called affective, cognitive, and sensorimotor. These mental organs are located in the spiritual body since birth, and remain there forever. Since the spiritual body is immortal, the mental organs are permanent in eternity. Our conscious self does not stop at the death of the physical body since the self is located in the spiritual body right from the start of conscious life.
Our mental organs are arranged in layers of operations from lowest (layer 9) to highest (layer 4). Our consciousness is determined by the level at which it is operating in any situation. The feelings, loves, mentality, thinking, preferences, limitations at each consciousness level have been described in the Swedenborg Reports and are presented in theistic psychology.
The above makes it clear that human consciousness has an organic basis. Note also that we consciousness is a composite contributed by three mental systems or functions of operation – affective (A), cognitive (C), and sensorimotor (S). Affective consciousness is determined by the quality of our loves in relation to God and the Spiritual Sun. This is because the Spiritual Sun, which is the origin of all human mental substances in eternity, is nothing but an exit point or outflow of the spiritual substances of Divine Love and Divine Truth, flowing into the created mental world of humanity. The Spiritual Sun is at the center, also at the highest region (layer 1) of the created mental world. There is only one mental world, and you and me and everyone is in that one same mental world. We cannot see one another now, while we are still attached to the physical body by correspondence. But immediately after our resuscitation, at the end of the dying process, we are awakened in consciousness in our higher or spiritual mind, and in that consciousness we can see everyone who has passed into the afterlife.
Swedenborg was an extraordinary Divinely initiated exception so that he was given conscious awareness in the spiritual mind while he was still here conscious in his natural mind and physical body. He led a strange dual consciousness life for 27 years, from age 57 to 84. He left behind the Swedenborg Reports which are about 30 volumes of his empirical and experimental observations during these years of the mental world of eternity and ho wit corresponds and relates to the conscious life we know here prior to passing on through dying and resuscitation.
Prior to our resuscitation our consciousness is limited the three layers of the natural mind (9, 8, 7). After resuscitation our consciousness operates in the layers of the spiritual mind (6, 5, 4). The task we have in our years on earth is to regenerate the natural mind, which allows the spiritual mind to open, grow, and mature. If the natural mind is not regenerated, the spiritual layers do not function after resuscitation. This means that we must then continue to operate in our natural mind, but now in the mental world of eternity. This is a disastrous situation and leads to an unhappy life in eternity called “hell.” But if we regenerate the natural layers, the spiritual layers are ready to function after resuscitation, and our consciousness can dwell in an eternal “heaven” with our soul mate.
Regeneration is an organic process. It is made necessary because our natural mind is born with inherited hellish loves. More precisely, we are each born with a unique spiritual bar code that automatically ties us to certain “hellish” societies, each of whom specialize in some selfish, cruel, insane, and destructive love or enjoyment. Regeneration is the organic process that separates us from that inherited connection. The process is carried out in cooperation with the Divine Psychologist who brings events and situations to the life of each person in such a way as to bring awareness to the individual of the inherited ties to the hellish societies. We can observe, witness, monitor our thoughts and feelings in the course of the day and evaluate them in terms of what we know about heavenly and hellish traits. The process is experienced as a "temptation" during which we are pulled by opposing emotional forces: to give in or to reject the hellish love, enjoyment, or habit. When we reject a hellish connection with the Grand Monster, we are gradually cut off from those societies so that we no longer "own" those hellish traits.
As regeneration proceeds day by day, and year by year, our spiritual mind (layers 6, 5, 4) is opened, operationalized, prepared for our conscious life in it after resuscitation. If we are unwilling to go through the lifelong process of regeneration, or conscious disowning of inherited hellish traits, then our spiritual mind is not opened or functional after resuscitation. We then experience consciousness in the natural mind (layers -9, -8, -7). The minus sign indicates that these natural layers after resuscitation are not suitable for genuine human life in the mental world of eternity. People in that consciousness are sub-human caricatures of their former selves when they still had heavenly traits along with the hellish. But after resuscitation, when the spiritual layers are non-functional, the heavenly traits are rejected or lost, leaving behind a monstrous version -- people who invert all truth and good into falsity and evil, creating a community of hell around them in which they have to spend their consciousness in mental eternity.
The construction of novel sentences, novel expressions, novel words, novel nonsense words, nicknames, names of endearment, titles, lyrics, names of people, streets, places, products, lifestyle practices, etc. -- these are normal speech acts all speakers of a language employ constantly. Children at play produce novel verbalizations that may be called nonsense neologisms or meaningless neologisms. I have neologued many romantic neologisms of endearment to describe the diversity of conjugial delights her appearance and presence initiates in me. According to my favorite author, no two things can ever be the same because all created things, qualities, or events must reflect God's infinity (Swedenborg). In other words, if things were not absolutely unique the created universe would not accurately reflect the creativeness of God, in whom "infinite things make one" (Swedenborg). In other words, all creations by God and all constructions by people are existential neologisms.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a voluminous writers. The current
publication of his entire works translated in English take up nearly 50 volumes.
About 37 of these were written after his dual consciousness was awakened at age
57. I have been studying these volumes since 1981 and have based my work on it
since then, especially my 18-volume project called "theistic
psychology." I coined the neologism "the Swedenborg Reports" to refer to
this collection of scientific reports on his observations during his dual
consciousness. He was quite surprised when he found himself one day being
conscious of two worlds simultaneously. One was the conscious awareness of the
natural world through his natural mind and physical body, the other was the
conscious awareness of the spiritual world through his spiritual mind and
spiritual body. Every human being is
In 27 years of full conscious awareness of the spiritual world, Swedenborg observed thousands of people being resuscitated and was able to talk to them, both strangers and people he knew in this life. He also interviewed people who had lived on this earth thousands of years ago, yet appeared in the "flower of youth" in their heavenly habitations in eternity. Some of my favorite neologisms coined by Swedenborg are these:
the Divine Human
the as-of-self
discrete degrees
conjugial love
interior sense of Sacred Scripture
natural, spiritual, celestial senses
science of correspondences
spiritual rational
celestial rational
spiritual natural
ruling love
spiritual heat or love
spiritual light or truth
Spiritual Sun
One Person in Three Divine Aspects
Grand Man (or Grand Human)
spiritual doctrine
Most Ancient Church
Pre-Adamites
In my attempt to render the Swedenborg Reports into contemporary psychological ideas and methods I had to coin a variety of neologisms such as these:
theistic psychology
the mental world of eternity
mental anatomy
spiritual psychobiology
genes of consciousness
substantive dualism
doctrine of the wife
surrendered husband
sweetheart rituals
unity model of marriage
substitution technique
self-witnessing
Perizonius thesis
Grand Human
Grand Monster
The act of constructing neologisms has a spiritual dimension or significance when examined from the perspective of the Swedenborg Reports. Note the etymology of neologism: neo=new and logos=word or meaning. Thus, neologism=new word or meaning. The Swedenborg Reports present the view that a new spiritual age was ushered in by God through Swedenborg's Writings in which God reveals through him the science of correspondences that describes the laws by which God manages the universe in its various layers or discrete degrees. These laws are contained in the "spiritual sense" of Sacred Scripture.
All Sacred Scripture is Divine Speech or Truth that has descended from God and was transformed from a celestial meaning, to a spiritual meaning, to a natural meaning. The natural meaning of Sacred Scripture is the literal meaning. By applying the knowledge of correspondences to the verses and words of the literal sense of Sacred Scripture, one can extract the spiritual and celestial senses that are hidden within it. This extraction process is possible only when the individual is enlightened by God to see these more interior truths within the literal sense. Everyone is enlightened by God who is willing to stop acting and thinking from selfish traits, and wants to become a "new person" who is altruistic and happy with heavenly enjoyments.
This new human ability accessible to every human being now and in the endless future is called the New Word or the New Church. Thus "neologism" has a spiritual meaning that refers to this New Word, this new consciousness that God is bringing about, a new step in the evolution of human consciousness. When we coin a new term in science we are enacting the new human consciousness which is a more interior thinking, more spiritual and rational, closer to truth, to Divine Truth or Rationality.
The process of constructing neologisms must be connected to the process of sharing them.
The adoption of neologisms by others and from others is a spiritual sharing called "spiritual love" by Swedenborg. Every person is a neologist and constructs neologisms every day in ordinary speaking, writing, and reflecting. The process of thinking produces neologisms as a by product. To speak is to create. The inventiveness of our thinking and speaking is produced by our love -- what it is that we want and desire to express outwardly. The nature of love is to strive to externalize. To achieve this external existence, love transmutes by correspondence into thinking and reflecting, then at last into doing and sensing.
Speaking more anatomically, every human being is a threefold self -- affective self, cognitive self, sensorimotor self. Each self resides and operates within its own specialized organ -- affective organ, cognitive organ, sensorimotor organ. These mental organs are fused into operational synergy by the Divine laws of correspondences that activate and coordinate the layers in every human mind. The affective organ is a receptor for spiritual heat, while the cognitive organ is a receptor of spiritual light. In other words, our feeling and willing are subjective experiences resulting from the operations of the affective organ stimulated by spiritual heat. And similarly, our thinking and reflecting are subjective experiences resulting from the operations of the cognitive organ stimulated by spiritual light.
This operational synergy between the affective and the cognitive, between the inner willing and its understanding, transforms itself by correspondence into an outward existence in the sensorimotor organ, whose operations we experience as sensing, moving, verbalizing, and doing. The threefold self is therefore an anatomical construction activated by God through the inflow of spiritual heat and light. What is truly amazing is that spiritual heat and light are live substances, not at all like physical heat and light that come from the natural sun. In fact, the Swedenborg Reports fully establish the existence of the Spiritual Sun in the mental world of eternity. From age 57 to his passing on at 84, Emanuel Swedenborg was a dual citizen, living a dual life, one through the physical body in the natural world of time and place, and the other through the spiritual body in the mental world of eternity, which he called "the spiritual world." He daily wrote copious notes of his observations, which have been published and translated and known as the Writings of Swedenborg. They amount to about 30 volumes.
Swedenborg confirmed that the Spiritual Sun is visible to all who raise their threefold self consciousness to the highest layer of their mind called the celestial-rational layer or "Third Heaven." He encountered and interviewed numerous inhabitants of this mental layer of humanity. These people told him that they had been born on earth in "Most Ancient" times and had been living in their Third Heaven since their death. Swedenborg marveled at their appearance and how they looked in their "early youth," which I take to mean around the age of 20. And what was even more amazing and delightful to discover, was that they were living as married couples in what Swedenborg called "conjugial love."
These Most ancient people were special and different from the race that evolved subsequently on this earth. We are part of the split-brain race whose genius and mentality is called spiritual, while the Most Ancients were a celestial race and their brain was not split into a left and right hemispheres. They were unable to simulate, lie, or act outwardly contrary to what they felt inwardly. Whereas our spiritual race can separate and break up the perfect synergy between willing and thinking and speaking. Our threefold self has evolved to be able to act somewhat independently of each other. As a result we are able to alternate between mental states called heavenly, and others called hellish. For instance when people drive in traffic it is common to alternate between relatively calm or good states and negative or agitated states. Sometimes it is called the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome. This kind of alternation is impossible for the celestial race, but for us, not only is it normal but the ability that makes it possible for us to regenerate the threefold self from its inherited negativity.
God works with every individual, continuously being active in the operations and synergy of the threefold self. From birth to endless eternity we are co-managers with the Divine Psychologist in the domain of our mind. God's management procedures are carried out through two types of forces acting on us. One is called "immediate influx" and the other is called "mediate influx." This refers to the way spiritual heat and light from the Spiritual Sun enters or inflows our threefold organs in the spiritual body. God's Divine Love inflows as spiritual heat substance, while God's Divine Truth inflows as spiritual light substance. The "flow" of spiritual substances first enters the layer of the mind that is closest to the Spiritual Sun. This is called the Third Heaven of mental eternity. Every human being is born into time and born into eternity. One is through a temporary physical body in the natural world, the other is through a permanent spiritual body in the mental world of eternity (or the "spiritual world").
Upon the death of the physical body, we lose contact with the physical world. A few hours later we awaken in our spiritual body. Remember that all along, since birth, our threefold self resides in the spiritual body in the mental world of eternity. When we lose connection to the physical world, we merely continue as before in the spiritual body. There is actual "passing on" or going anywhere. Our self and consciousness, our thoughts feelings and sensations, are already in the mental world of eternity. These have never been, and never could, exist in the physical world, as for instance in the brain of the physical body. Feelings, thoughts, and sensations are immaterial, hence cannot exist in something material.
Swedenborg observed then interviewed thousands of people who have just been resuscitated in the conscious awareness of the spiritual body. He describes the 30-hour process in some detail. He himself had been conscious in his spiritual body from age 57 onward, while normally one regains spiritual consciousness only after resuscitation, when natural consciousness ends. As a result of his dual existence for 27 years, Swedenborg was able to write the Swedenborg Reports which gives science for the first time in history, an empirical glimpse into the world of the afterlife.
One of the most far reaching discoveries Swedenborg's has made is that the threefold self has the spontaneous or automatic ability to project or create a sensorimotor environment that reflects, represents, and corresponds to the affective and cognitive organs acting in synergy. We have a foretaste of the mental world of the afterlife in eternity right now, when we are engaged in dreaming during sleep. We can gain a rational understanding of our afterlife if we reflect on what we are doing when we are dreaming.
It is the threefold self that is doing the dreaming during sleep. When we remember the dream upon awaking, especially when it is vivid, we can still picture or visualize parts of it. Our dreams are sensorimotor expressions and creations of the cognitive and affective organs acting together. We can actually experience sensations in all our modalities -- we can see things, taste and smell them, we can grab things, we can be held down by force or locked up in a room, and we can talk, eat, make love, even fly and transport ourselves instantly anywhere at any distance. This is the power of the sensorimotor organ in giving us subjective experiences. And all the operations of the sensorimotor organ are reactions by correspondence, to the operations in our affective and cognitive organs.
This is what Swedenborg discovered when he became conscious in the spiritual mind, the spiritual layers of our mental anatomy, into which all human beings arrive after resuscitation. The environment of the afterlife is somewhat similar and congruent with the environment here on earth. When people are resuscitated they see their spiritual body as similar to their former physical body -- it looks like it, feels like it, operates like it. We also know this from our dreams where the mental body (or dream body) of others, and our own body, appear just like the physical body we are all familiar with. Of course they are not similar in construction, the physical body being made of physical matter from the physical planet and sun, while the spiritual body and its threefold system of mental organs, is constructed out of the spiritual substances of the Spiritual Sun. The spiritual body cannot die, cannot starve to death, or get sick from germs and poisons, cannot be held by force in a room, cannot be disciplined against its own will. The spiritual body and its mind is forever free.
Swedenborg observed the interaction patterns between people in their life of eternity. Everything you see around someone, and everything that happens there, is a construction of our "ruling love." This refers to the affective hierarchy that is embedded anatomically in our affective organ. We develop and grow this hierarchy of feelings and intentions by the life choices we make every day, and every hour or minute of the day. All choices that are freely made, that is not coerced by circumstances or people, are called free will choices of love. It is love that dictates and determines the choices we think about and execute. Since we alternate all day between heavenly and hellish loves, we slowly and gradually construct our love hierarchy, both in the heavenly category of operations, and in the hellish. By the time we "pass on" in our consciousness from this world to the next, which occurs at resuscitation, we "arrive" in the other life fully equipped and loaded with our loves in both categories.
Swedenborg discovered that after resuscitation people go through a psychologically and emotionally intense series of mental states during which they are progressively exploring their love hierarchies through experiences and events arranged and provided by the Divine Psychologist. This intense Divine psychotherapy has but one purpose: to bring people in touch with their ruling love and its hierarchy of sub-loves. At last all pretenses of the personality fly out the window, leaving in place the ruling love and its total and absolute control over the threefold self.
Now this ruling love takes over the person's existence. It dictates what the person intends, desires, thinks, and does. Every love that is incompatible or contrary to the ruling love, gets banished forever to the outmost regions of the mind, and they just lie there, inert, no longer operative, as if no longer alive. By the laws of existence in the mental world of eternity, the sensorimotor environment or appearances begin to reflect the new person, now stripped of anything ambivalent. The threefold self is now rendered completely consistent, completely unified.
If the person's ruling love is a heavenly love, a love that is compatible with heavenly order in the heavenly layers of the mental world of eternity, then the person begins a new life of eternity in the heavenly zones of the mental world of humanity. Bit of the ruling love is a hellish one, a love that is incompatible with heavenly order, the the person begins a new life in the hellish zones of the mental world. Thus it is that some people live in heaven, and others in hell.
Swedenborg explored the mental spaces of Heaven and Hell. He describes how people live in habitations, cities, gardens, mountains, and how these sensorimotor appearances are beautiful, benign, spacious, and diverse in the case of the heavenly layers, and how they are ugly, noxious, cavernous, dark, and filled with unspeakable horrors that the inhabitants there impose on each other, playing out their infernal loves, hatreds, and insanities. When those who are in hell are taken up in consciousness to the sensorimotor environment of the heavens in their mind, they experience even more severe tortures of the mind than the worst they have in hell. They feel torn apart from the inside seams of their being, and they spontaneously precipitate themselves back into their hellish loves, environment, and companions. There they feel revived due to having their infernal loves back. For without one's loves, one is not alive.
Even more amazing discoveries are described in the Swedenborg Reports. He was allowed to receive a bird's eye view of the mental world of eternity. And from that perspective he confirmed the shape of the mental world of humanity: the heavenly layers are in the shape of a Grand Human in angelic appearance, and below that, the hellish layers of the mind are in the shape of a Grand Monster. Swedenborg's spiritual geography is therefore identical to mental anatomy. The shape of our threefold self is a human form, and every organ is in the human form as well. Swedenborg visited the various spiritual societies that form the Grand Human and the Grand Monster, and he would refer to his location by reference to the body parts. He would say that he is "in the province of the liver" or in the region of the uterus, or heart, or lungs, or pancreas. The Grand Human and Monster possess the organs of both sexes. People live in one region or another as determined by their ruling love. Those who have compatible ruling loves are close to one another, which means that they communicate with one another more than with distant societies whose ruling love is at variance.
And even more amazing: the character or mentality of the people, as determined by their ruling love, corresponds to the functions and properties of the organs they live in.
And further, Swedenborg discovered that the societies in the Grand Human and Monster are completely integrated and function synergistically. There is a common "respiration" that affects every society mutually. There is a constant "communication" of all operations in the threefold self of every person in a society with all others in that society. And after that, there is a similar reverberation of influence that spreads across the entire mind of humanity. Every single love, thought, and sensation experienced by one human being reverberates and is communicated to the entire network of human beings. As Swedenborg puts it, in the eyes of God all human beings are integrated and seen as one human being.
Now we can get back to the role of neologisms in all this.
All life is of love and all love reflects the infinity of God's love. Love is behind all neologisms. Think of a sentence you wrote or said recently to someone. Where did that sentence originate from? It came from some love, something you wanted to say to someone, something you desired to express in words, some perception or insight you've had by looking at something, or thinking about it. Love comes out on the wings of some thought or idea, and shows itself in the medium of sensorimotor appearances. Heaven is a sensorimotor appearance created by heavenly loves acting through heavenly thoughts. Heavenly loves enter our affective organ through spiritual heat, and transforms itself as the accompanying thoughts, which then produce the environmental appearances, objects, sensations, and actions.
Neologisms are therefore affective loves in cognitive form that create the word, phrase, or sentence.
If you want to know the quality of a person's love, look at the neologisms they produce. The meaning of each neologism is a spiritual map of where the love is that produced it, or, that is within that meaning. Every meaning contains a love. The meaning and the love become one, like husband and wife become one in the conjugial couples of our heavenly society. The marriage between our love and its meaning engenders the coming into existence of a neologism. The parents of the neologism are the love and its meaning. An operation in our affective organ ("love") forms a union with a corresponding operation in our cognitive organ ("meaning"), and the two together create a corresponding operation in our sensorimotor organ, which is the neologism when it activates the speech mechanisms, or the typing-texting of the fingers. The source of the neologism is the love, and the love is an inflow of the spiritual heat into the affective organ.
Such is the nature of infinite Divine love. Its infinite intensity comes out into the created universe through the Spiritual Sun, which Swedenborg described as an aura surrounding the Divine Human. This Spiritual Sun is the origin of all loves in the mental world of eternity. God's infinite love is infinitely diverse and abundant, which is why everything that comes into existence must be unique. No two things that exist can be identical since every thing is created from some love, and all loves from the Divine Human are infinite and unique. This means that there are also infinite truths in God since every love must be married to its own truth. All meanings are forms of truth, and also, forms of truth that are distorted or falsified by the loves of each individual. Spiritual light is truth substance itself, and spiritual heat is love substance itself. Swedenborg interchanged the words love and good, and also the words truth and wisdom, from which come knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.
In a pointed sense neos are zones of community ignorance. No one knows a neo prior to its construction by just one person. The diffusion of neos to others is the basis of community existence. People obtain their ideas and ideals from the neos of others. This is the process of cultural enrichment. Neo production of a group or society is an index of its inventiveness, adaptability, survivability. Cross-cultural sharing of neo production builds a unified globalism anchored in mutual love. It is the antidote to warfare and ethnocentric antipathy. People who benefit each other from their neo-construction procedures feel integrated in a community of humanity. All neos come down from God into the mind of its inventor. To love another’s neos is to love God in whom the neos are sourced. God is at the center of every neo.
Neologisms are new meanings, hence new truths from new loves.
When a neologism is born in the mental world of eternity, its location in the mind is either in the Grand Human or in the Grand Monster. Neologisms form a continuous reverberation within the spiritual societies that gave birth to its existence in the mind of an individual on earth, who is reflecting, speaking or writing. From there the reverberation of neologisms continue to the adjoining mental societies, and eventually every human being that ever existed or was born, experiences the results of that original reverberation of the birth of the neologism. Since every neologism is a unique spiritual child, it becomes the source of endless new meanings being added to the human understanding. This allows the generations to cumulate in intelligence and form ever more advanced, more humane, more heavenly civilizations on earth.
Each new generation thus benefits from this more advanced mentality and is able to create still more advanced and marvelous neologisms, that will further enrich the spiritual societies of eternity. This endless cycle of progress in the marriage of love and truth within each threefold self, is the organic mechanism that God provides for the endless evolution of the Grand Human, the endless expansion our loves and intelligences, with heaven and earth working together, the spiritual-celestial and the natural-corporeal acting by correspondence as one.
Be conscious of your neologisms and keep track of them. The semantic map or web, they form reveals the nature of your immortal existence in eternity.
Commercial neologisms like trademarks and product names are guaranteed by federal law the right to remain unique. Although one can use the name for other than commercial purposes, the owner can request a judge to prohibit certain ongoing uses by others of that name or title. Literary neologisms cannot be copyrighted, and once introduced or published, they are quotable and usable by anyone, including commercial dictionaries. Scientific neologisms are considered literary products and have no claims to ownership, except historical. Entertainment neologisms include titles of books, scripts, movies, and television programs. These are treated as commercial products and ownership of title and script are protected by federal copyright and patent laws.
Masculine neologisms are fundamentally different from feminine neologisms. One is the product of a man’s cognitive organ, while the other is the product of the feminine cognitive organ. Nothing in a man can be like anything in a woman, and vice versa (see here). I have not made an empirical study of this, and if anyone does, or already has, please email me if you would. It is well known that childish neologisms, that is, neologisms produced by the mind of children, revolves around the sensorimotor awareness of self. They respond with involvement and enthusiasm to little phonological games and interactions that involve verbalizing sound patterns and rhythms. They like stories where the teller imitates sounds of people, things, and animals. When they are a little older, they move on from sensorimotor neologisms to cognitive neologisms and invent clever and engaging limericks that people over the centuries have kept track of (the name Opie comes to mind). Adolescents respond with heart to patriotic neologisms that facilitate the development of a sense of belonging and identity. Young adults fall in love with affective neologisms or romantic neologisms found in the lyrics of songs. They also begin to be enmeshed in political neologisms in which they find a source of validation and self-confidence. Religious neologisms gain their deeper influence on people as they move into mature adulthood. Worshippers gain access to the doctrines and belief systems embodied in the titles of rules, principles, and creeds. In theistic psychology readers and students are introduced to the correspondential sense of Divine Neologisms, which are the words and expressions in Sacred Scripture.
As Swedenborg demonstrates, the Divine Style of Sacred Scripture is composed from Divine dictation or direct inspiration, and is such that every word and expression in it carries three meanings: the literal, the spiritual, and the celestial. Literal Divine Neologisms are expressed in a natural language and in the context of a particular cultural and historical milieu. This is why the literal sense of Sacred Scripture from different religions and time epochs appear to show independence or disagreements and contradictions. This is a necessary consequence of socialization practices in all cultures and places. We must provide intellectual content to religion so that children can be socialized into it, and so that adults can hold on to it with loyalty and belief, and pass it on to their children. This generational process of transmission of religious neologisms requires that their content be congruent with the content of the culture and belief systems that are being practiced. Hence it is that all Sacred Scripture in the literal sense reflects the content of the culture and civilization. God manages the two together, namely, the evolution of civilization and culture, and the progressive revelations in Sacred Scripture over the millennia and centuries.
But the spiritual and celestial senses of Sacred Scripture from different religions, cultures, and epochs are not only compatible but similar in intellectual content. The Swedenborg Reports demonstrate that every Literal Divine Neologism encapsulates within itself, a Spiritual Divine Neologism, and within that, a Celestial Divine Neologism. Everyone who studies the language or science of correspondences revealed in the Swedenborg Reports can perform this extraction process from the literal-historical, to the generalized spiritual, to the universal celestial. This threefold embedding of meaning and consciousness in Sacred Scripture is the physiological process that activates and maintains the threefold self of every individual – sensorimotor self, cognitive self, affective self.
The Literal Divine Neologisms of Sacred Scripture create and establish the sensorimotor self of every human being. The Spiritual Divine Neologisms of Sacred Scripture create and establish the cognitive self of every human being. The Celestial Divine Neologisms of Sacred Scripture create and establish the affective self of every human being.
The sensorimotor self is constructed out of our sensations, sensory involvements, and motor readinesses and determinations. The cognitive self is constructed out of our thoughts, reflections, images, and understandings. The affective self is constructed out of our feelings, loves, intentions, and desires. Hence it is that human consciousness and civilization is produced and managed by the Divine Neologisms in Sacred Scripture. The specific cause-effect connection varies with cultural and individual personality. The connection is more direct when people acknowledge Sacred Scripture as Divine Speech or Absolute and Divine Truth given to humanity for the growth and development of every human being. The connection is more indirect when people deny that Sacred Scripture is God’s Divine Speech or Word. The minds of people who reject the idea that God is real are nevertheless equally managed by God, without which the individual would cease to be human and intelligent. God manages the mind of atheists and others who have a system of beliefs that deny or exclude God, since without this Divine omnipotent management or control, the thoughts of the individual would not remain coherent and adaptable to survival.
The Swedenborg Reports, written in the 18th century, constitute a neologistic revelation as opposed to a “new” revelation which implies something different and foreign. But a neologistic revelation is a revelation about the old and familiar, now seen in a “new light,” which means that “new truths” are now seen in the old that were not seen by anyone before. Thus, the Swedenborg Reports (more commonly known as “the Writings of Swedenborg”), are a neologistic revelation about the Old Testament and the New Testament. These two Sacred Scriptures were studied by thousands of serious scholars and scientists for many centuries, generation after generation, and yet not one single individual saw the correspondential meaning that is hidden within these Sacred Scriptures. The Swedenborg Reports reveal the correspondential sense of the Old and New Testaments. This is not a “new” revelation, but a neologistic revelation about the old and familiar.
For instance, the New Testament has this verse:
nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you.(Luke 17:21)
What does it mean to say that “the kingdom of God is within you”? Generations of thinkers have been involved in this issue. Wikipedia summarizes a number of these views, which I sample here:
(…) Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, Norman Perrin and Johannes Weiss argued that Jesus’ “Kingdom” was intended to be a wholly futuristic kingdom. These scholars looked to the apocalyptic traditions of various Jewish groups existing at the time of Jesus as the basis of their study [22], [23], [24], [25]. In this view, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who would bring about the end times and when he did not see the end of the cosmic order coming Jesus embraced death as a tool in which to provoke God into action.
The most common view of the “Kingdom” in recent scholarship is to embrace the truths of both these parties – present reality and future manifestation. Some scholars who take this view are N.T. Wright and G.R. Beasley-Murray. In their views, the “Kingdom” that Jesus spoke of will be fully realized in the future but it is also in a process of “in-breaking” into the present. This means that Jesus’ deeds and words have an immediate effect on the “Kingdom” even though it was not fully manifested during his life. Even greater attention has been paid to the concept of the “Kingdom of God” by scholars during the current third quest for the historical Jesus (of which N.T. Wright is associated). (…)
The present aspect of the Kingdom refers to the changed state of heart or mind (metanoia) within Christians (see Luke 17:20-21), emphasizing the spiritual nature of His Kingdom by saying, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within (or among) you." The reported activity of Jesus in healing diseases, driving out demons, teaching a new ethic for living, and offering a new hope in God to the poor, is understood to be a demonstration of that Kingdom in action.
The Seventh-day Adventist Church accepts the doctrine of the Kingdom of God dividing it into two phases. These are, the Kingdom of Grace which was established immediately after Adam and Eve sinned, and the Kingdom of Glory which will be fully established when Christ returns to earth for the second time.
(The above is from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Heaven )
The knowledge of correspondences revealed in the Swedenborg Reports gives scientists a new technology of knowledge extraction or a new spiritual discourse analysis, that provides us with a scientific methodology able to translate Divine Literal Neologisms into Divine Spiritual Neologisms and into Divine Celestial Neologisms. This is literally a Jacob’s Ladder by which we can carry our scientific methodology across the array of discrete layers in eternity (or “discrete degrees”), with each layer or degree getting closer to God’s Divine Speech. The Writings of Swedenborg are called “the New Word” but not in the sense of a “new” revelation, but in the sense of a neologistic revelation of the Old and New Testament Sacred Scriptures, which are then called “the Old Word.” To say it again, the New Word does not replace the Old Word, but strengthens it, reveals its inner sense, which is infinite, because Divine Speech is in it.
The Divine Literal Neologism written in one English version as “the Kingdom of God is within you” is the external literal-historical sense that contains within it an internal Divine Spiritual Neologism. What is this? You can see from the Wikipedia summary that no one has known this. In the Swedenborg Reports we finally have the answer through revelation of the knowledge of correspondences, which are cause-effect connections between Divine Literal Neologisms and Divine Spiritual Neologisms. The “Kingdom of God” in the literal sense corresponds to the mental world of eternity in the spiritual sense. This is the world which contains the mental layers called “heaven” and “hell.” At the moment of our death here on earth, the resuscitation process begins. Swedenborg observed this process numerous times for 27 years. It takes about 30 hours to complete, and then we awaken as if from sleep, and begin our life of immortality in the mental world of eternity, supplied with a spiritual body (which we have from birth), and a mental environment that responds or reacts to our thoughts and feelings, as dreams respond and react to our wishes, desires, or fears.
The Divine Literal Neologism “within you” corresponds in its spiritual sense to the individual’s mind, which is born in the mental world of eternity and exists there forever. Hence, the entire Divine Literal Neologism “the Kingdom of God is within you” corresponds to the heavenly mental states we have after resuscitation – “if, and only if, we love and enjoy these heavenly mental states.” This is the Divine Celestial Neologism.
Divine
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Divine
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Divine
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the kingdom of God is within you |
the heavenly mental states we have after resuscitation |
if, and only if, we love and enjoy these heavenly mental states |
The
spiritual body is born with a spiritual mind and a natural mind, each arranged
in three discrete degrees. We are conscious in the natural mind while we are
still connected to our physical body on earth, but we are not conscious of our
spiritual mind until after resuscitation. The spiritual mind serves as our
consciousness after death and resuscitation. It has the power to create a
heaven. The spiritual mind must therefore be carefully prepared so that it is
fully operative for us after resuscitation. If we neglect to operationalize the
spiritual mind prior to our death and resuscitation, it will not function. Our
consciousness cannot move on from the natural mind we use here, to the spiritual
mind we use in the mental world of eternity. The natural mind is well suited to
give us a level of consciousness and intelligence that we use for our life on
earth. But it is totally inadequate in the mental world after resuscitation.
Those whose spiritual mind has not been operationalized have nowhere to go but
to remain in the consciousness of the natural mind. This makes them insane and
reduces their life to sub-human levels called hell.
In order
to operationalize our spiritual mind we must regenerate the natural mind.
The
natural mind must be regenerated in order to operationalize the spiritual mind.
This is because we inherit sub-human traits in the natural mind. These sub-human
traits give us many enjoyments to which we become very attached. Even though our
rational level of thinking tells us that we must give up these sub-human
enjoyments, we are unwilling to give them up. We love them and we make them part
of our habits and our identity. They include all the loves of self for the sake
of self. For instance, selfish loves regard only our own enjoyments, even if
these actions hurt others. It I s more important for us to have those enjoyments
than to stop hurting other people, whether they are strangers, family, or
society and humankind universally. We violate the human rights of others. We
operate below the level of our skill and intelligence. We mismanage,
miscalculate, procrastinate, neglect, destroy many of the good things that
belong to society and the human race – such as altruism, being useful, being
peaceful, being honest, protecting innocence, rational judgment, etc. These are
the human traits we inherit. They are our heavenly traits, while the former are
our hellish traits.
We
inherit both hellish and heavenly traits. These traits are grounded in, and
managed by, our ruling love and its hierarchy of assistant sub-loves. The ruling
love is the chief or dominant motive in our life. We are born with two ruling
loves: a heavenly ruling love and a hellish ruling love. Every individual
personality expresses these loves in a unique way. No one has exactly the same
ruling loves. As we grow daily we acquire habits of emoting, thinking, and
interacting. Each habit is controlled and managed by one of the ruling loves.
You can see form this that every habit of thinking and doing, feeling and
emoting, must be controlled either by a heavenly ruling love or a hellish ruling
love. Every thought, attitude, or reaction must be sourced in either heaven or
hell, also called, the Grand Human and the Grand Monster.
The
purpose of living on earth for awhile is to develop our natural mind and
consciousness through interaction with the physical environment through our
physical organs and body. Once we become adults, we are mature enough in mental
development to enter the lifelong process of regeneration that will
operationalize the spiritual mind we need to access our eternal heavenly life as
a conjugial couple with our soul mate. Operationalizing the spiritual mind
through regenerating the natural mind is the central purpose for our life here
on earth. God works with every
individual either with or without acknowledgement by the individual. When
not acknowledged as present in the person’s mind, God manages the events,
thoughts, and emotions of the individual in such a way that the person has no
inkling that anything in their mind is managed by anyone. And when these people
hear of this idea of God’s presence and management in their mind, they deny it.
Still, God manages everything in such a way as to maintain that individual in
perfect freedom to choose between a hellish habit and enjoyment, or a heavenly
habit and enjoyment. God activates their sense of conscience and natural
morality in order to incline them to human traits, and to disincline them from
sub-human traits. This protects them and the people with whom they live.
When God
is acknowledged as present, the individual feels attracted to Sacred Scripture
and other spiritual writings and topics. God then begins a personal relationship
with that individual. In theistic psychology God in that relationship is called
the Divine Psychologist. It is a relationship between the Divine Human and the
mere human. Human beings are human when they acquire the traits of the Divine
Human. When these traits are in human beings, they are called heavenly traits.
When these traits are deliberately turned into their opposites through the
freedom that God maintains in our mind, they are called hellish traits. The two
are opposites to each other and cannot coexist at the same time without the
heavenly being destroyed or “corrupted” (no longer heavenly).
Our
ability to oppose hellish habits and enjoyments is the basis for the
regeneration of our natural mind, which is necessary for the operationalizing of
our spiritual mind, which contains our conjugial heaven with our soul mate in
eternity. The Divine Psychologist first brings rational truths about life, God,
heaven, hell, and regeneration. These are the essential theistic knowledges we
must have in order to undergo the regeneration of our natural mind by the Divine
Psychologist. He is doing the regenerating, and maintains the freedom to choose
in the dilemma He brings to us on a daily basis. For example, we love to laugh
out loud and have a good time with our friends at a party or other places. This
activity can be carried out in a heavenly order or in a hellish order. The
heavenly order is to have fun without being offensive to others. The hellish
order is to have fun regardless of bothering other people. The Divine
Psychologist brings this event to your life so that your heavenly ruling love
may have an opportunity to take over and so that you can have fun without
bothering other people who are trying to sleep, or who are trying rest and
relax, and they have become innocent by-standers or neighbors of your noisy
party.
To take
another example: You have the habit of skipping appropriate dental care once or
twice day. You either never acquired the habit of daily flossing, or you are
performing it without consistency. This is called the hellish order for dental
care. The hellish order brings with it all sorts of unpleasant and painful
experiences to oneself, and it often hurts those you love, and innocent
strangers in the community. The heavenly order of dental care is to think about
the good you are doing by flossing, to think about the teeth you are maintaining
and taking care of. This gives a good feeling, a heavenly feeling that is far
deeper than the hellish enjoyment of skipping and ignoring. The heavenly order
gives you results, healthy teeth, clean breath. Your friends and intimates are
not exposed to the awful experience of receiving your hellish breath into their
nostrils, where it is nauseating them. They can love you more as you make
yourself more attractive to love. It alos shows you care about them, which is a
good love that others can love in you.
Take
another example: As you are looking around you, at work, in school, in a
restaurant, at a party, you make comments to yourself about people there. This
is normal. There is a heavenly order and a hellish order in which this activity
is performed. The hellish order gives you hellish enjoyments, and the heavenly
order gives you heavenly enjoyments. This is how you are operationalizing your
spiritual mind. You choose to perform daily activities in a way that conform to
the heavenly order. This makes your spiritual to respond more and more, higher
and higher, being readied by your actions, to serve as the consciousness of your
eternal conjugial heaven with your soul mate. The hellish order of thinking
about other people is to enjoy putting down, judging them, ridiculing them,
resenting them, wanting vengeance on them, wishing bad things to happen to them,
wanting to take away what they have and give them to yourself, etc. etc. Doing
these hellish mental acts give us pleasure, enjoyments, hellish happiness.
The
heavenly order of thinking about people is to think of both the good and bad in
every person, and to honor or love the good in them, and to ignore or not love
the bad in them, hoping and wishing that they strengthen their resolve for the
good, and weaken or abandon their attachment to the bad. This is the heavenly
order of thinking about others. It creates a heaven for you, if you think this
way, and it does not take away anything or punish the other person. The heavenly
order honors the humanity and right to dignity of every human being.
This includes the heavenly order of
loving not the person, but the good in every person.
The
regeneration of our natural mind proceeds by a specific process that we need to
know about and cooperate with.
As we
know from experience in learning skills, we go through intermediate learning
stages. So we can’t expect to regenerate our natural mind by going from hellish
motives and enjoyments directly to heavenly motives and enjoyments. There are
transitional states of mediate good that is not yet good, but is compatible with
genuine good, and eventually leads to good. For example, consider how we learn
to be successful in our jobs when we first enter the workforce as a teenager or
later. At first we learn to do things so that we don’t get fired. This is not a
hellish or selfish motive, but it is not our ultimate goal, which is to love to
do a good job for the satisfactions it brings us, as we are thinking about how
we benefit others in one way or another by the way we do our job.
There
are two stages here: (1) doing our job so we can satisfy our love for not
getting fired; (2) doing our job so we can satisfy our love for being useful.
The first love is not yet heavenly. The second love is heavenly because the
ruling love it belongs to is the love of being useful to others, and this is one
of the chief heavenly loves. Consider another example. Since gas at the pump has
gone to four dollars a gallon compared to less than half of that just a few
years ago, more drivers are learning to save gas by what they drive how they
drive. Newspaper stories and Web discussion groups have been discussing the
practice of “hypermiling” which involves using a collection of strategies, each
of which saves gas. The motivation to save gas can be heavenly or hellish, and
the difference is observable in how drivers are performing the activity of
saving gas.
Hellish hypermiling techniques
include “drafting” (following illegally close behind another vehicle), “pulse &
glide” (moving up to wanted speed, then letting the vehicle coast on its own
back down, then giving it enough gas back to the wanted speed, and so on – while
motorists following behind are subjected to this pattern), turning the engine
off and coasting when other vehicles are around, etc. These bad hypermiling
strategies increase the risk and inconvenience on others who are being subjected
to these illegal driving methods. Heavenly hypermiling techniques include
keeping tire pressure up, using higher quality engine oil, carrying less load,
avoiding unnecessary acceleration, avoiding the emotional use of the gas pedal,
maintaining proper car maintenance schedules, driving less when possible. From
these consequences of their actions you can see that the motive or love to save
gas can be either a hellish motive (“It’s good for me, and too bad for the cars
around me.”), or a heavenly motive or love (“It’s good for everyone, and no one
is punished through it.”).
Here is
another common instance of an intermediate good that leads eventually to more
genuine good and to heaven. It is the idea many people have that heaven is a
reward from God for the good deeds we accomplished, and hell Is a place of
punishment from God for the bad deeds we accomplished. This intermediate good is
not fully compatible with the rational understanding of Sacred Scripture and
God, from which we realize that God is pure love and cannot punish people for
something they did in the past, especially in such a horrific way as what we
imagine happens in hell as a form of punishment and torture. We rationally
understand that God is good and omnipotent, hence does not have such loves that
involve the satisfaction of punishing people who have evil loves and hurt
others. Instead, God makes a way of isolating the acts of such people and
keeping others safe from the consequences.
As you
by now understand from what precedes, that heaven and hell in eternity are not
rewards and punishments but consequences of one’s own ruling loves. Swedenborg
observed that when people with a hellish ruling love (though not yet knowing
it), ask after resuscitation, to be led to heaven, when they are there, they
become numb, see nothing, and experience inner torture as if they are falling
into a death swoon. These are the anatomical and physiological consequences of a
ruling love existing in the wrong mental layer. The individual feels like dying,
in agony, and being tortured. It Is not possible for a hellish ruling love to
live in a heavenly environment. Hence it is that God makes provision for hellish
loves to exist in the unregenerated natural mind after resuscitation. Hell Is
not a place of punishment, but a mental state provided of the mercy of God, who
is taking care of those who love hellish traits and consciousness, so that they
too may have an environment in which they can pursue their loves in eternity.
What
people do in their mind individually sums up to the level of humanity in a
society or civilization. Humanity on this earth has been evolving in
consciousness since the beginning. It took thousands of generations to cumulate
the modern scientific civilization in which we live today. We get a good
indication of the three phases of our individual regeneration when we consider
the three phases of the collective evolution of rational and scientific thinking
that evolved in the Western cultures during the past three thousand years. We
know from the Swedenborg Reports that God manages the level of our thinking and
feeling through the diffusion of knowledge and principles based in Sacred
Scripture. We can contrast the level of thinking that is evident in the literal
and historical meaning of the Old Testament Sacred Scripture (written between
3000 and 2000 BC), the New Testament Sacred Scripture (written between 35 and
100 AD), and the Writings Sacred Scripture, which we call the Swedenborg Reports
(written in the eighteenth century).
Our
motives and thinking in layers 9A and 9C (sensual-corporeal mind), matches the
level of thinking of the Old Testament civilization. When we are still children
mentally, we think a lot about being punished and getting rewards from our
parents, teachers, and other adults. Our motives (9A) serve the ruling love of
“me first.” We want our childhood pleasures and conveniences, insist on them no
matter what, and throw a temper tantrum when we are opposed in our loves. We
give in to our loves of owning the toys of others by taking them away from other
children, if we can. We always look out for “number one” and we enjoy being
cruel to other children who are different or who are more successful than we
are. As children we think of God as a Father Figure that punishes and rewards
what we do. We also have heavenly loves such as the love of obeying our parents
and the love of being good, of cleaning up, and sharing food and toys. When we
remain at this level of thinking and emoting as we grow up, we become corporeal
minded adults, living a life that is mixed with prejudice and selfishness, and
also with pride in parenting, loyalty to one’s own group, and a steady work
ethic for self and family.
Those of
us who grow out of the corporeal mentality of living, do so by acquiring higher
mental loves that are available to our consciousness in layer 8 (abstract
materialism). We must have a love of learning and being instructed, in order to
move on in thinking and emoting to level 8C and 8A. We learn scientific
explanations for everything around us. We begin to understand the objective
material world around us. We can understand management and government
principles, so that our laws become oriented towards supporting democracy and
equal opportunity. We can create abstract forms of art and architecture. We can
build an engineering industry capable of manufacturing machines, computers, and
sophisticated armaments that can destroy and kill many people at once. In the
United States in 2008 people will donate one billion dollars a day in voluntary
charitable contributions. Every individual has equal rights under the law. One
third of the population is overweight or obese, and half of all marriages end in
divorce. Millions of children grow up without adequate medical care or
parenting. And so on. I am drawing here a mixture of hellish and heavenly values
and attitudes.
Such as
are the individuals in the United States, such is that nation. One is a
reflection of the other. The mentality of the United States is grounded in the
New Testament Sacred Scripture. The Old Testament Sacred Scripture at mentality
9 focuses on the corporeal and the physical. God commands people what physical
things they must perform to merit a fruitful life here on earth (e.g., specific
animal sacrifices with specific rituals). God is portrayed as angry when people
do forbidden physical things. God then rages in wrath and screams vengeance, and
takes it out on the people, on their children, and on their children’s children.
The punishments and the rewards are physical. There is almost nothing specific
mentioned about the afterlife. This corporeal spirituality at layer 9 mentality,
contrasts with the abstract and materialistic spirituality at layer 8 mentality,
to which the New Testament is addressed. Now God is no longer portrayed as
partial to just one nation and religion (the “Chosen People” in the Old
Testament). God is now portrayed as universal, regardless of culture and
religion.
In the
abstracted mentality of the New Testament Sacred Scripture (layer 8), the new
consciousness is attained that God wants to relate to us in the mental world as
much as, or more than, He wants to relate to us in the physical world. Sinning
is now defined as a mental corruption. The physical becomes secondary and is
seen as the mere result of the mental. By themselves, physical rituals,
sacrifices, and regulations are meaningless and useless. It’s the thought and
motive in the physical act that must be examined and judged. Now for the first
time in Western history, the New Testament Sacred Scripture reveals an
astonishing and shattering new scientific fact, which is, that the afterlife of
eternity is the mental world that is already familiar to us. One instance of
this revelation is the well known declaration of Jesus in the New Testament that
“the kingdom of God is within you.” The “kingdom of God” refers to heaven, and
“within you” refers to our mental world. Hence it is that “sinning in the mind”
is the actual sin that bars heaven to us. Not by punishment – but by the love
that attaches us to thinking that way.
The Old
Testament (layer 9) is for the concrete-corporeal mind. The New Testament (layer
8) is for the abstract-sensuous mind. The Swedenborg Reports (layer 7) are for
the external-rational mind. These three anatomical layers are the origin of the
three degrees of human consciousness and mentality in this world.
The
Swedenborg Reports reveal that both the Old and New Testaments are written in
the code of correspondences, as it applies to each level, which is distinct. It
is shown that when you know these correspondences and apply them to the literal
text using the specified procedures, the new underlying meaning that is derived
is entirely at a different level of consciousness. While the literal sense of
the Old Testament Sacred Scripture is addressed to layer 9 (corporeal-sensuous
mind), its correspondential sense is actually addressed to layers 7i, 6,
5, 4 – in other words, to the spiritual mind, not at all to the natural mind.
Layer 7i is the interior of the natural-rational mind (layer 7e), which forms
the exterior of that layer. The interior anatomical portion of the
natural-rational mind receives its influx of reality from the higher spiritual
mind (layers 6, 5, 4), while the exterior anatomical portion of the
natural-rational mind receives its influx of reality from the lower natural
layers of the mind (layers 8 and 9). Hence it is that we have two discretely
different registers of thinking available to us while on this earth. One is a
rationality based on the external natural world (layer 7e), and the other is a
rationality based on the interior spiritual world (layer 7i).
We do
not, like Swedenborg, have consciousness in our spiritual mind, while we are
conscious in the natural mind. Swedenborg talked to some of the people who had
lived on this earth during the initial generations of human beings, many
thousands of years ago. He was able to interview them when he visited their
heaven in layer 4. The are mentioned in Sacred Scripture as the “Most Ancient
Church.” They are described as a celestial race, possessing a whole brain, while
our race of humanity that came afterward is called the spiritual race, and we
possess a split-brain with left and right hemispheres. These people had dual
consciousness, like Swedenborg, who was given the ability at age 57, while they
had it since birth. At any rate, I don’t know how far the two situations are
similar since they were whole-brained, while Swedenborg was split-brained.
Swedenborg found out that their Sacred Scripture was “written on their heart,”
which meant that they were spiritually “online” with the mental world of
eternity, where their grandparents and great-grant parents lived in layer 4.
While on earth they looked at the physical world around them as representative
effects of mental causes. Today we too can do this when we adopt the thinking
order and rationality that is expressed in the universal correspondential sense
of Sacred Scripture. These meanings or truths raise our consciousness when we
allow it to be immersed in the thinking of correspondences.
The
pre-modern person was unable to think in correspondences. The wisest of the
ancients were able to immerse their mind in the knowledge of correspondences,
but it took a lifetime of harsh spiritual discipline, and only a few people in
each generation could master it, and pass the knowledge on to the next
generation. But today’s modern mind can easily handle the complexity and
rationality of thinking in correspondences. The study of theistic psychology
gives every student the ability to acquire the mental skill of thinking in
correspondences. In the future, thinking in correspondences will be taught in
public schools to children as part of the general literacy curriculum. It will
greatly enhance the interest and receptivity of physical subjects such as
biology, farming, husbandry, art, dance, sports, hand craft, etc. Thinking in
correspondences is to translate the sensory input from external-natural (layer
9, 8, 7e) to interior-natural (layer 7i).
The
duality of reality is expressed in the dualism of the external-natural and the
interior-natural.
When we
see the interior-natural of an event, quality, or object, we see its cause, its
spiritual origin in the mental world of eternity (layer 7i), but when we see the
exterior-natural of an event, quality, or object, we see the mere effects, the
representation of its true reality in the mental world of eternity (layer 7e).
The content and meanings in our exterior-rational thinking is limited to the
appearances of reality. Imagine someone buying a large plot of land for just a
few hundred dollars. Hard to believe – until you find out that the plot of land
is a reflection in a mirror, or a painting on the wall, or just a video of the
real thing. Now you can see that the person who bought this for a few hundred
dollars got fleeced. If you take the appearances of reality to be reality, then
your consciousness and thinking will be limited to layer 8 (these being
materialistic abstractions of appearances).
According to the Swedenborg Reports, God has revealed the knowledge of
correspondences to the modern mind of humanity in order to allow science and
education to be the vehicle for its transmission to the new generations. There
are critical benefits available to people who have been prepared for
resuscitation through the skill of thinking in correspondences. Regeneration of
the inherited natural mind progresses to the degree that people are willing to
think in correspondences. The more the natural mind is regenerated, the more the
spiritual mind is enabled. There is therefore a direct relation between thinking
in correspondences and the quality of our life in eternity.
All
genuine Sacred Scripture given by God anywhere anytime to some culture or
people, is addressed to the spiritual mind when considered in the
correspondential sense. In the new millennium of 2000, when I first
published theistic psychology on the World Wide Web, another landmark step was
taken in the history of research on human consciousness. Theistic psychology is
defined as the scientific knowledge of God that is extracted from the
correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture. This new way of thinking in science
(interior-natural layer 7i), begins a new age in science, leaving behind the
monism of materialism, and immersing itself in the new methodology of theistic
science.
The
dualist thinking in science (layers 7e and 7i together), integrates into a
rational unity the physical and the mental, the temporal and the eternal. At
last, science can explore cause-effect relations between the rational and the
sensory, the universal and the local, the spiritual and the natural, the mental
and the physical. God has created a dual reality which we can now recognize and
make part of our literacy, our culture, our government and industry. Every
detail of society is a representative of some eternal reality in the mental
world of eternity. Managing society will be far more successful and effective
when we understand how every detail is caused by some mental love that is
sourced either in the Grand Human (mental layers 4, 5, 6) or in the Grand
Monster (mental layers -7, -8, -9). Similarly, managing ourselves will be far
more effective if we understand how our loves today create our future in
eternity.
The
powers of a new scientific thinking in the interior-natural mind is awesome to
behold. Every human being possesses all the anatomical layers of the human mind.
Nothing whatsoever prevents us from operating our life from the interior-natural
layer (7i) instead of the exterior-natural layer (7e). Nothing prevents us –
except our own ruling love. Love prevents thinking that is contrary to love’s
fulfillment. Such as our love is, such is our thinking. When we love
materialistic loves more than we love spiritual loves, our natural mind is
called a “little hell.” This is our daily consciousness, the meanings and
thoughts with which we operate our conscious life and manage our identity as a
person. But when we love spiritual loves more than we love natural loves, our
natural mind is called a “little heaven.”
When we
begin our regeneration in young adulthood, we turn our natural mind more and
more into a little heaven. This means that our feelings (A), thoughts (C), and
actions (S) are conjoined and arranged in a heavenly order, that is, in the
order of layers 6, 5, and 4 (the “Grand Human”). Until then our natural mind was
a little hell activated by thoughts and feelings sourced in the Grand Monster
(layers -7, -8, -9). The people in these mental layers who are connected to us
in our unregenerate states, are collectively a hell as a spiritual society, and
each member’s mind is a little hell. The negative marker indicates that these
layers were not regenerated prior to resuscitation. As discussed earlier, people
after resuscitation who imagine that they live in a physical world are insane,
and live out a delusional life in eternity based on fantasy and make-believe.
One
striking example is given by the people in the hellish layers that Swedenborg
observed who live in a collective and mutual fantasy of owning a fortune of
gold. By various means and laborious efforts over a long period, each member is
able to acquire a few tiny pieces of gold. At regular intervals they all gather
together in one room, each placing their few pieces on the table. When these
grow into a large heap of gold, they sit around it in silence, watching it, and
imagining that this is their own gold. One man that Swedenborg interviewed said
that they do this when they begin to experience an interior compulsion to see a
large heap of gold that they can imagine is their own. He said that they know
rationally that the gold they own is actually a tiny fraction of the large heap.
And yet, they are able to fantasize that all of it is their own.
The
fantasy is actually created by their ruling love. They are obsessively slavish
to this love. The rational thoughts they can think remain on the outside of
themselves. The ruling love will allow one thought that it keeps close by – the
thought of “All this is mine, mine alone.” This false sensory reality (S)
appearing in the cognitive organ (C) is constructed there by the love in the
affective organ (A). It is their love for such a fantasy that is so extreme, so
much more intense than any other love they can have. This is the top rank in
their hierarch of satisfaction and enthusiasm. This is the way they can
experience life again, or being alive again – like after a long sickness. He
said that this state lasts for awhile, and then they all experience the
irresistible need for a ‘recharge’ session. If they are prevented from it, they
begin to feel depressed, as if all enthusiasm of living has departed from them.
Then they are revived again after the fantasy recharge session.
The
awful thing about this, I think, is that in between the fantasy recharge
sessions, their folly does not diminish. The recharge experience works only on
their affective organ, where the ruling love sits and commands. Their cognitive
reality remains insane and unreal, filled with un-neos of everything. The mad
ruling love (A) turns their mind and their society (C) into a mad, mad world
(S). There is no consistency of growth and mental development. The people in
that mental state become progressively more mad, less capable of having human
feelings and rational thoughts. They are in a degraded form of sub-human life in
terms of their emotions, their reasoning, and their interactions with each
other.
Consider a common situation. We have the love of living in a clean place and keeping our living space clean and uncluttered. We enjoy that when someone else does it for us. We enjoy clean and orderly living and work spaces. We have a love for these things. This is a heavenly love since nothing in the perfection of the mental heaven of eternity can be less than perfect. Our love has the power to make things perfect in our mental world. But we don’t have the love of cleaning. Instead, we have the love of not cleaning, the love of avoiding cleaning, the love of not having to do what it takes to keep things orderly and clean around our living spaces. Many people hate cleaning chores. Many people do cleaning chores while they are hating it. Many people procrastinate and postpone cleaning because they hate it. Yet they all love a clean place. So something is wrong here.
What’s wrong with our natural mind is always the same thing: it is contaminated by inherited hellish tendencies and enjoyments. These are called hellish not out of moralistic judgment, but out of rational and medical assessment. In theistic medicine, the definition of “hellish” is any love that is sourced in the Grand Monster. The definition of “heavenly” is any love that is sourced in the Grand Human. The scientific and medical fact is that every love is an organic operation of the affective organ (also called the “will”). The affective organ is activated by an influx from either the Grand Human (or mental layers 4, 5, 6), or in the Grand Monster (our unregenerate mental layers -9, -8, -7). There is no other source of activation. These are the only two possibilities, given the mental anatomy revealed in the Swedenborg Reports. We inherit from our parental line, built-in connections to these two sources. Our life as an infant is activated by these two sources.
Observe an infant’s behavior and you will notice both heavenly traits (like innocence, curiosity, smile, focus on faces, etc.), as well as hellish traits (battles with parents about eating, lying down, sleeping, not touching, not eating, etc.). In childhood, the hellish traits become more visible and problematic – disobedience, stubbornness, rebellion, temper tantrum, screaming, hitting, getting away, not cooperating, etc. In adolescence and young adulthood we begin to see a lot of rebellion, criminality, addiction, destructiveness, emotional problems, selfishness, irrationality, etc. Every hellish act or habit comes from a hellish love, which comes from the people who live in the Grand Monster layers of the mental world of eternity. It’s a downhill journey. All we need to do is to give in to our hellish loves until we have a hellish ruling love entrenched at the top of the love hierarchy in our affective organ (layers -9A, -8A, -7A).
Immediately after resuscitation we are fully ready and eager to join one of the numerous mental societies of the Grand Monster. We are inexorably and irresistibly drawn to a particular society that is closest in compatibility to the hellish ruling love we brought with us in our natural mind (layers 9, 8, 7), from our life on earth. This is a downhill journey. It’s easy. You just coast with the river of inherited traits and enjoyments, living your life with them, enjoying them, loving them, becoming part of the society in which our ruling love is sourced. Swedenborg observed that when people first enter their “place” in the Grand Monster they are overjoyed, having the feeling that they at last have arrived “home.” The people around them who welcome them look familiar, feel like brothers, sisters, and cousins This is because all along we have been connected with these people as we developed our specific hellish loves.
God must intervene in this downhill slide towards and into hell. Every modern human being born today would take that affective slide, and arrive at their resuscitation surrounded by and grounded in some society of the Grand Monster. When they open their eyes after resuscitation is complete, and begin their final journey to immortality in eternity, they are surrounded by people from their society, and follow them quickly with gladness. Little do they know, or suspect, that after the introductions and the honeymoon period, their life turns into a hellish misery. They discover that the people around them are cruel and masterful manipulators. Their evil loves progressively worsens and creates a monster or demon, where a human being was before. This happens because the hellish ruling loves systematically finds and destroys any heavenly love remaining active. The individual becomes a mere evil caricature of the former self. The person is no longer a mixture of good traits and hellish traits. Imagine what you would be like if everything good and intelligent were put to sleep in your mind, and everything evil and stupid were to be intensified and magnified. Such is the person you would be in the hell of your eternity.
This is why God must intervene on behalf of all those people who are willing to undergo the process of regeneration before their resuscitation. This is a process that starts in young adulthood and goes on for the rest of your life on earth. God as the Divine Psychologist arranges the events of your life and the thoughts of your mind in such a way as to confront you with natural, spiritual, and celestial temptations. These are mental states during which you are consciously reflecting on your regeneration, while facing a dilemma or choice. The Divine Psychologist keeps you in a perfect balance by connecting you unconsciously to one of the spiritual societies in the Grand Human and a counter-society in the Grand Monster. The loves of the people in the Grand Human flow into that portion of your affective organ that contains your hierarchy of heavenly loves and sub-loves. The loves of the people in the Grand Monster flow into that portion of your affective organ that contains your hierarchy of hellish loves and sub-loves. The heavenly and hellish loves flowing in can actually be felt very intensely during the temptation moments.
For example, during your reflection of cleaning up your work space, you actually feel the intense motive to clean up. This is from the loves of the Grand Human flowing in. At the same time, or moments later, or alternately between the two, you feel like not cleaning up, like letting it go this time, postponing it. This postponement gives you an intense love and satisfaction. You are in a perfect balance. A heavenly love and a hellish love precisely oppose each other in your will. The Divine Psychologist manages with omnipotence and omniscience to keep you in this balance by maintaining the contact between you and the opposed societies. Every time you have this temptation you are given the opportunity to reject the love of not cleaning up, and to attach yourself to the love of cleaning up. That’s how the process of regeneration operates. You can see that you have plenty of time, plenty of opportunities – but not a limitless amount. Your time comes and you are thrown into the dying and resuscitation process. Then it’s too late to change anything after that. Your ruling love now at the top of your love hierarchy, makes the final decisions.
You can see from all this that “hellish” and “heavenly” are objective medical terms associated with mental anatomy, not subjective terms that are moralistic or judgmental.
The dying and resuscitation process lasts about 30 hours. Swedenborg observed thousands of people in the course of 27 years of observation who were undergoing the dying and resuscitation process. Swedenborg was allowed to undergo the dying and resuscitation process in order to understand the details of the procedure. He reports that upon awakening from this process people first see the faces of the spiritual medics who are assigned by God to handle every resuscitating person. There is a special zone in the mental world of eternity (or “spiritual world of the afterlife”), where resuscitation takes place. It is a biological process completely unconscious to the individual. Swedenborg says that God is especially close in attendance, managing the medical skills of the volunteers who came “down” out into the mental zone of resuscitation. These volunteers live in their mental layer 4 (celestial-rational consciousness). I was very surprised when I first read about these details in the Swedenborg Reports. It is quite likely that you too are surprised at these details. The mind is flooded with obvious questions, all of which come down to this one central question: Is this fact or fiction?
When I first started reading the Swedenborg Reports in 1981 I started with no knowledge of who he was or what these books are about. I just started reading one of the 27 Swedenborg volumes on the library shelf. Since I was a professor I had done this many times before about a favorite topic – the mind, spirituality, consciousness, God, the Bible, immortality, the afterlife. I confess here that I was little motivated to finish these books. I went as far as I could to keep my interest up. I felt guilty about this, wondering what was wrong with me. Other people love books, talk about books and authors, look forward to more books. They are very involved in books. I thought I was too. For many years I kept buying books to add to my collection. I kept all my books from college and graduate school. When I moved from one place to another, boxing and carting the books was my biggest expense. Again, I confess here that most of the text of these books remained unread by me. So I loved books. Why then was I not reading them like other people normally do.
Actually, I am still surprised to find out from people I talk with that they don’t read books. Swedenborg mentions that God (whom he always reverently referred to as “the Lord”), forbade him to read many books he may have otherwise read. This had to do with books on the subjects that he was going to write about, namely: Sacred Scripture, God, the spiritual world, angels, theology, and doctrines of the Church. Swedenborg’s thinking on these subjects had to remain neutral and impartial between the various religious and philosophical factions. He had to remain the impartial scientist and researcher. Swedenborg’s mind was the human vehicle by which God was constructing a new science to be known as Theistic Science, of which theistic psychology is the first instance.
This book written in 2008 is an executive summary, if you will, of my efforts to build a foundation for theistic psychology, which I began in 2000 after 19 years of studying the Swedenborg Reports. These were the only books that I have ever voluntarily read in full. Not only that, I have read them several times, I listen to audio versions of them every night when I go to bed, every day when I drive to and from work, every time I’m on an air flight, or in a doctor’s waiting room. I love having those audio versions that I listen to silently through ear phones, bothering no one. At the beginning I sometimes had the urge to start talking to people and to give them the good news – Did you know we are immortal? Did you know we are born into eternity with a spiritual body? Did you know that the Bible has a hidden spiritual meaning? Do you know why God allows evil in the world? Do you know what happens to children who die? To old people who die? Etc. etc.
It was fascinating for me to discover that people were not as interested as I was in these topics. I could not get over this. How could they just have a sort of take it or leave it attitude towards these topics? What other topic could be more important and fascinating that to know who is God, what kind of life do we have after death, do we lived a married life, do we have a body with which to enjoy sensual things such as we know them in the physical body or will we be sexless, foodless, passionless, and just a floating ghost or a dream fantasy…How does God manage every detail of every person’s life? How can Sacred Scripture be Divine and Holy? What makes it Holy? Did God really speak those words? Where is their supernatural power?
What is “mental”? Is it real? Is it as real as what is physical? What is the relation between the physical and the mental? Is it the same as the relation between the natural and spiritual? Are there angels? Devils? Do they influence people’s lives? What are natural laws? Does God manage these directly or indirectly? Do we have a spiritual body? What does it look like and what is made of? Do we mental organs, or only mental functions? Are some people born evil? How can people improve themselves and society? What does it take to have peace in the world? Why do some children die? Are there animals in the afterlife? What are the basic scientific laws God wants humanity to know about? Etc. etc.
I apologize for this long string of questions. They show you what some of the topics are in the Swedenborg Reports. Rational and full answers are provided to each of these questions. These were my questions, and the answers I sought in books in my adult life. I did not find the answers in those books. I only found incomplete, partially inconsistent, aesthetically inelegant speculations, theories, and intellectual constructions of vast proportions. I was desolate and desperate, my mind starving for rational truths about reality and the future. No one had them. No, not one. Until the Swedenborg Reports. Since then, everyone anytime anywhere can have rational, scientific, and complete answers to all these questions, to begin with, and many more as one continues studying them. Why? What is so special about the Swedenborg Reports?
The Swedenborg Reports are written in natural-rational correspondences of Divine Speech or Divine Rationality. In other words, Divine Truth in the form of spiritual light from the Spiritual Sun, flows first into the cognitive organs of those who are conscious there in anatomical layer 4C of the mental world of eternity. This highest level of human consciousness is also called “Third Heaven” and “celestial angels.” Our thinking layer 4C is by means of the celestial-rational correspondences in which is written the Sacred Scripture version that is in layer 4.
Second, the people who are conscious in mental layer 5C react to the activity in layer 4C above them, or within them. Our thinking in layer 5C (“Second Heaven” or “spiritual angels”) is based on the spiritual-rational correspondences of the version of Sacred Scripture they have in mental layer 5C.
Third, the people who are conscious in mental layer 6C react to the activity in layer 5C above them, or within them. Our thinking layer 6C (“First Heaven” or “spiritual-natural angels”) is based on the spiritual-natural correspondences in which is written the Sacred Scripture version that is in layer 6C.
Fourth, the people on earth who are undergoing regeneration of the natural mind (layers 7, 8, 9), react to the activity that is going on in their spiritual mind (layers 6, 5, 4). When we are conscious in mental layer 7Ci (the interior-natural mind) we are open to react to the correspondential sense of the Swedenborg Reports. Through reflecting on the correspondential sense, constructing a rational meaning out of it, we are able to react by correspondence to the activities in the layers of consciousness above us (layers 6, 5, 4).
Fifth and Sixth, the people on earth who are unwilling to study the correspondences in Sacred Scripture, react to the materialistic (layer 8C) and corporeal (layer 9C) components that only represent and correspond to the real operations that take place in their higher spiritual layers of consciousness (layers 7i, 6, 5, 4).
You can see from this that the descent of the Divine Neo, or exteriorization process of creation, goes through the sequential discrete anatomical layers of the mental world of eternity. At each successive layer the correspondences of Divine Truth or Divine Speech become more opaque, more covered over, more distant in meaning and consciousness. By the time Divine Speech has exteriorized and descended to mental layers 8 and 9, the Divine Truth has been transformed five or six times, translated into lower and lower forms of spiritual truth that is comprehensible to people whose consciousness is based in physical appearances of the senses (layer 9C), and on the logical abstractions based on those appearances.
This sequence of exteriorization of spiritual light through the mental world of eternity is replicated in exact proportions in the history, development, and evolution of human civilizations. The Old Testament Sacred Scripture was delivered to humanity three thousand years ago. The literal and historical meaning was addressed to the mentality of the people living in that age. But unbeknownst to them, the entire sequence of descent of Divine Truth in correspondences was contained within the literal sense of that Sacred Scripture. This follows the Divine law that sequential degrees are together in simultaneous degree. The first of the sequence is the center of the simultaneous. It is the deepest, most hidden. This is layer 4 with its celestial-rational correspondences to Divine Truth, the closest there can be in human minds. This layer can be recovered by extraction through the application of the laws of correspondences applied as prescribed in the Swedenborg Reports.
Layer 5 is next in the literal sense, less hidden, more visible, easier to extract. This layer allows us to extract the spiritual-rational correspondences hidden the literal of Sacred Scripture. Layer 6 is closest to the literal sense. It is less hidden and more visible in the extraction process.
So when we look at Sacred Scripture we are looking at the outside of Divine Truth, transformed and represented by correspondences. We can reflect on the spiritual-natural correspondences (layer 6) that lie hidden just below the surface of the literal and historical details being related in the text. Similarly with layer 5, which raises our consciousness to the spiritual-rational level of thinking and feeling (“Second Heaven”). Finally we can access layer 4, which raises our consciousness to the celestial-rational level of quasi-omniscience.
All Sacred Scripture that is genuine and from God must go through the sequence described above, and therefore, all Sacred Scripture contains the entire sequence to be extracted. While the literal sense is cultural, time-bound, and ethnic, applying mostly to one people, the correspondential senses that are extracted are not cultural, because not natural. The topics are spiritual, that is, relating the mental world of eternity.
It is anatomical layer 7i (interior-natural mind) that makes this extraction process possible. The Divine Psychologist must first activate this layer which otherwise remains dormant and non-functional. God activates layer 7i when the individual begins the regeneration process. The activation process is progressive, only a little at the beginning, and much more after that as we make progress in our regeneration. The more we resist our inherited hellish loves, the more our loves become heavenly, and the more activation takes place in our interior-natural mind.
This process slows down or dies when we make up our own interpretations to the literal of Sacred Scripture, using human knowledge, nontheistic science, and theory. This was done for hundreds of years in the case of the Old and New Testament Sacred Scriptures. And yet, after thousands of books written over hundreds of years, not one of them was able to present the correspondential sense that lay hidden within. This is because God prevents that path of thinking in order to protect people from “profaning” Sacred Scripture. This refers to destroying the spiritual mind, or, preventing it from ever being opened. When this is done, the fate of the individual is a progressively worsening hell to eternity. To protect people from profaning the knowledge of correspondences it remained hidden until the Swedenborg Reports, which begin the modern era of theistic science.
With respect to consciousness, individual development recapitulates collective evolution.
The regeneration process begins the phases of spiritual development. All spiritual development progresses by the elevation of our consciousness. Our consciousness exists at the level of the meanings with which we think. Early in the regeneration process we think with the literal meaning of the Sacred Scripture that we acknowledge as the basis of our relationship to God. Our consciousness is immersed in the literal meanings. For instance, when I first started reading the Swedenborg Reports my consciousness was immersed in the literal meaning of it. This literal is written in natural-rational correspondences at layer 7e, the external portion of the rational mind (layer 7). This layer is the highest of the three anatomical layers of the natural mind (8 and 9 are the other two).
As already explained, our thinking in this external layer of the rational mind (7e) is based on our own ability to figure out the meaning and try to make rational sense out of it. This is the approach or method we use when we study a textbook in a high school or college course. Also, when we read a technical manual for building or assembling something – we read the literal sense of the instructions and apply them to the physical objects to which they refer. This approach to the task of extracting the hidden layers of Sacred Scripture, is therefore done from the external layer of the natural-rational mind (layer 7e), using our own intelligence and methods of discourse analysis. This approach fails because it rests on layers 8C and 9C, which are time bound, culture bound, place bound, and ignorance bound. These are mere representations and appearances, not the real thing.
The real thing is what comes from the Spiritual Sun in the form of spiritual light substance and spiritual heat substance flowing into the mental world of humanity. This is real. This is the reality. By the time this reality or truth filters down to layers 8 and 9, the literal meanings no longer show all the hidden layers which the literal meaning covers over. This fundamental limitation and existential problem is overcome by the Divine Psychologist managing things in every individual’s mind form birth to endless eternity. In order for this to happen we ourselves must develop a love for the Divine arrangement, which is truthfully reflected in the arrangement of feelings, thoughts, and sensations in layers 4, 5, 6. We are not conscious in these layers prior to resuscitation. How then can we re-arrange our natural mind into a “little heaven” if we cannot rely on our own thinking regarding what Sacred Scripture says that God wants from us?
The answer is that we cannot rely on our interpretation of Sacred Scripture but must rely on enlightenment from the Divine Psychologist. This enlightenment is given in proportion to our love for cooperating with the Divine Psychologist in our regeneration. The Swedenborg Reports reveal that when we read Sacred Scripture the people in layers 6, 5, 4 are involved through correspondence. While we think of the literal sense as we read, they think of the inner sense hidden within the literal. First in line are the people in layer 6 who think of the spiritual-natural correspondences that are just below the surface literal meanings. Next in line are the people in layer 5 who think of the spiritual-rational correspondences that are two degrees below the surface literal meanings. Next in line are the people in layer 4 who think of the celestial-rational correspondences that are deeply buried below the surface literal meanings.
When a child reads Sacred Scripture the people in layer 4 are especially moved by the celestial correspondences that are hidden in the inmost sense. They can see this inmost celestial sense more clearly when a child reads Sacred Scripture because the ideas they have of the meanings are purely literal in the appearances (layer 9), rather than in the abstracted thoughts of the appearances, which is more nearly how adults read the language and style of ancient Sacred Scripture. The people in layers 6, 5, 4 are affected by the correspondence and are conscious of being affected – but they are not conscious or aware of any personal features of the people by whom they are affected, such as their identity, gender, or cultural origin. The vertical community operates by the laws of correspondences and without the conscious awareness of the people involved.
Progress in regeneration is possible to the extent that we do not consult our own self-intelligence when we are engaged in the process of extracting correspondences from Sacred Scripture. Neither can we consult the self-intelligence of someone else, which is also inevitably based on the order and arrangement of the physical world (layers 9C, 8C, 7eC). Our success in regeneration can come only from the interior layer of our natural-rational mind (7iC). An example of this is theistic psychology which excludes all hypotheses and theories that we can come up with about the hidden layers of Sacred Scripture. It includes only that which is explained in the literal sense of the Swedenborg Reports, but not on the literal sense itself, but the correspondential senses that lie within it.
Layer 7iC thinking is possible only as enlightened thinking. Anyone has this enlightened thinking when willing to use the information for one’s regeneration. This is the only love that will work. This love connects the individual to the Divine Psychologist in a conscious rational relationship in layer 7Ci. This new consciousness is called spiritual consciousness and is at first spiritual-natural (layer 6), but advances further depending on our willingness to fight our temptations in spiritual combat.
Regeneration is a lifelong process of getting rid of our hellish loves, and replacing them with new heavenly loves. The replacement of old loves with new loves is an organic process involving spiritual substances in the mental world of eternity. We are these living spiritual organic entities. Our identity and uniqueness comes from the unique personal “print” that God assigns to each of us at conception, which gets actualized in birth and maturation. Our mental organs are permanent, immortal, eternal. Our unique self must therefore be permanent, immortal, eternal. We have this immortality and permanence from the substances out of which we are constructed, namely, the spiritual heat and spiritual light flowing out of God into the mental world of eternity.
Our unique identity becomes more and more personal, more and more our own loves, as we live out our immortal existence, constructing a mental dwelling place for our self and our conjugial soul mate. This place is joined and enriched by new neighbors that continuously fill that mental dwelling place. Each new couple appears to us as family, having an appearance and manners that resemble ours. It is an idyllic mental dwelling in the world of rational ether where loves and truths are God’s building blocks. We have more and more of God’s good and truth as we develop more intense passion and attraction towards the heavenly order, which is the order of God’s Mind, and the reality of creation and existence by God.
The
perfect human heavenly order is the inmost of every human mind (layer 4). Every
human being receives a perfect and unique soul “print” in creation. This unique
person is born to change the whole race and universe. Every soul that is added
and integrated into the Grand Human (layers 4, 5, 6) changes the Grand Human
forever. God is building or growing the living Grand Human into ever grander
perfection. This is the evolution of consciousness of the human race. This
building up and perfection process involves the adding and integrating of new
souls. If a soul doesn’t get to the Grand Human after resuscitation of its
spiritual body, then it is added to the Grand Monster. This is an eternal mental
dwelling place for unrelenting selfish and cruel people. They have their own
life of freedom to do as they please, which they do by being incredibly cruel
and fiendish to the others who share their mental dwelling places.
The laws of spiritual locomotion or displacement in the mental world of eternity are such that you are always in the place of your desire or love. This contrasts with the physical world where we have to get our body to that place by some method like walking, driving, or being carried by another person, an animal, an airplane, boat, or rocket. But after resuscitation we are fully conscious in our spiritual body. There are no places to go to, only mental constructions directed by our loves and desires. Since there is only one mental world of eternity, all human beings are born into it and remain forever. This world of eternity is far more real than the physical world of time and space. This is a difficult idea to accept and understand.
If we think about this idea from the meanings we have in layer 8C, we will see it as illogical, and hence not acceptable to our comprehension. And if it is unacceptable to our comprehension we cannot love the idea, cannot relate to it, cannot get enthusiastic about it. Right. I understand. Fortunately I have the solution for the problem, a way of overcoming this mental barrier in our cognitive organ. This is where your difficulty is felt, sensed, perceived in yourself. How is it that you’re aware of the difficulty in your layer 8C operations addressed to this idea – the idea that there is only one mental world and everyone is in it?
But now, is you start thinking about it from above layer 8C, things immediately change. If you are looking down mentally on your thinking in 8C, then you must be doing the looking from your thinking in layer 7eC, which is the cognitive operation of the rational mind, external portion. You are doing that very thing (climbing to 7eC), when you notice how you’re thinking in your normal thinking layer, which tends to be layer 8C for most of us most of the time in daily social life and work. So when you notice in yourself that some new idea or principle that you are thinking about does not make sense to you, you are climbing in consciousness from 8C to the observation platform in 7eC. It is the rational mind (layer 7) that controls the operations of the abstract materialist mind (layer 8C).
The control exercised by the natural-rational mind (layer 7e) over the natural-materialistic mind (layer 8C) is by correspondence. This control is completely automatic and part of the mental flow and operation across the layers of the mental world of humanity around the Spiritual Sun in eternity. The Spiritual Sun as Layer 1, constructs and controls all the mental sub-layers from 2 to 10 through the built in laws of correspondence. This law is built in because worlds, layers, and objects are created by spiritual heat and light. These two infinitely varying substances are conjoined in God’s Mind as one. It is called the Divine Marriage in God. Every human being must also have a spiritual marriage in one’s mind, which is the conjunction of our affective (“will”) and cognitive (“understanding”) organs into a joint living synergistic operation that instantiates the sensorimotor world of the environment around us. These are the created dwelling places – physical for the physical body, mental for the spiritual body.
After resuscitation our consciousness is not in the spiritual body. It now displaces itself differently than we are used to in our physical body. Physical closeness in the natural world corresponds to mental similarity in the mental world. Since there is only one mental world you can understand the idea that all human beings can be together who want to, once they are conscious and functioning in their spiritual body after resuscitation. “Geographic place” or physical location corresponds to “mental dwelling place” which actually refers to “mental state.” Since mental states are organic operations in our mental organs, it follows that sharing loves brings people together in the mental world. We don’t need to travel or be carried since our love carries us. Love longs to be united to ideas, and together they love to create neo babies – new feelings, new thoughts, new sensations. When people get together in the mental world of eternity the similarity of their loves bind them together into a permanent community.
I was making up instructions for exercises that my students can do to increase their awareness of the level of consciousness they are thinking at any particular moment in the course of their daily activities. We all oscillate (or vacillate) between layers 9C, 8C and 7eC. For example, think about a routine task you have to do on a regular basis, like running errands for someone to whom you feel obligated. As you are thinking about the schedule for the day, while brushing your teeth or preparing breakfast, you feel flooded by a feeling of resentment: “I hate having to do this.” For a few more seconds, or minutes, your thoughts are compulsively addressed to this topic. It pushes other things out, for awhile. You are in the mode of venting. The Divine Psychologist has connected you with some spiritual society in the Grand Monster who specialize in the ruling love of feeling resentful. They absolutely adore and live for this sentiment, feeling, emotion.
During these few seconds, or minutes, and with some people hours and even days, our consciousness or mentality is situated (captured) in layer 9C. This layer is called concrete materialism, and sometimes sensual-corporeal. The people in the Grand Monster who operate permanently in this mental state feed on such connections between them and us. They are hoping and striving to be able to be connected to people in their natural mind, like we are here every day. Why does the Divine Psychologist connect you to them while you are brushing your teeth or preparing breakfast? The answer is always the same: get used to it. It’s because of your love. All day long, moment by moment, the Divine Psychologist connects and reconnects your mind to societies in the Grand Human and Grand Monster.
I think this may be one of the most difficult concepts to understand in theistic psychology.
It is also the very basis of theistic psychology. The purpose of theistic psychology is to acquire systematic, rational, and practical knowledge about regeneration. The success of this organic lifelong process determines our immortal life in eternity, which begins immediately after death. There is no end to that life. There is no comparison in choice between the value to us of safeguarding our eternal happiness versus safeguarding a tiny fraction of it here on earth. If we do not regenerate we are safeguarding the loves that we now have as unregenerate persons. These are not our loves, really, they are the loves of the people in the Grand Monster to whom you are connected. They become our loves only after resuscitation, when we enter their society, and immediately feel at home in that mental state of resentfulness.
The Divine Psychologist manages the process of regeneration in every little detail. This is necessary since mental states in our natural mind in daily life are always associated to corresponding physical events. These physical events must be arranged so that they happen to you. This requires omnipotence and omniscience, and Divine Love and caring for each human being. So all day long, the Divine Psychologist connects and reconnects each of us to the societies of the Grand Human and Grand Monster, meanwhile, making things happen in our physical and social environment that correspond to our mental states.
As you are venting your resentful thoughts to yourself in layer 9C, you are also conjoining these thoughts to your love of feeling resentful about the obligation you feel and the things it requires of you. This love is in layer 9A. It is a corporeal love joining up with a concrete materialistic thinking in layer 9C. This conjoining together of an unregenerate or hellish love (9A) with distorted reasoning (9C) is called the infernal marriage. It is the counterpart in the Grand Monster of the spiritual marriage of a regenerate or heavenly love (7A) with a rational thinking (7C).
As you are wallowing in the infernal marriage in layer 9, hating it, feeling hellish feelings that torture you like wanting to run away, wanting to tell the person off, wanting to destroy something, wanting to scream as if in agony, etc. These are hellish loves creating hellish feelings. As long as your consciousness is captured in that mental layer, you are going to be in hell with your feelings, with corresponding thoughts, and with the negative sensorimotor behaviors (9S) that the infernal marriage produces – pressing too hard on your toothbrush causing injury to your gums, or burning your toast, or cutting your finger, or banging drawers and doors, or driving off and practicing the emotional use of the gas pedal, etc. These series of little and big disasters go on and on – until your mentality, consciousness, and meaning of what’s happening, is liberated by some regenerated loves of happiness and control.
What is the mechanism by which we can change our mental state and raise our consciousness and mentality?
We change our loves by changing our thoughts.
Remember that -9A loves, like the love of feeling resentful, cannot “materialize” into your actuality or life until you are willing to think the thoughts and perform the reasoning procedures of venting to yourself about the obligations you hate. If you inhibit or suppress these thoughts and justifications, then the love of feeling resentful cannot be consummated. That is when the Divine Psychologist disconnects you from that society, and reconnects you to some other society. Now which one? That again depends on your love, since the Divine Psychologist is obligated to honor your love since that is your spiritual freedom to choose that love, whether it is hellish or heavenly.
As you are still brushing your teeth, or waiting for the microwave oven to deliver your meal, your love of getting out of hell is activated by the Divine Psychologist. Now comes the critical choice you have to make in full spiritual freedom to choose your loves. The love of getting out of hellish mental states (like feeling resentful, angry, and trapped), originates with some society in the Grand Human. It is a heavenly love that’s being offered to you. They don’t know who you are or what you are, and they don’t know your circumstances. They are just absolutely moved by the love of assisting people in getting out of hellish states. This love is used by the Divine Psychologist to make it available to you by connecting your consciousness to them. You cannot feel their love in layer -9A, but you can, in layer 8A and 7A. All you need to do is to cleave to that love being offered to you, namely, the love of getting away from hellish feelings and thoughts.
You are aware of this love “in the back of your mind.” You need to use a deliberate technique to bring that love to the fore of your mind, so that you can actually be in that state of love, which is heavenly and which brings peace, being focused, feeling enthusiasm and happiness for the coming day – the first day of the rest of your immortal life, one day closer to eternal conjugial happiness with your soul mate. These are the thoughts in layer 7C that you can dwell on as you finish brushing your teeth, or when the microwave oven beeps. As you develop these rational and heavenly thoughts about reality and your wonderful future, new loves can become active in your affective organ in layer 7A and 8A. The Divine Psychologist now connects you to societies that are immersed in the loves of scheduling and completing tasks. You feel imbued with new strength and enthusiasm.
As you are locking up the apartment and proceeding to your car or moped, you are back in layer 9, sequencing the sensorimotor activities that will take you to school or work. You are now far away from the place in the Grand Monster that hates the feeling of having these obligations to meet. Gone is the love of feeling resentful. It is replaced with the love of completing your tasks in as efficient way as possible, and still stay within the bounds of your standard of accomplishing things (which is also a heavenly love).
As you are locking up the apartment and proceeding to your car or moped, you are back in layer 9, sequencing the sensorimotor activities that will take you to school or work. You are now far away from the place in the Grand Monster that hates the feeling of having these obligations to meet. Gone is the love of feeling resentful. It is replaced with the love of completing your tasks in as efficient way as possible, and still stay within the bounds of your standard of accomplishing things, all of which involve a bunch of heavenly loves – the love to stay out of trouble, the love to enjoy friends, songs, and movies, the love to strive for success and prepare for a career or project, the love to be rewarded for work done, the love to be recognized and acknowledged for our skills and intentions, etc. etc.
These useful heavenly loves allow us to progress to our ultimate destination, which is to become a mature adult who is committed to regeneration progress on a daily basis.
This is then the personal challenge facing each of us – the challenge of regeneration. And this is assisted by knowledge of how the process of regeneration works. This process is revealed all around the world in every culture when you examine the Sacred Scripture they possess from tradition over the generations. Approach these holy texts with the knowledge of correspondences acquired for your own regeneration. These are the spiritual meanings that are hidden within the literal meaning. No one can extract this spiritual meaning except through the prescribed process, which is the only actually effective mechanism that God provides for human beings to access spiritual truths hidden within the literal meaning of all Sacred Scripture.
Theistic psychology is a phrase used to cover any and all knowledge that people have as a result of applying correspondences from enlightenment by the Divine Psychologist. That is how the spiritual organic process works. The natural organic process of the growth of a plant cannot be altered. All the variations of environmental conditions to which its organic process can adapt and function, will result in the plant surviving. But if some conditions are given outside this limit, the plant dies. This organic process is built into all organs, physical and mental. Our mental organs are constructed out of the substances that are within Sacred Scripture.
This is a difficult and confusing concept to understand from layer 8C, but it is clearly understandable in layer 7eC. Remember that our mental organs are constructed out of the mental substances of spiritual heat and spiritual light. These are mental substances, Divine substances, living, infinite, and eternal. Spiritual heat is nothing else than Divine Love and spiritual light is nothing else than Divine Truth. The problem of comprehension is resolved as soon as you allow in your mind the entrance of a layer 7iC idea. This is an interior-natural concept, not a external-natural concept. It is the idea that physical=temporary appearances representing reality, and mental=permanent eternal reality in our mind, which is the mental world of eternity, of which there is only one, for all people.
Once you allow that idea as “possibly real” (which is called the positive bias in science), you are departing from and removing the existing negative bias in science, which says that this idea is “outside the realm of logic, rationality, empiricism, and science.” The negative bias thinking about the Divine Psychologist, the Grand Monster, etc., is that it is just some idea by some author whose research and conclusions do not qualify as materialistic science. The thinking level of materialistic science is layer 8C and layer 9S. In other words, the data and measurements obtained at layer 9S, provide the sensory input and data recording instruments. Then, our ability to construct mental abstractions (layer 8C) of the empirical data provide us with scientific explanations, principles, and theories.
Note that the abstractions and scientific explanations in layer 8C are above or within layer 9C, which involves constructing concepts and explanations based only on the appearances of reality which we see in data. Clearly, the rational and scientific explanations must be at a level higher in thinking and consciousness than the level of the data which are appearances of the senses and the physical instruments. Scientific explanation is at level 8C, which is why that mental layer is called “abstract materialism,” while the layer below is called “concrete materialism.” Data and measurements are concrete, while explanations are abstractions of the concrete. Abstractions of data are much closer to actuality and truth than the appearances of those data, which hide or cover up the actual reality or truth.
The concrete materialistic thinking of our anatomical layer 9C is related to the concrete materialistic thinking of the literal sense of the Old Testament Sacred Scripture. The abstract materialistic thinking of our anatomical layer 8C is related to the abstract materialistic thinking of the literal sense of the New Testament Sacred Scripture. The external-rational thinking of our anatomical layer 7eC is related to the external-rational thinking of the literal sense of the Writings Sacred Scripture (or “Swedenborg Reports”). These three sets of sacred text are unlike any other discourse produced by human beings on their own. The discourse and text produced by human beings only has a literal sense that can be abstracted and symbolized in many ways. But this text does not contain a spiritual sense corresponding to the layers above our natural mind and the Spiritual Sun. Some text comes from Divine Speech to produce Sacred Scripture, while all other text is constructed at whatever level the person is thinking, the consciousness level of the person, which is in the natural mind.
You can test out this principle by learning correspondences and applying them to various types of discourse and text. The results will show that only Sacred Scripture text contains the layers of the mental world of eternity in discrete correspondences to each other, from layer 1 to layer 9.
Consider the external-rational concepts you are studying in theistic psychology, like regeneration, the Grand Monster, the Grand Human, layers of mental organs, eternity, spiritual substances, etc. Consider them within the positive bias. That is, allow yourself the benefit of saying “possibly true” and reject the idea that will rob you from that benefit, which says “not possibly true, clever fantasy, not science.” It is your choice. To me it makes sense to teach the positive bias framework. I can understand it rationally as a scientist who respects consistency, organicity, rationality, usefulness, empirical confirmations, power to generate new explanations that lead to better understanding, etc. etc. These are the reasons why I think that it is worthwhile for me to teach the positive bias in science.
One of the exercises that I found useful involves the activity of spiritual garfinkeling. I constructed this sensorimotor neo by considering the exercise in Garfinkel’s 1967 book. He gave his students the exercise of going home and acting like they are guests. This would allow them to observe two useful things. First, other people’s reactions. Second, what is normal and ordinary is an arrangement or order managed by the participants who coordinate their actions to each other. When the students acted like a guest would act, they broke up this coordinated arrangement, and the ordinary was no longer in force. The social world of the participants was turned upside down.
“May I use the bathroom?”You can see that the normal ordinary exchanges were disrupted by such questions and stances.
The exercise I am recommending uses a similar approach in a spiritual area, so I call it spiritual garfinkeling. I’m not sure if I should use a capital “G” or if Professor Garfinkel’s followers today would see my point for extending to theistic psychology what Harold Garfinkel did in non-theistic ethnomethodology. I see the neo I constructed as honoring the scientific value of his instructional assignment.
Spiritual garfinkeling consists of carrying out a regular activity while acting as if you are operating from layer 7, when actually you might be in layer 8 or 9. To act as if one’s consciousness is in a higher layer than it is – that’s the process that can help us raise our actual consciousness level to that higher layer. In this higher layer we have access to mental states that are sourced in the Grand Human (layers 6, 5, 4). This higher way of thinking (layer 7C) is rational rather than materialistic (layer 8C). For instance, when you analyze your feeling of hating your obligations, you can do it from layer 9C thinking (“I just hate it. I don’t want to do it. I resent having to.”). Or, you can do it from layer 8C thinking (“I can’t just walk away from the situation. I want to honor my obligations in this case. I am being a good person.”). Or, you can do it from your layer 7eC thinking (“Everything I do fits into a Divine plan for my future. It would be folly for me to ignore this central fact about it. Striving to be good will bring me the motivation, freedom, and happiness I crave for.”)
Once you begin to elaborate a higher form of thinking, you create the thoughts that your higher loves need in order to become actual in you, and to give you the mental states that you want for yourself. If you are in layer -9A facing concrete appearances (9S) that make you unhappy (-9A), the way out of the situation is to raise your level of thinking to 8C by the abstracted materialism to which we have access in that layer. We can construct abstracted explanations of our situation. Our situation appears bad (“I hate having to do this.”) (layer -9C). Our negative emotions (marked by the – sign), are supported by false thinking (“It’s not fair.”). The two form an infernal alliance to produce our disturbing environment (-9S) (feeling trapped, braking things, taking it out on innocent others, being in a bad mood, putting on a sad or mean face, etc.).
An effective method to gain control over the situation is to move right on up to layer 7eC thinking. You can do this if you are a student of theistic psychology, or, if you study Sacred Scripture and understand it in its deeper spiritual meanings. Layer 7eC thinking consists of paraphrases and applications of your knowledge and understanding of theistic psychology, or equivalent. It works most effectively when you are willing to think in the interior-rational layer (7iC), obtaining your information from the correspondential or spiritual meanings within Sacred Scripture. We need to be aware that when Sacred Scripture is applied in the literal sense, our thinking is restricted to the level at which the holy text is written.
Sacred Scripture text that is written for concrete materialistic thinking (9C), allows you to hate some people and to ignore their human rights. Sacred Scripture text that is written for abstract materialistic thinking (8C), does not allow you to hate some people and to ignore their human rights. You are commanded to love all people and to benefit them, not hurt them. Sacred Scripture text that is written for natural-rational thinking (7C), also does not allow you to hate some people and to ignore their human rights, but in addition, shows you what is actually going on with you when you hate some people versus when you love the good in all people.
At level 7iC thinking you are adding a critical missing component that is not present in 7eC thinking. This is the process of undergoing regeneration. Once you begin this process you are given access to 7iA loves and motives. Interior-natural loves are sourced in your higher layers (6, 5, 4). These loves are spiritual and celestial, while the loves in 7eA, 8A, and 9A are natural loves, possessing negative natural powers and weaknesses. Loves that are available in layer 7eA can conjoin only with 7eC thoughts (external loves with external thoughts). These are based on the materialism of the natural world, either concrete (layer 9) or abstracted (layer 8). There is a direct dependency between the content of 9C, 8C, and 7eC. To move the content to spiritual and celestial layers (6, 5, 4) it is necessary to operate in layer 7i, the interior-natural layer.
You move on from layer 7e to layer 7i when you activate the love of regenerating (7iA). This is called reformation. You change your world around by moving everything in it under the rule and command of your love of regenerating. You can elevate this love above all other loves you have, above the loves of what is concrete (9A), above the loves of what is abstract (8A), and above the loves of knowing and understanding rational truths (7eA). You enthrone a new love in the interior portion of your natural-rational mind, within the love that is in the external portion of your rational mind (7eA). This highest love in the natural mind is the love of regenerating. When you cleave to this love, holding on to it as dear life, you are given access by the Divine Psychologist to your spiritual and celestial layers.
When you practice spiritual garfinkeling you are acting as if you are in layer 7e or 7i, depending on your actual loves. For instance, when you are immersed in the negative feelings and thoughts of hating your obligation and lack of freedom, as discussed above, you can start acting as if you moved out of layer 9A, out of layer 8A, and into layer 7A. All you need to do is to figure out rationally within your understanding of the positive bias, how your regeneration motive applies to this one instance of feeling disturbed by your obligation, feeling rebellious, feeling enslaved. For example:
“What is my main task here. What am I trying to accomplish. Where am I trying to go. I want to be free of these negative feelings. I want to be free, really free. I cannot feel free on my natural loves. I need to access my spiritual and celestial loves. Sacred Scripture tells me that “with God all things are possible.” This means that the Divine Psychologist can give me new loves that will overcome the feelings of dissatisfaction and loss of emotional control. These new loves are spiritual and celestial, from my eternity, from my own heaven. I am moving towards that state. I must let the Divine Psychologist bring me these temptations of hating and rebelling against what I picked for myself as the right thing to do. I accepted this obligation out of a feeling of loyalty and caring. These are heavenly loves and I’m going to reject the hellish loves of trying to escape my obligation, then regretting it later, feeling the pain of guilt and self-hatred.” Etc.
You can see from the above discussion what is involved in spiritual garfinkeling. It’s like a mental bootstrap operation, lifting yourself out of the states you are in. Knowing about the details of regeneration and the work of the Divine Psychologist in your mind, allows you to access new loves, new powers, new satisfactions, new self-confidence, new skills and abilities.
The availability to us of this progressive level of abilities, is the result of the organic anatomy of our mental operations. As you know from prior discussions, we have the built in anatomical ability to operate our three mental organ systems at three levels of operation – layer 9, 8, and 7 (7e and 7i). These three levels of mental operations are in sequential discrete degrees, as discussed. This means that the highest possible progress in one level cannot reach the lowest operations of the next level. You also know that our consciousness or mentality level oscillates between these three, although as you can expect, the rate of oscillation will vary with the extent of our regeneration.
The process of regeneration starts in layer 7, when we abandon our thinking loyalty in layer 7eC to layer 8 and 9. Instead, we adopt a new loyalty in layer 7iC, which is filled with spiritual content from the correspondential sense of Sacred Scripture. From this interior-natural layer, we can raise our consciousness to the highest levels by extracting higher correspondences from Sacred Scripture. The regeneration of our layer 7 turns our natural-rational mind from a little hell into a little heaven. This transformation is achieved through the influx of correspondences from layer 6 into layer 7i. The result is that layer 6 is made fully functional. This insures that we will be able to live in first heaven after resuscitation.
Following the regeneration of our natural-rational mind (layer 7), the really hard work then begins – the regeneration of the external-natural mind, layer 8. Our rational mind can be a little heaven while our materialistic mind can still be a little hell. Our regenerated rational mind (layer 7) cannot impose a new heavenly order on the materialistic mind below (layer 8). Our feelings and thoughts in layer 8 prior to its regeneration, are abstractions of mere appearances (layer 9). The abstractions from the physical cannot get rid of the physical. Every scientific theory and concept in the negative bias approach, will exclude the non-physical, the non-temporal or eternal, and the spiritual or mental. These are excluded. But if this turns out to be the real reality, then science in the negative bias excludes the true reality. This is then the reason why our layer 8 is called a little hell – because our thoughts about reality are inverted. The result is that what is true, we call false; and what is false, we call true. This is the meaning of “hellish order” or “little hell.”
The rational mind (layer 7) has to be regenerated first because layer 8 and layer 9 resist all efforts at regeneration. However, things are different once layer 7 is regenerated. When we read the Swedenborg Reports, or study genuine theistic psychology based on it, we can make the effort of studying every paragraph until we can understand it. As we build paragraphs that we can understand, our rational mind is formed by the Divine Psychologist, regardless of our awareness, and regardless of our ideas about God and the afterlife. This paragraph by paragraph cumulation of rational ideas and explanations results in the gradual regeneration of the rational mind (layer 7). It is accompanied by much activity in the affective organ. Our rational loves (layer 7A) seize upon our new rational ideas (7C) and they reciprocally conjoin into one – the spiritual marriage in layer 7.
Now we look down upon our feelings and thoughts in layer 8C below, and what do we see?
We see a little hell. We see negative loves and false principles and attitudes. We see habits that we cannot condone. We see enjoyments that are selfish and cruel. We see thinking that is often stupid, reasoning that doesn’t conform to rationality. We see a life of weakness and neglect, addiction and powerlessness, a disorder of the mind that translates into a disorder of society. This is the unregenerate layer 8. But we also see some brilliance there, feats of engineering and medical achievements, large institutions and huge armies operating in an orderly and efficient manner. Layer 8 is not only a little hell, it is also a little heaven. But the heavenly order and abilities cannot remain because the hellish order destroys them. Regeneration of layer 8 must take place before the heavenly portion in it is destroyed. This is accomplished through the influx of our layer 5. When layer 8 is regenerated, our layer 5 is fully opened and functional. After resuscitation we will be able to exist in the second heaven.
After layer 8 is regenerated, layer 9 can be regenerated. This is achieved through the influx of layer 4. When layer 9 is regenerated, layer 4 is fully open and functional. After resuscitation we will be able to exist in the third and highest heaven.
Reasonings under the three levels of human consciousness:
Layer 7:Positive bias rationality: Reasoning based on rational-spiritual correspondences
Layer 8:Negative bias materialism: Reasoning based on abstractions from sensory appearances
Layer 9:Concrete materialism: Reasoning based on sensory or corporeal appearances
When
we are beginning our process of regenerating we are motivated by a rational love
in layer 7A. Loves are named according to the organic layer of our mind at which
they operate:
Organic layer 9A supports corporeal loves, attached to the appearances of the sensorimotor world around it (9S). Corporeal loves (9A) encourage concrete materialistic thinking (9C), and together they produce the sensorimotor appearances of our meanings and consciousness in the corporeal mind (layer 9).
Organic layer 8A supports sensuous loves that encourage abstract materialistic thinking (8C), and together they produce the sensorimotor appearances of our meanings and consciousness in the sensuous materialistic mind (layer 8S). The difference in consciousness between layer 8 and 9 is of a discrete degree. No matter how advanced we get in layer 9, we can never reach layer 8 by using corporeal consciousness and meanings. In layer 9 the meanings reflect the appearances. For example, you are driving and another car has been following closer than you think that one car should follow another. You are conscious that you are feeling annoyed. All of a sudden things around your corporeal mind (9S) are no longer OK. You are not conscious of the hellish love (-9A) that gives you the feeling of annoyance (-9A). Your corporeal cognitive operations (9C) fall in line to support this love. But you don’t know what this love is, or even that it is operating in your affective organ, triggering the thoughts.
You are thinking that the driver behind you is annoyed with you and wants you to speed up. This conclusion is entirely based on the appearances in your rear view mirror. That’s all you are going by to make this conclusion.
What is this love? It is the love of self for the sake of self as it operates at the corporeal level of appearances (layer -9A). The car behind you is invading your territory. There is pressure and threat to such behavior from one motorist to another. You resent that. They should respect you by being more considerate. You hate people who…Wait! Quick! Start doing some spiritual garfinkeling. You’re thinking: “OK, I need to calm down. I’m just going to act like it’s the other’s driver’s inattention. It’s not a personal message to me that he is annoyed with me and is pressuring me to go faster. Not necessarily so! Maybe he is distracted. Maybe he has the habit of following too close. Maybe he is busy multitasking and isn’t even aware of me.”
This new thinking is in your layer 8C. Your consciousness, rationality, and meanings have jumper from the corporeal level of appearances (9C), to a more realistic interpretations of the situation based on emotional intelligence (layer 8C). This is the skill of knowing how to use spiritual garfinkeling procedures to allow your consciousness to escape from the reasoning that is based on appearances (“He is annoyed at me”) in layer 9C, to the reasoning based on an abstract interpretation of these appearances (“Not necessarily so!”) in layer 8C.
There is a discrete difference in the two loves that support these two layers. Corporeal loves are for the most part unregenerate (9-A). The love of self for the sake of self and the love of the world for the sake of self are the two ruling loves in layer 9-A before regeneration. So until the regeneration process reaches layer 9 we need to use spiritual garfinkeling to escape that inherited love in our natural mind. We suddenly just start acting as if we are operating in layer 8. We don’t try to reason our way out of it. We just jump. Our consciousness just takes off to a higher zone of existence. When we act this way, the Divine Psychologist is right there to support us. He provides the power and the effectiveness for whatever is supposed to happen in that situation. Our job is simply to act as if we are doing it ourselves, as if we are jumping from a corporeal love (9-A) to a sensuous love (8+A).
The laws of operation for consciousness in the mental world of eternity allow us to “look down” from one mental layer to that immediately below. When we are thinking with meanings that operate in layer 8C, we can use these meanings to show us what is happening in the meanings that is just external or below. Remember that in the mental world, what is “below” is the same as what is “external.” The three sequential mental layers of the natural mind – 9, 8, 7 – are together in simultaneous order, so that layer 7 is within (or above) layer 8, which is within (or above) layer 9. Think of three concentric circles with 7 at the center, 8 in the middle, and 9 on the outside. This is the organic arrangement of our natural mind, the mind in which we are conscious prior to resuscitation. Similarly, the spiritual mind in which we are conscious after resuscitation, has three sequential and simultaneous layers – 6, 5, 4.
Our conscious awareness is created by the meanings we are using in our thinking. These meanings are nothing else than the operations of the cognitive organ. Hence our consciousness level at any one moment in our daily activities is determined by which of the three cognitive organs it is attached to by a love. Loves in the natural mind exist at three levels, since loves are nothing but the operations of our affective organ. Our natural mind contains an affective organ at three anatomical layers – 9A, 8A, 7A. The 9A loves in the affective organ will generate 9C meanings in the cognitive organ. Similarly, 8A loves will generate 8C meanings, while 7A loves will generate 7C meanings. Consequently, such as our love is, such are our meanings, and such is our consciousness.
In our daily life, the level of human consciousness in our sensorimotor organ (S) is determined by the marriage between our affective loves (A) with our cognitive thoughts (C). This is the spiritual marriage (S) between our will (A) and our understanding (C).
You can see from this mental anatomy and physiology that our daily life consciousness operates at three levels:
7S: rational consciousness from correspondences
8S: materialistic consciousness from abstracted appearances
9S: corporeal consciousness of concrete appearances
In infancy: corporeal consciousness (9S)
In childhood materialistic consciousness (8S)
In adolescence: rational consciousness (7S)
As young adults: rational consciousness (7S)
As mature adults: materialistic consciousness (8S)
In old age: corporeal consciousness (9S)
Remember that S (sensorimotor system of the mind) is the spiritual child or offspring – neo baby – of the spiritual marriage between the affective organ (A) and the cognitive organ (C). This is a feature of mental physiology in the organic layers of the mental world of eternity. What you see around you, outside of you, and coming into you through your senses (S), are the actual appearances (S) created instantaneously by the spiritual marriage in your own mind between your loves (A) and your thoughts (C).
We can influence where are consciousness is moment by moment, by deliberately thinking about thoughts and meanings that are attractive to a higher love within us. This is the spiritual garfinkeling technique.
For instance, you are brushing your teeth and thinking that you need to floss next. You are experiencing a feeling of distaste, reluctance, sadness. You are aware of your thinking: “I hate flossing. I think I’ll just skip today. Nobody is perfect. I’ve got more important things to take care of.” What