From: Introduction to Theistic Psychology
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/theistic/mental-anatomy.htm
Dr. Leon James
2008
In theistic psychology God is called “the Divine Psychologist.” This makes sense because the focus on God in theistic psychology has to do with the process of regeneration. God manages everything by rational necessity since God is defined as omnipotent. This word means all power. You can see rationally that God cannot give power to anything or anyone, if that means it is no longer God’s power. If God “gave away” some power to the individual, so that the individual can now wield that power from oneself, then God would no longer be omnipotent. Some power would no longer be under God’s direct and immediate control. So we must stay with the rational consequences of defining God as omnipotent.
It is the same with “life” since life is the power to survive and reproduce. If the individual organism had life in itself, of its own, then some life would not be God’s, and hence some power would not be God’s. Hence all life that an individual has, whether a plant, animal, or human being, is God’s life active in that individual. The life is never a part of the individual, but only in the individual. In other words, living organisms or beings are receptors of God’s life. This is the real meaning of “organism” and “organ,” namely, receptor organs, receptors of life from God. The Swedenborg Reports have established by direct observation and experimentation, that this inflowing life is actually a spiritual substance that streams out of the Spiritual Sun, which Swedenborg was able to visually observe and describe.
The Spiritual Sun is a bright aura within which can be discerned the presence of the Grand Human. The Spiritual Sun is the first phase of all creation and existence. God as He is in Himself is infinite love and truth, is omnipresent, and is indefinable, whose qualities are indescribable, who has always been, and is always the same forever, changeless, absolute, unapproachable. In order to achieve creation and existence, the infinite God had to first accommodate an approachable aspect of Himself, which may be called “God as He is in Creation” in contrast to “God as He is in Himself.” This first approachable aspect of God outside of Himself and in creation is the Spiritual Sun. The Spiritual Sun is life itself. It is God’s life, but not as life is in God Himself, but as life is in creation. God’s omnipresence in all creation is through and by means of the Spiritual Sun. Out of the Spiritual Sun stream forth two substances of life called “spiritual heat” and “spiritual truth.” Spiritual heat is infinite Divine love as it flows from God into creation. Spiritual light is infinite Divine truth as it flows from God into creation.
Love and truth are the building blocks of the spiritual world of eternity (not in time) and all that is in it, and of the natural world in time, and all that is in it. The Spiritual Sun is the origin of the natural sun, or star systems and galaxies. The spiritual heat flowing out of the Spiritual Sun is the source of the heat in the suns and stars of the physical universe. The spiritual light flowing out of the Spiritual Sun is the source of the light in the suns and stars of the physical universe. Planets are pieces of a sun that have been separated from the mother star that holds these planets in an orbit around itself, not allowing them to wander off into space. All physical objects on a planet, be it a car, the ocean, a flower, your nose and tongue, or a piece of bread, are constructed from the materials of the planet, and hence the sun. Whatever you look at, the clouds, mountains, a bee, or your cell phone, that object is constructed from the materials in and from the sun.
If you drew a schematic diagram of the layers of an object you would start with an outside circle, which represents the outside of the object. Then you would draw a second circle concentric with the outside one, which represents its atomic particles and space within which the particles whirl around in fixed sub-layers relative to each other. Next you would draw a third inner circle concentric with the other two, which represents the Spiritual Sun and the expanse it creates around itself.
The first circle or layer of an object is its physical or chemical composition.
The second circle of an object, going within it, is its atomic and sub-atomic composition.
The third circle of an object, or its inmost, is its spiritual and ethereal composition.
Since the spiritual and ethereal composition is from the Spiritual Sun, that layer of the object is composed of spiritual heat and spiritual light, that is, Divine love and Divine truth. These two are called spiritual substances, and together, they make up all life and life’s inherent endeavors, qualities, and virtues.
The physical sun and the Spiritual Sun are thus correspondences of each other. One is within the other and they cannot occupy the same plane of existence. The Spiritual Sun is the source and cause of the physical sun, which is then the effect. The Spiritual Sun creates an expanse around itself called the mental world of eternity. In the Swedenborg Reports it is called the “spiritual world.” In theistic psychology the expanse around the Spiritual Sun is called “rational ether.” It is called “ether” because it is a mental expanse made of truth (spiritual light) within which is love (spiritual heat). Love and truth are mental states. The Divine Human’s mental states are infinite and they are the source and cause of all mental states outside of the Divine Human and in His creation. It is called “rational” because Divine Truth is rationality itself.
Hence the expanse around the Spiritual Sun is a mental expanse, a rational ether.
In other words the “spiritual world” is the mental world of eternity created by the Spiritual Sun through its outflow of spiritual heat and spiritual light. It is according to this correspondences or pattern, that the physical sun creates a physical space or “force field” around itself in which pieces of itself cooled off as planets, can circulate and evolve, and support the development of living organisms.
Once the mental world of eternity (or spiritual world) has been established as an expanse around the Spiritual Sun, the spiritual substances of love and truth can construct out of themselves mental organisms that function as receptors of spiritual heat and light. There are three basic types of such organisms in the mental world of eternity, namely, an affective layer, a cognitive layer, and a sensorimotor layer. The affective layer is receptive of spiritual heat. The cognitive layer is receptive of spiritual light. The sensorimotor layer is receptive of the joint operation of the affective and cognitive layer. There are six distinct layers in the mental world of eternity. The three upper layers are called the spiritual layers, while the three lower layers are called the natural layers. Each layer is distinct and relates to the other layers by correspondence. Each upper layer is the cause of the layer immediately below it. There is thus a successive “descent” of succeeding and corresponding layers from the Spiritual Sun. These layers are arranged in a form or shape that is the human body, in all its external and internal parts and structures. Hence it is called The Grand Human.
With these six mental layers in place in the world of eternity around the Spiritual Sun, human beings can be created. A human being is born with two bodies. One is a spiritual body made of the substances of the Spiritual Sun, and it contains a unique combination of an affective organ, a cognitive organ, and a sensorimotor organ. The other body is physical, made of the materials of the natural sun, and it contains a unique combination of a circulatory system of organs, a respiratory system of organs, and a neuro-skeletal system of organs. The physical body, along with its three systems of physical organs, corresponds to the spiritual body and its three systems of mental organs.
Upon the death or breakdown of the physical body, the spiritual body is no longer “attached” to the natural world, and continues its immortal life in eternity. Hence it is that we are born into eternity. Our mental life and our mind is immortal because it is composed of the substances of the Spiritual Sun, which are love and truth, hence eternal mental states. Our mind, or conscious self as a unique individual, is immortal or eternal, endlessly evolving in the mental world of eternity. Since we are born into eternity to begin with, we are automatically immortal or “timeless” human beings. Our mental world is “timeless” while the physical world that comes through our senses is itself in time. What is “in time” is called temporary, while what is not in time is called eternal. Our mental life of sensations, thoughts, and feelings are operations in our mental organs in the spiritual body which is in eternity. Hence it is that sensations, thoughts, and feelings cannot be measured or detected by physical instruments.
In contrast, the physical brain’s neuro-electrical operations can be measured, and have been mapped out with modern digital techniques. Correlations have been obtained between these physical mappings and mental states such as arousal, sleep, interest, boredom, positive mood, negative mood, reflective mood, etc. that are reported by the individuals under observation. These correlations reflect the correspondence laws that govern the operations of mental states in eternity and the operations of physical states in time. The following correspondence exist and have been directly observed by Swedenborg in his dual consciousness states:
Affective operations in the spiritual body (feeling, willing) correspond to the operations of the circulatory system in the physical body. The person’s “ruling love” or dominant motive in the mental world corresponds to the action of the heart and its determination of vital functions such as blood pressure and blood composition, which depends on how the liver and related organs are functioning. This complex interdependence of organs and sub-systems in the circulatory system reflects, point by point, detail by detail, the complex interdependence of affective operations starting with the individual’s ruling love and the hierarchy of affective administration under this one dominant life motive. We can each become aware of our ruling love by monitoring the pattern of our free choices and intense enjoyments or satisfactions. Our lifestyle preferences, the habits we maintain, the changes we resist, the objects of our love and admiration, what makes us enthusiastic, what we value and desire – these are the operations of the affective system in the affective layers of the mental world of eternity. There is only one mental world of eternity of the human race, and every human being is born into it and stays in it forever.
The cognitive layers of the mental world of eternity provide the medium of operations for our cognitive life of thinking, remembering, reasoning, inventing, imagining, understanding. These cognitive operations in our cognitive organs correspond to the physical and physiological operations of the respiratory system in the physical body. The correspondence to thinking includes the organs of the lungs and its sub-structures, as well as the organs by which we produce speech.
The circulatory and respiratory system in the physical body are interdependent and operate synergistically. The heart and the lungs cooperate in the exchange and purification of the blood, without which there is quick death of the body from the accumulation of toxins. These physiological and biochemical operations correspond point by point to the mental operations in the cognitive organ. The physical organism’s health and well being, and its consequent active sensory and motor environment, is produced by the synergistic action of the heart and lungs. This interdependent operation corresponds to the point by point details of how our affective organ acts in conjunction with our cognitive organ. This co-action is called “the marriage of the will and the understanding.” In the Swedenborg Reports it is frequently called “the marriage of good and truth” because spiritual heat is love or good, these two being the same, for what we love is what we call good.
The marriage or conjoint action of the affective organ (feeling, willing) and the cognitive organ (thinking, imagining) produces an offspring that is experienced in the operations of our sensorimotor organ – our sensations in discrete modalities of experiencing (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.), and our motor determinations in context – walking, eating, speaking, dancing, moving and carrying things, etc. We have therefore the following correspondences and cause-effect relations:
Affective (willing, feeling) àCognitive (thinking, imagining) àSensorimotor (sensing, moving)
The sensorimotor layers of the mental world of eternity are constructed appearances. They are real appearances, not illusions. Swedenborg’s dual consciousness for 27 years made him very familiar with the appearances in the spiritual world. We are familiar with how we construct appearances in our dreams. Everything looks and feels real to the dreamer’s experiencing. Swedenborg was able to establish that the appearances in the sensorimotor environment of the afterlife are based on the mental states that correspond to things in the natural world. This is just like in our dreams that are made up of houses, streets, elevators, beaches, horses, etc. etc. Swedenborg became familiar with the appearances where people congregated in consciousness and “lived together” in “spiritual societies” of cities and houses filled with familiar objects, but more beautiful, more idealistic and artistic. The mood and particular mental states of the people, what they felt, what they were thinking or talking about with each other, was instantaneously reflected or represented by natural things that correspond to those mental states, feelings, or thoughts. In general, mental states that are compatible with good and truth, create surrounding appearances that are called “heavenly,” while mental states that are in opposition or contradiction of good and truth, create sensorimotor surroundings that are called “hellish.”
The purpose of being born into two worlds is to make it possible for us to acquire a personality that is happy with a heavenly environment. For this reason our mental anatomy includes a spiritual mind and a natural mind. Both are eternal and immortal because both are in the spiritual body composed of living immortal spiritual substances that cannot break down or die. Our natural mind is formed in content by the sensory input from the physical body which interacts with the physical world. Our spiritual mind is formed in content by the affective and cognitive input from the Spiritual Sun. When we are born we gradually become conscious of our natural mind and live our daily life through the operation of the natural mind. At the same time our spiritual mind also develops with the spiritual content that corresponds to the states in our natural mind, but we are entirely unconscious of this. However, a few hours into the “dying process” our consciousness is restored, this time, without being connected to the physical world. This is called the process of resuscitation. Swedenborg observed thousands of people going through the resuscitation process, and was able to interview them immediately as they regained consciousness after death.
For awhile after we are resuscitated we are still conscious in our natural mind, have all our memories, and recognize ourselves as the good old familiar self we knew prior to death. But after undergoing further developments our ruling love establishes itself as supreme over all our willing, thinking, and imagining. We appear to ourselves to congregate with people who share our ruling love and we gradually become fully aware of who we really are, and have been all along, regardless of our external features, culture, and conduct. Our ruling love gets rid of all loves that do not agree with it, or do not support it. We become purely our ruling love. Our appearance now starts to represent this ruling love and the mental states it commands, desires, and imposes on our consciousness.
When the ruling love is a heavenly love, compatible with good and truth, all the loves that are contrary, that are hellish, are let go and put to sleep forever. We become “conjugial angels” of virtue and wisdom and happiness, living with our soul mate in an endless progression of increased joy and intelligence. When our ruling love is a hellish one, incompatible with good and truth, it surrounds itself with corrupted good and falsified truth, and defines this as good and truth, thus, becoming spiritually insane.
This is then the battle of life, the purpose of our personality development in a natural mind. God brings us experiences of life that sets us up for a free choice of love guided by truth. God’s omnipotent management approach is to cumulate the individual’s free choices guided by truth. God set up the contingencies of your experiencing, moment by moment, from your birth onward to endless eternity. As a result of this mental coordination, our relationship with God is personal, close, and intimate. At first we do not acknowledge this close relationship in our mind, even if we acknowledge that God exists, and that He is omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient. But when we begin to work out the rational and scientific implications of this definition of God we are led to realize that God’s omnipotence must involve His management of the events going on in your mind, in your mental world. There is only one mental world for all human beings so it’s obvious that God must manage this mental world in order to cause it to develop and evolve from the first generation of humanity to the endless future. To manage the mental world of eternity means to manage your willing and thinking, moment by moment, from birth to eternity.
Once we come to understand God’s omnipotence in a rational and scientific way we are led to consciously and personally acknowledge our close and intimate relationship with God. We then want to know how we can cooperate with God in this process of developing and becoming a heavenly person. And that’s when we begin our relationship with God as the Divine Psychologist. This is the central purpose for studying theistic psychology.
There are various modalities of interaction that we can have with the Divine Psychologist. Many people mention God, or think about God, or talk to God when they are in an extreme situation, usually bad, but also sometimes good. Many people pray to God either through ritual prayers, or through spontaneous asking. Some people say that “God told me to do this or that” or that they hear His voice addressing them. But none of these modalities of interactions consist of talking to the Divine Psychologist or cooperating with the Divine Psychologist in one’s regeneration efforts in daily life, hour by hour, every day. This is a more specialized relationship and involves some knowledge of theistic psychology.
Talking to the Divine Psychologist involves our cooperation or reciprocation in what God is striving to accomplish in us. We need to know that God manages our experiencing for the purpose of cumulating our free choices for good and truth. This cumulation is the way God has created for us to appropriate a personality that can live in conjugial heaven forever, and be happy, as happy as it is possible to be. This universal spiritual truth needs to be acknowledged, understood, and loved. Then we can begin our cooperation and reciprocity with God, thereby evolving a personality that is heavenly, and consequently capable of eternal conjugial happiness.
By validating this new relationship with the Divine Psychologist we are able to make great progress towards the ultimate goal, which is to cumulate free choices of love guided by spiritual truths. God is eager to bestow heaven upon every human being, desiring to bring us to our own heavenly layers in the mental world of eternity. This is God’s universal, personal, and individual love and passion for the human race, and the reason He created the mental world of eternity. But before we can cumulate free choices of love guided by spiritual truths we must engage in spiritual combat against our hellish habits and enjoyments.
Re-read the last sentence. Memorize it, Keep it in your mind and focus.
The Swedenborg Reports demonstrate that we cannot love good before we suppress our love for the not good.
Our mental anatomy and our loves are inborn. We inherit them from our biological family line. Mental traits are inherited, and this corresponds to the inheritance of physical traits like color of the eye and hair, appearance of one’s features, genetic predispositions and traits, talents, health weaknesses, anatomical features, biochemical features of organs and blood, preferences in taste, tendencies for certain emotions, etc. etc.. These inherited traits include some that are compatible with good and truth, and some that are opposed to both of these. In theistic psychology we discuss the inheritance of “heavenly traits” and of “hellish traits.”
It is a mental anatomical fact that heavenly and hellish traits cannot be present in the same place at the same time. All day long people alternate between heavenly and hellish mental states. We can have moments of altruistic motives when we are being considerate, which is a heavenly trait, and moments of selfish motives when we are being selfish and egotistical. We can heavenly moments of peace, health, pleasure, blessed delight, insight, wisdom. And we can have hellish moments of anger, fear, anxiety, pain, cruelty, hatred, rage, motivation to defraud and deceive. The Swedenborg Reports demonstrate that the heavenly and the hellish cannot balance each other out. If we hold on to the hellish, we cannot develop or cumulate the heavenly. Instead the heavenly remains outside our loves and is discarded after resuscitation when it is no longer needed for gain and protection.
In order for the heavenly to be appropriated or cumulated in us we must first suppress the hellish. This is accomplished through spiritual combat or temptations.
The Divine Psychologist is a Divine Psychotherapist, as well as omnipotent God whose essential character is infinite love. The Swedenborg Reports define loving someone as the desire to make that person happy from oneself. We want what’s ours to be theirs as well. In a conjugial love union the husband wants to make the wife happy and the wife wants to make the husband happy. They each use their abilities to benefit the other, to make the other feel safe, looked after, cared for, kept comfortable. When one of them gets rich, the other becomes rich also. When one of them enjoys a certain dish, the other one desires to prepare it or buy it. When one gets an award, the other is happy for it. They do things for each other to save the other from pain, anxiety, or discomfort. This is loving each other. This love comes from God who is this love itself. This love is the spiritual heat of the Spiritual Sun entering our affective organ, which corresponds to the heart and its system.
The Divine
Psychologist as spiritual heat is to our affective organ as blood is to our
heart and circulatory system.
God’s love flows out of Him through the Spiritual Sun in the form of spiritual heat, and this live and eternal substance enters our affective organ, causing it to react, to have reactions. We subjectively experience these affective operations as feeling something heavenly or willing something good. This is God’s love, continuously flowing out of Him and providing human beings with affective operations. When God’s “influx” ceases for a moment, our feeling and willing cease. When God’s influx resumes, our ability returns to have feelings and to will to think or to do something. You can see from this how close and intimate God is to each of us. From birth onward to our immortal and endless eternity, God flows into our affective organ giving us life, humanity, love, and heaven – these are the operations of the affective organ when spiritual heat flows into it. Remember them: life, humanity, love, and heaven.
Remember that spiritual heat, or love, or good, flowing into our affective organ is alive. The substance of love is alive. The Spiritual Sun is alive since it is nothing but God’s love and God’s truth. Love is life itself. Remove love from a plant, animal, or human being, and there is no life left in them. For example, if we are unable to love our survival, we cannot survive. Or, if we are unable to love anyone or anything, we lose all motivation to think anything, or sense anything, or do anything. Love directs, guides, and motivates our thinking so that we can reason, analyze, and plan. This requires love, which supplies the motivation or motive power to think or do or sense. Love provides our willing and intending, for anything that we love to do, we do, unless prevented by conditions. When we are free, we always intend what we love, what we love, we also call good.
So we receive the spiritual heat for our ability to think and do directly from the Divine Psychologist. At the same time the Divine Psychologist also manages the process of acquiring abilities and using them for heavenly purposes or uses. Because we are born with inherited hellish traits and enjoyments we are not aware of them, especially since we practice them along with others in our family and social networks. We love many things and some of them are heavenly, and some of them are hellish. The problem is that as we progress in the course of our life, the hellish traits become progressively stronger and overpowering, until they start overpowering our heavenly traits. At this point we turn into selfish people and we practice the evil havit of corrupting and inverting the influx of good from the Divine Psychologist.
We need to understand how we do this before we can stop.
The Divine Psychologist is constantly and ceaselessly striving to bring us to this greater awareness of our evil enjoyments and practices. One important method used by the Divine Psychologist is to arrange the events that are happening around us in such a way that we experience a conscious temptation. Temptations in layer 7 are called natural temptations, whose purpose is to have us acquire civic responsibilities and moral obligations. Temptations in layer 8 are called spiritual temptations, whose purpose is to have us acquire
God prevents many, allows many why?
Varieties of loves:
Heavenly loves: Divine, celestial, spiritual, altruistic, natural
Those in hv. Loves are in God and with God, even if they don’t know about God, or have ideas about God that are inaccurate, or not fully inaccurate, thus mixed with genuine truths and falsified truths, and consequently no knowing the difference. Still, whatever are people’s belief systems, religion, or philosophy, they can be either in good or in what is contrary or opposed to good, which is called evil. By the time we attain young adulthood, and thus intellectual independence, which typically occurs at around age 20, we begin our own spiritual journey. Loves and affections, desires and intentions, now begin to reflect more and more what our actual loves are. We begin to think and reason in a way that agrees with our loves. It feels good to do this. It feels like we are finally getting to be real adults, and count as real adults. Our attitudes and discussion topics reflect our loves. We may not be aware of these loves, or what they are in a specific way, but we definitely feel the results when that love attains its object of desire or motive.
We all say that “It feels so good!” and the “it” refers to goal attainment, “sweet” success, tasting of the desired benefits of winning or being chosen, experiencing a sense of intense fulfillment, relief, aggrandizement of self, expansion of life. These are just some of the consequences of loves and their attainment. We strive for their attainment, willingly spending effort and time, willingly sacrificing pleasures and conveniences, for the sake of attaining this one high ranking love in our living hierarchy.
At the very top of the affective hierarchy of loves and affections sits the “ruling love.” This is the master-drive of all else in the person. It is the central management control of all else that is going on within the purview of the self. The Swedenborg Reports identify two ruling loves in the human race that are contrary to the two ruling loves that are in the heavenly layers of our mental world of eternity. The two ruling loves of the Grand Monster, that is, the hellish layers in the mental world of humanity, are
the love of ruling over others for the sake of self only, thus striving to exercise dominion over all people (hellish ruling love)
the love of the enjoyments and delights available from the material world only and devoid of any spiritual aspect or component (hellish ruling love)
the love of ruling over others for the sake of self and others, thus striving to exercise justice for all, peace, and prosperity in the community (heavenly ruling love)
the love of the enjoyments and delights available from the material world only when they represent the order of heaven (heavenly ruling love)
Try to memorize these four loves. They are relevant to you, even critical in what happens to you. Monitor your thoughts, plans, intentions, motives, goals. We have several of these every minute so you might have to just look at samples here and there in the course of a day, perhaps every day. Categorize each intention and desire, thus each love that moves you in the course of a minute, or an hour or a day. Your ruling love dictates, determines, causes the sequence of your thinking, second by second. No thinking process is unmotivated, and the motive is the love. It’s easy to see this when we are having a day dream or fantasy since then it is our love that presents itself to us in promissory anticipations and delights. We dream about some object we want to own. We fantasize of success and fame and reputation and power. We calculate and figure this way and that way, until we figure out a plan of satisfying a love. We observe and listen to, interpret and filter everything that comes to us that is relevant to our love, to what we want happen.
So we must monitor
ourselves to see which of the four loves is the ruling love
under which we habitually tend to operate.
Evil loves fall into principal categories that include selfish loves, adulterous
loves, scortatory lusts, loves of dominion, and materialistic loves.
The principal categories of heavenly loves include conjugial love, love
of good, love of truth, altruistic love, love of being
useful.
“Selfish loves” stem from giving in to the ruling love doing everything good or bad for the sake of self only, and if not for self only, then not doing any of the good. An example of selfish love is the love of getting away with not doing the required work for something we are involved in. For instance, many students try to get away with doing as little work as possible for a course for which they need academic credit to graduate. They love to get away with not doing the required work, the expected work. It makes them feel good to think they got away with something unfair by deceiving or defeating the system. Another example of selfish love is to play your music loud enough to bother others, while you don’t care if it does. Or, to use your cell phone in a waiting room and force people to be exposed to their talking. There are many occasions during an hour or day in which you will observe your selfish loves in operation in your affective organ.
“Adulterous loves” stem from giving in to the ruling love of using sex as an occasion for pursuing selfish loves. Some men love to subdue and hurt women by seducing them, gaining their love, and then abandoning them after emotional blackmail and much verbal, psychological or physical abuse. A common way of expressing selfish or abusive sexual relations is to secretly cheat or be disloyal to the partner. This is called “adulterous love” because it stems from the love of destroying conjugial love and heavenly marriage. This hatred for conjugial love stems from hatred of the “heavenly marriage,” that is, the marriage of good and truth in our affective and cognitive organs. In other words, when we give in and appropriate a hellish ruling love, we do so by hating heavenly loves, the chief of which, is conjugial love.
“Scortatory lusts” stem from a progressive deterioration of adulterous loves. Common examples include (i) attachment to pornography that denigrates women and exploit men who consume it, (ii) the practice of sexual blackmail of women by men, which consists of putting pressure on wife or girlfriend, to act like she wants to have sex when she doesn’t, for various reasons, the chief one being that the man has insulted her verbally or abused her emotionally, and repeats that behavior whenever he feels like it, and later, is unwilling to make up for it by acknowledging how he has hurt her and their relationship, and is unwilling to make up for it by rejecting his behavior and attitude, and resolving never to do insult her or abuse her again. Other scortatory lusts include child molestation, date rape, rape, promoting prostitution, and other sexual misconducts or perversions that are hurtful or abusive to victims of it, and to self.
“Loves of dominion” stem from giving in to the desire and enjoyment of controlling people for selfish purposes, the delight of deceiving others and defraud them of their goods and rights, and the desire to punish, enslave, or destroy all those who do not agree with them, or do not favor them as their choice. The male dominance tradition in marriage is often practiced by husbands as a license or opportunity to exert dominion over women. This attitude and practice deny the human rights of women, who are then treated as having less humanity than men, less need for freedom, less need for security, less need for comforts, etc. Loves of dominion can also be expressed with animals, taking the form of cruelty to animals.
“Materialistic loves” stem from giving in to the attachment for what is earthly, corporeal, sensual, and intellectual. For example, the activity of “being a fan” of some popular idol is often practiced by people as a type of idol worship. One allows the “idol” to exert influence on our willing, thinking, and doing. “Fans” filter what they see and hear through an uncritical acceptance of the “idol,” seeing only what they like and respond to, excusing all else as part of the package of being a fan. This is a materialistic love because it denies the existence or relevance of moral and spiritual considerations. People will adopt some view on life, reality, or lifestyle, merely because it is the trusted authority’s view, instead of investigating by reflection whether it is true or not. “Avarice” and “greed” are materialistic loves that exclude compassion and altruism. Working hard, and ambition for materialistic loves include exercising power ruthlessly, using one’s influence in unfair competition or discrimination, doing useful or patriotic things for the sake of reputation, honor, or glory only, thus not doing them at all when not gaining these things in exchange or as a material reward. Eating a diet that is traditional and familiar, but unhealthy, is a materialistic love that suppresses good traits such as prudence, moderation, rational self-management, and a sense of moderation for appetites.
“Conjugial love” is the chief of all heavenly loves as it leads to the attainment of the conjoint self of husband and wife. This conjoint self between soul mates is called an “angel.” Swedenborg confirmed by ocular observation that a conjugial couple in their celestial state (layer 4) is seen from a distance as one person walking, and then as a husband-wife couple upon closer approach. This appearance corresponds to their mental unity. Conjugial love corresponds to the Divine Marriage, which is the union of the Divine and the Human in God. The Divine Human is the result of this Divine Marriage. The conjunction of good in our affective organ, and truth in our cognitive organ, is called the Spiritual Marriage, and corresponds to this conjunction in the Divine Human’s Mind. This conjunction in us is the union and joint action of the will (affective organ) and the understanding (cognitive organ). For instance, when we know how we should act and think, and we compel ourselves to do that from the motive of providing for our eternal life, we are then in the spiritual marriage. The conjugial love between married partners corresponds to this conjunction such that the wife’s external affective conjoins itself to the husband’s external cognitive, followed by the husband’s interior affective conjoining with the wife’s interior cognitive. This process was discussed in Section zzz.
As you begin to witness your life you will be super-glad to acknowledge the co-presence and co-action of you and God in the operations of your affective and cognitive organs, and from that in the operations of the sensorimotor organ. In the experience of any human being from birth to eternity no other partnership or team can be as personal as the God-human spiritual partnership, or as unique, beneficial, enriching, and rewarding.
Seeking the Omniproprium of the Divine Human
We first discussed the Omniproprium in the Chart in Section 2.4. (zzz). It is the Proprium or Character of the Divine Human. Remember that the Divine Human is God as He is in creation, or God as He exists in the mental world of eternity. It is the Divine Human that God offers us as a way of relating to the Divine Itself. We cannot relate to the Divine Itself. We can only relate to that which God makes available to human beings. God makes Himself fully available to the human race by creating His Divine Human. We can relate to God’s existence as the Divine Human, but we cannot relate to the Divine Itself. Hence it was necessary and provided for by God that He should create for Himself a Divine Human in the mental world of eternity, by which, through, and in which God can be known to us. We can have a relationship, a partnership, with God as the Divine Human. And this relationship is even more intimate than we have considered so far in this discussion.
The Proprium of every individual is the person’s inner self or character. It is not the outward cultural social personality that constitutes a clothing or covering of our inner character. Our ruling love and its immediate hierarchy of sub-loves, is our character, our “proprium” a Latin word Swedenborg used for inner character as it literally means “what is our own.” The own is our character, our ruling love. This human “own” in the human race has turned hellish over the millennia of generations due to the accumulation of hellish traits that oppose heavenly traits. In order to attain immortality in our heavenly layers we must therefore abandon our “own” and adopt the “Own” of the Divine Human. The heavenly layers in the mental world of humanity (layers 4, 5, 6) are nothing else than varieties of ruling loves that are created by the influx of good and truth from the Spiritual Sun of the Divine Human.
In other words, in order to acquire heavenly traits we must (a) suppress and abandon the inherited hellish traits as contrary to our heaven; and (b) adapt and love the heavenly traits that are the Divine Human’s Own. There is not other heavenly layer in the mental world of eternity except the layers produced in the mind of every individual by the Proprium of the Divine Human. My wife and I received the insight a few years ago as we were discussing the heavenly life that we are planning together. It came to us in the same instant, and we both uttered the word “Omniproprium.” Later I realized that this concept in theistic psychology is the hum around which we have rebirth and regeneration of our character. The old inherited hellish loves in our affective organ of the natural mind cannot be fixed.
They must be suppressed, avoided, hated, put to sleep, banished to the outward circumference of our mental world and consciousness, as if dead, non-existent. This begins the new birth, which is called regeneration or progressive character change. This change involves the gradual adoption of the heavenly Proprium, which is the marriage of good and truth in our willing (affective organ) and thinking (cognitive organ). We call it the Omniproprium because “omni” means everywhere or omnipresent in the heavenly layers, and “proprium” because it is the Own or Character Traits of the Divine Human’s mind. Wherever we are in the Grand Human in layers 4, 5, 6, that is, whatever ruling love is our complete happiness and wisdom, we are in the Omniproprium, that is, in the marriage of good and truth from the Divine Human and in the Divine Human.
The Divine Psychologist is the Divine Human personally and individually
adapted to each of us in our conscious natural mind.
The Divine Psychologist forms a reciprocal partnership with each human being, from birth to eternity.
Reciprocal partnership means that there is something God does and then there is something we must do to reciprocate, as a response in love. God loves every human being, but not every human being loves God. Some people discover God while still on earth, others discover God after resuscitation. Some people discover God, here or hereafter, and love God in return. Others people discover God, here or hereafter, and hate God. The difference is dictated by the person’s ruling love, whether heavenly or hellish.
Back to Leon James Home || Back to Directory of Articles || To Theistic Psychology