This is Chapter 2 of A Man of the Field: Forming The New Church Mind In Today’s World. Volume 3: Regeneration: Spiritual Disciplines For Daily Life (Web address: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/nonduality.html )
Web address of this document: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/wife.html
For printing this document use the .doc file: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/wife.doc
By Dr. Leon
James
Professor
of Psychology
October
2002
(draft 18)
Contents
1. Introduction:
Subduing The External Man
4. The surrendered wife vs. the surrendered husband
5. Rule 1: The Regeneration
Discipline Of Acting From The Wife
6. Giving Up Male
Prerogatives As Contrary To Conjugial Unity
7. The Equity Model Versus
The Unity Model Of Marriage.
8. The Spiritual Discipline
Of Sweetheart Rituals
9. Conjugial Intimacy
Disciplines
10. Overcoming Threats To
Sweetheart Rituals
11. How To Avoid Turning
Cold Against The Wife
12. Spiritual Psychobiology
Of The Conjoint Self
13. The Regeneration
Discipline Of Conjugial Massage
14. The Regeneration
Discipline of Heaven On Wheels
15. The spiritual
discipline of shopping together
15. Wife takes precedence
over the children
16. The spiritual
discipline of metanoid television watching
17. Summary of
anti-absorption techniques.
The Word is
vivified with man, according to his life of love and faith … They whose
internal is open, and who thus as to their internal man are capable of being
elevated into the light of heaven, are enlightened … Enlightenment is an actual
opening of the interiors of the mind, and elevation of them into the light of
heaven …. Holiness from the internal, that is, through the internal from the
Lord, inflows with those who esteem the Word to be holy … They who are led by
the Lord are enlightened, and see truths in the Word, but not they who are led
by self (NJHD 256)
Chapter 2, Section 1
1. Introduction:
Subduing The External Man
Now as merely natural truths and goods, which in their
essence are falsities and evils, are altogether opposite to spiritual truths
and goods, which in their essence are truths and goods, therefore the devil, by
whom is meant hell, is in unceasing hatred against them. This is why hatreds of
various kinds are unceasingly ascending from the hells; while on the other
hand, spiritual loves also of various kinds descend from the heavens, and
between the hatreds of the hells and the loves of the heavens there is an
equilibrium, in which the men in the world are held, in order that they may be
able to act from freedom according to reason.
Consequently those who do not live from the Word but from
the world, since they continue natural, receive evils and the falsities thence
from hell, and conceive from them hatred against spiritual truths and goods.
Their hatred does not appear in the world, because it lies concealed inwardly
in their spirit; but it becomes manifest after death, when they become spirits.
Then they burn against those who are in spiritual truths and goods with a
hatred so great that it cannot be described; it is indeed a deadly hatred; for
as soon as they see an angel who is in these truths and goods, or if they merely
hear the Lord named, from whom these truths and goods are, they instantly come
into a fury of hatred, and feel nothing more delightful than to pursue them and
to do evil to them. And as they are unable to slay their body they endeavor
with a burning heart to slay their soul. (AE 754)
The
absolute duality of heaven and hell cannot be escaped. While we are in the
world, the Lord keeps us in equilibrium between evil affections from the hells
and good affections from the angels. Who are these evil spirits, called the
devil? Ordinary folks like we are who lived a normal life according to their
self-intelligence, exercising their freedom to chose
what to think and love. They are the future devils who have an insane hatred
for all truth and good they sense in the angels. It is said that “their hatred
does not appear in the world, because it lies concealed inwardly in their
spirit.” We are them in our unregenerate state regardless of religion,
philosophy, or lifestyle. We become those devils in the afterlife unless we
compel ourselves to live by the Writings rather than by the world. To live by the Writings means to monitor our
daily willing and thinking and subjugate them to conform to the Writings,
shunning whatever is not in agreement, and desisting from willing and thinking
in that way.
To compel
ourselves to live by the Writings is to obey the Divine commandment that we
cooperate in our regeneration. This cooperation includes fighting as-of self in
our temptations, refusing to give in to them.
Temptations, therefore,
have for their end that the externals of man may be subdued and thus be
rendered obedient to his internals, as may be evident to everyone from the fact
that as soon as man's loves are assaulted and broken (as during misfortunes,
sickness, and grief of mind), his cupidities begin to subside, and he at the
same time begins to talk piously; but as soon as he returns to his former
state, the external man prevails and he scarcely thinks of such things. The
like happens at the hour of death, when corporeal things begin to be
extinguished; and hence everyone may see what the internal man is, and what the
external; and also what remains are, and how cupidities and pleasures, which
are of the external man, hinder the Lord's operation through the internal man.
From this it is
also plain to everyone what temptations, or the internal pains called the
stings of conscience, effect, namely, that the external man is made obedient to
the internal. The obedience of the external man is nothing else than this: that
the affections of what is good and true are not hindered, resisted, and
suffocated by cupidities and their derivative falsities. (AC 857:2)
The
“external man” refers to our corporeal-sensuous self. We can also call it the
“sensorimotor mind” to distinguish it from the cognitive and affective portions
of the mind, which refer to the understanding and the will (see Chapter 8
Section 6). These three portions of the natural mind are arranged in
distance from the physical body. The affective functions of the mind are in the
will, or the inmost. The sensorimotor functions of the mind are close to the body
senses and the brain. The sensory organs of the body and the brain are physical
objects. They receive the chemical stimulation but they do not contain any
sensations because these are spiritual in substance, not chemical. The
sensations are in the natural mind, not the physical brain whose activity is
nothing but molecules and electricity moving in patterned motion. So to feel
sensations, we need a sensory portion of the natural mind which is made of
spiritual fibers. These can contain the sensations we experience when our
physical organs are stimulated by the natural environment.
This sensorimotor
mind is a receptor of stimuli from the spiritual world, of pleasures and
cupidities. The passage above says that this lower mind is a hindrance to
regeneration because it resists obedience to the higher portion of the natural
mind called the “internal man.” The internal man discussed here is that which
is in the depth of the natural mind. When speaking of the spiritual mind, the
internal man is the inmost of the spiritual mind called the celestial mind,
while the lower portion of the spiritual mind is called the external man. So,
both the natural mind and the spiritual mind have an external and an internal
portion.
The
internal man of the natural mind operates with concepts and reasoning that is
called the rational level of thinking. The Lord operates into this level by
means of the voice of conscience which is activated by our affections
for good and true, as the passage says. This means that our rational mind
prefers the good to the evil, and the true to the false. The Lord insures that
every human being is equipped with a conscience, for without it, one cannot be
saved for life in heaven.
From this
you can see that we are divided men, at war with ourselves. The higher wrestles with the lower and the lower resists, hinders, and
tries to suffocate the voice of conscience. These battles can be severe and we
experience inner pain, or the sting of conscience, when the lower wins over the
higher. Temptations play a crucial role in our regeneration because they compel
us to face the battle. Without temptations we can continue ignoring our evil
affections until death, and so come into the afterlife with the evil loves.
These evil loves cannot be removed in the spiritual world and prevent us from
choosing life in heaven.
Through
temptations in the natural mind, our external man is beaten into subservience
to the internal man. Gradually there is a realignment of the external man
through obedience to conscience and to the commandments contained in our
Doctrine from the Writings. Our life is thereby regenerated and the delights we
then experience are far more intense and blissful than former cupidities of our
unregenerate state. Sensorimotor pleasures are still retained as proven by the
immeasurably stronger sensations good spirits and angels experience in
comparison to life with a physical body (CL 44[8]). ). But spirits and angels do
not value sensuous pleasures highly in comparison to the rational delights of
the internal man. Yet the pleasure and happiness experienced by angels from
sexual love is immeasurable finer and superior than
the strongest pleasures we can have in the physical body. So we are not losing
anything or giving up anything when our external man is subservient to the
internal man. On the contrary, we are losing most of what we can have by
continuing in a state of disobedience to conscience and Doctrine.
Conjugial disciplines are techniques
we can use to fight our battles on behalf of conscience and Doctrine.
One might
at first think: Why do I need conjugial disciplines? Do I not love my wife
dearly? Do I not pray to the Lord to unite me with her in conjugial love? Do I
not feel it strongly enough? But I think these are vain thoughts, even
meritorious. Conjugial love is not a feeling or a status obtained by
declarations and reputation. Conjugial love is a doing. It is an activity of
willing and thinking not as oneself but as the conjoint self. To the extent
that we will and think as the conjoint self, to that extent we are progressing
towards conjugial love. It stand to reason therefore we have to take charge and
make sure that we are performing conjugial love daily, hourly, and minute by
minute. Doing this vigilantly and effectively is called a conjugial discipline.
1. Discounting
Our Wife’s Opinion Relative To Our Own
For many
years I hear my wife saying to me that I don’t listen to her, that I don’t
value her ideas, that I have an automatic prejudice against her because she is
a woman and women have no credibility with men. I did not appreciate this
wisdom and insight she was trying to pass on to me. I did not listen to this
idea, automatically assuming she was talking in hyperboles and exaggerating,
since she is a woman. This proved her point, of course, but I was too much into
my obscurities from ego to want to really figure out what she was saying and
whether it was correct. I was able to make progress in my regeneration to the
extent that I was willing to listen to my wife. The more I listened, the more I
got to find out that she was correct and insightful in her observations,
philosophy, and principles. This dawning realization continued to the extent
that I was willing to admit to myself that my ideas are frequently mistaken and
inaccurate. This was a totally new experience as I always implicitly had full
confidence in my own ideas.
There
arrived a stage where I was eager to listen to her wisdom, insights, and
opinions. I valued them as I saw their intelligence and depth of comprehension.
I discovered a new aspect to feminine intelligence and can clearly see how
superior it is to male intelligence. The Writings reveal that feminine
intelligence and wisdom is in their interior mind, thus of celestial origin,
while male intelligence is in the external mind, thus of natural origin (xx).
This gender-typed difference in intelligence enters into every single thing of
the threefold self—every feeling, every aspect of thinking, and every acting.
Women are very capable in enacting male styles of reasoning, acting, and
speaking in various social situations and roles. But these are surface
appearances enacted for natural reasons (power sharing and equal access), not
spiritual. In the interior mind, in which every thing is spiritual, women
retain feminine structures of feeling and thinking, by necessity of permanent
creation and eternal being.
The intelligence of women is in essence modest, refined,
peaceful, yielding, gentle and tender; but that of men is in essence serious,
harsh, hard, spirited and disposed to license.
(…) Men's gestures are bolder and stronger, women's weaker
and feebler. Men's behavior is less restrained, women's more elegant.
[2] I was able clearly to see the innate difference of
character between men and women by observing how boys and girls behaved when
they got together, a sight I have several times seen from a window in a large
city overlooking a street, where twenty or more children gathered every day.
The boys, in keeping with their innate character, played together making a
noise, shouting, fighting, beating and throwing stones at one another.
But the girls sat quietly by the doors of their houses, some
playing with babies, some dressing up dolls, some embroidering on small pieces
of linen, some kissing one another. I was surprised to see that the girls still
looked favorably on the boys, for all their behavior.
This experience allowed me to see plainly that a man is by
birth an intellect, a woman a love, and what kind of intellect and what kind of
love they are in their beginnings. So I could see what a man's intellect would
be like, if it developed without being linked with feminine love, and later
with conjugial love. (CL 218)
Consider the
last sentence: “So I could see what a man's intellect would be like, if it
developed without being linked with feminine love, and later with conjugial
love.” Remember this is the Word of the Lord in His Second Coming to the
Husbands, in keeping with their innate character, played
together making a noise, shouting, fighting, beating and throwing stones at one
another.
“Making noise” means that they accuse each other, but in
this case, the wife (AC 375). Also: that husbands are
subjected to the greatest temptations on account of their inherited nature (AC
756). “Noise” also means that husbands are kept in the emotion of fear “in
order that they may be deterred from evils” (AC 4942). The evils here refer to
the husband’s abusive treatment of his wife. “Shouting” refers to the “spirit
of war” (AC 1664), which is alternately applied to protect “the Lord’s truth”
or to rob a neighbor’s goods, in this case, the conjugial happiness of his wife.
“The Lord’s truth” here refers to the Writings. “Shouting” also refers to
declaring one’s faith to others (AC 5323). Here this means preaching to the
wife about how to interpret what the Writings say, by which husbands intimidate
their wife. “Fighting” refers to “fierce conflict … and
laboring … in thoughts and developments of truth” (AC 263). Here this
refers to the husband’s struggle for reformation. “Beating” is a sign of
rebellion against authority or legitimate officials (AC 4324).
In other
words, husbands reinterpret the literal text of the Writings to support their
dominion over the wife. “Throwing” in a bad sense means attacking truth and
“drowning in falsity” (AC 6693), and in a good sense it refers to “initiation
of truth into good” (AC 4266). “Stones” refers to “the
truth of faith” (AC 114, 4672). “At one another” designates the husband and the
wife. In other words, husbands alternate between periods of conjugial
cooperation with their wife and periods of enmity against the wife. When
cooperating, husbands are initiated in the interior truths of the Writings, and
thus they are regenerated.
To
summarize what the passage says about how husbands treat their wives: A husband
makes accusations or is verbally abusive to his wife .
This evil behavior is inherited and in order to get rid of it the husband must
be willing to undergo the greatest temptations. In order to deter the husband
from injuring his wife physically, the Lord keeps him in fear of the
consequences. During regeneration, the husband alternates between periods of
warring against his wife and periods of cooperating. When he is aversive to his wife, he is also rebellious against the
Writings, reinterpreting passages therein to justify his dominion over the
wife. When he cooperates with his wife, he is initiated into the interior
truths of the Writings, by which he is enlightened and prepared for life in
heaven.
Another
passage tells us about wives:
The nerves are softer in women; the veins somewhat wider,
and the arteries stronger [than] in men: the hips broader, because the hips
signify conjugial love, see Arcana Coelestia (SE 6110)
We can
apply this passage to our wife by substituting “wives” for “women.” “Nerves”
refer to truth (AC 4303). The truth in the wife’s understanding is “softer”
than the truth in the husband. Truth that is softer is more compatible to love
(AC 185). In other words, the wife’s understanding is higher than the
husband’s because it accords better with love. That the wife’s
understanding is celestial while the husband’s is more outward and less perfect
is revealed in many places in the Writings (see Sections 1and 2 below). “Veins”
is used to discuss purification of the blood, that is,
rendering suitable for celestial life (AC 5174). “Wider” means greater in scope
(AC 8121). “Wider veins” therefore means that the wife is regenerated from the
inmost and sits waiting for the husband that he may catch up to her and conjoin
with her in conjugial love, which celestial from the inmost.
The wife is
more willing than the husband to suffer herself to undergo rigorous
regeneration by the Lord since she is motivated by conjugial love and the
desire to conjoin with her husband from within. The husband is less willing to
do this. His love for conjunction is not as deep. He must struggle in
regeneration to attain to the same celestial depth. “Arteries” refers to
“genuine good” which is compared to the blood in the arteries (AC 3470). This
good “leads and applies truths into form” which means that the wife’s higher
love acquires to itself a greater wisdom. The wife’s wisdom, therefore, is to
“lead” and the husband’s wisdom is to cooperate with her leading. Thus he is
obedient to a higher good, whereby he can be regenerated still further.
Chapter 9, Section 2
2. The Doctrine of the Wife
In heaven a married pair is spoken of, not as two, but as one angel (HH 367)
Each love knows its own love, and they unite reciprocally, or mutually
and alternately. (TCR
Additions 4)
One of the
truly remarkable revelations given in the Writings is that the chief power and
dynamic spiritual force that animates the universe is conjugial love, the love
that internally binds and unites the minds of a husband and wife. Conjugial
love is the chief love that rules all other loves in the universe.
The chief love is sexual love; and in the case of those who
reach heaven, that is, those who become spiritual on earth, it is conjugial
love.
The reason why a person's sexual love remains after death is
that a male remains a male and a female remains a female, and the male's
masculinity pervades the whole and every part of him, and likewise a female's
femininity; and the impulse to be joined is present in every detail down to the
smallest. Since that impulse to be joined was implanted from creation and is
therefore continually present, it follows that the one desires the other and
longs to be joined to the other.
Love taken by itself is nothing but a desire and hence an
impulse to be joined; conjugial love is an impulse to be joined into one. For
the male and the female of the human species are so created as to be able to
become like a single individual, that is, one flesh; and when united, then they
are, taken together, the full expression of humanity. If not so joined, they
are two, each being as it were a divided person or half a person. Since that
impulse to be joined lies deeply hidden in every part of both male and female,
and every part has the ability and desire to be joined into one, it follows
that people retain mutual and reciprocal sexual love after death. (CL 37)
The
extending power and influence of this love can be seen in all living species
whose survival depends on male-female bonding for propagation. The supremacy of
conjugial love expresses God’s chief purpose in creating and maintaining the
universe. This purpose is to create an ever growing heaven populated by angel
couples who were born on some earth, developed a spiritual mind by living
rightly, then went on living to eternity in one of the
many heavenly societies Swedenborg has witnessed. The afterlife consists of a
heavenly life for soul mates bonded in marriage love between a husband and a
wife. This life constitutes the highest human spiritual state and is called
heaven. The inhabitants of heaven are all human beings born on one of the many
earths in the universe and are called angels in the Writings. We can truly say
that this revelation is good news.
The bad
news is that conjugial life does not come to us automatically and that most
people on this earth reject it and act against it, especially men. This is so
because we inherit our parents’ traits, both physical and spiritual or mental
(CL 202). Scientists today are unaware of these revelations in the Writings. It
is believed that psychological traits are not inherited, and it is not known that
psychological traits are spiritual organs constructed out of spiritual
substances from the spiritual world. These spiritual substances are carriers of
the mental or spiritual traits of parents. We thus inherit tendencies that
oppose conjugial love. One example is people’s desire to know more than one
partner sexually. Individuals who exhibit this
interest on Earth, continue to experience the desire for or interest in other
partners. But conjugial love does not allow this interest to remain in one’s
organic constitution, even when it is expressed merely hypothetically or in
fantasy.
This tendency and proneness to evils just mentioned, which
is transmitted from parents to their children and descendants, can only be
broken down by a person being born anew by the Lord's help, a process called
regeneration. Without this not only does the tendency remain unbroken, but it
is reinforced by a succession of parents, becoming more prone to evils, and
eventually to every kind of evil. (TCR 521)
Another
example of how conjugial love is opposed by inherited traits is the desire for
independence based on the false idea that the individual is the unit of life
and self-fulfillment. When people marry there is often a sense of loss of
freedom due to the marriage bond. But this idea is false because the bonds of
marriage and union create a state of heavenly freedom, while what is opposed to
this bond is rooted in infernal freedom, which is actually slavery to inherited
evil traits. Conjugial love establishes the married couple as the unit of human
life giving the partners a wholeness and completeness they do not have outside
the union.
For
conjugial love to develop with a couple it is necessary for both husband and
wife to overcome the inborn resistance husbands have for it. Marriage starts in
the external mind of the partners through commitment and natural love for one
another. This love is not yet conjugial love, which is a spiritual love, and
the relationship is not yet a spiritual one, not yet an inner union of minds.
In order for conjugial love to develop and grow the husband and wife must
change their inner character by defeating all the inherited forces that are
opposed to their conjugial union. The Writings teach that only couples that go
beyond the external bond of marriage into an internal union of minds can be
together as an angel couple in heaven. It is therefore of the utmost importance
to gain the knowledge of how to accomplish this since it doesn’t happen
automatically even with married individuals who sincerely love each other from
a natural love and are devoted to each other from loyalty and friendship.
The
Writings show how the natural love between partners joined together through an
external bond is not spiritually deep enough and as soon as external conditions
change and become a challenge, the love seems to evaporate and instead there is
anger, rage, resentment, and disdain. Due to the spiritual constitution of men
and women, there is more resistance to conjugial love on the part of husbands.
Wives are born with an inclination towards marriage and a desire to move on to
an internal or spiritual union, as long as the husband also desires it.
Husbands on the other hand are born with an inclination for having multiple
sexual partners and feel restricted by the marriage bond to one wife. As a
result, husbands need special help in order to be able to overcome their inborn
resistance to conjugial love, which is “the love of one of the sex,” in
contrast to the “love of the sex,” which is natural, not spiritual, and roving.
1. A
Philosophy Of Action Or
Spiritual Discipline
The
“Doctrine of the Wife” designates a philosophy of action, or spiritual
discipline, for husbands that is based on the Writings and is intended to help
them overcome their resistance to conjugial love.
In summary,
this doctrine says that the husband's regeneration or self-change efforts, to
be successful, must be focused on his wife and through his wife. She is to be
accepted as the seeing eye in the marriage
relationship and he needs to agree to voluntarily subjugate all of his
resistances to her wisdom and inner perception in everything pertaining to
their relationship. Swedenborg explains the mechanism whereby the Lord gives a
special perception to each wife about her husband's affections and
inclinations, knowledge which is not given to the husband so that he is only
dimly aware of his own inner tendencies. The spiritual purpose for this
difference in perceptual powers is to make the husband's regeneration dependent
on his wife. This is called "cleaving to the wife" in the Old
Testament, and is a Divine commandment enjoined on every husband. Without
following this commandment the husband cannot be regenerated, hence cannot have
an eternal marriage in heaven with this or any other wife.
People who are in a state of truly conjugial love look to
eternity in their marriage because eternity is inherent in this love. Its
eternity is owing to the fact that this love in the wife and wisdom in the
husband grow to eternity, and as these grow or progress, the partners enter
more and more deeply into the blessings of heaven -- blessings which their
wisdom and love of wisdom at the same time carry concealed within them. If one
were to snatch away an idea of eternity, therefore, or if by some chance it
should slip from their minds, it would be as though they were cast down from
heaven. (CL. 216)
In people who did not have conjugial love there is no
spiritual or inner bond, but only a natural or outer one; and if an inner bond
does not hold the outer one in its order and course, it does not last. (CL 320)
Conjugial
union depends therefore on the willingness of the two partners to modify their
inner character into a form that makes them fit together spiritually. Since
husbands put up more resistance to this union than wives, it is necessary to
give them spiritual tools that can overcome their own internal resistance.
2. Men’s
Resistance To Conjugial
Love
Wives are by birth forms of love, so that it is innate in
them to wish to be one with their husbands, and by keeping this thought in
their will they constantly nurture their love. So abandoning the effort to
unite themselves with their husbands would be abandoning their own nature. But
it is different with husbands; since they are not by birth forms of love, but
designed to receive that love from their wives, the more readily they receive
it, the more readily do their wives come in with their love. But if they fail
to receive it, their wives equally stay outside with their love and wait. (CL
216)
Many
husbands resist the process of conjugial unification with such intensity and
ferocity that it appears they are hell-bent on destroying their union, their
marriage, and their heavenly place with their wife. This is true whether or not
the husband is a member of the
Concerning
conjugial love, the Writings identify a natural opposition between men and
women regarding their receptivity to it:
Wives love the bonds of marriage, provided that their
husbands love them too. (CL 217)
It is different with husbands. Because they are not born
forms of love, but are receivers of that love from their wives, therefore to
the degree that they receive it, to that degree their wives enter into them
with their love. But to the degree they do not receive it,
their wives stand outside with their love and wait. (CL 216)
Avoiding
the conjugial union is natural and inherited for men as well as being fully
supported and reinforced by a masculinized society. New Church husbands have a
distinct opportunity to liberate themselves from this inherited evil by using a
systematic self-change method to achieve freedom. This method is the Doctrine
of the Wife, namely, a set of commandments extracted from the Writings to help
Passages in
the Writings that discuss men's understanding and women's affections are
sometimes interpreted by men to mean that Scripture gives them the role of ruling
over women or "having predominance" in relation to understanding or
intellectual things, since men are born a form of understanding. While women should rule or "have predominance" in
relation to affect ional things relating to feelings and love. In order
to see the error of this attitude, we need to draw a distinction between
(a) what the Writings say in the
literal
and
(b) the conclusion we draw from the
literal.
In this
case the Writings say that men are a form of understanding and women a form of
love. What conclusion are we to draw? Are we to conclude,
(c) that in matters of Church
governance or some other forensic or intellectual issue, men should
predominate; but in matters of domestic order and works of charity or
community, women should predominate?
Is this a
correct conclusion? Part (a) is far from part (c) which is a political
application having to do with governance and community relations. Whatever
social applications one makes from Doctrine or from the Word is not in itself
the Word or Doctrine. The Doctrine of the Church in the Writings does not
actually say that men should predominate in Church administration or that women
should be excluded. It is not correct to say that the Writings or the
Doctrine of the Church give men the Divine right to have predominance over
women in any area of life, intellectual or otherwise.
The claim
that men should predominate over women in decision-making in any given area of
society appears to be a self-serving policy by a masculinized society. The persuasion
guarantees that men will rule over women in everyday life--at home, Church,
profession, in managing things, making the final decisions, prevailing in
opinion, in short, recreating and maintaining a man's world. The Doctrine of
the Wife interprets the passages in the Writings relating to men’s
understanding and women’s affections as indicating that the husband's
understanding should unite with the wife's will, instead of predominate. And
since the will rules the understanding, it would make more sense to say that it
is the wife who is to rule the husband's understanding. It is therefore the
feminization of marriage that creates its sanctification and fulfillment.
Note
carefully that this is totally different from the idea that women should rule
over men. For we are talking about men’s voluntary choice
of acting form themselves or from their wife. When a wife rules over
her husband it is a disorderly state (CL 291). Instead, the husband chooses to
act from his wife’s will instead of his own. This is a free choice and can end
at any time he so wishes. The wife has no power to make him act from herself. This
is something the husband must do and enforce on himself.
Whether you
say "ruling over" or "having predominance over" is the same
in terms of the actual consequence, which is that the will of one prevails over
the other. But there is an essential difference between ruling over someone by
domination and ruling over someone by voluntary submission or cooperation. For
instance, the police force in a democracy rules over the population in daily
activities in public places. This is not oppression or domination as long as
the population willingly and rationally submits to the authority of the law and
its legitimate agents. But in an autocratic society the law rules by dominion
and is hostile to the population.
The
Doctrine of the Wife deals with the husband's voluntary and rational submission
of his will and judgment to that of his wife in all matters pertaining to their
relationship and interaction. If he refuses, there is nothing she can do to
compel him since he has the greater power. In other words, the husband must
listen and choose to follow the wife's directives in all things of their
decision-making. Obviously this must be a voluntary submission on the part of
the husband and not a dominion over him by his wife. Dominion of one over the
other is destructive of the conjugial union but voluntary submission for the
sake of union promotes it and makes it spiritual.
The infernal marriage, with those
who are in the love of ruling and are atheists. On the part of the man there is
deadly hatred. But, still, he is manifestly the servant and slave of the wife,
so that he dares not murmur against her will: but [this], when she, by various
means, has obtained the ascendancy. The reason is, because the man's
understanding is subjugated. These have no interior virtue and honor:
consequently, [such a one] is not a man. (SE 6110)
Every man who is not spiritually rational and moral but only
naturally so possesses a coldness towards his wife,
such a coldness being inherent in him in his inmost elements. (...) It comes
from a lack of rationality on their part in matters of the spirit. Every man
who is irrational in matters of the spirit is inmostly cold to his wife and inmostly
warm toward harlots." (CL 294).
New Church
husbands who acknowledge the Writings as the Word may have the temptation of
thinking that because they possess the Word of the Second Coming, they are
automatically spiritual. However the Writings teach that it is not the Word
that makes the Church but the understanding of the Word, and not even this, but
the degree to which people live in accordance with their understanding of the
Word (TCR 245). And so the study of and expertise in the
Writings do not in themselves make us spiritual. Husbands who study the
Writings and worship the Divine Human nevertheless remain natural, hate the
conjugial, remain unregenerate, and love unchaste sex--until and to the extent
that they live their daily life in accordance with their doctrine. The Doctrine
of the Wife will help husbands live their life according to their understanding
of Divine Truth. Every husband must create adequate and effective Doctrine for
himself so that he may strive to live according to it. It is in this striving
that the Lord can be present by influx. Without this striving the Lord cannot
be present in actuality, as taught in the Writings (xx).
3. Conjugial
Commandments In The
Writings
The Word cannot be understood except by means of doctrine
from the Word. The doctrine of the church must be from the Word … The Word
without doctrine is not understood … They who are in enlightenment form for
themselves doctrine from the Word … Doctrine formed by one enlightened may
afterwards be confirmed by things rational and scientific; and that thus it is
more fully understood, and is corroborated (WH 8)
In the Word
of the Writings, the Lord has given a number of new commandments to husbands
who aspire to become one angel with a conjugial wife. The Doctrine of the
Wife is a collection of these commandments and its purpose is to assist
regenerating husbands in their difficult task. I can hope that the Doctrine
of the Wife will become an ever-expanding body of knowledge, as future
generations of regenerating husbands contribute to it through the expansion and
deepening of their conjugial relationship. Representing the ideas of the wife
will be a primary concern in this knowledge base cumulated by
This new
state of culture and consciousness will be higher than all the preceding states
of humanity on this earth. This is why the Writings call the
The future
of humanity depends on the success of husbands in learning to conjoin to their
wife on the internal plane of the mind and not just on the external plane of
the body and material possessions. This internal conjunction is called
conjugial love and is the basis of all other loves in the universe. All other
loves are derivative of this one great love. But the husband cannot from his
own self conjoin to his wife in an internal way. He appears to be able to do
this externally or socially, but he cannot be conjoined in the internal mind
without becoming aware of the existence of the internal mind. This is normally
closed to his conscious awareness while he is still in the early stages of
regeneration. By acknowledging the Doctrine of the Wife, and then striving to
follow it, the husband is spiritually empowered by the Lord to overcome himself
through the act of enthroning the wife in his mind. By doing this, the
husband’s internal mind is activated and made operative in his awareness or
consciousness. The principles in the Doctrine of the Wife make explicit in the
husband’s mind that there needs to be an internal relationship with the wife
and how he can foster it.
To enthrone
the wife means to conjoin his cognitions or reasoning quality with her
affections or needs. This can be done only by loving her affections more
than his own, which means following her will or
judgment rather than his own whenever they are opposed. By suffering
himself to be led by her affections, the husband receives new cognitions that
are harmonious with the wife’s affections. These new cognitions are new
spiritual truths from the Lord given the man through his acceptance of the
wife’s affections as-if his own. In the Heavenly Doctrine (or Swedenborg’s
Writings) the Lord gave husbands a long list of commandments to follow in order
to allow them to achieve this internal union, each husband with his wife. The Doctrine
of the Wife is not only a collection of these commandments but an exposition
and explanation of them.
The
following are some examples of conjugial commandments for husbands. Note how
easy it would be to overlook these passages and not see them as commandments,
but husbands who are zealous for conjugial love can perceive and acknowledge
the commandments in these passages.
(1) All
human development is in relation to marriage
(see CL 191).
Therefore
unmarried men are to be considered "pre-husbands" in the sense we
think of "preschool" as a state that prepares for the real thing. One
implication of this commandment is that the curriculum in biology and
psychology needs to introduce all concepts and goals in human behavior as
arranged in a hierarchy with the top always being the conjugial union. The
hierarchy of affections corresponds to the hierarchy of goals so that the top
affection or love is also the primary goal that governs all other goals.
(2)
Husbands are wiser and more spiritual than unmarried men
(see CL 199).
The Lord's
commandment in the Old and New Testaments that a man shall leave his father and
mother and cleave to his wife, means that the man should dethrone his own
affections ("father and mother") and enthrone his wife's affections in
his own mind, thus to "cleave" unto her (Conjugial Love No 194). The
implication of this principle is that every boy’s education and socialization
process ought to be oriented towards becoming a husband and letting his wife
change his old character called “father and mother” into a new conjoint
character called “one flesh.” In order for her to achieve this, he must give
her all the help he can muster through daily interactions of a conjoint nature
called “cleaving to his wife.” The Doctrine of the Wife is a collection of
principles that foster the husband’s angelic development. A single man ought to
think of himself as a pre-husband. A single man should look at every woman as
someone’s wife. Feminity and feminization ought to be valued as the ideal state
of society and the world. Becoming a husband ought to be seen as a biological
necessity and an essential step for spiritual development towards becoming
whole and complete. As the Writings put it “marriage is a
person's fulfillment, since it makes a person fully a person” (CL 156).
(3) Women's
intelligence is like the Lord's intelligence, but men's intelligence is not
(see CL 218).
And behold Isaac was laughing with Rebekah his woman. That
this signifies that … Divine good was adjoined to Divine truth, is evident from
the representation of Isaac, as being the Divine good of the Lord's rational …
and from the representation of Rebekah, as being the Divine truth of the Lord's
rational (AC 3392)
The rational with the Lord … is represented by Sarah (AC
2189)
Here it is
said that the Lord’s Divine Rational within which is the Divine Truth is
represented by the wife. Women's intelligence, like the Lord's, is described in
the Writings as "modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and
gentle," while men's is described as "critical, rough, resistant,
argumentative, and given to intemperance." The implication of this for
husbands is to reinforce in their mind the Doctrine of the Wife as long as
their highest objective in life is to form a conjoint union. Unless husbands
elevate the conjugial goal to the highest position in their goal-hierarchy,
their life is not in the Lord’s order of things.
The central
feature of the conjoint couple is that the husband loves to be led by his
wife’s affections more than by his own. In this way man can be redeemed from
his nature as critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and intemperate,
traits, which gradually but inexorably take him to hell. His wife is a man’s
ticket to heaven, her heaven, for all the societies of heaven exist in a
feminized atmosphere, which is the Lord’s Proprium—modest, gracious, peaceable,
compliant, soft, gentle.
(4)
Conjugial love is the state of internal union between husband and wife and it
is achieved when they will that their two lives shall become one life
(see CL 215).
The “two
lives” in the Writings refer to the will and the understanding, or, the
affections in the will and the cognitions in the understanding. To will that
the two lives become one life means therefore that the will of the wife must be
conjoined to the understanding of the husband. Conjugial love is a biological
growth process of the mind or spirit that is achieved when the wife's
affections (or will) are joined to the husband's cognitions (or understanding).
In other words, the husband's thoughts and understanding are joined to the
wife's will and affections. This is not an automatic growth process that comes
with merely living together. Both partners must consciously will the
conjunction. The husband must will to conjoin his own understanding or thinking
to his wife's affections or will. This is not easy to achieve because of the
inner resistance he experiences and requires persistent effort into which the
Lord's power can inflow and achieve the union.
Before
being regenerated, men have an inborn tendency to discount the opinion or
judgment of women in comparison to their own. Husbands experience a sense of
revolt at the notion that they give up their own independent ideas and desires
in favor of their wife’s judgment with regard to all things involving their
joint life. This is why husbands must appeal to the Lord for strength and
resolve to overcome their inner resistance to the process of conjugial union.
The husband
can overcome his resistance entirely if he is willing to follow this one rule
on a daily and regular basis: When his wife expresses her affections in the
form of a direct request or an implied one, the husband must give and follow
these minimally appropriate replies:
Yes.
O.K.
That's right.
I will.
And never
anything else, for
it is always offensive and disagreeable to the wife's affections. (Of course
variations, extensions and equivalents of these are also acceptable.) This
principle may strike some as excessive or perhaps emasculating and denigrating
to men. But this is not the case. On the contrary, it is angelic. The Writings
reveal that the lower angels, called spiritual, reason about truths before
confirming them in their understanding and thereby accepting them as genuine.
But the higher angels, called celestial, do not reason about truths so as to
confirm them because they are given by the Lord to perceive truths instantly,
that they are genuine. They do not need to reason about them. All they have to
say to anything by way of confirmation is Yea or Nay. It is not denigrating but
elevating for a husband to keep himself from disagreeing with his wife’s
affectional requests. If she makes a request of him, his only rational and
loving answer is to confirm and go along. This relationship mode builds and fosters
their conjoint union.
4. Commitment
To Conjugial
Unity
Women are
born willingnesses and never cease their striving to conjoin internally to
their husbands. Since wives are conjugial willingnesses by spiritual necessity,
they are zealously involved in leading their husband out of their inborn hell
of unwillingness or independence. This is why husbands must bend over backwards
to accommodate and adjust to their wife’s affections all the time and without
exception of situation, topic, or area of contention. It doesn’t matter that
the wife may appear wrong in some situation and it doesn’t matter if she makes
mistakes, or if she fails in something due to her own temptations and
regeneration needs. Despite her failings, the husband should honor her at all times.
After all, the husband makes plenty of mistakes yet expects her to honor his
unilateral decisions. The rationale for his compelling himself to abide by her
affections is not that she is more right or smarter than he. It is his
acknowledgment of the Doctrine of the Wife that provides the rationale, and
this must be constant and continuous to eternity.
The most
important part is that the husband remains unfailingly committed to internal
union—this must never fail if we are to achieve success. This unfailing
commitment becomes real and actual when the husband does the following:
(a) He
acknowledges that he is out of line as soon as his wife tells him this.
(b) He
promises her in the name of the Lord that he is determined to change his
behavior.
(c) He asks
the Lord to give him the power to accomplish this.
(d) He
makes reparations by fixing the problem and adding a treat as a sign of
friendship.
(e) He
honestly strives to be true to his word by being watchful, even keeping a diary
if it’s helpful.
And when he
fails again, he repeats these steps—which for most husbands may be necessary to
do several times every day, year after year for decades.
5. The
Four-Step Conjoining Process
Conjugial love grows spiritually when the couple repeatedly
goes through the following four steps on a daily and hourly basis (based on CL
293-294):
Step 1: The wife acts. She reveals her affections to her husband in the
form of a direct request or an implied request, either in word, gesture, facial
expression, or mere expectation.
Step 2: The husband receives. He wills himself to love her affection—which
is within the request, and by this, he receives it, that is, conjoins his
cognitions to it. Her affection now is as-if his own. He chooses to act from
his wife’s will.
Step 3: The husband acts out. He says one or more of these four things:
Yes. O.K. That's right. I will, (and equivalents).
Step 4: The wife reacts. She feels his reaction of
conjunction as her bosom delight.
These are
the four steps of conjunction. The husband must constantly strive to build up
the network that conjoins his cognitions or thoughts to his wife's affections,
which are expressed as her moment-to-moment needs and requests. The conjunction
steps must be performed. Unition of mind or spirit cannot develop from mere
declarations and promises, or even occasional and intermittent good behavior.
The conjunction steps have to be performed continuously. Think about muscle
building exercises, how we repeat the same movement in series or in sets during
one workout session. Muscle tissue is built up, fiber-by-fiber, cell-by-cell,
with each repetition of a movement. In a similar manner the husband builds up
the spiritual fibers of conjunction with his wife when he repeats these four
steps on a daily and hourly basis. The Writings make it clear that the mind is
a spiritual organ made of functioning parts and fibers just as the organs and
muscles of the physical body. Repeating these four steps of conjunction
gradually but cumulatively builds up the united mind of the conjugial couple.
This united mind is a new spiritual organ called the angelic mind. Couples in
heaven have such a mind and those who have not developed such a mind while on
earth are unable to be immersed in the atmosphere of heaven and live there to
eternity.
To show how
the four-step conjunction process works in practice, consider this example on
the next page, to which most couples can relate:
|
|
The usual way (does not build conjoining fibers) |
The conjugial way (builds conjoining fibers) |
|
Step
1: The
wife acts |
Wife
says: “Honey, we need to talk about this now” (=her affectional request). |
Ditto |
|
Step
2: The
husband receives (or rejects) |
The husband internally disagrees (=hates conjugial unity
and feels it’s a loss of individuality). He wants to tell her several reasons
why it’s a bad idea to talk about it now (=discounts her intelligence). He
thinks about those reasons and loves them (=clinging to father and mother). |
He is conscious of an inner feeling of anger and his mind
begins to rehearse reasons why they should not talk about it now. But he just
laughs at himself doing that. He turns away from himself and turns to his
wife and to her affection and intention. He embraces her affection and
immerses himself in it (=cleaves to his wife) |
|
Step
3: The
husband reacts |
He says: “You don't understand.” And keeps talking for
several more sentences (=striving to coerce her behavior and deny her
freedom). |
He says: “O.K. Sure.” |
|
Step
4: The
wife reacts to the husband |
The wife senses her husband's conjugial cold and
experiences the pain and loneliness of internal separation. In her chest she
senses his rejection or refusal to conjoin his thoughts to her affection. |
The wife senses conjugial delight in her chest and
experiences her husband's act of conjoining with her (=one flesh). One more
pair of her affections and his thoughts are now united and function as one
conjoint individual (=angel). |
6.
Many times
my poor wife tried to tell me that I talk to her defensively, which she experiences
as offensive and upsetting from within. A family trait, she added, to spurn me
on to insight. For decades, my response was to deny that I was defensive. Each
time we went through this routine, the conjugial separation she felt was made
more painful and desperate. What could she do to penetrate this wall of
blindness and denial? She got no relief, year after year. At last the Doctrine
of the Wife was born in my understanding (in 1985) as I diligently studied the
Writings daily. The Lord showed me in illustration while reading the Writings
that the expression in Genesis “Hearken unto Sarah” (see discussion below) was
a commandment, and therefore applied to me. My defensiveness was obviously a
denial of that commandment. I was not hearkening unto my Sarah when I disagreed
with her or made her cry—which happened frequently! I attributed her
unhappiness to her lack of capacity to adjust to reality. I did not attribute
it to me. This is another form of conjugial cold and lack of inner friendship.
Later I was
able to see the psychobiological perspective on the Doctrine of the Wife.
That's when my regeneration really started showing results. For a long time I
was merely able to compel my external behavior, putting on a pleasant
expression on my face and compel my mouth to express the opposite of the
defensive and offensive things I thought and felt whenever she was “in my
face,” while not budging an inch in my mind. She would never compromise, thank
God. She remained steadfast and brave in opposing my resistance to
single-mindedness and independence. This power she had from the Lord, she often
said. I falsely thought she was being rigid and uncompromising, unreasonable,
not coping with life’s demands. Such was my conjugial cold and blindness.
She
suffered much because of my stiff-necked and self-centered gender bias. I used
to freely declare that women were great, etc.; because this is the reputation I
wanted for myself as a politically correct and just person. But in actuality I
acted like I considered the views and opinions of women to be inferior to
men’s. My wife’s opinion and judgment didn’t count with me as much as my own.
This was my inherited culture bias and I lived it, enjoyed it, and held on to
it. I came to realize that this unreality would inexorably take me to hell,
like an unseen current that pulls a ship towards the reef and disaster. My wife
was my only chance to make it to reality, and to heaven.
Since the
beginning of our relationship, my wife loved my cognitions and instantly and
constantly conjoined herself with them, making them as-if her own. She saw and
understood what I saw and understood about anything and everything I had an
interest in. She was my cognitive clone. In the Writings it is stated that a
wife is the love of her husband’s wisdom. But she was more than this for she
had her own mind and she deftly applied my knowledge and reasoning to all
situations, surpassing me in many things. I admired her. I was not envious of
her. I felt both superior and inferior to her. But she did not unconditionally
love my evil affections. She did not go along with the modern fallacy that love
is unconditional and therefore a wife has to accept her husband’s evils and
weaknesses. She drew a distinct line and never wavered.
Her
intelligence was the deepening of my intelligence. I could not attain with my
wisdom to the depths she could attain through my wisdom in her. Later I
understood why when I read in the Writings that her wisdom is, by spiritual
biology, inmost or celestial (third heaven), while a man’s wisdom is spiritual
(second heaven), which is lower or more external. As she receives my wisdom she
takes it into her inmost, which means that she elevates it within herself and
from spiritual she makes it celestial. This power a wife receives directly from
the Lord.
A wife
attains, lives, and uses a deeper wisdom than her husband’s, even though she
remains dependent on and united to her husband’s wisdom. It is rational
therefore for the husband to conjoin his wisdom to the wife’s affections
because her affections are conjoined in herself to a deeper wisdom than the
husband’s wisdom is in himself. In this way he can also attain to a deeper
wisdom. If he does not conjoin himself to her affections he cannot attain this
deeper wisdom, intelligence and understanding. This principle applies to all
rational ideas, including religious doctrine and domestic management. Husbands
can gain a more interior understanding of the Writings if they conjoin
themselves to their wife’s affections because they are then in a more interior
state. To conjoin himself to his wife’s affections means to
listen to her requests and not to disagree on something whenever he decides it
as an exception. This is the orientation of the Doctrine of the Wife.
Here is
another example (on the next page) of how the four-step conjunction process
works in practice:
|
|
The usual way (does not build conjoining fibers) |
The conjugial way (builds conjoining fibers) |
|
Step 1: The wife acts |
Wife
continues to clean up and arrange things while husband watches TV. She is
very much aware that she is doing this in front of him. Is he going to ignore
her, she wonders? She is letting him see that she is determined to finish. |
Ditto |
|
Step 2: The husband receives (or
rejects) |
The
husband sees her but feels cold for her. He hates the fact she picks this
time to buzz around the room, trying to make him feel guilty, no doubt, he
tells himself (=ignores her requests). He thinks about many reasons why she
is wrong while he is right, and he is in love with those reasons (=clinging
to father and mother). |
The
husband sees her and is instantly aroused by the sight of her slaving away
while he does what pleases him. How can he ignore her affection in completing
this task? It doesn’t matter that he thinks this is the wrong time to do it.
Here she is and he must respond. He sees her presence as his business and he
compels himself to accept the affection that animates her task orientation
(=cleaves to his wife). |
|
Step 3: The husband reacts |
He says in a tone of protestation: “Honey, do you have to
do that now?” (=striving to coerce her behavior and deny her freedom). |
He
immediately presses the mute button, gets up, and begins to facilitate her
movements. It's as if he said "O.K. I will" to her silent request
for sympathy and recognition. |
|
Step 4: The wife reacts to the husband |
The wife
senses her husband's conjugial cold and experiences the pain and loneliness
of internal separation. In her chest she senses his rejection or refusal to
conjoin his cognition to her affection. |
The wife
senses conjugial delight in her chest and experiences her husband's act of
conjoining with her (=one flesh). One more pair of her affections and his
cognitions are now united and function as one conjoint individual (=angel). |
It is therefore provided by the Lord that conjugial pairs be
born, and they are raised and continually prepared for their marriages, neither
the boy nor the girl being aware of the fact. Then, after a period of time, the
girl - now a marriageable young woman - and the boy - now a young man able to
marry - meet somewhere, as though by fate, and notice each other. And they
immediately recognize, as if by a kind of instinct, that they are a match,
thinking to themselves from a kind of inner dictate, the young man, 'she is
mine,' and the young woman, 'he is mine'" (CL 316).
Here is a
third example (next page):
|
|
The usual way (does not build conjoining fibers) |
The conjugial way (builds conjoining fibers) |
|
Step 1: The wife acts |
They are in traffic. Husband is driving. Wife
says: “Honey, it’s very stressful driving in the fast lane. Can you please
stay in the right lane?” (=her affectional request). |
Ditto |
|
Step 2: The husband receives (or rejects) |
The husband instantly feels
rage (=hates conjugial unity and feels it’s a loss of individuality). “It’s
actually safer in this lane. Just let me handle it.” (=discounts her
intelligence). “I told you before. Leave the driving to the driver. That’s
the way it should be.” (=clinging to father and mother). |
He is conscious of an inner
feeling of anger and annoyance at her interfering with what he wants to do.
But he makes himself look at the situation from her perspective. He turns
away from himself and turns to his wife and to her affection and intention.
(=cleaves to his wife). He has compassion for her fears. |
|
Step 3: The husband reacts |
He says: “Do some deep
breathing and relax. You know I hate it when you tell me how to drive.”
(=striving to coerce her behavior and deny her freedom). |
He says: “O.K. I’ll switch
lanes as soon as I can.” |
|
Step 4: The wife reacts to the husband |
The wife senses her husband's
conjugial cold and experiences the pain and loneliness of internal
separation. In her chest she senses his rejection or refusal to conjoin his
thoughts to her affection. |
The wife senses conjugial delight
in her chest and experiences her husband's act of conjoining with her (=one
flesh). One more pair of her affections and his thoughts are now united and
function as one conjoint individual (=angel). |
More
examples are given below in the Inventory of Confessions.
7. The
Husband’s Spiritual Dependence On The Wife
Even though
men are born understandings and receive wisdom from the Lord, they cannot hold
on to this wisdom or make it their own, unless and until they love their wife's
judgment above their own judgment. The husband's spiritual wisdom, when
genuine, is to know this. The husband's conjugial love is to love this.
The reason
for this co-dependence is that the wife's wisdom is inmost and celestial, from
the Lord. The wife's conjugial love is to love the husband's wisdom to the
extent it is genuine. Note this qualification—to the extent it is genuine,
since the wife should not love her husband’s ideas and reasoning
indiscriminately, just because they are his. Until the husband accepts the Doctrine
of the Wife, he is in the delusion that he has genuine understanding of his
own, from the Lord, independently of the wife. This delusion comes from
conjugial cold within the man. As long as the husband lives this delusion he
will deny and oppose his spiritual dependence on his wife. This false sense of
independence is also the reason that men discount the views of women in
comparison to their own views. Even when they deny this and act as if they
value the judgment of women, inwardly they despise women’s opinions, as
revealed in the Writings.
Men can
overtly declare that they support gender equality, but this is merely a
political stance they put on in order to uphold their reputation as fair minded
and favorable to women. In this state of mind they discriminate against women,
discount their views, and abuse them, while at the same time denying this.
Husbands refuse to recognize this year after year into the marriage. They seem
to be trapped in this mode of resistance. It makes their wife feel desperate
and confused and leaves them suffering and longing for intimacy and friendship.
Conjugial love is in the same measure a conjunction of
minds, and the conjunction remains during the bodily life of the one after the
passing of the other. This conjunction holds any inclination to remarry in
balance as though in a scale, and tips the scale its
way to the degree that true love has been embraced (CL 318).
Chapter 2, Section 3
3. The Unregenerate Husband
The husband
in his internal mind sanctifies marriage when he acknowledges, confirms, and
lives in accordance with the Doctrine of the Wife. This Doctrine is a Spiritual
Doctrine because it is drawn from the Letter of the Writings, as explained
throughout this Section. The Doctrine of the Wife is addressed to husbands and
is phrased as follows:
RULE 1:
The first and only rule is that husbands are to learn to
love acting from the wife, more than from self.
There are
no other rules except those that follow from this one rule. You can see that
this is a Divine Rule when you reflect on the Adam and Eve story in the Word of
the Old Testament, as it is explained scientifically in the Word of the
Writings (xx). This rational explanation shows that the spiritual sense of Adam
is the husband, and more specifically, the content of the husband’s will and
understanding, whether from self and hell or from the Lord and heaven. The
state of mind of Adam, prior to Eve’s apparition, was loving himself, loving
his self-intelligence, loving his manly prerogatives that take precedence over
women, loving to intimidate women and make them serve him, motivated to go
after what he is interested at the neglect of what he is to take care of.
This is
called the husband’s unregenerate state. Today in
This “or
else” is not said as a threat, punishment, or warning. It is a scientific
statement about the mind’s organic properties that we are to know about, just
as we know about the physical body that vitamin C fortifies its capacity to
resist an invading virus. If our immune system fails and we get the flu for
which we were vaccinated, is it reasonable to say that we are being punished,
or being unlucky? Scientifically we can see that the immune system is very
complex, hardly known, and vaccination is only a partial assist to the immune
system. Failure of our system is not attributed to our stupidity, since we went
to get the vaccination, and we practiced medically recommended washings and
inhibitions.
It is
exactly parallel with the mind, as it is to the body, since everything in the
body is a mere correspondence of that which is in the mind or spirit of every
human being. Whether we say mind or spirit, it is the same, for what is the
spirit except what the mind is, when we know that our affections are located
and live in the organ of the will, and our thoughts are located and live in the
organ of the understanding. These two organs make up the mind, and they make up
the spirit, for there is nothing in the spirit except affections and thoughts
(xx).
You can now
see that if we are denied entry into heaven, it is not a punishment for
misdeeds on earth. For example, if you are denied entry at a customs office or
check point, it is not a punishment for your race or your legal status as a
lawful citizen of a recognized nation. Instead, you don’t have your medical
vaccination certificate with you, something that you
know is required to be shown to gain legal entry. It is exactly parallel to
your being denied entry into heaven. It’s not that your past misdeeds have been
found out at the gate, and now a judgment has been rendered against you, and condemned
to hell—for there is no other place available when we are denied entry to
heaven!
If it’s not
because of our past misdeeds, why are we not admitted to heaven?
The answer
is that we are admitted, but before we can our second step at the entrance
gate, we are seized by mental pangs and inner torture of the most intense and
unpleasant kind. We are desperate to stop it, and it stops the moment we cast
ourselves down to the lower regions of our mind. This makes sense if you think
of the mind and the spiritual world as exactly alike. Heaven is the uppermost
region in the spiritual world, and hell is the lowest region there. Similarly,
with the human mind: the highest region of the human mind is a heavenly state
of life, bliss, love, consciousness, and understanding of truths and reality. This
is why the Lord said that the heaven is within us (xx). So it is the same thing
whether we say “entering heaven” or “entering our heavenly or celestial state
of humanity.”
In the same
way, hell is within us, at the lowest region of the human mind. Entering hell
therefore means sinking into the lowest form of the human mind—corporeal
spirituality in which there are no rational truths whatsoever. The outward life
of this hellish mentality shows as hatred, cruelty, selfishness, foolishness
and stupidity, insanity, grossness, vulgarity, immorality, and devoid of any
artistry or aesthetics. Denied entry into heaven and casting oneself out upon
arrival, is just a correspondence idea for the actual reality, which is that we
are then made of a mind or spirit whose will is filled with affections that are
suffocated by any rational-spiritual idea or lifestyle.
If you were
able to force your rebellious adolescent to believe and accept the Ten
Commandments and the Numbers of the Writings that you quote to them, what would
happen? The poor individual would be so tortured that it would be an inhuman
way for you to treat anyone like that. Instead, you have to give up the idea of
forcing the adolescent to accept the necessity of the Commandments and related
lifestyle behaviors. The Lord does likewise, never forcing any person to accept
and live by His Commandments. This guarantees that we always stay in a mental
balance that allows us to freely choose our willing and thinking. This is the
unregenerate Adam whose willing and thinking is biased in favor of his own
proprium, his own ego, his own way of thinking, his own things that he likes to
do, and that he doesn’t like to do and doesn’t want his wife to interfere. This
is the unregenerate husband who loves himself above his wife.
The wife is
in his eyes always less than himself, in all things.
Therefore
she knows that she is nowhere his first. As a result, she knows, perceives, and
senses that he is not hers. He is officially her husband, but not actually. A
wife has enlightenment from the Lord in sensing these conjugial matters (xx). By
this enlightenment, the wife can lead her unregenerate husband into undergoing
reformation. He resists and opposes her directions. Thus she feels unhappy,
lonely, and desperate. At last he is willing to apply his skills and
intelligence as a man to his own marriage. He begins to listen to her at times.
In those times, he feels happy. It’s a new feeling, a new state. Now he decides
to undergo reformation. He studies the Writings, builds it up into a Doctrine
in his mind, and starts dumping things that are contrary to the Letter of the
Writings.
His mind
rearranged and reordered by the Writings, he is a reformed man, a
1. The Appearance Of Eve
The
appearance of Eve as a correspondence to the New Church mind, marks the first
time that the unregenerate husband is seized with the determination to undergo reformation
and regeneration as a Divine Commandment of the Writings, hence the Lord. His wife seen through Rule 1 is the
appearance of Eve. This is what it means for the husband to reform and
regenerate. If he could do it by himself, would he not have done so already?
How long can he believably claim that his wife is not unhappy, and that if she
is, it is not his fault, thus not something that he could change, but refuses
to do so because he is in love with himself. This
self-love takes precedence over her, shuts her out, turns her from a wife into
a whore to whom he is married. Therefore she feels used, disrespected,
denigrated, injured, worthless, thrown away.
But then
the husband is seized with remorse and pity for her. He gets a glimpse of his
monstrous selfishness. He feels moved to repentance and change by his
conscience and by higher and deeper feelings he didn’t even know he was able to
have. He now turns to the Word and studies the Writings. He worships the Letter
of it as Divine. He undergoes reformation and sees that his male prejudices,
his male prerogatives and perks, his male belief systems—all of it, must be thrown away as dirty dish water or water that runs off an
agricultural field that is poisoned with insecticides and deadly chemicals.
As he is
reformed he begins to see the literal sentences of the Writings in a deeper way
because he is honest enough to want to apply them to himself. At first this is
only a very general sort of application and shows mostly in terms of his
declarations of support for Rule 1 and its sub-rules or applications. His wife
continues to suffer silently within herself, but she is encouraged by his new
declarations that sound genuine. Especially is she comforted and reassured by
the fact that he is now willing to accept Rule 1 as a Divine Commandment for
himself. She feels inward reassurance
because he now puts the Lord into the marriage, for the first time.
2. External Reformation Vs. Internal Regeneration
Studying
the Writings gives us an understanding of what is a thing or object. Every
created thing is created into a Divine order of discrete degrees (xx). Every
object is distinct and has an outside and an inside. This is the definition of
a thing or object. It must have two properties to be a created object. One is
that must be distinct form any other created thing. The other is that it has an
outside and an inside. Thus existential duality is built into the universe. For
instance, a fruit has an outside peel and an inside flesh. A rock has an outside
surface and an inside structure or matrix. The Word has an outside Letter and
an inside meaning. A government has an outside cohort of elected and appointed
officials, and an inside authority of making laws that apply to all citizens. A
marriage has an outside legal and social reality in the community, and an
inside mental or spiritual reality in the mind of the husband and wife.
The husband
has a mind which has an outside portion and inward portion. The outward portion
of his mind is called natural and the inward portion is called spiritual. The
mind has two organs: the will and the understanding. Each of these organs must
therefore have an outward portion and an inward portion, like the heart and the
lungs whose outside walls are made of different types of muscle structures or
membranes than the inside of their walls. At birth the outward portion of the
mind, which is natural, grows into a deformed pattern as it matures. The inward
portion, which is spiritual, remains undeveloped until reformation. At
reformation we use the power in the Letter of the Writings to reorder or
priorities, rearrange our goals, reconstruct our
definitions, radically changing our justifications and orientation. Now Eve
appears on the scene, and we acknowledge Rule 1 as a Divine Commandment to
which we are committed out of fear of hell and love of heaven.
Reformation
takes place in the outside portion of the mind. The order in this portion of
the mind is a model of hell, from heredity and culture (xx). It is filled only
with nondualities, as discussed in Volume 1. Without the Letter of the
Writings, taken up into our natural-rational understanding as Doctrine with a
Divine authority, we could not undergo reformation. Our acknowledgement that
the Doctrine in our conscious understanding is Divine,
becomes the condition which the Lord has specified, for being regenerated. That
is, for removing the evil affections from hell, and planting new affections
from heaven. The part of the husband who displays these new affections, is the man whom
the wife recognizes as her conjugial husband. When this man is around her,
she is in her joy of life.
But the bad
guy husband always seems to return unexpectedly and suddenly, especially when
she “crossed an invisible line” that he built in his mind and maintains for himself.
Like a Jekyll and Hyde masquerade, the husband alternates between treating his
wife with evil and treating her with good. He is still not reformed in many
areas of his relationship. He is only reformed in some areas, those areas that
he will allow. And so his wife languishes, begging the Lord to return the
conjugial husband to her.
But while
he is oscillating between these two states of order and disorder, the husband’s
spiritual mind is being opened and implanted by the Lord. This is an
unconscious process of the Lord and heaven in our mind. Simultaneously, the
Lord creates an interior portion within the man’s natural-rational mind. This
interior portion is called the interior-natural mind and it is capable of
spiritual consciousness. This process has been described in detail in Volume 2.
Regeneration
begins in the areas of the husband’s mind in which he was willing to undergo
reformation. While he remains in an unregenerate state in some areas, he is
making progress in regeneration in other areas. Now for the first time he
begins to change in the inward portions of his mind. The outside portion of his
mind consists of his corporeal, sensuous, and natural-rational portions. The
inward portion consists of his interior-natural mind that the Lord build within his natural-rational mind. The husband himself
is in full charge of his natural-rational mind, but only the Lord is in charge
of the interior-natural mind. The husband therefore owns his external mind, but
the Lord owns his interior mind. To regenerate means that the husband compels
his external mind to align itself with the interior mind. In other words, he
compels his conscious willing and thinking all day long to conform to the
spiritual truths kept in his interior-natural mind by the Lord. In effect, this
result is that the Lord now rules the man, to the extent that the man compels
his willing and thinking to conform to the spiritual truths he can perceive.
These perceptions of spiritual truths constitute his spiritual understanding of
the spiritual topics he reads in the Letter of the Writings (as explained in
Volume 2).
In this way
portions of the husband are regenerated from the interior to the external, and
these portions give the husband an ability for
conjugial love. The wife is now completely reassured. She can now see that her
husband knows and wants to unite with her from within, that is, with the
external portion of his mind under obedience from the interior portion. She
sees that her husband wants now to be ruled by the Lord. And this is the
condition for conjugial love and internal unity.
You can see
from this scientific and medical account of regeneration that Rule 1 is nothing
but a behavioral method by which the husband can engineer his regeneration. His
mind starts in a disorder, prior to the appearance of his wife as Eve, his help
mate in regeneration. When he lives his life by Rule 1 the husband is
actualizing his wife as his spiritual help mate. Rule 1 is his lifeline, his
ticket to her heaven, which is his ritual inheritance form the Lord, his
Rule 1 guarantees that the regenerating husband will enter into the
inner marriage, that is, the external marriage within which is the spiritual
marriage. The external marriage is the social and legal form of it, hence also
the body and the external behaviors and interactions visible to others if they
are present. The internal marriage is the spiritual form of the marriage within
the external form. A couple may appear compatible and friendly to one another,
while inwardly there is disagreement and enmity. Rule 1 is a method for
eliminating this inward disagreement and enmity the husband feels towards his
wife. By following Rule 1 as a Divine Commandment, the husband gains the power
to gain control over his willing and thinking, forcing these to conform and
obey Rule 1.
In other
words, whenever he disagrees with his wife’s explicit or implied requests, he
compels his outward behavior and appearance to obey her request. This by itself
would be mere hypocrisy, ultimately to fail, if he did not also agree with
himself that he owes allegiance to Rule 1 from the Lord, not from himself. Therefore
the husband cannot justify going against Rule 1 at any time he so wishes
because some line he defined has been crossed by his wife’s request. This would
make a shambles out of Rule 1 and the Doctrine he has from the Letter of the
Writings. Therefore he has no other option but to continue to compel himself to
obey Rule 1 as a Divine Commandment. IN this way the inward unity with his wife
can go forward gradually and cumulatively over the years of his regeneration.
3. Leave Mother and Father And Cleave To The Wife
Marriage is
the state of spiritual growth between a wife and a husband. There are two
phases to this growth, external and internal, or, growth in the external mind
and growth in the internal mind. In the external mind, marriage is masculinized
and, in society, this is equivalent to the popular notion that it’s a man's
world. But in the internal phase, which comes next, the husband through living
the Doctrine of the Wife feminizes marriage. Thus from a man’s world society is
transformed into a feminine world, more gentle, more interior in intelligence,
and nearer to the Lord’s intelligence and character. In the Writings it is
stated that the Divine Proprium, which refers the Lord’s Character, is the all in
heaven and the angels are given to adopt or assume this Proprium as-if their
own (AC 8409).
In their
conversations with Swedenborg the inhabitants of the highest of the three
heavenly Kingdoms said that they actually have a living perception of the Lord’s
influx (HH 8). The Lord inflows into their internal mind with
Divine Good and Truth, the good into their will and the truth into their
understanding. They attribute all their intentions and ideas to this
Divine influx. They also said that the instant they close themselves off to
this influx in favor of their own intentions and ideas, they experience a
sudden drop, whereupon heaven disappears for them and they are in a lower
spiritual realm. But the instant they turn themselves again to the Lord and admit
Him by influx, they experience an elevation of the mind and they find
themselves again in their heaven. Paradoxically, the more they empty themselves
and allow spiritual influx from the Lord, the more they feel free and powerful;
but the more they turn to their own ideas and intentions and doing what they
then feel like, the more they feel constrained and captive of their flight of
ideas and emotions. While we are still in the physical body on earth we tend to
feel the opposite of this heavenly model. In our external mind it appears that
we feel most free when we do what we desire without any interference anywhere.
Most
husbands experience a sense of constriction and loss of freedom when they
acknowledge the commandment against adultery, even in the imagination. Most
therapists in our generation tell their clients that it does no harm to the
marriage when the husband fantasizes about sexual activities with other women
so long as it remains fantasy. They even prescribe it as an activity that can
re-invigorate the couple’s sexual relationship. Both self and society look with
favor upon that which the Lord forbids, as people can read in the New Testament
for the past two thousand years. While our moral or religious life is
restricted to the external mind we feel a loss of freedom when we acknowledge
God’s commandments. But when our internal mind is opened and made operational,
we are turned to God and His commandments and feel freedom in obedience to His
will. The internal mind of everyone is opened through the ongoing process of
regeneration. This consists of a life in accordance with one’s doctrine based
on God’s commandments.
The
commandment for husbands to "leave mother and father" means to
abandon loyalty and love for masculinized truth, and the commandment to
"cleave unto the wife" means to conjoin himself
in all things with the wife's affections. The essence of a woman’s life is her
affections and when the husband conjoins himself to his wife’s affections he
becomes a unity with her. The affections in her will and the cognitions in his
understanding are organically conjoined like the heart and the lungs in the
body that function together as one circulatory system. This is not just an
analogy. It takes organic substances from the spiritual world to create the
organs and fibers that make up the will and understanding in the mind. As the
married partners are engaged in their daily interactions their new joint mind
comes into being, built up fiber-by-fiber during their interactions.
In this way
they gradually achieve the state of "one flesh" which means of one
mind, i.e., the mind of an angel. This angelic mind is composed of the wife's
affections in the will conjoined with the husband's cognitions in the
understanding, thus making one angelic mind out of a man and a woman. This
conjoined mind is the highest state provided by the Lord for humans and in this
state we are truly human, immortal, in perfect health, ecstatically happy,
fully rational, loving and compassionate, creative and skillful to the extreme in
all things. This is the angelic state, and it is created when the husband loves
his wife's affections more than his own and adjusts his own cognitions or ideas
to harmonize with the wife's affections. In his striving to achieve unity the
husband is feminizing the marriage. And the Lord rewards them by creating the
perfect angelic mind out of the two imperfect individuals.
4. Becoming An Interior Man
From being
an unregenerate outward man, the husband after reformation becomes an inward
man. The outward man is represented by a mule of the desert (xx) and hunter of
the field (xx)—thus rough, gross, and anti-feminine. But after reformation the
husband becomes gentle, civilized, and wise. He is then called a man of the
field (see the Introduction to Volume 1). The
XV. THAT IN THE MARRIAGE OF ONE MAN WITH ONE WIFE BETWEEN
WHOM THERE IS LOVE TRULY CONJUGIAL, THE WIFE BECOMES MORE AND MORE A WIFE, AND
THE HUSBAND MORE AND MORE A HUSBAND.
That love truly conjugial conjoins two more and more into
one man may be seen above (CL nos. 178, 179); and because the wife becomes a
wife from conjunction with her husband and according to it, likewise the
husband from conjunction with his wife; and because love truly conjugial
endures to eternity, it follows that the wife becomes more and more a wife, and
the husband more and more a husband.
The reason is, because in a marriage of love truly
conjugial, each becomes an ever more interior man; for that love opens the
interiors of their minds, and as these are opened man becomes more and more a
man. To become more a man is, on the part of the wife, to become more a wife,
and on the part of the husband, to become more a husband. I have heard from angels, that a wife becomes more and more a wife as her
husband becomes more and more a husband, but not the reverse, for rarely if
ever is it lacking that a chaste wife loves her husband. What is lacking is
love in return on the part of the husband; and this is lacking on account of
there being no elevation of wisdom, which alone receives a wife's love.
Respecting this wisdom, see nos. 130, 163-65. This, however, is said of
marriages on earth. (CL 200)
In this
passage, and similar ones elsewhere, the Lord is revealing to the human race
one of the most central and important scientific facts about human kind. Every
man of the race is born a pre-husband or a husband-to-be. In other words, the
individual male as a single man is not a true human being but only natural.
True human beings are celestial, such as those who live in heaven. To become
one of them we must prepare our mind by compelling the disorderly external mind
to obey the order of the interior mind. This order in the interior-natural mind
is a Divine order expressed in the higher spiritual correspondences active
there and of which we are conscious when regenerating. This is called being enlightened
by the Lord through the Letter of the Writings and its Heavenly Doctrines that
we are taking up in our memory and understanding for the sake of regeneration.
To “become
more and more a husband” is a correspondence for regeneration. A husband who is
undergoing regeneration is the husband who is becoming more and more a husband.
The expression “becoming a husband” signifies to form the
It is now
revealed that conjugial love “opens the interiors of their minds, and as these
are opened man becomes more and more a man.” (CL 200).
The conjugial couple is the genuine
unit of the human race.
Knowing
this Divine truth gives the regenerating
5. Proving The Doctrine of the Wife and Rule 1
In the celestial Church good resided with the husband and
the truth of that good with the wife; but in the spiritual Church truth resided
with the man and the good of that truth with the wife: Such is and was the
actual relationship between the two, for in human beings interior things have
undergone this reversal. "wife" in the
representative sense signifies truth, and a "husband" good (AC 4823).
We can
apply this passage to ourselves by looking at the main expressions as
correspondences to activities in our willing and thinking. Doing this will
allow us to see its more interior meaning, that is, what the Lord is saying to
us about our willing and thinking, and especially, how they are to be
regenerated. Note the contrast between the “celestial Church” and the
“spiritual Church.” Taking it as a correspondence to our regeneration, the
“spiritual Church” represents our willing and thinking during regeneration on
earth, and the “celestial Church” represents our willing and thinking as conjugial
couple in heaven. During regeneration “truth resides with the man and the good
of that truth with the wife.” But in conjugial partners “good resides with the
husband and the truth of that good with the wife.”
Human
action is always by the understanding from the will,
and never by the will through the understanding (xx). This amazing scientific
revelation will surely revolutionize many social practices and beliefs, once it
is generally understood. Applying this principle to the passage above (AC
4823), we can say that during regeneration the husband (“truth with the man”)
acts from the wife (“the good of that truth with the wife”). This follows
logically from the principle that it is the understanding that acts from the
will, since truth is in the understanding while good is in the will. To say
that it is the understanding that acts from the will, is the same as saying it
is the husband who acts from the wife, since truth in the understanding of the
husband acts from good in the will of the wife. Truth is in the understanding
while good is in the will. Truth always acts from good (xx).
But during
regeneration “good resides with the husband and the truth of that good with the
wife.” In other words, the wife acts (“truth of that good with the wife”) from
the husband (“good resides with the husband”). Again for the same reason as
before, namely that it is truth in the understanding (conjugial wife) that acts
from the good in the will (conjugial husband), and never the good in the will
that acts through the understanding.
What is the
significance of this? What does it mean that in the first state the husband
acts from the wife, while in the second state the wife acts from the husband?
The second state is always higher or more interior than the first,
in the same degree that celestial is higher than spiritual. While the husband
is regenerating on earth he is called a spiritual Church, but after, in heaven,
he is called a celestial Church. Now you can see how Rule 1 is related to the
spiritual sense of this passage (AC 4823). The spiritual sense discusses the
contrast between the husband on his way to conjugial
love vs. the husband in conjugial love. While the husband is on his way to
conjugial love he acts from his wife. Once he is in conjugial love, his wife
acts from him. When he acts from the wife he is regenerating. In other words,
in order to regenerate the husband must act from the wife. Rule 1 says that the
husband must learn to love to act from his wife more than from himself. You can
see therefore that Rule 1 is a Divine Commandment by which we can approach conjugial
love.
Continuing
with the same Number:
In the celestial church the husband was in good, and the
wife in the truth of this good; but in the spiritual church the man is in
truth, and the wife in the good of this truth; such were they in fact then, and
such are they now, for the interiors of man have undergone this change. Hence
where celestial good and celestial truth from it are treated of in the Word, it
is said "husband and wife;" but where spiritual good and spiritual
truth from it are treated of, it is said "man and wife," or rather
"man and woman." (AC 4823)
The
expression “man and woman” signifies husband and wife in an external union,
while “husband and wife” signifies husband and wife in an internal unity.
Marriage in an internal unity is the true marriage, but marriage in an external
union is only a representative of true marriage. On earth, the regeneration of
the husband is the condition for an internal unity. This internal unity is
exactly proportional to the husband’s progress in regeneration. When he
falters, the internal unity dies. The husband is not much aware of the internal
unity, seeing it from a distance like a four-legged animal approaching in a field
with tall grasses. But to the wife the internal unity is up front, right in
front of her face. It is the biggest thing in her life, all other things having
a smaller importance. This is how she feels and is from creation.
Prior to
regeneration, the husband acts from his own will. This unregenerate male mental
state is as deadly as a poisonous snake and as slick as an eel. Deadly to himself and slick in his apparent inability to see his
own spiritual insanity. Everyone prior to regeneration is spiritually
insane (xx). Women marry the unregenerate man, who then becomes their
unregenerate husband, rough and painful, self-involved, loving the masculine
sphere above that of the feminine. The unregenerate husband is toxic to his
wife, in whom conjugial love is present from nativity (xx). He hates conjugial
love because the unregenerate mind hates what is heavenly, and hates conjugial
love more than any other thing in the universe because it is the highest and
most central of all heavenly loves and truths.
The Lord
has therefore provided the
To oppose
Rule 1 is to keep the marriage in an external union, merely legal, social, and
convenient for multiple reasons. To adopt Rule 1 as a regeneration discipline
is to move the marriage into its interior unity.
How does
Rule 1 work? why does it work? Consider this passage:
As speech is the form of sound, so man may be described as
the form of the wife; they are one flesh; a man shall cleave to his wife; the
wife is the man's soul, and life, or is the heart of the man; but neither knows
anything else than that the other is his, or hers, and that each is the other's
reciprocally and mutually. (SE 6110)
“Man” here
signifies the husband who makes Rule 1 into a regeneration discipline. The
husband who loves to act from his wife is the “man” here described. The husband
is created to be the form of his wife. That he is “created” means that his
regeneration creates a “man” out of him, that is, a conjugial husband. Man is
created the form of his wife because man is born an understanding of truth
while woman is born a will or affection of truth (xx). Every man attains the perfection of his creation when he allows himself
to be regenerated by the Lord. To allow himself to
be regenerated means that he compels himself to act form the wife, not from
himself. He has to desist from acting from himself since this is evil, as all
things of the unregenerate man are evil (xx). Hence Rule 1 is his very
salvation, the bridge that leads him away from hell and to heaven.
Note this
amazing scientific revelation: “a man shall cleave to his wife; the wife is the
man's soul, and life, or is the heart of the man.” This refers to the
regenerating husband who follows Rule 1 as a regeneration discipline. The
expression “to cleave to his wife” signifies the application of Rule 1 in his
everyday interactions with his wife, which means, always, since the external
union of marriage makes one responsible to the other 24 hours a day. The
expression “the wife is the man’s soul” signifies that when he loves to act
from his wife, his will can be regenerated, so that form an infernal man he can
become celestial. The expression “the man’s soul” refers to his will because a
man is nothing but his affections, and his affections are in the will. Therefore
in his will is not regenerated, he remains infernal, which is referred to as
the soul dying or being destroyed.
The
Doctrine of the Wife is called here “the man’s soul” because this Doctrine
regenerates his will. And the regenerated will is his new “life.” This new
celestial life is said to be “in the heart of the man” because heart represents
the love of his will. When he loves to act from the wife (Rule 1) his wife is
in his heart, and she is his soul, therefore, his life. To cleave to his wife
is man’s life because he then acts from her, not from himself. To act from himself is death because he then cannot be regenerated.
The husband's life enters the wife, through the thighs, and
by means of love. How truth then becomes good, or understanding, the will of
the wife, and how, finally, the husband's understanding becomes the form of the
wife's affection. (SE 6110)
Here it is
specified what Rule 1 is, namely, it is “the husband's understanding [when it] becomes
the form of the wife's affection.” The “wife’s affection” signifies to act from
the wife since the understanding acts from the will and affection is in the
will. When the husband’s acts from the wife’s will he is said to “enter her
through the thighs, and by means of love.” This is the meaning of loving the
wife: To cleave to her, to act from her will, and to love this. To love to act from her affections is the
true love that unites.
To become “the form” of the wife’s
affection, the husband has to appropriate to himself the wife’s affection.
The wife’s
affection, now in the husband’s will, motivates and
directs all his thinking. His willing is according to her affection, and
therefore his thinking will also be, as a consequence of the first. This is
what creates the internal unity of conjugial couples.
But once
they are completed as a conjugial couple, it is said that the wife acts from
the husband. This is a way of saying that the husband and the wife act from
each other. Nothing else would be logical. The husband’s understanding has been
formed by the wife’s affection during regeneration. Now, this understanding is
therefore her understanding in her husband since it was formed by her
affections. Therefore she acts from this understanding. She doesn’t act from
her own understanding for this would not be unity.
Any widow. That this signifies those who are
in good without truth, and yet long for truth, is evident from the
signification of "a widow," as being good without truth, and yet
longing for it. That "a widow" has this signification is because by
"a man" is signified truth, and by his "woman" is signified
good; and therefore when the woman of a man becomes a
widow, she signifies good without truth.
But in a still more interior sense "a widow"
signifies truth without good. The reason is that in this sense "a
husband" signifies good, and his "wife" truth ... (AC 9198)
You can see
here that “widow” or “woman without husband” represents the two states of
marriage when they both fail. The failure of the external marriage is
represented by “widow” in the spiritual sense, but the failure of the internal
marriage is represented by “widow” in the celestial sense. “Widow” in the spiritual
sense signifies “good without truth.” This is the failure of the external
marriage. But “widow” in the celestial sense signifies “truth without good.”
This is the failure of the internal marriage.
Good receives power
through truth (AC 3563,
4592)
A man is
constructed spiritually as the inverse of a woman since woman is interior truth
covered over with external love while man is interior love covered over with
external truth (CL 32). Therefore, the
wife’s truth is more interior than the husband’s by spiritual make-up.
The
Writings also teach that in all things whatever is interior is always more
heavenly than that which is exterior (xx). Clearly then, a woman's intelligence
is more celestial or higher than a man's intelligence because the quality of
intelligence and wisdom is determined by the truth out of which they are made.
The recognition by the husband that the wife’s intelligence is higher than his
own sanctifies the marriage in his mind.
Regeneration
in the case of husbands consists in giving up their own proprium and living
as-if from the Lord's Proprium. This means abandoning the unregenerate
masculine truth (=leaving father and mother) and entering existence into the interior
feminine truth (=cleaving to his wife). The feminine truth is celestial while
the masculine truth is spiritual. Feminine truths are called “truths about good”
or “truths about love,” while masculine truths are called “truths about truth”
or “truths about wisdom” (xx). In the Lord’s Proprium there are both types of
truths since in Him infinite distinct things are a one (xx).
The Lord’s
Proprium is the very atmosphere of life in heaven and only those couples can
live in it that have abandoned the natural order of life in the external mind
and live in the spiritual order of life in the internal mind. Husbands must
choose to place their own masculine affections or intentions below the feminine
affections of their wife because her intelligence is higher or more interior
than his intelligence and this higher or more interior intelligence can conjoin
only with feminine affections, and not with masculine. Higher truths are called
here feminine because they are truths about love and good, and these are
celestial things. Masculine truths are called lower because they are truths
about truth and wisdom, and these are spiritual things. The celestial is higher
than the spiritual. Celestial truths are called feminine truths because woman
is born a form of love and good, while man is born a form of truth and wisdom
(xx). Celestial truths are about love and good while spiritual truths are about
truth and wisdom. Therefore feminine
truths are to rule over masculine truths since the higher rules over the lower.
(xx) Higher means more interior, as celestial is more interior than spiritual.
By accepting the wife’s affections as-if his own, the husband
experiences an inner elevation of the mind because he can now be given higher
truths in his understanding. These higher truths are feminine in constitution and he can
now appropriate them to himself by conjoining them to the wife’s affections in
him, which he upholds as-if his own. It is this spiritual biology that
necessitates the process whereby feminine affections are conjoined with
masculine cognitions in the mind of the husband. The Writings call this union
“the marriage of good and truth.” All good belongs to affections in the will
and all truth belongs to cognitions in the understanding.
We know
from the Writings that the Lord's purpose in creating and maintaining the
universe is to populate the heavens with individuals born on earths. The
greater the number of people in heaven, the more perfect it grows (xx). In
other words, people in heaven continue to experience greater and greater
perfection every day to eternity. The unit of life in heaven is the couple, not
the individual, and all heaven is made of married couples. The angelic or
conjugial couple is in actuality a single complete angel. Swedenborg witnessed
a representation of this when he saw an angel approaching him from a distance,
and when the angel was nearer he saw that it was a husband and a wife. This
visual representation confirms the idea of the actual internal unity of the
married couple.
6. External
And Internal Marriage
Changes of state are of one kind with men and of another
with women, because, by creation, men are forms of science, intelligence, and
wisdom, and women, forms of the love of these with men (CL 187).
Passages
such as the above are seized upon by a man’s external masculinized mind, which
wants to hold on to the idea that intelligence and intellectual pursuits is the
arena of men while feelings and affections are the arena of women. By this
affirmation men put themselves ahead of women in intelligence and wisdom while
they concede that women are ahead of men in love and affection. This false and
self-serving view turns their marriage into an inauthentic union made by man,
not by the Lord. The union men want to make is the adjunction together of man's
intelligence or wisdom with woman's “affectional predisposition,” as it has
been called in
(a) The
difference essentially consists in this, that the inmost quality in masculinity
is love, and its veil wisdom, or in other words, it is love veiled over with
wisdom, while the inmost quality in femininity is that same wisdom, the wisdom
of masculinity, and its veil the love resulting from it.
(b) This
second love, however, is a feminine love, and the Lord gives it to a wife
through the wisdom of her husband, whereas that first love is a masculine love,
which is a love of becoming wise, and the Lord gives it to a husband according
to his reception of wisdom.
(c)
Consequently, the male is a form of the wisdom of love, and the female is a
form of the love of that wisdom.
(d) Therefore from creation there was implanted in both male
and female a love of uniting into one (CL 32).
This
passage has four sentences, which we marked from (a) to (d) in order to
consider each in turn. Sentence (a) specifies the "essential" or
inmost spiritual difference between man and woman. This spiritual organic
difference is such as to allow the formation of an internal unity between a
husband and a wife. No unity is possible between alike and alike for that
yields only an external adjunction or co-location. Note that in order to create
a structural unity there must be a particular kind of difference or relation
between the two parts, so that they may function in unison like the heart and
the lungs in the body act together in unison, each having its own distinct
form, yet the two fitting together for joint operation as one. Sentence (a)
specifies the organic structural relation in marriage by indicating that
feminizing it consists in elevating masculine wisdom from external truth and
reasoning, to internal, or which is the same, from the external mind to the
internal mind.
A wife
imbibes and appropriates her husband's intelligence and wisdom and then elevates
it within herself, that is, makes it more interior, and then covers it over
with feminine love. This is stated in sentence (b). Note this very important
observation: In sentence (b) it is said that the Lord gives the wife conjugial
love "through the wisdom of her husband." There are two ways of
interpreting the meaning. One is that the wisdom mentioned here is the wisdom
of the husband such as it is in the husband. But this is not in accord with the
Doctrine of the Wife and its rationale. The other possible meaning is that the
wisdom of the husband mentioned here refers to the wisdom of the husband that
is now in the wife, and this wisdom is higher than the husband’s even though it
originated from the husband. This means that the wife has conjugial love from
the Lord when she unites the current wisdom in her (originally from the
husband) with harmonious affections also in her, within which is the love from
the Lord.
In this
second interpretation it is clear that the wife's intelligence and wisdom is more
interior than his, even though her wisdom originates with him. But it is given
to the wife to take that wisdom of the husband within her and to elevate it by
implanting it in her inner rational mind where it now functions at a more
interior level than that of the husband from which it originated. The Writings
say that this interior truth is represented in the Old Testament by Sarah,
Abraham's wife, and by Rebecca, Isaac’s wife. It is celestial truth and is such
as the highest angels have. Angelic unity of the married couple depends on the
husband imbibing the wife's affections and the wife imbibing the husband's
cognitions. This reciprocal and organic process gradually changes and perfects
the cognitions and affections of both husband and wife in an endless process of
deeper and richer union. This is not a static or one time process. When the
husband imbibes the wife's affections, his cognitions must change accordingly
in order to maintain the equilibrium of unity. He gains a deeper wisdom than
before. When a wife imbibes her husband's cognitions, her new affections are
more sublime than before. Swedenborg was very affected by this interiorized
beauty whenever he was in the presence of angelic wives who were advanced in
wisdom. The more husbands and wives love each other's reciprocity, the more
they are conjoined in deeper unity. And this to eternity.
What an amazing and wonderful reality! This is indicated in sentence (d).
Sentence
(b) also states that the Lord gives the husband wisdom according to his "reception"
of wisdom. What is the measure of his reception? Not his knowledge and
intelligence, but the life he conducts according to these. This means the kind
of affections he favors because people are led by their affections. The Lord is
instructing husbands that if they favor the affections of the wife, then they
are receptive of His Wisdom. Then He can give them that Wisdom to be as-if
their own, and more of it to eternity. A husband can become wise only to the
extent he is living what we knows to be true from his religion, and in the case
of the Writings, this means loving the affections of his wife above his own.
These are the affections wives have from the Lord and by elevating them above
their own affections, husbands are living the doctrine they know and understand
from the Writings. They are then receptive to the Lord's Wisdom.
As they
receive deeper wisdom from the Lord, their wife imbibes it, elevates it in her
interior mind, and receives new, deeper and more genuine conjugial love from
the Lord. The husband now can imbibe her new affections--and the cycle of unity
continues to grow and perfect itself forever. To imbibe the
wife's affections and to favor them means that the husband must never disagree
and always agree with his wife's affectional requests in all things.
7. Heresies
Regarding The Husband's
Wisdom
The
Writings of Swedenborg contain the greatest scientific revelations ever made to
humankind. The center of these revelations is that human emotions and feelings
are arranged in a hierarchy from strongest to weakest, and the strongest at the
very top is the intense desire to unite in marriage. This state of inner
unition between a husband and a wife is the complete and pure human state of
life. It is the angelic life of couplehood. This is the life Swedenborg
witnessed with numerous couples with whom he interacted in the spiritual world
and the heavens. The married couple is organically united in spirit or mind in
a fashion similar to newly born Siamese twins who are physically joined in the
body. Without knowing this internal spiritual reality, an inner union between
husband and wife cannot be achieved. In fact, due to inherited evils, there is
strong opposition to the conjugial union, especially by men.
In
Conjugial Love Number 168-177 it is shown that a conjugial union is necessary
for an individual to become whole and complete as a human being. A man and a
woman are singly incomplete, the man lacking the love or affections his
understanding needs to be whole, and the wife lacking the understanding or
intelligence her love and affections need to be complete. It is stated that men
are born to be “intellectual” while women are born to be “affectional.” The
Writings also state that men are called wisdoms while wives are called
affections. A woman is said to be the love of her husband’s wisdom. A man’s
mind is born a form of understanding while a woman’s mind is born a form of
love.
There is a
temptation for men when they come across statements such as these in the
Writings. From a natural perspective men prefer to
think that they are superior to women in understanding the dynamics of life and
the world, and therefore they feel that they should have the ultimate power to
decide things relating to Church, government, business, and domestic affairs.
In other words, it’s a man’s world and women have their appropriate place in
it. The letter of Sacred Scripture in the major religions is written according
to natural and cultural appearances so that men of every religion have found
Divine justification for putting men ahead of women in many walks of life, if
not all. This masculinized notion is a doctrinal fallacy. Husbands must let go
of this persuasion or fail in their attempt to regenerate and become an angel
with a wife in heaven.
In order to
free oneself from this masculinized persuasion it is necessary to balance
statements of Scripture with passages that say just the opposite. For example,
in the symbology of the Writings, Abraham represents Divine Love while his wife
Sarah represents Divine Truth. This correspondence is repeated in other
Biblical couples such as Rebecca and Isaac. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael
in the Old Testament we are told that Sarah asked Abraham to banish Hagar and
her child Ishmael from the household, an idea to which Abraham balked. So God
appeared to him and commanded, “all that Sarah saith
unto thee, hearken unto her voice” (Genesis
"Husband," when mentioned in the Word, signifies
good, and "wife" then signifies truth. It is otherwise when the
husband is called the "man;" for then "man" signifies
truth, and "wife" good (AC 2517)
In the spiritual church the wife represents good and the man
represents truth, but in the celestial church the husband represents good and
the wife truth; and-what is a mystery-they not only represent, but also in all
their activities correspond to them. (AC 4434)
This is
another example showing that the intelligence of a wife is higher or more
discerning than her husband’s, and that a husband should be obedient to his
wife for the sake of conjugial love. Abraham’s idea in his own external mind is
to think that Ishmael is his son, and so he is disinclined to listen to his
wife when she tells him to get rid of him. Sarah’s more interior perception can
see that Ishmael is not the one, that Isaac will be the inheritor, and that
leaving Ishmael to hang around will threaten Isaac’s God given mission. If
Abraham is going to advance to his inner rational state he must disregard his
own inclination and external reasoning, and submit to his wife’s more interior
perception and spiritual understanding which she has from the Lord. This
exchange in the Old Testament represents the Doctrine of the Wife, which is
summarized by the Divine commandment to husbands: “Hearken unto her voice.”
And behold
Isaac was laughing with Rebekah his woman. That this signifies that Divine good
was present in Divine truth, or that Divine good was adjoined to Divine truth,
is evident from the representation of Isaac, as being the Divine good of the
Lord's rational (n. 3012, 3194, 3210); from the signification of
"laughing," as being the love or affection of truth (n. 2072, 2216);
and from the representation of Rebekah, as being the Divine truth of the
Lord's rational (n. 3012, 3013, 3077). Hence it is evident that "Isaac
laughing with Rebekah his woman" signifies that Divine good was present
with Divine truth. (AC 3392) (italics added for
emphasis)
The reason
for the apparent contradictions as to the intelligence and wisdom of men and
women has to do with the fact that the internal and external mind is in an
inverse relationship. Intelligence of the external kind is a lower form of
intelligence, less spiritual and celestial, in comparison to the intelligence
of the interior mind. Conjugial union is the joining of the internal mind in
which the intelligence of women is more internal than the intelligence of men.
This allows men to escape their inherited lower state of masculine independence
and evolve into a new higher state of conjoint dependence. This is the angelic state
of life.
A sermon by
Rev. Geoffrey H. Howard titled "The Transformation of a Man into a Husband
and a Woman into a Wife through Marriage" appeared in New Church Life,
June 2001 issue, pages 243-248. We will use this article to illustrate some
doctrinal issues in relation to the Doctrine of the Wife. The literal of the
Writings can lead to misconceptions unless contextualized in relation to the
Doctrine of the Wife or other passages in the Writings. In other words,
articulating the Doctrine of the Wife and applying it to interpret the literal
of the Writings avoids the heresy of believing that men’s intelligence in
forensics and in spiritual instruction is superior to women due to men's
wisdom, which women cannot attain. It is difficult to avoid this heresy without
the Doctrine of the Wife.
It is
customary to make a statement of denial in relation to the heresy of the
superiority of men over women. Rev. Howard states it this way:
It is
important to take teachings such as these in their proper context. Some have
read into such teachings in Conjugial Love the erroneous notion that masculine
virtues are extolled over those of the feminine. Nothing could be further from
the truth
(NCL,
June 2001, p.244).
Every
“We say
that masculinity cannot be converted into femininity, nor
femininity into masculinity, and that after death a male is consequently still
a male, and a female still a female. (…) The difference essentially consists in
this, that the inmost quality in masculinity is love, and its veil wisdom, or
in other words, it is love veiled over with wisdom, while the inmost quality in
femininity is that same wisdom, the wisdom of masculinity, and its veil the
love resulting from it. This second love, however, is a feminine love, and it
is given by the Lord to a wife through the wisdom of her husband, whereas that
first love is a masculine love, which is a love of becoming wise, and it is
given by the Lord to a husband according to his reception of wisdom.” (CL 32)
Rev. Howard
concludes:
From this
we can see that the reception of masculine wisdom depends upon a man's
willingness to look to the Lord and shun as sins against the Lord the evils
that may tempt him. Thus we can see that a man does not automatically receive
wisdom because he is a male. He receives it only by honoring the Lord through
living according to His commandments.
Following The Lord's Commandments Through One’s Wife
How does a
man live according to the Lord's commandments? One might think at first that
the husband has that power from the Lord independently of his wife. Can a
husband live according to the Lord's commandments from his efforts apart from
the wife or can he do this only through his wife? Could it be that the husband
cannot follow the Lord's commandments unless he does so through his wife? How
else can the mind of each grow into reciprocal form that can fit into a unity
of mind or spirit? This conjoint growth process was described above as a
four-step interaction repeatedly made with each other on a daily living basis.
What would happen if the heart said to the lungs, “I’m superior,” while the
lungs, speaking in unison, retort, “We are superior.” One angel in heaven is
made of a husband and wife interacting continuously as a conjoint unity.
Swedenborg was witnessed this phenomenon while speaking to an angel husband in
heaven who had invited him in to discuss the subject of wisdom:
I saw
inside that the building was divided into two sections, and yet the two were
still one. It was divided into two
sections by a transparent partition, but it looked like one room because of the
partition's transparency, which was like the transparency of the purest
crystal. I asked why it was arranged like that.
The
receptionist said, "I am not alone. My wife is with me, and though we are
two, yet we are not two but one flesh."
To which I
replied, "I know you are wise, but what does a wise man or wisdom have to
do with a woman?"
At this,
with some feeling of annoyance, the receptionist's expression changed, and he
stretched out his hand, and suddenly, then, other wise men were present from
the neighboring buildings. To them he said with amusement, "Our visitor
here says he wants to know what a wise man or wisdom has to do with a
woman!"
They all
laughed at this and said, "What is a wise man or wisdom apart from a woman
or apart from love? A wife is the love of a wise man's wisdom." (CL 56)
Rev. Howard
recognizes that women’s wisdom is more interior, therefore, higher, than a
man’s:
Feminine
wisdom, or perception, does not easily lend itself to description because it is
of a more interior nature than is the wisdom given to a man (...) They are
entirely different in quality and nature, yet complementary to each other.
(NCL,
June 2001, p.245)
From the
perspective of the Doctrine of the Wife it is not enough to say
(a) that masculine and feminine wisdom are different; and
(b) that they are complementary.
A
conclusion must follow:
(c)
Therefore the husband should elevate the wife's judgment above his own.
Another way
of saying this is Rule 1 for conjugial husbands, as discussed frequently
throughout this volume:
RULE 1:
The first and only rule is that
husbands are to learn to love acting from the wife, more than from self.
(See
Chapter 9, Sections 3 and 4 for more discussion on Rule 1)
Without
this conclusion, the literal of the Writings may be misinterpreted. The
husband's wisdom may indeed be elevated even to the highest heaven, but he
cannot appropriate it to himself. His wisdom falls back quickly to the level of
his love or affections, which are in hell for all who are unregenerate. The
Writings make this comparison referring to the natural man before he is
regenerated:
He is also
like an adulterer who hides a harlot in a room below, and in turn ascends to
the highest story of his house, and there in the presence of his wife talks
wisely with visitors about chastity, and again steals away from the company and
satiates his lust with the harlot below (TCR 590).
This
comparison is said about every husband whose internal spiritual mind has not
yet been opened through regeneration. Husbands can elevate their intellect into
doctrinal things of the Writings while they are studying and applying
themselves piously. Then they descend from the lofty heights of studies and
interact with their wife, abusing them mentally, discounting their intellect,
holding the wife's judgment as nothing in comparison to their own, and other
such indignities, which they think nothing of. And this is done repeatedly,
daily. There is no regeneration possible for them so long as this pattern in
their life continues to rule their interactions with the wife.
Rev. Howard
cautions that the wife’s love of her husband’s wisdom does not mean that she
also loves his evils:
No wife can
love a proud or conceited husband. (...) The attraction he feels [as he is drawn
to her by love] has the effect of subduing his proprial pride. (...) Through
the influence of her love his mind becomes elevated and aspires to a new
idealism that no longer looks inward. He feels an incentive to live in a manner
worthy of her love and respect. Through her influence he is withdrawn from his
fallen proprium. By living a principled life of service to his wife, family and
others, he begins to receive a degree of wisdom which will draw the affections
of his wife
(NCL,
June 2001, p.247).
The husband
must make progress in his regeneration or character reformation, for without
this there is no wisdom in him that the wife can love. According to the
Doctrine of the Wife the only way a husband can improve his wisdom is by
elevating his wife's judgment above his own. This is “living a principled life
of service to his wife.” Unless this is the case the husband is drawn away by
his proprium or inborn egotism and cleaves to his idols rather than his wife.
It’s not enough to respect the wife and consult her in matters of importance,
though these external rituals are required. If there is no commitment to the
Doctrine of the Wife the husband can be drawn away by his masculine proprium
and decide to exercise a veto power over the “joint” decision making process.
Consulting
the wife in matters of importance still allows the husband to override her
point of view or desire in the matter. And he will exercise this power when he
is tempted, which means he cannot loose himself, cannot change his character,
cannot regenerate, cannot form a union with the wife, cannot become an angel.
But if he
commits to the Doctrine of the Wife he cannot permit himself to exercise veto
power or override his wife’s affections in any matter whenever he is inclined
to do so for whatever reason or rationale. He can only compel himself to be
obedient to the Heavenly Doctrine for this is the Lord’s Two Great Commandments
rolled into one. By loving the wife above himself, the
husband loves his closest neighbor, and he thereby simultaneously loves the
Lord because this love for his wife and her love for him is conjugial love, the
love in which angels are in heaven. The Writings teach that it is the Lord’s
most passionate desire that He be able to create as many angel couples as we let
Him, for this is the purpose for which He created the universe and maintains it
in order to perpetuity.
It is
believed that if the husband applies himself to following the commandments, his
wisdom will grow from the Lord, and the wife will be able to love his wisdom
even more, and thus the couple is conjoined. But this contains a dubious
assumption, namely, that the husband gains wisdom from the Lord apart from his
wife, through his own independent effort and striving to follow the Lord's
commandments, and then the wife can love this new wisdom in him. But the
Writings specify that a husband receives new wisdom from the Lord only in
proportion to his love. Striving to improve in itself is not sufficient for the
husband to receive more interior truths from the Lord. This is because the
striving is from his proprium. His only salvation is to love the wife's
judgment and perception above his own, to love the wife's wisdom above his own.
Then his love will be elevated because her wisdom is more interior than his.
This higher love can now receive more interior wisdom from the Lord. This is
the genuine new wisdom, which the wife takes into her inmost and from which she
brings out a feminine veil of love that covers her.
There are,
in consequence, two loves in a man, one of which is the love of growing wise,
which comes first, and the second of which is the love of wisdom, which comes
afterwards. But if this second love continues on in a man, it is an evil love,
and is called conceit or love of his own intelligence.
It will be established later that to keep this love from destroying man, it was
provided from creation that this love be taken from him and transferred into
woman, so that it might become conjugial love, which makes him whole again. (CL 88).
8. Feminine
Love Within Which Is
Masculine Wisdom
It is this
feminine love within which is masculine wisdom that makes the atmosphere of
heaven in which the angels live in blissful splendor to eternity. Couples here
on earth in which the husband is committed to the Doctrine of the Wife and
lives it, are internally in this heavenly atmosphere. Their conjoint spirit is
actually in heaven.
I have
often asked myself this question: What does it mean when the wives of
There are
two types of explanations. One type takes the position that Doctrine is for
men, primarily, especially formulating Doctrine and interpreting the Writings as
Doctrine. The other type takes up the position that Doctrine is separate from
priesthood. For instance, an evil or insincere priest can perform sacraments
but can’t create genuine doctrine (AC 9180). An evil man can create only false
doctrine because he creates it from his self-intelligence. He is no motivated
to understand the Writings for the sake of truth, but for the sake of dominion.
Therefore the Lord can reveal not a single genuine Doctrine to his mind. He
will teach only false and adulterated doctrine.
This proves
that being a priest and performing the sacraments for the community does not
necessarily go with being good and, therefore, having truth in the doctrine
they formulate.
It stands
to reason therefore that a priest has no special authority to create Doctrine
for the Church. The Writings say that priests ought to teach the Word in
sermons and classes (NJHD 315). It doesn’t say that that what they therefore
teach will be genuine Doctrine. This depends entirely on his state of
regeneration (LIFE 39). A priest has no special inspiration to formulate
genuine Doctrine when he is in evil, for falsity goes with evil, not truth.
Since we never know whether an individual is internally in good or evil (CL
523), we cannot automatically assume that any priest’s teachings of doctrine
are genuine or false—it could be either. If we merely accepted what a priest
teaches out of authority for his position, we are precipitated into persuasive
faith, and this is deadly for it leads to no belief at all when we arrive in
the afterlife with that kind of faith (NJHD 117)
So priests
ought to encourage people to study the Writings and accumulate their Doctrine
from it. This is the only protection the sheep have from the wolves—their own
reformation, that is, their acquisition of knowledge from the Writings and the
use of this Doctrine in their daily willing and thinking. This is the only way
to develop genuine Doctrine for each
He who
loves the ends also loves the means (AE 1144). Since the end in view is
reformation and regeneration through forming Doctrine and living it, therefore
teaching how to form Doctrine is the priest’s primary work of saving souls. Primary, because no one is saved by sacraments, but only by regeneration
(LJP 216). And no one is regenerated without willing and thinking
Doctrine from one’s as-of self comprehension (AC 47, 233, 1712, 2877, 5664,
10299; NJHD 148; DP 102; CL 82; SE 5958; LJ 299; AE 864). Clearly therefore,
the
I come back
to the question I posed above: Why are we not seeing more doctrinal activity
and involvement by women in the
The
priesthood may discourage or prevent women from becoming priests in the full
sense. This is one issue. But the priesthood may not discourage women from
actively being interested in doctrine and contributing to it. Regardless of the
Church’s official position on the issue of “women priests,” the priesthood must
always teach men and women how to formulate Doctrine for themselves out of the
Writings. They must teach that there is no power of salvation in the sacraments
they provide or in the doctrinal things they teach. They must teach that
the only method of salvation is reformation and regeneration, and that this can
be performed only by means of Doctrine each individual forms from the Writings
in their own individual mind.
The
attitude that Doctrine is primarily for men is present in all religions. Where
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family it was required that all boys start
attending “cheder” (religious classes) at age four or five. But the girls were kept
with the mothers learning domestic duties. This is clearly detrimental in the
light of the preceding discussion. Other religions, both Western and Eastern,
similarly keep women from active involvement with formulating Doctrine for the
Church. There is thus a long standing generational bias to deny women what they
need for their own salvation. What can motivate this except the hatred for
conjugial love? This is a hatred all men have from inheritance and confirmation
in life (see the following Sections below).
Of course
we know from the Writings that the Lord protects all innocent people from being
denied spiritual freedom. The women who are deprived by the dragons (AR 565) of
their doctrinal rights and privileges are protected inwardly by the Lord so that
their spiritual choices in life are protected. Outwardly, that is, socially and
politically, women can be denied knowledge and legitimacy of forming Doctrine,
and this results in great harm to the community. But inwardly, every woman is
given by the Lord other secret means of reformation and regeneration. Women
receive special perception from the Lord so that they have Doctrine written in
their hearts, like we all do when we become angels in heaven (HH 25). This
inward perception gives them wisdom, or the ability to perceive that a
spiritual proposition is true or false. Men do not have this perception from
the Lord so they must study as-of self and struggle with learning the Writings
and applying it to their willing and thinking. In this less direct and more
elaborated way, men too can form Doctrine.
The
And we are
to remember this: that the level of life of the highest angels of the entire
human race, now and into the future, is as nothing in comparison to the Lord’s
Life, His Love and Wisdom (HH 273).
9. The Role
Of The Wife
In The Husband's Wisdom
One of the
many biological facts revealed in the Writings is that the spiritual
constitution of men and women is inside out and outside in relative to each
other. This organic difference results in reciprocal roles for unition. Unition
would not be possible unless the spiritual organic parts of men and women were
reciprocal. Wherever the word "spiritual" is used, you can also think
"mental" because the mind is the spirit-body that continues its
immortal life in the spiritual world. At birth, the mind or spirit is born
along with the physical body and is formed through social and natural
experiences on earth.
Man was
created by God so as to have his internal in the spiritual world and his
external in the natural world. Thus he was created a denizen of either world in
order that the spiritual, which is heavenly, should be planted in the natural,
which is worldly, just as a seed is planted in the ground, and he might thus become
steadfast and enduring to eternity. (TCR 14)
We are thus
dual citizens, the physical body on earth and the mind or spirit in the
spiritual world.
Man was
created by God so as to have his internal in the spiritual world and his
external in the natural world. Thus he was created a denizen of either world in
order that the spiritual, which is heavenly, should be planted in the natural,
which is worldly, just as a seed is planted in the ground, and he might thus
become steadfast and enduring to eternity. (TCR 14)
When the
spirit is disconnected from the physical body at the time of passing on, the
spirit is then visible in its full form and beauty. Swedenborg has encountered
thousands of individuals in heaven and they all are in the “flower of youth and
beauty” or around seventeen or eighteen. The spirit-body is organically and
functionally far superior to the physical body, even the body of a top fashion
model or athlete that our society admires. Men and women appear in their ideal
form in heaven, but in hell they appear deformed.
In order to
be soul mates in heaven a wife and a husband must develop a character and
personality other than what each was born with on earth. One of the startling
revelations in the Writings is that the character of every child contains the
cumulative evils of all its ancestors. It is also taught that no one goes to
hell for the evils of another. We inherit the tendency and preference towards
innumerable evils attached to egotism and irrationality (CL 202). But
simultaneously we also inherit the power to oppose our evil tendencies and to
reject the false philosophies within which these evils are immersed. The Lord
in regeneration gives us this power. First, the Lord makes spiritual truths
available to us in our external mind through education and instruction. Second,
he gives us the power to live up to these truths, as we are tempted over and
over again in daily living. As we struggle with our temptations and win
victories over them, the Lord is able to open up our internal spiritual mind,
which is in heaven. This internal mind then descends into the external mind
where we become conscious of it. This is our tangible reward.
The process
by which husbands are regenerated is not the same as what happens with single
men. The wife plays a required role. This makes sense since the couple’s life
in heaven is only through a conjoint mind. This must be developed on earth
because regeneration is possible only while we are in the physical body. Once
the spirit-body is liberated, its life then continues such as it developed
while tied to the physical body. There is no “changing your mind” after you
pass on. A regenerating couple on earth must therefore evolve and develop a
conjoint mind through daily interactions. This is why it is required that the
wife be involved in the husband’s regeneration. The wife’s role in the
husband’s regeneration is determined by the biological necessity of their
respective spiritual form. The Doctrine of the Wife specifies the kind of
interactions that correspond to this form.
It has now
been revealed that husbands are born conjugial unwillingnesses and feel the
urge to rebel, to resist, to protest, to complain, and to withdraw. But the
wife, strengthened by the knowledge of spiritual truth and reality, will remind
him thus:
My husband,
you know you cannot save yourself by yourself. You know the Lord has appointed
me to lead you to heaven. To assist me in this task, the Lord gives me
perception to see your inmost inclinations or affections, and the Lord gives me
wisdom to defeat the pack of delusions and lies that you've surrounded yourself
with and to which you continue to hold on. You have no choice. I'm waiting. The
Lord and heaven are waiting. Get with it. Give up your pride and arrogance and
listen to me. Do as I ask. Etc.
This is the
Doctrine of the Wife--talking sense into men that they may enjoy eternal
conjugial bliss. It contains the idea that marriage is social, legal, and
religious on the outside but spiritual on the inside. The external aspects of marriage
may be called by the usual word "conjugal" but the internal spiritual
aspects are called "conjugial." The extra “i” represents the
elevation of the natural marriage into spiritual marriage. The Lord intends
that we first form, build, develop the outside conjugal aspects of marriage and
then, when this is solidly established, that we form, build, and develop the
inside conjugial aspects.
Unity is to
be achieved in both outside and inside aspects. Then the marriage is truly
conjugial, blessed, and eternal. But the fact is that
external unity can be achieved and then never go on to internal unity.
Spiritually this is a disaster. Husband and wife are then on their own in
regeneration, like single men and women. This is important to remember when a
woman feels discouragement because her husband resists the work it takes to
achieve inner unity. All is not lost for her, and though it's not possible to
know this fully in advance, she can trust that the Lord will provide her with
her true soul mate in the afterlife. A wife ceaselessly and courageously
continues her efforts to unite herself to her husband, externally and
internally, despite all his efforts to discourage and resist her. By doing this
she makes it possible for the Lord to unconsciously prepare her conjugial mind
from within in such a way that she in the afterlife can conjoin with a suitable
man also prepared for her by the Lord.
10. Inventory Of Confessions For Husbands
To shun evils is to
do goods (AE 803)
The
Writings teach that “All of us are born with a tendency to every kind of evil,
and if we do not partially remove evils by repentance, we remain subject to
them, and if so cannot be saved.” (TCR 520) The Writings also teach "A
mere verbal confession that one is a sinner is not repentance." (TCR 516). In order to repent and reform we must become
conscious of each evil trait in our character in a specific way. This is the
purpose of the inventory of evils inspired by the Doctrine of the Wife. The
inventory is something we need to keep track of for ourselves. A public
confession to anyone but one’s wife is not a requirement for repentance and
regeneration. But because we don’t want to publicly discuss our evils of daily
life is not a reason for not becoming aware of them ourselves in an objective
way by self-witnessing and monitoring our moment by moment willing and thinking
all day long. This kind of self-awareness takes practice to perform effectively
just like any other discipline or task that you learn to do well. First, can
you see yourself making this kind of confession to the Lord, to yourself, and
to your spouse?
I husband,
will circle the items that constitute my confession, which is that I have been
engaging in these lowly acts on a regular basis and that now I wish to stop, by
first, recognizing my brutishness, and second, holding it in aversion for the
sake of the Lord and a heavenly life with my wife. One way I can show my honest
intention is to print out the list with the circled items and to ask my wife to
help me fill in what I have left out.
I also
realize that it's not up to me to tell her to fill out a similar list for
herself because our situations are not parallel, and for me to ask her to do
that would be insulting her and thus contrary to the intent of this confession.
I also
dedicate myself to maintaining these lists up to date so that I will write all
those additional items that do not yet appear, but of which I'm guilty and
become aware of.
In all this
I realize that though I must do this as-of self, the power for my success is
solely the Lord’s. I acknowledge that the removal of these evils is not
something I do on my own and alone. Angles and spirits are present and
intimately involved in every detail. The Lord manages and supervises this
process in its every detail.
Now take a
look at the list. It can be considered a behavioral Inventory of Confessions
for husbands. You might like to adjust the style and particular content to fit
your actuality. These items are for the most part the things I have noticed in
myself, after much help and insistence from my wife. A few were added from
other husbands who wrote to me. I numbered them for easy reference but I have
not tried to order them or group them—though that might be a beneficial task as
it increases consciousness of the inner affections that maintain these outward
behaviors of conjugial evil, both inherited and acquired.
1. I
upset her by raising a topic at the wrong time
2. In
our conversations, I initiate most of the topics
3. When
we talk, I pursue my perspective on the topic rather than hers
4. When
I get upset in our exchanges, I raise my voice and put on a stern face
5. When
I'm under stress, I don't mind taking it out on her
6. When
I'm very angry, my body assumes a threatening posture towards her
7. When
I feel that she is driving me nuts, I stay away from her
8. When
I think she is not paying attention, I punish her by making her feel bad
9. When
I feel nagged, I think it's OK not to answer her
10. If
in a discussion, I feel that she is getting irrational, I put her down in my
mind
11. If
I get annoyed at her, I don't mind showing it
12. I
refuse to take responsibility for her bad feelings
13. I
criticize her when I feel she deserves it
14. I
hate it when she pouts because of something insignificant I did to her
15. I
hate it the way she keeps bugging me when I won't do something her way
16. Sometimes
I think she is a bit lazy
17. I
think she tends to deliberately exaggerate our difficulties
18. I
often think it's unfair the way she mostly wants things her way
19. When
things get impossible with her, I just walk off
20. When
she leaves or comes home, she wants me to make a big fuss over her, and I hate
it
21. When
she has PMS, I try to stay out of her way
22. I
don't mind embarrassing her in public if she gets on my nerves
23. When
I drive, I don't tolerate her telling me what to do
24. I
put my loyalty for our children ahead of my loyalty for her
25. I
show my impatience when I am shopping with her and thinking she is taking too
long
26. When
I get mad at her, I stay mad longer than a few minutes
27. When
I make her cry, I wait more than five minutes to come to her rescue
28. I
let weeks go by without making her dance with me even though I know she wants
to
29. I
let days go by without giving her a shoulder and neck rub even though she would
want one
30. I
let a whole day go by without giving her at least one kiss or hug
31. I
often change topics without satisfying her
32. I
frequently conveniently forget something I agreed to do
33. I
neglect her and exploit her in many different ways
34. I
betray her in my mind by ridiculing her, belittling her, saying No to her
35. I
try to keep certain information about myself from her so she won't be able to
get to me by using it to pressure or fight me
36. I
retaliate when she's just doing her conjugial job pointing to my resistances
and lack of cooperation in conjugial unity
37. I
flatulate at my pleasure without consideration for her feelings or
sensibilities
38. I
belch aloud in her presence without excusing myself, acting like a savage
39. I
expose her to my bad breath
40. I
expose her to my body’s unpleasant acrid odors from sweating and not washing
41. I
often present my scratchy unshaven face and irritate her skin and her sense of
grace
42. I
touch her with dirty finger nails
43. I
let my nose and ear hair grow until they show despite her protest
44. I
walk around the house in dirty shorts and sneakers, not caring about what it
looks to her
45. I
leave my clothes lying around for her to pick up
46. I
never pick up after her, expecting her to do that
47. I
don't launder my dirty clothes and often don't bother thanking her for doing it
for me
48. I
am mostly oblivious to washing dirty dishes, leaving the kitchen chores to her
49. I
expect her to take care of the bills and then criticize her if she makes a
mistake or is late
50. I
don't call her when I'm late coming home, ignoring her fears and insecurity
51. I
neglect to express my appreciation for a thousand little kindnesses she does
for me all day long
52. I
don't mind staring at other women when she is with me, and I don't hide it from
her (or else: and I hide from her).
53. I
stare at other women when she is not with me, without trying to remind myself
that my wife wouldn’t like that
54. I'm
not upset if I forget to do something I promised her, and I don't try to own up
to my mistake and make her feel better about it
55. I
fail to give her dependable and regular sexual satisfaction due to my
incompetence
56. I
fail to massage her body every day, though she likes it, needs it, and feels it
as closeness
57. I
sometimes criticize her body parts
58. I
fail to play with her hair, though she told me many
times she likes that and makes her feel secure
59. I
often fail to comment appropriately on her appearance, clothes, jewelry
60. I
sometimes criticize her looks
61. I
make her wait when she calls me to the meal table
62. I
make her late when she's anxious to get there on time
63. I
often enter a room where she is and do not first acknowledge her presence
64. I
often show insufficient enthusiasm for her proposals, hints, plans
65. I
lie to her when I decide it's OK to do that
66. I
let her believe a lie sometimes to avoid an argument
67. I
don't laugh at her jokes or sense of humor
68. I
have not bothered to learn how to walk with her without bumping into her
69. I
have not bothered to learn how to drive without making her anxious about my
driving
70. I
have not bothered to learn how to find something at home without asking her
(e.g., a light bulb, a battery, a clean bed sheet, a tax record, etc.)
71. I
have not bothered to learn how to buy her tampons without having to ask her the
size
72. I
have not bothered to remember what her doctor's name is and what medicines she
takes
73. I
don't feel responsible for running out of things at house parties--that's her
problem
74. I
don't feel responsible for getting us to a social engagement on time
75. I
don't feel responsible for keeping up appropriate social appearances and do all
the expected rituals fro family and friends, like birthdays etc.--that's her
job
76. I
don't feel responsible for planning and preparing for a party we throw--that's
her job
77. I
don't feel responsible for taking care of Christmas gifts--that's her job
78. I
don't feel responsible for taking the cats to the vets for their shots, but I
complain when she doesn't
79. I
make her responsible for overdrawing our checking account
80. I
don't feel responsible for taking our clothes to the cleaners
81. I
sometimes forget our anniversary date
82. I
often discount what she says and perceives, even though I know from the
Doctrine of the Wife that she speaks and perceives from the Lord
83. I
raise my voice above hers to force her to relinquish her demand
84. I
am task-involved in discussing something with her, and pay little attention to
how she feels during the discussion, simply ignoring her frustration and
suffering
85. I
often ignore where a discussion was left off, so she gets the feeling it's
hopeless because there is no cumulative progress--so she has to start from
scratch each time
86. I
often forget things that are important to her that she doesn't want me to
forget. Further, I don't act like my forgetting is a big deal and I act like
she is a stickler or nag because she insists on remembering that stuff
87. I
don't try to find out what she thinks about many things because I don't make
the effort to find out, so that she is left with the injurious feeling that I
don't care about her and that I'm not interested in her
88. I
raise my voice at her and intimidate her physically (like throwing something,
banging on something, or grabbing her with force, etc.) so that she feels fear
from me as if I were her father or a stranger
89. I
criticize her, which makes her feel that I do not like her
90. I
don't always help her when she needs help, thus letting her figure it out for
herself--which gives her the feeling of not having a friend
91. I
have sex with her without making up for my prior insults or quarrels--this
makes her feel like a slut, but I act like it's not a big deal
92. I
use my male prerogatives to satisfy myself in sex without wanting to know or
making the effort to find out, whether she has been satisfied
93. I
rebel against her desire to know my every move, and don't tell her details
about my schedule, so she has to wonder where I am and when I'm coming home.
And worse: sometimes lying about what I do or covering it up because I want to
retain my independence, or because I decided it's not her role to keep tabs on
my comings and goings.
94. I
resent her for wanting to micro-manage my time or activities and, going along
with that resentment instead of fighting it as illegitimate and evil
95. I
involve myself with activities that exclude her automatically so she feels like
her connection to me is broken, e.g., having a long conversation with an
ex-girl friend; going to a bar with the boys and spending time there, instead
of coming home to her; spending a lot of time at some hobby in which she cannot
participate or in which I don't want her to participate; etc. etc.
96. I
embarrass her in public, or to her friends or company, or to the children;
making a scene and spoiling the decorum and mood she wants to set or maintain
97. I
keep away from her at parties and gatherings, sticking with the men, avoiding
the women's talk as disinteresting; or, if participating, then taking over and
dominating the conversation or focus
98. I
don't mind letting a whole day go by without complementing her or her
appearance or her work; taking her for granted, and making her feel that I'm
taking her for granted instead of treating her like I think she is special,
which is what she wants and needs
99. I
relentlessly pursue my topic, insisting on my opinion or judgment, suffocating
her with my dominating power and rigidity and selfishness
100. Sometimes
I act like I don't want to have sex when she hints at it
101. I
refuse to give her veto power over what I want to wear, then embarrassing her
by what I wear as if that decision is mine entirely
102. I
act disinterested in her aesthetic side so she ends up feeling neglected and
needing friends who will give her attention
103. I
leave wet towels in the bathroom for her to pick up, like she were my slave,
and then not acknowledging her charitable deed on my behalf
104. I
jab my fingers into my wife's ribs, and claim I'm just tickling, when really
it's to make her flinch and struggle to pull away—a kind of obnoxious game
violence
105. I
procrastinate in self-destructive ways (e.g. not getting forms filled out by a
deadline, not taking care of needed repairs), then act like she's responsible
for the remedies to the situation (like rushing to the post office for me, or
making the phone calls to service people)
106. (add your own)
You can see
from the inventory of evils that the items are pretty universal and apply to
every husband. You can also see that they are very specific and recur many
times in the course of a single day. You can also see that there are thousands
more that have not been written down. Many additional items are mentioned or
described in Section 1 above and in the sections on disciplines below.
11. Six-Step
Process For Removing
Our Evils
The
sequence of our moment to moment behaviors is made of three parallel or
“simultaneous” levels integrated into a smooth flow: the motive, the reasoning,
and the body’s actions. The motive is affective and resides in the will. The
reasoning is cognitive and resides in the understanding. The body’s actions is sensorimotor and physical. Every single
sensorimotor act is the effect, while the cause is the reasoning that is
selected and driven by the motive. This threefold integration of the natural
mind is like the threefold integration of the body, which corresponds to it:
the heart and the circulation of the blood (affective; the will); the lungs and
the respiratory system (cognitive; the understanding); and, the nervous system
(sensory and motor activities). Clearly then, as we perform one of the
behaviors on the inventory of evils, it is a threefold integration that allows
us to perform it: our anti-conjugial motive or affection selects and drives the
negative thinking about our wife, and the two acting to trigger the outward
nasty, hurtful, and insensitive behavior. When we think of this integration we
cannot dismiss these behaviors as relatively unimportant, due to family or
cultural habits, and other such excuses.
Many
believe that man is purified from evils by merely believing what the Church
teaches; some, that man is purified by doing good; others, that it is by
knowing, speaking and teaching such things as pertain to the Church; others, by
reading the Word and books of piety; others, by attending churches, listening
to sermons, and especially by approaching the Holy Supper; others, by
renouncing the world and devoting oneself to piety; and others, by confessing
oneself guilty of sins of all kinds; and so on.
Nevertheless,
man is in no wise purified by all these works unless he examines himself,
recognizes his sins, acknowledges them, condemns himself for them and does the
work of repentance by desisting from them; and unless he does all these things
as of himself but still in acknowledgment from the heart that he does them from
the Lord.
[2] Until
he does these things, the actions just mentioned avail nothing, for they are
merit-seeking or hypocritical; and those who do them appear in heaven in the
sight of angels like beautiful courtesans giving forth the offensive odor of
their defilement; or like ill-favored women made to appear handsome by the
application of paint; or like clowns and actors wearing masks on the stage; or
like apes in human clothing.
When,
however, men have removed their evils then the actions mentioned above are acts
of their love, and they appear as beautiful men in heaven in the sight of
angels and as their associates and companions. (DP 121)
Note well
what the Lord is telling us here. Our evils cannot be removed unless we go
through this sequence:
Examining the sequence of our daily willing
and thinking
Identifying the evil behaviors at all three
levels—what we will as our affections, what we think in our understanding, and
what we execute in our outward acts
Acknowledging that if we don’t stop doing them,
we go to hell (“condemning” oneself)
Repenting so that we can rationally see that
they are selfish and evil
Desisting so that we no longer do them—in our
willing, in our understanding, and in our outward acts
Knowing that the power to desist is from
the Lord but that nevertheless we must struggle as-of self to bring it about
This
six-step process must consciously be practiced as a daily and hourly
discipline. If this seems exaggerated to you, ask yourself, what then is going
to get rid of these evils in you? Are you relying on what the first paragraph
says in the quoted passage above? Which lists these things:
Being
purified from evils by merely believing what the Church teaches
Being
purified by doing good things (as long as the good things outweigh the bad
things)
Being
purified by knowing, speaking and teaching things that pertain to the Church
Being
purified by reading the Writings and books of piety
Being
purified by worship in the Church (listening to sermons and approaching the
Holy Supper)
Being
purified by confessing oneself guilty of sins of all kinds
These are
not going to get rid of your evils or neutralize them somehow. Only cooperation
as-of self in getting rid of them will achieve the process, and without
undergoing this process there can be no salvation and life in heaven. There are
no exceptions! And how can the process go on if you don’t begin it and get it going?
And is it not a most dangerous evil to postpone the beginning of it? Clearly
then, you must make the decision to begin today, now at this hour!
He who
leads a life of piety, and not at the same time a life of charity, does not
worship God. It is true, he thinks of God, yet he does not think from God, but
from himself; for he constantly thinks of himself, and not at all of the neighbour (NJHD 124)
Believing
that you do not need to rid yourself of these evils in relation to your wife is
called here a life of piety that is not at the same time in a life of charity.
For charity to your neighbor refers to conjugial love to your wife, since this
is the love that is to be placed above all other loves (xx).
God is
loved when a man lives according to His commandments; and the neighbour is
loved, when a man performs uses. In order therefore that a man may receive the
life of heaven it is absolutely necessary that he live in the world, and engage
in its various duties and vocations. (NJHD 126)
I did not
struggle with my daily evils for many years. When my wife brought them forward
I told her no one is perfect. When she asked me whether I think I can go to
heaven with them, I replied that eventually I will get rid of them. When she
pointed out that I do not know how long I have on this earth, I became anxious,
but I still wanted to postpone getting rid of them. It was too much work, too
soon, I felt. I can take it little by little, with more comfort, so the process
doesn’t interfere with my pious activities studying the Writings and writing
about it. But the passage above, and many others like it, should have told me
that I do not love the Lord unless I obey His Commandments, and He commanded
that we as-of self get rid of our evils so that we may be regenerated. And
neither did I love my wife who is my neighbor in the house because I was
willing to subject her to continued hurt from my evils. And neither did I love
uses because loving self, willing to live with one’s evil affections, is not a
use but contrary to use.
Hereditary
evil derives its origin from everyone's parents and parents' parents,
or from grandparents and ancestors successively. Every evil which they have
acquired by actual life, even so that by frequent use or habit it has become
like a nature, is derived into the children, and becomes hereditary to them,
together with that which had been implanted in the parents from grandparents
and ancestors. The hereditary evil from the father is more inward, and the
hereditary evil from the mother is more outward. The former cannot be easily
rooted out, but the latter can. When man is being regenerated, the hereditary
evil enrooted from his nearest parents is plucked up by the roots; but with
those who are not being regenerated, or who cannot be regenerated, it remains.
(AC 4317)
We cannot
be regenerated in the abstract or in the general. Only in the
particular. And if we are regenerated in the particular, then we will
have been regenerated in the general. Every particular evil in our affections
is a spiritual fiber that lives on forever, unless rooted out by the Lord. And
this rooting out or purification process is performed by the Lord—but only to
the extent we cooperate, that is, we make lists of our evils, monitor their
occurrence, and make a conscious effort to desist from it because it is
contrary to the heavenly mind we must have to live in heaven. We have numerous
such evils that we inherit and many more that we add prior to our reformation
when we lead life in spiritual unconsciousness. Since there are these many
thousands of evil affections we hold on to and enjoy, it takes years and years
to go through them one by one. Clearly we cannot afford to postpone the process
for one more day. And it is begun, we cannot afford to waste a single day in
which we do not identify a bunch of them, and struggle consciously against
them, thanking the Lord for supplying the power. And He is always willing, if
only we are.
But what
hereditary evil is, few know; it is believed to consist in doing evil; but it
consists in willing and hence thinking evil; hereditary evil being in the will
itself and in the thought thence derived; and being the very conatus or
endeavor that is therein, and which adjoins itself even when the man is doing
what is good. It is known by the delight that is felt when evil befalls
another. This root lies deeply hidden, for the very inward form that receives
from heaven (that is, through heaven from the Lord) what is good and true, is
depraved, and so to speak, distorted; so that when good and truth flow in from
the Lord, they are either reflected, or perverted, or suffocated. (AC 4317:[5])
Once again
you can see from this passage that doing evil is the resultant effect of
willing evil and the thinking derived from it. And willing evil is a love of
the infernal or lust. It is something delightful to us. And note this very
important statement: that the evil love in our willing “adjoins itself” to the
good we are also willing, and therefore, corrupts it. The good we are doing,
and the uses we are engaged in, are not genuine good because the evil we are
also permitting in us, remains and corrupts
unconsciously. Therefore we have no choice but to monitor our willing and
thinking hour by hour and to go through the sex-step process outlined above.
12. The
Marriage Of Good And
Truth
Regeneration is the psychobiological
activity of the Lord in our mind by which He conjoins His good to the truth we
take in from His Word. When good is conjoined to truth in our mind, it is called a “marriage,”
as in this passage:
There is,
however, a marriage of good and truth in the cause, and there is a marriage of
good and truth from the cause in the effect. The marriage of good and truth in
the cause is a marriage of the will and the understanding, that is, of love and
wisdom.
There is
such a marriage in everything that a man wills and thinks, and in his
consequent conclusions and purposes.
This
marriage enters into the effect and, indeed, produces it; but in the process
good and truth appear to be distinct, because what is simultaneous then
produces what is successive. For instance, when a man wills and thinks about
being fed, clothed, having a dwelling place, conducting any business,
performing any work, or engaging in social intercourse, he first wills and
thinks about these things, or forms his conclusions and purposes,
simultaneously; but when he has reduced into effects what he has willed and
thought, the one follows after the other; nevertheless, they continue to make
one in his will and thought.
In these
effects, uses pertain to love or good, while the means employed to furnish the
uses pertain to the understanding or to truth. Anyone may confirm these general
truths by particular illustrations, provided he clearly perceives what has
relation to the good of love and what to the truth of wisdom, and also how
these are related in the cause and also in the effect. (DP 12)
This says
that the threefold integration of our behavior is called by the Lord a
“marriage.” The outward act involving the physical body is nothing but an
automatic effect of the marriage of our will with the understanding. In other
words, every act, at both the macro and micro levels, is the child or offspring
of our willing and thinking. This is the marriage the Lord is talking about to
us. The Lord’s intent is to create a celestial marriage in our mind in order
that we may become angels—for this is His utmost desire, as He often reveals it
in all Three Testaments of His Word. But in the Third Testament of His Second
Coming He can at last reveal the rational principles by which He governs the
universe and our regeneration. And so it has been amply shown in many places in
the Writings that affections in our will remain forever because they are
spiritual fibers, and as such immortal and indestructible. And yet the Lord has
provided that He can uproot them, lay them aside so they can have no influence
on the new will He gives us. But this requires our active and willing
cooperation, and He has explained in the Writings what this cooperation must
consist of.
We have
been discussing this cooperation process throughout this book, and especially
in Volume 2. The Lord calls it a marriage between the good He gives us in our
new will and the truth we acquire in our understanding from His Word, in the
First Education of the letter, and then in the Second Education of the spirit,
when we undergo reformation in adult life (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]). Now
we can understand this process at first in the general only, and then after
regeneration is on its way, we can understand it in a particular way. And this
particular understanding refers to the thousands of acts of willing and
thinking we do in an hour and in a day. These particular acts must be witnessed
and condemned, ad discussed above. The self-witnessing of our willing and
thinking is our reformation and our regeneration, therefore our enlightenment
and salvation, but only when put up the inner struggle to inhibit them, to
desist from willing and thinking all the old things that must be uprooted by
the Lord. And He does it to the extent that we cooperate willingly and
effectively, that is, sincerely.
The
inventory of evils in our willing and thinking can only be identified and built
up when we monitor our willing and thinking all day long, hour by hour. In the
Lord’s providence, to which I can testify, it is a task that is most arduous at
first, but after just a few years of practice, or three to four thousand days,
it no longer feels arduous, and then we bask in the bliss of understanding the
Lord’s Word that His Yoke is easy (xx). And we continue our struggle until the
end, but we have our love in it.
… the Lord continually flows in with man with good, and in
good with truth; but man either receives or does not receive; if he receives,
it is well with him; but if he does not receive, it is ill with him. If when he
does not receive he feels some anxiety (here meant by "distress of
soul"), there is hope that be may be reformed; but if he has no feeling of
anxiety the hope vanishes.
With every
man there are two spirits from hell, and two angels from heaven; for man being
born in sins cannot possibly live unless on one side he communicates with hell,
and on the other with heaven; all his life is thence.
When man is
grown up and begins to rule himself from himself, that is, when he seems to
himself to will and to act from his own judgment, and to think and to conclude
concerning the things of faith from his own understanding, if he then betakes
himself to evils, the two spirits from hell draw near, and the two angels from
heaven withdraw a little; but if he betakes himself to good, the two angels
from heaven draw near, and the two spirits from hell are removed.
[2] If
therefore when a man betakes himself to evils, as is the case with many in
youth, he feels any anxiety when he reflects upon his having done what is evil,
it is a sign that he will still receive influx through the angels from heaven,
and it is also a sign that he will afterward suffer himself to be reformed; but
if when he reflects upon his having done what is evil, he has no anxious
feeling, it is a sign that he is no longer willing to receive influx through
the angels from heaven, and it is also a sign that he will not afterward suffer
himself to be reformed.
… for with those who are then in anxiety there is an internal
acknowledgment of evil, which when recalled by the Lord becomes confession, and
finally repentance. (AC 5470)
You can
clearly see from this passage that reformation occurs only in adult life, and
only if all along, in our youth, we allowed our conscience to survive. For there are many who squelch, subdue, and eventually silence all
conscience within them from the Lord. This is the anxiety we feel when
we observe our evil willing and thinking. The anxiety is the consequence of
allowing the angels to stay near us in our decisions and reflections. In this
way we avoid giving ourselves totally over to the evil spirits and creating a
permanent association with hell that later remains. The passage also shows that reformation in
adult life depends on “the things of faith in the understanding,” which means,
the Doctrine we take up from the literal of the Writings. This Doctrine in the
understanding then is made spiritual by the Lord who opens our spiritual mind
to the extent that we cooperate. The passage also shows how important it is to
maintain a good education and social atmosphere for the youth who are in our
charge. This means teaching them about how to resist the nonduality of culture
and science in their social environment.
It is known
that faith from love is the essential means of salvation, and thus is the
principle of the doctrine of the church; but since it is important to know how
a man can be in such enlightenment as to learn the truths that must constitute
his faith and in such affection as to do the goods that must constitute his
love, and thus can know whether his faith is a belief in truth and his love a
love of good, this shall be told in its proper order, as follows: (AE 803)
This
passage (more is quoted below) outlines the details of how we can cooperate in
our regeneration by the Lord, for without this cooperation the Lord cannot
regenerate. Note that we cannot be regenerated without knowing spiritual truths
by enlightenment from the Lord. We cannot obtain spiritual truths from self or
from the literal of the Writings, as shown in several places above. Spiritual
truths only come to us by means of enlightenment from the Lord when we read the
Writings and apply its Doctrine to our willing and thinking. Note also that we
cannot cooperate in our regeneration by means of the spiritual truths we
acquire but only by means of the affections we have for them. When we have an
affection or love for the spiritual truths that we receive by enlightenment,
then and only then, do we have the motive “to do the goods that must constitute
our love.”
13. Shunning
Sins, Doing Good, And Performing
Uses
How do we
know whether the affection we have for doing good is
genuine, that is from the Lord and not from self? For both are possible! We can
have a love for doing good to others and for
performing uses that is from self, not from the Lord. That is, we can love to
do good and perform uses for selfish reasons such as
reputation, gain, or merit. This is not from the Lord, hence its is not doing good actually, and it is not performing uses actually. Hence
the Lord is giving us methods by which to know ourselves, whether we do good and perform uses form self or from Him. Several are
outlined in the continuation of the passage (AE 803). The numbers are in the
original.
(1) Let him
read the Word every day, one or two chapters, and learn from a master and from
preachings the dogmas of his religion … and that the Lord is the God of heaven
and earth, … that the Word is holy, that there is a
heaven and a hell, and that there is a life after death. (AE 803)
For the
(2) Let him
learn from the Word, from a master, and from preachings, what works are sins,
and that they are especially adulteries, thefts, murders, false witness, and
the others mentioned in the Decalogue; likewise that lascivious and obscene
thoughts are also adulteries, that frauds and illicit gains are also thefts,
that hatred and revenge are also murders, and that lies and blasphemies are
also false witness; and so on. Let him learn all these things from childhood to
youth. (AE 803)
This
specifies what we are to learn in our First Education about the literal of the
Writings: namely: which of our loves and deeds are sins. They include outward
acts (“thefts, murders, false witness”), acts of thinking something
(“lascivious and obscene thoughts”), and acts of loving something (“hatred and
revenge”). Sins are therefore in our willing, in our thinking, and in our
outward acts.
(3) When
man begins to think for himself, which is the case after he has grown up, it
must be to him the first and chief thing to refrain from doing evils for the
reason that they are sins against the Word, thus against God, and for the
reason that if he does them he will gain, not life eternal, but hell; and
afterwards as he grows up and becomes old he must shun them as damned, and must
turn away from them in thought and intention. (AE 803)
Note that
we don’t begin to think from ourself until young adulthood when we are
considered “grown up”—in today’s times and culture this means in our late
twenties and early thirties. Even if you are born in the
But in
order to so refrain from them and shun and turn away from them, he must pray to
the Lord for help. The sins he must refrain from and must shun and turn away
from are chiefly adulteries, frauds, illicit gains, hatreds, revenges, lies,
blasphemies, and elation of mind. (AE 803)
Note that
we must acknowledge that it is the Lord who is withholding us from evils but
that we are to struggle as-of self to do this. The Lord cannot remove our evils
unless we struggle as-of self to do this. Note also that these evils are in our
behaviors and acts at all three levels, outward and inward. To will evil is an
act. To think something obscene is an act. These inward acts are just as
necessary to remove as the outward act. Generally in society, from a social and
legal point of view, outward acts are more important to regulate, while inward
acts are left to one’s freedom. But spiritually, the reverse is true. Inward
acts are more important because the rule over the outward acts. “Hatreds” are
acts of hating; blasphemies can be outward or inward acts, or both. Adulteries
can be merely cognitive acts, like enjoying watching obscene movies or enjoying
daydreaming about sexual acts that are forbidden or scandalous when performed
outwardly. Illicit gains include the thought of cheating but not doing it out
of fear of repercussions. Note that it is
not the occurrence of these thoughts or feelings that is
the sin, but our approving of them, that is, not shunning them.
(4) So far
as man detests these evils because they are opposed to the Word, and thence
opposed to God, so far there is granted him communication with the Lord, and conjunction is effected with heaven. (AE 803)
Conjunction
with heaven and the Lord opens our spiritual mind by which we are regenerated.
Note that this conjunction or communication only takes place when we detest our
evils of willing and thinking. And further, to detest them because they are
against the Writings, therefore against the Lord Himself.
For the
Lord enters, and with the Lord heaven enters, as sins are removed; since these
and their falsities are the sole hindrances. The reason is because man has been
placed in the midst between heaven and hell, wherefore hell acts from the one
side, and heaven from the other; therefore so far as evils that are from hell
are removed, so far goods from heaven enter; for the Lord says:
Behold I
stand at the door and knock; if anyone hear and open the door, I will come in
to him (Rev. 3:20).
(AE 803)
The Lord
desires nothing more than to grant us conjunction with Himself
and heaven. But it says that sins hinder. He cannot enter until He removes our
sins, and He cannot remove our sins until we allow it, for this is given to us
by creation. Without this freedom we have of not allowing the Lord to remove
our sins, we could never be regenerated and saved (xx). And so the Lord
guarantees that we retain this spiritual freedom forever. Our spiritual freedom
is achieved not from ourselves, but solely from being in balance between good
forces from the angels and evil forces from the devils with which everyone is
associated by the Lord so that they may have freedom of choice. And when sins
are removed, “goods from heaven enter.” This refers to our new willing and
thinking after reformation.
But if man
refrains from doing these evils for any other reason than because they are
sins, and are opposed to the Word and because thence to God, no conjunction of
heaven with him is effected, because his refraining is from self, and not from
the Lord. The Lord is in the Word, even so that He is called the Word (John
1:1-4), because the Word is from Him; consequently the conjunction of heaven
with the man of the church is by means of the Word, as may be seen in the work
on Heaven and Hell ... (AE 803)
By means of
the Writings we have conjunction with the Lord because He is His Own Word and
Divine Truth. This conjunction is only in proportion to sins being removed by
means of the spiritual truths of doctrine from the Writings. If we only have
the literal truths of the Writings, the Lord cannot enter, cannot remove sins,
cannot regenerate us and save us. And the
Lord gives us the spiritual truths within the letter to the extent that we
detest our sins because they are contrary to the literal of the Writings.
(5) So far, then, as man detests these sins so far good
affections enter. Then so far as he detests adulteries so far chastity enters;
so far as he detests frauds and unlawful gains so far sincerity and justice
enter; so far as he detests hatred and revenge so far charity enters; so far as
he detests lies and blasphemies so far truth enters; and so far as he detests
elation of mind so far humility before God and love of the neighbor as oneself
enter; and so on. From this it follows that to shun evils is to do goods. (AE
803)
14. To Detest Evils And Sins
To shun the
evils within our willing and thinking is to detest them. To detest our evils is
to do good from the Lord. To do good from the Lord is to be saved. Everything about our regeneration depends
therefore on our willingness to detest our evils. This willingness is at
first extremely difficult to muster because we love our sins and we are
unwilling to detest them. Hence we experience spiritual temptations which are
states of despair and inward suffering and dread. The inward pain is felt on
account of our realization that we must give up our delights of sin because
they are contrary to heaven. It appears to us in those states that we are going
to lose all the value of living that makes it worthwhile. But after the
temptation process is over, the Lord gives us inward peace (xx) and the
strength to detest our sins. Nor can this be accomplished generally, once and
for all initiation or baptism, but gradually over time, after many many
temptations in everyday situations over and over again, each time with a slight
but significant variation. This is what we must be willing to go through.
(6) So far
as a man is in these good affections he is led by the Lord and not by self; and
so far as he acts from them so far he does what is good, because he does this
from the Lord and not from self; and then he acts from chastity, from sincerity
and justice, from charity, from truth, in humility before God; and from these
no one can act from self. (AE 803)
Our goal in
regeneration is to lose self and gain the Lord! And when we have gained the
Lord we have immeasurable improved our condition of life, our happiness, our
fulfillment, as well as the happiness of others who benefit from our love of
uses, and especially our wife, for the greatest of all uses and all happinesses
is the use of conjugial union. Such are we from creation, that we complete
ourselves as perfect human beings in our heaven, in the conjugial union, while
all else is meager in comparison to this human state.
(7) The
spiritual affections that are granted by the Lord to him who is in them and who
acts from them, are the affection of knowing and understanding the truths and
goods of heaven and the church, together with the affection of willing and
doing them; also the affection of combating with zeal against falsities and
evils and dispersing them, both with himself and with others. From this man has
faith and love, and from this he has intelligence and wisdom. (AE 803)
Where do we
get intelligence and wisdom, the two things men long for and in which they feel
their fullness of being? This passage tells us that it is from faith and love
that we get intelligence and wisdom. If we pursue intelligence and wisdom from
our self-intelligence and self-motivation, we only get stupidity and
foolishness, no matter how learned and famous we become in our generation. But
if we pursue faith and love, then we get intelligence and wisdom. And what is
faith and love that we are to pursue? How do we pursue them? It says in the
passage that we get faith and love by doing these two things: (1) “combating
with zeal” the many evil affections in our will; (2)
acquiring Doctrine from the Writings in our understanding (“truths and goods of
heaven”) to guide and direct our combats against our evil affections. From
these two actions we have faith and love that gives us the intelligence and
wisdom that is the fullness of our being as a man.
(8) Thus
and in no other way is man reformed; and so far as he knows and believes
truths, and wills and does them, so far is he regenerated, and from natural
becomes spiritual. The like is true of his faith and his love. (AE 803)
The faith
and love we have from our willingness to undergo reformation and regeneration,
is a spiritual faith and a spiritual love. These two things cannot exist in the
natural mind. The spiritual mind must first be opened by the Lord so that
spiritual faith and love can exist within us, within our natural mind that is
otherwise empty and infernal. We become spiritual when our spiritual mind is
opened by the Lord. This is a psychobiological process of growing spiritual
fibers that coil in a special way and form our spiritual-body which we need to
live in heaven (xx). There is no other way that the Lord has provided for our
regeneration. He uproots the old evil affections in proportion to how much new
spiritual fiber we allow Him to grow in us (xx). If the Lord should implant
spiritual fibers at a greater rate than He uproots the old depraved fibers,
what do you think would happen? We would suffer the agony of death and be
destroyed forever. Therefore it says that we are regenerated “so far as we know
and believe truths.” To “know truths” refers to our study of the Writings and
extracting Doctrine for ourselves. To “believe truths” refers to compelling
ourselves in our willing and thinking all day long, to conform to the Doctrine
in our understanding.
[3] If
evils have not been removed because they are sins nothing that a man thinks,
speaks, wills, and does, is good or true before God, however it may appear as
if good and true before the world. The reason is that they are not from the
Lord but from man, since it is the love of the man and of the world from which
they are, and which is in them. Most people at this day believe that they will
come into heaven if they have faith, live piously, and do goods; and yet they
do not turn away from evils because they are sins, consequently they either do
them or believe them to be allowable; and those who believe them to be
allowable do them when opportunity is given. (AE 803)
This
passage refers to a most dangerous and pernicious nonduality that can destroy
our regeneration and spiritual life. It is the equity model of good and evil.
It is the belief that our good traits can outweigh our bad traits, and since no
one is perfect, everybody has flaws which must hen be
balanced as against their good. In relationships this belief expresses itself
variously as “I am the way I am. Don’t try to change me. Take me as I am if you
love me. Ignore my weaknesses, focus on my strengths. Nobody is perfect. Who
can be the one to throw the first stone. Who is
blameless? Who doesn’t have faults? It’s human. Etc.”
(See the discussion on Unconditional love in Chapter 6, Section 7.) But this
and many other passages teach the contrary, that there is no compromise or
equity or balance between good and evil loves. They are in a discrete duality.
Every single evil affection must be uprooted and not a single one can be taken with us
into heaven. This can only be done when
we shun our evils as sins. Why? Because, as it says, if we shun them for
reasons of reputation, gain, or merit we shun them from self, and not from the
Lord, all things from self are infernal (xx). But when we shun our evil
affections and delights because they are sins, we shun them from the Lord since
sin is an idea that is connected directly to the Lord: we sin against Him when
we love our evil delights! And this makes His goods unavailable to us, as a
result of which we enter the life of misery from which we can never escape to
eternity.
But let
them know that their faith is not faith, that their pious things are not pious,
and that their goods are not goods; for they flow from the impurities that lie
inwardly concealed with man; and externals derive everything that they are from
internals. For the Lord says:
Thou blind
Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup and of the platter, that the
outside may become clean also (Matt.
There is no
equity in spiritual things, no continuum between evil and good, no compromise, but only absolute truth and absolute good
distinct from all evil and falsity. Religious worship and piety are nothing
when we fail to undergo reformation and then regeneration. The “inside of the
cup” refers to our evil delights and their many false beliefs. The “outside of
the cup” refers to our religious and pious behaviors, thoughts, and prayers. It
says that these are not pious and not good unless we are sincerely struggling
against our evil delights and false beliefs. “Sincerely” struggling against
them means acquiring effective techniques to combat them rather than leave it
up to circumstance, hope, promise, or wish fulfillment. It requires a conscious
focus and discipline on a daily and hourly basis to be effective and real. Do
you not agree? The shunning of our evil affections as sins against the Lord
must be a forefront activity for our day, every day, don’t you think? How else
can we get rid of each particular and specific delight and belief or idea?
There is no general forgiveness and dispensation or propitiation of our evil
attachments (xx). It’s a matter of a psychobiological gardening—the uprooting
of each bad plant and the implanting of a new plant in its place. No other
method has been provided by the Lord from creation! This He repeats to us man
times in all Three Testaments.
From this
it can now be seen that if a man were able to fulfill all things of the law, if
he should give much to the poor, if he should do good to the fatherless and the
widow, and if he should also give bread to the hungry and drink to the thirsty,
take in the strangers, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and go to them that
are bound in prison, if he should earnestly preach the Gospel, convert the
Gentiles, frequent temples, listen devoutly to preachings, observe the
sacrament of the Supper often every year, spend his time in prayer, and other
things; and his internal has not been purified from hatred and revenge, from
craftiness and malice, from insincerity and injustice, from the filthy delight
of adultery, from the love of self and the consequent love of rule, and the
pride of self-intelligence, from contempt of others in comparison with oneself,
and from the other evils and their falsities; still all these works would be
hypocritical and from the man himself, and not from the Lord. (AE 803)
The Lord
makes a wonderfully helpful list of our evil delights—the spiritual fibers He
must uproot for us, if only we Let Him. The first grouping is about religious,
pious, humanitarian, and “spiritual” behaviors that are internally hypocritical
because they depend and live from equity theory, or the cherished idea that our
good traits and deeds outweigh our bad, so that we don’t have to struggle so
hard against some of the evil delights we are unwilling to give up. This is the
first grouping of our evil affections and thoughts that lead to damnation. The
second grouping refers to the evil affections that we are unwilling to give up,
that we are willing to keep: “hatred and revenge, craftiness and malice,
insincerity and injustice, the filthy delight of adultery, the love of self and
the consequent love of rule, and the pride of self-intelligence, from contempt
of others in comparison with oneself.” Keep a list of these things and use it
to organize the inventory of evils discussed above. These are the chief enemies
of reformation and regeneration.
And yet
these same works, when the internal has been purified, are all good, because
they are from the Lord with man, and since the man is in the faith and in the
love of doing these works he will do them as a matter of course. (AE 803)
There is no
merit in doing good from the Lord. Doing good is to detest our evil affections, as discussed above.
But note that it is not possible to do good except from the Lord, which for the
This has
been proved to me by a thousand examples in the spiritual world. I have there
heard that it has been granted to many to recall the actions of their life in
the world, and to enumerate the goods they had done; but when their internal
was opened it was found to be full of every evil and the falsity therefrom; and
it was then disclosed to them that the goods they had enumerated had been done
from self, because for the sake of self and the world, and that they were full
of evils from their interiors; and on this account they appeared either as if
scorched with fire, or as if sooty. (AE 803)
The Lord
has provided through the Writings all that the
Chapter 2, Section 4
A husband possesses
elements taken from his wife, which increase his ability to receive love and
wisdom (CL 199)
4. The surrendered wife vs. the surrendered husband
The
Doctrine of the Wife is a religious and spiritual discipline for husbands. The
wife has no actual power to control her husband. The main principle in the
doctrine of the Wife is Rule 1:
RULE 1:
The first and only rule is that
husbands are to learn to love acting from the wife, more than from self.
(See
Chapter 9, Sections 3 and 4 for more discussion on Rule 1)
The
initiative here is in the husband. It his voluntary decision to learn a new
thing: to learn to love acting from his wife more than from himself. What
happens when he does not take this initiative and actually opposes it
ferociously? After all, this is the most common scenario with husbands: they
oppose their own reformation, and by this, they oppose their wife’s desires and
requests regarding his conduct and personality. If the wife then continues to
take the initiative, the husband knocks her down, and the marriage turns into a
hell. This is the theme of a new movement among wives started by Laura Doyle
through her book known as “The
Surrendered Wife.”
Here are
excerpts from the Introduction of the book:
Why Would a Woman Surrender?
When I was newly married at 22, I had no idea I would ever
call myself a surrendered wife. At that time, I would have been repulsed by the
whole idea.
(…)
At first I treated him with respect and kindness because I
was so impressed with him. Then, as his imperfections grew more familiar and
glaring, I began correcting him as a way of trying to help him improve. From my
point of view, if he would just be more ambitious at work, more romantic at
home and clean up after himself, everything would be fine. I told him as much.
Needless to say, he didn't respond well to this. In fact,
the more I tried to control him, the more strained things got. While my
intentions were good, I was clearly on the road to marital hell.
(…)
None of us feels good about
ourselves when we're nagging, critical or controlling. I certainly didn't. The
tone of my voice alone would make me cringe with self-recrimination. Through
surrendering, you will find the courage to gradually stop indulging in these
unpleasant behaviors and replace them with dignified ones.
(…)
There was no single moment when the
surrendered light bulb went off in my head. Instead, I changed little by
little. I experimented, first by keeping my mouth shut and sometimes even my
eyes when John drove. When we arrived in one piece, I decided that I would
always trust him behind the wheel, no matter how strong my urge to control.
(…)
We were intimate again. Instead of
keeping a running list of complaints about how childish and irresponsible he
was, I felt genuine gratitude and affection for John. We were sharing our
responsibilities without blame or resentment. Instead of bickering all the
time, we were laughing together, holding hands, dancing in the kitchen and
enjoying an electrifying closeness that we hadn't had for years.
(…)
The basic principles of a surrendered wife are that she:
Relinquishes inappropriate control of her husband
Respects her husband's thinking
Receives his gifts graciously and expresses gratitude for
him
Expresses what she wants without trying to control him
(…)
If you're a wife who feels
overwhelmed, lonely and responsible for everything, this book is perfect for
you. If you can admit that you frequently or sometimes control, nag, or
criticize your husband, then it is up to you and you alone to take the actions
described here to restore intimacy to your marriage and dignity and peace to yourself.
… The point of my journey was to give up controlling behavior, and to look
inward instead of outward.
(…)
1. Do not surrender to a man who is physically abusive to
you.
2. Do not surrender to a man who is physically abusive to
your children
3. Do not surrender to a man who has an active addiction.
4. Do not surrender to a man who is chronically unfaithful.
(…)
If your husband doesn't fall into
one of the categories above, then you are married to one of the good guys. Not
a perfect husband, but one who is capable of loving you and cherishing you one
who has the potential to help you feel great about yourself and your marriage.
(…)
I know what I'm suggesting is difficult. I know it doesn't
seem fair. It didn't seem fair to me that I had to work so hard to change while
my husband continued to sit around watching television, but your husband will
have to make big changes too. … He will have to listen to his own inner voice
of conviction instead of relying on yours to tell him when he's not doing
something right. He will need to use his own mind to figure out what's best for
his family rather than reluctantly carrying out your subtle or not-so-subtle
orders.
(Laura Doyle. “The Surrendered Wife: A Practical Guide to
finding Intimacy, Passion and Peace with a Man” 2001 on the Web at
www.surrenderedwife.com/chapterone.html Accessed June 2002)
This new
philosophy is being acclaimed by many wives whose marriage became more
satisfactory when they stopped trying to “control” their husbands and learned
to act like a “surrendered wife.” The lesson I see in this is that a man has
more power to make his wife miserable than the other way round. The
“surrendered” wife gives up two things. One is her participation in negative
interactions that are used by the husband to create a hell for her. This is no
doubt a good thing for her and for their relationship. The other thing she
gives up is her participation in initiating his reformation. This is not a good
thing.
The wife
has an essential role to play in her husband reformation. He is dependent on
his wife for undergoing reformation and he is rarely able to do it on his own.
The examples Laura Doyle gives about her “control” attempts include all the
things that he should be listening to her, but refuses. It is his refusal,
attitude, and punishing reaction that turns her
interventions into “nagging” and “controlling.” She is only courageously
insisting that he change his irresponsible, bad behaviors that are abusive,
rejecting, and non-cooperative. The wife’s motive is not “control.” This is a
basic misunderstanding of the surrendered wife proposal. This notion assumes
that what the wife is trying to do is to control her husband. This is a
misconception that men have foisted on women so that the men won’t have to
change. Anytime a man thinks that his wife is “nagging” him or trying to
“control” him, it is most likely not so. This may happen, but it is rare with
the vast majority of cases. Wives are more honest and more skilled in
relationships. They are given perception about what conduct in their husbands
is injurious to their intimacy and love.
This
motivation ought to be honored by the husband. And when it is, the husband does
not feel “nagged” or “controlled” but helped along the way of reformation and
regeneration. If the “surrendered wife” surrenders her role in his reformation,
the external marriage may improve, as Doyle testifies, and others who have
followed her. But the inner union is made impossible. For that union to
develop, the husband must accept his wife’s role in changing him.
1. The Surrendered Husband is The Ideal Elevated Man
Men are
unwilling to give up the male prerogatives or perks that society bestows upon
them as a right and privilege for being a male man. I received this idea from
childhood culture. My parents said it was better to have boys than girls. Boys
carry the name and the blood line. Boys grow up to be men with power, fame, and
riches. Girls were nice, but they were weak and you had to spend more effort at
keeping them unspoiled so a man would want them. They also cost you a lot of
money when you give them in marriage. Boys can protect you and take care of
you. Yes, boys are trouble sometimes, but you have to give them a lot of slack.
Etc. As a result, I was instructed by my parents before marrying that I be sure
to “train” my bride right from the start to be subservient to me. She has to
follow your word. A man must wear the pants and make the decisions. She has to
serve you, cook for you, wash your clothes, look after you properly, like you
deserve. And you have to let her know you’re expecting her to look fresh and
nice for your, when you come home, anytime. She shouldn’t let herself go. You
have to demand respect from her. Then she’ll love you and she’ll be happy, and
she’ll take care of your children too. How astonishing to me now, as I list
these factual realities of cultural gender arrogance.
The truth
in the Writings has now been revealed: It is the opposite! It is the feminine
perception and the feminine intelligence and the feminine beauty that is
superior relative to men (xx). And so it is the feminization of marriage that
sanctifies it and makes it a spiritual and whole (see Chapter 9 Section 1
above). One might wonder: Does this mean that it is the man who has to
surrender to the wife—THE SURRENDERED HUSBAND? This would not be far from the
truth, as long as you make sure to include the idea that it is another way of
saying Rule 1:
RULE 1:
The first and only rule is that husbands
are to learn to love acting from the wife, more than from self.
(See
Chapter 9, Sections 3 and 4 for more discussion on Rule 1)
This is
what makes the difference between subjugation, servitude, and dominion. Only
love can fend away these inherited enemies. Rule 1 doesn’t say “Husbands must
obey their wives.” Neither does it say “Husbands should listen to their wives.”
It says: “Husbands are to love acting from the wife more than from self.”
If a
husband behaves in a way that is pleasing to his wife, he is pleasing her, even
if internally he feels emotional conflict and stress. This is the first step of
learning to live by Rule 1. It is loving your wife
more than loving yourself. This type of love is called celestial, and is
the highest human love (xx). If this love is elevated by the husband to the
highest position in his hierarchy of loves, he will behave to please her, and
this always means firstly, to avoid displeasing her. Eventually he will no
longer feel the inner conflict of rebellion when he is pleasing her. He will
then act to please her, and love it. From then on he lives by Rule 1, the
celestial life on earth. He is conjoined as one from within with his wife. Of
the two, they make a one—the conjoint self (see Chapter 9 Section 4
below).
This is the “surrendered husband”—the
elevated true man of creation, who loves the feminine sphere of his wife’s
affections more than the masculine sphere of his own affections.
The
“surrendered wife” is the man’s exploitation of the woman, as a result of which
he fails to attain his true self, the self into whose perfection he was created.
A man can reach his perfection in the state of being an elevated husband, which
is defined as a husband who has learned to love acting from his wife’s
affections more than from his own. The man is then a celestial mind, conjoint
to the wife from within. Her life is his life because affections is nothing
else than life itself in human beings. He then acts from his wife within him.
Note how different this is from acting from the wife from without!
If a man
acts from his wife from without, he is not a man but a zombie under the woman’s
control. She thereby becomes infernal, and he as well, because only voluntary
submission can create the zombie relationship with someone. The Lord guarantees
freedom of choice moment by moment for every individual in the universe. If a
husband becomes a zombie, he maintains himself in that state voluntarily, by
his own falsifications of truth or reality. This is acting from the wife from
without—she is standing there, with her hands on the hips, staring him down,
and giving him orders to prove to herself that she can dominate him. This is an
infernal couple. But it’s altogether
different when the husband acts from the wife from within.
The expression
“to act from the wife from within” means that the husband loves her affections
and appropriates them to himself. Now the wife’s affections are within him. Now
he acts from the wife’s affections from within. This kind of action is possible only from love of her affections.
And what is loved, one chooses freely and voluntarily, in freedom (xx).
2. The Self-Entrapment of Male Intelligence
I agree on
this with Laura Doyle and the many enthusiasts she seems to have among married
women: It’s far better to be treated in a civilized way by one’s husband than
in an abusive way.
What a
relief these women feel when their man suddenly stops the heavy handed
punishing treatments and abuses, verbal and physical, social and psychological.
But he still holds it on top of his wife’s head, like a sword of Damocles,
ready to fall on her head if she should step over a line that he defines.
This is an
external improvement, like what the citizens experience when a dictator of a
country passes away and is replaced by a democracy. Yes, being treated with due
human rights is a start. Look what it took for the man to stop making a hell
for his wife: Her surrender! He is now back with his
male privileges and prerogatives! She is now treated a little better, but at
what ultimate cost?
The wife’s
surrender in order to achieve peace, romance, and respect is similar to the
psychology and politics of blackmail, family style. The man says to his wife: “I
will stop abusing you and neglecting you if you turn yourself into a surrendered
wife.” And she has no choice but to accept, or else see no end to the abuse.
She has no recourse because the man she is tied to by external marriage bonds, has closed off the interior relationship between
them. Yet the interior marriage relationship is the wife’s life roots, the
wellspring of her happiness and fullness of being. This is why she is married:
To unite herself from within—feelings, thoughts, futures.
She is the genuine married partner while he is the bogus husband, one who does
not treat her lovingly, but tortures her instead. She feels like a lamb chained
to a wolf who at any moment he wishes, can pounce on her and annihilate her
lifeline.
The husband
sees himself adjoined to her in the
exterior physical and social domains. She sees herself conjoined to his interior psychological and emotional self, his
hopes and aspirations, his dreams and perfectionism, his intelligence and power
of reasoning. She loves all of these because they are his, and unites herself to them, which means, she takes these things within
herself as she takes his semen into her birth canal. But the husband in
contrast spews out his wife’s affections and walls himself off to be sure they
don’t get to him. He will not appropriate them. His wife’s affections are his
pet peeves, the bane of his marriage. It is on account of her affections that
he denigrates her, calling his wife a nag, the moment her affections touch him.
He acts like he wants to shake them off, like so many worms clinging to his
body. He hates conjugial love because he is born with hell within him.
And hell
hates nothing more fiercely an insanely than the idea of conjugial love. When
an infernal sees a an angel couple, and receive a
whiff of their conjugial sphere, they fly into a maniacal frenzy in an attempt
to tear apart and squash the couple. But as they approach nearer to the angel
couple, the infernals are seized with such anxiety and terror,
that they cast themselves back down into hell. This was witnessed by
Swedenborg in the spiritual world where the angel couple had descended (xx).
Such is the
husband’s inherited opposition to internal unity with his wife. Such an
internal unity with the wife REQUIRES that he love her affections!
But he
hates her affections and finds them obnoxious and unpleasant, grating and
nagging on his nerves. This hatred of her affections is what his lower outward
self expresses as abusive behavior, emotional coldness, uncaring, and
independent. She desires to tie him to her, for this is the internal unity. He
is revolted by the idea and makes him suffocate. He feels all the joy of his
life squeezed out of him when her affections touch him. He then feels like he’s
been burned and denigrated. He lashes out against this hated foe called his
wife’s affections. And she wonders “Why? And how can he be such a beast, such a
hypocrite, so self-destructive of his own elevated happiness, who he was created to be, whom I fell in love with? O, O
Where is my true husband who has been hijacked by this rude and gross man
pretending to be my husband. How long Lord?”
So now
that she is a surrendered wife she sees her inner striving for conjunction with
him closed off. The
door has shut!
How could
it be otherwise? He still wants her to
obey him! This is the death of the conjoint couple, the celestial ideal
creation that makes up one celestial angel. As long as the husband wants his
wife to obey him, the interior door is shut tight. She is excluded in an
absolute way. It feels to her like death. Now it’s her husband and God, forming
an alliance against her. She is the third person. First comes himself. Then comes his God. Then comes her. This
is the hierarchy in his mind, the idol he worships, or claims to, for
convenience and perks. By the wife “obeying him,” he means that he wants her to
act against her own wishes, her own best sense of what their relationship needs!
She is the expert who can see the relationship in a rational way since
conjugial love imparts the perception to the wife (xx). Her inner desire for
conjugial love is the source of her perception form the Lord. The Lord gives
her conjugial love, and then he can have it to the extent that he loves her
affections (xx). When he doesn’t love her affections, she is powerless like a
fish before a steamboat, or like a tomato on the road before a truck.
She feels
disjointed, rejected, abandoned for the sake of an external politically
motivated physical and social intimacy, but not a spiritual intimacy. What she
craves for is a spiritual unity, which means that he loves her affections, appropriates
them as his own, then acts from her, now within him. It’s a process that
continues and repeats itself endlessly so that she is in the fullness of
perfection of her being as a woman. A woman and a man are created reciprocals,
in general and in every particular so that they may be united into one conjoint
self.
Consider
the wife who got into an accident on her way over to visiting her husband in
the hospital, where he was waiting for a suitable donor to replace his worn out
heart. The take her to emergency and before she dies she wills her heart to her
husband. They perform the heart transplant and now he sits at home thinking
about her. He lives because her heart is
in him.
This story
is parallel to the conjugial union which is established when a man adopts the
Doctrine of the Wife and Rule 1 as a regeneration discipline. The wife dying
represents his hatred for her affections. The wife’s heart that is now transplanted
in him, represents her affections within him, because
he now loves them. That she is no longer around physically because she has
died, represents that she has resurrected in his mind as the conjugial wife.
Since this is a spiritual unity, it doesn’t appear in the outside natural
appearances.
Perhaps it
is necessary for a woman to become a “surrendered wife” for awhile, as a phase
in the marriage relationship. This may be imposed on her by the husband’s relationship blackmail mentioned above.
But if there is going to be a heavenly marriage with these two, the man must
become a “surrendered husband” as discussed above, since this is the state of
perfection into which a man is created. This is his “elevated state.” This is
the second phase, when the marriage turns into an inner unity between the
willing and thinking of the man and the willing and thinking of the woman.
It has been
revealed that a woman’s intelligence, wisdom, compassion, and grace is more abundant and inspired than a man’s (xx). A woman’s
intelligence is celestial or the highest and inmost of human possibility (xx).
A man’s intelligence is spiritual, which is a discrete degree below that of the
celestial. A woman’s intelligence can therefore be compared to the noonday sun
in the summer, while a man’s intelligence is like the light of the moon on a bright
night (xx).
Since this is the created reality,
it is rational and spiritual for man to love to act from his wife more than he
loves to act from himself.
This means
that the highest wisdom and intelligence of a man is that which he acquires for
himself from his wife’s affections which he has taken up within himself.
Affections
always determine the quality of wisdom and intelligence:
Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such
is the man. (DLW 362)
The
affections in the will are called “love.” The unregenerate husband acquires all
his wisdom and intelligence from his own affections. This intelligence opposes
itself to the intelligence of his wife, which she acquired from her affections.
In other words he loves himself and is sealed and isolated in himself. There is
no entry point. His wife receives from the Lord conjugial
love in her affections (xx). Her affections regarding him and the marriage are
therefore heavenly. She now has to wait. At some unpredictable point he will
decide to stop opposing and hating her heavenly affections. He undergoes
reformation by means of the Letter of the Writings which he applies to his
mind, bringing order out of disorder. Now he officially acknowledges to her
that he is struggling to learn to love her affections so that he could act from
her, rather than from himself. His Doctrine now confirms this process and he is
officially ready to participate, to submit, to die, for the sake of being
reborn an angel man.
He begins
regeneration. He fights against his nature. He has to simulate friendship and
enthusiasm as he painfully makes himself swallow her affections, like bitter
medicine. As he persists in this struggle, the Lord enlightens him. He builds
Spiritual Doctrine for himself whose power is so great that he sees himself a
new creation. He loves to love his wife’s affections! He has been healed. He is
now the elevated husband in training. He is happy. She is ecstatic. Soon they
are both ecstatic. Ecstasy becomes the bliss of their life here on earth. They
are forerunners of the new human race. The Alpha Couple.
The angels are in bliss for they actively participate in this awesome makeover.
Angels love nothing more than to assist in the birthing of conjugial love in a
couple on earth (xx).
Now the new
husband would not be able to support displeasing his wife, an idea that
devastates him as if all his happiness were suddenly gone. He would always act
from her affections, which means from her perceptions and perspectives, not his
own. In this way he can be conjoined to her form within and be happy and wise
to eternity.
But if the
wife surrenders to him, he is once again entrapped in his own male intelligence
and externality. It’s as if God had not created Eve as an
help mate to Adam.
The husband cannot save himself and
he cannot be saved by his wife, as intended by the Lord.
The future
of this man is sorry and miserable. This fate is not something she contributed
to. He is the one who forced her into the subservient status of a “surrendered
wife.” He forced her by systematically wearing her down over years of strenuous
effort. He made her feel scared, made her doubt herself, threatened her,
ignored her, did not value her judgment or opinion. So she had no choice but to
give up her most central role and task in life: To unite herself to her husband
and thus to make him happy and alive from herself, from what she has in herself
from the Lord. This is how the Lord intended it from the beginning and this is
what the Lord once again will re-create, as conjugial love is to return to this
earth through the Heavenly Doctrines (CL 130).
When the
man acts from his wife’s affections which he has internalized (Rule 1), her
life is in him like the organ transplant the husband received of his wife’s
heart. Her life is within him because her life is nothing else than her
affections (xx). His intelligence is now
reformed by the new affections in his will. Her higher affections, which
are from love and good, shape his new intelligence which are
from truth and faith. He receives truth from the Lord as before, but the truth
he now receives is far more interior and higher than before because he now has
his wife’s affections in the will, and these celestial affections conjoin themselves with a more interior truth form the Lord.
The more
the man loves his wife’s affections, the more he has got the celestial love
within him, and the more interiorly he can receive Divine Truth from the Lord.
When he has only his own affections in his will, the man also receives Divine
Truth, but in a more external way. The Lord longs to be conjoined with the man
more and more interiorly, as He is already conjoined to the woman through
conjugial love.
3. Who Is Going To Do The Bills?
Recall
again that “surrendered husband” doesn’t mean that she must now do the finances,
the military service, and the paycheck! Equity is not what it refers to (see
Chapter 9 Section 5). Rather, to be a surrendered husband means that he prefers
to act from her more than from himself. If she says, “Honey, would you explain
to me our finances?” he then strives to satisfy her. He explains as much as she
wants to know and tries to respond to her inner emotions and intentions so she
can feel that he is with her and for her. That’s what she wants, that’s what
the surrendered husband gives. Or, if she says, “Honey, I think we should do x,
not y” he then strives to value this request, to honor it, so that she feels
that he cares and he likes her. If she says to him,
Do this.
Don’t do that.
Do it this
way. Don’t do it that way.
Start now.
Stop now.
Keep up
with me.
Lower your
voice. Stop frowning.
And other
things like these,
and he
doesn’t do any of these things, what will happen?
What will
happen to her conjugial? She will be feeling a process of breaking off, a
growing incapacity to feel conjoined to him from within. This is because he
refuses to meet with her in the interior mind. That’s where they are
united, each giving something and living by what the other has. He—the
cognitive reception from heaven by means of her celestial affections which he
has internalized as-if his own. These are the interior truths that her conjugial
love craves from within to unite with. Her
inmost being or consciousness wants to unite to this Divine truth he receives
from the Lord by means of her affections in him.
This is
the achieving of the conjoint self. (See Chapter 9 Section 1 above.)
4. The Spiritual Physiology Of Marriage
One
expression of men’s distaste of the feminine sphere is the grouping of the
people at family gatherings. The men group together and bask in the masculine
sphere of each other. Their wives are forced therefore to group with each
other. They rather be together with their husbands,
but when they try, the husbands abuse them. So the only peace the women can
find is in each other’s sphere. This changes completely when a husband is
surrendered to his elevated creation, which is that he act
from his wife’s affections within him. When he does this, his intelligence
tells him that his wife wants to be together with him. He is entertained by her
feminine sphere far more than he cares for the masculine sphere. The feminine
sphere of his wife is now his life. This is because her life is in her
affections, and when he appropriate her affections to
himself, her life is now within him. Now he is a complete man, a true human, a
celestial mind, a conjugial husband.
The reason
husbands hate the affectional sphere of women is that it breathes out conjugial
unity, spiritual conjoining in willing and thinking. The man feels this as a
process of being shackled or restricted. He feels that the woman wants to
encroach on his territory of independence and freedom. He experiences the
mother, the sister, the girlfriend, or the wife as constant nagging to do this
or to do that, to be this way or that way, never to be who
you really feel like being. So men prefer the permissive company of other men who
respect the brotherhood rule of not trying to pressure or coerce one another.
The woman’s
sphere of affections is animated and domestic, because it is celestial. Domestic
uses are celestial while forensic uses such as business, science, and politics,
are spiritual and natural uses. The reason domestic uses are higher is because
they have to do with the home, with conjugial love, and with raising children.
These are celestial uses because the purpose of the earths in the universe is
to be a seminary for a heaven out of the human race (xx). Domestic uses are
therefore higher. Women are in charge of domestic uses because the affections
of women is celestial by birth, while the affections
of men is spiritual by birth. Celestial uses are far more elevated and human
than spiritual uses.
A man can
transcend his lower creation by conjoining with a wife who is created into a
higher creation. This is the meaning of the surrendered husband. He is surrendering the masculine idea that
his essence is masculine.
For in fact
the Lord has revealed the physiology of the masculine and feminine. The man as
a whole, and in his every part and particle, is love in his inmost, and this
love is covered over with truth, which forms his exterior. The reciprocal is
the case for what women are made of. Woman as a whole, and in her every part
and particle, is truth in her inmost, and this truth is covered over with love,
which forms her exterior.
You can
picture this to yourself as a diagram:
What an
amazing scientific revelation! How beneficial it would be for society if this
revelation were understood rationally. Since
man and woman are reciprocals of each other in general they must also be in particular,
which means not a single thing in a woman can be like a thing in a man, and
vice versa. (xx)
This can be
understood rationally if you think of marriage in a physiological sense, which
it is. Marriage is something sanctified and Divine since it is the vehicle of
the seminary for heaven, and this is the highest purpose or use for creation. Unity
is the conjoint operation of two things together so that the result is a new
conjoint object that is superior to the composing parts. Man as an individual
and woman as an individual are not human units, but only potential human units.
A human unit is the conjugial pair that from a distance is seen as one angel
(xx). The closest maximum unity is achieved between two distinct individuals.
Since not one thing in a man overlaps with one thing in a woman, they remain
most distinct. Therefore, when they unite, their unity will be more perfect
(xx).
Conjugial
unity is so perfect that it demands that not a single thing in a man can be
like a single thing in a woman. An exception would reduce the perfection.
This
applies to the body and the mind. Not a single fiber in a man can be like a
fiber in a woman. Not a single thought a man has can be like any thought a
woman has. Not a single affection a man has can be like an affection a woman
has.
You can see
the perfection of conjugial love when you consider from the Writings, what
happens when a man meets a woman and they fall in love and get married. The
woman takes within herself the man’s thinking style and reasoning process. This
is the same way as she takes his seed through her birth canal and gives it life
in her womb. That child born of her represents the husband’s intelligence in
the wife. She is now no longer an individual woman but a married woman, which
means that she has within her, his seed, his intelligence, his ideas, his
manner of thinking. She has a replica of her husband’s mind within herself so
that she always know what he is thinking!
Now it’s
the man’s turn. His job is to take his wife’s affections within himself just as
she took his cognitions within herself. As a conjoint self, the couple has
become just one. She acts from his
thinking within her and he acts from her affections within him.
Thus they
form a superior human being called the celestial mind or conjugial couple. This
is the plan of creation, now revealed!
Consider
the second diagram of the spiritual physiology of marriage:
The marriage on earth of a regenerating couple is called Phase 1, while
their marriage once they get to heaven, is called Phase 2. Conjunction in Phase
1 is external, also called spiritual. Internal conjunction in Phase 2 is
celestial. In the external conjunction while regenerating on earth, the husband’s
intelligence (“truth, wisdom) is conjoined to the wife’s affections (“love, good”). The wife’s affections are within him as a result of
loving them more than his own affections. This gives the surrendered husband a
new will from the wife. And it gives the conjugial wife a new understanding
from the husband. In this mode they grow more and more into a spiritual unity
while on earth. After they are reunited in heaven, they begin the conjunction
of Phase 2. Now they are both interior people having cast off whatever was not
part of their love and affections. The external truth and wisdom of the husband, are gone. The external love and good of the wife, are gone. What remains in the spirit-body of the angel
couple is the interior—his celestial love and her celestial truth. As these
unite, they become one angel more and more to eternity (xx).
Unity is
only possible between truth and good, which is the
same thing as saying, between wisdom and love (xx). This unity is called “the
marriage of good and truth” (xx). For the celestial couple, the husband is the
good and the wife is the truth (xx). Their conjugial unity is the result of the
universal unity between good and truth in the Lord. Marriage is holy because it
is an image of the marriage of good and truth in the Lord (xx). Marriage on earth is holy only when the
husband’s truth unites with the wife’s love, which is nothing else than her
affections. In other words, when the husband loves to act
from her affections more than from his own.
The
surrendered husband loves to meet his wife’s requests because that’s how he reciprocates
in conjoining himself with her, as she is conjoining herself with him. The man
who rebels and hates the feminine sphere perceives her wishes and instructions
as demands, as nagging, as taking away his freedom, as going too far, as power
hungry, as misguided, etc. I have felt all these feelings and they are general
to men, because biological and cultural.
A Christian, because he knows the Lord, has the Word, and
since the Lord places the church in him through its means, it is obvious that
he is more able than the non-Christian to be reborn, so becoming spiritual, and
to achieve truly conjugial love, since these go together. (CL 339)
A husband is a form of truth, and his wife a form of good,
and that good cannot love any other truth than its own truth, nor can truth
love any other good in return than its own good. If it were to love another, the inner
marriage that forms the church would die, and the marriage would become merely
external - the kind of marriage that idolatry corresponds to, not the church.
(CL 76)
Here it is
revealed how the “inner marriage” or internal unity,
can be achieved. The husband loves his wife as his own good attached to
his truth. Not his own good attached to his own truth—for this is the
life of an unregenerate single man, or an unregenerate married man who avoids
internal unity with his wife. To take his wife’s good as his own means to
love to act from what is in her will more than what is in his own will.
This is Rule 1 as discussed throughout this chapter.
[3] Take as
another example conjugial love. The good which comes first and is introductory
is good looks, or good manners, or outward compatibility, or similarity of
social class, or aspiration. These forms of good are the first intermediate
ones of conjugial love.
After this
comes the joining together of minds (animus) in which one wills as the other
does and finds delight in doing that which is pleasing to the other. This is
the second state, and although those initial forms of good are still present
they are no longer kept in view.
Finally there follows a uniting involving celestial good and spiritual
truth. That is
to say, one believes as the other believes, and one is moved by an affection for good as the other is moved. When this state
is reached both together experience the heavenly marriage, which is a marriage
of good and truth, and so experience conjugial love since conjugial love is
nothing else.
At the same
time the Lord is flowing into the affections of them both as into a single
affection. This is a good which flows in down a direct line, whereas the
previous kind of good which had flowed in down an indirect line had served as
the means of introduction to this good. (AC 4145)
Note the
statement: “At the same time the Lord is flowing into the affections of them
both as into a single affection.” The expression “into the affections of them
both as into a single affection” refers to what might be called the conjoint
self.
Why must
the husband surrender to his wife before he can achieve the conjoint self?
Because:
He hates
giving up his prerogatives and superiority status
He loves to
have dominion over her
He has
justified his superiority by philosophy or religion
He doesn’t
trust women’s abilities
He hates
the sphere of conjugial love she has within her
He
ridicules or gets enraged at the idea he should act from her will
He
justifies the falsity in his mind that it should be a kind of equity
arrangement—he has his roles and his places assigned by society and religion,
and she has hers.
What
about the idea that the wife often doesn’t know as much as he does about many
things, and so it wouldn’t be prudent or rational to let her make the decisions
instead of him.
You will
see that this is not a real danger, only an imagined one. It’s a doubt about
women being able to be reasonable and practical. It’s the generalized gender
bias that men have about women from inheritance and from culture. This biased
reasoning says, How can you trust women to make the right decisions about so
many things where men are used to making the decisions—etc. These are the
doubts that come from not valuing women. The external philosophy of equity that
men try to impose on women is nothing but a ploy. And unless men awake from
this subconscious acquiescence, they will be men no longer, for the
unregenerate man turns into a sub-human worse than any beast (TCR 564). Man’s
salvation is regeneration of character, for which the wife is a Divinely appointed and essential instrument. This has
been justified by many quotations from the Writings in Section 1 above.
Many
intelligent men will admit to this: that the wife is essential in their life.
And yet they do not ordinarily mean essential for their inner life, but
essential for their outer life. By their outer life they mean their intellectual
and economic power and their achievements and awards, including successful
children. Many men admit that without their woman they would not have achieved
what they did. And also, that they could not be content in
life without being in love with this woman. These are noble legends.
He may have convinced himself easily enough that he believes them sincerely. If
indeed it had been the truth, his woman would have been in the fullness of her
being, conjoint to him from within. But instead, she has been offered a fake
marriage life, one that has the trappings of external propriety, success, and
happiness, but not the real life and animation that is supposed
to be within these outward achievements and enactments.
The outward
married life remains an enactment until it grows a spiritual reality within. This
is the spiritual union held together by each being the other’s all in all in
their willing and thinking. Can she achieve this without his reciprocation?
No, not in the least, for spiritual love requires reciprocation to become alive
and real.
He is
satisfied with the outer success, but she languishes from within. He is content
to wait and let time pass, endless years and decades to her, waiting for her
real man to enter her.
And so what
is to be done?
The surrendered
husband is a practical proposal. It is just another way of saying the Doctrine
of the Wife, which is discussed at length in the preceding section. Women are
intelligent and wise from within from heaven from the Lord. They will not do
anything that is contrary to conjugial love. This is their highest love and
all other loves are placed below and subdued under its command and absolute
rule. This is woman’s wisdom: the certitude they feel from within as to whether
something is this way or that way in relation to her husband. This is a
Divine perception women receive from the Lord regarding their husband (CL 166). It is a perception of seeing the husband’s spiritual mind and
content, his inner affections, loves, and reasoning through them. She knows this
thoroughly, fully. More than he ever will—until he knows it
from her, when he is united to her.
The wife
will know when to make a decision, and when to let him make it. She would never
override him except for one reason: she can see the danger he cannot see. So it
makes total sense that he should listen to her and really believe from within
that she has this perception from the Lord. This is the religion of the
But, but
what if she makes mistakes? What if she is uneducated? What if she’s got
weaknesses, blindnesses, even neuroses and addictions? The answer is: And what
if he has these things? Husbands make many many mistakes, do they not? Is there
somebody there to remove him from the office of decision maker and over rider
of her opinions when events prove her to have been right and he
to have been wrong? No of course not. He makes mistakes as he goes along and
the family lives with it. The point is that if he’s willing to live with the
consequences of her mistakes she will gradually improve and be at least as good
as he used to be—with his help. This is the point. Perhaps he needs to educate
her views when ignorant, just as she does that for him. After all, he is free
to do as he wants at any time whatsoever. His acting from her will is purely
voluntary. He has the exercise that power at any time. Again the point is this:
is he after dominion over her or after internal union? This he must answer
for himself moment by moment.
It makes
sense to think that the Lord is managing this process as closely as any other
in the universe. The Lord longs for the husband to want to be united to the
wife. The Lord calls the two together, “One flesh,” and “His Church.” (CL 178)
The husband-wife conjoint self makes the one angel that is the Church to which
the Lord is married.(CL 62). Not the husband by
himself, ever, even if he comes to the gates of heaven in Aaron’s robes. The
only admittance to heaven for a male man is as a conjugial husband (CL 50). The
only.
And so is
this not the most important work a man has—to prepare his mind to be a
conjugial husband? Which is why a religious discipline is
needed, as discussed throughout this chapter.
The natural
world tends to be male dominated, but not because of men’s superior
intelligence to women. It is a “man’s world” because the unregenerated natural
mind operates by the corporeal principle of “might makes right.” The feeling
from which this idea issues is at the level of animals and men’s affections are
at the animal level of operation in the unregenerate state. But when they begin
to be regenerated their internal mind is opened and receives feminine intelligence
through his wife from the Lord. This softening and humanizing of the man shows
that man on his own is only a half-man:
And when
they become one, then taken together they are man in
his fullest sense. But without that conjunction they are two, and each is like
a person divided or half a person. (CL 37)
(For more
on the spiritual psychobiology of gender see Note 16 at end).
For years
now I’ve made it a habit to keep notepads all around the house and write down
many of my wife’s observations. I can accurately state that her perceptions and
insights form the starting point of the many rational and spiritual ideas I
elaborate in this and related articles. I’m especially stimulated by the way
her observations contain nonobvious connections to other things, revealing to
my sight relationships that raise the level of my understanding and
explanations. This cross-gender intellectual borrowing and sharing process
creates a more interior spiritual dimension in our relationship. The wife’s
interior wisdom from the Lord descends into the natural-rational intelligence
of the husband where he builds it into an outward shape that has many new uses.
In this way
it has become true that I think from my wife, which is Rule 1 in conjugial
development (see Chapter 9, Sections 3 and 4 for more discussion on Rule 1). If
you ask her she would tell you that this is the ideal to which I am officially
committed, but that my actual adherence to it is variable. Therefore I continue
to struggle, turning to the Lord for strength to persist. And He always gives
it, if only I would take it from Him.
The