Theistic Science
(continuation)

Leon James
1985

To view other articles on Theistic Science,   please click here:  Glossary of Swedenborg Concepts

Theistic science has two principal components: good & faith.  By good is meant spiritual loves and by faith, spiritual beliefs.  Our loves and our religious beliefs are the two kingdoms of religious psychology.  These two are to the mind what circulation & respiration are to the body.  Here are some additional relations & correspondences connecting psychology concepts to spiritual loves (good) and spiritual beliefs (faith):

GOOD & FAITH

 Please consult a related Glossary entry called Good and Truth.

Two related articles that may be consulted are: 

Theological and Psychological Aspects of Mental Health: The Marriage of Good and Truth

Scientific Dualism in Religious Psychology

Once we understand the basis of this distinction, we can generate an endless list of cause-effect relations we can perceive.  In the Writings of Swedenborg this basic distinction is explained in many ways, and permeates all other ideas we draw from scientific revelation.  In religious psychology the distinction may be described in general terms, in specific terms, and in particular terms as follows.
 

     I.  General Terms: (Good & Faith)

    Two Kingdoms were created: celestial & spiritual.  The celestial Kingdom is structured or corresponds to the Lord's Divine & Infinite Love.  The spiritual Kingdom is structured or corresponds to the Lord's Divine & Infinite Wisdom.  In the Lord's Divine Human, these two are conjoined to form a One.  Because of this, all things created were created in correspondence to this Divine Union.  This Divine Union is called  "the Word of God" because It comes to us as the Interiors of historical descriptions.  Within these narratives shines forth the Interiors.  These Interiors are insights, visions, or understandings of the Word, or the Divine Union of Love & Wisdom.  
    

    Through these insights and understandings we begin to feel or experience a new kind of participation in life. This new kind of participation in our events, sensations, thoughts, strivings, and actions is totally dependent upon the Word, that is, our understanding of the Word and our living accordingly.  It has no independent life of its own.  As soon as we distance ourselves a bit from the Word, which is also called the Divine Order, we are plunged into darkness and into all our former despair and weaknesses.  We eventually learn this, and then we feel a new love for the Word.

This new love stems from the confirmation that our celestial state of  heaven on earth, is organically dependent on spiritual food form the Word.  Perhaps "oxygen" might be an additional way of representing the relationships, or "light" and "heat."  When oxygen is withdrawn, we instantly become conscious of our dire need for it, or else we don't survive for long; when heat is withdrawn form the body, we become sluggish, then lose all sensation, and finally the blood stops flowing; when light is withdrawn, we see nothing.  These natural dependencies reflect the spiritual dependence of our new insights and our new understandings upon the heat & light, the oxygen, of the Interiors of the Word.  Without the interior ideas from the Word, our external ideas see only falsities, and further, these falsities opposes as trues, and can be confirmed as trues, yet they are falsities.  This is the delusion of the spiritually insane rational self.  

To understand this rightly, it is required that we think scientifically and not mystically about the mind and God's action on it from within and from without.  The mind from without is the natural mind, which receives input from the brain, senses, and the natural world.  The mind from within is the spiritual mind, which receives input from the will (affective organ of reception) and the understanding (cognitive organ of understanding).  It's important to note the use of the word "organ."   Without an organ, there cannot be reception or function or use or quality or permanence.  The mind is as real as the body in terms of being made of some stuff.   the natural mind is made of material stuff (time-space-mass qualities), but the spiritual mind is made of substantive stuff (not in time-space, having no mass, but made of spiritual substances streaming from the spiritual sun, and called good and truth (or love and wisdom).  It's necessary in theistic science to think of love as a substance; and of wisdom as a substance.  And all their derivatives are thus substances:  thoughts, emotions, faith, character, personality, beliefs, attitudes, affections, preferences, convictions, imagination, etc.--they are all real things made of the substances of good and truth.   So if I say that love is to the mind as oxygen is to the brain, you can now see that this is not a mere analogy, but a real correspondence.  Love is a substance that makes up the fibers of that part of it called the will, which functions to operate all our motives, preferences, interests, attitudes (positive and negative).  Similarly, truth is a substance that makes up the fibers of that part of the mind called the understanding, which functions to operate our thoughts, reasonings, knowledges, and rational evaluations.  For more on these issues, please consult my Swedenborg Glossary.
    

The spiritual self is the same as the rational self, but only the interior of the rational mind.  The exterior of the rational mind is mixed with the natural mind, but not the interior of the rational mind, which is purely and only spiritual.  So if you've been wondering what is spiritual, as I have for decades before starting to study Swedenborg's Writings, you can define the spiritual as the rational mind.  This mind is sometimes called the spiritual mind, but in its interiors, it is called the celestial mind.  These mapping details and the spiritual anatomy and spiritual geography that go with it, will become familiar to you after some study of Swedenborg's Writings and the theistic science that is contained in them.   When we're born, only the natural mind is being formed.  The rational or spiritual mind is not formed until later in life, when we begin to think from ourselves, that is, when we are adults.  Until then all our knowledges are in the natural mind, including what we know about the Bible from religion. 

Once the rational self (or spiritual mind) is   "opened", it needs the interiors of the Word to stay healthy and sane.  If these are withdrawn the new-born rational self turns spiritually  insane.  It now will exhibit perverted perception and will lead the individual into all sorts of erroneous confirmations and beliefs, and from these, into erroneous decisions and actions.  A new-born rational turned insane the "adulterates"  the trues it sees in the Word.  The individual's external will then exhibits pathological syndromes of human behavior, such as, evil intentions, cruelty, disregard of others, being hypocritical and entirely calculating and without any compassion for others, and plagued by all sorts of obsessions, compulsions, and scandalous, and abominable fetishes.  The ills of society are the external natural consequences of this spiritual insanity---the rational gone insane in matters of the spiritual, that is, in matters of the interiors of our mind.   We can be spiritually insane in our interiors while at the same time be in natural intelligence in our exterior mind.

Nothing of spiritual insanity will show directly as we go about on our daily round and fulfill the roles of our social station in life.   But indirectly, the spiritual insanity will show by symptoms that are contrary to Divine Order:  selfishness, cruelty, illness, war, poverty, natural disasters,   poisonous things, ugly things, bad luck, and hell, with all the things in it and corresponding to it.  These negative phenomena are not part of the original creation, all of which was into Divine Order and all Good.  But they arose within creation, permitted by Divine Omnipotence, but not willed.  And permitted only for the sake of preserving human minds, and carefully calibrated so the dis-oder does not go beyond what the God permits.
   

All forms of psycho-therapy----the healing of the spiritual - rational in us---- must therefore be oriented toward helping the person return to the Word, to Its holy Interiors.  Religious psychology can help the person return to the source of health, through which they will be healed.  There is an organic relation between spiritual sanity and the Interiors of the Word. Theistic science helps a person get to the Word in such a way as to give the lower rational an opportunity to investigate the claim of dual citizenship.  We already know the historical Bible: but we do not see it as a practical solution for needed know ledges.  Theistic science helps a person realize that no other source of information can exist for the birth of the spirituality we long for, than Divine revelation of scientific knowledges.   These are impossible to detect through the natural senses, and therefore there is no other source of scientific data on ourselves as spiritual creatures, and on our eternal future life, but Divine revelation of those scientific facts.  This has now been accomplished through the Writings of Swedenborg (1668-1772).
 
  II.  Specific Terms (Good & Faith)         

Good corresponds to our will, and faith to our understanding.  These are spiritual organs in the mind.  The will is a receptor of spiritual heat (of the spiritual sun Swedenborg saw and described), and the understanding of spiritual light of the sun.  Spiritual heat is the source of motivation when it is received in the organ of the will, while spiritual light is the source of cognition when it is received in the organ of the understanding. 

The will is thus "flooded" or "influxed" with affective impulses, according to its spiritual geographic location, or mental state.  In upper zones of the spiritual minds, the will is influxed with good impulses and affections emanating through the sphere of life of celestial angels in heaven, but from the sun of the spiritual world, which emanates directly   from God.  These good affections enter our mind through the will, and from there they are communicated to lower and more external regions of the mind; these are the regions of the understanding.  We can become quite conscious of the events occurring in our lower regions: we can see there by means of our understandings, reasoning, and thoughts.  Being consciously aware is the experience of representing our thoughts; this feeling is called understanding.  See my essay on what is consciousness.
 
We are much less conscious of our inner motives because these are events that go on in the upper zones of the mind where the will is located, and the understanding does not search there.  We have insights, or inner vision, only as far as our cognitions reflect our affections, but no further; hence we cannot be conscious of our will, that is, of the affections it receives from its spiritual environment.  The will's activities in the body are sub-conscious or unconscious; the will directs the biochemical and genetic procedures of the cell; the will directs the preferences and inclinations, the aptitudes, and abilities; the will directs our lifestyles, our conscience, our morality; the will directs our decisions, choices, movements.  The will is everything, and so, we see nothing when we rely only on the external natural environment of the individual organism. 
 
Yet we are content to feel the will and see the understanding.  However, when we are spiritually insane, our will is inundated by perverse affections which we experience as feelings of discontent and all sorts of aberrant preoccupations and pleasures.  We go off on a search for meaning, a journey to alien cults, the practice of dreadful idolatries, the coldness of fantasy heavens.  Eventually we are removed from these spheres and our will now receives more positive affections; these become conscious as they descend into the lower regions of the mind; we see more understanding, more rationality.  This problem of "vastation," or spiritual psycho-therapy ("regeneration"), continues with the will being carried to ever purer atmospheres in the spiritual world, even all the way up to heaven.  Here we become conscious of the good affections when they descend into wisdom.  The rapidity of this process depends on our cooperation.  When we strive to follow the guides of the Word, the will is quickly vastated of its negative infestations and is removed from old atmospheres.  Sometimes we strive for the opposite direction, and live contrary to the Word's indications to our rational.  We then turn insane and our will is then carried deeper and deeper into nefarious atmospheres. 

  III.  Particular Terms    (Good & Faith)           Good is God.  God's Good is Divine Love.

    God wills that His Love be adjoined to the good in us from God. This good in us is not our own good.  It appears to be our good because we are unconscious of the affections that enter our will.  This good in us appears as ours because it feels like it corresponds to our own loves.  Imagine a self-conscious, but delusional automobile.  When it feels itself moving, it thinks, "I'm going for a ride now." When it feels itself back up, it thinks, "I'm going to back up now."  When it feels itself at rest, it thinks "I'm not going to move now."  And so on.  So it is with our conscious automatic self, our natural mind.  When we sense the hand move, it thinks "I'm going to reach that object."  When we sense ourselves become angry, it thinks "I'm going to yell and make faces."  When we sense our decision for this choice, it thinks "I'm going to choose this one."  And so on.  Whatever the will does to the mind and body, the conscious automatically thinks, "I'm doing it."  But actually, the will is doing it, and the conscious, automatic self only obey as a steering wheel.  And of course it's not the will doing it by itself or from its own power, but it is the use of God's power to the extent that each individual can receive, in accordance with one's state of mind or receptivity.  See this article on how we're connected to the spiritual societies:  the vertical community.
 
This is hard to believe at first, because difficult to see.  But soon we can see it rationally,  we can confirm it, explain it, and feel confident about its truth.  We then understand or perceive that the voluntary acts as reflective thoughts we're conscious of are merely effects, external consequences.  The choice for the good is not ours but God's with us.  Yet it feels to be ours.  But we know and perceive that it is God's .  Our good is as-if our own.  God's Good is adjoined to us and appears on good that is as-if ours.  This good can now be the receptor of God's Good. The good is God's but as-if ours; the Good is God's entirely.  The conjunction of God's good with us is the flow of regenerated life in us.  As we perceive our good acts, we perceive God's face. This is heaven and eternal progress.
 
Theistic science helps us acquire skills of perception.  We strive to know the revelations of God's Word so that we may have guides to our thoughts and intentions.  As we become vastated of old negative tendencies in our will, we begin to perceive the Interiors of the Word and through them, the inner causes of our behavior.  We begin to perceive that every single motive we have in us from inheritance and habit is selfish and insane.  Yet more and more we act well and are delighted.  We see how these good acts are good.  But we already know this good cannot be ours.  So we become conscious of the God's presence in our will.  God is the good impulse in our good.  We feel blessed.

ONE'S OWN (continued)
293: for anything to become one's own, or permanent part of the self, it needs to be chosen in freedom, or in love.
463: we have external and interior memory; the latter records every thought, feeling, act.
484: our own = loving of self = evil (even doing good from our own)

365: to enter form external knowledge into things of the church is to become spiritually demented
455: with positive bias it's OK to rationally confirm truths drawn from the Word, but not with negative bias
456: if after repentance we relapse into evil we profane the church and the Word and our fate is much worse off
475: judgment and recompense is according to the love within our works, or the intention within our deeds

THEOLOGY/CHURCH
308: the church is with all those in the whole globe who do good in accordance with the dictates of their religion
311: without doctrines drawn from the Word, there is no understanding of the Word, Divine truth, and no church
318: the heathen equally with the Christians are saved; Christians not saved unless they lead a life of charity and faith
321: all one thought by angels in the afterlife regarding salvation

DUAL C2. (5)
314: heaven is in us according to our reception of good of love and faith; this is opened after death when we become angels
342: we're born into evils, but through rebirth we're changed; evils are: contempt, enmity hatred, revenge, cruelty, deceit.
461: after death we still possess memory, thought, affection
463: we all have a universal spiritual language after death
473: we are immortal by virtue of being conjoined tot he Lord through love and faith

LOVE
475: love is in the interior of deeds and works and judgment is therefore according to our love within our works
481: loving the lord is living in accordance with good and truth (doing good) and loving thy neighbor = honesty civil good, justice
463: we are entirely as our good and truth in the will and understanding
470: after death our life is such as our character was on earth
474: understanding proceeds from love; life is according to love in the will; whatever is not in the love, vanishes.

DUAL C
513: when we pass into afterlife we are vastated; i.e. falsities we have thought in the world are taken away with the well disposed who live in good and truths are taken away with the wicked.
535: our state in the afterlife = such as our life of charity has been

CHURCH
523: we can't be saved by mercy alone if we have lived in evil
535: salvation is possible only when doing good is joined with willing and thinking good

LOVE
535: a life of charity = obeying commandments
558: love to neighbor should depend on his or her good (prudence)
         (not indiscriminate)
603: willing and thinking good gives the capacity to receive influx, but not knowing truth alone

ORGANICITY
536: the Lord rules the hells
545: only good comes form the Lord; evil, anger, punishment are in us but appear to be from the Lord
551: all in hell are in evils and falsities form love of self and world
567: there is influx form spiritual world into natural, but not the reverse
603: we think and reason from influx
603: influx of good and truth is according with reception = our life of good and truth in the will and understanding
603: influx is through the internal into the external, through the spirit (in spiritual world) into body (not world)

MAN'S OWN
597: freedom = equilibrium between h & h in us
503: freedom = being led by the Lord through regeneration
603: we ought to compel ourselves to do good or if from self but acknowledge it is from the Lord
603: overcoming in temptation combats = more interior freedom
603: internal freedom = being led by love of self = servitude = being led by hell in us

Basic Correspondences

Alcoholism - Geriatrics - Insufficient Altruism
Driving accidents - Insufficient illiteracy
Dependency - Learned Helplessness - Denatured Food - Deschooled Society
Workaholics

examples of common spiritual ills of society today.
Applied rp to solve these ills.

Methods:
1.  Rational analysis in the bias (diagrams)
2.  Rel. self - inspection
3.  Specific Explanations
        A.  In alcoholism ----> spirits!
        B.  Geriatrics --------> resuritation
        C.  Insufficient Altruism ----> {the Word (study)
        D.  Driving -------> rsi
        E.  Learned Helplessness -----> cross cultural huddle buddy
        F.  Food ------> co-ops and health food literature and club
        G.  Deschooled -----> holistic medicine and religion
        H.  Workaholics ------> dual citizenship
        I.    Laziness and Boredom -----> charity

see Charity book markings (Religious Behaviorism)
see other book markings on various
see my Religious Behavior sheets and other charts

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