Scientific discovery of Spiritual Laws given in Rational
Scientific Revelations
|
|
Series: |
A Man of the Field Forming The New Church Mind In Today’s World
Volume 1: Reformation The Struggle Against Nonduality
Volume 2: Enlightenment The Spiritual Sense of the Writings
Volume 3: Regeneration Spiritual Disciplines For Daily Life
Volume 4: Uses The New Church Mind In Old Age
Please note: This page will take about 10 to 15 seconds to load. I’ve been working on the problem but haven’t found the solution yet. Sorry for the delay!
By Leon James November 2002 (draft 17c)
Author information appears at the end. This document is in the process of being revised. Please note the draft version marked on top. To print this document, see Printing Note at the end.
A “field” means doctrine (AC 368) A "man" signifies faith and truth (AC 427; 4823)
Volume 1
Reformation The Struggle Against Nonduality
Chapter 1
Table of Contents
Access to other Chapters and Volumes here: 1. The Writings Are A Divine Scientific Revelation 2. The Writings Are The Lord’s Second Coming. 3. Heaven Is Created From Rational Love 4. A Divine Revelation That Surpasses All Others 5. Swedenborg’s Scientific Experiments In The Spiritual World 6. Swedenborg’s Dual Citizenship—Natural And Spiritual 7. This Book Is About Regeneration REFORMATION: THE INWARD STRUGGLE AGAINST NONDUALITY The New Church Mind is to be Formed by the Writings Exclusively 3. Spiritual Truths Understood Naturally and Spiritually 4. The Great Battle Of Nonduality Vs. Duality. 5. Enlightenment From The Lord 7. At The Threshold Out Of Hell Into Heaven. 8. Cooperation in our Regeneration 9. The Lord’s Relationship to All Religions 10. The Writings As The Exclusive Source For Spiritual Truths 11. Separating Nonduality and Duality in the Mind 12. Reformation by Means of the Writings 13. Old and New Testament From Perspective Of The Writings 14. The Writings Are The Last Revelation 15. The Writings Are For The Rational Mind 17. The Birth Of The Interior-Natural 18. Reformation And Regeneration Begin In Early Adulthood 19. Nonduality Fills The Culture Around Us. 20. Two Methods For Fighting Nonduality In The Mind Absolute Opposition Between Duality and Nonduality 1. Religious Membership Not Required For Salvation 2. Revelation Is Necessary For Spiritual Truths 3. The New Rational Consciousness of God 4. Nonduality is from Self-intelligence 5. Nonduality In The Mind Opposes Regeneration 2. Incompatibility with the Writings 4. Duality is the only reality 1. The New Age Of The Second Coming 5. The natural and spiritual mind 1. Nonduality Is In The Unregenerate Natural Mind 2. The Spiritual Begins With The Rational 3. The Spiritual In The New Testament 6. Why nonduality can be attractive Titles for the Abbreviated Citations in the Book Full Text Free Online Access to All Swedenborg’s Writings:
Access to other Chapters and Volumes here:http://www.theisticpsychology.org/books/nonduality/nonduality-toc.html
Every
spiritual truth in the Writings
Preface to Volume 1
This book presents the perspective on reality given in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).
It is intended for all those, regardless of religious or intellectual background, who want to form a new mind in themselves that is based exclusively on the Writings. The book’s purpose is to assist them in undergoing reformation and regeneration in preparation for a conjugial life in heaven.
1. The Writings Are A Divine Scientific Revelation
In today’s intellectual climate revelations from God, His Name, the Bible, heaven and hell, Church Doctrine, and the like are automatically considered religious issues. When I started reading the Writings I was well into my career as a psychology professor, writer, and scientist. I knew that the two-dozen books of the Writings that I was studying were categorized as religious books, since I found them in our university library in the section on Bible Commentaries. But the books were written by Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist of repute in his days, and known to many influential intellectuals in Europe and North America in the 19th century. Swedenborg, the impeccable mining engineer with international reputation, differed from his scientific colleagues in that his science was fully a theistic science.
Swedenborg was a fully rational thinker with a passion and commitment for explanations of phenomena that span the entire chain of their existence from ultimates to firsts. And since it is irrational to think that firsts can be from nothing or from chaos, rationality requires that the first of all phenomena be a rational Human God.
Swedenborg’s science was therefore inclusive and centered on a Human God who runs the universe in a rational way that is discoverable by intellectual investigation.
Swedenborg relied on the revelations of the Bible for the scientific facts about the spiritual world. Since he had no direct access to the spiritual world (until age 57), he extracted the facts from the Bible using both its literal meaning and spiritual meaning. The Bible reveals many scientific facts about the spiritual world in relation to the natural world, as for instance:
q that there is a God who forms and runs the universe q that God is Human q that God’s personality is motivated by Divine Love q that God runs the universe by means of rational laws q that there is a spiritual world and life after death q that we are immortal q that in the afterlife we live in either heaven or hell q that the spiritual world is within the mind, thus that the mind is in the spiritual world q that spirit and mind are the same q that those who make it to heaven are then angels q that those who make it to hell are then devils q that heaven and hell are within us q that our character is what determines whether we are to live in heaven or hell within us q that we inherit a degenerate character that must be regenerated q that regeneration consists in following conscience, not doing evil to the neighbor, loving to do good q that our mind or spirit is in unconscious communication with those who are already in the spiritual world q that God manages the smallest details of our willing and thinking so as to facilitate regeneration q that God manages the details of every event or outcome at the macro and micro levels, including fortuitous events, accidents, the laws of chance, randomness, regularity q and many others
The above list of scientific facts about the universe is based only on the literal meaning of the Bible.
Swedenborg also extracted many scientific facts from the spiritual meaning of Bible verses, as for example:
q that the Bible is the Word and therefore it is Divine Truth q that parts of the Bible are written as accurate history, while other parts are spiritual visions q that spiritual visions are universal phenomena brought about by correspondences q that correspondences are revealed by God to the human race q that correspondences are Divine Truths accommodated to human intelligence q that correspondences are ordered in discrete degrees or levels in a hierarch of truths from external to inmost q that regeneration of one’s character is achieved by the applying the power of correspondences to one’s daily willing and thinking q that the universe is managed by a hierarchical order of correspondences that are represented in the spiritual meaning of the Bible q that individual regeneration and biography recapitulates history and evolution q that the Bible reveals the intellectual history of the human race within the spiritual meaning of the details regarding names, places, numbers, and descriptions q that we live in heaven as angel couples q that in the afterlife we have spirit-bodies allowing us to live in society, marriage, and an active creative life q that the human race extends beyond this planet to the entire universe q and many more
At age 57 the Divine Human appeared to Swedenborg, held him affectionately in His arms, and announced to him the mission for which he was prepared by God since early childhood. Swedenborg was to be the revelator by whom the Second Coming of the Lord was to be effected. Swedenborg was going to write and publish a series of books called the Writings. The Writings were to be the Divine Rational of the Lord which was to be revealed to the human race as a rational and scientific system of thinking. The Divine Human was to effect its Coming within these rational truths. Any individual who read these truths and understood them, taking them to be the guides of life, would be regenerated and conjoined to the Divine Human by means of this new rational consciousness of God. Henceforth this will be the orderly method of regeneration for the human race.
In order for the revelations of the Writings to be scientific and rational it was necessary that Swedenborg have direct access to both worlds simultaneously. Swedenborg had to be given the means to make empirical and experimental observations in the spiritual world, such as the following:
q to be present in heaven and hell and to interview the people there q to watch the resuscitation process during death and how the spirit emerges from the physical body q to talk to people whose body was being buried q to interview various authors well known from history and the Bible q to conduct experiments involving spirits and their mental abilities q to compare the language and script of the Word on earth and in heaven q to interview angel couples in their homes q to travel in spirit to distant planetary regions in the universe and to investigate the character of spirits from those planets, and even, to see certain physical scenes on those planets through the eyes of spirits associated with the people there q to be given visual observation posts from which to describe the shape or form of the land masses of heaven and hell q to witness demonstrations of the spiritual power of truths from the Word q to attempt therapy on those in hell q to interview new arrivals in the afterlife and what memories they bring with them q to observe the education and raising of children who arrive from the many earths q to experiment with correspondences, seeing which produces what visual appearance q and many more
From all this you can see that Swedenborg’s Writings constitute theistic science. The Writings of Swedenborg are rational scientific works written in Neo-Latin by a Swedish scientist and engineer in the 18th century. They are unique in the history of humankind because they present a fully rational comprehensive scientific account of all of reality, God, and human beings.
Prior accounts in the history of literature were never fully scientific, and never fully complete and comprehensive. If Swedenborg had merely written what his own genius figured out, the Writings would remain one of the greatest collections of rational philosophy, science, and theology anywhere. But the Writings are not books from the genius of Swedenborg, but much more, something entirely different, unparalleled in the history and evolution of the human race. The Writings are God’s Rational and Scientific Revelation now given to the human race for the first time. They present a fully rational and scientific account of reality, such as God has created it. If the content of the Writings were merely Swedenborg’s ideas of reality and God, they would form part of the literature of the world. But if the Writings are from God, then the Writings are unlike all other books that could be written.
No one should decide between these two possibilities without examining the Writings. I have examined them in detail, like I would a scientific collection of books which I intend to evaluate. Having done this, I have come to the conclusion that the Writings are the work of God, the last of the great revelations intended for the human race and called “the Word.” What is astonishing is that the Word of God in this new revelation is a science encyclopedia of the spiritual world! Since the spiritual world is within the natural, and is the cause of all natural phenomena, you can see why the Writings are a total and full scientific revelation of God. The human race now possesses two sets of scientific encyclopedias, one natural, the other spiritual; one about the natural world, the other about the spiritual world and how it animates the natural.
Now in the Writings, the human race has before it a full integrated rational description of God, creation, the universe, heaven and hell, history, truth, love, marriage, and regeneration.
This new beginning in science and rationality may be called the new age of THEISTIC SCIENCE.
The Christian tradition since the Lord’s First Coming has been that He is to come again to complete the world’s makeover called the salvation of the human race. They expect the Second Coming of the Lord to take place physically, appearing in the clouds, calling on those who believe in Him, gathering them together in one place, and giving them eternal life and happiness in Him. No one can tell you exactly what this means in terms of details—except those who have read and understood the Writings. For the Lord has effected His predicted Second Coming. This Second Advent was to complete the creation of the human race. He had already appeared physically in history and science, giving sensuous proof of Himself. When He foretold that He must come again, He did not mean that He is to come again in His glorified Divine Natural. He was actually saying that He must come again in His Divine Rational. Then we can know Him fully, by knowing the Divine Rational that is within the Divine Natural. A Second Coming in the physical would retard still further the evolution of rational consciousness in the human race.
The Lord is Divine Truth, which means that the new heavens He creates are made of rational loves, and these exist only in rational consciousness. The human race must evolve rational consciousness to become spiritually enlightened and live in heaven in eternity. This rational consciousness is brought about by forming our mind to reflect the order described in the Writings. This rational order is the Divine Rational of the Lord. From creation this is what the Lord intended, a human race that would evolve into rational consciousness and capable of having a celestial mind that lives in heaven. Now these rational truths have at last been revealed in the Writings. This rational revelation of Divine Truth is the Lord in His Second Coming.
Can a neighbor of yours know you if he only knows what you look like but not what you believe in and how you think? Christians got to know the Divine Natural of the Lord in a sensuous way, tangible, touchable. Even after the first generation passed on, the ensuing generations of Christians knew the Lord in this sensuous way because they believed that He was real, that He had indeed been here on this earth as God Incarnate. But this is relatively speaking, knowing the Lord like a neighbor whom we can see with our eyes every morning exiting from the apartment building, but whom we do not know because we do not know his beliefs and attitudes.
The Divine Rational of the Lord is within His Divine Natural, which makes sense because the Lord is Human. All humans consist of a rational mind within a body. In this world, we are a rational mind within a physical body, and in the afterlife, we are this same rational mind, but now in a spirit-body. The Lord is always within His Divine Natural Sensuous Body, as humans are always within their sensuous body. The sensuous body is the outward casing for the spiritual rational mind. The Lord’s Divine Natural Body is the outward Casing for His spiritual-rational mind called the Divine Rational. This Divine Rational is the origin and source of Divine Truth, the substance from which all is created. So the Lord’s Divine Rational is the true Divine Human that we are to love and know. This Divine Rational is what has been revealed in the Writings.
2. The Writings Are The Lord’s Second Coming
The Second Coming refers to the revelation of the Divine Rational. This revelation was completed and published on June 19, 1770, a date marked by the Lord in the spiritual world, by gathering the Apostles that had followed Him in the world, placing a copy of the True Christian Religion in their hands, and instructing them to go out and preach the new revelations of His Second Coming. This was witnessed by Swedenborg as part of his mission to be the architect and composer of the Writings. This new revelation was given for the entire human race, for all people regardless of religious background. Because it is a universal revelation of the Divine Rational, the form and content of the revelation had to be scientific and verifiable by rational analysis and criticism.
The Writings are God’s revelation to the human race of how He creates the universe and how He runs and manages every detail. This includes the revelation that the universe is created for a human purpose by means of truth within which is love. And it also includes the revelation of the existence of two worlds, one being a natural world where human beings are born and raised, the other a spiritual world, where human beings awaken a few hours after death and continue individual life eternally in either a celestial existence in heaven or an infernal existence in the hells. I mention these things here as general topics that have been of interest to the human race since the beginning of literature. But the Writings deal with these spiritual, philosophical, and religious topics in a rational way that give a scientifically precise and dynamic account of them. This is what I found so attractive in the Writings the minute I started reading them in 1981 at age 43, having discovered them in our university library while I was searching for Bible Commentaries.
Subsequently I also found out that the Writings of Swedenborg have had a distinguished but small following, that his books have been translated in a dozen languages, and that several communities have been created by people who call themselves the New Church religion that is based on the Writings. When I started reading the first pages of the first volume of the 30-volume collection called the Writings, I was able to see that this is not like any other work in the history of our race. I was trained as a scientist and earned a living as a psychology professor in a department that expects its faculty to teach the science and method of psychology. I have done this for 40 years now, and continue to do so as I write this book, at age 64. If the Writings had been like other books, I would have had to continue searching and longing for the scientific and rational understanding of reality and self.
Well, if the Writings do not spring from Swedenborg’s genius, what is their origin?
God has created the human race to evolve to ever higher powers of life and being. The perfecting of the human race is a gradual evolution in which our conscious cooperation with God is required to increase as we evolve to higher states of life and consciousness. The method by which the human race cooperates ever more consciously in its own evolution, is the method of truth and love. God is a Divine Rational Being whose essence is love and truth in an infinite degree. Divine Rational is the same as Divine Human, because the human is defined by the rational. The spiritual is nothing but the human rational in its essence.
God creates the universe not out of nothing, for this is irrational. God is infinite in quantity and complexity, and this infinite quantity is in God as one, that is, as one coherent whole. Nothing can exist that is not created from this infinite Divine Rational Substance called love and truth united as one. All things that exist are kept in existence by God’s substance of truth, within which is love.
3. Heaven Is Created From Rational Love
Since the universe is created from truth and into the order of truth, reality is a rational reality. God is a rational entity and our idea of God is a rational idea. All laws of the universe are rational laws. The spiritual world and the natural world are both rational worlds, by necessity of creation. Heaven is a rational creation. The suns and earths in the universe are rational entities. The human race is a rational creation and event, with a rational goal, and a rational method of evolution. The ultimate goal of this evolution is to reach perfection as a rational being.
Truth belongs to love. Love is the creating, driving force, power, and goal. When love creates something, it does that by means of truth. Truth is the exteriorization of love. Love is the substance, while truth is the form of this substance. Truth can do nothing by itself, but only from love. Love can’t do anything except by means of truth. Since all things are created from love by its truth into truth, the human mind is the highest element of all creation. Only the human mind is created capable of conscious understanding of truth, which can also be called rational love. The human mind is to evolve into the ability to understand ever more interior truths or rational loves, of which the most interior, is God. All things of creation are in God, yet God is separate from this creation. It would not be rational to think that God has created Himself! Neither that reality has created itself! God has created reality, which means that God is outside reality, able to create it and run it.
The method by which the human race is to evolve to ever more interior understanding of infinite Divine Truth, is the method of Divine Revelations. This has been the case since the first generation of the human race. Literature has preserved the long record of Divine Revelations to the earlier generations. Each Divine Revelation was given by God as a stepped up evolutionary leap for the human race. Each new revelation took hundreds of generations to fully digest and incorporate into the fabric of human understanding. In this way there has been steady progress in the evolution of human consciousness, as reflected by a world that has left barbaric savagery behind and has developed for itself an advanced civilization based on rational principles of mutual cooperation and treatment.
4. A Divine Revelation That Surpasses All Others
The Writings are the latest new revelation given by God to the human race.
This is a special new revelation that surpasses all other Divine Revelations.
These new revelations are for the first time fully rational and scientific. The human race had to evolve a modern scientific mind before these new rational scientific revelations could be given. At last, in the Age of Reason of the 18th century in Christian Western Europe, the human mind was ready to receive, understand, and accept a full unqualified and total revelation of God and reality in rational concepts and terms that the modern mind could readily understand. This was done through the mind of Emanuel Swedenborg, recognized as one of the great geniuses in the history of literature and science.
At age 57 Swedenborg was at the height of his scientific and professional career. His achievements have been well documented in several fields, including metallurgy, chemistry, anatomy, psychology, theology, education, and legislation. He tells how the God of His childhood and country, in the image of Jesus Christ, appeared before him and held him affectionately in His bosom for a little while. He writes that the Lord then told him that he was being prepared since early childhood for the mission of Revelator and that the time has now come, in 1741, for him to begin his Divine mission.
Swedenborg’s awesome mission was to write the 30-volume collection of books called “the Writings” or “the Writings of Swedenborg.” These Divine Revelations are going to be the last in the series of Divine Revelations that were to be given to the human race. They were therefore going to be a full and total rational disclosure of reality and its workings. Prior Divine Revelations of the Word, such as the Old and New Testaments, were given in a language of authority and mystery, but the final portion of the Divine Word for the human race, are given in a language of rationality and science. No mystery is left standing. No appeal is made to authority, but only to the individual’s rational understanding.
A Divine Revelation is given for the purpose of raising the consciousness of the race. This is accomplished by means of the truths in the Revelation. It is necessary therefore that people be able to understand the revelation. To make this possible therefore, all Divine Revelations are given through the mind of an individual human being, a capable representative of the rest of the race. The man whose mind was prepared for issuing this last of Divine Revelations had to be a product of the Age of Reason in Christian Western intellectual culture. It had to be a modern scientific revelation because the human race had evolved to this level of rational and spiritual consciousness. The modern mind was unwilling to believe in a God of mystery and authority. It needed a rational scientific account of God, reality, and our position in it. Even a sensuous God was no longer enough. This sensuous God had to have a rational explanation or else He could not be understood, and what the modern mind cannot understand, it won’t love. Without love for God, we cannot be regenerated and saved for life in heaven.
The Age of Reason in Europe had two well developed rational elements. One was scientific and the other was religious. Science and theology were both rational creations of the modern human intellect.
The Christian religion was given as both a sensuous and rational revelation to the human race. The sensuous revelation was the unprecedented event of Incarnation--God born in history as a human being of flesh and blood. This event took the human race forward into rational consciousness. Now there was scientific physical empirical historical evidence and proof of God’s existence. Besides the sensuous revelation of the New Testament, a rational revelation is also made there, namely, that God is Human. This was the first time that the human race had proof that the universe was a rational universe created for a human purpose by a Human God. God was Human and Rational, thus, Love and Truth. And He created the universe out of Truth into truth, hence in a rational order. God’s Laws were rational laws. The presence of God with the human race was through rational consciousness, rational understanding, rational loves, not ecstatic emotions or animal sacrifices and ceremonies.
The First Coming was the Incarnation of God in a physical body. It was a momentous forward step in the evolution of human consciousness because the human race had never had this proof before, had never been able to face God in a physical and natural presence. Now God was part of our history, part of our science, part of our rational understanding of reality. Prior to God’s Incarnation the relationship of the human race to God was an indirect one. God could make an appearance in the sensuous human world by taking over the mind of a celestial individual and speaking through this person like a mouthpiece. The prophets and various individuals to whom God appeared in the Bible saw God through such an appearance, thus not God, but a human being possessed by the Spirit of God. But since God’s Incarnation, He can appear to human beings as Himself in His Own Divine Natural Body. This allows a far closer contact with God, hence a far higher level of consciousness and life for the human race.
The New Testament Revelations also revealed that there is going to be one more Divine Revelation necessary to complete the creation of the human race into its full perfection. This full perfection is the state in which we can cooperate consciously with God in our preparation for heavenly life in eternity. Full conscious cooperation cannot be done while there are mysteries left in religion, science, and reality.
The Last Divine Revelation, or the Last Testament of the Word, has been laid down in Latin through the mind of Swedenborg, and now we have it, I, you, and the rest of the endless generations to come. A copy of the Writings as the New Word is also to be found in every society of the numberless heavens in the spiritual world.
The Divine Rational Revelations in the Writings could not have been constructed and delivered through Swedenborg’s mind if Swedenborg had merely to take Divine dictation and to write down sentences in that way, without understanding them, without having constructed them out of his understanding. Therefore in order to have Swedenborg write those sentences he had to first understand all of reality and God in relation to the human race. He had to understand rationally so that he could compose those sentences from which others could extract the rational truths.
5. Swedenborg’s Scientific Experiments In The Spiritual World
How was Swedenborg’s understanding to be enlightened so that he could rationally and scientifically describe reality and God in relation to the human race?
The answer is surprisingly simple: Swedenborg had to be given access to a spiritual laboratory so that he may conduct his experimental and empirical observations by which he might discover the rational truths of reality and God in relation to human beings.
These laboratory facilities were given him as part of the Divine mission, which is why Swedenborg wrote that the Writings represent the greatest miracle and wonder ever bestowed upon the human race by God’s Love. Swedenborg’s experiments with spirit subjects and geographical explorations in the spiritual world were effected through the intermediary of many people in the spiritual world. The people who inhabit the celestial regions in their mind are called angels and have many powers that Swedenborg did not have, being still a man on earth. These angels intervened of his behalf, protected him from harm, and arranged for conditions Swedenborg needed to make his observations and to write them down in a natural language (Neo-Latin and Swedish). He not only wrote down what happened but was also given the capacity to provide a scientific and theological context for his observations and reports. Thus, nothing is wanting in the Writings for fulfilling its role as the greatest intellectual boon the human race has ever received, or will ever receive again.
Within a matter of a few weeks since the Lord’s appearance to Swedenborg, he began to experience new perceptions as he was reading the Bible. His practiced genius was able to make detailed indexes of the Holy Book which he read in the original Hebrew and Greek. To his amazement he discovered that within the literal meaning of the Old and New Testaments there lay hidden a spiritual meaning that was not apparent to the reader until each word and phrase was taken as a correspondence for some deeper spiritual meaning. For example, by collating many corresponding passages from both Testaments, Swedenborg showed how any rational and educated person could discover the spiritual message in each verse. The content of these spiritual meanings hidden within the literal had to do with the rational exposition of reality and God in relation to the human race.
This systematic work of discovery was most important and impressive, and will be a benefit to humankind for all the ages to come. And yet, this work would not have been sufficient to constitute the final, total, and thus last, Divine Revelation by which everything the human race can know and understand. There also had to be a science to it. Where was the science of it? Extracting a rational system from historical Divine works in the Bible is admirable, but it is not a scientific work. The only way Swedenborg could produce a scientific report of the spiritual world was to be there when he describes it!
This was granted to him by Divine intervention as the greatest miracle in human history.
6. Swedenborg’s Dual Citizenship—Natural And Spiritual
A few months after his momentous encounter with the Lord, Swedenborg began to have flashes of conscious presence in the spiritual world. He did not know what is the spiritual world. From his initial flashes it looked like a version of the natural world, with people walking about in cities and in the country side where there were forests, deserts, mountains, and lakes. It took just a few months for him to get adjusted to a full time permanent conscious awake state in both worlds simultaneously.
Never before in history has anyone ever claimed to be fully conscious in both worlds simultaneously and uninterruptedly for 27 years while carrying on their profession and normal duties and in society. This was especially a significant development because Swedenborg was an impeccable scientist of the modern Age of Reason in Christian Western Europe. He was able to connect all his vast modern knowledge of natural science and biology to his new life in the spiritual world. He wrote daily notes, forming a coherent description of the relationship between the two worlds. He was given access by the Lord to any society or individual in the spiritual world that he desired to investigate. He was given the means by which to conduct experiments, such as for example, what happens to the mind when you experimentally remove from it this or that idea or belief. Also, what happens when you supply this or that truth to an individual, or how people with different genius communicate with each other through others, in an information network, what the language of communication is in the spiritual world, how people form different cultures and civilizations can co-exist, and many such things.
He kept notes of his meetings and interviews in the spiritual world with thousands of people in all categories that were relevant to his science and culture. He was thus able to compare the understanding and state of life of many categories of people, comparing their demographics with their spiritual character. He was able to talk to authors from the ancient Greeks whose books he had read and studied, so that he could compare what happens to the author’s mind when he goes to the afterlife with these ideas. He was able to speak and travel with people in the spiritual world who had been born on other planets and thereby he gained an empirical knowledge of the varieties of the human race. He was able to visit the high places and the low places of the spiritual world, encountering there the highest level of the human, and the most depraved. Because humans retain their ideas and attitudes when they pass on, they can be explored as to the details of their life and conduct. Swedenborg was able to make precise cause-effect observations between the ideas and loves we accumulate as our personality, and the quality of our life and experience in the spiritual world.
You can see from all this that no other writings can be compared with the Writings of Swedenborg.
Now that the modern scientific Divine Rational Revelations have been given to the human race, it will take many generations before they are recognized and acknowledged by many. Since 1771, the year the last work of the Writings was published, there have been thousands of individuals who have recognized them and acknowledged them as Divine Revelations. Today, in the computer age of the Internet, the Writings have become available to anyone who desires them. The Lord manages every detail in the universe, hence also, who and when anyone gets to see the Writings, and then, what of it one can understand, love, and assimilate for life.
No one can see anything special and spiritual in the Writings who is not led by the Lord to do so. This is not some special favoritism or sectarianism of this or that new religion. The Writings are a complete work of rational science. The only requirement for access to higher human consciousness is to read the Writings as the Divine Word given to humankind for the enlightenment of rational consciousness.
No religion is necessary, no teacher or guru, no initiation ceremony, no prior qualification of personality, orientation, or character. Nothing is required except a modern scientific mind able to figure our and comprehend rational ideas laid down in a rational and scientific manner.
In this book I have taken the rational arguments and proofs in the Writings and applied them to my understanding of reality and science. As a trained professional scientist all my life I have carried my profession and science into the analysis and confirmation process of all that is in the Writings for anyone to verify. I have then taken this new understanding of reality and myself and applied it to what is every individual’s principal tasks in life: regeneration.
7. This Book Is About Regeneration
The human race has been for a long time in a “Fallen” or degenerate state by heredity. This is because all new human loves and tendencies accumulate in the mind and are passed on by hereditary mechanisms to one’s offspring. Today as each of us is born into the modern world and culture, we have the potential of becoming a celestial mind by means of regeneration, which goes on throughout our life in the physical body. Once we awaken in the spiritual world, a few hours after the physical body dies, we begin a new life in a spirit-body that contains our will and understanding. These two organs are filled with our experiences, knowledge, and affections or loves. We are then to continue forever being the kind of individuals we became while maturing on earth. Clearly then, it’s a matter of survival and rational self-interest to see to it that we arrive in the afterlife with a personality and character that can live in a heavenly sphere, by which we can avoid the eternal misery of those who sink down into hell because of their distorted and insane character or personality.
In the spiritual world all individuals feel totally free to be who or what they are in their loves and interests. In fact, they are compelled by the laws of the spiritual world to be on the outside what their affections or loves are on the inside. While tied to a physical body, our inner madness, rage, and insanity do not show, being inhibited by society and consequences. But as soon as we awaken in our spirit-body, nothing that is within can be kept from coming out. Therefore by necessity there are Divine laws of reality in the spiritual world that keep the order and make continued life possible in that order. And so, regions and habitations are set up in the endless expanse of the spiritual world, in order to accommodate the life for every type of human beings that enter the world of spirits from the numerous earths in the universe. There are heavens and there are hells, reflecting the character of those who live there. And within the heavens and the hells, there are innumerable sub-regions and societies, each made up of people of a similar character who live together and share one another’s fate.
This book is about regeneration, which is the conscious discipline of character change based on the scientific principles revealed in the Writings.
When we read the Writings we begin to understand regeneration in a medial, psychological, and educational perspective that is unique and new. Our prior understanding is based on the fundamental principle of nonduality, which is that all things exist in one continuum of the universe or reality. When we begin to see things from the perspective of the Writings, we can replace every concept of nonduality into a duality. Every duality is by reference to the natural and the spiritual as two separate and distinct worlds, tied together by rational laws of correspondence that have now been revealed by God.
In Volume 1 I show how rational analysis can be used to debunk and deconstruct concepts and notions of nonduality that are opposed to the dualities in our mind from the Writings. Once our mind is rearranged in this new mode, we can begin regeneration, which requires us to cooperate with the Lord by shunning evils as sins because sins prevent the preparation of our mind for eternal life. This cooperation must be in all the specifics of our willing and thinking hour by hour, every day. In Volume 3 I explain how to do this systematically and effectively by means of spiritual disciplines. These “regeneration disciplines” consist of doing ordinary things in our daily life from a new motive, which is that we are striving to obey the Lord’s Commandment that we monitor our willing and thinking, that we evaluate every particular in the light of the truths from the Writings, that we desist from willing what is evil and thinking what is false, and at last, that we detest these things that are in us from hell by heredity, culture, and unregenerate habits.
Others may also have an interest in the book, especially the wives of the men who are undergoing reformation and regeneration by means of the Writings. Women are also going through the gradual process of regeneration and have to cooperate with the Lord in that process in order to be saved for heavenly life. They may find it useful to learn what their husbands are going through from a Doctrinal point of view. Men and women have categorically different patterns of regeneration because there can be no overlap of interior nature between men and women (xx). Also, this book discusses the content and quality of everyday thoughts and feelings of husbands who are undergoing reformation and regeneration. And since husbands resist conjugial love from hereditary antipathy, often fiercely and cruelly, their wives have to endure much abuse and unhappiness in the process of their regeneration. Knowing the details of their husband’s mental struggles may be of interest and use to their wives, and to women generally.
Also, all who are interested in Swedenborg’s Writings and ideas may find much useful details and spiritual applications to daily life. People who have not read the Writings may be interested in how I analyze important lifestyle concepts such as God, religion, spirituality, heaven and hell, love, truth, personality, and especially, the process of deepening marital relations.
The New Church mind, as defined in the Writings, is to be formed entirely and solely from what is written in the Writings. The New Church mind contains many traditional views and ideals. It accepts the Christian virtues, supports law and order, supports liberty for all, puts patriotism and religion as its highest values along with marriage, parenting, and a strong educational system for all. The New Church mind supports human rights, equality between the genders, equal opportunity for all, constitutional democracy, and a strong defense system to protect the homeland. All these things are traditional values in our society and history and forms a part of the New Church mind. The New Church mind considers the Bible as the Holy Word of God, along with the Writings, which it calls the Word of the Second Coming and the Third and Final Testament.
No religious or spiritual mystery is allowed in the New Church mind, but only that which is explainable rationally. This is because the Lord has, in a rational way, revealed in the Writings all the former mysteries of religion, philosophy, and science. It is not necessary to join a religious denomination or Church in order to form the New Church mind in oneself. The only requirements and methods are from the Writings. The New Church mind cannot be formed solely by the traditional values mentioned, without undergoing reformation and regeneration. This means that everything in the mind must be rearranged. Our moment by moment willing and thinking must be radically changed. This is called being in “the good of life.” To quote from the Writings:
For it is the case with the life of charity (which is the heavenly life itself) that with those who are being reformed and regenerated it is continually being born and growing up and receiving increments, and this by means of truths; therefore the more of truth there is insinuated, the more is the life of charity perfected … (…) In truth, however, there is no life, but in good. Truth is only a recipient of life, that is, of good. Truth is as the clothing or garment of good; therefore also truths are called in the Word "clothing," and also "garments." But when good constitutes the rational, truth disappears and becomes as if it were good. (AC 2189)
The Writings explain why reformation is necessary. The reason given is that we are born with a natural mind and with the potential of developing also a spiritual mind. This new mind becomes functional only through reformation and regeneration of one’s old mind and inherited character. The spiritual mind is required for a life in heaven after the life in the physical world. Regeneration is the process of character self-modification and it goes on throughout one’s life here, and hereafter to eternity (AC 47, 233, 1712, 2877, 5664, 10299; NJHD 148; DP 102; CL 82; SE 5958; LJ 299; AE 864). The New Church mind is the individual who is motivated to adopt the rational system presented by the Writings and to let it exclusively form one’s willing and thinking minute by minute in daily activities and life.
This book presents practical methods for husbands who want to form the New Church mind in themselves. It is not a commentary on other systems of religion and philosophy. Every group must find its own truth and method of salvation. Liberty for every group to do this is essential for progress, peace, and freedom. Thus, I speak only for what should be the New Church mind as defined by the Writings. I have attempted to justify every assertion by reference to the Writings. If you find anything that you think is a misinterpretation, please write me (email address: leon@hawaii.edu ).
All citations in parentheses are to Swedenborg’s books which collectively, are called the Writings. The places marked by (xx) are still to be filled in. If you have any of these citations at hand, please email them to me. The standard Title of the Work referred to in these citations is given at the end.
The Word is the Divine Truth which is in the Lord and from the Lord … Divine Truth has power in itself, and such power that, by means of it, heaven was created and the world with all things therein. (HH 137).
Without the Lord's coming into the world no one could have been saved. It is the same today; and therefore without the Lord's coming again into the world in Divine truth, which is the Word, no one can be saved. (TCR 3)
In the spiritual sense, a “man of the field” signifies “the faith and truth of doctrine” (AC 368, 427, 4823). This book is about the spiritual Doctrine that each man is to extract from the Word of the Writings, by applying the literal sense to oneself, to the hundreds of willing and thinking acts we perform every day in the course of our normal activities. This use of the literal sense is required for our reformation, regeneration, and salvation for eternal life in heaven. Every time we apply in this way one of the literal sentences from the Writings, we are enlightened by the Lord so that we can perceive the spiritual sense within the literal. This conscious process counts as cooperation with the Lord in our regeneration. Without this active conscious daily habitual cooperation with the Lord, we cannot be regenerated. This will be proven in the book by many citations from the Writings. It is the spiritual understanding of Doctrine that constitutes faith and truth. The Lord infills true faith with Divine Love, and from this union we have closeness with Him, love unto Him, and new interior celestial truths that make us wise like an angel, and capable of conjugial union with the wife.
Dedication
To my wife
It is her internal wisdom that led me to write this book as-of myself. She brought into our marriage the conjugial love she has in her from the Lord, inborn from nativity
An inclination to love one of the opposite sex, and with it a capacity for receiving that love, has been implanted in Christians from birth, for the reason that this love comes from the Lord alone (CL 466).
Wives are by birth forms of love, so that it is innate in them to wish to be one with their husbands … But it is different with husbands; since they are not by birth forms of love, but designed to receive that love from their wives (CL 216)
The intelligence of women is by nature modest, gracious, peaceable, compliant, soft and gentle, while the intelligence of men is by nature critical, rough, resistant, argumentative, and given to intemperance. Evidence that this is the nature of women and the nature of men is clearly apparent from the body, face, tone of voice, speech, bearing and behavior of each sex. (…)
From this I could clearly see that a man is born a form of the intellect, and a woman a form of love. I could also see what the nature of the intellect is and what the nature of love is in their beginnings, and thus what a man's intellect in its development would be like without conjunction with feminine love and eventually conjugial love. (CL 218)
VOLUME 1:REFORMATION: THE INWARD STRUGGLE AGAINST NONDUALITY
Introduction:The New Church Mind is to be Formed by the Writings Exclusively
Quoting from the Writings:
There are two states that man must enter upon and pass through, when from being natural he is becoming spiritual. The first state is called Reformation, and the second Regeneration. In the first man looks from his natural to his spiritual state and longs for that state; in the second state he becomes spiritual-natural. The first state is formed by means of truths, which must be truths of faith, and through these he looks to charity; the second state is formed by means of the goods of charity, and by these he enters into the truths of faith. Or what is the same, the first is a state of thought from the understanding, and the second a state of love from the will.
When this latter state begins and is progressing, a change takes place in the mind; the mind undergoes a reversal, the love of the will then flowing into the understanding, acting upon it and leading it to think in accord and agreement with its love; and in consequence so far as the good of love comes to act the first part and the truths of faith the second, man is spiritual and is a new creature; and he then acts from charity and speaks from faith; he feels the good of charity and perceives the truth of faith; and he is then in the Lord, and in peace, and thus regenerate.
The man who while in the world has entered upon the first state, after death can be introduced into the second; but he who has not entered into the first state while in the world, cannot after death be introduced into the second, thus cannot be regenerated. (TCR 571)
The New Church mind in this book refers to any individual who is motivated to study the Writings as Divine Truth, and to love it by daily willing and thinking according to one’s understanding of it.
This means that every spiritual truth found in the Writings is to be taken as a Divine Commandment. Every idea and concept we acquire elsewhere must be kept separated in the external of our knowledge or memory and not allowed to commingle in the mind that is to be formed exclusively by the Writings. The New Church mind, as defined here, is not the New Church mind unless it is formed exclusively by the Writings.
Without the Lord's coming into the world no one could have been saved. The situation to-day is similar. So unless the Lord comes into the world again in the form of Divine Truth, that is, the Word, no more can anyone now be saved. (TCR 3)
You can see from this that the New Church mind can be saved only by means of the Writings and through no other means. The phrase “no more can anyone now be saved” refers to the new dispensation of the Second Coming, as indicated by the phrase “unless the Lord comes into the world again in the form of Divine Truth, that is, the Word.” This new Word now revealed for our salvation is the Word of the Writings. Whatever exists in the world today that is not from this new Word, cannot be for the salvation of the New Church mind.
All Christian people draw their doctrines from the Word as being their one and only source. (TCR 629)
God's Word is the source whence all theology must be derived (Letters 7).
What in particular concerns the doctrine that now follows, is that it also is out of heaven, because it is from the spiritual sense of the Word; and the spiritual sense of the Word is identical with the doctrine which is in heaven. (NJHD 7)
The existence of writings in the heavens is a provision of the Lord for the sake of the Word; for the Word in its essence is Divine truth, and from it is all heavenly wisdom, both with men and with angels; for the Word was dictated by the Lord, and what is dictated by the Lord passes through all the heavens in order and terminates with man. Thereby it is adapted both to the wisdom of angels and the intelligence of men. Thereby, too, the angels have a Word, and read it the same as men do on the earth, and also draw from it their doctrinals, and preach from it (AC n. 221). It is the same Word; but its natural sense, which is the sense of the letter with us, does not exist in heaven, but only the spiritual sense, which is its internal sense. What this sense is can be seen in the small treatise on The White Horse spoken of in the Apocalypse. (HH 259)
These passages teach that henceforth, from the Writings “is all heavenly wisdom, both with men and with angels.” All Doctrine for the New Church mind is from the Word of the Writings and from no other source. “Doctrine” refers to spiritual truths contained within the literal language of the Writings. No other books can be a source of spiritual truths for the New Church mind. All spiritual truths in our mind must be from the Writings, and no idea that is not from the Writings can be taken as spiritual truth for the New Church mind. While the Old Testament and the New Testament are also the Word, they can only be understood spiritually through the Writings.
The Word is the doctrine of Divine truth, and … everything of doctrine must be from the Word (AE 612)
It is written that “the only source of human regeneration is the Lord” (AC 10042) and the Lord is the Word (TCR 225; LORD 7; AC 2). Hence the only source of regeneration is the Word, which for the New Church mind, is the Writings.
The Word of the Divine Human in the New Heavens today is the Word of the Writings, and this Word is the same as the one we have on earth:
It is the same Word; but its natural sense, which is the sense of the letter with us, does not exist in heaven, but only the spiritual sense, which is its internal sense. (TCR 1)
What in particular concerns the doctrine that now follows, is that it also is out of heaven, because it is from the spiritual sense of the Word; and the spiritual sense of the Word is identical with the doctrine which is in heaven. For there is a Church in heaven as well as on earth; for the Word is there, doctrine is there from the Word; temples are there, in which sermons are delivered; because ecclesiastical and civil governments are there. In a word, the only difference between the things which are in the heavens, and those which are on earth, is, that all the things in the heavens are in a state of greater perfection, because all who are there are spiritual, and spiritual things immensely exceed in perfection those that are natural. (NJHD 7)
The Word is to be found in all the heavens and is the source of the angels' wisdom. (TCR 240)
The Word in heaven is written in a spiritual style which is quite different from the natural style. The spiritual style is composed simply of letters, each one of which denotes a particular meaning; and there are dashes, curves and points above, between and within the letters, which heighten the meaning. The letters used by the angels of the spiritual kingdom resemble printed type in our world; the letters used by the angels of the celestial kingdom are in some cases like Arabic letters, in others like ancient Hebrew letters, but with curves above and below, and pointing above, between and inside them. Even a single one of these points conveys a complete meaning. (TCR 241)
It is clear therefore that the angels read the Writings and this is their only source of intelligence and wisdom—“doctrine is there from the Word”. Note that Doctrine is the same as the spiritual sense of the Writings contained within the literal language—“doctrine is from the spiritual sense of the Writings” since the Writings are the Word. The spiritual sense cannot be written down in a natural language, and neither can the spiritual Doctrine drawn from this sense, since these two are identical. Note also that the spiritual sense of the Writings in heaven also have a letter! Without an outward letter of the Word there is no writing possible. So the outward containant of the holy truths from the Lord, is the letter the angels have. The angelic writing mode varies in accordance with the level of thinking in the three heavens, as the passage above describes it (TCR 241).
3. Spiritual Truths Understood Naturally and Spiritually
It’s interesting to note what natural letters of the alphabet on earth are similar to the spiritual writing alphabets in the heavens. The written letters of the second heaven of the spiritual angels resemble visually the “printed type in our world.” The letters of the third heaven of the celestial angels resemble visually “Arabic letters” and “Hebrew letters.” These two correspond historically on this earth with the three religions of the Western world--Islam and Judaeo-Christian. “
Those in heaven pay attention to the Word in the letter and perceive things there in exactly the same way as anyone is accustomed to perceive a person's thought as it presents itself in spoken words, or in the inmost heaven as anyone is accustomed to perceive a person's aims or end in view. (AC 9407)
Note therefore that the spiritual sense of the Writings only exists in the understanding because it is impossible to render it in the letter of the Word. If it were possible, the angels would not need a letter of the Word within which they can see and receive spiritual things! But the highest angels also need a letter for the Word, written in visible script, as discussed just above. This is a rational matter to understand and follows from discrete degrees in all things created (see Chapter 5 Section 6).
Clearly then, the natural literal sentences in the Writings cannot be same as the spiritual truths.
Prior to our reformation, sometime in adulthood, we read many things about heavenly secrets, which are knowledges revealed from heaven. They are called secrets because no human being in all of history and evolution, can ever discover a single spiritual truth from self, from experience, or from another human being. Every spiritual truth comes from the spiritual world which is in a discrete degree above the natural world, so that one can never access the spiritual from the natural.
This also means that there is no conscious access possible to our spiritual mind from our natural mind. The spiritual mind is tied to heaven because all its content is from heaven, and the natural mind is tied to earth because all its content is from earth. All spiritual truths that enter our spiritual mind from the angels, is unconscious to us in the natural. But it has an effect by correspondence. The spiritual meanings enter the natural meanings that we have obtained from the Writings. This correspondential activity goes on in the interior-natural mind that is formed within the natural-rational mind.
Note carefully: the natural-rational mind reads and understand the Writings naturally, but it is the interior-natural mind that understands it spiritually, by correspondence. It is the spiritual understanding that we need in order to be regenerated and saved.
4. The Great Battle Of Nonduality Vs. Duality
To be saved we must undergo reformation first, and when that is completed, we begin regeneration. The unregenerate mind prior to reformation is filled with nonduality. Nonduality is an orientation of the mind in which we are motivated to prevent the entry into the mind of absolute dualities such as compose every page of the Writings. For example, everything in the Writings is based on the idea that God is separate from created things, as He is infinite and created things are finite. Nonduality puts up a combat against this absolute duality, preferring the idea that there is a continuum between the finite and the infinite, so that if we could imagine ourselves to grow more and more perfect, we could become like God.
Another example is good and evil. In the Writings there is an absolute and eternal division between good and evil, or between spiritual truth and falsity. But nonduality in our mind desires to level them into a continuum so that evil is just a lesser form of good. Still another example is the spiritual constitution of men and women. The Writings describe the difference as an absolute duality so that nothing in a man can ever be like something in a woman, and vice versa. Nonduality is motivated to prefer a continuum between men and women that yields an overlap in traits. While this may be the appearance for natural traits, it is not so for spiritual traits.
There are many thousands of such items of nonduality in our mind as we begin our reformation. The nonduality is already ensconced, and receives the support of culture, science, and education. We therefore are faced with a great and mighty struggle to clean out our mind from these nondualities. If we leave them there, they destroy the absolute dualities we take up from the Writings, and therefore, prevent our reformation, regeneration, and salvation. The nondualities cannot be gotten rid off except by means of dualities form the Writings, and this only if we acknowledge the Writings as the Word. For only Divine Truth from the Word has the power to defeat the hells, and all of the hells are involved in maintaining nonduality in our mind.
We are in this sorry and precarious situation by birth. Our spirit or mind is born corrupted by heredity, deformed, injured, sick, and dying, on its way to hell. The most atrocious evils are within a beautiful baby, kept suppressed for a few months or years, by the presence of angels. But as soon as the child grows older, and begins to think from self, the evils break out and surround the individual, pulling like a mighty chain tied to hell. We can put on a facade of niceness for the sake of self-preservation and acceptance by others, but within the heart breathes every rage, hatred, deception, and obscenity. This sorry and troubling description is one of the most important revelations of the Lord’s Second Coming in the Writings. We must know our spiritual state in order to reform and regenerate, thus be saved for life in heaven. No religious faith or worship can save us, but only reformation and regeneration. The Writings have been given so that its truths within our mind, may have the power to battle and defeat the hells within us.
You can see that it is essential to acquire in our mind the literal meaning of the Writings. Without this knowledge of the Writings in sufficient detail, we cannot be reformed because we are unwilling to give up the nonduality which is in our unregenerate mind. The only way we have the motive power to reject our own nonduality is by reading, understanding, and believing the literal sentences of the Writings, even as we believe and worship Divine Truth or the Lord. This is the only way that the Lord has provided for salvation in His Second Coming.
Once we imbibe the letter of the Writings and honor it in our mind as the Word, we have developed into mature adult minds ready to undergo rebirth and reformation. Now the literal sentences that are in our mind become Doctrine of Life. We see each sentence as applying to ourself, even though very obscurely, and sometimes seeing not even that. But we accept rationally the idea that every sentence applies to us, in fact, is the Lord speaking to our natural mind. Now we suddenly become aflame with the desire to reform. We passionately seek out every nonduality in our mind, deconstruct it, mark it, put it in a special bin, and substitute for it a duality from those many sentences and ideas we imbibed from the Writings. Suddenly we see clearly in the light of those sentences and concepts. This is spiritual vision. For the first time we have a spiritual consciousness, the very beginning of it because we are in the reformation phase, but much more brightly when we progress in regeneration.
In the Writings, we read details about correspondences, the Lord’s Laws of Providence and Permissions, conjugial love, states of regeneration. All these subjects are spiritual topics, but they are laid down in a natural language. The literal meaning of the sentence is not the spiritual meaning that is contained within it. Because this would be impossible! It is impossible on earth as it is impossible in heaven, because the Word in both worlds is written in a visible script with letters.
This is most important to understand, and is repeated in different ways, in several places throughout this book. At first this is hard to believe and accept, regardless of how much study we have done on the Writings. This resistance is similar to the resistance Christians put up to the idea from the Writings that the Old and New Testaments have an inner sense, and the only this inner sense is actually spiritual. They have difficulty believing this because they can hardly be expected to understand it without the Writings.
Prior to our reformation in adult life we are called Christians, but after reformation, when regeneration has begun, we are called True Christians—as the title of the last book of the Writings clearly indicate: The True Christian Religion. And the last thing in a section of the Word recapitulates all of the Word (xx). Hence The True Christian Religion (TCR) is the special Work of the Writings that embodies, recapitulates, and completes all that has been written in the Word before it. All who are called “True Christians” are of the New Church. The New Church mind regardless of religious background, is called the True Christian mind. The word “Christian” as part of “True” represents the Divine Human of the Lord as revealed in the Second Coming, for He is Divine Truth, and He is the Risen Glorified Christ born in the world (xx). All who know Him in His Second Coming, and love Him as the Divine Human, He calls “True Christians.”
After reformation, we develop a dual relationship to the Writings. We continue to study the literal as essential for the continued development of our natural mind. Remember that every word and sentence of the literal in the Word contains infinite spiritual secrets (xx). We need those sentences and ideas in our external memory-knowledges as an endless source of new spiritual truths that enhance our happiness and consciousness as angels to eternity. This is why the angels have the Word and read it as the source of all their wisdom (xx). But remember again how they access these spiritual truths each time they read the Word in script, or think from it in their memory-knowledge. The wisdom does not lie in the letters and sentences, but within them. This is a discrete degree above the script or letter. Therefore it is impossible to express spiritual truths in the script of the angels, even though that script is called “spiritual script” (xx).
This is the same for us on earth. The literal sentences and their meanings in our mind, are not spiritual since they are in the natural mind. We read the sentences and definitions about “the heavenly doctrine” and the sentence, “This is the Heavenly Doctrine.” These are indeed spiritual and heavenly subjects, but what’s written down is not the spiritual meaning. The Lord has provided for this: that as we and angels read the script, or think from it in our mind, He enlightens each of us. That’s how it works! Only this enlightenment is the spiritual sense. It’s like a flash of lightening in a meadow in the dark—our understanding breaks through the darkness and for an instant, we see the terrain in clear vision. After that instant we can describe what we have seen, but this description cannot recreate the vision of the terrain, but only a representation of it in language.
5. Enlightenment From The Lord
When does the Lord give enlightenment as we read the sentences of the Writings, or think from them in our mind?
The answer is the same for us now and later, when we are angels. The Lord gives enlightenment when we try to apply the sentence or idea in the letter, to our life, that is, to our willing and thinking moment by moment. This is the “work of charity” or the “life of good” that we must perform in order be saved. Our willing and thinking moment by moment consists of a sequence of acts we perform in our will and in our understanding. Thousands of individual acts of willing, intending, thinking, and reasoning, go on every day for every human being. Each one of these is either from hell or from heaven. Prior to our reformation, all are from hell! (xx), and to be regenerated we need to get rid of them as-of self, in our conscious mind, by a free choice motivated by the spiritual truth that they are sins against the Lord and prevent us from becoming angels. That’s a lot of work! But the Lord provides for the orderly progress within this psychobiological growth process.
Enlightenment is the flash of heavenly light the Lord sends into our conscious natural mind, whenever we examine one of our numerous acts of the day or hour, and evaluate them in the light of the sentences and ideas from the Writings.
The meaning of the flash that we try to write down or express in words, is called the spiritual Doctrine in our understanding (xx). This is the spiritual meaning of the Heavenly Doctrines now seen spiritually, while before regeneration began, we only saw their natural meaning, since we could not see what is within those sentences. Our mind was locked into what was in the outside of the sentences, namely their natural meaning. This natural meaning was essential to acquire so that we may use them to evaluate our willing and thinking acts. But now that we have applied it to ourselves, we are given to see what is within. Note carefully: the literal is till there, still true, still holy. It is still essential to imbibe it and understand it naturally with our rational understanding. NO progress can be made without this step!
But it must not be the last step! Mere memory-knowledges of the literal scientifics of the Writings does not have the power to save us, despite their holiness and essential condition for being saved. Faith cannot save, but charity within faith, saves (xx). The charity is the works of good we do by modifying our willing and thinking in accordance with the faith, the Doctrine, the understanding. The spiritual meaning is then revealed, first to the spiritual mind, of which we are unconscious, and second, by correspondence, to the interior-natural mind, of which we are conscious like a flash in the dark.
Prior to reformation, the Lord calls the works we do as “a hunter of the ground.” We have the Writings, we acknowledge it as the Word, we study and memorize it, but we do not apply it to our willing and thinking in particular, but only in general, like a confession or creed. It is in our mind for a few minutes a week or day, but then out of our mind, as we carry on intending and willing in the absence of our thinking about the Writings. But after reformation, we are motivated to change our moment by moment intending and thinking, so that they conform to what we have learned from our study of the Writings. In this new state, the Lord calls us “a man of the field.” We don’t just put the heavenly doctrines into our understanding, but into our will. This requires gradual regeneration, day by day, like a gardener or farmer toiling in his field.
Then the Writings are no longer merely the Word of our religion, but the Lord Himself in His Holy Spirit or Divine Rational. This is because we can now perceive the Lord within the letter in a way not perceivable until then. Our love for this Divine Truth develops our spiritual mind all the way to the Second Heaven of the spiritual angels. But if our love is for the Lord, and thence for His Truth, our spiritual mind is developed all the way to the Third Heaven of the celestial angels. To love the Lord’s Truth is to study the Writings and to make its concepts the governing ideas in our mind. To love the Lord, and thence His Truth, is to use this truth to modify our willing and thinking, so that we may become more agreeable to the Lord, to His Order, and closer to Him in conjunction.
Those who consider themselves in the New Church may assume that they are already saved since they believe in the Writings as the Word of their religion. But they must apply to themselves the Lord’s Doctrine:
UNLESS A MAN IS BORN AGAIN, AND, AS IT WERE, CREATED ANEW, HE CANNOT ENTER INTO THE KINGDOM OF GOD. That unless a man is born again he cannot enter into the kingdom of God, is the Lord's doctrine (TCR 572).
We need to ask ourselves: How is the New Church person reborn? The answer given in this book is based on my understanding of the Writings as the Word, and how it is to be applied to our daily willing and thinking. By observing the resistances I am experiencing in my reformation and regeneration I have become aware of how the Heavenly Doctrine is to be applied specifically to our willing and thinking in daily activities. The Writings show that progress in our regeneration depends entirely on the degree of our cooperation with the Lord. This cooperation is performed in the mental effort we exert in our willing and thinking, moment by moment, in our daily routines of social life. The effort is required because our natural willing and thinking is not in agreement with the Writings prior to reformation, regardless of our religious membership. This mental effort or daily struggle, is the arena of reformation and regeneration. I present techniques that I have found effective that allow us better knowledge and control over our willing and thinking, to force them into alignment with the spiritual Doctrine in our mind.
The techniques fall into two categories: critical analysis of ideas and concepts, and systematic methods of self-witnessing or objective self-observation. Critical analysis by means of the Writings as the only authority, is the work of reformation presented in Volume 1. Everything in our mind from heredity, socialization, and culture must be rearranged and subjected to critical evaluation in this heavenly light. Our moment to moment intending and thinking, emoting and verbing, must be monitored so that we may get to know the evils in our unregenerate character. In Volume 3 this is called self-witnessing and is the actual process of our cooperation with the Lord in regeneration.
The Writings were given to humankind universally, but also to each unique individual mind in particular, as pointed out in this General Church sermon:
The acceptance of the Writings is an individual thing. The New Church is formed of individuals in whom there has been a profound occurrence in the rational mind. … The Second Coming of the Lord is effected in what has been written, and through which the Lord speaks to the rational mind. … The Writings declare themselves to be a revelation from the Lord Himself. …
The books claim to be the Lord speaking to man. It is pointless for a man to decide whether they are or whether they are not until the doctrines have had access to his mind. If his mind responds to them, he may see that he is approaching a momentous decision. “Perhaps these doctrines really are the Lord Himself speaking to me.” If they are, if he accepts them as such, a complete change comes about, for they have Divine claim on his rational mind. The reception of them becomes the supreme service to which the rational mind can be turned. (Rev. Donald L. Rose, Sermon titled “The Colt Loosed For the Lord’s Service” General Church, Bryn Athyn. Undated)
This book is written for those who read the Writings as the Lord Himself speaking to them through the rational ideas contained in them. Since the reception of the Heavenly Doctrine must be particular to each individual, no one can escape the main issue presented here: What effort is required of each of us to receive the Writings? As soon as we begin to read the Writings as the Word, we learn that we must be regenerated to be saved, and that this process is carried out gradually by the Lord, but only to the extent that we cooperate in the process. Clearly then, reading and acknowledging the Writings as the Word is not enough for anyone to be regenerated, hence saved. Worshipping in the New Church is not enough to be regenerated, hence saved. What then is required? The Writings teach that we first must undergo reformation in adult life (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]; TCR 587), and then we must begin our regeneration, a process of change that is to continue to the end.
How are we to cooperate with the Lord in our reformation and regeneration? This book presents some spiritual methods and disciplines that help us to perform this required cooperation. In the Writings, this required cooperative effort is called being “a man of the field”:
'A man of the field' means the good of life that has its origin in matters of doctrine.
This is clear from the meaning of 'the field'. In the Word reference is made in many places to the earth (or the land), the ground, and the field. … And since the Church is not the Church by virtue of matters of doctrine except insofar as these have the good of life as the end in view, or what amounts to the same, unless matters of doctrine are joined to the good of life, 'the field' therefore means primarily the good of life. But in order that such good may be that of the Church, matters of doctrine from the Word which have been implanted within that good must be present.
In the absence of matters of doctrine the good of life does indeed exist, but it is not as yet that of the Church, and so not as yet truly spiritual, except in the sense that it has the potentiality to become so, like the good of life as this exists with gentiles who do not possess the Word and therefore do not know the Lord.
[2] That 'the field' is the good of life in which the things of faith, that is, spiritual truths existing with the Church, are implanted, becomes quite clear from the Lord's parable about the sower in Matthew …
[3] With regard to the good of life which has its origin in matters of doctrine being meant by 'a man of the field', the position is that those who are being regenerated first of all do good as matters of doctrine direct them, for they do not of themselves know what good is. They learn to do good from matters of doctrine concerning love and charity; from these they know who the Lord is, who the neighbour is, what love is, and what charity is, and so what good is. Those who have come into this stage are stirred by the affection for truth and are called 'men (vir) of the field'.
But after that, once they have been regenerated they do good not from matters of doctrine but from love and charity, for the good itself which they have learned about through matters of doctrine exists with them, and they are in that case called 'men (homo) of the field'. …
[4] The same also applies to spiritual truths which are called doctrinal and are more interior Commandments still. For matters of doctrine are interior truths which the natural man possesses, the first truths there being sensory ones, the second truths being factual, and interior truths matters of doctrine. The latter are based on factual truths inasmuch as a person can have and retain no idea, notion, or concept of them except from factual truths. But the foundations on which factual truths are based are sensory truths, for without sensory truths nobody is able to possess factual ones. Such truths, that is to say, factual and sensory, are meant by 'a man skilled in hunting', but matters of doctrine are meant by 'a man of the field'.
Such is the order in which those kinds of truths stand in relation to one another in man. Until a person has become adult therefore, and through sensory and factual truths possesses matters of doctrine, he is incapable of being regenerated, for he cannot be confirmed in the truths contained in matters of doctrine except through ideas based on factual and sensory truths - for nothing is ever present in a person's thought, not even the deepest arcanum of faith there, which does not involve some natural or sensory idea, though generally a person is not aware of the essential nature of such ideas. But in the next life the nature of them is revealed before his understanding, if he so desires, and also a visual representation before his sight, if he wants it; for in the next life such things can be presented before one's eyes in a visual form. This seems unbelievable but it is nevertheless what happens there. (AC 3310)
This passages teaches many things, some of which may be summarized in relation to this book:
1. The “good of life” that the New Church mind is required to perform is that of willing and thinking in accordance with the spiritual Doctrine which we have acquired in our understanding. Note that “the good of life has its origin in matters of doctrine.” In order to reform and regenerate we must first have Doctrine from the Writings to guide our new spiritual growth and development, for this is the “origin” of the good of life.
2. The church in us is not made by knowledge and understanding of the Writings, but by willing and thinking in accordance with the spiritual Doctrine in our mind that we obtained from the Writings.
3. Willing and thinking in accordance with the spiritual Doctrine is only possible to the extent that we study the Writings sufficiently to have articulated in our mind an accommodated version that can guide our willing and thinking all day long. This accommodated version in our mind is called the Doctrine, and it becomes more and more spiritual as we advance in regeneration.
4. Church membership and worship do not create the spiritual mind, but only the spiritual Doctrine in our mind, and this only to the extent that we use it to guide our daily willing and thinking.
5. There are two stages we must undergo. In phase 1 we do our willing and thinking from the literal Doctrine in our mind. This is our state of reformation, of obedience to the truth. We do not yet know the Lord as to His Love, but only the Lord as to His Truth. After this phase is matured, we enter phase 2 in which we do our willing and thinking from the love of the Lord and neighbor by means of the truth of Doctrine in our mind. This truth of Doctrine is now spiritual, whereas before, it was only natural. This is actual regeneration and salvation. We must not get stuck in phase 1, for this does not lead to Heaven.
6. There are two levels of willing and thinking in the natural mind. The lower level is called scientific, based on natural truths from sensory observations and facts. The upper level of thinking is called doctrinal, that is, based on the truths from the Writings. The scientific level (“a man skilled in hunting”) is based on what’s below in our mind and is purely natural, but the doctrinal level (“a man of the field”), is based on what’s above and pertains to what is spiritual.
7. The doctrinal level of willing and thinking must be founded on the scientific or literal level. Truths about spiritual things remain rational abstractions, not genuine spiritual-rational truths, unless they are grounded in sensuous actions from our willing and thinking. The indescribable wisdom and intelligence of angels must rest in sensuous things in them and around them, which is why heaven is so rich in external life, in art and sublime conveniences (CL 12).
8. Regeneration is spiritual, therefore it must take place within the outward level of willing and thinking in our sensuous life. This outward level of life is where we can make decisions and choices based on our own philosophy, beliefs, and rational faith. This thinking from self normally starts in early adulthood. Until then we merely act from the authority of others and the things we have learned since early childhood. Regardless of the religion in which one is born, there is no reformation until early adulthood and beyond. After reformation is matured, spiritual regeneration can begin.
9. Reformation begins when we are ready to acknowledge the truths from the Writings as Divine Commandments we are required to perform daily for our salvation.
10. The Writings consist of natural truths (“scientific truths”) and spiritual truths (“Doctrine”). Both scientific truths and doctrinal truths appear or are contained in, the letter of the Writings. Doctrinal truths about spiritual things are first taken up as the literal language, understood literally or naturally. But later, we understand them spiritually.
These ten statements constitute the rationale and general content of this book.
7. At The Threshold Out Of Hell Into Heaven
The theme of the reformation techniques (Volume 1) is how to identify and deconstruct nonduality in our mind, which we have taken up from culture and self-intelligence. The theme of the regeneration techniques (Volume 3) is how to perform the daily discipline of self-witnessing, which consists in monitoring our willing and thinking moment by moment, keeping track of its ceaseless stream, and modifying it in accordance with the Doctrine in our mind. We must undergo reformation before we can begin regeneration.
At this point something will now be said on how the internal man is reformed and how the external man is reformed by means of it. The internal man is not reformed merely by knowing, understanding and being wise, and consequently merely by thinking; but by willing what knowledge, understanding and wisdom teach.
When a man knows, understands and has wisdom to see that there is a heaven and a hell, and that all evil is from hell and all good is from heaven; and if he then does not will evil because it is from hell, but wills good because it is from heaven, he is in the first stage of reformation, and is at the threshold out of hell into heaven.
When he progresses further, and wills to desist from evils he is in the second stage of reformation, and is now outside hell but not yet in heaven, which he sees above him. A man must have such an internal in order that he may be reformed; but he is not reformed unless the external as well as the internal is reformed. The external is reformed by means of the internal when the external desists from the evils which the internal does not will because they are infernal, and still more when the external for this reason shuns them and fights against them. Thus willing is the part of the internal and doing of the external. For unless a man does that which he wills there is within him the failure to will which eventually becomes want of will.
[2] From these few considerations it can be seen how the external man is reformed by means of the internal. This also is what is meant by the Lord's words to Peter:
Jesus said: If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me. [Simon] Peter saith unto Him: Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. Jesus saith to him: He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit. John xiii. 8, 9, 10.
By washing is meant spiritual washing, which is purification from evils; by washing the head and hands is meant purifying the internal man; and by washing the feet is meant purifying the external man. That the external man must be purified when the internal has been purified is meant by this, "He that is washed, needeth not save to wash his feet." That all purification from evils is from the Lord is meant by this, "If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me." It has been shown in many places in the ARCANA COELESTIA that washing among the Jews represented purification from evils, and that this is signified in the Word by washing; and that by washing the feet is signified the purification of the natural or external man. (DP 151)
Reformation eliminates the many nondualities in our mind and allows us to build up the New Church mind in ourself. Reformation is completed when we have acquired in our conscious understanding enough knowledge of the Writings that the Doctrine is in our conscious awareness and available for immediate, spontaneous use in our daily willing and thinking. Then regeneration can begin. The Doctrine we take up from the Writings is made of rational ideas I will call “dualities” or concepts of “duality.” These concepts of duality are to replace all the concepts of nonduality. Nonduality is the negative affirmation by which one denies that duality exists in this or that area of reality. Reformation is the rearranging of the mind from the nonduality of the world to the duality of the Writings. Hence the rational mind must be involved in spiritual growth.
According to Rev. Rose:
Every person raised within the church must come to the time of a possession of a rational faculty… Every person raised within the church, although he has many times heard the Lord speaking, must in the privacy of the chamber of his mind know what it is to acknowledge this and say, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” … Even if we have accepted the Writings, we can still have wrong ideas. …
Suppose that the new truth puts light upon imperfections in our self. It exposes our evils and proves that our thoughts have been false. Our pride resists it; the habitual thinking of many years resist it. … But when we realize that it is the Lord Himself speaking, our reluctance can give way to a thrilling sense of progress and change. (Rev. Donald L. Rose, Sermon titled “The Colt Loosed For the Lord’s Service” General Church, Bryn Athyn. Undated)
Nonduality exists in the human mind as a property of being unregenerate. Regeneration is effected by the Lord through our persistent application of dualities from the Writings to our daily willing and thinking. This is the commandment of performing “works of charity:”
The proper and genuine uses of charity are the uses of each one's function and administration, as has been said above. These then become goods of charity, in which love to the Lord exists, or with which that love is conjoined, when man does them from spiritual fidelity and sincerity, which those have who love uses because they are uses, and who believe that every good is from the Lord. But besides these there are other general uses, as faithfully loving the marriage partner, rightly bringing up children, managing the home prudently, and dealing justly with servants. These works become works of charity when they are done from the love of uses; and in reference to a marriage partner when they are done from mutual and chaste love; such uses are household uses which are uses of charity. (D. WIS. 10)
The following two things are clear from this passage. First, that the Lord is present with us nowhere but in our love of uses, which love is called “works of charity.” Second, that works of charity refers to our willing and thinking daily as we carry out our activities and relationships. This motivation of uses in our willing and thinking cannot be merely “uses of external charity” called “piety,” for this is not itself spiritual or of our salvation:
To give aid to the needy, to widows, to orphans, solely because they are needy, widows and orphans, and to give to beggars solely because they are beggars, are uses of external charity, which charity is called piety; but these are uses of internal charity only so far as they are derived from use and the love of use. For external charity without internal charity is not charity; the internal must be there to make it charity; for external charity from internal charity acts prudently, but external without internal charity acts imprudently, and often unjustly. (D. WIS. 10:5)
We are commanded to form the New Church mind in ourselves through reformation and cooperation in our gradual regeneration. This means to perform our daily willing and thinking from a spiritual motive, namely, the motive that to love the Lord is to perform our willing and thinking as works of charity. We must avoid leading a daily life from mere piety, which means, merely acknowledging one’s religion and attending regular worship and supporting the Church organization. These are external acts that are below the spiritual-rational and cannot contribute to our salvation in themselves no matter how much we engage in them. Rather, our regeneration must be the result of an internal motive that governs all our daily activities—at work, at home, in our conscious mental struggles and intentions. This internal motive is what’s called the genuine “works of charity” or “inward charity.”
8. Cooperation in our Regeneration
This motive for regeneration must involve all our willing and thinking, moment by moment throughout the day, in our social, professional, and recreational activities. How are we to accomplish this? We need to learn the mental discipline of accomplishing this ceaseless activity every day. This discipline must be spiritual and its justification and method must be from the Writings.
Anyone therefore who looks to the Lord and wants to be guided by Him is in a state of good. But anyone who turns away from God and wants to be guided by himself is not in a state of good (CL 444)
To look to the Lord is to reason from spiritual truths obtained from the Word of the Lord. To “be guided by self” is to reason from natural appearances obtained either from self or from the ideas of others. The fundamental duality of the New Church mind is the duality between the spiritual and the natural. This fundamental duality has innumerable sub-dualities within it, associated in a hierarchy or series, and each duality is a unique permanent distinction that cannot change to eternity (DLW 226). For example: Divine and Human, Esse and Existere, Love and Wisdom, will and understanding, husband and wife, interior and external, mind and body, heart and lungs, uncreate and created, unregenerate and regenerating, good and evil, truth and falsity, heaven and hell, the Lord and self, and many more. All sub-dualities have the fundamental duality at their core which cannot be removed. If the core were to be removed from any duality, all other dualities would fall. The mind will then contain only nondualities. The unregenerate mind is such a mind.
Even those born in a New Church religion are unregenerate until early adulthood, when reformation can begin. Until then the dualities and truths obtained from education and study of the Writings are “natural scientifics” of religion rather than spiritual truths of Doctrine. Reformation marks the turning point when natural scientifics of religion become personal life choices by preference. Reformation defines the line of demarcation between unregenerate and regenerate.
9. The Lord’s Relationship to All Religions
After reformation is completed, regeneration begins, and continues till the end. This is the process of gradually internalizing the truths in our memory into the choices of our life. This new mind is appropriately called the New Church mind because all its dualities are from the Writings which is the Word for the New Church mind. A reader of an earlier draft of this book objected to the idea that the New Church mind is to be formed exclusively by truths from the Writings: “What about truths that the Lord gives to other religions and nations who do not know of the Writings, or if they know about it, reject it because it is contrary to their religion, philosophy, or tradition?” The answer given in the Writings can be summarized as follows:
(1) Religious membership does not constitute salvation (TCR 254; AC 8762; NJHD 126).
(2) Therefore, those born in the New Church are unregenerate and must undergo reformation and regeneration in adult life. (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]; TCR 587)
(3) Hence also, those born in any religion, and those who have no religion, are unregenerate and must undergo regeneration, either in this life or in the afterlife (HH 512, 308).
(4) Every individual, regardless of religion or belief system, is born unregenerate, and in order to be saved for eternal life in heaven, must undergo regeneration (HH 308).
The Lord provides for the salvation of every individual (TCR 142). Every person is born for eternal life in heaven (HH 82, TCR 574). The Lord is the same Divine Human for all people on this earth and on all the other earths in the universe (EU 121; SE 4373, 5513). It stands to reason therefore that the Lord provides a means for regeneration in the case of every human being. This New Church view on salvation is unlike all other religions, which assume that religious membership is the condition for being saved for heaven. But the Word of the Second Coming reveals the true relationship between God and people in the universe. All people who are good form the Lord’s “universal Church” regardless of religious membership (HH 321).
The Church where the Word is and the Lord is known by means of it, in relation to those outside the Church where there is no Word and the Lord is unknown is like the heart and lungs in man in comparison with the other parts of the body, which live from them as from the fountains of their life ... Before the Lord the universal Church on the earth is as one Man ... (HH 305)
Here it is revealed that the Lord unites the entire human race into “one Man” or in the Form of one human being, even as He unites the body’s many parts into one integrated functioning unit.
There is also a conjunction of heaven by means of the Word with those who are outside the Church where there is no Word; for the Lord's Church is universal, and is with all who acknowledge the Divine and live in charity. Moreover, such are taught after death by angels and receive Divine truths (HH 308).
This passage reveals that people of all religions are part of the Lord’s Heaven, the only condition being, not religious membership, but living an individual life that is good. Good is defined universally by all religions as worshipping God, obeying God’s commandments, and loving the neighbor, that is, not injuring others for the sake of self. Further, the above passages reveal that all individuals must be taught by angels upon arrival into the afterlife. In this instruction everyone is given genuine spiritual truths, and these truths are understood with variety, depending on the genius or religious beliefs of each individual. All those who lived a life of obedience to God and love to the neighbor, are able to receive the Divine Truths from the angels. But since these truths are accommodated to the mind of each individual, the Heavens are arranged by the Lord in numberless angelic societies, each different, each unique (AC 10334). Therefore people of different religions have their own Heavens under the Lord, depending on the idea of Him they form for themselves (DLW 13).
Those born in a New Church religion and those who adopt it afterwards, have genuine truths of religion in this life, but they are not admitted to heaven on account of them:
They who are born where the Word is, and where the Lord is thereby known, are not of the church, but they who are regenerated by the Lord by the truths of the Word, that is, they who live the life of charity … (NJHD 246)
Here we see once again that Church membership is not saving. Those born in the New Church who acknowledge the Writings as the Word of their religion, are not saved by Baptism in childhood, or by years of Sunday Worship, and by graduating from a religious New Church school. Salvation is by one method for all human beings: regeneration. And regeneration does not begin until after reformation in early adulthood (AC 3518). Clearly then, the New Church member is saved only to the extent of undergoing regeneration. This is because salvation is by regeneration, not by religious membership or initiation. Regeneration is treated of in Volume 3. But before regeneration can begin, the individual must undergo reformation, which is the subject of this volume (Volume 1).
It is clear from all this that the New Church mind cannot be inherited or bestowed by membership. It must be formed individually in adult life by reformation and regeneration (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]; TCR 587).
10. The Writings As The Exclusive Source For Spiritual Truths
Hence the crucial question: How are we to reform our mind from the unregenerate state to the state of becoming the New Church mind? Here the answer from the Writings is clear: All spiritual truths must come from the Word and from nowhere else, as shown in the quotations above and in what follows. The Word for the New Church mind is the Word of the Second Coming, that is, the Word of the Writings, sometimes called the Latin Word or the Third Testament. Hence the Writings must be the exclusive source for spiritual truths in the New Church mind. Nothing whatsoever can be borrowed from other religions or intellectual traditions. You can see from the discussion above that this is not a judgment on other religions and traditions. Instead it is a statement of the requirement for the New Church mind, hence for anyone of any background who wishes to form the New Church mind in themselves. No other genuine New Church mind exists but that which is based exclusively on the Writings.
Clearly, then, it is not permissible for the New Church mind to “import” spiritual concepts from other spiritual traditions of any kind.This may seem extreme and unreasonable, at first, but it will be seen to be true as I bring in additional critical thinking from the Writings. At first we have difficulty seeing that the Writings must be the exclusive source of all spiritual truths in the New Church mind. We think about the truths given to every religion and we think about the Lord’s universal church. These things are true, indeed, as discussed above. But they do not mean that the New Church mind can import any of these spiritual concepts that are not from the Writings. The key to understanding this is to remember that Heaven is distinguished between those who have the Word, and those who do not (CL 343, 352; TCR 268). There is no sharing of truths between them, which is why the heavens are isolated from each other (CL 352). Truths cannot be shared across discrete levels of spiritual mentality.
Take for instance the concept of “God” which is universal to all the Heavens. Universal doesn’t mean similar between the integrated parts. The New Heavens of the Second Coming are at the center of all the Heavens and closest to the spiritual Sun, or the Lord (xx). Concepts from this Heaven cannot be exported to the other Heavens in a direct way, but only in a from accommodated to their genius and willingness. Similarly, concepts from the other Heavens cannot be imported into the New Christian Heaven, which is the New Heaven established by the truths of the Writings (TCR 1).
What applies to heaven also applies to the Church on earth (TCR 14, 119). And so, once more we see that the Writings as the Word of the New Christian Heaven, must be the exclusive source of all concepts regarding salvation of the New Church mind. Reformation is the process by which the New Church mind is formed and prepared into a mind that can live in the New Heavens of the Second Coming (TCR 1). Everything in this mind must be made of concepts that originate from the Writings. The concepts we then hear of from other sources must not be admitted, but marked and separated in memory, so that they do not commingle with the truths of Doctrine from the Writings.
It will be shown in this volume that every concept from the Writings is a duality and every concept not from the Writings is a nonduality in the New Church mind. Thus the Writings are the only source of dualities for the New Church mind and for the highest angels (NJHD 257; AC 8939; TCR 340, 347, 350; SS 111; SE 5961). Again, this may sound extreme and wrong, but only to those who are unwilling to form all their concepts from the Writings.
Note that the individual with a New Church mind can easily function as an expert scientist and scholar on any religion or system of thinking. The knowledge we have about nondualities is not what’s meant by “not allowing them to commingle” with truths from the Writings. The New Church mind that is formed exclusively by the truths and reasoning of the Writings is quite able to read about nondualities and to see them in the light of the dualities from the Writings (HH 38). Our scholarship and expertise of nondualities can even be enhanced by our special rational perspective, and if we had the motive to do so, we could be effective in teaching nondualities to others. Yet at the same time we would not allow these nondualities to commingle with what we have intact in our New Church mind, in our willing and thinking at any moment.
11. Separating Nonduality and Duality in the Mind
The advantages afforded to the New Church mind by the dualities of the Writings are due to their genuine rationality and correspondence to reality:
Only he who knows how degrees are related to Divine order can comprehend how the heavens are distinct, or even what is meant by the internal and the external man. Most men in the world have no other idea of what is interior and what is exterior, or of what is higher and what is lower, than as something continuous, or coherent by continuity, from purer to grosser. But the relation of what is interior to what is exterior is discrete, not continuous. Degrees are of two kinds, those that are continuous and those that are not. Continuous degrees are related like the degrees of the waning of a light from its bright blaze to darkness, or like the degrees of the decrease of vision from objects in the light to those in the shade, or like degrees of purity in the atmosphere from bottom to top. These degrees are determined by distance. (…) [3] Until one has acquired for himself a perception of these degrees he cannot possibly understand the differences between the heavens, nor between the interior and exterior faculties of man, nor the differences between the spiritual world and the natural world, nor between the spirit of man and his body. So neither can he understand the nature and source of correspondences and representations, or the nature of influx. Sensual men do not apprehend these differences, for they make increase and decrease, even according to these degrees, to be continuous, and are therefore unable to conceive of what is spiritual otherwise than as a purer natural. And in consequence they remain outside of and a great way off from intelligence. (HH 38)
At the beginning of our reformation in adult life our unregenerate mind is mixed with dualities from the Writings and nondualities from self and culture. Our reformation is therefore nothing but a clash of ideas in our mind, a battle of life and death, a struggle for heaven or hell. Our own unregenerate will is dead set to lead us to hell, while the reformed will is from the Lord, hence set to eternal life in heaven.
… man when regenerated is as to the intellectual part the Lord's, but as to his will part is his own, these two parts in the spiritual man being opposed.
But though the will part of man is opposed, yet it cannot but be present; for all the obscurity in his intellectual part, or all the density of his cloud, is from it. It continually flows in from it, and in proportion as it flows in, the cloud in his intellectual part is thickened; but in proportion as it is removed, the cloud is made thin. (…) [3] This condition of things between the will and the understanding is as if two who were formerly conjoined by a covenant of friendship, as were the will and the understanding in the man of the Most Ancient Church, had their friendship broken, and enmity had arisen-as took place when man wholly corrupted his will part-and then when a covenant is again entered into, the hostile part is set forth as if the covenant were with it, but it is not with it, because it is utterly opposite and contrary, but it is with that which flows in from it-as already said-that is, with the Own of the understanding.
The "token" or "sign" of the covenant is this, that in proportion as there is the presence of the Lord in the Own of the understanding, in the same proportion the Own of the will be removed.
The case herein is exactly as it is with heaven and hell. The intellectual part of the regenerated man, from charity, in which the Lord is present, is heaven; his will part is hell. So far as the Lord is present in this heaven, so far is this hell removed. For of himself man is in hell, and of the Lord is in heaven. And man is being continually uplifted from hell into heaven, and so far as he is uplifted, so far his hell is removed. The "sign" therefore, or indication, that the Lord is present, is that man's will part is being removed. The possibility of its removal is effected by means of temptations, and by many other means of regeneration. (AC 1044)
The above passage teaches several things about how we are to undergo reformation and regeneration:
(1) All the willing we do prior to reformation in adult life is evil from hell and cannot be regenerated.
(2) Reformation is the struggle of opposites in our mind. The truths we acquire from the Writings are the Lord with us in our “intellectual part,” but our will part, or our willing and intending, is hell with us since there is nothing in it but evil affections of every kind. This evil doesn’t show in our social personality because we are motivated by selfish affections to simulate what is required, and to hide how we would desire to behave.
(3) Prior to reformation our evil affections or motives, called cupidities and lusts in the will, create falsities in the understanding, from which we have false beliefs where we see falsity as truth, and truth as falsity. This falsified mental life is called “clouds” in the mind. And as the “density of his cloud” thickens, the more is one’s mental life impaired and falsified in every intention of the will and every reasoning of the understanding. This is our unregenerate life until reformation begins in early adulthood when we can make the conscious rational lifestyle choice to rearrange our thinking in accordance with the Writings. Then for the first time the Lord becomes actually present in our understanding as opposed to being there nominally or by reputation.
(4) Our automatic progress to hell can be reversed by allowing the Lord to remove the cupidities and lusts in our will and to give us a reformed will. The Lord cannot do this without our conscious cooperation. This conscious cooperation is to learn the truths of the Writings and to consider them as Divine Commandments for living. Then the Lord is present actually and can remove the old will. He does that by Himself for we have no power whatsoever. The process of replacing the old will is gradual and proceeds only so far as is made possible by our actual daily cooperation, minute by minute. And “in proportion as it is removed, the cloud is made thin,” meaning that the life of evil and spiritual insanity is gradually removed during the years of regeneration. But nothing is removed by the Lord except that which we allow.
(5) While we are regenerating, from young adulthood to the end, our mind is in opposition, partly sane and partly insane, though not at the same level in the mind, for they are kept apart by the Lord who prevents commingling (DP 296; cf. AC 2426). Commingling would lead to profanation and a fate worse than hell (cf. AC 3757).
(6) Once our understanding is filled with the dualities from the Writings, we are expected to proceed as-of-self in our daily struggle with choices. We are to recognize and isolate all nondualities that are in our mind from many sources. From this categorical rearrangement, the New Church mind is born. This is reformation. Since this mind is now formed exclusively by the Writings, it is called “heaven in which the Lord is present” while what is in our will is called “hell.” Therefore, in the New Church mind, hell is in its nonduality while Heaven is in its duality.
(7) After reformation, the childhood and adolescence of the New Church mind gradually undergoes the “thinning of the cloud” or the restoration of mental health to the regenerating individual. The motive we must acquire to undergo restoration is called “charity” and it is within this motive that the Lord is present with heaven. Charity refers to love of the neighbor and love of uses, the chief of which is conjugial love (AC 7038[2]). For husbands this involves learning to love to act from the wife more than from self (see Chapter 9, Sections 1 and 2). To the extent that we persist in this motive, to that extent the Lord is present in our understanding of Doctrine. Also to that extent can the Lord remove hell from us and remove it to the distant and inactive portion of our mind (cf. AC 10621).
(8) As we struggle daily, in our willing and thinking, the Lord gives us a “sign” of His presence: It’s our awareness that the old cupidities and lusts we are familiar with, no longer appear in the same situations. We become aware of this during temptations, and in other ways.
To initiate and complete our reformation we must examine our chief concepts as they exist in our mind, and deconstruct them, so that we learn to distinguish between the nondualities and the dualities. This volume is about learning the process of eliminating conceptual nondualities and establishing dualities of life, called Doctrine, and thereby forming as-of self the New Church mind in ourselves.
The Lord is creating our gradual regeneration step by step, but only to the extent that we actively cooperate with Him moment by moment in our willing and thinking (TCR 371, 577; 615; cf. TCR 464; BE 15, 13). What does this cooperation consist of? What is it that we have to do in order to be considered “cooperating”? This book gives two broad answers. Volume 1 deals with Reformation, which is the struggle against nonduality in our mind. Since we internalize our culture and education, our unregenerate mind is suffused with all sorts of concepts and ideas and attractions that are nondualities.
For example, many people are attracted to Eastern nonduality in the form “self=divine,” or the idea that self is an illusion or unreality, while in reality we are God (see Chapter 1). Another example is scientific nonduality or materialistic science which asserts that only the natural world exists and denies heaven and hell. Another example is psychological nonduality which introduces and supports ideas that clash with dualities in the Writings, such as the idea of unconditional love and self-acceptance (see Chapter xx Section xx).
One final example is the cultural nonduality of pluralism and relativity which are opposed to dualities such as heaven and hell or genuine truth and adulterated truth. Our reformation consists in struggling against these nondualities in our mind from all these sources. The motive or purpose must be to replace them with the dualities we take up from the Writings. This process of replacement, if it’s going to succeed, must be done consciously, with full awareness and rational understanding. Therefore I illustrate in this volume various ways of using rational analysis to deconstruct and debunk the nondualities in our mind. To think and will from the Writings is the cooperation we must perform to be conjoined to the Lord and have heavenly life:
The freedom of choice resulting from this is the ability to will and to think from the Lord, that is, from the Word, and also the ability to will and to think from the devil, that is, contrary to the Lord and the Word. (TCR 371)
Volume 3 deals with Regeneration, which is the struggle against our inherited and acquired lusts and their falsities in our mind. I describe many kinds of spiritual disciplines that I found suitable for developing the New Church mind in myself. They are all based on self-witnessing techniques by which we monitor our willing, thinking, and doing all day, hour by hour, minute by minute, and second by second (see Note 20 at end). Performing spiritual disciplines is a religious activity to the extent that we carry them out for the purpose of cooperating with the Lord in our regeneration. This cooperation is a Divine Commandment and serves to prepare our mind that it may be able to live in heaven (DP 114).
12. Reformation by Means of the Writings
The New Church mind is a rebirth. Reformation only begins in adult life (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]; TCR 587) (AC 3518 [2] is quoted and discussed below). Those born in the New Church religion today are no different from those born anywhere else in relation to the requirement for reformation and regeneration, without there is no salvation for anyone. As children we grow up with our received religion. This religious practice and worship is not spiritual in itself but external without yet an internal (AC 3310). We are warned that this external faith does not remain in the afterlife, but is rejected for the sake of our own idols that remained hidden despite our external religion. It is necessary therefore to be reborn, which means to come to the worship of the Lord from within. This can only be done to the extent we undergo reformation and acquire the motivation to change our willing and thinking in daily life (HH 473).
We first are to change our thinking by studying the Writings every day and forming the Doctrine of Life in our understanding. Often readers believe that I am exaggerating when I mention that the study of the Writings should be a daily task. But consider what you do if you are going to succeed as a student, scholar, or expert at anything whatsoever. It requires many hours a week that amount to daily portions, and this, week after week, until there is accumulation. This is what needs to be done if we are going to accumulate enough Doctrine in our mind to serve as Divine Guide in our every moment of willing, thinking, and behaving. The accumulation of Doctrine can never cease because Doctrine is to be understood more and more interiorly in order to serve our regeneration. The highest angels continue to regenerate by means of more and more interior ideas they receive from the Lord when studying the Word.
Consider also what would prevent you from serious daily studies of the Writings, given that you know that it is the Lord present with you and through which He wants to regenerate you by giving you ever more interior visions and truths of Himself and of heaven.
So I am not exaggerating when I frequently repeat this requirement that we study the Writings daily as a serious student. Overcoming the obstacles that pose themselves to prevent this, is a key element of reformation. They can all be overcome by holding this one genuine idea in your focus: The Writings are the Lord in His Word of the Second Coming and every truth in it is a Divine Commandment for me. To love the Writings is therefore to love the Lord. To postpone the Writings is to love something else above the Lord. To have a distaste for studying the Writings is to love self above the Lord. Since we all start that way, we must compel ourselves to act in opposition to our resistance or avoidance of Him in His Word in which He is Himself, His Own Divine Truth.
The more interior our understanding of Doctrine from the Writings, the more we are willing to think and act in accordance with our Doctrine.
They who are being regenerated, at first do what is good from doctrinal things, for of themselves they do not know what is good, but learn it from the doctrinal things of love and charity; from these they know who the Lord is; who is the neighbor; what love is, and what charity; thus what good is. (AC 3310)
Regeneration is a gradual process over our entire life on earth, and beyond (AC 9410). It is a conscious process because it can go on only with our conscious cooperation (DP 114). This takes the form of monitoring our thinking and willing, assessing them in the light of the understanding of Doctrine in our mind, modifying our thoughts and decisions accordingly, and continuing every day to live in this manner. Doing this as-of self prepares our mind for heaven. To do it as-of self means that we struggle in the natural mind as if we were doing it alone but knowing in our rational mind that it is the Lord doing it by the infinite power of His Divine Wisdom from His Divine Love (AC 47, 233, 1712, 2877, 5664, 10299; NJHD 148; DP 102; CL 82; SE 5958; LJ 299; AE 864).
To the extent that we progress in our regeneration day by day, and week by week, to that extent the Lord reveals to us more and more interior spiritual truths as we study the Writings. Our consciousness is thereby enlightened and we can think and understand things in the light of heaven.
The Word is not understood except by those who are enlightened. … The human rational cannot apprehend Divine things, nor even spiritual things, unless it is enlightened by the Lord … Thus only they who are enlightened apprehend the Word … They who are in the good of life, and thereby in the affection of truth, are enlightened (NJHD 256).
This new understanding is simultaneously applied to all things around us and guides our willing and thinking, and to the extent that we are persistent and consistent, to that extent the Lord can create a new will within our reformed understanding. Now we continue life on earth in this celestial state of mind and life. Meanwhile we continue to have this new mind perfected by the Lord until His judgment of the right time, and then we pass on, leaving the physical body, and awakening in a spiritual body. Upon that momentous occasion angels are present, and help us to prepare fully for entrance into heaven. This period of preparation is fairly brief, equivalent to less than a few months in relation to the pacing we are used to from the natural world (HH 498). We then enter the heaven of our society where we find our house and our spouse. That is our bliss and happiness in eternity.
If we don’t do this daily work, there is only one other way, which is to remain infernal as we were born, whereupon when we arrive in the afterlife we are prepared for life in hell and our spirit-body sinks down to its level of miserable and inhuman life.
Evils are as it were heavy, and fall of themselves into hell; and so also falsities that are from evil (n. 8279, 8298). (HD 170)
The Writings play an essential role in this overall process of reformation, regeneration, and preparation. Without the Writings the New Church mind cannot reform and regenerate and thus, be prepared for heaven, and saved. Since the new era of His Second Coming the Lord provides only one way for salvation—the Word of the Writings:
The Word is the only doctrine which teaches how a man must live in the world in order to be happy to eternity. (AC 8939)
A human being is created for everlasting life, and any person can inherit that life, so long as he lives in accordance with the means of salvation prescribed in the Word; every Christian, as well as every non-Christian who possesses a religion and sound reason, assents to this proposition. (TCR 340)
Without the Word there is no rational conception of the Lord, and thus no salvation (SS 111)
As to the formation of faith: it is effected by man's going to the Lord, learning truths from the Word, and living according to them. (TCR 347)
I spoke with those who placed the only means of salvation in reading the Word. They were overhead, and said that they take great care that all in their society are diligent in reading the Word. But I told them, that this does not save, but that they must live according to the Word, and that nobody can live according to the Word except he be in the doctrine of truth from it; otherwise, they do not know how they are to live, for, from the sense of the letter of the Word, they are able to defend everything that belongs to their life, be it what it may, and this to protect falsities. It was shown also what is the nature of the Word in the letter, but that those who are in doctrine from the Word, see the Word and read it, quite differently; they consequently understand it, and are thus able to become rational: otherwise, this cannot take place. It was shown, also, that the reading of the Word is not attended to by the Lord, and therefore does not promote salvation, unless they are in the life of truth; and that they cannot be in the life of truth, except they be in doctrine from the Word (SE 5961).
For the formation of the New Church mind it is necessary to see these passages discussing “the Word” as referring to the Writings. Can you do this, or do you feel objections in your mind? See the discussion in Chapter 8 Section 4).
13. Old and New Testament From Perspective Of The Writings
If we could be saved by the Old and New Testaments then the Writings were not necessary! The salvation of the New Church mind depends on the Word of the Writings, not the Word of the Old Testament or the Word of the New Testament. When the New Church mind reads the Old and New Testaments it reads them only through the perspective of the Writings. If you read the Old and New Testaments as Christians do, can you be of the New Church? Clearly, then, the Word of the Writings must be the exclusive authority for the New Church mind. The New Church is the Crown of Churches and is to last forever:
As we have now one God in the church, who is God Man and Man God, this church is called the crown of all the churches. (INV 43)
These are evidences that this has been granted for the sake of the New Church, which is the crown of all the churches, and which will endure forever. Being in the spiritual world, seeing the wonderful things of heaven, and the miserable things of hell; and being there in the very light of the Lord in which are the angels, surpasses all miracles. Evidences that I am there, may be seen in abundance in my books. (INV 39) (…) This New Church, truly Christian, which at this day is being established by the Lord, will endure to eternity, as is proved from the Word of both Testaments; also it was foreseen from the creation of the world; and it will be the crown of the four preceding churches, because it will have true faith and true charity. (CORONIS 0) (…) After these things, from good elevated to Himself, He founds a new heaven, and from the evil removed from Himself, a new hell; and in both He establishes order, so that they may stand under His auspices and under obedience to Him to eternity; and then through this new heaven He successively inaugurates and establishes a new church on earth. (CORONIS 0)
You can find other passages that say similar things (e.g., AR 68, 73; TCR 786-788; AE 91-92; and others). You can see from these considerations that there is not going to be an endless procession of Churches in the evolution of our race. There are a definite number of steps or phases that the Lord brings the race through so that He might complete His creation, which is that we become celestial minds capable of living in His New Heavens. The New Church is the Crown of Churches or civilizations because it is the last, hence it is said of it the “it will endure forever.” There is not going to be a decline of the New Church as there was with the prior Churches. Therefore there is not going to be a new Word given after the Writings.
14. The Writings Are The Last Revelation
The Lord in His First Coming taught that He must come again to complete His Divine mission of the salvation of the human race (AC 4060). The Lord gave the Old Testament through Moses and the Prophets. That was the equivalent of the Word’s legs and feet. It was so obscure that the Jewish Church is called a “representative of a Church.” The literal of the Word reveals the level of understanding of the people who receive it at the beginning of a new dispensation. Consider the literal of the Old Testament. By today’s standards scholars call it pre-modern, superstitious, racist, barbaric, and obscure in meaning. It is written at a level entirely unacceptable to the modern mind concerned with human rights, humanism, and rationality. You can see why I said that it is the legs and feet of the Divine Word. It does establish that there is God, and that God rules all details of the universe. It establishes that God saves human beings for eternal life in happiness and bliss if they follow His commandments, but puts away all others into an eternal hell of misery. Enough is established by this Old Testament Word to save those who obey the commandments of their religion.
But after many generations the level of thinking of the Old Testament was no longer believable to the generations that were surrounded by more advanced civilizations and intellectual traditions in the East and the West. A new Word was then given as the New Testament by the Lord Himself in His First Coming. This Word is like the entire midsection of the body, including the abdomen and the chest and the arms. The level of thinking is a discrete degree above that of the Old Testament. Enough is established in this Word to once again be able to save for heaven all those who obey its commandments as being from the Lord. These commandments, even in their literal statements, are more internal than those given in the letter of the Old Testament. The level of thinking of the Old Testament is corporeal-sensuous, while that of the New Testament is external rational.
The new truths and principles were for the rational mind, unlike the Old Testament where the truths were for the external mind that is close to the body senses. For example, the Old Testament tells nothing specific about the afterlife. The only level of thinking the people were capable of at that time was the idea that heaven is what a reformed earth will be after the resurrection from the graves. That idea of heaven was a heaven in the physical world. But the heaven of the New Testament is “within you,” thus not out there or here, but in the interior of the human mind. To go to heaven is not to go to a place but to develop a state of mind in which heaven can exist:
Heaven is in the man; and there is a place for him in heaven according to the state of life and of faith in which he is (AC 9305)
The New Testament Commandments were also at a higher level of rationality, suitable for the new mind. “Love thy neighbor” meant not just your own ethnic group or religion. “Being married” meant not just doing what you please but what God demands and consecrates. “Adultery” is not just what you do, but also what you desire and think. In the New Testament level of reasoning, willing and thinking become more important for salvation than ritual sacrifices or prayers. Not overt doing is the measure of salvation but inward thinking and intending. So a new more interior, more rational method was made available by the Lord through this new Word.
As deeds and works are from the will and thought, so are they from the love and faith, consequently they are such as the love and faith are; for it is the same thing whether you say one's love or his will, and it is the same thing whether you say one's faith or his established thought; for that which a man loves he wills, and that which a man believes he thinks; and when a man loves what he believes he also wills it and as far as possible does it. Everyone may know that love and faith are within man's will and thought, and not outside of them, for love is what kindles the will, and the thought is what it enlightens in matters of faith; therefore only those that are able to think wisely are enlightened, and in the measure of their enlightenment they think what is true and will it, or what is the same, they believe what is true and love it. (HH 473)
But in the course of time a new modern mind emerged from the successes of science and modernism. The New Testament was no longer believable to this new mentality and civilization that rejected mystery of faith and anything spiritual that could not be understood and justified by the modern mind. Those who still adhered to the New Testament as religion still were not able to be saved thereby because internally their rational mind rejected mysteries (TCR 116, 182; AE 870). When all these people across the centuries after the First Coming entered the afterlife, their mind was not at a level of reasoning that could support life in heaven which was a spiritual-rational state created by spiritual-rational truths.
These people of the “spiritual church” were all stuck in the spiritual world, unable to go up, being kept by the Lord from sinking down (TCR 119; AC 7975). At last the generations on earth reached the intellectual capacity to receive and understand the last portion of the Word. This was the Lord’s Second Coming in the Writings. This new Word was like the head of the body, which is why the New Church it establishes is called the Crown of Churches (TCR 786). Now for the first time the human race has possession of the entire Word: its legs and feet, its abdomen and chest, and its head. The Word is now completed.
The Lord has revealed the spiritual meaning of the Word at this day because a doctrine of genuine truth has now been revealed. This doctrine is contained in part in The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine, and now in some shorter works which are in process of publication.********** And because this doctrine and no other agrees with the spiritual meaning of the Word, therefore that meaning has now for the first time been disclosed, along with a knowledge of correspondences. (De Verbo 7:8)
Add to these most manifest evidences, that the spiritual sense of the Word has been disclosed by the Lord through me, which has never before been revealed since the Word was written among the sons of Israel; and this sense is the very sanctuary of the Word: the Lord Himself is in this sense with His Divine, and in the natural sense with His Human. Not a single iota in this sense can be opened except by the Lord alone. This surpasses all the revelations that have hitherto been made from the creation of the world. (INV 44)
Now a new way is provided again for salvation. The level of thinking of this new Word is spiritual-rational:
Without the Word there is no rational conception of the Lord, and thus no salvation (SS 111)
The Word of the Writings are the Lord’s Divine Truth in His Second Coming to humankind. This is the only way of discovering who the Divine Human is. No other door way has been provided by the Lord for the new salvation, the new Heavens. The angels read the Writings and derive therefrom their Doctrine of Life and all their ineffable knowledge and wisdom (AC 1405, 1767). They have no other religion but the Word of the Writings.
Not everyone who reads the Writings is willing to raise their level of thinking to the rational reasoning presented in the Writings. In that case one does not read the Writings as the Lord in His Word. One sees no more in it than books of excellence by a magnificent genius, if appreciated, and if not, one sees only the fantasies of a religious madman. Only those who read the Writings as the third portion that completes the Word of God, can see in it genuine spiritual truths.
[in the Word] they are called "drunkards" who believe nothing but what they apprehend, and for this reason search into the mysteries of faith. And because this is done by means of sensuous things, either of memory or of philosophy, man being what he is, cannot but fall thereby into errors. For man's thought is merely earthly, corporeal, and material, because it is from earthly, corporeal, and material things, which cling constantly to it, and in which the ideas of his thought are based and terminated.
To think and reason therefore from these concerning Divine things, is to bring oneself into errors and perversions; and it is as impossible to procure faith in this way as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The error and insanity from this source are called in the Word "drunkenness." (…) Spirits are perfectly well distinguished from each other, as to whether they are in the faith of charity or not. Those who are in the faith of charity do not reason about the truths of faith, but say that the thing is so, and also as far as possible confirm it by things of sense and of memory, and by the analysis of reason; but as soon as anything obscure comes in their way the truth of which they do not perceive, they defer it, and never suffer such a thing to bring them into doubt, saying that there are but very few things they can apprehend, and therefore to think that anything is not true because they do not apprehend it, would be madness.
These are they who are in charity. But-on the contrary-those who are not in the faith of charity desire merely to reason whether a thing be so, and to know how it is, saying that unless they can know how it is, they cannot believe it to be so. From this alone they are known at once as being in no faith, a mark of which is that they not only doubt concerning all things, but also deny in their hearts; and when they are instructed how the case is, they still cling to their disbelief and start all kinds of objections, and never acquiesce, were it to eternity. Those who thus persist in their contumacy heap errors upon errors. (AC 1072)
15. The Writings Are For The Rational Mind
Rev. Donald L. Rose has noted in a sermon that the Lord has need of our rational in order for Him to enter our mind:
As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, "Why are you untying the colt?" They replied, "The Lord needs it." They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. (Luke 19:33-35) In reading this story of the Word, we may picture ourselves addressed by those words: “The Lord hath need of him.” The colt has various significations and is especially related to what is rational (see AC 2782, 5741, 6376). We can see here the Lord’s emissaries sent to bring the rational mind to himself. The owner of the rational questions this action. The so-called owner of the rational is the man himself.
In this story we see especially the giving of the Writings to man (see ISB 20). (Rev. Donald L. Rose, Sermon titled “The Colt Loosed For the Lord’s Service” General Church, Bryn Athyn. Undated)
We accumulate knowledge about the Writings from our education and from study. Where in the mind is this accumulation? Of course it is in the organ of the understanding, but this has several discrete levels, each with a totally different psychological function. The sentences of the Writings can be understood according to one’s level of mental functioning at the time. In the lowest intellectual mentality, called the natural-corporeal mind, the Writings are understood as a storybook about heaven and hell sprinkled in among mostly incomprehensible pages. At the next level of intellectual mentality, called the natural-sensuous mind, the Writings are understood as a storybook about the spiritual world mingled with Church doctrine and a lot of history about the previous churches and the mentality of those people. At the third an uppermost level, called the natural-rational mind, the Writings are understood as the new Rational Word, revealing a coherent rational system of theology tied to the Bible and corroborated by Swedenborg’s special mission as the revelator of the Lord’s Second Coming. And the more we study the Writings at this level of understanding, the more we create suitable “vessels” or dualities, in which the Lord will implant spiritual truths. And with more and more study of the Writings, we can begin to see the marvelous rational web and framework of truths by which the Lord maintains reality.
To live from the Word is to live from the Lord, for the Lord is in the Word, yea, He is the Word. (AE 754)
These are three levels of the natural mind. This is the mind we build up totally by ourselves through experience and choice. It feels like our very own life, our very own identity, and so it is called the self. The conscious self, whom we know ourselves to be, has these three levels of mentality and functioning.
At some point in our adulthood, early on or later, we feel the motivation to undergo reformation. We have been studying the Writings before this, but it was a lukewarm thing. But now we feel a new passion for studying the Writings, excited by the thought that it is the Word of the Lord speaking through the rational mind of this awesome 17th century Swede. We now begin to think about the topics of the Writings in a personal way. For example, while you’re doing something somewhere, you begin to think about what it will be like to be an angel, what it’s like to have an occupation there, and to have friends and neighbors. Now for the first time you are applying the Writings to yourself. Before this, it was a storybook you inherited by culture and family.
Or take another example. While you’re doing something somewhere, you begin to think about the heavy emphasis the Writings place on the principle of no salvation without regeneration. Suddenly the thought occurs to you: What about my own regeneration? Now for the first time you stepped across a threshold. You applied the Writings to a vital part of yourself, your concern for your salvation. You know enough about hell to want to avoid it! You eagerly go back to the Writings and search it for passages on regeneration. You quickly find out that before you can begin regeneration you must undergo reformation. You begin to worry, feeling a vague anxiety. You’ve now crossed another threshold. The anxiety you felt was the first step you took in your reformation. It was a brief, very brief, view into the difficulty of the task that lies ahead. The thought occurs to you: Perhaps I’m not ready for all this. But you are, and you go ahead. You systematically go through all your main belief systems and hold them up to the principles of the Writings. One by one they must be rationally deconstructed and discarded, like Abraham had to smash the icons of his inherited false religion.
Sooner or later this great task comes to its completion. Suddenly the thought occurs, usually prompted by the wife, “Why am I wasting time holding on to the non-heavenly behaviors and traits?” We refuse to face, close up, so from afar we look at it and retort: “But look how much I know about heaven” or, “But look how much I love the Word and the Doctrine” or, “But look what great progress I’ve already made compared where I was before reformation” etc. But at last we find the motivation to begin our regeneration with full sincerity, though not yet with full success. You’ve just crossed the final big threshold. You’ve taken your baby step in the process of regeneration. You’re now fully committed to condemn your evil loves. From then on the Lord will fight with you in a series of spiritual temptations, precisely designed for your struggle to map out the hell within you. The temptations reveal your inner delights to yourself. Normally they’re hidden from your focus and attention, conveniently tucked away so that you can continue to enjoy them, even while you continue to declare you passion and love for the Writings.
But you also continue to study the Writings at an accelerated rate in comparison to before. You’re driven to find the relevant truths, those that can help your predicaments. They are everywhere now—in your marriage relationship, in your work situation, even in your recreation. Everywhere you feel challenged by what you passionately believe and know, and your seeming inability to align your willing and thinking with what you know is right. For example, you know that scortatory interests harm the conjugial relationship. Yet, you feel delight in them, secretly. You beg the Lord to purify you, but you find His answer in the Writings: “You have water. You have soap. Go wash yourself, like a real man.” And you feel ashamed. You’ve just made a step in a new direction. You repented of an evil delight you’re holding in secret. Like Adam and Eve who were ashamed of their nakedness after they had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:
Now you feel driven out from your paradise. Nothing of the many delights you’re so attached to, can be allowed to stay around. No one. If you catch yourself arguing for mercy, that you’ve given up so much already, you feel forced to withdraw the mercy request, realizing full well, everything must go. An affection must be traced to its origins by a simple test of duality: Is this delight from heaven or from hell. There is no in between, so there is no hiding any more. Now you’ve taken your last baby steps in regeneration. You’re fully ready because fully committed to the idea that not one can be left standing. All must be exterminated, every one of our delights that are form hell. And it seems that they are all from hell. Now you begin to apply what you know form the Writings to everything of your threefold self: your affections and delights, your thoughts and style of reasoning, your outward acts of the body and its appearance. Now you begin to see new things.
For the first time you become conscious that you have an inner perception of spiritual things as you think about the sentences of the Writings, and apply them to your willing and thinking all day long. You begin to see how every sentence applies to you, though how may remain obscure for some time. But you are all excited again about your new level of consciousness. You search the Writings with trepidation and suddenly sentences you didn’t pay much attention to, now spring to life before you. You have living proof that the Lord is managing the process of your regeneration in every detail—what sentences come to your attention when, and what they say about you, about whatever you’re struggling with at the time. You feel a great relief and you recall the Lord’s statement that His yoke is light. At last you can feel the living certitude that you want to be in His hands more than in yours. It now terrifies you as you think back on your earlier period when you were anxious that getting closer to heaven is giving up all the fun in life, and begged for more time. Now you can see that your best chance is not with you, but with the Lord. So you’re relieved in your heart and your love for the Lord takes a big leap.
17. The Birth Of The Interior-Natural
What is happening now as you read the Writings? You’ve almost gotten used to it now: You can see within the Letter! It just comes to you automatically. You’re reading the sentences, you’re reflecting, figuring out what they mean rationally, and suddenly you see what they mean spiritually. You now understand what is happening in a scientific way, like anatomy or physiology, and like agriculture or gardening. Regeneration is a biological process of steady growth built on spiritual truths implanted in the mind by the Lord’s activity in us through the sentences of the Writings that are firmly established in our conscious mind. These sentences are established firmly because they form the basis of our thinking, of our concluding and analyzing anything. We have appropriated those sentences and rational ideas. They are no built up as our own edifice. Now the Lord can enter into the interior of this edifice, and implant spiritual truths. We are not conscious of this activity directly, but the Lord creates a new thing in our mind, a new organ, more interior than the natural mind. This new organ is called the interior-natural.
Note that this new organ is spiritual and of celestial origin. There is nothing in it from self or the natural world. What’s in it is a correspondence to what’s in the spiritual mind. We are not conscious of the spiritual mind and its activates, but we are conscious of the natural mind. And now this new interior organ gives a new function, a new conscious awareness of spiritual understandings and meanings. Spiritual topics that before this we understood in a natural way, now we understand them in a spiritual way, like the angels of the First Heaven. This new spiritual awareness and understanding would not be possible without the sentence and their rational understanding, that we gathered for ourselves in the natural-rational mind. This is obvious because the new interior-natural organ of spiritual perception is located within the natural-rational. It cannot be located anywhere else in the natural mind.
Our prior understanding of the Writings was external-rational or natural-rational, not yet spiritual-rational (AC 978, 2654, 4286; AE 355:14). The spiritual only begins with regeneration and this only begins in adult life (AE 803; AC 8780; AC 3518:[2]; TCR 587), if ever. Therefore the New Church mind is acquired at reformation and gradual regeneration after that. Our mind becomes a New Church mind to the extent that we regenerate. There are various phases of development to undergo in order for the New Church mind to become a fully genuine New Church mind.
The New Church mind refers to any individual who is motivated to study the Writings as Divine Truth, and to love it by willing and thinking according to one’s understanding of it.
18. Reformation And Regeneration Begin In Early Adulthood
When a child is first instructed he is affected with the desire of knowing, not at first for any end that is manifest to himself, but from a certain pleasure and delight that is born with him and is also derived from other sources; but afterwards, as he grows up, he is affected with the desire of knowing for the sake of some end, as that he may excel others, or his rivals; and next for some end in the world; but when he is to be regenerated, he is affected from the delight and pleasantness of truth; and when he is being regenerated, which takes place in adult age, from the love of truth, and afterwards from the love of good; and then the ends which had preceded, together with their delights, are separated little by little, and to them succeeds interior good from the Lord, which manifests itself in his affection. From this it is evident that the former delights, which had appeared in the outward form as good, had served as means. Such successions of means are continual. (AC 3518)
This passage clearly shows that reformation and regeneration begin in early adulthood, and not before. The first phase of reformation starts when as adults we become rationally convinced that the Writings are indeed the third and final portion of the Threefold Word. It is a step beyond the received creed. It is the exercise of a new individual choice under the new vision of rational understanding and confirmation. It’s the confidence we have when we can explain it rationally and confirm it in our principles and philosophy. The Writings are indeed the Word. It is beyond the idea that the Writings are “divinely inspired.” This is a nonduality if the idea admits other inspired books and authors so that the Writings are seen at the extreme end of a continuum lined up with other “inspired” books.
This idea of the Writings is not yet the stage of reformation. One must cross over to the position that “the Writings are the third portion of the Threefold Word.” This is what the New Church mind alone can do. This is the only acknowledgment that gives the Writings the power of salvation. If this bridge is not crossed the Writings do not have the power to save since only the Word has that power (see quotes above from TCR 340, 347; SE 5961; SS 111).
The second phase after this is to understand rationally how it is that the Writings are the Word in the same sense as the Old Testament and the New Testament are the Word, not in some lesser degree. This phase establishes the idea that the Writings are Divine Truth, that they are the Lord Himself in His Second Coming. The worship of the Writings is the same as the worship of the Lord. We must realize in a rational way how it is that for the New Church mind to worship the Lord directly is not possible but only through the Writings as the Word:
[5] It is now clear from these things that the spiritual sense of the Word was to be revealed for a new Church which will acknowledge and worship the Lord alone, and hold His Word sacred, and love Divine Truths and reject faith separated from charity. Concerning this sense of the Word more may be seen* in THE DOCTRINE OF THE NEW JERUSALEM CONCERNING THE SACRED SCRIPTURE (n. 5-26, and following numbers); as, in this section, what the spiritual sense of the Word is (n. 5-26); that there is a spiritual sense in all things of the Word in general and in particular (n. 9-17); that it is by virtue of the spiritual sense that the Word is Divinely inspired, and holy in every expression (n. 18-19); that hitherto the spiritual sense has been unknown, and why it was not revealed before (n. 20-25); and that henceforth the spiritual sense will be possible only to one who is in genuine truths from the Lord (n. 26). (DP 264)
Enlightenment is the influx, perception, and instruction people receive from the Lord when they read the Word. (AC 10215)
All worship of the Lord, appears from the Word (AC 440)
Where the Church is, there the Lord is worshipped, and the Word is read (NJHD 8)
The individual becomes a New Church mind when willing to see that the above passages are about the Word of the Writings. Reread the passages above, this time thinking “the Writings” when you see “the Word.” In this way we enter a new phase of our reformation that immeasurably increases our love and worship of the Writings as the Lord. Now for the very first time our mind is reformed, turned around, facing the Lord, and ready to take up genuine spiritual truths from the Writings. These truths are of celestial, not human, origin and are contained in every word of the Writings. Infinite such truths are contained in every word of the Writings:
In every particular of the Word there is a spiritual sense from which it derives its holiness. (DP 264)
What in particular concerns the doctrine that now follows, is that it also is out of heaven, because it is from the spiritual sense of the Word; and the spiritual sense of the Word is identical with the doctrine which is in heaven. (NJHD 7)
Our illumination or enlightenment from these truths is proportional to our struggle to consciously cooperate with the Lord as He gradually regenerates us day by day and hour by hour. The rate of progress is proportional to the extent of our daily willing and thinking in accordance with the truths we take up from the Writings. The truths for our salvation that we take up from the Writings are called Doctrine in our mind:
He who does not know the arcana of heaven must needs believe that the Word is supported without doctrine from it; for he supposes that the Word in the letter, or the literal sense of the Word, is doctrine itself. But be it known that all the doctrine of the church must be from the Word, and that the doctrine from any other source than the Word is not doctrine in which there is anything of the church, still less anything of heaven. But the doctrine must be collected from the Word, and while it is being collected, the man must be in enlightenment from the Lord; and he is in enlightenment when he is in the love of truth for the sake of truth, and not for the sake of self and the world. These are they who are enlightened in the Word when they read it, and who see truth, and from it make doctrine for themselves. (AC 9424)
This clearly says that all Doctrine is from the Word. For the New Church mind all Doctrine for its salvation is from the Writings. All other sources must be excluded, as stated in the above passage. The daily systematic study of the Writings is therefore a requirement for the New Church mind to flourish and progress. And when we fail to meet up with this standard due to worldly affairs, we ought nevertheless to strive to do it daily. If it is in our striving, it will be granted by the Lord. Remember that there is no worship of the Lord apart from the Writings and the Lord Himself dwells in the Doctrine we draw up from the Writings into our understanding so that it may guide our daily willing and thinking. This is the true and only worship with angels (HH 321).
19. Nonduality Fills The Culture Around Us
Since our as-of self role in regeneration is so crucial it makes sense to learn how to do it effectively. This learning is called performing spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines allow us to discover the innumerable things in our mind that we receive from culture and heredity. Once we know what they are we can reject them as-of self by rational considerations. The culture we live in contains a variety of nonduality traditions, attitudes, and popular followings to which we are exposed from childhood onward. It is not readily obvious how nonduality is promoted in our mind when we enjoy our favorite sit-com program or admire a book for its message, or see our teenager practicing meditation. What about Yoga or Tai Chi or vegetarianism? Sometimes the philosophy is embedded in a mere formality we follow, like “Namaste” with which my Yoga teacher ends every class. Once in a while she adds the explanation: “It means: the God in me greets the God in you.” You can see the fundamental nonduality within this formality routine since it is motivated by the idea that self=God, and that is the fundamental nonduality.
Sometimes nonduality comes to us in a secular Western tradition like Ayn Rand’s ethics of Objectivism or Ferguson’s thesis of an unconscious communal spirit elaborated in the popular book The Aquarian Conspiracy. (see Chapter 6 Section 6). This nonduality is described in the Writings as follows:
This deadly conviction, that God infused and copied Himself into men, was held by the people of the most ancient church in its final period leading up to its termination, as I have heard from their own lips. On account of their horrendous belief that they were thus gods, they lie hidden deep within a cavern, which no one can approach closely without falling victim to an inner vertigo. (TCR 470).
And sometimes we see nonduality in Christian traditions like the popular notion that there is no hell, or the idea that long and repentant prayer brings salvation and holiness. The nonduality here is the idea that prayers can be more or less effective on a measurable continuum of how long and with how much self-blame or guilt one prays with. Duality on the other hand recognizes a distinct and categorical separation between spiritual things and natural. Praying long and with much guilt is separate and distinct from the spiritual reasons the Lord grants a prayer. He grants all prayers that are inspired by Him, and this is a duality rationally opposed to the idea of “effectiveness” of prayers. (AE 325) (See Chapter 1, Section 3)
Scientific education and science reporting in the news media are also nondualist and opposed to the fundamental duality of natural world and spiritual world.
From this ordering of creation it can be seen that the coherent linkage from first things to last is such that taken together they make up a single unit; in this prior cannot be separated from posterior, just as cause cannot be separated from the effect produced by it. Thus the spiritual world cannot be separated from the natural world, nor this from the spiritual. In the same way the heaven where the angels are cannot be separated from the human race, nor the human race from that heaven. It has therefore been provided by the Lord that one should perform services for the other, that is, the heaven of angels should perform services for the human race, and the human race for the heaven of angels. (LJ 9:[3]).
No concept or theory from dualism is allowed today into science. It remains staunchly nondualist and materialistic, that is, insisting that a world that is not physical does not exist. News stories surround us with materialistic interpretations whether they be on archeological finds, biological evolution, stellar formations, or brain scan technology. The modern culture around us continues in an intellectual climate of popular nondualities that deny all the scientific and spiritual dualities we have from the Writings--between mind and body, natural world and spiritual world, self and God, good and evil, heaven and hell, absolute truth and absolute falsity, revelation and self-intelligence, regenerate and unregenerate, uncreate and created, and many others. Without these rational dualities of reality we have a falsified science and no religion or spiritual sanity (DL 188). (See Chapter 4 Section 7)
Surprisingly, New Church nonduality is also a source of exposure like the secular Christology of Henry James, Sr., or Charles Tulk’s thesis of psychological nonduality between the Son and the Father in the New Testament (see Chapter 4). Another nonduality that is widespread in the New Church today is to remove the Divinity of the Writings and treat it on a continuum with other books and authors. This is a hurtful nonduality because the Writings are the Divine Word of the Lord. To remove this Divinity is to introject self into Divinity, and thus to destroy the absolute duality between self and the Lord. The Writings reveal that the Lord protects those who take away the Divinity of the Word since this denial closes the mind to the Word’s interior truths which are those that can be profaned (see Chapter 3).
To acknowledge that the Writings are the Lord in His Second Coming and to understand this in a rational way makes our spiritual growth and progress possible. If we are exposed to some idea or principle that runs contrary to a single sentence in the Writings, we would know instantly that we want to reject that idea. We do not need more than one statement in the Writings for what is the absolute truth. Every statement in the Writings has a Divine warrant of truth and validity. Of course, by comparing a collection of statements on a topic one gains deeper understanding of the topic. Still, one occurrence gives enough understanding to exclude from our assent any idea that is contrary to it. This makes deciding all life choices so much simpler.
They who are in the genuine doctrine of truth from the Word, and in enlightenment when they read the Word, see everywhere truths that agree, and nothing whatever that is opposed; for they do not dwell upon what is said therein according to appearances, and according to the common apprehension of men, because they know that if the appearances are unfolded, and as it were unswathed, the truth is laid bare. (AC 9424)
Those who do not acknowledge the Writings as the Lord have much more difficulty since they have to compare and weigh things in balance. It becomes a matter of equity in their mind: how many passages say this and how many say that, etc. What is the preponderance of the evidence, etc. This leaves plenty of wiggle room for going wrong and we lose the full protection of heaven. We start wondering how many mistakes are contained in the Writings. We start thinking that Swedenborg was but a limited human being hence did make mistakes, either his own or those of his age and civilization. These are murky thoughts from which we are spared merely by being totally categorical in our acceptance of the Writings as the Lord Himself in His Word.
The acknowledgment of the Divine source of the Writings brings about an entirely new state … A man must loose something of self-esteem in accepting the Writings entirely. For before that he can exalt his own intelligence, granting that the Writings are true here and true there, but still, as it were, holding himself above them. … Many are most reluctant to acknowledge this, for it is to give up too much. … If there is indeed a Divine mind, a God, then true rationality is to become a servant to truth.
This is a joyous recognition. When an individual really understand the Divine claim on his rationality, straightaway he complies. … It is a wonderful liberation and a real beginning when we acknowledge Divine Revelation. Before that we are free to say perhaps this is right and perhaps that; perhaps this is good and perhaps that. We have so-called open minds to everything, even things which contradict each other. In this state we do not make progress. (Rev. Donald L. Rose, Sermon titled “The Colt Loosed For the Lord’s Service” General Church, Bryn Athyn. Undated)
Further, this absolute affirmative attitude allows us to revere and worship the Writings as the Lord Himself. Whether we adore and worship the Writings or the Lord is the same, for the Lord is the Word (NJHD 263, DP 172). How marvelous it is to love the Lord in this way, through his Word, for the Lord speaks to us only through the Word (TCR 231). It is nonduality in our mind that weakens this absolute Divine status of the Writings of Swedenborg.
20. Two Methods For Fighting Nonduality In The Mind
The source of all nonduality is a natural inherent opposition to the fundamental duality. The natural mind before it is regenerated is immersed in nonduality and its concepts are arranged to fit the apparent order of the physical world entering through the sensory organs and brain. This apparent order is sensuous and by its own logic excludes the spiritual that it cannot see, and is aversive to all absolute dualities that refer to things unseen by the physical eyes or undetected by physical machines (DLW 66, 92). This is why our modern mind must be regenerated, and it takes place by re-arranging the concepts from nonduality to duality by means of the rational truths we take up from the Writings.
These rational truths accurately reflect reality and serve as cognitive vessels into which we can receive spiritual truths (NJHD 51; AC 3508). There is no salvation or eternal life in heaven without undergoing regeneration while we are still attached to the physical body (HH 470). This obligatory process progresses only to the extent that we consciously cooperate with the Lord. It does not go forward at all if we do not cooperate, for the Lord cannot do it on His Own, nor can He compel us (BE 69, TCR 615, 577; DP 234). It stands to reason therefore that we ought to learn how to detect nondualities in our mind out of a desire to cooperate in our regeneration.
This book proposes two types of methods that can help us to guard against nondualities in our mind. Volume 1 deals with learning how to analyze common ideas to which we are exposed from culture and the times. I show with many illustrations how to find the nonduality hidden in the assumptions behind these ideas. Volume 2 deals with the process of enlightenment that is needed to undergo regeneration. Volume 3 deals with learning how to monitor our feelings, thoughts, and acts in our daily behaviors, also for the purpose of cooperating with the Lord in our regeneration. Many illustrations are given showing how to infuse a religious motive in everything we do, turning daily life into a series of spiritual disciplines. The approach involves tracing the implications of our daily choices and habits to see where they lead to nonduality or the denial of the fundamental dualities of our religion. All dualities are unique permanent distinctions that never cease to eternity (DLW 226).
For example, the popular ideas of unconditional love and unconditional self-acceptance run contrary to the duality of unregenerate and regenerating, or to good and evil. A notion promoted by mental health professionals is the idea of equity in relationship between husband and wife. Equity is the policy of sharing everything fifty-fifty—chores, contribution, responsibility, status, independence. This is a nonduality that threatens the conjugial duality of an absolute and permanent distinctness in all things between man and woman, or husband and wife (CL 33). Many conjugial self-witnessing disciplines for husbands are described and related to the Writings. They all follow one principle: that the husband should learn to love acting from his wife rather from himself. While learning this he ought to simulate so that he always enacts the conjugial stance: to love acting from the wife more than acting from self. Many of the illustrations are from my personal self-observations as a husband who is forming a New Church mind in himself.
I hope that you will find in this presentation useful tools for your reformation and regeneration. If so, think about sharing the knowledge with others who may also find it helpful. For comments and questions, I welcome your email: leon@hawaii.edu The Web address of this document is: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/nonduality.html and contains links to related articles that can also be accessed.
Chapter 1.Absolute Opposition Between Duality and Nonduality
All truths are from the Word, which is spiritual light… and nothing ought to be believed except the truth (INV 7)
1. Introduction
A Gallup Poll in 2002 reported that about 7 percent of Americans believe in “absolute truth” when asked in a survey—among those who categorized themselves as “Christians.” Among those who categorized themselves as without a religious affiliation, only 4 percent believe in absolute truth. What does it mean that nine out of ten people today in our society declare that absolute truth does not exist? It demonstrates that nonduality is reigning in the entire generation, regardless of religious background. Nonduality has replaced the traditional dualities of religion in the mind of the postmodern age. The New Church mind must be prepared within this culture that has turned against the reality of dualities.
The Writings teach that all truth from the Lord is absolute truth because the Lord is absolute truth, and this is only from Him. Everything from Him is absolute truth within which is absolute love (xx). Nothing from Him can be anything but absolute truth because He is Absolute Truth Itself within which is Absolute Love. In this sense, “absolute truth” means Divine Truth. Since the inauguration of the new age of the Second Coming, the human race has received conscious rational access to Divine Truth through the Writings. Everything in the Writings is Absolute Truth, because it is Divine Truth, from the Lord, for the Word is the Lord Himself (xx). The denial of the existence of absolute truth is therefore a symptom of spiritual insanity. The unregenerate person today, regardless of religious or other background, inwardly denies absolute truth because it denies Divine Truth as the Divine Human, preferring for a God some invisible and unfathomable something called “the universe” or “the everything which is nothing” or “the energy” or whatever. There is an endless variety of ways that the unregenerate mind can fabricate denials of absolute truth. There is a big payoff at stake: Denial of God means the delight of making up our own god, even ourselves as god, or something within us as god, and even to the gross insanity of believing that one is above God.
The Writings make a simple and accurate point: whatever is not from the Lord cannot be absolute truth, but whatever is from the Lord is absolute truth. Further, the Lord reveals absolute truth to every individual who seeks for it in His Word, and nowhere else (xx). And for the New Church mind, the Word is the Writings. Therefore the Writings are the only source of absolute truth today and henceforth to eternity. Also therefore, everything in the Writings is absolute truth because everything in the Word is absolute truth (xx). There is no other book or source for genuine spiritual truths other than the Lord. All genuine spiritual truths are absolute dualities that make the foundation of reality, the world, and heaven. Therefore the Writings go on the one hand, and every other book or source on the other hand. Absolute truth in the universe today is from the Divine Human and all other statements or experiences are from self, and therefore not absolute, not genuine spiritual truth.
This is the fundamental duality that has been weakened, or suppressed entirely, in the minds of people today as a result of the severe climate of cultural nonduality.
The categorical reasoning of the Writings, when presented for evaluation to a random sample of people, would be rejected today as sectarian, fanatic, prejudiced, or dogmatic. They point to other instances of sectarian religious groups in the past and those of today, and see in the Writings a similar exclusionary dogmatism, unjustified by the light of human reasoning and intelligence. We know quite a bit of the historical record of dogmatic religions from the Writings, and we can explain rationally why this persuasive approach to religion is wrong headed, and impedes rather than aids the salvation of its adherents (xx). But at last, the human race was given a Divine method for regenerating from nonduality to duality, from a base in self, to the Lord as the Base of reality. The New Church mind has broken this historical record of religious sectarianism, bringing an end to dogma and mystery in religion, by means of new rational and compete revelations in the light of which dogma falls.
These new revelations give the rational means by which any reader can enter into all previous and future mysteries about the afterlife, the spiritual world, devils and angels, spirits from other planets in the universe, life in heaven and hell, and how the Lord regenerates every individual who cooperates, and so leads the person to eternal life in heaven. And many additional things are now revealed by the Lord in the Word of His Second Coming, relating to how the Lord manages the universe, how the Lord manages our willing and thinking through other spirits, how physical events depend completely on spiritual events, and many details about the past history of the race. The Second Coming is the final completion of the creation of the human race. At last every individual anywhere can now form a celestial mind for themselves, capable of eternal life in heaven. The only requirement is a willingness to be reformed and regenerated by a life in accordance with conscience and truth from the Writings.
Some might argue that acknowledging and worshipping the Writings as God Himself is a religious requirement for salvation, and similar therefore to previous sectarian faith. But this view is not based on the actual information in the Writings. The Writings give rational, objective, empirical, and scientific explanations and demonstrations of who God is, and the invariant mechanisms by which the universe is run and kept running by laws and principles anyone can study and understand. Reality is not something one can invent or discover. It must be revealed to be known. The earlier forms of revelation led to dogma because they were not scientific and rational revelations. They were full of mystery and unexplained workings behind the scenes by an invisible and little understood Deity. If this had been the new revelation once more, dogma would again be inevitable. But dogma can no longer exist in the light of rational explanation of religion, God, regeneration, heaven, and hell.
All anyone needs to do to verify what I’m saying here, is to read the details in the Writings. The full set is available online for searching and reading at this Web address:
1. Religious Membership Not Required For Salvation
The Writings show why the Second Coming was necessary at this time in history and evolution of the race. This new creation, called the New Church mind, is the Crown of human evolution, completing all that has gone on before. All prior intellectual and religious systems came to an end when they were no longer suitable for the salvation of the human mind. The Lord saves and evolves the human race steadily towards a creation called the celestial mind. This is the mind we have as angels in heaven. This angelic mind has now been made available to anyone on earth who wishes to receive it by the Divine means made available to all. This new human mind is the New Church mind formed exclusively from the Writings. Anyone with any background of any religious or philosophic membership, can form the New Church mind in oneself by using the Writings to rearrange everything in the mind in accordance with the Writings.
This is called reformation and is the prelude to regeneration that goes on till the end of life in the body. Then, a few hours later, the individual awakens in the spiritual world in a spirit-body and continues immortal life in either heaven or hell. All are instructed in the truths that have been revealed in the Writings, and those who can receive them, enter heaven, but those who reject the truths, enter hell. It has nothing to do with religious membership, belief system, or past misdeeds and sins. The only requirement for entering eternal life in heaven is to accept the truths that are taught to all novitiate spirits as they arrive from the earths in the universe in great numbers every day (xx).
In this new universal age, all religions and cultures have been rendered equivalent in salvation.
That means that henceforth anyone, regardless of religion or culture, has a way of salvation by undergoing reformation and regeneration in accordance with the new truths revealed in the Writings. Since the vast majority of people today go through life without having even heard of the Writings, they are instructed as novitiate spirits as soon as they arrive in the afterlife. Why the Writings? Because the Lord had to chose a revelator through whom the New Word can be given and written down (TCR 779). There is no other way possible from creation. Salvation has always been be new revelations from the Lord. All evolutionary steps of the human race were accomplished in this way, by new truths given to the race by means of a revelator who writes down and teaches the New Word of the Lord (xx). Spiritual truths cannot be discovered but must be revealed from the Lord (xx). And only spiritual truths in the mind can make it possible for an individual to live in heaven (xx).
To be saved means to develop a mind that can live in heaven. No one is saved by merit, status, reputation, initiation, birth, or membership. Who is saved is a scientific issue. It is a matter pf psychobiology, just as it is a matter of agriculture as to which plant survives and flourishes in the face of insects and the weather.
Hence no one can have any spiritual truths from any other source but the revelations from the Lord to one individual who writes them down for others to read, understand, and believe. Through this knowledge, there is contact with the Lord who can then effect actual regeneration and salvation, to the extent that we are willing to cooperate with Him. Without this conscious intellectual system obtained from the revealed Word, regeneration cannot actualize in this life. This necessary regeneration process cannot take place in the afterlife except to the extent that the individual has led a life of good in accordance with conscience that was considered from God. If conscience was thought of as the voice of self within, or the voice of our higher self within, then we refuse the truths of regeneration when instructed in the afterlife. This was empirically demonstrated to Swedenborg by much careful observation he made over many years, involving thousands of individuals arriving every day in the afterlife (xx).
2. Revelation Is Necessary For Spiritual Truths
Why is a revelator needed? Why does the Lord not come Himself, in the natural world for all to see, as He did at the Incarnation? Many people have this physicalistic idea of the Lord’s return and His physicalistic exercise of Divine power to flatten all objections and doubts about the Divine. Why would He not do this since this would convince everyone as they are convinced that airplanes exist and the moon is made of rock, not cheese.
The Writings explain that the First Coming was to create in the human race a sensuous consciousness of Him as God. This was accomplished by glorifying the natural human self He acquired as a Child growing up among the people with whom the Word was at that time and point in the race’s evolution. To glorify His natural human self means that He made it one with the Divine in Himself (xx). This act of making the human Divine, created a new reality by which the human race could see Him and understand Him. It was important for the human race to be able to have a definite view of Him in order to feel close to Him and love Him. By this love alone can the human race receive from Him what it needs in order to be saved. And now we know that this what we need to be saved: Understanding Him in scientific detail. This kind of rational and full understanding of Him makes it possible to receive from Him the eternal endless blessings of salvation. These blessings of salvation and happiness are received within the rational understanding of Him.
Heaven is made of His Truth within which is His Love. Clearly then, our access to heaven is by means of learning His truth, understanding it, and loving it. Then we have heaven or salvation. A revelation is therefore always needed to bring Divine truth to our understanding. If we reject this truth, we deny ourselves a mechanism for receiving heaven. The only thing we can receive in man-made or man-discovered truth, is hell. It’s a simple practical matter: You can hop on a real helicopter to take you up the mountain, or a wooden helicopter that will never take of the ground except when lifted and thrown back down by a hurricane. It’s not a mystery, not a secret membership of the favored, not a slot you can buy by means of power, influence, and money. Everyone has equal access through willingness to receive.
In the First Coming of the Lord at His Incarnation, the human race was able to see God in a Natural Body. Until then the Lord was not visible, though He appeared to many by taking over the spirit-body of an angel and speaking through the angel. What people then saw was not the Lord, but the angel from whom the Lord spoke to them. Many such encounters are described in the Old Testament. But this arrangement was only temporary because it did not allow the closest possible contact between the Lord and the human race. How can one love a God who only speaks through an angel, not through His Own Presence?
The Lord then came into the natural world through the virgin pregnancy of a woman who birthed the Divine Child (xx). The Lord did not allow this new natural human Form of Himself to have full perception into its interior mind so as to see who He was in reality. He wanted this Child to grow up like other children so that it would develop a natural self and personality. This could not have occurred if He had not limited the Child’s vision into Himself. He gradually taught this Child in an external way, about who He really was, doing this by means of the Hebrew Word, or the Old Testament (xx). This is how the Child gradually learned from the Word who He was and why He had been incarnated. It was a self-realization that came to Him consciously from His external environment—the Holy Book that the Jews had guarded over the centuries. The purpose of this gradual self-realization, rather than instantaneous revelation and vision, is described in great detail by the Lord in both the Old Testament and in the Writings. But in the Old Testament these descriptions were hidden by the language of correspondences, which are now revealed and rationally explained by the Lord in the Writings. This is why the Writings are called Heavenly Secrets (AC 1). These revelations about Himself could not have been given before this. The reasons are fully explained in the Writings.
The Lord’s Incarnation was necessary so that the human race could form a genuine and true “picture” of Him, without which we could not get close to Him and love Him from an inmost love. Without this inmost love unto Him from Him, no one could receive the ultimate celestial blessings that He longed to bestow on every created human being. Therefore the Lord had to Incarnate and show Himself to history, science, and physical reality. But this was only the first step in the makeover of the human mind. The final step could not as yet be taken by the human race. Seventeen more centuries of preparation had to pass, until the human race had acquired a modern rational mind. The final revelation can only exist in the human rational mind. This step was completed in 1771 when Swedenborg published the last work of the Writings called The True Christian Religion (xx).
This second step of the Lord’s revelation of Himself was to create a new mind within the natural one, that could function to give us rational consciousness of Him, not merely sensuous consciousness from His natural and physical Appearance to the race. This new rational mind is called the spiritual mind and the Lord creates it in everyone to the extent that one is willing to apply the New Truths to our daily willing and thinking--regardless of religious background! The Lord saves and elevates to Himself every individual of the human race anywhere in the universe, to the extent that the individual allows Him to do this. Spiritual freedom is maintained by thinking with rational concepts about spiritual truths. For example, to think that there is no absolute truth is to think naturally about spiritual things. To think this is a persuasion rather than a rational opinion. Ask a random sample of those who deny absolute truth to state their justification. You will discover that they have no rational justifications. They put together various inconsistent or unrelated things they pick up here and there when they are impressed by someone or some writing. Yet they feel convinced. Hence it is a persuasion. There is no mental freedom for those who are in a state of being convinced from persuasion (xx).
3. The New Rational Consciousness of God
Approaching the spiritual domain through sensuous consciousness leads to states of persuasion and loss of rational freedom, hence, loss of spiritual sanity. There is then an inability to recognize which spiritual propositions are true and which false. Even worse, truth is seen as falsity and falsity is seen as truth (NJHD 171). There is no exit from this hell in the mind except through one door provided by the Lord for every religion and every philosophy—reformation and regeneration. For those who are ignorant of the Writings or are unable to read it and comprehend it, the Lord provides an inner conscience through which He speaks to them and guides them in their daily willing and thinking—but only to the extent they are willing to obey the voice of conscience and to take it as God’s Voice within them. In the afterlife they are informed and instructed who this inner voice was, and those who listened to the voice of conscience as God’s Voice, recognize His voice then, accept the details of the New Truths about Him, and with these in their mind and understanding, enter their heaven and eternal bliss.
The voice of conscience is effective for salvation since it provides rational consciousness of super-human authority, that is, of God’s connection and intimate closeness to the individual.
We can only love God when we feel close to Him and connected. And only in this love can we be saved and receive eternal blessings from Him. Those who withhold and reject this love in themselves from Him, arrive with a mind unfit for heavenly habitation. They sink down into hellish habitations where they eek out a miserable existence among others who are like them. What is amazing is that the Lord does not keep them there, but they keep themselves there, for when at any time they have the desire to visit heaven, they do so, but quickly cast themselves back down, being seized with explosive and insane hatred for the life they find there. Amazingly, they find the unspeakably miserable life in hell more desirable and pleasurable than the life of love, truth, and beauty in heaven.
In the Word of the New Testament, the voice of conscience is represented as the “Holy Spirit.” The followers of the Lord at His First Coming loved Him in His physical presence, that is, they knew Him from sensuous consciousness. Seventeen centuries of intellectual development had to happen before the race was sufficiently prepared for His Second Coming, that is, in our rational consciousness of Him. This rational consciousness did not exist with the Apostles and the Christian Church, except in a slight degree, through their belief in the existence of the Holy Spirit within them. A full awareness and rational understanding of what it means to have the Holy spirit within, only became possible when the spiritual-celestial mind could be created within the modern version of the external rational mind, developed by science, education, art, and culture. Human beings had to evolve so that they might be willing to love the Lord from rational consciousness.
Until then, people were willing to love Him from sensuous consciousness—e.g., His Blood, His Tunic, His Relics, His Sacrifice, His Miracles, His Resurrection. They were unable to love Him from rational consciousness, such as the idea that He and the Father were the same Person. It takes rational consciousness to understand how the Lord manages every detail of our willing and thinking, and yet we are still full of evils. It takes rational consciousness to understand that people keep themselves in hell and that it is not a forced punishment. It takes rational consciousness to understand how discrete degrees operate in every object and in the human mind. And what cannot be understood is not revealed by the Lord since it would place people into spiritual harm far worse than they can place themselves on their own through fantasies and distortions (xx).
Further, people cannot love what they don’t understand (xx). These are the rational reasons why the revelations of the Second Coming could not be given until modern times. Sensuous consciousness of God is a type of connection that allows only a distant relationship of love, while rational consciousness of the Lord allows the inmost relationship of love capable by the human race. And every good and truth the race has, is from this rational love unto Him that we have from Him.
Even today, these ideas appear to most people as vague, imaginative, inconclusive, unbelievable. Many people are willing and able to love God when He makes Himself sensually or sensibly present through physical miracles, a physical voice form heaven, a physical pestilence brought on the people by their sins, and the like. Furthermore, people can only feel actually forgiven if they see tangible evidence of it, like sacrifices being offered as atonement, in the olden days. Today, people still expect as proof of God’s existence, physically evident miracles, special gifts and physical powers, a successful outcome to their projects and prayers, objects they consider sacred, and so on. This sensuous consciousness of God is a natural relationship, not spiritual. It has been vastated and consummated, and a new rational consciousness, serves in its stead.
Miracles close the internal man, and deprive man of all that free will, through which and in which man is regenerated. Free will really belongs to the internal man; and when this is closed up, the man becomes external and natural; and such a man does not see any spiritual truth. Miracles also are like veils and bars lest anything might enter. This bar, or this obstruction, however, is gradually broken, and [then] all truths become dispersed. (INV 6)
Rational consciousness allows the idea of the universal Church (HH 308), that is, the idea that religious affiliation cannot save but what can, is individual regeneration. Faith based on sensuous consciousness is persuasive faith, which the individual rejects in the afterlife (xx). But rational faith remains in the afterlife and saves. This is because all the heavens have been recreated by the Lord through the new rational truths He unveiled in His Second Coming. Now people must come into the afterlife with rational consciousness of spiritual things, in order to form a plane of life that supports heavenly existence. This is because He is Divine Truth, and all truth is rational, and all things are created by means of Divine Truth (xx). Unless we have rational truths of God we cannot be conjoined with the Lord. Without conjunction through our rational idea and love for the Lord, our presence in heaven is not possible.
Prior to the formation of the New Heavens there were the old heavens and their vast outskirts where people were able to live adequately while waiting for the New Heavens to be created (xx). Then, when Swedenborg published the last work of the Writings in 1771, the New Heavens were completed by means the new truths that the Lord revealed to the angels and those living in the outskirts of heaven (xx). A vast migration was then accomplished by the Lord, instructing everyone there in His new rational truths, and admitting and accommodating all those who were willing to receive the new rational truths about Himself. But here on earth things take much longer! Only a few people today are willing to form the New Church mind in themselves by the exclusive means of the Writings. This is because nonduality in the natural mind opposes rational consciousness.
Remains are like some heavenly star, which, the smaller it is the less light it gives, and the larger, the more light. (AC 530)
4. Nonduality is from Self-intelligence
Nonduality is the intellectual process of our natural intelligence when we think about God and spiritual things. This opposition between the natural sensuous mind and the rational spiritual mind, is a developmental process of the human mind—even the Lord as a Divine Child growing up on earth made Himself go through this process. When He was still growing up as a young child, the Lord consulted his natural mind or natural intelligence, about the truths of the Old Testament He was reading. He then revealed to Himself from within His Divine, that He is not to consult natural intelligence regarding the truths of the Word. Instead, He instructed Himself to rely on truths that He is going to reveal to His natural mind from His spiritual mind (HH 308). It is a natural step therefore, for everyone to first attempt to discover spiritual truths by using one’s own natural intelligence. Afterwards, the Lord reveals to us when we read the Writings, that we must no think naturally about spiritual revelations. We must read the revelations as Divine Truth already, and then, and only then, trying to understand what we read. This understanding is not passive but active. It is a rational process of figuring out what the literal language of revelation says. The goal of this understanding is to avoid doubt and questioning based on our own prior ideas and attitudes. Instead, all our mental effort must be in understanding how the details we are given are true and rational. This is the activity what builds our rational consciousness, and nothing else.
The general belief that there is no absolute truth is an instance of this nonduality operating today in the natural mind. Absolute truth is a spiritual idea since only God is absolute, and His truth is absolute truth. This is known from revelation that God gives to all people through their religion and culture. To accept genuine revelation is therefore to have an idea of God that is rational. This rational consciousness of God saves the person, as long as one obeys God’s commandments in daily life. But to deny absolute truth is to consult one’s self-intelligence in matters of spiritual truths, and this is forbidden because it leads to spiritual self-destruction:
Those things which are from one's own intelligence have no life in them, since nothing good proceeds from man's proprium (NJHD 256).
[in the Word] they are called "drunkards" who believe nothing but what they apprehend, and for this reason search into the mysteries of faith. And because this is done by means of sensuous things, either of memory or of philosophy, man being what he is, cannot but fall thereby into errors. For man's thought is merely earthly, corporeal, and material, because it is from earthly, corporeal, and material things, which cling constantly to it, and in which the ideas of his thought are based and terminated. (AC 1072)
Spiritual self-destruction means that people in the afterlife refuse to let go of their self-imposed spiritual insanity, thereby keeping themselves in the hells that exist in every human mind (NJHD 256).
Self-intelligence in matters dealing with natural things is called the external rational level of thinking, or the natural-rational level of the mind. This external rational level is to be contrasted with the interior rational level, which is called the spiritual-rational level of the mind. The difference between the natural-rational and the spiritual-rational is like the difference between hell and heaven. Why then is the natural-rational capable of giving us science and civilization? Wouldn’t the natural-rational mind become insane and not capable of living a modern life of law and order in democracy? The answer is that it would indeed, were the Lord to allow that. But the Lord wills that we succeed in our physical environment with this self-intelligence based on our experience and reflection.
Our successes in the natural world is powered by the Lord, even when we deny it. He gives His power and intelligence to people’s goals and plans regardless of their acknowledging Him and regardless of whether they live wickedly or well in this world. He does this out of love for the every individual and His greatest desire to keep the individual in a state of spiritual freedom as long as possible. Only in spiritual freedom can we choose willingly to love Him. In this way He keeps everyone in a state in which they can decide freely to cooperate in regeneration and thus be saved for eternal happiness. But this Divine assist in the background, works out only for our natural activities and ideas. It would be spiritually disastrous for the Lord to do the same thing in spiritual things and ideas that we form for ourselves in freedom and rationality.
Instead of this disastrous direct intervention in the background, the Lord provides indirect management or assistance in His open revelation of the Word. This allows us to be informed in genuine truths about Him, and thereby to reject the falsities of truths we invent in the natural mind. Spiritual truth cannot be discovered like natural truth. This is a Divine Law of Providence (AC 6047 [2], INV 22, SE 4131). All genuine spiritual truth must come to us from the Lord into the external natural mind, by means of the written revelations of His Word. When we accept genuine revelation as Divine truth, we are allowing the Lord to create our spiritual-rational mind, the mind we must have to live in heaven.
By Adam, or man, and by Eve his wife, was there meant a new church, and by the eating of the tree of knowledge, the fall of that church from good to truth, consequently from love to the Lord and toward the neighbor to faith without these loves, and this by reasoning from their own intellectual, which reasoning is the serpent (AC 8891).
The American intellectual climate we live in exposes nearly everyone to ideas of nonduality. Some are imported from Eastern religions and philosophical systems, some are Western in tradition and contemporary formulation. And some are indigenous to the New Church. This Volume tries to show how nonduality as a system of thought is inherently opposed to the fundamental dualities that are taught in the Writings. For example, the duality between uncreate and created enters into many fundamental concepts in the Writings such as the distinction between human beings and the Lord, heaven and hell, or the permanent distinctiveness between men and women. These and other distinctions in the Writings are given as categorical, absolute, eternal, and discrete. No one escapes this process of duality.
Every one after death is immediately bound to his like, the good to their like in heaven, but the evil to their like in hell (LJ 69)
The power that governs all loves is called conjugial love, and it is based on the permanent and absolute distinction between a man and a woman (CL 44). It would be instantly destroyed by any switching around of sexual identity (to use a modern phrase), and so the duality of man and woman cannot be turned into a nonduality or a continuum of masculinity-femininity. Eastern nonduality is the opposite view that all distinctions are illusory, temporary, unreal, and to be transcended. Self=God, man=woman, individual=Divine, material world=spiritual world, corporeal=spiritual, energy=God, evil=good, angel=man, and so on. You can see that some of these equations are imported from the East, but others are indigenous to the West, as for example the idea in materialistic science of human sexuality as a continuum on a masculinity-femininity scale. Nonduality is a property of the natural mind and acts against all spiritual-rational concepts of duality. Nonduality is a corporeal-sensuous style of reasoning that looks outward and downward in the spiritual mind, seeing a continuity of degree between everything conceivable. This is why nonduality is also in science, where it is called materialistic monism (i.e., “only the natural world exists”).
Another reason that the natural mind reacts against the spiritual mind is that the natural mind consists not only of substances of the spiritual world but also of substances of the natural world, as was said above (n. 257), and substances of the natural world from their very nature react against the substances of the spiritual world. For substances of the natural world are in themselves dead, and are acted upon from without by substances of the spiritual world. And substances which are dead, and are acted upon from without, resist from their own nature, and thus from their nature react. From these considerations it can be established that the natural man reacts against the spiritual man, and that there is a conflict. It is the same thing whether it is said the natural and spiritual man, or the natural and spiritual mind. (DLW 260)
If any idea of nonduality were to be confirmed in the New Church mind it would strive to erode the dualities we take up from the Writings. Mental management techniques informed by the Writings are efficacious in deconstructing the science concepts that we are all exposed to in our education and culture. We may know these concepts, learn them, use them, and teach them—but we may not confirm them in our own mind. And it is dangerous to just let them lie around unexamined in our thinking process. The weakening of categorical dualities in our mind from the Writings, impedes our reformation and regeneration. Neither is it practical to eliminate scientific and cultural nondualities from our mind, or to prevent our children from being exposed to them and learning them. Rather, we need to mark, isolate, and store them in a special mental compartment so that each time they show themselves in our thinking, we can shield and protect our dualities. The maintenance of our absolute dualities is an essential task for every New Church mind. It is the substance of regeneration, as will be shown in what follows.
Nonduality is a natural consequence of the natural mind. Rational nondualities abound in modern science and in humanistic philosophy and psychology. The natural-rational mind is a modern development needed for the build up of the spiritual-rational mind. But its initial or unreformed state, is opposed to spiritual-rational ideas to the extent that we have confirmed in our mind the theory of nonduality of existence, that is, believing that the natural can exist by itself, without the spiritual or God. This belief may be around in society and culture, but it is not necessary to confirm it and believe in it within our interior mind where we are free to believe whatever we want. If we do not confirm the ideas of nonduality we remain open to believing spiritual truths from the Word, that are not accessible to the natural mind. This belief opens up the spiritual mind, and we for the first time begin to live like a genuine human. The genuine human only begins in the spiritual-rational mind. Everything below it in the natural-rational mind, the sensuous mind, and the corporeal mind, is not genuine human, but animal (xx). Our natural mind is superior to animals in language and thinking power, but this is merely a continuum of superiority in physiology and functioning. The human begins with the spiritual rational at reformation in adult life. Only the spiritual mind is human, and we are born with the capacity to become genuinely human and to have our spiritual mind opened in adult life. The spiritual-rational mind can be opened only by revealed truths from the heaven from the Lord. This is also why the New Church mind can be formed solely by means of truths from the Writings.
Nonduality permeates our modern culture and is a dictating force in politics, entertainment, recreation, education, science, the arts, man-woman relations, and articulated or fashionable lifestyles. Eastern nonduality did not create nonduality in the Western mind. Rather, the enormous appetite of modernism for nonduality in Western cultures, have created a mental marketplace for the imported ideas from the culturally rich fabric of Eastern religions and philosophies, and their physical and mental disciplines and arts. The imported nonduality mixes around with the indigenous nonduality with the result that we are surrounded by a culturally rich web that enters into our mind from everywhere--into public life, mental health practices, group and individual therapy, popular followings, professional ethics, morality in relationships, and lifestyle choices relating to health, physical programs, and “spirituality.” Thus, nonduality in our mind is a significant presence that must be dealt with first when we start our reformation in adult life.
One who knows nothing about discrete degrees, that is, degrees of height, can know nothing about the state of man as regards his reformation and regeneration, which are effected through the reception of love and wisdom of the Lord, and then through the opening of the interior degrees of his mind in their order. Nor can he know anything about influx from the Lord through the heavens nor anything about the order into which he was created. For if anyone thinks about these, not from discrete degrees or degrees of height but from continuous degrees or degrees of breadth, he is not able to perceive anything about them from causes, but only from effects; and to see from effects only is to see from fallacies, from which come errors, one after another; and these may be so multiplied by inductions that at length enormous falsities are called truths. (DLW 187)
You can see then that nonduality is the mind we have when we begin our reformation and prior to being on the road to regeneration. The New Church mind refers to the mind we develop in the process of rearranging everything in it from nonduality to duality, as we begin our regeneration in early adulthood (AC 3518). The Writings give us the rational tools for accomplishing this awesome mind makeover task.
5. Nonduality In The Mind Opposes Regeneration
If any imported element of nonduality were to be admitted and confirmed in the New Church mind, or left there unattended, the result would be disastrous spiritually. Damnation itself would then threaten at the door! But the solution to that utmost danger is also at hand—the spiritually informed rational analysis of every idea of nonduality to which we are necessarily exposed by the culture around us. A spiritually informed rational analysis is what we do when we examine an idea in our mind in the light of the Writings. To the extent that we study and know the Writings, and understand them rationally, to that extent we are able to analyze our ideas in the light of the Writings. The light of the Writings refers to the reasoning process we follow when we strive to understand the Writings rationally. This means forming conclusions about how they apply to our willing and thinking. Without this application there is no understanding of spiritual truths. Spiritual truths are seen only in application, until then, we only understand tem naturally. Spiritual truths understood naturally is not spiritual but natural. But as soon as we proceed to apply the truths we understand naturally, they immediately become spiritual in our understanding. It is amazing to experience this in actuality, as I can testify.
When we try to write down the spiritual insight that came in the application, we can do so, but when we read it in another state of mind, we only see something natural in it, and we may even believe that this natural that we see, is spiritual. But it is not. The spiritual-rational only functions in the spiritual mind, and the spiritual mind is closed when we fall back into a natural state. We need many years of constant spiritual discipline to be able to remain steadfastly in a state of mind where we are consciously living from the spiritual mind through the natural, and not merely from the natural (see Volume 3 for spiritual disciplines). In the unregenerate state of mind the natural mind is turned downward towards earth, but at reformation, the natural mind is turned around, and now faces heaven (xx). When the natural mind faces heaven, it faces the spiritual mind, and it obeys. Prior to that, it does what it pleases from itself, and thus, it slides easily into hell. The turning around of the natural mind is effected at reformation by means of rational analysis of everything in our mind, comparing each element with the truths of the Writings that we study and endeavor to understand rationally. All that is needed a this point to make the process effective, is to apply it to our daily willing and thinking. This application gives birth to the spiritual mind and opens it for continued growth. By the end of reformation, everything in the New Church mind has been turned around and faces heaven in the Writings. We then begin life as a true human, one who is being regenerated by the Lord through our free, rational, and conscious cooperation.
A constant and effective mental vigilance is therefore necessary in order to manage our willing and thinking moment by moment every day. This orientation is fully efficacious against the spiritual invasion of “strange fires” in the surrounding ocean of cultural and scientific nonduality. Constant self-witnessing is also an efficacious mental management technique that gives us the ability to cooperate with the Lord in our regeneration (BE 69, TCR 615, 577). I discuss this in Volume 3 under the topic of spiritual disciplines that we can use for the conscious self-management of our daily activities. Since this is the very arena of our regeneration it is crucial that we make use of available techniques the Lord puts at our disposal. I will show that the numerous resistances we experience in our daily regeneration efforts, stem from ideas of nonduality, either imported or indigenous. Rational analysis of our ideas that is informed by the Writings, creates dualities to replace every form of nonduality in the mind.
It is important to understand in detail, not just in general, what danger nonduality poses to the New Church mind. The danger is present when any concept of nonduality is uncritically admitted or left in place without analyzing and questioning its assumptions or implications. To let nonduality lie unchallenged in our mind is equivalent to falling in a persuasive belief. The nondual assumptions interact with the dualities we have from the Writings, modifying them, eroding them away. There is mental pressure, conscious or only dimly perceived, to loosen the categorical and permanent dualities taught in the Writings.
A persuasion of falsity extinguishes and as it were suffocates everything spiritual and celestial; as everyone may know from much experience, if he pays attention. They who have once conceived opinions, though most false, cling to them so obstinately that they are not even willing to hear anything that is contrary to them; so that they never suffer themselves to be informed, even if the truth be placed before their eyes. (AC 806)
All nonduality concepts have at their core nonduality. Search if you like and see if you can find one that is not so marked from within. Every nonduality concept is opposed to our mind because it contradicts the duality concepts that we have from the Writings.
Chapter 1, Section 2
2. Incompatibility with the Writings
I became aware of the dangers that nonduality might pose to the New Church mind when I was recently asked to comment on a brief article by Wilson Van Dusen titled “The Highest Insight in Hinduism and in Swedenborg” (first published in the Messenger June 2001; reprinted in ISI News, Newsletter of Information Swedenborg, March 2002, issue 54, pp. 8-9). It was about nonduality and introduces the issue as follows: (discussed further in Chapter 2 Section 1)
Hinduism's advaita vedanta or non-dual theology, probably represents the highest mystical insight possible. It is the insight that ultimately only God exists. My friends know that I regard Swedenborg's mystical revelations as the greatest ever. We can then ask the question, Can we also find non-dualism in Swedenborg? The answer is a resounding yes. The highest revelation of Hinduism is also in Swedenborg's revelations even though the two traditions had no contact.
In order to understand what this article is saying in relation to Swedenborg I needed to research how Hindu nonduality exists in the ideas of Americans today. Searching for nonduality sites on the World Wide Web yielded a large quantity and diversity of information on contemporary formulations of traditional definitions. I then went back to Dr. Van Dusen’s article and felt surprised at the opening claim, quoted above. How can nonduality be compatible with the Writings when every concept I know from the Writings is grounded in permanent and absolute dualism: God/creation; love/wisdom, heaven/hell; create/uncreate; natural/spiritual; spiritual/celestial; regenerating/unregenerate; good/evil; truth/falsity; Father/Son, Esse/Existere; infinite/finite; will/understanding; and so on. Nonduality would deny that these distinctions are absolute and a permanent feature of reality. As we read in the Writings:
Good exists from creation, and it varies in degree from the highest to the lowest. When its lowest degree reaches zero, evil arises on the other side. So there is no relationship or progress of good to evil, but it relates and progresses to what is more or less good. Evil relates and progresses to what is more or is less evil, because these are opposites in every single detail. (CL 444)
There is therefore an inherent clash in the New Church mind when any concept from nonduality is admitted. I will review several sources through which nonduality can readily enter: Eastern, Western, Christian, Scientific, and New Church. Since nonduality is so abundantly around us it becomes a struggle to identify and tag them so that nonduality concepts can remain separate in memory. In this way we remove its power to affect our understanding and motivation for regeneration. The absolute and permanent dualities we have in our mind from the Writings are eroded and corrupted when allowed to commingle with concepts of nonduality. We depend for our regeneration on the determination to distinguish between good and evil, truth and falsity, the Lord and self. Nonduality tries to create a continuity between these separate elements. It eats away at anything that is absolute and permanent in us and around us. The three discrete degrees of creation are replaced by one continuous degree. This is the destruction of rationality and spiritual sanity in the New Church mind.
1. Evil and good cannot exist together in man's interiors; and consequently neither can the falsity of evil and the truth of good. 2. Good and the truth of good can be introduced by the Lord into man's interiors only so far as the evil and the falsity of evil there have been removed. 3. If good with its truth were introduced there before or in a greater measure than evil with its falsity is removed, man would depart from good and return to his evil. (DP 232)
Chapter 1, Section 3
3. Definition of Reality
Nondualism is opposed to the definition of reality given by dualism because nondualism asserts the contrary view that all dualities stem from a temporary illusion created by the mind, which itself is an illusion created by its many attachments to temporary things. And so, when the individual awakens from this illusion (maya) all dualities drop off, leaving behind nonduality as the only reality called God (Brahman). Nondualism urges that every individual mind awaken from this illusion created by the unreal self (atman), and when all attachments drop off and the self is emptied, there remains the only Reality (Brahman). This is the basis and foundation stone of religious and philosophic nonduality. Every other concept derived from this defining proposition must also be congruent with nonduality. Therefore not a single concept in nonduality can be similar in meaning to any concept in the Writings where dualism permeates every concept to its core assumptions and implications. To attempt to commingle the two by arguing for similarities leads to a clash of doctrine in the New Church mind. This mind is arranged in its order by one’s knowledge of the Writings and their acknowledgment as the Word of the Second Coming. Every other authority or system of thought is laid aside and replaced by the Writings which we see as the treasure that voids all other treasures in the mind:
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field. (Matthew 13:44) (AC 5886)
This confirms what has been stated in the Faith of the New Heaven and the New Church in its universal and in its particular form, at the beginning of this work, namely, "The Lord came into the world to remove Hell from man, and He did remove it by means of combats with it and victories over it, thereby subduing it and reducing it to obedience to Himself." And further, "Jehovah God came down and took upon Him the Human for the purpose of reducing to order all things in heaven and all things in the church; because at that time the power of the devil, that is, of hell, prevailed over the power of heaven, and upon earth the power of evil over that of good and in consequence a total damnation stood threatening at the door. This impending damnation Jehovah God removed by means of His Human, thus redeeming angels and men. From this it is clear that without the Lord's coming no one could have been saved. It is the same today; and therefore without the Lord's coming again into the world no one can be saved" (see above, n. 2, 3). (TCR 121)
Given birth by the Writings, the New Church mind is purely and absolutely dualist, like the mind of angels in heaven, which they have from the mind or Proprium of the Lord that makes the all in heaven:
All truths - not only the general ones but also the particular, and indeed the most specific - must in heaven have been arranged into that order so that one truth relates to another within a form like that in which the members, organs, and viscera of the human body relate to one another. That is, their uses relate to one another in general, also in particular, as well as most specifically, and act so as to be a single whole. … When therefore truths have been arranged into an order like that into which heaven is arranged they exist in heavenly order and are able to enter good. Truths and goods exist in such order with every angel, and they are also being arranged into such order with every person who is being regenerated. (AC 4302)
Eastern and Western nonduality forever strives to empty itself of the rational order into which the celestial mind is arranged from creation (AC 5113). It grounds itself in corporeal and experiential things instead. Its religious life of discipline is in physical and mental disciplines accompanied by prescribed physical exercises and communal chanting or rituals of initiation. These are traditions that were established long before the religious civilization initiated in the West by the First Coming. From the perspective of the New Church mind the highest content it can find in the mental exercises (often called “meditation”) consist in sensuous visions and corporeal metaphors of spiritual ideas like God, heaven, sacred objects, forms of energy, action at a distance, merging into the all, divine vibration, mystical union, transcendental, universal spirit, and many such things, all of which are below the rational in the New Church mind. This is also true of all forms of nonduality including Western and scientific sources. It is one thing to think about God in a natural way, and another to think from God in a spiritual way (DP 142). To think about spiritual things in a natural way means to think of them only in metaphors.
From the point of view of the Writings, natural metaphors have no spiritual-rational content except as correspondences of each other. The knowledge of the correspondences is natural, but from them one can be introduced to spiritual meanings (AC 9280). The spiritual cannot be seen in the lower portions of the natural mind, but starts to be seen above the corporeal and above the sensuous, in the external rational region of the natural mind (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). Below this, there is no spiritual content because no rational.
Correspondences are rational only to the extent that they are understood from the idea of discrete degrees between the natural and the spiritual (D. Wis. 2). This alone is rational. Any form of nonduality cannot rise to the rational level, but sinks down to the material. Material ideas cannot be spiritually rational because they deny what is not natural. Scientific theories that assume materialism are based on material concepts or natural-rational reasonings. They reject or spew out whatever idea that is not natural. These natural things of the mind that that are the highest in nonduality, correspond to the lowest spiritual level, and is compared in the Writings to "the intestines" (AC 10030).
Nonduality as a religious and philosophic discipline leads to the notion that the control of the body and the corporeal mind, is a way to spiritual things. There is no requirement for the rational to be initiated and developed. The spiritual is said to develop when these physical exercises and mental feats are performed. Hence the focus and emphasis on corporeal and mental disciplines, martial arts, initiation rituals, and diet. It is taught that spiritual “energy” issues from the body in particular places identified as “chakras.” Also, that performing well practiced physical movements of a certain style help the practitioner to become “one with the flow, one with nature.” This sensation of integration is by itself considered as the spiritual attainment. It’s a spirituality that is emptied of any rational content in contrast to New Church spirituality from the Writings where only rational and spiritual-rational concepts make a part of the Heavenly Doctrine. This is on account of the fact that the Writings are a revelation of the Divine Rational through which the universe is created and managed. In the New Church mind, the spiritual begins with the highest rational in the natural mind. This is the level of the literal text of the Writings. It is called the external rational level of thinking and understanding spiritual truths (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). Above this begins the genuine spiritual-rational mind, whose opening and growth depends on the lower rational being formed first.
Chapter 1, Section 4
4. Duality is the only reality
[3] The human rational - that is to say, the rational formed from images of worldly things received through the senses, and later on from images of things analogous to actual worldly ones, such as are received from factual knowledge and from cognitions - virtually laughs or mocks if it is told that it does not live of itself but only appears to itself to do so. It likewise laughs if it is told that the less anyone believes that he lives of himself, the more he is truly living, that is, the more wise and intelligent he is, and the more blessed and happy. And it also laughs if it is told that that life is the life which angels possess, especially those who are celestial and are inmost or nearest to the Lord; for these know that nobody except Jehovah alone, that is, the Lord, lives of himself.
[4] This rational would also mock if it were told that it has nothing of its own, and that its possessing anything of its own is an illusion or an appearance. Still more would it mock if it were told that the more it is subject to the illusion that it possesses anything of its own the less it in fact possesses, and vice versa. It would likewise mock if it were told that whatever it thinks and does from what is its own is evil, even though it was good [in its effect], and if it were told that it has no wisdom until it believes and perceives that all evil comes from hell and all good from the Lord. This is a conviction, indeed a perception, that exists in all angels, yet they possess selfhood or a proprium in fuller measure than all others. But they realize and perceive that their selfhood comes from the Lord, even though it seems to be completely their own.
[5] This rational would again mock if it were told that in heaven the greatest are those who are least; that the wisest are those who believe and perceive that they themselves are the least wise; that the happiest are those who wish the greatest happiness to others and the least to themselves; that heaven consists in wishing to be below everyone else, but hell in wishing to be above everyone else; and that consequently the glory of heaven does not hold within it anything at all of that which the glory of the world holds.
[6] This rational would similarly mock if it were told that in the next life space and time do not exist at all but states in accordance with which there are appearances of space and time, and that life becomes more heavenly the further removed it is from the things that belong to space and time and the closer it comes to that which is eternal - for that which is eternal has absolutely nothing within it that is received from the notion of time or anything analogous to it. In the same way would the rational mock at countless other things it could be told.
[7] The Lord saw that such things were present in the merely human rational and that this rational therefore mocked Divine things. He did so from the Divine spiritual, which is meant by the words 'Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian', 2651, 2652. The fact that a person is able from within to have insight into the things residing with him that are below is well known from experience to those who have perception, and also to those who have conscience, for they see clearly enough to reproach themselves for what they think. This exemplifies how regenerate persons are able to see what their rational prior to regeneration is like. In man's case however such perception is received from the Lord, but in the Lord's case it was Self-derived. (AC 2654)
The Writings reveal that the Hebrew Church as presented in the Books of Moses of the Old Testament was a representative Church, and therefore the literal text of the Old Testament does not refer to spiritual-rational ideas (AC 4288). The New Testament does contain spiritual-rational ideas taught by the Lord when He was physically in the world. But these spiritual-rational ideas are not explicit and are presented, for the most part, through parables. In the Hebrew Church of the Old Testament, the connection between heaven and that Church was maintained by animal sacrifices and cleansing rituals, which the people were commanded to follow. In addition to animal sacrifices, they practiced corporeal rituals involving the designation of sacred places and objects that the Lord endowed with physical power to heal or kill (AC 4847). In the mind of the people this Church therefore was based on nonduality since their ideas of God and heaven were material, not rational. They witnessed physical miracles and physical demonstrations of Divine power, thinking them to be the spiritual in itself (AC 4311). There was no discrete duality in their mind between the natural and the spiritual.
In contrast, the New Testament reinterprets the Old Testament text in a more rational, abstract, and spiritual way. The New Testament introduces external rational concepts that can serve as vessels for containing genuine spiritual-rational ideas, not mere natural representatives of spiritual ideas (NJHD 51; AC 3508). The representations in themselves are not spiritual just as the literal sentences of the Word are not spiritual, but only the spiritual correspondences to which the literal represented.
Truth Divine is not received by anyone unless it has been accommodated to his apprehension, consequently unless it appears in a natural form and shape; for at first human minds apprehend none but earthly and worldly things, and not at all spiritual and heavenly things. Wherefore if spiritual and heavenly things were set forth nakedly, they would be rejected as if they were nothing, (AC 8783)
Anyone reading the Word without at the same time thinking of the spiritual meaning in the sentences has then read nothing spiritual (AC 9280). Further, the content of the spiritual meaning one thinks of must be revealed truths about God, heaven, sin, love, faith, and regeneration. This process of rational analysis is a necessary step for applying the rational rules of correspondence that have been revealed. Without this rational application, the faith of one’s religion, including the New Church, is merely a natural idea called a persuasive faith, and this does not save (AC 9368).
The Christian mind prior to the Second Coming in the eighteenth century could not be regenerated from natural to spiritual by means of the ideas it obtained from the literal text of the New Testament. Christians who passed into the spiritual world between the First and Second Coming, were kept “in waiting” in the spiritual world, until such time as the Writings were completed. They then were instructed in the new spiritual-rational revelations, and by means of these in their understanding, they were at last admitted to heaven (TCR 115). All those who were willing to receive the Heavenly Doctrine were made part of the New Heavens of the Second Coming (TCR 1)
Because it is here said, "until the words of God are consummated," it shall also be told what is signified by the Lord's last words to the disciples, which are these:
Go ye and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you; and behold, I am with you all the days, even until the consummation of the age. Amen (Matt. 28:19-20).
"Until the consummation of the age" is until the end of the church (n. 658); and then, if they do not go to the Lord Himself, and live according to His commandments, they are left by the Lord; and being left by the Lord they become like pagans, who have no religion; and then the Lord is with those only, who will be of His New Church. These things are signified by "until the words of God are consummated," and by "even until the consummation of the age." (AR 750)
But before the Lord’s Second Coming, Christians were not able to be constituted into a new heaven because unable to receive spiritual-rational truths about the Divine Human. During the First Advent, the Lord was reticent to multiply miracles because this strengthens corporeal spirituality and weakens rational spirituality. Since the Second Advent no miracles are allowed (AC 7290). The Lord on earth frequently taught abstract and rational ideas, encouraging, challenging, sometimes teasing, the disciples to prompt them to think more abstractedly and rationally about Him, heaven, and regeneration.
But these rational vessels were not yet dualist enough. The Lord was unable to bring to them concepts of absolute dualism, for they were uncomprehending and unwilling. In a matter of a few generations even these few and obscure rational concepts were diverted and turned downward towards many forms of heretical nondualities that prevent regeneration in confirmed believers. When confirmed believers of Christian nonduality arrive in the afterlife they are unwilling to be instructed in the dualities of the Heavenly Doctrine (AC 2329, 5256, 10736-10738, 10821; TCR 821; SE 408; HH 321). Thus they cannot be saved.
More gentiles are saved than Christians. For people who have thought what is good in regard to their neighbour and have willed for him that which is good accept the truths of faith in the next life more readily than those who called themselves Christians; and they acknowledge the Lord more than Christians do. (AC 2284)
The interiors cannot be so closed up with the heathen as with Christians (n. 9256). Neither can so thick a cloud exist with the heathen who live in mutual charity in accordance with their religion as with Christians who live in no charity; the reasons (n. 1059, 9256). (HH 321)
A principal example given in the Writings, is the idea implanted by allegiance to the Nicene Creed (325 AD onward) of a “Son from Eternity” which created a nonduality between “Three Divine Persons” being of “one substance” and formed into one “Godhead.” (TCR 174, CAN 43) This idea was called a “mystery” and it replaced the Father/Son duality that the Lord taught to the disciples, which was “the Son born in time” and “the Father from Eternity” and not, “the Son from Eternity in the One Godhead” and “the Father from Eternity in the One Godhead.” The generations following the apostles were unable to understand the Incarnation of the Father Himself in the external form of the Son born in time. The Divinity of “the Son born in time” within whom was God the Father Himself, could not be understood and believed, until the generations were prepared by rational science and philosophy to understand more abstract dualist concepts in discrete degrees. The Lord could say to them “The Father is in Me” but they could not but take this description in the natural sense. At this level of thinking, it is not possible to see an identity of Personhood between Father and Son. Therefore the mind is thrown back to the idea of “Two Divine Persons in One Godhead.” The only other option is that the Father is Divine while the Son is human—the “Arian heresy” that the Nicene Creed was designed to defeat. In the Writings these are also called “Socinian spirits” (DP 231; TCR 94, 380, AR 0, LJ 38).
1. The New Age Of The Second Coming
All things both in general and in particular come forth and subsist from the Lord, and from the unition of His Human Essence, as in a marriage, with His Divine Essence (AC 1432).
At last, in the Writings of the Second Coming, the Lord has brought humankind the gift of spiritual-rational ideas that are fully suitable for being infilled by the celestial ideas of the angels. The literal explanations of the Writings are first received in the external rational of the natural mind. This in itself is not spiritual but is well suited for the construction of rational “vessels” that can be infilled by spiritual-rational truths from the Lord through heaven (AC 9280, 8783, 3508). This infilling is the opening of our spiritual mind. It is the one and only way the New Church mind can be regenerated and saved, and this only to the extent that our daily willing and thinking is kept in conformity to the Doctrines we create in our understanding (AC 10638).
Cognitions are vessels for receiving good and truth entering in from the rational. The way in which the vessels receive and the amount they receive determine the nature of their enlightenment and how far they are enlightened. Vessels which receive good and truth from the rational are the truths themselves belonging to the natural, which are no more than facts, cognitions, and matters of doctrine. From the order according to which they flow in and from the order which exists among them there they become goods. This is the origin of the good of the natural. (AC 3508)
The absolute duality of every concept in the Writings rests on the revealed existence of discrete degrees of separation between levels of creation, and therefore, between the levels in the mind.
These levels in the mind can never touch each other or be in the same sphere—they can only communicate by spiritual-rational correspondence. The natural level which includes the sensual and corporeal, is the lowest region or outmost level of the natural mind. It is closest to the body senses and identifies itself with the physical environment. The physical environment and the body are material, but the natural mind is natural-spiritual. The highest portion of the natural mind is called the external rational, which is therefore natural-spiritual, not yet spiritual-rational or celestial (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). The spiritual itself cannot exist in the external rational because it is in a discrete degree above it. The spiritual mind has its rational which is called the interior rational or the spiritual-rational, not from the natural world, but only and exclusively from the spiritual world by means of influx from the Lord through heaven (AC 9280, LJ 10).
The existence of these three degrees in people can be seen from the elevation of a person's mind even to the degrees of love and wisdom possessed by angels of the second and third heavens. For all angels were born people, and a person is, in respect to the interior elements which are those of his mind, a heaven in miniature form. Consequently there are from creation as many degrees of height in a person as there are heavens. The human being is furthermore an image and likeness of God, and these three degrees are therefore engraved on a person because they exist in the human God, which is to say, in the Lord. (DLW 231)
The angels with each person inflow into the individual’s spiritual mind by means of spiritual-rational truths. This inflow is proportional to the extent to which the individual thinks and wills daily in conformity to the external rational truths they understand. The more the angels inflow with spiritual-rational truths, the more we are regenerated, the more we become spiritual-rational and sane and wise. In this way, we are prepared for heaven, which is living in the highest level of the mind called the celestial degree. This level is constructed of interior rational truths that are an image of the Lord’s Divine Rational order in the universe. Duality is the only reality because all things in the Divine Rational are arranged into discrete order.
Chapter 1, Section 5
5. The natural and spiritual mind
The difference between natural, spiritual and celestial things is such that there is no proportional relation between them. Therefore natural things cannot in any way by any approximation approach in likeness spiritual things, nor spiritual things celestial things. That is why the heavens are distinct. I have been given to know this from much experience. Again and again I have been conveyed into the company of spiritual angels, and I then spoke with them in their spiritual way of speaking, and what I said I then made a point of remembering. When I returned into my natural state-the state every person in the world is in-I then tried to recall what I had said from my earlier remembrance and write it down, but I could not. It was impossible. No words were to be found and not even any mental concepts by which to express it. The spiritual mental concepts and words were so removed from natural mental concepts and words that there was not the least approximation. Surprisingly, when I was in that heaven and spoke with angels, I then knew no other than that I was speaking in the same way that I speak with people here. But afterward I found out that the thoughts and speech were so dissimilar that the one could not approximate the other, consequently that they have proportional relation.
[3] There is a similar difference between spiritual and celestial things. (De Verbo 3)
It is therefore very important to distinguish between the external rational of the natural mind and the interior rational of the spiritual mind, as discussed before. These two rational levels of the human mind are in discrete degrees (DP 154, TCR 564; AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). Nothing of the spiritual can exist in the natural, but only within the natural by correspondence of discrete degrees. There is no continuity between the external rational and the interior rational (or spiritual-rational), because one is in the natural mind and the other in the spiritual mind. This means that it is not possible to keep increasing the natural-rational (or natural-spiritual) and eventually arrive at the interior rational (or spiritual-rational). In the New Church mind regeneration is going on when the external rational is turned around by our rearranging all its concepts and affections to be in conformity and obedience to the literal sentences we take up from the Writings into our understanding where it is called “the Doctrine of the Church” (NJHD 257). This is the process of being reformed and regenerated. From birth and heredity, the external rational of the natural mind is arranged according to the world and nature—thus in the appearances of nonduality:
Human rational truth does not apprehend Divine things, because these are above the sphere of its understanding, for this truth communicates with the memory-knowledges which are in the natural man, and in so far as it looks from these at the things which are above itself, so far it does not acknowledge them. For this truth is in appearances, which it is not able to put off; and appearances are born from sensuous things, which induce a belief as if Divine things themselves also were of a like nature, when yet these are exempt from all appearances, and when they are stated, this rational truth cannot possibly believe them, because it cannot apprehend them.
[3] If for example it is stated that man has no life except what is from the Lord, the rational supposes from appearances that in that case man cannot live as of himself; whereas he for the first time truly lives when he perceives that he does so from the Lord.
[4] The rational supposes from appearances that the good which man does is from himself, and yet there is nothing of good from self, but all is from the Lord.
[5] From appearances the rational supposes that man merits salvation when he does what is good; whereas of himself man can merit nothing, but all merit is the Lord's.
[6] From appearances man supposes that when he is withheld from evil and is kept in good by the Lord, there is nothing with him but what is good and just, nay, holy; whereas there is nothing in man but what is evil, unjust, and profane.
[7] From appearances man supposes that when he does what is good from charity, he does it from his will; whereas it is not from his will part, but from his intellectual part, in which charity has been implanted.
[8] From appearances man supposes that there can be no glory without the glory of the world; whereas in the glory of heaven there is not a particle of the world's glory.
[9] From appearances man supposes that no one can love his neighbor more than himself, but that all love begins from self; when yet in heavenly love there is nothing of the love of self.
[10] From appearances man supposes that there can be no light but that which is from the light of the world; whereas in the heavens there is not one whit of the light of the world, and yet the light is so great that it surpasses the world's noon day light a thousand times.
[11] From appearances man supposes that the Lord cannot shine before the universal heaven as a sun; when yet all the light of heaven is from Him.
[12] From appearances man cannot apprehend that in the other life there are motions forward; whereas those who are there appear to themselves to move forward just as do men on earth-in their dwellings, courts, and paradises; and still less can he apprehend if it is said that these moving forward are changes of state, which so appear.
[13] Nor can man from appearances apprehend that spirits and angels, who are invisible before our eyes, can be seen; nor that they can speak with man; when yet they appear to the internal sight, or that of the spirit, more manifestly than man does to man on earth; and their voices are heard as distinctly; besides thousands of thousands of such things, which man's rational, from its own light, born from things of sense, and thereby darkened, cannot possibly believe. Nay, the rational is blinded in natural things themselves, not being able to apprehend, for instance, how those who dwell on the opposite side of the globe can stand on their feet and walk; and it is the same with very many other things. How blind then must the rational not be in spiritual and heavenly things, which are far above natural things? (AC 2196)
You can see from this list that nonduality is according to appearances and the rational thinking of the external mind is not capable of believing contrary to the sensuous appearances of its life and reasoning. This is why revelation is necessary! Because from revelation the rational mind that has been formed to look only outward to the world of the sensuous body, can turn itself around and face upward to the spiritual world which enters through the interior-rational mind, and not through the external rational (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). Therefore the source of all rational-spiritual concepts we can know is from revelation in the Writings. Those who deny and reject revelation are therefore trapped at the level of thinking of their external rational (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14).
1. Nonduality Is In The Unregenerate Natural Mind
The devil's hatred is against spiritual truths and goods, because merely natural truths and goods are the direct opposites of these, for merely natural truths and goods are in their essence falsities and evils, although to those who are merely natural and sensual they appear to be truths and goods (AE 754).
All ideas and affections in the external rational mind which have not been reformed, are opposed to all ideas we have from the Doctrine of the Church in our mind. When we read the Writings as Divine Truth, we acquire in our conscious mind heavenly concepts that function as external vessels suitable for being infilled with spiritual-rational truths inflowing from the spiritual world through heaven as we read the Writings (AC 9280, 3508). This infilling is proportional to the extent that our daily willing and thinking is made to conform to the Doctrine of the Church which is in our understanding.
Regarding thoughts: All the thoughts of people, including each single idea in them, involve conceptions drawn from space, time, person, or material-things that appear in natural light or the light of the world. For no one can think anything apart from light, just as nothing can be seen without light. And natural light or the light of the world is lifeless, being from the sun of the world, which is nothing but fire. Nevertheless, the light of heaven flows into that light everywhere and continually, giving it life and making possible the perception and understanding of things. The light of the world by itself cannot impart any perceptive or intellectual ability or confer any natural or rational sight, but it does so from the light of heaven, because the light of heaven comes from the sun of heaven, which is the Lord and so is life itself.
The influx of the light of heaven into the light of the world is like the influx of a cause into its effect-the nature of which will be explained elsewhere. It is apparent from this what natural thought is like, or ideas of thought in people, namely, that they are inseparably bound up with notions of space, time, personality and material. Because of this, those thoughts or ideas of thought are very limited and restricted, and so are crude, and must be called material. (De Verbo 3:6)
There are also in our natural self reasonings that are grounded in falsities impressed from infancy. Moreover, we apprehend by manifest sense what is in our natural self, but not so what is in our rational, until we have put off the body. This also causes us to believe the body to be every thing; and all that does not fall into the natural sense, we scarcely believe to be anything.
From such causes and many others, it results that we receive truths in the natural self much later, and with greater difficulty, than our reception of truth in our rational self. Hence arises combat, which continues for a considerable time, not ceasing until the vessels recipient of good in our natural part have been softened by temptations, as before shown …; for truths are nothing but vessels recipient of good …, which vessels are harder in proportion as we are more fixedly confirmed in the things which have been mentioned; and if we are to be regenerated, the more fixedly we have been confirmed, the more grievous is the combat. (AC 3321:3)
Concepts of nonduality can only enter the natural mind since they are devoid of spiritual-rational content. (How this is will be shown in the Sections below.) There they act by persuasive pressures that strive to oppose the rearrangement of the external rational ideas into absolute dualities from the Writings. These absolute dualities are at first only in our external rational mind as we read the literal of the Writings. There is nothing spiritual in itself about our memory-knowledges from the Writings (AC 9280, 8783). Yet these memory-knowledges are necessary as vessels (or cognitive constructs) which can be infilled through correspondence by the spiritual ideas from the angels that are with us. They cannot inflow except into rational concepts in our mind from the literal text of the Writings.
It will also be briefly stated how the Lord casts out lusts of evil, which beset the internal man from birth, and how He bestows in their place affections of good when a man as of himself removes evils as sins. It was shown before that man has a natural mind, a spiritual mind and a celestial mind; and that he is in the natural mind alone, as long as he is in the lusts of evil and their delight; and that during this time the spiritual mind is closed. But as soon as he, after self-examination, acknowledges evils to be sins against God because they are contrary to Divine laws, and therefore desires to desist from them, the Lord opens the spiritual mind, and enters into the natural mind through affections for truth and good; and He also enters into the rational, and from it disposes in order the things that are contrary to order below it in the natural. (DP 147)
The angels understand the Heavenly Doctrines spiritually (in their interior rational mind), while we understand the Writings naturally (in our external rational mind). Only if we have formed these external rational vessels can the interior rational ideas inflow by correspondence. Hence it is that we cannot be regenerated unless we fill our external rational mind with concepts and reasonings from the Writings. For the New Church mind the Writings are the only source for such external rational vessels (NJHD 257; AC 8939; TCR 340, 347, 350; SS 111; SE 5961). You can see from this why it is so important for our reformation and salvation that we study the Writings daily. Our thinking and willing hourly and minute by minute, must be brought into conformity with the truths in the Writings that we take up into our conscious understanding.
We don’t want oppositional concepts or loyalties in our natural mind. Least of all do we want them in our external rational which is the highest level of our natural mind (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). That level must be filtered and purified to make sure that only concepts of duality from the Writings are there as vessels waiting to be infilled by spiritual ideas. This filtering and purification process is not possible through censorship, sectarianism, or dogmatism. It is only possible through rational analysis and freedom of thought. Hence the importance of studying the Writings so that we have available in our mind, its concepts or ideas, its reasoning process, and all its related affections.
2. The Spiritual Begins With The Rational
Corporeal spirituality, which may also be called spirituality of the intestines (AC 10030), is the natural-spiritual level of the mind that identifies with the material body since it is built up by the sensations from the body’s interaction with the physical world. This is why their location is in the natural mind (DLW 257, AE 577). The natural mind is below the spiritual-rational level where genuine spirituality can exist, which is called spirituality of the chest (AC 10030). The natural-spiritual mind and the rational-spiritual mind are created into discrete degrees and cannot interact except by correspondences. (D. Wis. 2) Rational spirituality is formed only by the inner sensory organs of the will and understanding, and these spiritual organs are fed by the spiritual Sun and its world of events and modifications (DP.166). Corporeal spirituality is formed only by the outer physical senses which are fed by the material world through the body. The mind in the spiritual world interacts with the body in the natural world only by correspondences because the two are created into discrete degrees (DP 166; D. Wis. 2).
The Writings define the spiritual as only that which is rational, while everything that is below this level is not spiritual but natural, corporeal, and sensuous from the natural world (AC 4667). The human begins with the spiritual- rational, a discrete degree above the natural mind, which in itself is animal or sub-human (AC 2196, 3570). Meditation, chanting, and initiations are not considered spiritual activities for the New Church mind. Neither does the practice of physical and mental disciplines or maintaining a special diet. Nevertheless, all useful physical activities can be performed for a spiritual or religious motive, that is, for one’s regeneration. When performed for this purpose they can serve a spiritual function in opening the spiritual mind. What then is spiritual about the activity or discipline is not the physical or mental portion, but the spiritual motive within it. Volume 3 presents many examples of such spiritual disciplines.
In the New Church mind the spiritual starts only where the rational begins. Any discipline or activity can be infused with a spiritual motive, as discussed in Chapter 9. The spirituality cannot emerge from the physical or mental efforts no matter how much they are practiced. Rather, the spirituality must be infused in their interior level which is in a higher discrete degree from creation. This is true of any created object or activity. Since the spirituality is not already in the physical-mental activity, and since nothing about it can ascend to the next discrete degree, therefore it is necessary for the rational-spiritual to descend through correspondential action in the discipline. Then the discipline has the spiritual within it. The correspondential action cannot take place through material, corporeal, or sensuous ideas in the natural mind because these are too gross and do not react.
The pleasures that are in the bodily or outermost things of man have their origin in delights that are successively more and more interior. The delights that are perceived in those outermost or bodily things are relatively vile, for it is the nature of all delight to become more vile in proportion as it progresses toward the externals, and more happy in proportion as it advances toward the internals. For this reason, as before said, in proportion as the externals are stripped off, or rolled away, the delights become more pleasant and happy, as may be evident enough from man's delight in pleasures being vile while he lives in the body, in comparison with his delight after the life of the body, when he comes into the world of spirits; so vile indeed that good spirits utterly spurn the delights of the body, nor would they return to them if all in the whole world should be given them. (AC 996)
Correspondential communication between the interior and the exterior occurs with the highest level of the natural mind called the external rational mind (AC 978, 4286; AE 355:14). The ideas we have at this level are suitable “vessels” into which the spiritual ideas can descend, but not descend directly but only in correspondential interaction. The natural conscious understanding of what is spiritual and celestial is achieved when we acquire external rational concepts that are suitable for reacting correspondentially to spiritual-rational ideas that we receive into our spiritual mind while reading the Writings and applying its truths to life. This is how the spirituality of the New Church mind is built up. The New Testament teaches that physical activities like ritual sacrifices and repetition of prayers are not spiritual. The Writings describe it this way:
When man becomes internal and is instructed about internal things, external ones are of no account to him. He then knows what the holy is, namely, charity and the faith therefrom. According to these are his external things then regarded, that is to say, according to the amount of charity and faith in the Lord there is in them. Since the coming of the Lord, therefore, man is not regarded in heaven from external things, but from internal ones. And if anyone is regarded from external things it is because he is in simplicity, and in his simplicity there are innocence and charity, which are in his external things, that is, in his external worship, from the Lord, without the man's knowledge. (AC 1003)
3. The Spiritual In The New Testament
The power to be regenerated starts with consciously thinking about rational issues and living according to them. At first, this rational is not yet a spiritual-rational but something representing it in the natural mind. This natural-rational can be infilled with a spiritual-natural such as the ideas found in the New Testament. The Lord frequently brought up puzzling issues that encouraged the disciples to be analytic and rational:
The Kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21) Before you can be saved you must born again (John 3:4) The Father and I are one (John 14:10, John 10:38) The Son of Man sows the good seed (Matthew 13:37) Who do people say the Son of Man is? (Matthew 16:13) before Abraham was born, I am! (John 8:58) All that is in the Old Testament is about the Christ (Luke 24:27) In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1) John the Baptist is the Elijah who was to come. (Matthew 11:14) Let the man who is without sin cast the first stone (John 8:7) The kingdom of heaven is made of such as the children (Matthew 18:3) I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. (John 14:20) What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? (Mark 4:30)
And many more…
The rational is crucial to the New Church mind because there is no desire or motive for reformation and regeneration below the human rational. “How do I cooperate with God in my daily activities so that I can hate evil and love good?”
The Lord loves man, and from love wills that he may be happy forever, and man cannot become happy except by a life according to His commandments, because by means of these a man is regenerated and becomes spiritual, and in this way can be raised into heaven. (AC 10578)
This is the burning passionate spirituality of the human rational by which the individual becomes fit for receiving Divine Rational things, which alone are spiritual-rational. These are the holy things by which we are saved and by which we have eternal life. But to nonduality these rational things of salvation are taken as merely illusory attachments to nonexistent things such as good and evil, God and self, prudent and foolish. Is it possible to transfer any idea at all across two systems that are so opposed to each other? Perhaps only by remaining superficial or most general.
Chapter 1, Section 6
6. Why nonduality can be attractive
There is a state of the New Church mind in which we desire to share the Writings. There is even a tendency to be disappointed if we bring the Writings to others in one way or another, and they act uninterested, unenthusiastic, even unimpressed, and once in a while, denigrating and hostile. The desire to help spread the rational revelations remains however. For scholars and students this may take the form of comparisons between some author’s idea and an idea in the Writings. This comparative activity tends to be reassuring to the New Church mind since it is concrete evidence that Swedenborg is influencing the world through the ideas brought forth in the Writings. Sometimes the New Church mind wants to look for natural phenomena that confirm spiritual truths from the Writings, and this is allowed (AC 2588).
Nevertheless these comparative interests and ideas can be harmful to the New Church mind if one commingles imported ideas that are antagonistic to the Writings. Concepts that are opposed to the rational truths in the Writings must not be admitted, but marked in the memory and isolated. This is not a straightforward process and it is prudent to practice how to do this as part of living life in accordance with New Church teachings. One needs to learn what are the psycho-dynamics of concepts in the memory and understanding. When a general idea is allowed in, unexamined and unmarked, it begins to circulate in the mind, mixing with other ideas, and influencing them, reshaping them, modifying them. All general ideas have tacit implications, or more precisely, “presuppositions.” These hidden assumptions do not come readily into conscious awareness and can only be identified and debunked by reflection and rational analysis in the light of the Writings. They cannot be rightly analyzed in the light of self-intelligence or the authority and ideas of others.
Some months ago I received an email from someone who came across my article on dualism posted on the Web (see Note 1 at end). He wrote:
I got here by accident. I am interested in Swedenborg. Van Dusen has taught me a lot. I think I started with William James! At present, I am trying to understand more about monism - reading "Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path" - and I think you wrote that you think Swedenborg is a dualist. I want to believe that Swedenborg would be a monist.
Why, I wondered? Such is the subconscious attractiveness many Americans have for nonduality and monism. This love for nonduality is the unconscious desire to annihilate absolute duality in one’s mind and to become more mixed because this appears more balanced and fair to the natural mind—which is the external rational doing the thinking and which leads to corporeal spirituality when applied to spiritual things:
With those who conjoin the truths of the Word to the affection of the love of self, the natural mind also is closed, and only the ultimate of this mind is opened, which is called the sensual, which clings most closely to the body, and stands forth nearest to the world. Thus does man's spirit become corporeal, and then it can have no lot with the angels, who are spiritual. (AE 579)
Duality demands humility—“I am not God and I never can be. I am God’s creation and I’m next to nothing in comparison to God.” Or: “I am evil by nature but God is good. I can be saved by God from my evil nature and I can be good from Him.” The attractiveness of nonduality is the promise it gives of avoiding the suffering of regeneration. With nonduality, people don’t have to face the idea that heaven is only for the good, while hell is for the bad. They don’t have to be responsible for sustaining the idea that salvation is tied to the Word of the Lord and cannot be obtained from “strange fires.” (Lev. 10:1, AC 10244, 934) Nonduality offers the more convenient idea of “Universe as Spirit” or “God as Emptiness.” It is not as personal as the God of Abraham or the Son of God, thus easier to relate to without having to change, and it offers less demands on the self. The Writings reveal that in the afterlife, there is no belief in God in those who in this life annihilated in themselves the idea of God as Person. Without a belief in God as Person they cannot be reformed, regenerated, or saved from hell.
How important it is to have a right idea of God can be seen from the fact that the idea of God forms the inmost element of thought in all who have any religion, for all constituents of religion and all constituents of worship relate to God. And because God is universally and specifically involved in all constituents of religion and worship, therefore without a right idea of God no communication with the heavens is possible. So it is that every nation in the spiritual world is allotted its location in accordance with its idea of God as a person; for in this idea and in no other lies an idea of the Lord. (DLW 13)
Nonduality introduces in the Western mind a certain peace or quietude that comes from the idea that we need to be more detached. We don’t have to struggle so hard. We don’t need to be so desperately always trying to be better or good. There is the promise of a healthier consciousness, less competitive, less anxious, more self-confident, even to the point of unshakableness. This introduces a lulling sense of relaxing the pace of our struggles and of weakening the utmost determination to reform. Thus it runs contrary to the most important task we have in this world--to cooperate with the Lord in our regeneration, which must be effected through the long-term accumulation of all those little struggles daily (BE 69, TCR 615, 577). The good news is that as we advance in our regeneration, the Lord gives us more and more rest and peace. This is felt from within and looks down upon the continuing struggles and stress as something far and distant and ultimately so small. We do not wish for detachment but pray for the Lord’s will to be done. This peace we have from the Lord is peace indeed, whereas the lulling nonduality of some good mixed with some evil, is not peace in our New Church mind, but spiritual paralysis and obscurity.
Chapter 1, Section 7
7. Definition of nonduality
The universal principle of faith must be in each thing and in all things of it. … The universal principle of faith on man's part is that he should believe in the Lord (TCR 2)
Every idea or concept in the Writings contains the fundamental duality, which is here called “the universal of faith.” In the same way every idea that derives from nonduality has nonduality as its central core presupposition. Every single idea of nonduality is therefore antagonistic to any idea from the Writings, which contains only spiritual-rational ideas. This is because the ideas that derive from the Writings have dualism as their central core presupposition. Dualist ideas are rational, spiritual, and celestial (AE 708). Nondualist ideas are corporeal, sensuous, and natural. By mixing these two in the New Church mind, the dualist truths from the Writings are destroyed, and there remains something lukewarm (half-truth or falsified truth) about which the Lord warns against as damning (Rev 3:16; cf. DP 296).
Duality and nonduality can be compared to two different cognitive trees. The trunk is the central idea or supposition and all the branch ideas take their root from the trunk. Every concept therefore will have at its inmost, the core supposition it springs from. In the system of thought called nonduality, the central core is the eradication or dissolution of all duality. Any concept in nonduality that is admitted into the New Church mind will strive to eradicate whatever duality is within view. This may be seen from the definition of nonduality:
dvaita-advaita: (Sanskrit) "Dual-nondual; twoness-not
twoness." Among the most important terms in the classification of Hindu
philosophies. Dvaita and advaita define two ends of a vast spectrum. --advaita: The doctrine of nonduality or monism, that reality is ultimately composed of one whole principle, substance or God, with no independent parts. In essence, all is God. Hinduism's Online Lexicon. (Himalayan Academy Publications on the Web at /www.himalayanacademy.com/books/dws/lexicon/d.html (Accessed April 2002)
"Advaita" means "not two," nondual. This is the nature of Reality: it is indivisible. The Self is One. God is One. The Self and God are one and the same. This is Nonduality; this is Advaita. (Society of Abidance in Truth (SAT) (Maharishi ). Found on the Web at www.satramana.org/sswhoare.htm Accessed April 2002)
I will present examples from New Church publications that contain articles about similarities between nonduality and Swedenborg. I will identify the specific incompatibilities to illustrate how subtle they may be and to show how they are to be refuted, marked, isolated, and kept from commingling with any ideas from the Writings. This activity is in no way sectarian or prejudicial. There is no condemnation or denigration of nonduality or its adherents. Instead, there is the necessity for the prudent disposition of these ideas in one’s own mind, to be sure they do not commingle with and thereby adulterate the ideas of duality from the Writings.
Second: Good and the truth of good can be introduced by the Lord into man's interiors only so far as the evil and the falsity of evil there have been removed. This is a necessary consequence of what has gone before; for as evil and good cannot exist together good cannot be introduced before evil has been removed. The term man's interiors is used, and by these is meant the internal of thought; and in these, which are now being considered, either the Lord or the devil must be present.
The Lord is there after reformation, but the devil is there before it; therefore, so far as man suffers himself to be reformed the devil is cast out; but so far as he does not suffer himself to be reformed the devil remains. Everyone may see that the Lord cannot enter so long as the devil is there; and he is there so long as man keeps the door closed, where man acts together with the Lord. (DP 232:3)
The Writings teach that in the age of the Second Coming, the only way to salvation is by instruction from the Writings, either in this world or in the afterlife (TCR 108, DLW 429; AC 1775). Entrance to the New Heavens cannot occur without acknowledgement and love of the Divine Human (Coronis 1; TCR 2; 121). This is the beginning and end for the New Church mind of all that is necessary for salvation and eternal life. But when we retain a penchant for universalism or pluralism we are hesitant to acknowledge the Writings as the only salvation and the only truth. But it is necessary that we guard against admitting into ourselves nondualist ideas from other sources because all nonduality is opposed to the dualities of the Writings, and therefore creates impediments to one’s regeneration. Nonduality is a parent idea with many offspring sub-ideas, and each of them singly is opposed to every idea in the Writings, since it contains only dualist ideas.
All good and truth is from the Lord and remains the Lord’s even when it is in us (DLW 113). This good and truth is Divine and remains absolutely distinct and separate from anything in us. Because the Divine is in us we must not conclude that therefore we are Divine! The good and truth in us from the Divine is accommodated to each individual, and our use of it for choices is appropriated to us by the Lord. The good and truth is never ours and we can never become part of it (AC 9338). A permissive and uncritical attitude for nonduality can insinuate the thought that we are this good and truth that is in us. And this false notion further insinuates the idea that we are god. The entire intellectual thrust of nonduality is to have people accept this identity between self and God. Once this idea gains a foothold in our New Church intellect it spreads into all sorts of contrary views that are conjoined with corporeal affections which we all have from heredity. When this infernal union between unregenerate affections and unreformed ideas, becomes sealed in confirmation or in life, our faith is destroyed and our fate is doomed.
The following chapters will show how nonduality creates opposition or impediments to our regeneration, hence salvation.
End Notes and References
Note 1
A directory of all my publications, with full text access to most of them, is available on the Web at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leonpublish.html
Leon James. “Substantive Dualism: Swedenborg's Integration of Biological Theology and Rational Psychology” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/dualism.html
Leon James. “Scientific Dualism.” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/dualism.html
Leon James. “Religious Psychology or Theistic Science: A Guide to Spiritual Self-examination” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/man/religious.html
Leon James. “Swedenborg Glossary of Theistic Science” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss.html
Leon James. “Do the Writings Contain Scientific Revelations?” New Church Life , July 1995, 115(7), 325-330. Also available on the Web at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409ss99/nfile2.htm
Leon James. “Dualist Science and the Writings of Swedenborg” New Church Life , June 1995, 115(6), 264-270.
Leon James. “Overcoming Objections to Swedenborg's Writings Through the Development of Scientific Dualism” New Philosophy 2001 v.CIV n.3 & 4 pp. 153-217. Available online at: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/np98.html
Leon James. “The Fourteen Scientific Fallacies in AC5084: Implications for Science Education.” New Philosophy, July-December, 1996, XCIX(3 & 4), 439-450 www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/fallacies.html
Examples of promoting dualism in science in New Church literature include:
Gregory L. Baker, Religion and Science: From Swedenborg to Chaotic Dynamics (New York: The Solomon Press, 1992)
Linda Simonetti Odhner, The Bread of Life With Honey From the Rock: A Chaste Union of religion and science New Church Life March 1989, pp. 117-122
Leon James, Swedenborg's Religious Psychology: The Marriage of Good and Truth as Mental Health Studia Swedenborgiana December 1993, Vol.8, No-3, pp. 13-42
Ian Thompson, Foundations of the Theory of Spirit, Mind and Nature from Theism www.TheisticScience.org
Note 2
W. F. Pendleton Topics From the Writings (Academy, 1928)
Note 3
Leon James. “My Pre-Swedenborgian Discoveries and Inventions (1960-1980)” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/dhl3.html
Note 4
Mark Carlson. “Evolution, the Limbus, and Hereditary Evil (Part 2)” New Church Life June 1990, pp.259-275.
Note 5
Barry C. Halterman. “Swedenborg's Influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1883)” www.swedenborg.ca/swedenborg/r_w_emerson.html
Jane K. Williams-Hogan. Swedenborg: A Biography Available online here: www.glencairnmuseum.org/jkwh.html
Leon James “Swedenborg Revolution in the Social Sciences” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499s98/shintani/logos.html
Leon James “Spiritual Psychology” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/spirpsy.html
Note 6
Wilson Van Dusen, The Distinctiveness of the Church of the New Jerusalem New Church Life March 1994, 112-114.
Peter Rhodes, Gurdijeff’s and Swedenborg General Church Sound Recording Library, Bryn Athyn, 1976.
Leonard Fox, Gurdijeff’s: Guide to Heaven or Hell? New Church Life June 1993; (see also his reply in the October 1993 issue.)
Note 7
Leon James “Moses, Paul, and Swedenborg, or Ritual, Faith, and Theistic Science: The Three Phases of Religious Behavior” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/moses.html
Leon James “Religious Behaviorism” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/relbehaviorism.html
Note 8
Leon James “De Hemelsche Leer--Part 1--Degrees of Consciousness” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/dhl.html
Leon James “Spiritual Geography--Graphic Maps of Consciousness for Regeneration” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/geography.html
Note 9
Leon James “Overcoming Objections to Swedenborg's Writings Through the Development of Scientific Dualism” New Philosophy 2001 v.CIV n.3 & 4 pp. 153-217. Available online here: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/np98.html
Note 10
Dr. James’ Student Reports on Swedenborg are listed in this directory: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/swedenborg.html
Note 11
Leon James, “Genes of Consciousness: Spiritual Genetics for Regeneration” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/harmonizing4.htm
Note 12
Ian Thompson, Foundations of Theistic Science The Theory of Spirit, Mind and Nature from Theism (containing several articles)
Note 13
Leon James, “Vertical Community” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/vertical.html
Note 14
Leon James, “The Will and the Understanding or The Affective and the Cognitive or Good and Faith or Heart and Lungs or Internal and External Mind” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/w+u.html
Note 15
Leon James, “Affective and Cognitive Resistance to a More Healthy Lifestyle www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/health1.html
Note 16
Leon James, “Notes on the Doctrine of the Wife: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/dow1.html
Note 17
See our Web site at www.DrDriving.org
List of Media Interviews with Leon James and Diane Nahl
Articles on Driving Psychology by Leon James and Diane Nahl
Leon James and Diane Nahl. Road Rage and Aggressive Driving: Steering Clear of Highway Warfare (Prometheus Books: New York, 2000).
Leon James and Diane Nahl. Heaven on Wheels: Principles of Christian Driving Psychology www.aloha.net/~dyc/articles/christ.htm
Leon James. “Drivers Behaving Badly: DBB Ratings” www.aloha.net/~dyc/articles/dbb.htm
Note 18
Hatfield, E., & Rapson, R. (1996). Love and sex: Cross-cultural perspectives. New York: Allyn and Bacon.
Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional contagion. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Note 19
Leon James “The Universal Modes of Enactment in Human Experience: A Self-Witnessing Account of the Discovery of Sudden Memory and My Interpretation of Its Significance for the Human Race” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/man/enactment.html
Leon James “Autobiography: Sudden Memory as the Integrating Mechanism on the Daily Round” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/ethnos/es0.html
Leon James “Objective Autobiography: Sudden Memory” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/pederson/TOC.html
Leon James “Radicalist Empiricism. The Universal Modes of Enactment in Human Experience. A Self-Witnessing Account of the Discovery of Sudden Memory and My Interpretation of Its Significance for the Human Race” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/man/enactment.html
Leon James “The Hexagram of Sudden Memory “ www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/updates/lee/section8.1.2.html
Leon James “Discoveries and Inventions--Sudden Memory” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/discoveries.html
Leon James “The Hexagram of Sudden Memory” (excerpts) www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/qqlj2.html
Leon James “Pre-Swedenborgian Discoveries and Inventions (1960-1980)” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/dhl3.html
Leon James and Diane Nahl “Workbook for the Study of Social Psychology” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/updates/lee/Section8.1.5.html
Leon James “The Analysis of Transactional Engineering Competence” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/tec.html
Leon James “Community Archives in Social Psychology” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/updates/lee/Section5.2.3.html
Leon James “Understanding Discourse: From Ethnosemantics to Transactional Engineering” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/pederson/discourse.html
Leon James “Genetic Culture: Primacy of the Affective over the Cognitive” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/already.html
Leon James “Lectures in Social Psychology (directory of chapters)” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/updates/lee/
Leon James “Lecture Notes on The Psychology of Knowledge: The Discovery of Sudden Memory“ www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/pun/knowledge2.html
Note 20
Leon James “The Method of Self-Witnessing” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/self-witnessing.html
Leon James “Religious Psychology or Theistic Science: A Guide to Spiritual Self-examination” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/499ss99/man/religious.html
Leon James “Self-witnessing our emotions in daily life” www.aloha.net/~dyc/articles/red-blue.htm
Leon James “General Instructions for Your Research Project: The Four Options--Customizing My Daily Emotional Spin Cycle” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy16/g16reports-instructions.html
Leon James “Temptations entry in the Swedenborg Glossary” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/temptations.html
Leon James “Self-Witnessing the Threefold Self” www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/409as97/atakahas/499/atakahashome.html
Note 21
Rev. Ray Silverman teaches at the New Church Academy in Bryn Athyn. He and his wife Star are the authors of a successful book Rise Above It! – “a curriculum for spiritual growth based on the Ten Commandments.” A seminar program is based on the book and is called Touchstone Seminars: A Life-changing Experience. See Web site at newearth.org/user/touchstone/
Note 22
Harrie G.D. Groeneveld “The Second Coming of the Lord in the Doctrine of the Church” De Hemelsche Leer, First Fascicle, 38-43, 1930 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8) Available online at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409ss99/thompson/mscan1.html See also its reprint version in the restart issues of De Hemelse Leer, April 2002 issue, Dr. Rutger Perizonius, Editor (Van der Heimstraat 5, 2582 RX, The Hague)
Rev. Ernst Pfeiffer “Elucidation of Mr. Groeneveld's Address” De Hemelsche Leer, First Fascicle, p.82-95; 127-131, 1930 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8) Available online at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409ss99/thompson/mscan2.html See also its reprint version in the restart issues of De Hemelse Leer, April 2002 issue, Dr. Rutger Perizonius, Editor (Van der Heimstraat 5, 2582 RX, The Hague)
Rev. Theodore Pitcairn, “The second Education” De Hemelsche Leer, Third Fascicle, p.22. 1935 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8; Chapter 8 Section 3) (Available online at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409ss99/thompson/mscan8.html )
James, Leon (2002) “The Substitution Technique: A Method for Extracting What the Writings Say About Themselves as the Word” De Hemelse Leer, Vol. XIV No. 2 (April 2002), 103-109.
Note 23
The following New Church ministers are quoted in this book:
Rev. Donald L. Rose, Sermon titled “The Colt Loosed For the Lord’s Service” General Church, Bryn Athyn. Undated (quoted above in the Introduction to Volume 1)
Rev. Erik E. Sandstrom, The New Age and the New Church (Part Two). New Church Life, June 2002, 251-260 (quoted above in the Introduction to Volume 1; Introduction to Chapter 2; Chapter 4 Section 6; Chapter 6 Section 3; Chapter 7 Section 2)
Rev. Mark Carlson. “Evolution, the Limbus, and Hereditary Evil (Part 2)” New Church Life June 1990, pp.259-275. (quoted above in Chapter 3 Section 7).
Rev. Dr. Ray Silverman’s review of Henry James, Sr. in Arcana 1996 v.2 n.4 p.56 (quoted above in Chapter 4 Section 2 and Section 3)
Rev. Grant R. Schnarr “Swedenborg And The Near Death Experience” on the Web at www.newchurch.org/faq/indepthfaq/swedenbNearDeathExperience.html Accessed June 2002 (quoted above in Chapter 4 Section 5)
Rev. Douglas M. Taylor “Self-Esteem” New Church Life March 2002 v.CXXII No.3 pp. 99-105 (quoted above in Chapter 6 Section 7)
Rev. Edward S. Hyatt, Sermons on the Word. Swedenborg Genootschap, 1935 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8)
Rev. Hugo Lj. Odhner, “The Transition from Human to Divine Philosophy” Written in 1921. Published in The New Philosophy 1974; 77:43-71. Available online at: http://www.newchurchissues.org/SR/hlo74.htm ) (quoted in Chapter 7 Section 8)
Rev. Theodore Pitcairn, “The second Education” De Hemelsche Leer, Third Fascicle, p.22. 1935 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8; Chapter 8 Section 3) (Available online at www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409ss99/thompson/mscan8.html )
The Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg. Translated and Edited by Rev. Alfred Acton (Bryn Athyn, PA. Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1948) (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8)
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. (quoted above in Chapter 9 Section 1)
Rev. Ernst Pfeiffer “Elucidation of Mr. Groeneveld's Address” De Hemelsche Leer, First Fascicle, p.82-95; 127-131, 1930 (quoted above in Chapter 7 Section 8)
Acknowledgment
I wish to thank Dr. Ian Thompson for his invaluable editorial assistance with several drafts and for supplying many of the citations to the Writings (see Note 12 above ). I also wish to thank Rev./Dr. Ray Silverman who spent much appreciated effort reading and critiquing an earlier draft (see Note 21 above). Rev. Robert Junge made critical comments on several key issues that greatly improved my discussion of them. I am very grateful for their contribution. Their astute observations helped me to avoid critical errors and to strengthen the presentation in numerous places.
About the Author
The author, Dr. Leon James, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii. His Web site and information on his professional background is located here: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leon.html
A directory of articles and books by Leon James, with full text access is available here: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/leonarticles.html
For comments and questions, I welcome your email: leon@hawaii.edu
The Web address of the latest version of this document is: www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/nonduality.html
Titles for the Abbreviated Citations in the Book
Full Text Free Online Access to All Swedenborg’s Writings:
The Web site includes a search engine and a key to the Bible. It also carries many articles on Swedenborg and the New Church.
http://www.theheavenlydoctrines.org
|
|
