It would be helpful to you to compare the distance between where you are starting from and where you end up when you complete the study of this book. I created this test to help you estimate that distance. Each question has three alternatives and you are to pick one of them that best represents your views on several spiritual topics. I provide an Answer Key and an explanation of how to interpret your score.

Please page through to the Appendix at the end where the 100 questions are located.

0. Introduction

Note:

The expression “The Writings” is being used throughout to refer to the books written In Latin by Swedish scientist, Emanuel Swedenborg (1668-1772). These are available online along with collateral works and search engine:

www.theisticpsychology.org/writings.html

Many public and academic libraries also carry one or more Swedenborg books. They can also be ordered from local and online bookstores.

Selections from the Writings are given in Section 19 and are arranged by topics of relevance to the discussion.

0.1 A Brief History of Rational Spirituality

A person without religion does not become spiritual, but remains natural (Swedenborg, CL 149)

We know from the Writings of Swedenborg that the most ancient civilizations on this earth were pre-industrialized people with the mental ability of communicating with their departed ancestors. Swedenborg was given the opportunity to talk to them in their heavens where they live happily to eternity, as will be fully explained in what follows. While they lived on earth in a physical body they were able to be in conscious mental contact with those who had departed and were inhabitants of heaven. This celestial communication between heaven and earth was the source of their knowledge about the world, heaven, and God. As a result, their perspective on reality was objective and realistic, hence dualist and theistic. For them dualism was not a belief or a religion, but a scientific reality. They did not have to invent philosophies, theologies, and theories about the source of life, the immortality of human beings, the existence of heaven and hell, and the laws by which God operated both worlds, the natural world of earths and the spiritual world of heavens and hells. This was not mystery to them but science -- clear understanding based on empirical facts. Whatever information they needed about reality, they were able to access through the vertical community of their ancestors. They were celestial people, conscious of the operations in their celestial mind, which gave them a sensuous consciousness of both this world and the spiritual world. This dual consciousness was the source of their science.

And where did the inhabitants of heaven have their scientific knowledge from?

From God. Such is the character of life in the heavens, that truth and good streams into the mind from within. Knowledge is not something that needs to be acquired by learning and discovery. All knowledge is from God. While attached to the physical body we are compelled to discover some knowledge on our own. Scientific revelation has the character of being wrapped in endless layers of appearances of truth. It seems that we have to exert mental effort to read it and comprehend it. But at some point we are no longer attached to the physical body and we take over conscious control of the spirit-body during our resuscitation into the world of spirits. As we enter the uppermost level of our mind called heaven, there is a radical change in how knowledge comes to us. In that state our will is in the inmost and our understanding is on the outside of it. Scientific knowledge or truth streams into consciousness from the spiritual Sun, which first enters the will with its spiritual heat or love, and then exits into the understanding with its spiritual light or truth. This inward source of scientific knowledge is blocked to consciousness while we are attached to the physical body.

You can see therefore that the most ancient peoples on this earth did not need an education and a scientific institution to know the properties and laws of natural events. Whatever scientific facts they wanted to know came to them from those in the heavens with whom they were in communication.

An important component of their knowledge was called the Science of Correspondences. This involved understanding the rational hierarchy of discrete degrees into which the two worlds were created, and by which they are maintained in synchronous action. The spiritual world is the source of all causes while the natural world is the theater of their effects. Every event or quality in the natural world is an effect of some prior corresponding spiritual event or quality, the two being linked as effect and cause. Neither world can survive without the other for they are locked into synchronous correspondence by pre-established Laws of Divine Providence. A world of causes (spiritual world) cannot exist without a world of effects (natural world), and vice versa of course. Further, all events in the spiritual world are from the same source which is the spiritual Sun. It is the source of all causes in the spiritual world, and therefore of all effects in the natural world. Hence all spiritual and natural phenomena are produced by these laws of correspondences by the spiritual Sun.

[3] 'It would be too tedious to explain how creation progressed from its first beginning. But while I was in a state of enlightenment I perceived that by means of the light and heat from the sun of your world, one after another spiritual atmospheres were created, which are in themselves substantial. Because there are three of them, and they therefore have three degrees, three heavens were made, one for angels in the highest degree of love and wisdom, one for angels in the second degree, and a third for angels in the lowest degree. But because this spiritual universe could not come into being without a natural universe, in which the spiritual one might produce its effects and perform its services, at the same time the sun which is the source of all natural things was created; and through this in the same way, by means of light and heat, three atmospheres were created to surround the first three, like a shell round a kernel or bark round wood; and it was finally through these that the globe with its lands and seas was created from the earth consisting of soil, stones and minerals, to be the home of men, animals, fish, trees, shrubs and plants. (TCR 76).

The spiritual Sun is uncreate, which means that it was not created but always existed. All things that exist were created by means of the uncreate infinite substances in the spiritual Sun. Its heat and its light are the foundation substances of all created things. This spiritual heat is nothing else then Divine Love, and this spiritual light is nothing else than Divine Truth. To accept this idea you will need to start thinking about love and truth as substances, and of the will and the understanding as organic receptor organs of these spiritual substances.

An analogy might be to compare the Science of Correspondences to the modern day Human Genome Project, which, upon completion, will yield a database of the identify of all the approximately 30,000 genes in human DNA. The Science of Correspondences allowed the people of these ancient civilizations to recognize what spiritual phenomenon was the cause of each natural phenomenon that was detected by their physical senses. In other words, they possessed dual sensuous consciousness, at once natural and spiritual. Since natural phenomena are corresponding effects produced by spiritual causes, dual consciousness empowered them to sustain a temporary environment of paradise on earth. Our inability today of living in a paradisal peace is due to the loss of the science of correspondences so that we sometimes see truth as falsity and falsity as truth; also, we see good as evil and evil as good. As a result of this mixed up perception we create an inferno instead of a paradise.

These ancients may be called celestial minds because the upper portion of their mind was opened, activated, and fully conscious. This gave them a sensuous celestial consciousness in addition to sensuous natural consciousness. Their rationality and science was not based on separated physical observations of correlated effects, such as is the case with today’s materialistic science. Their science was a True Science. It was a theistic science because it was true to their empirical observations of both worlds, not merely the natural world. They could thus observe that the spiritual world had a spiritual Sun while the natural world had a natural sun. One Sun was alive, the other dead. They could empirically observe that the natural world was dead, and that the life of plants, animals, and humans was not at all in the natural world, but in the spiritual world. The physical bodies on earth were merely receptor organs of life streaming forth from the rays of the spiritual Sun. These rays enter our spirit-body in the world of spirits and thereby descend from the upper to the lower portions where we become conscious of their corresponding effects. The corresponding effects consist of a conscious awareness of spiritual light in the form of natural correspondences or “topics.”. All natural topics in our awareness all day long are produced by means of such influx and its correspondences. Our thinking and willing operations would cease instantly without this continuous influx streaming in from the moment of birth to eternal immortality.

The most ancient peoples on earth could comprehend from inner rational enlightenment that the stream of light and heat streaming out of the spiritual Sun was composed of living uncreate substances identified as love and truth in infinite quantities and varieties. Plants and animals were created in an outward physical form, built from within a discrete degree, upon a framework of rational truth called Divine Wisdom (or Truth). You can see therefore that uncreate substances of the spiritual Sun form the inmost discrete framework of created physical organs and objects. Physical organic forms like plants and animals, are capable of receiving life in various degrees. The chemical and geological levels receive life in the lowest degree. Then the plants, which have an organic form that is superior to rocks or liquids. Then animals, at various levels of receptivity in accordance with their organic forms. And at last, human beings whose form is an image of God, can receive life in the highest degreed called angelic or celestial.

The most ancient celestial civilizations on this earth were able to comprehend that the human mind was the most perfect creation and the purpose for which all creation existed. They did not feel the need or motivation to use their knowledge of True Science to create an industrialized society such as later civilizations have produced. They were wisely content in a peaceful unhurried environment in which they could mature as young adults and then make the joyful transition to heaven. They did not experience death as agony or fear, but as a pleasant transition into a celestial environment that did not possess the heaviness and fixedness of a material natural world. Instead, their external environment in heaven was now a spiritual construction, instantaneously produced, living and changing constantly, reflecting the inner life of feelings and thoughts of the inhabitants there. There was no need in heaven to gather stones for their dwelling places and cut down trees, and nail them together. Their magnificent palaces sprang up instantaneously under the laws of correspondences, and the amazing objects within, the rich garments, the delicious foods, the incredible art work, the striking architecture of gardens and lakes – everything sprang up instantaneously as constructions of the mind by the power of correspondences.

Swedenborg was able to visit with these earliest inhabitants of our planet when he visited the heavens where they now live. He was amazed at the rationality and intelligence they have. Their celestial consciousness gives them a comprehension of reality that is impossible to fathom in our natural mind. They are full of innocence, in mutual love, ready to share what they have, and they live in conjugial love, one husband and his wife, the two being soul mates, yea, united into one soul so that from two they became one. Despite their age being thousands of years, the appearance of their spiritual body was that of the flower of adolescence. When you see a couple walking at a distance the two actually appear as one angel. They were amazed and saddened to hear from Swedenborg that the people on earth have strayed so much from their path that all knowledge of correspondences is lost, and that almost no one lives in conjugial love. They were unwilling to hear details about the scortatory and adulterous loves that permeate the race now, as it was too shocking to their innocence.

What happened in the intervening thousands of years since they had departed earth? Historically it is known as “the Fall.” This refers to the decline in innocence, rationality, and knowledge of correspondences, sad events that were brought about by a gradual and cumulative turning away from rational spirituality and True Science. At first only a few people entered upon this nefarious course. They were isolated on earth, kept away from the inhabitations of the others. When these people entered the world of spirits at their death, they had to be kept separate from the heavenly inhabitations to prevent them from causing disturbances in the peaceful and Divinely obedient life that was part of being in heaven. The places they were kept in was called the hells. With the course of the generations entering the world of spirits, more and more people entered the hells as well as the heavens. There thus evolved two sets of populations in the spiritual world, celestial and infernal. Those still on earth were now born in an entirely new condition. First, they had no direct sensuous access to the spiritual world. The only information they were able to glean from the dual universe was that which came in through the physical senses. They were now totally ignorant that they were immortal, that there was an afterlife, a heaven, and a hell. They had become merely natural minds, thus similar to animals. This is called the Fall of the human race.

As a result God introduced a new phenomenon in the evolution of the human race – from sensuous consciousness of Him to rational consciousness. It was the beginning of rational spirituality in the human race. Henceforth God would make scientific revelations about Himself, heaven, and hell through the mind of chosen individuals whom He would put into a state of trance and produce visions of the spiritual world that they could then describe and record in writings. These prophetical writings were collected together into a set known as Sacred Scriptures or the Word of God. Now all the generations were able to read from a physical book what their dual reality was like. This was the beginning of a new rationality of the human race. The old spirituality was based on direct sensuous consciousness of the dual universe. With their outer physical sensory organs they were able to know the natural order, and with their inner spiritual sensory organs they were able to know the spiritual order. When this dual sensuous consciousness ceased with the Fall of the race, knowledge of the spiritual world and the afterlife was lost. The human race on earth had become natural. This was reflected by the evolution of a new brain – the split-brain race.

0.1a The New Split-brain Race

The early civilizations on this earth were composed of celestial people, as just discussed. Their mind was unified so that whatever was in their will, externalized in their understanding, and ultimated in their physical actions. They were not capable of thinking one thing and saying another, nor of any deceit or disinformation. This unity of the mind was reflected by their possessing a single brain. After the Fall, the mind of the people on this earth was divided. The unity was broken up by God who provided a new method for the human race to know Him and the journey of joyous immortality in heaven, which was the purpose God created the dual universe. This new method was called regeneration of the mind. Now the will and the understanding were no longer united as they were in the celestial people. Now people were born with a will filled with tendencies and loves that were opposite to those of the celestial people. The understanding however was like a blank slate. Nothing from the spiritual world could enter the consciousness of the mind, and so it was born totally dark, turned off. This fundamental mental change was reflected by the action of correspondences as the brain splitting into two parts, the left brain for the understanding, the right brain for the will.

As the infants of this new split-brain race grew and became socialized, their understanding was gradually filled with both falsities and truths. Falsities are opposites and denials of truths, while truths are the revelations from Sacred Scriptures. These revelations were summarized in every society and ethnic group in accordance with their specific conditions of life and culture. Thus arose numerous religions that taught doctrine to the children and the adults. These were called Doctrines of Life and they were acknowledged as Divine Commandments to be followed now in order to enjoy a blissful eternity in the afterlife.

By inheritance the will is filled with natural motives for acquiring knowledges. When we acquire information about spiritual topics our will responds to the content, testing it whether it agrees with its dominant loves. If the spiritual information contradicts what the will wants, the information is rejected. But if the information is compatible with the dominant loves, it is adopted and expanded in scope and importance. By this method we develop a unified mind that is mixed with evils, goods, falsities, and truths. This is not a stable situation since evil fights with good in the will, and falsities fight truths in the understanding. God participates in the tremendous tug of war struggle in our daily affairs as we are pulled and pushed by these two opposing forces. If God were to leave people to themselves, the outcome is predetermined. Inherited evil in the will gradually and inexorably banishes all good from itself, and surrounds itself with falsities manufactured by the understanding, so that the two can make what’s called an “infernal marriage,” which is a marriage from hell, taking the people to hell in the afterlife. The inevitability of this awful outcome meant that the human race was doomed and creation could not survive.

God then had to assume the role of a Divine Savior. He had to intervene in the mental operations of every split-brain individual by a supernatural intervention. God had to break into the natural consciousness of human beings on earth by a series of steps which took many millennia and centuries to accomplish. The Writings describe three fundamental steps in this Divine intervention process. They can be understood in relation to the Word of God or Sacred Scripture. The first phase of intervention to raise human consciousness covers the period of the Old Testament civilizations. Human consciousness is raised by means of Divine Truth. We can receive Divine truths from revelation in Sacred Scripture. The Old Testament was written through the minds of dozens of authors over several centuries. In other words, Divine truths had to descend and externalize in form so that they may be suitable to the genius of the people of those civilizations. Divine truths are perfectly rational because they originate from God’s Divine Rational mind. It is by this mind that God creates the dual universe and manages it. Divine Truth is the acting arm of Divine Love. Love by itself cannot act, but it can through truth. Truth is therefore the outside form of love or good. Everything that was created was created by love through truth. Therefore every created thing or quality contains love and truth at its essence. And whether you say love or you say good, it is the same. And whether you say truth or wisdom, it is the same.

By reading, studying, and reflecting upon Divine truths, our consciousness is raised. This is how our mind has evolved from creation. We become enlightened from knowing that there are two worlds, that the two are connected, that God rules all the details, that we are immortal, that our blissful eternity in heaven or our miserable fate in hell will be determined by the choices we make in accordance with the Divine truths in our understanding. Enlightenment brings us to the edge of salvation. Once again God has placed the human race on this planet into a position of freedom to choose between evils and goods, and between falsities and truths. It is called the edge of salvation because we are first given the rational understanding of our real condition. We can then actualize that salvation by beginning the mother of all battles – which is our struggle at character reformation by means of temptations – first natural, then spiritual, and a t last celestial. The Divine truths in our enlightened understanding are temporary visions of reality as it is truly. We see God rationally. We can be filled with rational loves by acknowledging Him as a Divine Human Person, and loving Him by obeying His Commandments. He can then intervene in further ways that He could not before. The reason He could not help us before in this new way is that we were not sufficiently prepared so that we were unwilling to be helped in this way. Had God insisted on helping us in this way before our readiness being complete, we would have lost our spiritual freedom to choose heaven or hell. And without this choice, we cannot be made human and happy to eternity.

God supervises every detail of our character reformation or regeneration, or else it would fail. The extent to which He can intervene in our conscious understanding is limited by our willingness to learn deeper rational truths than what we start out with. We cannot rest in the spiritual growth process. We must progress continually, or retrogress. Our spirituality must become more and more rational in order to become more and more celestial. Celestial spirituality is the highest form of rational spirituality that human beings can attain. We begin our rational development with a natural understanding of spiritual truths (or Divine truths). We read Sacred Scripture and are instructed in religious doctrine. This initial phase is a natural understanding of spiritual truths. This is the Old Testament phase of cultural evolution. We read about who is God and what God wants from us and why. All our thoughts and feelings in this regard are natural-rational. In other words we think of God naturally, as a Divine King who wants us to follow His Commandments and to worship and to give Him glory. We think of heaven as a place of reward for our good deeds, and for our origin of birth and the inherited blood we carry. We think of hell as a place of eternal punishment for sins and misdeeds. We think of these things in a natural way.

For instance we think of heaven as something that will be created on this earth, or some other planet, after the earth is first destroyed. Or we think of hell as prison where we are tortured and held against our will. We think of angels as a separately created race to serve God who wants to be praised and gloried all day long and all night. And other such characteristics that natural kings would have and natural societies on earth.

The Old Testament phase brings the mind to a higher level than the natural level ever could attain by itself. The idea that there are two worlds, natural and spiritual, is a degree of rationality that the people of the Old Testament could not yet attain. Those who acknowledged the Old Testament as Divine Truth were raised above the level of others who had fallen into natural forms of religion called cults and myths. For example the ancient Greeks, had a culture that transmitted remnants of truths left over from the celestial civilizations. These remnants were no longer genuine but filled with falsities. For instance, instead of one God they had multiple gods. They were locked into this myth, believing it to be true. As a result they were not able to develop their rational spirituality having met a dead end in their religious myths. But when the Old Testament was completed, people were able, if they were willing, to receive rational and scientific facts about God and the spiritual world, thereby elevating their mind from primitive superstitions to a rational description of God, who He was, what He wanted, and what methods we were to use in our regeneration. By adopting these truths, our spirituality becomes rational, that is, in accordance with true reality as revealed by God.

But this level of rational spirituality is but an intermediate step. It is not genuine rational spirituality but a lower from of it created to allow us to progress further. For instance, the rational mind rebels against mystery and obscurity. It desires to attain a scientific understanding of all things, including God and heaven. This rational is encouraged or empowered by God to begin to see inconsistencies in Sacred Scripture. For instance, on the one had we are told that God is perfection itself, omnipotent, and loving. On the other hand we are told that God is demanding, punishing, and even retaliates out of anger when people sin or break His Commandments. How can the two facts be reconciled? This creates a strain in the rational mind. Some people respond to this mental strain by beginning to doubt that Sacred Scripture is really Divine, and eventually turn themselves away from the Word, and begin to think with thoughts that deny God, heaven, and hell.

Others respond to the inconsistencies by turning the rational mind away form them, and calling them mysteries of God that the human mind can’t quite comprehend. Or else, it is said that these mysteries will be understood in the afterlife. In this way, rational spirituality declines. New doctrines are introduced that give a false interpretation of Sacred Scripture. Heresies and insanities abound, making it difficult for those in them to turn back, hence to regenerate their character. More and more people come into the afterlife with an unregenerate character. They are unwilling to receive the truths they are given and taught, and sink down into the hells of their mind from where they are stubbornly unwilling to return.

It is was necessary therefore for God to provide new revelations in order to raise the rational spirituality of the race. Spiritual evolution must progress in successive steps. When we are regenerating today, you and me, we go through the same steps that history went through because individual biography recapitulates racial history. When the Old Testament phase of evolution was completed in the human race on this earth, the New Testament phase was initiated by the Incarnation events, and subsequently by the writings that are collected as the New Testament. The Divine truths are now cast in a higher version of rationality than ever before. The Old Testament mentality of a natural God gives way to a new mentality of a spiritual God. Now for the first time the human race is capable of thinking about a heaven and a hell that is not out there on the planet, but in here in the mind. This is a discrete and fundamental leap in rationality. The human race could not have received this Divine Truth prior to the Incarnation. The Incarnation was a physical intervention in the natural world. This has never happened before. In Old Testament days God appeared as an Angel, as Burning Bush, as a Thunderous Living Voice, as a sacred place with mighty powers like the Ark, or as the invisible force of the universe. These methods of appearance, or Epiphany, were indirect and distant. Where was God in the burning bush? Where was God in the Ark or Temple? The mind could not form a rational description of God that was actual and true.

But with the Incarnation, the sensuous-rational mind had physical proof of God’s existence. He was now a historical figure, born a citizen of a country, walking about making miracles and teaching followers, then dying, resurrecting, and ascending to heaven again, where He came from. Now He was in this world; now He is in the spiritual world. This is rational proof of the dual universe. Later generations who did not see Him nevertheless are able just as well to rationally confirm His existence by acknowledging the events of the New Testament as true. This acknowledgment raises our rationality to a new high. Now we are able to think about spiritual topics in a spiritual way, not merely natural way.

For instance, heaven is not a place but a state of mind. Hell is not a prison but an environment created by the mentality of the people who are there. God is not like a natural king who punished His subjects when he gets angry. God never gets angry since He is pure love, yet the people who turn against Him become insane and now begin to see Him as the opposite of what He is. This is why God talks and appears in the Old Testament as an earthly king, not because He is that way, but because the Old Testament mentality sees Him that way. He permits this distortion of Him for the sake of establishing a basis for a higher spiritual mentality. When we receive the New Testament mentality, and acknowledge it, and desire to live by it, we ascend to a new level of enlightenment far above what was possible before.

For instance, our thoughts and loves become more rational. When we think of sin, we think of intention, not merely the overt deed. Breaking the marriage vows is called adultery in Sacred Scripture. In the higher phase of rational spirituality we can see that if we fantasize adultery, enjoy it, consider it permissible because it is only in the mind, we are committing a sin just as much as when we carry it out in deed. This is a higher level of consciousness since it elevates the significance of mental events to be equal in importance, or more important, then outward actions. This is more rational because outward actions are nothing but the automatic expression of inward thoughts and feelings or intentions. We may hide or inhibit our outward actions to avoid being punished by norms and laws, but we try to them secretly if we think we can get away with them. Thus our character remains inwardly such as it is, and we are not regenerated. Now with the New Testament mentality we can see more rationally that heaven cannot be given to us by God as a reward, or else God would, since He is pure love. But He cannot. God can bring us to heaven only if we have heaven in our mind, that is, only if our thoughts and feelings are true and good. Thoughts and feelings must be changed by our struggle to regenerate or else they remain such as they were. We can also in this new rational spirituality that the human race is united in God’s eyes and that entering heaven has nothing to do with the blood of our ancestors or with our standing in society. God is personal, in addition to being universal.

But this new rational spirituality is itself still in an intermediary stage as shown by the fact that it contains many obscurities that are turned into mysteries. For instance, how does our rational mind explain the Incarnation? If God is omnipresent, how can He now be this Divine Child, or that Adult Man who died on the Cross and was Resurrected? And how can God die? The rational mind of the civilizations of the New Testament came up with various explanations based on the natural understanding, rather than based on spiritual understanding. One of these was the idea that there were not one, but two Divine Persons. One was called the Father, the other the Son. Father God and Son God were in heaven when the Son God decided to descend and Incarnate so that He might become a Holy Sacrifice that would placate the Father God and be right again with the human race, so long as the people accept the idea that their sins are forgiven by Father God solely on account of the noble and Divine Sacrifice of the Sun God who Incarnated. And after the Sacrifice, the Son God returned to heaven to be with Father God again. This explanation fails to satisfy the rational mind.

All sorts of inconsistencies and irrationalities are detected in the story. First and foremost, how can there be two Divine Persons “each of whom is God” (according to the Christian Creed). Realizing this logical impossibility, the intellectuals of the New Testament Mentality again came up with various explanations. One is that this one of those mysteries, an answer to which we shall only know in heaven. Another idea was the that the Son God is Divine but He is not as high as the Father God whose role is Creation, while the Son God’s role is Redemption. This idea led to injurious heresies, one called the Arian heresy, which said that the Son God was the Messiah, and so a lesser god than the Father God since the Son was born human.

None of these explanations satisfy the rational mind, and once again the human race was poised to slide back in consciousness and away from Divine Truth, the only reality and science there is. The slide backwards was so intense and prolonged that 20 centuries after the Incarnation and the writing of the New Testament, our public schools teach materialistic science and are even forbidden by law to teach the true role of God in every natural phenomenon. The consequences of a backsliding consciousness were devastating and horrible. The human race on earth turned spiritually insane since the start of these irrational explanations of reality. Materialistic science and secular humanism became the mentality that captured the governance of society.

The new rules that were formed for human interactions were inhuman and beastly, so that nations turned against nations, waging war with each other and bringing much suffering. Similarly, neighbor turned against neighbor as they became competitors to each other in business, sex partners, politics, sports, traffic, and humor. Hostility became normal and accepted. Physical, mental, and economic abuse became commonplace. Entertainment and art became brutal and obscene. People stood in long lines to get to watch a movie that portrayed violence, adultery, murder, deception, indecency, pornography, blasphemy – and the more of these things were portrayed, the more people were willing to pay to see it. The majority of marriages ended in divorce after much suffering, and it became normal for children to grow up in single parent homes.

Individual lives and lifestyles reflected the spiritual insanity within Fallen materialistic humanity. The consciousness of a spiritual link to heaven died out. As a result the mechanism was turned off by which goods can be received from God through influx into the spiritual mind. Prior to materialism, the human mind operated with a consciousness of heaven so that influx into the spiritual mind may be effective and could descend into the natural mind where the individual experienced enlightenment. With this enlightenment in the understanding, God’s influx of good could enter the will. The Divine good is within truth just as heat is within sunlight. By retaining a consciousness of Divine Truth in our understanding, we are able to receive Divine good in the will. This good is what we need to live the heavenly life. This good is the good of character and is given in endless variety – the capacity to love, the desire to conjoin, the motivation to persevere, the love of truth, the attraction to innocence and purity, the capacity to learn, the strengths and virtues of character – these are the goods we receive from God that make us genuine human beings in the image of the Divine Human Person.

Without consciousness of God, or dualism, this venue of reception for goods is interrupted. If we are not open to receiving these heavenly goods, there is only one other alternative available – the reception of evils. There is no in between, only this absolute duality from creation. No other possibility exists. Every single thing on this earth and in the spiritual world is either from heaven or form hell. No other possibility has been created. Therefore every single thought or emotion we have is either form heaven or from hell. Either heaven or hell is the source of every particle and content of the mind. Friend, if you learn to keep in mind this one universal absolute fact, you will be saved for eternity in heaven, and in the meantime, you will live a joyous life here on earth.

The reception of evil in our character is obvious. We are mixed bags of a fallen humanity. We live a daily life of mental pollution. Inwardly we rage against everyone. To our loved ones, we are abusive with various intensities, some brutal and cruel. Our marriages end in divorce. We quarrel with one another. We overeat, under-exercise. We make many mistakes. We are forgetful. We are disobedient and selfish, harmful and arrogant. At the same time can show loyalty, patriotism, friendship, productivity, inventiveness, industriousness, and many more. We are thus mixed minds with a split-brain without the power to purify ourselves. What happens to mixed minds with split-brains? Some people theorize that the good they have done and possess in their character will outweigh the bad, and a just and merciful God will not keep them from heaven.

This is a balance theory of Divine equity in judgment. But it is a fantasy. The truth, as revealed by God in True Science, is that evil and good cannot mix for evil destroys good by corrupting it and changing into evil. Evil is nothing else than good changed in that way. The mixed character theory cannot save you for the evil you actually love will destroy the good you think you love. You will then realize that the good you thought you loved, you actually hate. It was just a kind of a put on. God allows this mixed mind operation for the sake of the individual’s reformation and regeneration, for without allowing mixed minds on earth, no one could be regenerated and saved for heaven. A way had to be provided for regenerating the mixed mind of the split-brain race on earth.

God had to intervene again, for the third time, and now at last He was able to give the final revelations of the Threefold Word. This had been God’s plan since the beginning – to give three collections of revelations – the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Writings -- to allow the new split-brain humans to be regenerated and to be made whole again, and single brained, like the celestial people. This is the meaning of the expression the “Threefold Word.” The re-elevation of the human race to celestial status was planned in three steps of rational spirituality, in accordance with the discrete laws of correspondences revealed in the Writings. The first phase was the collection of scientific revelations called the “Old Testament” given in Hebrew, which raised the human mind from pre-scientific thinking -- idol worship, superstition, and barbarism -- to the first step of a scientific civilization, a first step in rational spirituality. It established the rational idea that the universe is operated by a rational Divine intelligence called Jehovah the Creator who is Omnipresent, Omniscient, and Omnipotent. The idea of one God in relation to the universe raises the mind’s consciousness from materialistic and sensuous darkness to rational consciousness. When people think and feel from a perspective of monotheism, they are operating rationally. This is obvious since all rationality comes from Divine Truth in our understanding. God is the source of all rationality and operates everything of the universe by means of rational rules of operation. Knowing anything about God is therefore operating at a rational level. Denying God is evidently thinking insanely and irrationally since in actuality God is the source of all.

The rational idea of God revealed through the Old Testament, eliminated the insane and illogical theories that captivated the minds and lives of most people at the time the Old Testament was given to the human race. This chief rational idea of one God, became the source of other rational ideas, like the idea of omniscience. Prior to this, people were captivated by the idea that they could hide from God, or that they could play one god against another, or that God was limited in power due to other godly-forces of Destiny. Another idea was that since we are limited humans, we are always going to be mixed good and bad, but that what matters is the balance – are we more good than bad. Under this irrational idea many justifications have been found for not having to regenerate the character. We can excuse some of the bad with the good, so that we can keep that bad with us, maybe take it to heaven. Or even that the bad can be regularly washed away by purification rituals. The result of all these explanations was to create a culture with arrested spirituality. A second Divine intervention became necessary. It was time to give humanity the second portion of the Threefold Word.

The New Testament got rational spirituality going again by eliminating these irrational justifications of evil in the self, and placing a brand new focus on the intentions, not the deeds. It was a higher more logical science. An analogy is represented by the science of linguistics when considered over the span of my professional career. Prior to the 1960s, linguistics was in the external behavioral phase, not unlike ritual religion and superstition. Sentences were analyzed by breaking them up into functional categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. In this first phase of linguistic science, there was no consciousness of what caused a sentence to be what it is. Linguists could only organize sentences in terms of their surface visible structures like adjectives, nouns, verbs. Then a paradigm shift took place, largely by means of the ideas of Noam Chomsky at MIT who proposed that sentences are produced by inward rational operations and that we need to investigate what they are. “Intentions of the speaker” became a new scientific concept that led to great new strides in linguistics. It also had a decisive influence on the course of psychology.

The New Testament presented a new more advanced paradigm of science. It established scientific dualism, which is the rational idea that God has created a dual universe, one natural or physical, the other spiritual or mental. Furthermore, there is a cause-effect relation between them, so that the spiritual moves the natural, not the other way around. In other words, the mind moves the physical body, not the other way around. Therefore when we commit an evil act that is injurious to others, it is the evil intention that is the cause of it. Similarly, when we commit a good act of use to others, it is the good will or good intention that is the cause of it. Finally, when we commit a good act of use to others, it may not have a sincere motive, but a hypocritical one, and in that case the good act does not count as good, but counts as evil. Similarly when we commit an evil act, but then repent of it, the intention is changed and the evil is shunned and avoided. The person is then no longer guilty of the former evil.

This type of reasoning elevated the scientific consciousness of the civilizations that were influenced by the New Testament. For example, people started thinking about the causes of the visible things they see around them. In this way a cause-effect science in general came to be established, razing civilization to a new rationality.

This rational approach could have worked in terms of furthering spiritual development of the race had it not been for the many heresies and mystical doctrines that obliterated the rational gains in the New Testament. Therefore the Christian world was warned to expect a Second Coming of the Lord. This was in everyone’s consciousness for many centuries. All sorts of new heresies were invented as to how this is going to take place. Absolutely no knowledge of it was available, only speculation. The Lord prevented any such knowledge from becoming known. The human race could not receive this last portion of the Divine Revelation without being harmed by it. When we are exposed to a Divine truth prior to our ability to comprehend it, we turn the truth into its opposite, thus harming ourselves. The Lord carefully hid this new knowledge of the Second Coming until the 18the century when Emanuel Swedenborg began publishing the Writings. These were completed when the last of about 30 volumes was published by Swedenborg in 1772. In these volumes the full blown answer is given about what is the Second Coming and how is it going to take place.

A redemption has also been accomplished by the Lord at this day, because at this day is His Second Coming according to prophecy; by which, having been an eye-witness thereof I have been made certain of the truth of the foregoing arcana. (Coronis 21)

To-day the Second Coming of the Lord is taking place, and a new church is to be established (TCR 115)

At last the Lord has revealed Himself in His Divine Rational as a True Scientist. We now have the answers to all the puzzles of mystery and heresy that plagued all the prior civilizations since the celestial beginning of the race on earth. Now it is permitted to go into these mysteries of ages in a rational way, so that the rational mind can be fully and perfectly satisfied that there is nothing that can puzzle us that has not been revealed. It is this method that the Lord has chosen to conjoin Himself to the human race, and to permit the human race to reciprocate by clinging to Him with our rational mind. The Second Coming marks the new evolutionary era of celestial consciousness by means of the rational spirituality of True Science.

This book is about the journey every individual is embarked on, the journey to heaven or hell. It is about how to avoid hell and end up in heaven by developing our rational consciousness of Divine Truth.

Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from other worlds. (Swedenborg, EU 1)

0.2 But is this Scientific?

Yes, because it meets all the standards of science, which is that a scientific explanation must be rational, must fit in with what’s already known, and must be verifiable by empirical observation and capable of being disconfirmed by data gathered by others. Any explanation that meets these criteria is a scientific explanation.

The explanations in the Writings are rational. I have gone through the nearly 30 volumes and have been impressed and delighted at its extraordinary rationality and consistency. There is a substantial literature on Swedenborg, as you can expect, and it is generally recognized that he was an unusual genius with vast knowledge of the sciences and the classics. The Writings have been admired for their strict rationality, sometimes criticized for it by those who would prefer seeing the expression of more fuzzy passion. The Writings are a model of rationality for science, theology, and philosophy.

The explanations in the Writings fit in with everything that’s been known and understood in Western Christian literature, science, and history. The Writings are a continuation of the Old and New Testaments, and complete the collection of Divine revelations called the Threefold Word. The Writings analyze the major theories of theology, philosophy, and science from Aristotle to Newton. Topics include the structure of physics, the evolution of biology, human development, mental influences, navigation and geography of the spiritual world, psychological experiments in the spiritual world, interviews of witnesses now in the spiritual world who recalled their life on earth with accurate detail, observation and description of the resuscitation process which takes place 36 hours after death, exploration of societies on other planets, medical details relating the action of correspondences on the activity of organs in the body, and much more.

CONCERNING THE RESUSCITATION OF MAN FROM THE DEAD, AND HIS ENTRANCE INTO ETERNAL LIFE

Being permitted to describe in connected order how man passes from the life of the body into the life of eternity, in order that the way in which he is resuscitated might be known, this has been shown me, not by hearing, but by actual experience. (AC 168)

I was reduced into a state of insensibility as to the bodily senses, thus almost into the state of dying persons, retaining however my interior life unimpaired, attended with the power of thinking, and with sufficient breathing for life, and finally with a tacit breathing, that I might perceive and remember what happens to those who have died and are being resuscitated. (AC 169)

Celestial angels were present who occupied the region of the heart, so that as to the heart I seemed united with them, and so that at length scarcely anything was left to me except thought, and the consequent perception, and this for some hours. (AC 170)

The angels who sat at my head were perfectly silent, merely communicating their thoughts by the face, so that I could perceive that another face was as it were induced upon me; indeed two, because there were two angels. When the angels perceive that their faces are received, they know that the man is dead. (AC 173)

An aromatic odor was perceived, like that of an embalmed corpse, for when the celestial angels are present, the cadaverous odor is perceived as if it were aromatic, which when perceived by evil spirits prevents their approach. (AC 175)

As soon as the internal parts of the body grow cold, the vital substances are separated from the man, wherever they may be, even if enclosed in a thousand labyrinthine interlacings, for such is the efficacy of the Lord's mercy (which I had previously perceived as a living and mighty attraction), that nothing vital can remain behind. (AC 179)

When the celestial angels are with a resuscitated person, they do not leave him, for they love everyone; but when the soul is of such a character that he can no longer be in the company of the celestial angels, he is eager to depart from them; and when this takes place the spiritual angels arrive, and give him the use of light, for previously he had seen nothing, but had only thought. (AC 182)

Afterwards there seems to be something gently unrolled from the face, and perception is communicated to him, the angels being especially cautious to prevent any idea coming from him but such as is of a soft and tender nature, as of love; and it is now given him to know that he is a spirit. (AC 185)

He then commences his life. This at first is happy and glad, for he seems to himself to have come into eternal life, which is represented by a bright white light that becomes of a beautiful golden tinge, by which is signified his first life, to wit, that it is celestial as well as spiritual. (AC 186)

One of the most dramatic empirical demonstrations in the Writings is the proof that the Old and New Testaments are written in the code of correspondences, the same code that relates spiritual phenomena to natural phenomena generally. This is most impressive because the dozens of authors of the Old and New Testaments wrote independently over many centuries. Unbeknownst to them, what they wrote down was in a code, the same code!!

Isn’t this impressive? Most impressive? Does it not stand as a historical and scientific proof of God’s existence and intervention in the minutest details of the world and the mind?

Finally, verification. Are the explanations and facts reported in the Writings verifiable? Yes, they are, and they will be, by every individual approximately 36 hours after death. Swedenborg interviewed many “novitiate spirits” who are the people who have just gone through resuscitation and are beginning to figure out where they are. When told by the attending nurses that they are now in the world of spirits, some are joyous, whether they knew in advance, or are happily surprised. Others are disbelieving, making up other explanations, for example, that they have been transported, they don’t know how, to another place or island, and they need to find their way back home. But soon everyone is compelled by the events to acknowledge that they are now spirits in the afterlife of heaven and hell.

Some scientists reading the above verifiability test would not be impressed, this I know full well. They want verifiability now, not when they depart forever. But here is the news straight from heaven: They are not going to get it. There is no verifiability of the spiritual world while connected to the physical body. The reasons for this are medical and will be explained in the book. Now the only question left is this: Is a rational explanation disqualified from science when it is not verifiable prior to death? Some scientists might say yes, but some might say no. I’ve been a career scientist for forty years and am still on the job, and my answer is No, the rational explanation is not disqualified even though it is verifiable only at the death of each scientist.

The Writings do not merely give us a grand theory of heaven and hell. Swedenborg has been admired by many famous authors in the 19th century and some people consider his writings as important works of literature and philosophy. This is also true no doubt. But more than that, the Writings make it fit in with what’s known in history and science, and with pragmatism and behaviorism. And, as I mentioned, there is the demonstration of the code of correspondences in which the Old and New Testaments were written in. This alone makes the Writings completely unique in the history of ideas.

0.3 Overview of this Book

The human mind has the capacity to operate at different levels. Lower levels of operation are called “animal” while higher levels are called rational, spiritual, and celestial. Each of the three discrete levels of the mind – animal (corporeal, sensuous), rational, and spiritual-celestial – gives us a different perspective and insight on life and reality. Our perspective of reality is known as “consciousness” or “conscious awareness.” Human beings have an innate striving to elevate their consciousness. This is a genetic built in feature of every human mind. Consciousness is elevated when our perspective on reality jumps to the next level of operation. The entire course of human history has been marked by a sequence of civilizations that rise in human consciousness, from animal, to rational, to spiritual, to celestial. Individual development recapitulates historical evolution. Every human being is created with the same human mind marked by a collection of unique qualities. We are born into the animal level of consciousness. We develop our mental capacities as we mature, rising as adults to the level of rational consciousness. As we advance in maturity, our rational consciousness leaps to a new level of thinking and feeling called celestial-rational consciousness or rational spirituality.

The link between animal consciousness and rational spirituality is the rational mind. This spiritual organic form characterizes humans and distinguishes them from animals. Animals have a natural mind similar to our natural mind, but only in its lower portions. The upper portion of the human natural mind is far more evolved than the highest portion of the minds of animals. This upper portion of the human natural mind possesses an internal structure that is not formed from the natural world but from the spiritual world. It is called the natural-spiritual mind. We thus have access to two orders of information, one natural, the other spiritual. It is our dual mind that allows this dual access.

Access to spiritual information is only possible by knowing and understanding Divine revelations. Divine revelations are given in Sacred Scripture by means of the mind of individuals who have been prepared by God to fulfill this role. These Divine revelations cannot be understood by means of thinking and feeling at the natural level below the rational. By acknowledging and comprehending these Divine revelations we are elevated in consciousness from the natural level to the spiritual level. We begin with natural-rational thinking and feeling, then we rise to spiritual-rational thinking and feeling when we take in the Divine Truth into our understanding. The Divine Truth in our understanding is what elevates our consciousness to the enlightened level. We then become aware of two synchronous orders of reality, natural and spiritual. Natural-rational thinking reflects the information from our physical senses. This order of reality denies the existence of something that is not physical. Therefore when it hears rumors of the spiritual world, it denies it, or else, reinterprets it in natural terms. On the other hand, spiritual-rational thinking understands and perceives the spiritual within the natural.

Rational spirituality is a biological developmental process of closer access to God. Studying it allows us to elevate our consciousness all the way to the top of the human mind called “heaven.” This book provides information and explanations on how we can avoid the bottom of our mind, called “hell,” and rise to heaven. All the information and its explanations, are obtained from the Writings of Swedenborg (approximately 30 volumes).

0.3a Diagram of the Mind

This is a basic anatomical chart of the human mind. You can see that it has three discrete levels – natural, rational, spiritual. Looking at the bottom half, you can see from the arrows that information from the natural world is captured by the sensory organs of the physical body and transmitted by corresponding effects to the natural mind. The natural mind has three sub-levels, to be shown later – corporeal, sensuous, and rational. The sensuous information is transmitted upward to the rational mind, or more accurately, the rational mind perceives the activity in the sensuous mind and creates an abstract representation of it called natural-rational correspondences.

Looking at the upper half of the chart, you can see that information from the spiritual world is captured by the spirit-body, located in the spiritual world. The spirit-body houses the mind. Information entering the spiritual mind is called celestial-rational correspondences and spiritual-rational correspondences. These are ways of thinking about Divine Truth. Note that the rational mind is pivotal and plays an intermediary role. It receives information from both the natural world in the form of natural-rational correspondences, and it receives information from the spiritual world in the form of spiritual-rational correspondences. Our enlightenment occurs when these three types of rational correspondences operate synchronously or simultaneously in our mind. This involves the celestial-rational correspondences to resonate with the spiritual- rational correspondences and the natural- rational correspondences all at once.

The Threefold Word is the source of natural-rational, spiritual-rational, and celestial-rational correspondences.

Without knowing and comprehending this fundamental duality between the natural and the spiritual-celestial, one cannot elevate one’s consciousness beyond the natural-rational level of atheistic science (monism or physicalism). One’s level of understanding, of thinking, and of feeling, remain at the natural level. One is incapable of comprehending the reality of the spiritual world, hence the reality of human beings. Despite this inability, God intervenes in the minds of every individual and implants rational ideas that the individual believes is form self. This illusion is necessary to maintain the motivation for learning and survival while we are still in animal consciousness. It also insures that society can survive, for it would not, if it were left to the human natural mind to run it.

0.3b Three Steps in Rational Spirituality

The unconscious tutelage by the Divine, just discussed, ceases or changes in operation in the afterlife, which starts immediately after the physical body becomes a corpse. We begin our life in the spiritual world with a spirit-body, the same we had all along “within” the physical body, which now drops off, leaving the immortal spirit-body intact and free to live its new life in the spiritual world. This new life is of two separate forms, heavenly and hellish. It is necessary therefore to raise our consciousness above the natural level so that we may be prepared to live a heavenly life to eternity. If we do not, our thinking and feeling remains at the natural level of operation. Upon awakening in the other life we will find that we are incapable of living a heavenly existence. Instead, we sink into the hells of our mind from which few are willing to return, where we lose any good and truth we once may have had, and begin an endless progression of evil and falsity, insanity and unimaginable misery. The stakes are therefore could not be higher – eternal heavenly happiness and wisdom vs. eternal hellish misery and insanity. Only if we rise above the natural level of thinking and feeling can our consciousness comprehend the stark reality of heaven and hell, as it has been revealed by God.

While the outside portion of the rational mind is natural, the inside of it is spiritual. This is the form and function of the human organic mind. It is created with an outside rational portion that gets its information from the physical world. Within this natural-rational mind there is formed a spiritual-rational mind that gets its information from the spiritual world through Divine revelations. In other words, we are created and born into a dual existence, natural and spiritual. This dual existence must be based in organic forms and structures, or else it would be nothing. The organ of the natural mind and the organ of the spiritual mind are both constructed physiologically out of spiritual substances from the spiritual Sun, just like the organs of the physical body are constructed physiologically out of physical substances from the natural sun. When we comprehend this dual reality and assimilate it into our normal thinking, we enjoy a new consciousness of reality that may be called rational spirituality.

We can better control our individual spiritual development by knowing how rational spirituality has developed in the history of Western civilizations since individual biography recapitulates racial evolution. The Old Testament civilizations have elevated human consciousness above the animal level by assimilating the Divine spiritual message given through Moses into their everyday thinking and feeling. The natural-rational mind is a discrete level above the natural-animal mind because of the abstract idea of God which can be formed only by means of rational thinking. Animals cannot have the idea of God since their cognitive abilities are restricted to the physical order of the natural world. God is not part of this physical order. God is absent from the physical detection systems that have been created for the animal mind. It is not possible to discover God’s presence physically or by concepts based on physical order. Such concepts are called “materialistic” and “monist” because they cannot incorporate the fundamental duality. God is an idea that originates from the spiritual world, hence any human mind that assimilates this idea into every day reality, is raised to a higher consciousness of reality, a higher understanding, a higher operational level of thinking and feeling. Spiritual-rational thoughts from revelation and spiritual-rational loves from influx, constitute the content of operation of spiritual rationality.

These spiritual-rational loves from influx enter the mind of every human being but they cannot survive in the mind without spiritual-rational truths from revelations. First we must acquire spiritual-rational truths from revelations, then we can retain spiritual-rational loves from influx. In this way we become angelic beings.

Following the civilizations of the Moses revelations came the Christian civilizations of the New Testament revelations. These elevated human consciousness to a new level of thinking and feeling. The Moses revelations were cast in a local, sectarian frame that was hostile to strangers. The New Testament revelations were cast in a universal, personalized frame that was inclusive of the entire human race. The intellectual justification of the New Testament in the form of Pauline doctrine, dissolved the earlier sectarian forms of spirituality, beginning a new life of universality and Divine personalism. God is not only Divine but Human. It is impossible to have a relationship of love with an infinite Divine force. Divine love is essentially Human, as revealed and demonstrated in the Incarnation. A giant leap forward in understanding reality takes place when the infinite God is conceptualized as a Divine Human Person. This new idea of God cannot be formed in the natural-rational mind, but only in the spiritual mind within it. The spiritual mind is an organic form that responds to spiritual ideas from the spiritual world. By assimilating this new spiritual idea of God into our everyday thinking and feeling, we begin a new order of life immersed in rational spirituality.

But there is one more step to ascend. The intellectual justification that Paul forged out of the New Testament revelations, were contaminated with ideas from lower civilizations. Similarly, when individuals enter this phase of their spiritual development, their consciousness will remain somewhat general rather than particular, and may thus retain elements that are not genuine, leading to false ideas, even heresies that become a stumbling block to further spiritual development. Our understanding of reality takes its final step of escalation when we particularize the Divine Human Person by knowing how and where He operates in our mind.

This ultimate level of spiritual rationality has been provided for by means of new scientific revelations given through the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), a renowned and respected scientist in Sweden. The Divine Human Person wants a reciprocal relationship with each individual in order to become a conscious co-participant in our thinking and feeling. In order to achieve this possibility, God had make new scientific revelations never before given. These new revelations are given in the form of True Science. This makes sense since materialistic science is the ultimate achievement of the natural-rational mind. With the beginning of the modern mind in the 17^th and 18^th century, the rational understanding of civilization rose to its most abstract level so that it became capable of incorporating the new scientific revelations of God’s immediate involvement and co-participation in our thinking and willing.

Christian spirituality has undergone three phases of evolution – spiritual-natural, spiritual-rational, and celestial-rational. These three phases of spiritual rationality are embedded in the Christian view of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Third Testament (or Writings of Swedenborg). The revelations of the Writings thus complete the creation of the human race. Now God has at last revealed all the details of His Rational Mind by which He creates and manages every detail of the universe. All the mysteries of Christian spirituality that have been invented by the human intellect can now be enlightened by the objective and clear facts of theistic science. Mysticism and spirituality have been connected in the earlier phases of the race’s spiritual development. Attempts have been made to connect materialistic science and mystical religion. This attempt was unable to elevate consciousness into its next higher level. Other attempts involve connecting Eastern philosophies with Christian mysticism. This too yields no elevation. What is fully effective however, is connecting science with scientific revelations. This transforms atheistic science into True Science, theistic science, the science of God.

The mind is elevated in consciousness by means of Divine revelations. The human mind is created to operate in this way. These genuine spiritual ideas can be understood rationally because all spiritual ideas are from God’s Rational Mind. Christianity has received the scientific truth that God created the universe by means of Truth. Those outside of the Christian faith, like Gandhi of India, have also received this new scientific perspective and have incorporated it into their own religion and culture, as demonstrated by the life of Mahatma Gandhi who identified God with Truth. Since the universe is created out of Divine Truth in its infinite variety, it is clear that only a rational spirituality, that is, theistic science, can be the vehicle for forging our individual spiritual development. The level of our thinking and feeling can be raised to the celestial level by means of rational spirituality.

This book presents the three phases of rational spirituality that every individual needs to understand in order to elevate the consciousness to the angelic level. This is the true human level of thinking and feeling. People of all religions and philosophies can use this understanding to advance themselves in their consciousness within their culture and lifestyle. Religious traditions and practices are no barrier to consciousness raising by means of True Science. The Writings of Swedenborg appear sectarian when viewed from the surface since all Divine revelations reflect the culture and era of the revelator. But neither Jews nor Christians have an automatic entry pass to heavenly life and consciousness just because they acknowledge the Word of God as a Divine revelation. They must extract from it principles and doctrines for life and they must overcome the enormous resistance all people experience to the growth of spiritual rationality in their mind.

To the extent that these doctrines are applied to our daily thinking and feeling, they become systematic and effective techniques of self-change. God regenerates every individual through daily efforts of cooperation with Him. He provides us with specific experiences and challenges every day that are tailored to every unique individual in the form of temptations of conscience. God provides us with a conscience and doctrines of revelation, God provides the daily temptations, God provides the power for overcoming them, but we must provide the free choices by which we deny ourselves to love evil and its falsities, and compel ourselves to love good and its truths. The power is God’s but the choice is ours. He participates in setting up that choice in our mind and through the events in our environment. He gives us the power to think truth and choose good moment by moment, day by day.

This intimate and close cooperation and co-acting between God and every unique human being, has been fully revealed by God through the Writings of Swedenborg. This is the dawning of the age of True Science when all mystery is banished and rational spirituality furnishes humankind with rational loves and rational truths.

I am educated with a Ph.D. (which I obtained in 1962) and am experienced in the behavioral sciences. I am a successful, practicing, academic scientist, and you can see my list of publications (www.theisticpsychology.org/blank/leonpublish.html) and some of my current activities in the public eye as a noted expert on aggressive driving issues--see a list of my media interviews during the past few years (www.DrDriving.org/about ). I am well trained to make a scientific and professional presentation on many subjects--see a list of articles and book chapters you can read online (www.theisticpsychology.org/leonarticles.html ). My purpose in the present article is to connect with your mind long enough to describe a satisfying rational answer to the all important questions of “Where am I going?” The answer is rational, scientific, practical, useful, satisfying, pan-human, non-sectarian, good, wise, loving, and perfect in all ways. This answer is not from me, which is why I can use these superlative terms to describe it. It is the answer God gives in a new Divine scientific revelation that has been made available to the human race through the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1771).

Access to all the books of the Writings and collateral works is available on the Web:

www.theisticpsychology.org/writings.html

0.3c In a Nutshell

In summary, my presentation tries to establish the following six points--see how many of them you're interested in:

(1) The mind and the spiritual world (afterlife, heaven, hell) are one and the same, yet with a difference. They both have the same overlapping three-layered levels of structure – natural, spiritual, and celestial. These are in discrete degrees and relate to each other by the pre-established Divine Laws of Correspondences revealed in the Writings.

(2) Our thoughts and feelings are spiritual substances in action within spiritual organs called the understanding and the will. They are not "emergent" phenomena or non-entities in so called “pure” consciousness. These substances stream out of the spiritual Sun, in the midst of which the Lord can be seen by the inhabitants of the heavens. This infinite Divine influx enters every created thing and forms its inmost framework.

(3) The inner character we build up by the way we live is actually the spiritual body in which we live forever in the afterlife. This spirit-body is not material and temporary, but substantive and eternal. It is the body people have in heaven or in hell.

(4) Our condition or fate in the afterlife is completely determined by the inner character we bring with us, which thus completely determines the level or quality of our life in eternity (from varieties of the heavenly to varieties of the hellish).

(5) If we take conscious, voluntary, and dedicated daily charge of our character reformation, to make it grow good and right, it is guaranteed to grow into a well formed and healthy character, that is, a well formed and healthy spirit-body, which then lives in a blessed and productive state of life forever called "heaven." Character reformation is by means of victories in temptations.

(6) If we don't take conscious, voluntary, and dedicated charge of our character, to make it grow good and right, it inevitably grows into a deformed and sick character, that is, deformed spirit-body, which then lives in a miserable state of life forever called "hell."

(7) Character reformation, called “regeneration,” is a lifelong struggle in preparation for heavenly life. It is the only condition we must meet in order to enter heaven to eternity. Regeneration requires (a) rational consciousness or understanding of the scientific revelations in the Threefold Word; and (b) rearranging our thinking and willing in accordance with this new understanding.

(8) Our progression in regeneration goes through three levels of thinking and willing – ritual, faith, and True Science. In the ritual phase, our consciousness of God is natural, our salvation is sectarian, and our view of the world is materialistic. In the faith phase, our consciousness of God becomes personal and universalist, and our view of the world is dualist. In the True Science phase, our consciousness of God takes a final step and becomes particularistic and scientific.

(9) Each of these three phases has three successive states, yielding nine zones of rational spirituality, as represented in the “ennead matrix.”

The words that are underlined in these nine items refer to concepts that are repeatedly discussed in this book. Look our for them. They constitute the semantic skeleton you’ll need to build up in your mind to become spiritually enlightened. Here they are again:

(1) mind and the spiritual world; discrete degrees; Laws of Correspondences

(2) substances in action within spiritual organs; spiritual Sun

(3) inner character; spiritual body; heaven; hell

(4) our fate in the afterlife

(5) character reformation; healthy spirit-body; temptations

(6) deformed spirit-body

(7) regeneration; rational consciousness; Threefold Word

(8) ritual, faith, True Science

(9) nine zones of rational spirituality; ennead matrix

If you're interested in one of these, you will be interested in all nine because they form a logical set. You can also see why I said that the subject of this book is important and vital, don't you agree? What can be more vital? You'll find my e-mail address at the beginning and end of the text. But before you write me, I ask that you read on some more, so you can react to what I say in a deeper sense than your immediate reaction to the introductory remarks. Thanks.

1. The Dawning Age of True Science

1.1 Quo Vadis?

This surpasses all the revelations that have hitherto been made from the creation of the world. (Swedenborg, INV 44)

This book is about the most important and vital question every one needs to answer in a rational way. It's the question of “Where am I going?” -- in the sense of my life, my future, my death, my afterlife, my immortality, my heaven or hell, my God. These are endless versions of saying simply: “Where am I going?” Why is this question so important and vital to you, to me, to every human being? After all, this is some philosophical stuff, isn't? Actually, this subject matter is not philosophical, not evangelical, not spiritistic, or cultist. Neither is it entertainment, fiction, poetry, or fantasy. This subject is about what is reality, or what is “my” actuality. So it is practical and scientific. People acquire the biased thinking that science is not about God, heaven and hell, and other supernatural things. This bias belongs to materialist science which denies that the study of the natural world has anything to do with God or supernatural things. But this is obviously a mistaken view if God intervenes in natural phenomena, and if our mind is immortal so that heaven and hell are a continuation of our temporary life of experience and physical phenomena on earth. The natural and the spiritual are part of one reality or one dual universe, and to deny this is irrational and harmful to our discovery and understanding of reality. Hence also our ability to cope and live effective lives.

I'm going to provide you with a presentation that contains a rational description of an unbiased science that is capable of investigating and understanding the cause-effect relation that exists between natural phenomena and spiritual phenomena. These two are interrelated like cause and effect. Of course, to be acceptable in a rational way, the presentation cannot rely on persuasiveness or dogmatism, or technicalism, these being barriers to the immediate apprehension of truth. My presentation will stick to the rational and empirical, so that the only requirement you have as a reader is to keep going until the end. At that point, expect to have become an enlightened human being -- to some degree. At least in vision or understanding. To actually become the truth that we understand, it is necessary that we live accordingly. The moment we start living according to the truth, as we understand it, we become spiritually enlightened. This is because the inner light of understanding that we call spiritual enlightenment, flows in from within into our spiritual mind at the very instant we execute an act in accordance with and for the sake of the truth that we know. This decision or act according to truth as rationally understood, is called “doing good works.” Heavenly good flows into every good work and gives spiritual enlightenment. And along with spiritual enlightenment comes wisdom, love, celestial bliss, full confidence, and the power and might of angels.

Our modernistic society and permissive social life provide a laissez faire agnosticism and a relativistic moral norm for every individual to endorse and internalize. We are content to remain in a lukewarm attitude towards heaven and hell. A common point of view is to say: “Well, maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t. Why do I have to worry about the afterlife now -- whether there is one or there isn’t one. When I die, I get to find out anyway. If there is nothing, that’s it, there is nothing. If there is something, a heaven or a hell or whatever, I’ll see it. That’s all there is to it. Who is there who has ever come back to tell us? Let’s just see. For now, we have all of this. Let’s enjoy it. It won’t last forever.”

What is this attitude but pure foolishness and reckless self-destructiveness? Here is why.

The only reason such a non-argument is kept in the mind is that internally, in one’s private cognitive chamber, one believes nothing about the supernatural and one is ignorant of everything spiritual. Just consider what we would do if we were given notice that we must vacate our home, our city, and be taken to a distant island where we will have to survive on our own. What would we do in the few days we are given as warning? We would prepare for our impending departure. We would try to find out information about the destination and bring with us whatever we might need to survive—clothes, money, utensils, a gun, rope, a fishing rod and tackle, a dictionary of the language used on that island, a map, etc. Do you see what I’m trying to point out? The only people who would not do preparations are the people who do not believe that they will be transported to that island in a few days. Similarly with the afterlife and its condition of life called heaven or hell to eternity. You can be lukewarm about it if you do not actually believe that you are being taken there in just a few years, or unpredictably sooner.

Such disbelief is the most costly mistake one can ever make. For if you are wrong and there is a heaven and a hell, and you arrive in the afterlife unprepared for heaven, your lot will be far more miserable than you can imagine now in your worst fears, and this state of misery is to last with you forever! Is it possible to make a more costly or injurious mistake?

What then is the rational response to the idea that there is a heaven and a hell? What would a scientist or engineer do? What would a wise person do? An intelligent and adaptive response to the question “Where am I going?” is to investigate and become informed.

We obtain information about the supernatural from religion, theology, philosophy, and popular writing and culture -- all offer information and opinion on this vital subject. There is a convergence of thinking that people who are good, end up in heaven, but people who are evil end up in hell. There is also general agreement as to what is good vs. evil. For instance, a good person is engaged in some useful work or activity, can be counted on to be loyal to duties and obligations, normally obeys laws and social norms, respects others, owns up to responsibility, is a decent person, and refrains from hurting others or damaging their property. But an evil person is selfish, takes advantage of others, doesn’t mind hurting them for gain and convenience, misleads and abuses people, loves to corrupt innocence, ignores the laws when inconvenient for self, doesn’t respect social norms, deceives and plots against others for personal gain, and cannot be counted on to be loyal or honest. When the physical body dies, people awaken in a spiritual body and continue life in either heaven or hell, depending on what their mind or character is like. Those who have a good character are capable of living in heaven and those who have an evil character are only capable of living in hell. Heaven and hell merely reflect the two sides of the immortal human character.

Sometimes we like to argue that good and evil is in everyone and people are generally mixed, possessing good traits and motives, and evil traits and motives. People sometimes like to quote the New Testament story where the “teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. And instead of punishing the woman, He said to them: "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." (John 8:7). This passage is sometimes used to justify the idea that in the eyes of God everyone is guilty of sin, and that we ought to forgive sins instead of holding against anyone. This interpretations and justification is not in the original passage. What is the Lord teaching us through that passage in the New Testament Word? The Lord has revealed it in His Second Coming in the Writings. And it is this. Heaven and hell are within the human mind but separated, just like heaven and hell are in the spiritual world, but separated by the world of spirits. No one can migrate from heaven to hell or from hell to heaven. Once a person enters either heaven or hell, it is permanent, forever, to eternity. This vastly important scientific fact has been revealed.

We therefore have a choice whether we are going to love the hell in us or the heaven in us. Everybody is mixed in the sense that we have loves that are from our heaven and we have loves that are from hell, the two types of loves never mixing in our mind, kept separate by the Lord. In other words, while we desire to love something from hell, we must descend to our hell by lowering our consciousness, lowering our level of operation in thinking and feeling. But when we desire to love something from our heaven, we must elevate our consciousness to heaven, and this can be done through the Threefold Word or from its influence in our socialization environment. All societies encourage a life of virtue and health, sometimes hypocritically, but always officially and idealistically. There are no societies that advocate vice and ill health, again often hypocritically, by condoning and practicing social evils.

Entry into heaven is not something we do externally, by credentials and achievements. It is not an external reward for certain deeds. Heaven is your own mind, the top of it, where your consciousness operates with celestial-spiritual correspondences of God, that is, of Divine Good and Truth. We acquire this operational capability by rational spirituality, which is the ordering of one’s thinking and willing according to the Doctrine of Life that we extract from the Threefold Word by understanding it rationally and scientifically. Entry into heaven is a medical decision: Is your mind prepared to handle the environment of heaven? Can you survive when you’re cut off completely from any evil love? All the people in hell, which is a very large number, are incapable of feeling alive if you surgically remove the evil loves in their consciousness. Hell is a sort of spiritual insane asylum for people who are unwilling to live in heaven by giving up their evil loves.

When I first reflected on this idea from the Writings, I felt relieved – O, good. If I end up in hell I can always give up my evils for the sake of living in heaven. This was a dangerous thought for it has the potential to lull me into thinking that I do not need to struggle desperately to get rid of all my evils, and that it’s enough if I get rid of most of them, or some of them that are really bad, etc. This kind of merit economy is deadly, that is, leading to hell forever. Later I read in the Writings that all those who end up in hell are given the opportunity to visit heaven, and some do. When they are elevated into the heaven in their mind, they respond by swooning and feeling agony and life leaving them, and they instantly cast themselves back into their abode in hell where they are revived by the evil loves they can enjoy there as their very life.

In many circles today, both outside and inside the various religious and Church organizations, it is not fashionable to talk about hell, and even less so, about hell forever. The idea goes against the grain of liberalism, universalism, permissiveness, tolerance, ecumenism. But I will show that this is a mistaken orientation and ignores what has been revealed in Sacred Scripture. For instance, the Bible explicitly teaches about hell and it makes no sense to doubt the existence of hell just because it is politically incorrect to think that many people, maybe the majority of people, are in hell rather than in heaven. It may not be politically correct or philosophically convenient to keep the idea of hell around, but the consequence of ignoring the revelations of God is to cut oneself off from the knowledge of truth and consequently, the power to be regenerated in preparation for heaven. Regeneration is the lifelong progressive process of character reformation, from evil to good, and involves our daily effort to fight our evils by means of the Divine Truth from revelation. The scientific rationale of this position is given in this book. I agree that one can have a knee-jerk reaction to the distasteful notion of hell, and especially, a hell that is forever. But the distaste comes from not knowing what it really means scientifically to say that there is a hell, and how the system works so that some people end up in heaven while others in hell. When we are told by a priest, minister, teacher, or parent “Stop doing that or you’ll go to hell,” we learn to ignore this and later, we evolve the notion that there is no hell.

But I will show that there is a hell, and also, what you need to do to get there – not much, for we are born with all sorts of tendencies and preferences that take us to hell unless we reform our character. So this is the purpose of this presentation and why it is worthwhile for me to write this, and for you to figure it out: We are on our way to hell, each one of us, from birth, and therefore we need to change something to avoid that place, so that we can end up in heaven instead. “A firebrand snatched form the fire.” That’s what this brief life on earth is for, namely, to give God the opportunity to snatch each one of us from this easy downward slide to hell forever. Why the situation is like this, and why God let it go this far, and many other puzzles, will be explained rationally in what follows. Read on.

Every person has a conscience and will power to refrain from doing evil, and thereafter, to learn to do good. This is called regeneration or character reformation. That’s all that is required for preparation for the life of heaven. Those who have reformed their character then start an eternity of happiness as angel couples in heaven, blissfully in love and growing in higher knowledge daily to eternity. Those who have not reformed their character then start an eternity of misery as devils, satans, genii, and sirens in the many hells provided for the endless exploration of the fantasies and insanities of the deformed human mind. This is then the clear choice. Nothing could be more clear. And yet, complications have arisen, false beliefs that oppose the simple truth of salvation and immortality.

1.2 Salvation by Faith Alone vs. Good Works

For centuries now, in the Western mind and consciousness, there has been a religious suspicion cast upon “doing good works.” Generation after generation learns the idea that religious life consists of “faith alone” and that our salvation has been “bought” by the sacrificial death of the Son of God on the cross. By this act of redemption we have been reconciled to God the Father in whose eyes we are clean once more, despite our evil character and evil loves. All that needs to be done, according to this view, is to believe that Christ died for you on the cross. This doctrine becomes ingrained in the mind while we are still children and unable to judge rationally whether such an idea makes sense. Those who question the rationality of such an idea are thrown back on another idea, namely that “faith is blind” and that we shall not fully understand the mystery of redemption until we live with the Lord in heaven. Afterwards, as we become young adults, we begin to wonder at this doctrine of sacrifice and salvation by the blood of Christ.

It appears to the developing rational mind that God would not have the same sentiments and attitudes as a feudal lord, angry at his citizens, depriving them of life’s necessities and comforts, having no pity or compassion for them, keeping them away from himself, his face turned away, removing his spiritual heat, his love, his truth from us, keeping us in the pit of darkness and need. Then, all of a sudden, He can turn His face to us again, He can see us in pristine innocence, ignoring our love of evil and our arrogance and cruelty to one another, reconciled to us once more, as before. And what causes this radical and sudden switch? The willingness of the Son of God to suffer the agony of death by torture, to spill His innocent blood like a sacrificial lamb, for no other reason than His passionate desire to save us, to have us be reconciled to His Father, as before.

This rational reaction against the mystery of the doctrine of sacrifice, is described in the Writings of Swedenborg from both sides of the great spiritual divide. Swedenborg was well versed with Christian Reformed Theology, being the son of a Lutheran Bishop and receiving a classic education. At age 57, at the height of his brilliant scientific career, he was granted dual consciousness, as will be explained below, so that he became able to speak with the departed spirits living in the spiritual world. He discovered that every individual is resuscitated a few hours after the physical body is dead. One awakens in the spiritual world in a spirit-body with the same feeling of “me” that one knew in the physical body—all the memories and all the affections and loves are intact. One then continues life to eternity. With his dual consciousness, which lasted for 27 years until his passing on at age 84, Swedenborg had the opportunity to observe and talk to thousands of people in the spiritual world who were being resuscitated, and many others who had been in the spiritual world for thousands of years and could still remember and discuss their life on earth. Swedenborg was particularly interested in talking to Christians about their faith, and their belief in “faith alone without good works.” He studied their reasoning process as to how they justified the idea that good works are not counted for one’s salvation, but blind faith in the doctrine of salvation by sacrifice.

Following the initial phase of life in the world of spirits, which may last up to a few months, one grows more and more inward. Our consciousness and understanding is now determined not by what we had in our external personality, but what we had in our interior mind or character. Our interior motives or loves govern our life but we learn to hide them when we discover ourselves to be selfish, evil, and inclined to irrational judgments and savage actions. We therefore put on a surface personality that acts as our agent in the outside world. Our interior self that pulls all the strings and supplies all the motives, stays hidden, feeling free to be arrogant, contemptuous, self-righteous, cruel, and stupid. This interior self is the real self, and not the external personality we put on for show and is just an agent that will eventually be silenced and laid aside in the world of spirits. Now our real self emerges to the surface. The external appearance of our spirit-body reflects this new interior self now come to the fore. Swedenborg observed two types of loves in these interior places of the mind—heavenly and hellish. In the spiritual world this becomes easily visible since the outside is forced to reflect the inside and can no longer be hidden.

1.2.a Diagrams of the Human Mind and Divine Influx

The diagram below depicts the relation between God as the Divine Human Person, and human consciousness.

sun.jpg (30759 bytes)

As depicted in the diagram above, human consciousness has its origin in what proceeds from God as the Divine Human Person. Every individual human being is human (rather than animal or plant) solely from this cause, namely, the influx of humanness into every individual’s mind. This influx of humanness is by means of substances streaming forth from the spiritual Sun and into individual minds. This spiritual influx of living Divine substances is received by organs created for their reception. These organs of reception for Divine influx holed together into a whole which we call the mind of the person, and also, the spirit of the person. The spirit-body is the essential human anatomy and physiology and contains the mind and its organs. The physical body with its brain is an exact replica of the spirit-body and its mind or spirit. The shape and physiology of the physical body is determined by the shape and physiology of the spirit-body, and the two are connected by the synchronous action of correspondences.

The mind is built into three layers or levels of operation. Each layer or level has an organ called the will, on the interior, and another organ around it on the exterior, called the understanding. These two organs operate together by synchronous correspondences. The operation of the understanding organ is by means of the influx of Divine Truth, which is an infinite spiritual substance streaming forth endlessly from the spiritual Sun and proceeding into the created universe, including the minds of human beings. The reception of this spiritual substance called Divine Truth is in the understanding of human minds, but not so for animals, plants, and physical objects or energies. In human minds the reception of truth is called “mediate influx” and results in human consciousness. But there is no mediate influx of truth into other created things, but only immediate influx, and this influx does not result in the phenomenon of consciousness.

Consider the following chart that describes the course of influx from God.

Divine Human Person
↓
Spiritual Sun Good and Truth
IMMEDIATE INFLUX OF GOOD (unconscious)			MEDIATE INFLUX OF TRUTH (conscious)
↓			↓
celestial will	(3) ↔		celestial understanding
↓			↓
spiritual will	(2) ↔		spiritual understanding
↓			↓
natural will	(1) ↔		natural understanding
↓		↓
========filtering mechanism========
infernal natural will	(-1) ↔		infernal natural understanding
↓			↓
infernal sensuous will	(-2) ↔		infernal sensuous understanding
↓			↓
infernal corporeal will	(-3) ↔		infernal corporeal understanding

Influx originates in the Divine Human Person who is in the midst of the spiritual Sun. The two infinite substances streaming out of the spiritual Sun are called good and truth. The heat of the stream is good, and the light of the stream is truth. These two infinite substances are one in God, but as they emerge from the spiritual Sun and enter the human sphere, they separate into the unconscious immediate influx of good and the conscious mediate influx of truth. The immediate influx of good is received unconsciously by the organ of the will in the mind, while the mediate influx of truth is received consciously by the organ of the understanding in the mind. Note that influx enters the highest portion of the mind called celestial, then descends into the next lower discrete portion called the spiritual mind, and then into the lowest portion called the natural mind. Prior to regeneration, we are conscious of only the natural mind, so that the mediate influx into the celestial and spiritual mind, is not yet conscious, but it has the potential of becoming conscious with advancing regeneration. The opening of the spiritual and celestial mind is by means of revelation which contains celestial truths, spiritual truths, and natural truths.

The activity of the celestial and spiritual mind becomes conscious in the natural mind by correspondences. To accomplish this, God creates an interior portion of the natural mind. This interior organ is spiritual so that it can reflect by correspondence the ongoing activity in the spiritual and celestial mind. When we pass into the afterlife, we gain full conscious awareness of the spiritual and celestial mind that had been gradually opened by means of regeneration.

Note also that the influx continues into the lowest portion of the natural mind but goes through a receptor filter that inverts the influx into its opposites – good into evil, and truth into falsity. The natural mind has its opposite in the infernal natural mind. The spiritual mind has its opposite in the infernal spiritual mind. The celestial mind has its opposite in the infernal celestial mind. This is because every heavenly good and truth is turned into its opposites, and since there are three discrete degrees of heaven there must be three discrete degrees of hell.

It is the spiritual organ of the understanding that gives us the power of experiencing living consciousness. What is consciousness? Few people even have an opinion, let alone any knowledge of what it is. I’ve been in the field of Psychology for 40 years and though there are books and articles on the subject of consciousness, there is no knowledge of it. People write about theories and speculative, imaginative, and abstract accounts of what consciousness might be. But now True Science gives us a full scientific revelation from God the Creator and Manager of every individual’s consciousness.

So we now know, as just explained, two fundamental things about consciousness. First, we know that it is a spiritual substance originating in the infinite spiritual Sun and streaming out into the created universe, both the spiritual world and the natural world, both into humans and into animals, plants, and physical objects and energies. Second, we also know that the quality of this Divine influx exists in two discretely different modalities, called mediate and immediate influx. Only the mediate influx creates the phenomenon of consciousness and it is operative only in a particular created organ of reception called the human understanding.

True Science gives us many more details of this fundamental process of creation and existence. Creation is out of the substance of consciousness streaming forth from the spiritual Sun as spiritual light or Divine Truth itself. Divine Truth is the substance that makes up the inner framework of every created object or quality. What a tremendous scientific revelation! It is scientific because it is about the mechanism by which physical objects are created. Every physical object or quality is brought into existence by a successive sequence of steps called its “successive order.” This causative chain of being remains in “simultaneous order.” If you take any object or quality and analyze its constituent structure of discrete degrees, you are identifying its simultaneous order. This simultaneous order is an exact replica of the object’s successive order. Hence we can say that all successive order in creation is replicated in all simultaneous order after creation. An analogy might be the rings we can notice on a slice of a tree trunk. Counting the rings gives an accurate estimate of the tree’s age. The tree’s successive order of growth produced each ring with advancing age, and this successive order is replicated in the slice of the trunk that shows us the rings.

This scientific revelation to the human race globally, will facilitate new theories in physics in which consciousness becomes the basis of all matter. True Science as we know it today from the Writings is much more advanced any current notions in physics which is still weighed down by materialistic compunctions. One can expect that the early proposals of this new paradigm in physics will not be dualist and will redefine consciousness in abstract natural terms, rather than spiritual, as in True Science, where it is recognized that the consciousness is not abstracted matter but concretized spirit. Consciousness is a substance which is far superior to matter in that matter is temporary while substance is permanent or eternal. Matter exists in finited space-time limits while substance exists in infinite and uncreate states. Substance is the underlying framework of matter. Every physical object, from sub-atomic particle-wave to galaxy, has an underlying substantive framework that gives it body. The outward object is natural while the inward substantive framework is spiritual. This dual character of all objects is a tremendously useful scientific revelation. Now we know that the source of all substances is the spiritual Sun.

Consider the fact that every tree, stone, water molecule, or protein cell is made of a piece of the sun. Earth is a piece of the sun and so everything on this earth must be a piece of the sun. You can say therefore that the sun is the underlying physical framework of every object on the planet. Now we can another step. Consider the fact that the natural sun also has to have an underlying framework. Logic tells us that the underlying framework can’t be the same as the thing itself, or else it is not an underlying framework. So if the sun is the underlying framework of every thing on the planet, what is the underlying framework of the sun? Fair question, but the answer is not known unless we turn to scientific revelations. True Science describes the spiritual Sun as the underlying framework of the natural sun. Skipping for now all the details, we can nevertheless rationally conclude that the spiritual Sun is therefore the underlying framework of every physical object on the planet.

And what is this underlying framework from the spiritual Sun? It consists of the spiritual light and spiritual heat that is carried inside the light. Spiritual light from the spiritual Sun streams out into creation and begins it as the first step in a successive order by which this spiritual substance proceeds from the spiritual Sun and creates by successive steps of layering itself with more and more limits, until it reaches an outer layer called natural limits. Every object of this outer natural layer will therefore contain, like the rings of a tree, a replica in simultaneous order of its steps of creation. Therefore the initiating substance from the spiritual Sun will be in the inmost or central ring of the object. And what is this inmost constitutive substance of every physical object or quality? It is spiritual light within which is spiritual heat. And spiritual light is called Divine Truth and spiritual heat is called Divine Love. This proves then that every thing in its inmost is Divine Truth and Love. And Divine Truth is nothing else then Consciousness Itself, the source of all human consciousness in the mind. We now have a scientific explanation of why it can be accurately said that this is fundamentally a Human Universe made of Truth and Love at its core.

The diagram and chart above depict some of these details. Note that the Divine Human Person, who can be seen by angels in the midst of the spiritual Sun, is the origin of influx. Whatever is streaming out of the spiritual Sun is the Divine Truth and the Divine Love of the Divine Human Person. This is because that’s what the Divine Human Person is in Constitution or Essence. In His essence or inmost being, He is infinite Divine Love, and in His outward existence, He is the infinite Divine Truth. These are the two substances -- celestial and spiritual -- streaming out of Him into the created universe. Love is a celestial substance while truth is a spiritual substance. Both come in infinite and inexhaustible varieties. These two infinite substances are uncreate and have the capability of transforming themselves into created things by a process of exteriorization, or self-limitation. The light of the stream of influx is nothing else than actual Divine Truth, and the heat within this light stream is nothing else than actual Divine Love.

Substance contrasts with matter. All things in the natural world are constructed out of material elements and compounds. But all things in the spiritual world are constructed out of the two substances, celestial (=love) and spiritual (=truth). Substances are not in time and space, while matter is. For example, a house in the natural world is constructed of materials like stone and wood, while a house in your dream is constructed out of substances (thoughts and images). Feelings and thoughts are constructed out of celestial and spiritual substances (love and truth) streaming into the mind. A house in heaven is constructed out of celestial and spiritual substances from the spiritual Sun. Clearly, the house in your dream is more like the house in your heaven than your house on earth. In the spiritual world a house is maintained in existence as long as your feelings and thoughts are conscious and connected to it. There is no time limit or spatial restrictions to your house in heaven, as there is to your house on earth. In the spiritual world, whatever thoughts and feelings you have exteriorize by correspondence to create the specific appearances of the sensory environment. On earth this is not so. Your house remains fixed as is, no matter what your thoughts and feelings are. Material houses are partially independent of your mind, but substantive houses are completely dependent on your mind. Those who are in hell have thoughts and feelings that exteriorize as dark caverns and huts rather than magnificent houses or palaces.

It takes a high level of abstraction to be able to comprehend the idea that truth and love are substances. The mental effort it takes to understand how truth and love can be substances, produces a more abstract and rational intelligence or wisdom. Our consciousness operates from influx at three discrete levels, and the resultant conscious awareness and perception is different at each level, so different, that a lower level can never comprehend a higher level no matter how much it improves at its own level. It is like a staircase having three steps separated from each other by several hundred feet. How are you going to get to the top? No matter how much you walk and shuffle at one step, you will never get to the next step. The only way is to find a way of being transported up by some entirely new method that is radically different from walking and shuffling. Similarly with consciousness, which is like walking and being transported.

The three discrete levels of the organic physiological mind are called natural or natural-rational (lowest), spiritual or spiritual-rational (intermediate), and celestial or celestial-rational (uppermost). Consequently we experience the phenomenon of consciousness at these three steps or discrete levels of operation. The thoughts and feelings we have when the natural consciousness alone is operative, are at the level of animals, though at a more advanced stage. In other words the physiology of the natural mind is more advanced with humans than it is with animals. This is the reason that humans use a natural language for communicating at a distance and for abstract thinking, while animals have only crude signaling systems in comparison. But in addition to having a more advanced natural mind, humans also have two additional organs of a higher construction which animals do not possess and can never possess from creation. These two higher organs are called the spiritual mind and the celestial mind.

The state of a person's mind in the natural world determines its state in the spiritual world. (Swedenborg, TCR 816)

When we are born, our physical body is born in the physical world and our spirit-body is born in the world of spirits. The two are connected by the laws of synchronous correspondences. When the physical body is disconnected by its death, the spirit-body continues its immortal life in heaven or hell. This spirit-body is what houses the natural mind, the spiritual mind, and the celestial mind. Therefore when we appear to ourselves to “awaken” in the world of spirits, our consciousness of self and our memories are all present because they were located all along in the natural mind, which was born in the spirit-body and remains there forever. The natural mind is formed by the information we obtain from sensory input through the physical body. The physical body and the natural world are therefore necessary to form the natural mind, but this formation is not in the physical world but in the world of spirits where the spirit-body is.

As the natural mind develops and grows, so does our natural consciousness. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us influx is reaching the natural mind by correspondence with the operations that go on in the spiritual and celestial mind. These operations of influx in our higher mind are unconscious. We become conscious of them only when they reach the natural mind. What reaches the natural mind is not the influx itself, which is spiritual, but the action of synchronous correspondence of the spiritual upon the natural. Our natural consciousness is therefore the result of the activity of the natural mind. This activity is nothing but a correspondential effect of the activity in the higher mind (spiritual and celestial). Of course the natural mind cannot see or be aware of the higher mind and when we read in scientific revelation of the existence of the higher mind, we do not comprehend it except in a natural way. Natural level consciousness consists of thoughts and feelings that reflect the order of the natural world. Everything in this order is different from the order of the spiritual world. The lower cannot comprehend the higher consciousness.

Clearly then, the natural mind is capable of replicating representatively and consciously, the activity of the spiritual mind, which is unconscious while we are earthlings. The natural mind has therefore the capacity to grow into more advanced phases that can represent the higher stages in a conscious mode. This is accomplished physiologically by the growth of a new organ in the interior of the natural mind. This new interior portion of the natural mind is called the interior-natural mind or the natural-spiritual mind. This interior-natural mind is a discrete degree within the natural mind proper, which is why it has the capacity to represent consciously the spiritual and celestial operations of the higher mind. The opening and growth of the interior-natural mind is effected by God in proportion to our willingness to be regenerated, that is, our willingness to undergo spiritual and celestial temptations.

The diagram above shows the proceeding of influx as it descends into human consciousness. Note the line of descent or exteriorization form the Divine. First reception is heaven. After going through the three discrete layers of heaven, in sequential order, the influx of Divine Truth has been changed by the minds of the people in the three heavens. By the time Divine influx has filtered through the lowest heaven, it is discretely different from what it was on its descent, because a lower heaven cannot recognize anything directly from an upper heaven, but only indirectly by means of correspondential reaction. Finally, when the mediate influx exits the lowest heaven, it enters the world of spirits. This is where are located the spirit-bodies of all the humanity alive on the many earths in the natural world. They are all on their way to eternal life in the same spiritual world. Now the course of mediate influx as it enters each sprit-body, replicates the course of influx across the heavens because the structure of the human mind is the same as the structure of the spiritual world, and in fact, overlaps with it completely since there is no extension or spatial location in the spiritual world.

The influx from the highest or celestial heaven enters the highest or celestial portion of the mind in the spirit-body. Of course we have no consciousness of this operation or action. Next, influx enters the middle heaven below (called the spiritual heaven) at the same time that it enters the mid-level mind called the spiritual mind. Next, mediate influx from the Divine enters the lowest heaven (called the natural heaven) at the same time that it enters into the lowest mind, called the natural mind. At this point the influx becomes conscious by means of the correspondences to it in our natural mind. These correspondences are the conscious thoughts and feelings in our natural mind.

Note from the diagram above that the beginnings of Divine mediate influx with humans are in the heavens, and this is called human higher consciousness. The content of this influx is truth and good, which are the substances of the spiritual Sun. These substances make up the stream of influx that is received by the organs of the mind. Influx therefore is a physiological process of the mental organs which are created as organs of reception for spiritual and celestial influx. The organ of the understanding receives the light of the stream, which is actually nothing else than Divine Truth, and the organ of the will receives the heat of the stream, which is actually nothing else than Divine Love. The reception of this stream creates the phenomenon of consciousness, or conscious experience, in every individual. The content of this consciousness is therefore fixed, embedded, and recorded by physiological synapses that are made of spiritual fibers in the spirit-body. Since spiritual fibers or substances are uncreate and immortal, the form and character of the mind is permanent and immortal, indestructible. Whatever we once felt or thought, remains part of us to eternity.

As portrayed in the diagram above, the good and truth substances stream into the world of spirits from the lowest heavens. From this the influx enters the lowest or natural mind. Since the Fall of the human race on this earth, the natural mind automatically filters the influx of good and truth and converts it into evil and falsity, as portrayed in the diagram above. The content of evils and falsities are opposite to the content of goods and truths, hence the consciousness of evils and falsities is called lower consciousness. The lowest form of consciousness is the content of thoughts and feelings in the corporeal mind when separated from all upper portions of the mind above it. That is called the hells.

You can see from these True Science revelations that spiritual development is no less physiological than physical development. Also, that consciousness raising is the process of receiving truths and loves from influx without distorting them or changing them into the opposites. By changing inflowing Divine truths and loves into their opposites, we keep our consciousness at the animal level, trapped in the natural mind of understanding and willing. When, at the death of the physical body, we make the consciousness transition into the spirit-body, our quality of experience and life is determined by how high our mind is operative. If we arrive with the celestial mind operative, we experience the life of eternal heaven, but if we arrive with only the natural mind operative, we experience the life of eternal hell. What determines how high our mind becomes operative, is the process of regeneration. This refers to the lifelong struggle to change our inherited character into a new one arranged in the order of heaven by means of revelations which we study, take to heart, and use to guide our daily thinking and willing.

1.2.b Regeneration -- Shunning Evils As Sins

In the spiritual world there is perfect correlation between beauty and wisdom, between good and truth. Those whose interior self is filled with good loves and true ideas appear beautiful as angels. But those whose interior self is filled with evil loves and false ideas appear ugly and monstrous as devils. Angels and devils cannot be together in the same sphere because the good and truth in the angels obliterates and destroys the evil and falsity in the devils. As a result, the spiritual world is divided into heaven and hell, where people have their permanent abode, and there is an impassable barrier between these two.

Swedenborg discovered that many who believed themselves to be devout believers with a strong faith, found themselves with an interior self that was the opposite of what they believed on the outside of their conscious awareness. They now laughed at their former faith and believed nothing. They saw their own evil loves, their own hatreds, their own arrogance, their own cruelty, their own hatred of monogamy and charity, their own disdain for the very idea of Lord and God—when they saw all this in themselves, they did not judge it and condemn it. Instead, they defended these things and they associated with others who were like minded, who loved gossip and slander, who were amused by the misfortune of others, who were openly envious, scortatory, adulterous, blasphemous. These things are the things they loved in their interior self.

The Writings are the revealed Divine Truth that the Lord has given humanity in His Second Coming. He wants to open the eyes of humanity, to raise our consciousness and loves to the heavenly state of bliss. He has provided this new revelation to open our eyes of understanding so that we are able to understand in a rational and scientific way, what it takes to get to heaven. Not the sacrifice of someone else, not even God, can change the interior self, and its loves and ideas. If God were to change our interior self without our awareness, what would happen? Our annihilation as human beings forever. This is too much of a fate to endure or to impose. Even life in hell is better than annihilation. If we are annihilated, we can no longer be human, but if we are devils, we still can become angels, the moment we want to. All it takes is the willingness to abandon evil loves and to acquire good loves. That’s all it takes to change a devil into an angel. It is not an act of God that can do this, for this would result in annihilation. Clearly then, we must change our character voluntarily here on earth, or else we cannot be saved for eternal happiness in heaven.

The Writings use the expression “doing good works” to refer to the work of uses in life. This means that we must live our life for the sake of others at least as much as for the sake of self. In other words, all the daily choices we make could be either for self or for others as well as for self. For example, we can let the television or music blare from our room, or we can think of the room mates and neighbors. We can drive dangerously and think of ourselves, or we can drive carefully and think of other drivers and pedestrians. We can let ourselves go and be overweight, or we can reign in the appetite and increase our physical workout. Etc. There is no mystery here, no great complication. Everyone can understand this. Everyone knows what is good or bad, decent or selfish, and we all have ideas about God from culture and education. God gives us all a conscience as well. You can see therefore that every human being, regardless of background, can work at becoming a good person according to the truth one possesses. That’s all it takes to develop an interior self that is filled with good loves and true ideas. And with these, we can enter heaven and grow in intelligence and love endlessly, in company with others, but especially with one’s soul mate or spouse.

Note this very important fact: only those people who tried to be good on account of God or the afterlife, had a good interior self, one that is capable of heavenly life. All those who tried to be good on account of some other reason, did not have a good interior self, but an evil one. What were these other reasons? Some put on a good personality for reputation and honor, others for gain or influence. Others did it out of fear or shyness. But with these motives only the external behavior and personality are good, that is, appear to be good, but the interior self is not changed. It is filled with contempt for others and religion. The interior self can be totally insane spiritually, but show none of this externally, while maintaining an appearance of sanity and normalcy. External motives cannot change interior loves and ideas, but interior loves can change external ones. The motive to be good on account of God, the afterlife, heaven and hell, is an interior motive, and in fact, it is the highest motive in the human mind, as explained in the Writings. This motive has the power to change the interior self, to transform it from loves that concern only the self, with which we are born, for loves that concern others, thus mutual love for the sake of unity with God.

The idea that we are saved by faith alone rather than by character change for the sake of faith, has therefore become a major stumbling block in the mind that opposes the new truths revealed by the Lord in His Second Coming. Nevertheless, every individual can see from reason that blind faith without character change is not a realistic or true idea of religion, but a distortion and misunderstanding of Scripture. And every individual has a reason by which to be able to inspect these new truths that the Lord has now revealed through the Writings of Swedenborg. Since they are completely rational revelations, everyone can judge for themselves. There is no persuasion involved. No mystery. No data that we do not have access to ourselves.

1.3 Truth Is the Appearance of Love

The truth I discuss is not my truth but God's truth. God's truth is beamed into every mind from within, yet few can see it or understand it. This is because few listen to it and value it. The only truth there is, is God's truth. No truth exists that is not God's truth, which is the truth given to us by God. When you begin to see God's truth, or simply, truth, you will experience an extraordinary desire, even compulsion, to tell others of this truth. This compelling feeling of sharing truth is built into the truth we receive. The reason is that genuine truth can only be received within good. In other words, when we strive to be good by doing the right thing, truth is implanted by God in this striving to be good. The effort we exert is called a motive, purpose, love, or affection. When we act right from the desire to be good, God then strengthens and extends this desire for good within our character. The desire to be good has tremendous power in it. And one of its powers is to receive truth from God as the earth receives a gestating seed. There is no other way of receiving spiritual truth from God but in the effort of being good or acting right.

Good and truth do not exist separately but act only in unison, just like the lungs and the heart act together for the body’s survival and well being. When we discuss truth, we do not yet possess actual truth. The truth is then only in our memory, which is external to our actual self of feeling and existing. The actual self is our life of love and feeling, while thinking and knowing truth is merely a reflection of our love and feeling. But acting or behaving according to the truth in our understanding, is our life, for it is love that acts by means of truth. Truth therefore is not within us until it is in our will to act right. Once truth is implanted by God as a seed in our understanding, it begins to multiply astronomically as we continue to strive to be good and to act according to the truth we understand. Good is the origin of all love, and truth is the origin for all wisdom. Love and wisdom are inseparable since good and truth are inseparable. Truth is the outside form of love. Love appears in the world by means of truth. Love does not act by itself but my means of truth. Truth does not act from itself but from love. Love is the Divine Essence and truth is the Divine Existere. In the Divine Human Person, love and truth are united as one. Love is His Divine Essence while truth is His Human Essence. These verities sound abstract before we fully comprehend them. The better we comprehend them, the higher our consciousness is elevated. When we operate from a higher consciousness of truth, our thinking and feeling about everything is raised to a new operational level.

God also gives us the power to transform or distort good into evil, and at the same time, to change truth into falsity. Similarly, we can transform love into hatred and other infernal lusts, and at the same time, we can distort wisdom and intelligence into insanity and foolishness. The same good and truth, or love and wisdom, flows in from God into every person, and it is the individual who then has the spiritual freedom to filter and transform them into either something that is compatible with love and wisdom, or into something that is contrary to them. If we change truth to its opposite we become spiritually insane and forfeit the capability of heavenly life.

The desire to share the truth is not present when we seek truth as part of our strategy to get ahead of others or to compete with them. Spiritual truth can be seen only by those who desire to see it for the purpose of becoming a better person, because as we improve our character we grow closer to God from whom we can then receive love and wisdom, or what is the same, genuine good and genuine truth. To be a good person and to act right according to truth, is not possible from ourselves but only from God. From our own self we can only remain an evil person filled with falsities that we believe to be truths. This is how we are born, namely, spiritually inverted and morally perverted, so that when Divine good and truth flow into us from within through the soul, we disperse them and transfix them into their opposite. If we do not love God but ignore or deny Him, we cannot be genuinely good, because good is from God only, along with genuine truth. We may act as if we are good, but this is only an outward put on. We may even believe that we are good, but this is only a convenient persuasion or self-serving fantasy. Neither is truth from any person, but from God alone. Both truth and good are from God alone and an individual can have truth and good only from God, that is, when we acknowledge God and affirm our love for Him out of free choice. Therefore, to receive good and truth, we must first acknowledge God.

Every individual who possesses genuine truth, possesses God's truth received from Him. Truth is received by the mind in accordance with one's ability to understand rational ideas. There are simple truths that are rationally simple, and they can be understood by all, even the uneducated. These simple truths are enough in themselves to allow one to love God and to live a life of conscience that prepares the mind for heaven, to the extent that one uses the truth to shun inherited evils. There are also more complex truths that demand a mind trained in rational thinking. This training can be intellectual, artistic, or scientific. Truth in itself, as it flows down from God, is absolute and Divine, but it is received with variation depending on each individual's mental state and preparation. The more we shun our known evils as sins against God, the further we are regenerated by God from within, as a result of which we also grow in understanding and enlightenment.

One day I had been meditating on the creation of the universe. This was noticed by the angels above me to the right, where there were some who had several times meditated and reasoned about the same matter; so one of them came down and invited me to join them. I passed into the spirit and accompanied him; on my arrival I was brought to the prince, in whose hall I saw as many as a hundred assembled with the prince in their midst. . (Swedenborg, TCR 76).

2. Swedenborg’s Dual Consciousness

The name I use for the approach in this book is “True Science,” and also “theistic science” and “ scientific dualism” (see the articles available from this directory: www.theisticpsychology.org/gloss.html

I have included only rational concepts and scientific or empirical methods.

By "scientific" I mean any rational explanatory account that is tied to empirical facts verifiable through observation by anyone under the appropriate test conditions.

It is known that rational is universal, and is a property of the human mind with which we are born and which we can exercise as part of our racial evolution. Societal activities are governed by the rational to the extent that they are effective. We have lawyers, accountants, legislators, and judges to see to it that rational methods of evidence presentation and conclusion are followed. We have engineers and economists who plan our environment and are required to write rational reports and justifications for their planning. In science, every method and approach, every school of thought and specialization, is governed by rational steps of operation and evaluation. Architecture and art are based on rational principles of harmony and interrelationships. Survival is a function of adaptation, and in humans, adaptation is the outcome of rational principles.

I have been trained as a practicing scientist for several decades to learn what is rational reasoning and how to operate within its scope to give meaning to facts, data, evidence, logic, inner consistency, outer harmony, specificity, and unitary coherence. This is possible for me only because Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1771) was a superb and honest scientist and the Writings he left us are thoroughly and consistently rational, empirical and scientific. He is the only writer in all of human history that has been able to retain this high quality of scientific standards on this topic of "What is real? Where am I going?", and includes scientific explanations of the afterlife, the mind, Sacred Scripture, heaven, hell, and God.

Quoting Swedenborg at the beginning of the book titled Heaven and Hell:

The arcana revealed in the following pages relate to heaven and hell, and also to the life of man after death. The man of the church at this date knows scarcely anything about heaven and hell or about his life after death, although all these matters are set forth and described in the Word; and yet many of those born within the church refuse to believe in them, saying in their hearts, "Who has come from that world and told us?" Lest, therefore, such a spirit of denial, which especially prevails with those who have much worldly wisdom, should also infect and corrupt the simple in heart and the simple in faith, it has been granted me to associate with angels and to talk with them as man with man, also to see what is in the heavens and what is in the hells, and this for thirteen years; so now from what I have seen and heard it has been granted me to describe these, in the hope that ignorance may thus be enlightened and unbelief dissipated. Such immediate revelation is granted at this day because this is what is meant by the Coming of the Lord. (HH 1)

The principal reason why Swedenborg is absolutely unique is that he was given access to the spiritual world in full wakefulness for 27 years. His Writings are empirical in that they are based on this daily experience, which included various experiments he was allowed to conduct to investigate various phenomena and properties of the spiritual world. His contemporaries were well aware of Swedenborg's intellectual commitment to science in all matters of human understanding, including the understanding of the spiritual. He wrote only as a scientist about phenomena and observations no other individual in human history has had access to. Though Swedenborg was well known to many key writers of the 18th and 19th centuries, he has been systematically kept out of the history of science literature in the 20th century. This is why he is not known among scientists today. And the fact is that most scientists today would still vote to keep his writings out of the scientific literature. No one in science today is allowed to talk to Aristotle or Newton in the spiritual world, and to angels and devils, and call it part of science. No one in science today is allowed to cite Swedenborg’s Writings and call them science, as I have done. I am therefore defying science as it is today, attempting to stimulate change towards what will be called the True Science.

Sometimes as scientists we are troubled when we must evaluate an experiment for which we have inadequate equipment to verify the observations that have been reported to prove the hypothesis. We rely in that case on reputation of the researcher and the publication venue, which is often a scientific journal containing only articles that have been peer reviewed and approved as meeting the usual standards of scientific method. In the case of Swedenborg’s observations of the spiritual world, the verifiability issue becomes even more difficult since no one has the equipment he possessed, namely dual consciousness, or the ability to observe the phenomena of the spiritual world.

Nevertheless, this is not an absolute caveat since there is the certainty that everyone will possess this equipment when passing from this world to the spiritual world. Swedenborg only did what everyone can do, except in a special order, not given to anyone else. He was given sensuous consciousness of the spiritual world while he was still a man in a physical body on earth. But what he reports is verifiable by anyone who reaches that world. The experimental conditions to be met to verify Swedenborg’s observations are available to anyone who attains that condition. An analogy might be to consider the special insight that mature people have compared to their earlier years. Younger people cannot verify the insights of the mature people, yet they will be able to verify those observations when they meet the conditions of maturity. What Swedenborg reports is not secret or subjective, but public and objective. More people can verify Swedenborg’s observations than people who cannot, because more people live in the spiritual world than on this earth.

Furthermore, copies of Swedenborg’s Writings exist in heaven, are read by angels as Divine Truth. They do not associate the Writings with Swedenborg, whom they have no knowledge of. When they read it they are not conscious of the literal meanings and descriptions in the sentences. They are conscious only of the inner spiritual sense of the Threefold Word, which deals with celestial ideas only, ideas incomprehensible to us while still on earth.

(See this article on Overcoming Objections to Swedenborg's Writings Through the Development of Scientific Dualism.

www.theisticpsychology.org/articles/np98.html )

Note that my presentation of “true science” (which is theistic) is not a response to a wish to unify science and religion, as this has been attempted many times from many fields of scholarship and persuasion. Instead, I ask rational questions about the mind, God, heaven, and hell, as a scientist or lawyer might ask when investigating an event or claim: Is the mind something real? If yes, then it is part of science and rational inquiry. Is God real? If yes, then it is part of science and rational inquiry. Is the afterlife real? Then it too is part of what science wants to investigate. Science, through rationality and empiricism, investigates whatever has reality. Just because we want to investigate the reality of God or heaven doesn't mean that we are into religion--we are still in science, investigating something real. No one has ever convinced me that science has any limitations in the rational and empirical investigation of real things. Nevertheless, given that science has been distinctly atheistic and monistic for a couple of centuries, it may be less confusing for now to use the expression "theistic science" by which I mean the scientific and rational inquiry of God's reality and relationship to humans, including afterlife, heaven, hell, and Sacred Scripture or Divine revelations.

There are two ways of approaching God as a scientific issue, one negative, the other affirmative. Both involve making a premise that cannot be independently proven. The negative approach allows scientists to remain materialistic, monistic, and atheistic by saying: “We start with the premise of atheism and monism. We will give up this premise if there is proof of God’s reality. The proof must be by means of materialistic methods.” You can see that this position insures the retention of the atheistic premise, which itself is not provable. On the other hand, the affirmative approach allows scientists to abandon the unproven and unprovable atheistic premise. This is what I did. First, I had to realize that the atheistic premise of science is not provable. This reduced its persuasive hold on my mind. Second, I had to find out from Divine revelation, or Sacred Scripture, the rational explanation of why God does not appear in the physical world and put an end to the mistaken premise of atheistic science. This question can only be considered or investigated from the affirmative approach. One must first grant that God exists and manages the universe by means of rational principles. Then one is in a position to investigate these rational laws or principles of reality.

The Writings of Swedenborg are a Divine revelation about reality, about God, the human mind, heaven, and hell. The Writings present a full and coherent rational explanation of the interaction between the natural and spiritual world, and the laws by means of which phenomena in both worlds can be understood and interrelated. It is revealed that God has created the human mind to consist of several levels or layers of functioning, the lowest being called hell, and the highest being called heaven. In the lower regions we function at the corporeal and sensuous level of operation. This level is similar to that of animals. At the next higher level in our mind, we function at the natural-rational level, which marks the progress of civilized life on earth. At the next higher level, we function at the spiritual-rational level, and at the highest level possible, we function at the celestial-rational level of operation, consciousness, and understanding. We are born at the lowest level with the capacity to reach the highest level.

The journey for becoming human, then angelic, is the journey of our loves and their quality. Our animal loves are corporeal and pre-civilized, not yet rational and human. Next, our natural-rational loves take us to feelings of community and thoughts of science and art. Next, our spiritual-rational loves take us to feelings of mutual love, love of God, and understanding of Divine Truth. Finally, our celestial-rational loves take us to feelings of unity and oneness with God and with each other, and the interior perception of Divine Truth. Note that this journey of elevation and evolution of the human mind is achieved by means of the rational—at first in a natural version, next in a spiritual version, and at last in a celestial version.

The celestial-rational is the highest and inmost of the mind where the true human begins. Not until then do we have truly human feelings and perceptions. When we are separated from the corpse, we awaken in our spirit-body in the world of spirits. Our fate to eternity is then determined by this spirit-body, that is, the feelings and thoughts it contains. Remember that feelings and thoughts are immortal organic substances that gradually build up our spirit body as we live our life in the physical body. Such as are the loves we bring with us, such is our fate in eternity. If we arrive with feelings and thoughts below the rational level, we sink down into the corporeal level of the mind, and life there is called hell. But if we arrive with rational feelings and thoughts, we rise to the spiritual and celestial levels of the mind, and life there is called heaven.

God cannot appear in the physical world today to settle the matter of His existence for science. Why not? Because, as the Writings reveal, such an event would destroy science, and society, and will result in preventing anyone from acquiring spiritual-rational and celestial-rational loves. This would condemn the entire future human race to hell. This terrible result would obtain because God’s appearance in the physical world violates and tears apart the fabric of the natural world as it is conjoined to the spiritual world. The details of this explanation are rationally and fully justified in the Writings. It makes complete sense to me, and would to anyone who is motivated to read it with rational understanding and consistency. The human mind as two modalities or organic venues for consciousness: sensuous and rational. Understanding this difference is the key to understanding why God cannot physically appear to science to settle the matter of His existence.

God has appeared twice to the consciousness of the human race on earth. The first, at the Incarnation, when God appeared as a Divine Child in a physical body, and grew to adulthood, then exited the natural world to dwell in the spiritual world where He can be seen by the inhabitants of heaven. While God was on earth, He had a dual role, called Father and Son. The Father role did not change and continued to manage the details of the universe. But the Son role was new in human evolution. It was a new creation of God in relation to humanity. Whereas before God in the Father role was invisible in His infinity, now in His newly created Son role, He was visible to all humanity, both on earth and in heaven. This new visibility allowed the human race to evolve much further and higher in the human mind since God’s visibility enhances contact, communication, and conjunction. God in the Son role can therefore bestow on every individual the celestial-rational loves that make us truly human, truly like God, because more from God. God’s appearance again in the physical world would reverse this evolution, so that from rational consciousness the human race would slip back into sensuous consciousness of an earlier and lower phase or level of operation.

The way science can progress now is not by obtaining physical proof of God’s existence, but by strengthening the rational consciousness of God through theistic science. Science can now accept God by rational understanding, not by sensuous demonstrations. God’s infinity and omnipresence cannot be understood sensually, but only rationally. From the sensual perspective, omnipresence is impossible, but from the rational perspective, it is clear and comprehensible. The Writings are a Divine revelation given for the building up the rational consciousness of humanity. Hence it is that God made a Second Appearance on earth to the rational mind within the pages of the Writings of Swedenborg. Now the human race can have a clear view of God, and science can become the True Science, theistic and rational, through and through. Now science can lay hold on true and genuine reality, on benign control of the environment, on human happiness, knowledge, and mutual love, on the present and the future. This is the new age of the Second Coming which marks the evolutionary completion of the human race, the human mind, human consciousness. No mystery has been left about God, the universe, life, and the afterlife. The final and last revelation has been given. Within the literal meaning of the Writings there is hidden an infinite amount of new knowledge for humanity. The Writings give us the methods we are to apply to extract this vast knowledge for all time to come. Though this is not yet known generally, a few people already know it, and I am one of them. You can be too. Quoting from Swedenborg:

Once, when the interior heaven was opened to me, and I was conversing with the angels there, I was permitted to observe the following phenomena. Be it known that although I was in heaven, I was nevertheless not out of myself, but in the body, for heaven is within man, wherever he may be, so that when it pleases the Lord, a man may be in heaven and yet not be withdrawn from the body. In this way it was given me to perceive the general workings of heaven as plainly as an object is perceived by any of the senses. (AC 3884)

True Science based on the scientific revelations in the Writings is not divisive, sectarian, or limited by history or culture. God as a subject of discussion is divisive only in the outward form of religion and politics, since religion has an animated externalized life at the edge of culture and nationalism. Divisive sectarian religion is based on corporeal and sensuous feelings and thoughts. These are in the lowest portion of the mind’s operation. Sectarianism is not yet fully human because it is based on exclusion and division, while the genuine human is based on acceptance and unity. Within all external natural religious behaviors and beliefs, there lives an internal. This internal is the rational mind, and it operates at the three levels mentioned above: natural-rational feelings and thoughts, spiritual-rational feelings and thoughts, and ultimately, celestial-rational feelings and thoughts, which is the genuine human that leads to mutual and unity.

When you bypass external forms of religious behavior, and go to what is within it, you find the levels of the rational mind. This is the same mind that studies universal laws of reality, thus science. Science is a universal explanation of all events, including religious behavior. Science is at a higher rationality in the human mind than external religions. If external religion looks at science, it sees nothing except something below itself. But if science looks at religion, it sees religion and politics below itself as cultural phenomena. What is below cannot look at what is above, for it sees nothing, but what is above in the mind can look at what is below, and see everything in detail. Religion cannot explain science, but science can explain religion. Note well: atheistic science such as we have today cannot explain religion because religion is above it in the mind. Religion is the understanding of rational concepts like God and mutual love, while atheistic science is so low in rationality that it cannot give a meaning for rational concepts like God and the spiritual world. But True Science is based on Divine revelations, therefore it is in the highest portions of the human mind called spiritual-rational and celestial-rational. Knowledge of God based on True Science is higher in the mind than knowledge of God based on religion. The religious knowledge one possesses may be entirely true, yet this truth is at a lower level than the truth of True Science.

3. Character Reformation By Means of the Threefold Word of God

Understanding the ideas in True Science, as based in the Divine revelations of the Writings, gives us a closer position from which to view God and our relationship to Him. This greater closeness is due to the more interior rational understanding that is provided by Divine revelation. God is the highest rational from whom all other rational comes from and is embedded in. God has two infinite substances within Himself that is His very life, namely, love and wisdom. From this Divine Love and Wisdom God creates a universal aura called the Spiritual Sun. Infinite amounts of spiritual heat and spiritual light emanate from this Sun. This Divine emanation goes forth from the Spiritual Sun, and as it does, it creates distance between God and the emanations. These distances are fixed by means of atmospheres or levels of division and separation in the emanations. Each fixed atmosphere has particular properties and creates specific phenomena according to these properties. As the atmospheres multiply and create more and more distance from the Spiritual Sun, the properties, events, and phenomena become less and less rational, more and more physicalized or materialized. At last, in the ultimate of atmospheres emanating from the Spiritual Sun, is the physical universe or the natural world.

Human beings are born with dual existence. Their mind is in the rational atmospheres called the spiritual world, while their physical body is in the lowest atmosphere called earth or planet. Our mind, which is in the spiritual world, is still asleep to the spiritual environment and is not receptive to incoming spiritual phenomena. In this first phase, the mind is conscious only of what comes from the sensory information streaming in from the physical body. The mind is unconscious of the spiritual world that surrounds it as long as it is tied to a physical body. When this body becomes a corpse and can no longer transmit sensations, the mind is separated and suddenly becomes receptive to the spiritual environment where it had been all along. Subjectively this feels like an awakening. Hence it is said that novitiate spirits, or new arrivals in the afterlife, appear to themselves to be awakened from a sleep.

Since the fabric of the universe is made of the emanations and atmospheres of the Spiritual Sun, and since the Spiritual Sun is Divine Love and Divine Truth, therefore everything in the universe has a rational basis. Truth is the rational substance out of which the emanations from the Spiritual Sun are created. At the ultimate atmosphere furthest removed from the Spiritual Sun, is the material world of atoms, electrons, protein, and minerals. An atom is therefore a piece of truth. A physical law or number is therefore a piece of truth. A rose, a rock, a river, a planet, the mind of a human being, heaven and hell, all are pieces of truth. Nothing else exists except pieces of truth from the Spiritual Sun. You can see from this the supreme importance of the rational at its various levels. In fact the human mind is an exact map of the spiritual world, so that all the layers of the universe created by the emanations are exactly reproduced and imaged in the human mind. Hence we can say that the journey from birth on earth to eternity in heaven is a journey form the lower portions of the mind to its highest portion. This journey is made by truth, within which is love, for truth is nothing but the outside form of love. Love and truth are the constituent blocks of reality.

Religion is the first step for opening the human mind and starting the journey upward, back to God where our soul is. As you read on, you will come across diagrams and tables that will help you to visualize the patterned observations I make about our religious life. Religious life has an external cultural aspect that might feel threatened by my presentation. But if you're willing to go deeper into the foundations of your religion, you will find mutual agreement between all of us. This is the value of theistic science. It leaves the surface culture-based disagreements behind, and constructs a scientific platform of agreement and pan-human understanding. You will not have to leave your religion behind, only enrich it with inner meaning in your own life and future.

To say that atheistic science can validate or enhance religion is not true since atheistic science is below the rational while religion has rational ideas from revelations. Bui it is accurate to say that theistic science, or True Science, validates and enhances religion because both are based on revelations. True Science is the most specific and advanced of the Divine revelations ever given to humanity. The Writings of Swedenborg are this Divine revelation called the Second Coming, which opens the new evolutionary age of celestial-rational understanding and consciousness, the final frontier in human creation that leaves behind ignorance and mystery.

True theistic science can also be called “scientific dualism,” an expression that contrasts with “scientific monism.” Atheism and monism are central elements of nonduality, which is the philosophical perspective that all dualities or categorical contrasts are illusions of the human mind. Nonduality sees a unity between material and spiritual substance, between human and Divine, between evil and good.

(See Volume 3 of A Man of the Field: www.theisticpsychology.org/books/nonduality/v1ch1-nonduality.html )

Nonduality is based on the negative principle and the denial of every duality. Atheistic science denies that there is a spiritual world, denies that there is a God who creates and manages the details of the universe, denies that the building blocks of the world are spiritual and celestial—namely, love and truth. In contrast, theistic science is a scientific dualism because it bases itself on the Divine revelations given in the Writings, and every concept so given is a duality, never a nonduality. Divine rational truth is presented in the form of dualities, and therefore also, every detail of the universe. Scientific dualism is rational while monism is pre-rational. Every human mind develops by an orderly process and monism is the first phase of self-intelligence by which we develop our rational mind, first the lower external rational, but later, the upper internal rational that is of spiritual and celestial origin, hence from God’s Intelligence and not from self. The Writings declare that scientific dualism is spiritually sane while monism is spiritually insane. We begin our young adulthood in a state of mind that is spiritually insane because we rely on self-intelligence or on the intelligence of other human beings more than on God’s Intelligence given to us in revelations. Atheistic science, being based on monism and nonduality, is a phase of pre-rational thinking that is replaced later in development, by rational thinking based on dualism found in the Divine scientific revelations of the Writings.

In the dualism of True Science, God is real, and both the natural and the spiritual worlds are real. The external natural mind gets its data from the natural world, while the internal rational or spiritual mind gets its data from the spiritual world. We are thus born dual citizens--our natural mind connected to the physical body in the natural world, and our spiritual mind within a spirit-body in the spiritual world. The natural mind and the spiritual mind are interconnected and operate together though we are only aware of things within our natural mind. The physical body and its natural mind are connected to the spirit-body and its spiritual mind by the laws of correspondence. At the death of the physical body, the spirit-body along with its rational mind becomes conscious of itself, and we awaken in full conscious life in the spiritual world. This process of awakening, or resuscitation, has been described in detail by Swedenborg who was able to observe the process hundreds of times (see especially his work titled Arcana Coelestia, Volume 1).

There is an additional puzzle that must be cleared up before going along with the ideas I’m presenting. One may wonder how atheistic science could be responsible for modern civilization, which would not be possible without the advances of science and engineering over the centuries of evolving knowledge and industry. If atheistic science is based on a false premise about the universe, so that its explanations are spiritually insane, how could scientists continue to cumulate scientific discoveries and theories able to bring about and maintain the modern world we live in? The answer from the perspective of theistic science is that modern civilization is brought about by God, not by the scientists. While we operate within the premises of atheistic science, we are immersed in spiritual insanity in our lower mind—the natural-rational level of operation. The upper portions of the mind are not spiritually insane. This spiritual rationality is unconscious and protected by God from being influenced by the lower natural mind built on self-intelligence. The rationality of scientific operations and experiments is to be attributed to the unconscious spiritual-rational mind and not to the conscious natural-rational mind. The conscious portion is spiritually insane, because from self-intelligence, but the unconscious portion is spiritually sane, because from the spiritual world and God. With True Science, the conscious natural-rational mind and the unconscious spiritual-rational mind are realigned in harmony with each other.

You can see from many facts in our society that there is an obvious discrepancy between the general rationality of civilization and science, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the irrationality that is rampant with individuals. Crime and abuse are rampant and the divorce rate is over fifty percent. Current surveys indicate the majority of people are depressed at least once a day, that their daily round of activities is full of negativity and unpleasant emotions, that they are overweight, constipated, addicted to pain killers and sex performance drugs, and beset with anxieties, hostilities, resentment, and unfulfilled lives. Surely this is not the syndrome that goes with rational people and rational communities. Most evidently, people are not yet at the human rational level of operation where the peace of heaven is sensed, where rational loves arrange things in harmonious order, and where Divine Truth is understood and loved. The conclusion therefore must be that the apparent rational progression of civilized societies and science, is to be attributed entirely to God’s rationality at work within the unconscious portions of the human mind, and nothing of it can be attributed to the rationality of humans.

God’s Intervention in the Details of Our Lives

One important question must be answered here, if the discussion is to satisfy the rational mind that reads this and reflects on it: “If God can exert his omnipotence to keep civilization progressing in a rational direction, as just said, what keeps Him from exerting that same power to keep individuals rational and positive in their daily lives, instead of the opposite?”

Consider this quote from the Writings:

CONCERNING PROVIDENCE AND FATE.

I spoke with spirits concerning Providence, and some also were present who believed somewhat in fate; and it was shown them how the case stood. They supposed that all things were accomplished out of absolute necessity; and, thus, that the whole life was the unavoidable force of circumstance; consequently, that the Lord was bound by necessity; therefore, that there was nothing except this to keep things in existence; and that this is the Divine. But they were shown that they have entire freedom; and if freedom, then there is not necessity, because there are so many contingencies which bear man, in freedom, to opposites. This was exhibited by means of pebbles, which were so placed as to form a certain figure: then, if necessity required that one pebble should be placed in order after another, and thus that man [should arrange them] from necessity, nothing further would follow; but [it was shown] that the case is this: that the pebbles are put, now here, now there, so as to appear dispersedly; and this according to freedom; and the Lord foresees the form, namely, that in which man, from freedom, wills [to arrange his life]; but He determines for him, from other considerations, and so foresees the form, and permits him to go hither and thither, so that the moments of his life appear like scattered pebbles. But the Lord then sees whether he fills up that space between them; He sees what is lacking and where; and, then, continually, what is next in order, after a hundred or a thousand years; and so forth.) (SEM 4692)

The answer, found in the Writings, is that God does all things necessary and loving, and withholds Himself from doing certain other things that humans can imagine could be done. God avoids doing things which are detrimental to our preparation for heaven. This goal is the highest in God’s Mind. He creates each individual soul on some earth in the physical universe, and this soul has the capacity to live in conjugial bliss increasing daily to eternity. Conjugial bliss is what a husband and a wife feel in heaven as they live in such perfect unity that it is unimaginable. This is the marvelous goal, almost beyond belief, that God has with each individual. It is now revealed to humanity that God created the physical universe to fill it with planets, and to increase their number at an explosive rate to endless time. Each planet is created to be the birthplace of immortal spirits, temporarily clothed in a mortal physical body. After a few decades of preparation, the individual’s mind is ready to abandon the physical body, to assume the spirit-body and to continue heavenly life to eternity. God’s Divine loving purpose is therefore to increase the population of the vast heavens from numberless planets with spirits and angels who are capable of receiving God’s love and truth in purity and innocence. What an amazing revelation! It is full of warmth and love, wisdom and power. How reassuring it is to find out that God is so close and so involved in the minutest detail of our day, of our thinking and reasoning, and of our loves and attractions. Moment by moment God not only knows about these micro-details of every human being, but participates in a determinative way, interferes with its course and progress, keeping things from being remembered while bringing other things to the fore, and so on. God is more intimate with each of us than any two beings can be, even soul mates in heaven.

It is therefore puzzling to rational reflection why God doesn’t intervene to get rid of the plagues of evil and falsity that has gotten hold of the fallen human psyche. Generation after generation these evils and falsities are transmitted by heredity and by culture. The Writings explain that God ceaselessly strives to bend the thinking of the human race, to guide people’s involvements with good things, and to withhold them from much worse evil than they already are in. God already does everything that is Divine possible. So there is only rational conclusion: human beings have been given by God the capacity to resist Him. Humans have zero power, and whatever they do is powered entirely by a cooperating God who knows what the individual is attempting to do and supplies the power in the background. This is a necessary conclusion if you want to remain rational. The assertion “God is omnipotent” has this necessary meaning. “Omni” means all, and “omnipotent” means all power. Logic tells you therefore that we have zero power, or that nature has zero power, etc. All power is God’s power and ceases instantly when God ceases to apply that power, whether it is the power of a whirling electron in an atom, the power of a heartbeat, or the power of the mind to have a rational thought or to remember some information. God also gives us the power to resist Him, to oppose Him, to turn His truth into its opposite falsity, and to adulterate His good into its opposite evil.

The Writings explain that God gives us the power to deny and reject Him in order to give us the power to acknowledge Him and to love Him.

This is a rational idea that needs to be thought through carefully and studied for full understanding. But you can already see no doubt that these two things must go together. If we are given the power to acknowledge God we must also have the power to deny God. To acknowledge God means that we do so voluntarily, as of self and in complete freedom. Freedom means that we can choose either way, or else it is not freedom. The nature of love is such that it only exists in freedom. Not so hatred, which exists in slavishness or spiritual slavery, also called in the Writings “infernal freedom,” such as devils have in hell. But good spirits and angels have freedom to love God and acknowledge Him, His Divine Truth, His omnipotence in their lives. Swedenborg talked to many angels in their heavens and they declared to him that their greatest experience of freedom is when they recall that they have zero power and the Lord has all power in their willing, thinking, and doing moment by moment. And so the inhabitants of heaven have no worries or negative emotions of any kind ever, because they live in “the peace of truth,” in the “current of Divine Providence,” in which moment by moment their thoughts and feelings are formed by the Lord’s Proprium or Persona, whom they love with the greatest intensity.

Since the heavens are formed by love and truth from the Lord, the hells are formed by people who destroy the love that flows in from God and falsify the truth that also flows in. Therefore every heaven has a counterpart hell in which the same loves and truths that forms that particular, are adulterated and falsified to form that particular hell. While we are on earth our mind is an image of heaven and hell, containing both, so that we have the freedom of choice at every moment to follow heaven or to follow hell. There is no other choice that God allows. It is obvious that today in our society people choose hell over heaven the majority of time. God cannot prevent this and still maintain spiritual freedom in every person. Therefore God creates for every individual all sorts of opportunities to reverse the trend in oneself, to reject hellish things and to choose heavenly things. This is called regeneration or character reformation. The Threefold Word has been given by God to insure than humans have the Divine Truth to choose in their lives. This Divine Truth has been revealed in infinite plenitude in the Threefold Word, hidden in its exterior meanings but available for extraction by means of the methods prescribed in the Writings.

Correspondences -- The Secret Code of Rational Spirituality

Correspondences have all force, so that what is done on earth according to correspondences has power in heaven; for correspondences are from the Divine. Those who are in the good of love and of faith are in correspondences, and the Divine effects all things with them... All miracles in the Word were effected through correspondences. The Word is so written that every minute thing therein corresponds to the things in heaven; hence the Word has Divine force, and conjoins heaven and earth. (AC 8615)

Therefore in order to remove all doubt as to such being the character of the Word, the Lord has revealed to me the Word's internal sense. In its essence this sense is spiritual, and in relation to the external sense, which is natural, is as soul is to body. This sense is the spirit which gives life to the letter; it can therefore bear witness to the divinity and holiness of the Word, and convince even the natural man, if he is willing to be convinced. (SS 4)

My presentation relies on three sets of scientific revelations: the Old Testament (Hebrew Word), the New Testament (Greek Word), and the Third Testament (Latin Word), which refers to the Writings of Swedenborg. Together, the Three Testaments are called the Threefold Word, and constitute a direct open line of communication between God and the individual who is reading the Word with the acknowledgement and belief that it is the Word of God given by means of human minds as intermediaries. Such were the prophets of Israel, the Gospel writers, and Swedenborg. The Hebrew Word was a revelation for the natural-corporeal mind and is written at that level of reception, relying on physical demonstrations of God’s presence. The Greek Word was a revelation for the natural-sensuous mind, relying on the sensuous existence of the Incarnation. The Latin Word is a revelation for the natural-rational mind, relying on the modern scientific level of thinking. What is most unexpected and almost incredible to the natural mind, is what the Writings reveal about the Old and New Testaments.

This is the revelation that the literal sentences of the Old and New Testaments are written in a secret code not known to the writers themselves who had their attention focused the historical and descriptive account they were giving, which was interpreted by commentators as visionary and poetic language, by no means always clear, and containing strange metaphors and seeming repetitions and exaggerations, especially in the Old Testament. What is marvelous is that Swedenborg goes through a verse by verse and word by word analysis of the Books of Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations, along with thousands of passages from the rest of the Bible. This word by word and phrase by phrase analysis proves beyond the shadow of any doubt, that the Threefold Word is written in a Divine language that no other human writings compare to. The literal meaning of the Threefold Word can be decoded by applying the knowledge of correspondences. This translation changes the message from the literal-historical to the spiritual-rational. The spiritual-rational meaning contained within the literal meaning can be understood only at the spiritual-rational level of thinking (zone 6 and above). Examples will be given in what follows. If you read Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, you will have a full knowledge of these correspondences and of the spiritual topics that the Word addresses and teaches in its “internal sense” (or “spiritual sense”).

Section 19.8 below presents several passages from the Writings relevant to correspondences.

Note: The Writings are available online along with collateral books at this Web address:

www.theisticpsychology.org/writings.html

When these facts become known to scientists and scholars generally, it is bound to be seen as a proof of God’s direct intervention in the smallest details of individuals and nations. The historical events, names, places, objects, and numbers discussed in the Word were written independently by dozens of authors over hundreds of years who had no idea of the fact that they were writing in a code. Every historical event and detail described in the Bible is accurate, according to the Writings, and yet it is not the reason the details have been recorded. Only those details are recorded that add up to a coherent sequence of the spiritual-rational things being discussed in the underlying or inner sense of every verse and chapter. For instance, when details of the journeyings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph are decoded through the knowledge of correspondences, what emerges is a scientific treatise on the human mind, how it must go through stages of development from the corporeal-sensuous level, to the natural-rational level, and at last to the spiritual-rational and celestial-rational levels. The details of the adventures of the patriarchs and other characters mentioned, add up to an internal spiritual series that is rational and descriptive of the human mind, of our relation to God, of heaven and hell, of angels and devils, of love and wisdom, good and truth. These are the topics of the Word when the literal is decoded.

Anyone who does not know that the Word has an internal sense which is not visible in the letter will be utterly astonished by the idea that spiritual realities too are meant by the numbers used in the Word. The specific reason for his astonishment is his inability to use numbers to give shape to any spiritual idea, when yet the spiritual ideas known to angels present themselves as numbers, see AC 5265. The identity of those ideas or spiritual realities to which numbers correspond can, it is true, be known; but the origin of such correspondence remains hidden, such as the origin of the correspondence of 'twelve' to all aspects of faith, the correspondence of 'seven' to things that are holy, as well as that of 'ten' and also 'five' to forms of good and truth stored up by the Lord within the interior man, and so on. Even so, it is enough if people know simply that such a correspondence does exist and that by virtue of that correspondence each number used in the Word denotes something present in the spiritual world, consequently that what is Divine has been inspired into them and so lies concealed within them. (AC 5291)

And equally amazing is one more detail. The correspondences between the literal meaning of the Word and its coded inner spiritual meaning, are not arbitrary like some human code but generic to reality. Correspondences reflect the universal laws that cause spiritual and natural events to occur in synchronous relation to each other. Every natural event or quality exists by means of a corresponding spiritual event or quality. Neither can exist alone. For instance, a horse in the Word is a coded term for intelligence. Different types of horses are mentioned, as well as donkeys, assess, camels, and other animals that carry riders. Each type of horse refers to some aspect of human intelligence and the level of thinking operations in the human mind. Further, Swedenborg observed this thousands of times, that whenever he was discussing human intelligence with someone in the spiritual world, horses of various types appeared in the environment. Similarly with other correspondences that decode the Word. When he was talking to evil spirits, the environment turned into deserts or swamps, and noxious animals could be seen like snakes, dragons, and scorpions, while foul smells reached his nose. In other words, there is close connection between the secret code of the Word and the external phenomena that are routinely observed in the spiritual world. Quoting Swedenborg:

In hell every lust of evil when visually represented appears like a noxious creature, as a dragon, or a cockatrice, or a viper, or a bird of night, or an owl, and so on; and similarly do the lusts of evil appear in a wicked man when he is viewed by angels.

All these forms of lusts must be changed one by one; and the man himself, who with respect to his spirit appears as a human monster or devil, must be changed to become like a beautiful angel; and every lust of evil must be changed to appear like a lamb, or a sheep, or a pigeon, or a turtle dove, as the affections of good in the angels appear in heaven when visually represented; and to change a dragon into a lamb, a cockatrice into a sheep, and an owl into a dove can only be effected step by step, by rooting out evil from its very seed and implanting good seed in its stead. (DP 296)

The natural meaning of the Word and its corresponding spiritual meaning show exactly the same relation as there is between the spiritual world and the natural. There is therefore objective evidence that the knowledge of correspondences unveiled in the Writings are actual laws of interconnection between the spiritual and the natural. Quoting Swedenborg:

A knowledge of degrees is like a key for opening the causes of things, and for entering into them. Without that knowledge, scarcely anything of cause can be known. For without it, the objects and subjects of both worlds appear so simple as though there were nothing in them beyond that which meets the eye, when yet the things that appear are as one to thousands, indeed, to myriads, compared with the things which lie hidden within. The interiors which do not lie open can by no means be disclosed except by a knowledge of degrees. (DLW 184)

Miracles have not been done from causes sought out from nature ... Miracles related in the Word were done by means of influx from that prior world into this posterior one, ... by means of bringing such things as are in the spiritual world, into corresponding things in the natural world, so that the things which come forth actually in the spiritual world are actually brought into such things in the natural world as correspond. (Invitation 60)

Correspondences have all power ... what is done on earth according to correspondence, avails in heaven, because they are from the Divine. All miracles recorded in the Word were done by means of correspondences. (AC 8615.3)

There is a correspondence of sensuous with natural things, a correspondence of natural with spiritual things, a correspondence of spiritual with celestial things, and finally a correspondence of celestial things with the Divine of the Lord; thus there is a succession of correspondences from the Divine down to the ultimate natural.

[2] But as an idea of the nature of correspondences can with difficulty be formed by those who have never thought about them before, it may be well to say a few words on the subject. It is known from philosophy that the end is the first of the cause, and that the cause is the first of the effect. That the end, the cause, and the effect may follow in order, and act as a one, it is needful that the effect should correspond to the cause, and the cause to the end. But still the end does not appear as the cause, nor the cause as the effect; for in order that the end may produce the cause, it must take to itself administrant means from the region where the cause is, by which means the end may produce the cause; and in order that the cause may produce the effect, it also must take to itself administrant means from the region where the effect is, by which means the cause may produce the effect. These administrant means are what correspond; and because they correspond, the end can be in the cause and can actuate the cause, and the cause can be in the effect and can actuate the effect; consequently the end through the cause can actuate the effect. It is otherwise when there is no correspondence; for then the end has no cause in which it may be, still less an effect in which it may be, but is changed and varied in the cause, and finally in the effect, according to the form made by the administrant means. (AC 5131)

From all this, once you spend the effort of studying it, you gain a complete rational understanding of reality, the connection between the spiritual and the natural, the Laws of Divine Providence by which the universe is managed, and the regeneration and evolution of the mind, the spirit-body, and eternity.

If you are still thinking, “But where is the proof?” you need to continue reading this book and it will become clear to you that no other explanation can be given for the facts presented, namely, that the code of correspondences in which the Threefold Word was written is the same code by which natural phenomena on the planet are effects produced by spiritual causes. The cause-effect relation in the universe follows the same code as that which relates the natural meaning of the Threefold Word to its spiritual meaning. And finally, that Swedenborg visually observed the natural appearances as effects produced by spiritual loves as causes (e.g., evil and hostile intentions of a spirit in the world of spirits, produce or project an environmental appearance of caves, deserts, and noxious animals and stenches).

4. The Varieties of Religion Under One Divine Human Person

Rational spirituality tends away from religious sectarianism, prejudice, or irreverence for other religions who have their own form of Sacred Scripture, handed down from their ancestors. The rational approach of True Science insures that sectarianism and fundamentalism are understood in terms of their mental mechanism in relation to spirituality and salvation. Most readers will not be familiar with all Three Testaments of the Threefold Word, and some may not be familiar with any. This is not a necessary stumbling block to acquiring knowledge from True Science. Just translate the ethnic names like Moses, David, Jehovah, Jesus, Adam, Jacob, Jerusalem, and so forth, to your own historical events. These names are local names for global concepts. All people, nations, or races each have their own religious history, and their own prophets and leaders. They all have a name for God. These are external names. Internally, there is one true name that is revealed to all at some point.

The Threefold Word was given for all of humanity and will last endlessly in the natural world. To people in the modern age, the literal of the Old and New Testaments appear sectarian and exclusionary rather than universal and inclusive like the Writings. But this is only an external, historical appearance. When the literal meaning of the Three Testaments is decoded, what is left is the spiritual sense, and this sense is devoid of historical names, places, and nations. These names and events are given not for their own sake but for the sake of their representative meaning in relation to correspondences. The referents that are signified by these representative names and events – what are they?

They are mental states of the human mind being regenerated. Every human being must be regenerated to enter heaven. Therefore the inner spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word has been given by God to assist us in regeneration. Regeneration is a spiritual medical process performed by God on every human being. God’s performance is limited by our willing cooperation expressed as willingness to struggle as-of self in temptations. There is no other way for any human being born on this planet to reach heaven but by this process of regeneration. This is a question of spiritual medics, not theology or religion. True Science has now been given to humankind which details this crucial process of spiritual medics in regeneration. These crucial scientific revelations clearly appear in the Threefold Word when one applies the Laws of Correspondences to the words and concepts in which the Three Testaments are composed. When this process of extraction or “scrutation” is applied, the names of people and places, and the natural events in the narrations, all disappear in consciousness, and what is perceived is the mental state that the representatives designate.

This is how the inhabitants of the heavens perceive the Threefold Word when they read it there. They see nothing of the natural things being mentioned such as names, places, numbers, battles, time, possessions, weddings, garments, floods, animals, harvesting, journeying, eating, sleeping, dying, being born, being sick, getting old, etc. These details about the natural things in the Threefold Word are not seen by spiritual eyes. Instead, they see the “representatives, significatives, and correspondences” that these natural things have within them, in their spiritual plane or degree. This spiritual plane contains only what is Divine since the inmost framework of every physical object is the spiritual Sun, as already discussed.

The Inner Spiritual Meaning of the Threefold Word

There exists a crucial difference between the literal meaning of the Threefold Word and its spiritual meaning. The literal meaning appears culture-bound and time-bound rather than universal and all inclusive. This is why the literal meaning of the Threefold Word is claimed by three different incompatible religions – the Old Testament by Judaism, the New Testament by Christianity, and the Writings by the New Church or New Christianity. But the spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word does not have this external appearance tied to cultures and times. The spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word is pan-human, on this earth, on the other earths, and in the heavens of all the humanity from the distant galaxies. The societies of the heavens do not have religion as part of their identity. But the have True Science based on their reading of the Threefold Word in its inner spiritual meaning. The Threefold Word is an instrument of consciousness for all humanity because, in its inner spiritual meaning, it is Divine Truth Itself in infinite and endless variety prepared from creation to be the vehicle of rational spirituality upon which the human mind is carried to endless and eternally increasing joy.

Clearly then, the inner spiritual meaning of the Threefold Word is for all humanity, and when it is acknowledged and recognized as the revelations of True Science, sectarianism of religion will no longer interfere. Then at last the Threefold Word will be for all peoples and cultures. What the literal took away due to human cultural divisions, the spiritual restores to rational humanity, taking the Threefold Word out of its historical and cultural context, and placing into a pan-human scientific application.

And so the divisions of religion disappear when we enter inward into the spiritual-rational. Few are those, today or in the past, who realize that God is rational, that the created universe is rational, that the underlying framework of the physical world is a rational substance called “truth within which is love.” Another way of referring to this is “rational loves.” Few people know that love is nothing without truth and truth is nothing without love. Love must be within truth, driving it, animating it, giving truth life and purpose, goal and intentionality. Many philosophers would argue that the notion of a “rational love” is a contradiction in terms. It is popular to see love as mythical, mystical, ineffable, and experiential, and thus opposed to “logos” which is rational conceptual discourse. But True Science now shows that love is the underlying framework of truth, just like wood is the underlying framework of a particular chair, or heat is the underlying framework of cooked meat. You can’t have one without the other. Love is within, invisible, truth covers it, visible. Clearly then, if we think of the “rational” in our mind, which is truth in our understanding, we must also think of the “love” in our will that is united to that truth as its underlying framework. Hence the phrase “rational loves” is perfectly suitable as a scientific reference for one process. The uniting of love with its truth is called “the Heavenly Marriage.” When this marriage is in our celestial mind, we are in heaven.

We are born in the Fallen civilization of the split-brain race, as discussed above. Instead of the Heavenly Marriage we are born with the “infernal marriage” in us. This refers to selfish loves, which are hatreds, and distorted truths, which are falsities. The union between hatreds in our will and falsities in our understanding, is called the infernal marriage. Regeneration is the medical process of surgically removing this infernal marriage and replacing it with the heavenly marriage. This is done by God in the mind of every human being, but effectiveness is limited by the individual’s willingness to reject evil delights one has come to like. We can use the expression “irrational loves” or “insane loves” to refer to these evil delights prior to regeneration. All human beings are born filled to the max with these spiritually insane loves, regardless of civilization, culture, religion, or intellectual ability. Hence a new revelation, to be acknowledged as True Science, was given to humankind to address that part of the mind that is above religion, culture, and ancestry. These lower things are not removed or hindered in any way. True Science is within these lower things.

The same True Science is hidden within all religious ideas, regardless of cultures and times. This was not known before, so surface differences acted as dividers and separators between religions. These will remain, but only on the surface. All those from each religion who are willing to enter in the spiritual ideas of their religion will find there True Science, the same True Science that is in the Threefold Word. True Science cannot be detected by the Old Testament alone. It cannot be detected by the New Testament along with the Old Testament. True Science can only be detected by putting the Three Testaments together as one unit called the Threefold Word.

Few realize that love and truth are rational substances out of which the universe is constructed. Most people have an idea of truth as something abstract, mental or logical, not substantial like rocks, clouds, and the brain. And yet Swedenborg shows from revelation and empirical observation that truth is the substantial light that streams from the spiritual Sun, establishing atmospheres at further and further distances, until the ultimate external distance is reached in the natural world with its suns of physical matter and energy. So the origin of the natural suns and stars with their associated planets and nebulae is this substantive light of truth streaming from the Spiritual Sun. Truth is not abstract, but a spiritual substance out of which matter and mind are formed.

The manifestation of the Lord, and intromission into the spiritual world, surpass all miracles. This has not been granted to anyone since the creation, as it has been to me. (Swedenborg, INV 52)

Swedenborg's revelation is the mightiest and greatest of all revelations because they come through the rational mind of a modern well-placed and respected Swedish scientist in the 18th century. There is no precedent for it anywhere in human history. There is no equal event in the history of the universe. Swedenborg at age 57, at the height of his renowned and professional career, had an apparition from Jesus Christ, of whom he had thought of as “God Man” since early childhood when he is reported to have talked to angels--his father was the Lutheran Bishop to the royal family. The Lord announced to him that he had been prepared for a special task which He expected Swedenborg to now fulfill. It was a very very touching moment, and he describes it in the Journal of Dreams (JD) he kept in those days (1740 onward). Over the next few months he was given trance like experiences, following which he was able to recall communicating with departed spirits. However, these experiences were completely tied to his reading Bible verses, each verse tying him to a different experience. He noticed that there was a clear relationship between the content of the verse, and the experience he witnessed in the spiritual world through his spiritual mind which had now been rendered conscious to allow him to accomplish his Divinely appointed mission of revelator.

He started an extensive set of notes in which he described the empirical relationship between verse content in the Bible and events in the spiritual world that he became involved in. Soon he discovered a pattern which he called "spiritual-natural correspondences” according to the name the most ancient peoples used for their spiritual perceptions. At that time, the human race on this earth was directly connected to the departed spirits who lived in heaven as angels. Subsequently this direct sensuous consciousness of the spiritual world ceased, so that rational consciousness was henceforth going to be the only means of knowing and perce3iving the spiritual. Swedenborg then realizing that the Bible was written in verses that had a double layered meaning, and that he had been given the Divine assignment to expose and describe these empirical relationships.

Is there any way of explaining away this relationship as some coincidence or exaggeration or mistake? There is no other way to explain Swedenborg’s discovery than that it is the work of God that has been revealed to humankind. Think of it, my friend. Historical and biographical events happen to these ancient peoples and individuals. Details get recorded by scribes and prophets over many centuries from about 1300 BC to 100 AD, the period during which the Hebrew and Greek Word were written by dozens of individuals. And yet, as Swedenborg is able to prove, every detail fits perfectly in its position in an overall message of awesome proportions. The writers did not know that the words and verses they are writing down have a universal code encrypted in them, so that an uninterrupted rational series of underlying topics is being treated of in excruciating detail. How could this happen by coincidence? This would be a foolish conclusion.

You can see rationally that this is a Divine Work. God made sure that the dozens of writers over hundreds of years wrote down only those words and sentences which formed an accurate underlying meaning. That underlying meaning, hidden by the code of correspondences, was the real, the actual message the Divine wanted to reveal to humanity. There is no other rational explanation. If you reject it, you reject rationality and condemn yourself to spiritual insanity and foolishness, as well as to evil and ultimately to life in hell in eternity. What a way NOT to go! Therefore think and live. If you accept the rationality of this long hidden message, you accept its Divine authority, and you are beginning to be saved for heavenly life by ordering your mind into a rational system that is capable of receiving heavenly life.

The Growth of Rational Consciousness of God

Why did God hide this knowledge for all these centuries, and why is God now revealing it?

The answers are revealed in the Writings. These are God’s answers to humanity. God desired to reveal the spiritual knowledge hidden in His Word because this knowledge elevates the human mind to heaven. Therefore God was preparing the human race for this revelation. The Threefold Word took 31 centuries to write out—from the fourteenth century BC to the seventeenth century AD. And there were prior versions of God’s Word that were revealed to the ancient peoples prior to known historical age. The human mind is constructed in such a way that it acquires rational and spiritual consciousness by means of knowledge of Divine truths. Natural consciousness is acquired first, from self-intelligence and the physical environment. This is the animal level of life, and for us, it is the pre-human or quasi-human level of life. It appears on the outside that we are rational human beings capable of evolving a civilization that is rational and viable. But the fact is that it is God who is managing things so that they turn out viable and rational. If it were actually left to human self-intelligence, everything would quickly collapse into chaos and insanity, thus not capable of survival and evolution.

We are so constructed that we have the capacity to operate at a human level, thus far above the animal level as supervised by God. We take the journey upward by developing our rational capacities to think and understand rational concepts that are removed from the sensory observations and organization. The sensory organization is a lower form of operation for the human mind. We develop a higher organization in the regions of the mind above the corporeal and sensual. The natural mind thus evolves in layers as we grow—corporeal layer of thinking and feeling, sensuous layer of thinking and feeling, natural-rational layer of thinking and feeling, spiritual-rational layer of thinking and feeling, and at last, celestial-rational layer of thinking and feeling. These are the gradations of human consciousness by creation. Only in the upper regions of operation, that is, the spiritual-rational and celestial rational levels, do we enter the genuine human life. This life is called heaven, and it awaits every individual immediately upon resuscitation from death, approximately 46 hours after we are separated from the corpse. But only the individual whose mind can be opened to that degree. The others sink down into the lower regions of their mind where they eek out a sad and hellish existence to eternity, full of willfulness and insane fantasies they are unwilling to give up.

Should any one of them decide to give them up, they would be instantly taken up to their heavenly sites in their mind. But when they experience what it is like, they feel that none of their affections or loves can have an life there. They thus fall into a swoon or unconsciousness or feel the searing burning touch of truth and love, which they cannot support because it is against what they desire. They therefore throw themselves back into hell, into the bottom regions of their minds, where they feel somewhat revived, capable of expressing their insane and cruel fantasies, and cruel practices on each other, taking turns in torture, living for the moment it is their turn to torture someone else, even as they are tortured. Such is their insanity and willfulness.

Rational consciousness is the only method provided by creation to open the heavenly regions of the human mind. This consciousness is acquired from acknowledging and understanding Divine revelation given to the human race over the course of its history. In the Judaeo-Christian history, God’s spiritual-rational ideas are hidden in the Letter of the Threefold Word – the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Writings. Knowing and understanding the ideas and principles given in the Threefold Word, arranges the mind in a heavenly form so that one can feel and think in a way that is heavenly. This then becomes our life to eternity. The power to elevate consciousness and open the spiritual levels of the mind resides in the spiritual-rational ideas that are contained in the spiritual messages of the Threefold Word. One can read the Threefold Word without acknowledging that there is a hidden message to be extracted by applying the code of correspondences.

But those who are willing to acknowledge such a possibility can discover it for themselves by studying the code of correspondences given in the Writings, and applying it to each sentence in the Threefold Word. The moment one starts doing this, one is enlightened from within. Such is the power of the spiritual-rational correspondences. These are actually forms of higher truth that descend from heaven and enter the mind from within. There they meet up with the Letter of the verse, or its literal meaning. The instant these two meet up in our conscious mind, we experience enlightenment. This occurs because the spiritual-rational truth hidden within the literal meaning, is now perceived within the natural-rational truth of the literal meaning. To consciously see the spiritual meaning within the natural meaning, is called enlightenment.

Enlightenment is the resultant effect in consciousness of the Lord’s Co-presence. God is present within the spiritual meaning because this is from Him, and what is from God, remains Divine in our consciousness. The Co-presence of God in our conscious awareness, moment by moment, and hour by hour, all day long, is called the angelic life. God’s Co-presence causes us to be lifted up to Him. This lifting up process of consciousness takes place by an opening of the uppermost portions of the human mind. The mind at birth contains all the levels and portions it is capable of from creation. But only the lowest part, called the corporeal and sensual mind, are opened with the developing child and young adult. In mature adulthood, the next level of the mind can be opened or made operational. This occurs when we acquire intelligence by study, education, practice, and experience.

Once the natural-rational mind is opened, which is the middle layer, the adult can begin reformation of character, which is called regeneration. The self-modification efforts are empowered and made to succeed when we appeal to God for help, knowing that God wants to give it, is ready to give it, and gives it. Our appeal to God brings us closer to Him, especially if we are sincere. This means that we teach ourselves to love Him, to respect Him in our mind, to strive to know His revelations, and to follow them as guide. We thus incorporate the Divine truth from without, from the literal meaning of His revelations. We apply this truth to our life, to our moment by moment choices, emotions, and intentions. This application is done in the Co-presence of God. It is accompanied with shame, remorse, fear, and repentance. We compel ourselves to shun the evil thought or delight, to judge it in the light of truth, to condemn it, to banish it, to withhold ourselves from doing it. We do this over and over again until God puts an end to it by removing that evil tendency in us. We are born with innumerable such evil tendencies that must be removed by this process of regeneration.

To the extent that we do this, and at the rate that we do it, we become more and more enlightened, which means that our conscious awareness is raised to the uppermost portion of our mind called heaven. This is where God resides in our mind. God cannot descend below this level in our mind. Instead, at the lower levels, God exists only in appearances of truth called correspondences. The lowest portion of the mind called corporeal-sensual is filled with sensuous correspondences such as order, pattern, beauty, variety, harmony, contrast, reciprocity, and many others. These can be turned by the mind into opposites such as disorder, randomness, ugliness, sameness, disharmony, confusion, isolation, and many others. You can see that natural-rational correspondences in our mind are based on sensory input. Therefore, natural-rational correspondences cannot open the higher portions of the mind, which require a different input, not from the natural world through the physical senses, but from the spiritual world through the rational senses called the inner sense, or the inner eye, or spiritual understanding. This spiritual understanding requires the opening of the middle level of the mind, which is called the rational level of thinking and feeling. This level of consciousness is above the natural order of things. It is a closer level to God and His Co-presence in our mind at that level is holier, closer, and more loving. That is, we can accept or receive more intense loving from Him.

This more intense loving is made possible by the presence of spiritual-rational correspondences. These appearances of Divine Truth are more genuine, less distorted by the natural mind. Hence our consciousness rises to a new level of inner spirituality, though not yet to the celestial level. With the conscious awareness and perception of spiritual-rational correspondences we are empowered to a higher degree so that God can reveal to us our deeper faults and weaknesses, those that oppose and resist the development of our celestial mind, or heaven. Now we begin a new higher phase of our regeneration through this higher enlightenment. Now we attack these new more subtle evils in our tendencies, over and over again, until God can remove them. As they are removed, He can also open and operationalize the heaven within us. We have now at last begun our new state of life as a genuine human being, as intended and crated by God. This now begins an endless of progression of further development to eternity.

You can see from these considerations that God could not reveal the spiritual-rational truths to the minds of the generations that were not yet prepared for it. Had He revealed it to them, they would have rejected it, and profaned it, that is, used for evil or selfish purposes. This would have destroyed their capacity to be rational, hence to be human and exist in their heavenly state. Clearly God could not do this. Therefore the spiritual-rational ideas were hidden in a code, to be revealed later, when the generations can understand it and accept it. This age has now come—since the 18^th century when the books of the Writings were written and published by Swedenborg. Since then, the Writings are gradually spreading around the world, having been translated in many languages, a work that continues today by the few who have found and recognized this priceless human treasure. So it happened with me, when I came across the Writings in 1981 while browsing the shelves in our university library. My mind had been adequately prepared by science and an interest in spirituality. I was able to understand the Writings and from then on my mind has been rearranged and reformed in harmony with this knowledge. This rearrangement was produced not merely by my understanding the Writings, but by applying this understanding to my life – thinking, willing, intending, and feeling. Any human being, regardless of cultural background, can now read the Writings and rearrange the mind into a heavenly form. By this means we guarantee our eternal happiness. Nothing in this world can be more important than that task.

But what about the vast majority of people who do not find the Writings, do not read it, or even, having read it, do not care for it?

The Writings explain that every individual awakens in the world of spirits at the death of the physical body. This occurs of “resuscitation” takes approximately 36 hours. Upon conscious awakening in the spirit-body we assume a new life of immortality that will never end. We have freedom to explore what that life is going to be. But in the course of time, no more than a few months, speaking subjectively, the individual undergoes an inevitable physiological change whose result is that the interior loves and motives come to the fore of the character so that they are now in the open and striving to fulfill themselves. This is a moment of great enjoyment as people suddenly feel freed from inhibition and suppression. At last they can act overtly how they really feel. At last they can pursue their passions, whatever they are. Swedenborg witnessed these things happening as he was in their company for 27 years. The Writings explain that those who arrive in the world of spirits with an unregenerated character often surprise themselves that they hold these emotions and desires hidden within. This is especially true of those who had a religious life that was only outward rather than inward, as will be explained in what follows. But there are many who arrive with a strong conscience, having spent a lifetime on earth compelling themselves to follow inner standards of right and wrong, of good and bad. Since they have this inner capacity through a life of conscience, they are able to accept new instruction about God and heaven. Even if they had no prior religion or regardless of their prior religion, they are now capable of accepting new truths they did not know before. This instruction in new truths is arranged for them by God through appropriate others from the heavenly region who love nothing more than to open the rational-spiritual consciousness of newcomers so that they may be admitted to heaven where they are.

Your fate in heaven or in hell depends therefore not on your religion, sin, atheism, or belief system. It depends only on your inner character, whether it is regenerate or not. I predict that as the decades and centuries progress, more an more people will be exposed to spiritual-rational correspondences through the spread of True Science in public education and the popular culture, until at last it has become universal. Thus the human race will be lifted to its next phase of evolution.

The dawning age of True Science has now been initiated. God is the only True Scientist and His rational ideas are the only genuine truths by which the human race can become angelic. These new scientific revelations are given through natural language and historical events, by necessity, since the natural mind will not accept the rational version of it in the form of theistic science. But after the mind is developed through sectarian religion and materialist science, the rational or spiritual mind can be opened and scientific revelation accessed and described.

The presentation that follows is not that science and religion are compatible, but that they are each part of a necessary progression of the human mind. The surprising thing is that True Science, or rational faith, ends up on top, while mystical faith and ritual faith end up at the bottom. To figure this out, please read on. To those who are Christians, I can say, Fear not, your faith will be vindicated, not contradicted. To those who are Jews, I can say, be not offended by the appearances, God is the God of all people. To the Muslims I can say, it is permitted to search for scientific truth, even in heaven. To the Buddhist I say, the right posture is always the one that points to good. To the Baaha'i I can say that unity is achieved through perfection in diversity, not homogeneity. To the Hindu I can point to the marvels of heavenly places that are mentioned in their religious texts. Their mythical stories embody the idea of spiritual geography, which is the idea that places and names are states of mind in every individual. To the atheist and secular humanist I can say, Behold, this is the supremacy of science over religion, but not the atheist kind, the theistic kind.

If you asked me up front, what is the most important conclusion of this presentation for your own benefit, I would say "character building for your eternal life." In other words, this presentation gives you the scientific rationale for the need to take charge of your character building as preparation for your afterlife, which starts a few hours after your physical body is dead, as observed many times by Swedenborg. The character we inherit is born attached to harmful tendencies which if allowed to proceed, necessarily corrupts the entire character, and you end up an evil, selfish person who believes to be a good person. And that's spiritual death. In other words, that fixes you with a permanently sick character that is passed on to your spiritual body ad death. The final result is that you cannot tolerate any other life from then on but a life in the hellish parts of your mind, in company with others who are also in similar low lying places of the mind, or of the spiritual world. Together you form a society of torturers, taking turns in inflicting horror on others who then get their turn against you, and this to forever. Nothing can be more scary and discouraging than to contemplate that fate. Would you not want to take step to avoid it? That’s what I told myself.

You will find rational proof, and empirical proof, that your inherited evils can be healed by a process provided by God, called the Reformation and Regeneration of your character. That's what this presentation is really about. If you are deep into your religion, this study will only strengthen your worship and loyalty to the truths that are contained in your religion. If your religion contains falsities put there by people's errors of selfishness, then this presentation will allow you to see them, isolate them, set them aside, without hurting the rest of your religion. If you don't have a religion, you can jump directly to True Science by studying the Writings of Swedenborg. The result will be the same, namely, the regeneration of your character and the adequate preparation of your mind for heavenly life which can start immediately after death.

Are you ready? One approach that helps me stay focused on sequences of rational paragraphs such as these, is to read the sentences out loud, as if to someone present, or, as if you're recording on tape. With a little practice, you can achieve this effect by reading the sentences “out loud to yourself” as it were, which is easier since it doesn’t involve the speaking musculature except in vestigial form, hence it is not as tiring. I believe this helps our understanding because it slows down the semantic input. It helps if you read it with meaning. It helps tremendously if you're willing to re-read a sentence more than once, before going on, unless it's crystal clear. It's not easy rapid reading with half of your mind solving some other issue in your mind. Since the mind doesn’t stay completely focused, we can compensate by repeating sentences and paragraphs before going on.

Treat yourself well, and avoid assuming that you're dumb or lack something, if an idea or explanation seems obscure or unclear. Treat me well in your mind, and avoid assuming I'm being ridiculous or arrogant, if an idea strikes you as unacceptable or offensive. If you have that sense, keep trying to understand it by going over it again. Neither blame yourself, nor me, nor the idea. Instead, re-read it again and exert your will upon it, forcing your rational mind to consider it. Remember this: you are not doing this alone. God supervises every detail of your understanding or lack of it. And He does this by means of connecting your spirit to others in the spiritual world. As you read one sentence you might be connected to this spiritual society, and as you move on to another sentence, you might be connected to another society, and so on. God is in charge of your mental progression, of every single detail of it in your mind. All you need to do is to put up the effort as if from yourself. Do not sit there meditating, waiting for influx of truth from God to hit you or enter you. This cannot work in that way. Influx of truth from God is solely and only through rational understanding of His Word, the Letter of it first, then the inner coded meaning, and at last, the spiritual enlightenment of understanding spiritual-rational ideas and concepts. Once you are enlightened, you can continue more easily and rapidly in your progress in True Science.

To be enlightened means that you can operate in the spiritual-rational region of your mind. You are then conscious of spiritual-rational ideas, meanings, or truths. These are dualist, and far above the sight of natural-rational ideas and concepts we have from self-intelligence and other humans.

All of this is possible only if you're going to assume that what I say here is possibly the truth. I call this the positive bias, and it is the only approach I know of that lets you open your rational mind when your natural mind opposes it, as it naturally does.

The Writings of Swedenborg present an integrated and comprehensive developmental theory of the psychology of regeneration. Three successive phases of individual growth correspond to three historical phases in religion. This is a situation where cultural history recapitulates individual biography . In other words, knowing the history of religions allows us to draw parallel developmental changes in individuals of every generation. For instance, in the history of Christianity, the three evolutionary phases of religion are evidenced by the content of Sacred Scripture, namely the Old Testament (in Hebrew), the New Testament (in Greek), and the Third Testament (in Latin). These three Testaments represent the characteristics of the three phases of religious behavior which we may call, respectively, the Moses phase, the Paul phase, and the Swedenborg phase. In other words, every individual who undergoes regeneration or character change for the sake of the afterlife, goes through these three phases of spiritual development. How deeply and significantly we move within each phase depends on our own willingness, as shall be explained.

5. Phase 1 – Ritual Faith or the Moses-Phase (Sectarianism, Fundamentalism)

The Moses-phase of religion is least internal, or relatively external, in the sense that the laws of conduct are not rationally justified to the believer but given as Divine Commandment to obey. Whatever is done from understanding is higher spiritually than that which is done from obedience, authority, persuasion, or blind faith. Following a Divine Commandment from understanding is a higher spiritual understanding that following the same Commandment out of obedience, respect, or fear. In the Moses phase of spirituality we follow prescribed rituals dictated by tradition and denominational membership. Verses of Scripture are applied to life in a literal sense without concern for its more interior or spiritual sense. The spiritual sense of all Divine Commandments give us a rational understanding of God and how He regenerates our character by means of daily temptations.

The diagram below shows the sequence involved in regeneration of our character. First, it is the Lord who regenerates since human beings have zero power of their own to do anything. Second, the Lord arranges circumstances around us and prepares our mind within us, so that we may go through a temptation on some particular occasion. Third, our reaction must be an as-of self struggle in which we compel ourselves to oppose the impulse that attracts us to evil delights and to obey our conscience. The Lord infuses power into this self-compulsion. Without the struggle and pain of self-compulsion it is not possible for the Lord to regenerate us – or else He would do so with every person from birth onward. But an angel cannot be created out of us except in spiritual freedom of choice and self-compulsion according to conscience and doctrine. Fourth, our self-denial allows the Lord to cut off our association with the spiritual societies from whom comes this particular evil delight. As the old association is cut, the Lord can connect us with new spiritual societies from whom we receive good loves and delights.

tempt.gif (6814 bytes)

We can see rationally that giving us Commandments to follow is the process God uses to gradually modify our inborn evil character. Those who are taught the Divine Commandments in childhood have both a conscience and religious doctrine to rely on in the fierce struggle against daily temptations. Those who did not receive a religious education, nevertheless have the doctrine of morality embedded in their cultural and intellectual socialization process. They also have a doctrine and a conscience, but since this doctrine is natural, not spiritual, the Lord can only bring natural temptations, which they can overcome by means of their rules of morality. The Lord gives them the power to overcome in their moral struggles, and thereby the Lord establishes protected and hidden “remains” in their character, which can in the afterlife, be used to receive genuine spiritual and theistic ideas, wherewith they can enjoy a heavenly existence. We can see the outcome of failing to follow a commandment of religion, conscience, or moral dictate, namely, that we get stuck with much evil which prevents us from being regenerated, which is the healing of our inherited evil character. Without being regenerated we cannot be saved for heavenly life. What an awesome and terrible tragedy!

We need to understand the resistance we experience to spiritual development in phase 1 thinking and feeling. In this fundamentalist phase of religious behavior we tend to be orthodox, literalist, dogmatic, and intolerant, and there is a lack of clear separation between cultural and religious loyalty. I call it the Moses-phase because the Five Books of Moses (or Pentateuch or Torah) represent the spiritual mentality of the Old Testament civilizations that spanned for many centuries in history. This is a pre-spiritual religious orientation, in which external rituals, prescriptions, and proscriptions are strict and unforgiving, exacting harsh punishment and retribution upon the unfaithful and disloyal. Compliance is from external fear and superstitious or magical beliefs, and is attendant with the hope of reward or merit. In this phase 1 consciousness, spiritual status differences are based on one's degree of compliance and earned merit through strict literalistic adherence to ritual. This idea of the spiritual is not actually a spiritual idea but a natural idea of a spiritual topic. There is no bogus spiritual only bogus natural regarding the spiritual. Everything that is actually spiritual comes to us from God through the vertical community of influx. Religious superstitions and magical beliefs in prayer and ritual, are not spiritual beliefs or perceptions, but natural beliefs regarding spiritual topics. Only by crossing into phase 2 consciousness can we receive and understand spiritual ideas regarding spiritual things and regarding natural things.

Ritualizing is a form of literalism. For instance, while growing up in an Orthodox Jewish sub-culture, I was raised to perform prayer rituals on several required occasions during any ordinary week day, and many more rituals added on the Sabbath and other holy days that were to be observed. The reading of prescribed daily prayers were required in the morning, late afternoon, and late evening. Blessings were required before a meal, after the meal, when drinking or eating anything at any time, when witnessing a natural disaster, when seeing certain things on the street (e.g., a funeral, a Christian priest, a police officer, a physically challenged or handicapped person, a deformed face or body, a corpse, and many other such things). Each occasion had its own prayer written by the sages and rabbis over the centuries. Each enclave, tribe, ghetto, or orthodox grouping kept track of their own rituals and they overlapped with each other to the extent they shared a common history or were in physical contact. In the broad sense, all these rituals had to harmonize with what was in the Old Testament and the cumulative historical writings and cited opinions of the Rabbis that are recorded in the Talmud, Toiswes, and Rabbinical Commentaries and books of Jewish law and jurisprudence based on the Old Testament.

Now here is a totally remarkable fact: I did not understand these prayers in the Hebrew language, yet this did not reduce their power or necessity in the minds of my family and tribe. I was drilled to read ancient Hebrew phonetically and required to memorize large chunks that were needed for these daily prayer rituals. As far as I can remember, there was never an emphasis on understanding the recited text. This was not considered important or essential, only the memorizing and the reciting at specified times. Among my cousins and uncles, the understanding of Hebrew was mostly limited to reading the prayers phonetically without being able to translate them into the vernacular language, which was Yiddish or the European language of the region. The result, as I could ascertain later as an adult, was that the majority of Orthodox Jews who performed these prayer rituals every day, did not understand the meanings that went with them except for a few words here and there. This fact alone proves my point: that the fundamentalist phase of religion is based on literalism, which involves the idea that the words and the act of saying them have a magical power to move Heaven or God. The strength of the magical power varies with the holiness or merit of the person saying it. More than once that I can recall, I accompanied my mother to visit the reigning local Rabbi of the tribe or group, or else a visiting Rabbi who had a reputation for extra holiness. The purpose was to have the holy man intercede on behalf of someone, either my mother or some relative, involving an issue of sickness, pregnancy, or financial undertaking. After the intercessionary prayers, money was expected for the service.

This pattern of reliance on the superstitious power of external rituals and holy objects, is evident in other religious groups that are in this fundamentalist phase of development. History tells us that most Catholics up to the middle of the twentieth century, were required to hear and recite prayers in Latin, a language they did not understand. When the Bible was first translated into a common language by an Englishman in the 16th century, he was arrested and decapitated for it. Of course, shortly thereafter, the King James translation was commissioned under a royal edict. Not long after that, the Protestant Revolution started with its new reliance on one's personal study and understanding of the Bible as a requirement of faith.

In general, there are so many rituals that evolve over time that less and less members of that religion understand all the particulars. In the course of time, most members no longer understand most of the rituals. At this point the spiritual value of the rituals declines, and sometimes becomes anti-religious or cultist, harming all its adherents. Ritual turns into magic, which is used for selfish and evil purposes and corrupts the practitioner. Subconsciously they get more and more involved with evil spirits who lead them towards themselves in hell, and their spiritual development is arrested totally and forever. When they pass on, the spirits they had been with await them and take them to their abodes in hell from which there is no inner desire to return, ever.

Evils are as it were heavy, and fall of themselves into hell; and so also falsities that are from evil (HD 170)

All religions that are in the fundamentalist phase evolve similar behaviors involving the personal use of holiness and merit that may be attached to some physical object or person. Holy shrines and miracles performed by holy men exist in all major religions on our earth when they pass through their own Moses phase. Intercessionary prayer, either for expected voluntary offerings, or for charged services, are offered in many Christian churches today, and is a mainstay feature of radio and television evangelism.

Besides the magic or power of ritual and holiness, sectarianism leads to an anti-scientific attitude and orientation that is harmful for intellectual and rational development. An example is the doctrine of Creationism, which is the rejection of scientific knowledge and rational thinking whenever these appear to be contradicted by a literal and unenlightened reading of the Old Testament.

The Moses phase is based on the emotion of external fear, which is external or below the spiritual level. Phase 1 is only an entrance place for regeneration, but not quite, unless it is followed by phase 2. The motive to move on to phase 2 is the motive of religious universalism and personalism, which allows a relationship to a Divine Human God that is entirely independent of one’s culture or ethnic background. This new higher mode of consciousness removes the evils of sectarianism which befall those who stay at the phase 1 level of thinking and feeling. Sectarianism prevents regeneration of our inherited evil character. In my own case history, I was in my early forties before I moved into the Paul-Phase of Christianity. It happened when I decided to read the New Testament for the first time! One week I was in the Moses phase and in the next week I was in the Paul phase. The transition was accompanied by strong emotions of fervor and joy. Some of these changes I experienced are described in these articles:

The Story of Our Conversion: www.theisticpsychology.org/articles/conversion.html

The Coming Swedenborgian Revolution: www.theisticpsychology.org/students//shintani/logos.html

6. Phase 2 – Mystical Faith or the Paul-Phase (Personalism, Universalism)

What is beyond religious ritual? Why is religious ritual by itself, without rational meaning or understanding, harmful to one's intellect and spirit? In what way is religious ritual by itself similar to superstition, cult, or black magic?

These issues must be rationally resolved in our mind if we are to enter the second phase of spiritual consciousness. Ritual is a physical, corporeal, and natural activity and involvement. There is nothing holy in the natural part of the ritual itself, nor in its performative execution. There is nothing holy in the ink on paper of the verses of Sacred Scripture. My childhood years were obsessed with ritualistic fears that are natural consequences of fundamentalist rituals: What I must do if I forget to say the appropriate prayer before I took my first swallow of water in the morning, or what to do if I started evening prayer before I could see three stars, or if I wore my new shoes without having said the new shoes prayer before putting it on. I heard adults around me curse someone with such and such plagues for doing something or not doing something. There definitely was the implication that the curse had power. Superstition was mixed with holiness and sacredness, so that it was not easy for anyone to tease them part by rational reflection, even if they had the rare motivation to do so.

The natural history of sectarianism, when it's not transcended into the next phase, is to engender a series of degrading personality traits that harm self and society:

q sectarianism

q superstition

q prejudice

q fanaticism

q racial hatred

q xenophobia

q closed mindedness

q anti-intellectualism

q cultism

q resistance to assimilation.

These mental attitudes and values operate at the Moses phase of spiritual consciousness. It is not yet rational, not yet good, not yet true. It is a corporeal spirituality rather than a sensuous or rational one. The Writings reveal that those who arrive into the afterlife with their mentality or spirituality developed no further, consistently make choices that involve them deeper and deeper into evil and insanity, so that their fate is to end up in hellish habitations and regions in the spiritual world. They end up in those regions in the afterlife because their mind is an image of hellish things, having been formed in this life by negativity, selfishness, stupidity, and the inward hatred for God, heaven, innocence, chastity. They have evolved a mind set that is against good things and true things. While in this world, they could be this way and still appear normal citizens, even successful people. But as soon as they transition into the spirit-body, their interior character comes to the fore, no longer inhibited by fear or gain. As a result, they sink into the hells where their life is exciting at the beginning, but gradually turns into misery and suffering that cannot be described. The Writings give us many details of the unenviable lot of these people – it is scary and nearly incredible.

Clearly, then, it is most important to not get stuck in this first phase of spiritual consciousness. There is only one condition that must occur in order for anyone in any religion to move from the sectarian phase of their spirituality (phase 1) to the personalist phase (phase 2). It’s this: the understanding, and acceptance, of the idea of scientific dualism, that is, the idea that we are simultaneously citizens of two worlds, one natural, the other spiritual.

Note carefully the word “simultaneously.” Even in our first phase of spiritual consciousness we can accept the idea of successive dualism, which refers to the belief that the natural world is going to be destroyed and a new spiritual world will be established. This does not allow the idea of a simultaneous dualism. Phase 1 spiritual thinking rejects the idea that we are in both worlds right now. This does not make sense and does not appear logical in that mode of thinking. But when we take a rational step upward in our mental operation we become enlightened, which means, that it is obvious to us that we are dual citizens right now. We reflect for instance on the nature of thoughts and feelings in our mind, and we ask, ”Where are they?” and “What are they made of?” Our rational understanding informs us that thoughts and feelings cannot be weighed and measured because they are not material or physical entities. They are mental entities, and we are sure that mental means spiritual because we are told in the Word of God that love and wisdom are spiritual. And so we realize that mind is the same as spirit, and that the mental world is the same as the spiritual world. Perhaps we do not yet understand the details fully, as we will in our phase 3, but we understand the general rationality of it.

This second phase in our race’s spiritual history was initiated by Jesus of Nazareth whose many sayings depend on this one saying He said to His disciples who wanted to know where is God's Kingdom: Heaven is within you. With this one brief saying, a new spiritual paradigm was ushered in – phase 2 in the spiritual evolution of the race.

6.2 New Testament Sayings of Jesus and their Spiritual Meaning

Study the following table. Note especially how the Word of the New Testament introduces a whole new set of ideas about the existence of spirits, demons, evil angels, devils. In the Word of the Old Testament not much is revealed about these entities. In the New Testament we are given new scientific facts about the nature of these demons and how they communicate with the people on earth. Obviously, the evil spirits are in the spiritual world and so is our spirit. They can therefore interact. There are also consequences to our physical body on earth because our spirit and our physical body are tied to each other by the Divine laws of correspondences, as these have been revealed in the Word of the Third Testament, or the Writings. You will note that in the following Sayings of Jesus many scientific details about the spiritual world are revealed.

Our spiritual consciousness is elevated to phase 2 when we acknowledge these facts as scientific and rational.

This may be a stumbling block to you, dear reader. You may feel threatened in your faith, or else in your secular beliefs. How can the sayings of Jesus in the New Testament 2000 years ago be considered scientific today by a modern person?

You can understand this puzzle if you’re willing to hear the answer. This means to lay aside your opposition to the idea that the New Testament contains scientific revelations. You would not oppose the idea if it could be shown that the idea of scientific revelations being given in the Threefold Word does not in any way detract from the idea that the Threefold Word is the Word of the Lord and is the unchanging everlasting absolute Divine Truth from beginning to end. The two ideas can be taken separately and independently, as well as reinforcing each other. This can be demonstrated by rational consideration.

First, the Threefold Word, being a Divine document, contains an infinite amount of knowledge and wisdom. Second, this source of endless knowledge can be mined by all the generations of humankind that are still to come, and who will receive the Threefold Word as the Divine Truth from the Lord. Third, the knowledge that can be extracted from the Threefold Word concerns reality, the universe, creation, regeneration, heaven, hell, Divine Providence and its laws of operation, the method of creation and maintenance of the universe, the anatomy of the human mind, the forces of evil that oppose morality, the life after death, the relationship between our behavior and our fate in eternity, and many other things. Clearly, this information is scientific information. God is the one and only True Scientist whose Divine Rational Mind has planned and created this universe, and now manages it with absolute rational rules and laws by means of Divine truth in infinite variety. If this is not science, then what is?

Science is the systematic investigation and explanation of reality. If you assume that God exists and that the Threefold Word is His Divine Truth, then you can grant that the knowledge and understanding we have from this Divine Truth is science. Truth is science and Divine Truth is Divine Science. “Science” is a Latin word meaning knowledge (from the verb “scire” to know). All knowledge is science, as long as the knowledge is rationally constructed and evaluated. The essence of science is rationality, and the highest rationality is spiritual rationality. The Threefold Word contains the highest truth and is the source of all rational spirituality. Without the scientific revelations contained in the Threefold Word, science is condemned to materialism, monism, and spiritual insanity. In this life spiritual insanity does not break forth to the outside visible and conscious world, but remains locked into the unconscious spiritual mind. When we make the transition to the afterlife, barely 36 hours after the death of the body, we awaken in our spirit-body and feel fine, for a few days. But inexorably the outward personality and social put-ons and scripts that we brought with us in the mind, fall away, discarded like old clothes, and the inner loves come to the fore. Then spiritual insanity shows itself, and there is no other place to go but downward in hell, where we share a very sad fate with others who are also spiritually insane. All this can be avoided by action now.

Let your rational spirituality develop and grow. Let your faith be stronger as a result of learning the facts of True Science. These are the scientific revelations in the Threefold Word. We need to take them into our mind, to form our ideas from them, to eliminate all ideas in our mind that are contrary to them, and to perform our daily tasks in accordance with them. This is the purpose God has given us the Threefold Word. It is called regeneration and involves the struggles of character reformation. We can perform this task more effectively by using scientific methods and facts revealed by God. I call it True Science because it is science, and because it is true. All other science is not science and not true. Only God’s Science is True Science. And we can take up True Science into our mind, into our understanding, into our acceptance and love, and then God can elevate us to the celestial human state called heaven in eternity.

If you are more ready to accept the idea that the New Testament is a collection of scientific revelations, we can proceed with an analysis of some of the Sayings of Jesus, to show what scientific revelations are contained in them. The following selections give many details concerning how we are to move from phase 1 thinking and feeling to phase 2. You will note that the scientific information is not in the literal meaning but in a deeper spiritual meaning. Take for instance the first mentioned item in the Table, which talks about Jesus driving out demons and about the Kingdom of God having arrived. Where is the science in this?

There is much science evident in this if you are joining scientific dualism by accepting the idea that there is a spiritual world and a natural world, each with its own laws and phenomena. Since we have no sensory perception into the spiritual world it is obvious that for us to know anything about it, God must reveal it to us. Hence the necessity of scientific revelations in the Threefold Word. We can pick up scientific facts in every sentence of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Writings. Here, looking at what the Lord says to us in Matthew 12:28, we can see that demons exist – which is a scientific fact we must be aware of, and that demons prevent us from entering heaven (“the kingdom of God”). Getting rid of demons must therefore be the prime task we each set for ourselves in this life. It is more important even than getting rid of a deadly virus that attacks our physical body. The Lord also reveals in this sentence what medical methods we must use to get rid of the demons, and that is given in the words “I drive out demons.” Only the Lord can drive out our demons, and therefore we must turn to Him and His medical advice for how to get rid of the demons.

New Testament Sayings of Jesus	Phase 2 Interpretation that erases phase 1
Matthew 12:28 But if I drive out demons by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you	The Kingdom of God is the spiritual realm, and it includes, heaven, hell, and our mind or spirit, with which demons or spirits interact.
Matthew 19:24 Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.	A “rich man” designates all those who are in phase 1 or the Moses Old Testament state. The “kingdom of God” is the spiritual realm in our mind, that is, phase 2 understanding. One cannot enter phase 2 without abandoning phase 1. To get into the Paul phase, one must give up the Moses phase (“rich man”). To get into personalism (New Testament perspective), one must abandon sectarianism (Old Testament perspective).
Matthew 21:31 "Which of the two did what his father wanted?" "The first," they answered. Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.	“Tax collectors and prostitutes” designate that part of our external natural life, or religious ritualism, which is harmful to others (like dishonest tax collectors referred to here) and insincere in their show of love (like prostitutes are known to be). External rituals by themselves are corrupt and spiritually useless. We can become spiritual, that is, “enter the kingdom of God,” when we abandon our external corrupted and self-serving ritualisms, for the sake of internal purification of the mind.
Matthew 21:43 Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.	“Taken away from you" indicates that the phase 1 external sectarianism cannot become a spiritual entry point to the inner realm of heaven within you. Rather, you must adopt a system of worship that produces its fruit, that is, becomes internal, which is the true worship or "fruit" of religion. Internal worship regards our intentions, not merely our outward deeds separate from our intentions. “Fruit” refers to successful character reformation by which we become sincere and have good will towards the neighbor.
Mark 1:15 "The time has come," he said. "The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the good news!"	"The time has come" refers to the crossing from phase 1 to phase 2 religious behavior. This was not possible before. "Repent" means to acknowledge that one's phase 1 worship is not yet spiritual or heavenly, thus, it is self-centered and based on false doctrine (e.g., meritoriousness, personal holiness, predestination or "being chosen"). "The Good News" marks the beginning of a new human evolution in which internal worship (New Testament state) becomes possible. Only external worship was possible before (Old Testament state).
Mark 4:11 He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables.	"The secret" refers to the existence and availability of the inner church (inner worship), that is, the opening of phase 2 religious behavior. "To you" refers to those who hear and accept this revelation, and have made the decision to abandon their external ritual worship in the form of fundamentalist sectarianism, trading this in for an internal worship of personalism. "To those on the outside" refers to our refusal to hear and accept this revelation of the existence of an inner worship. "Everything is said in parables" means that for them, the statements about inner worship make no sense, that is, they see nothing in the “good news" even as they continue to cling to the former external worship and idea they had of God. To them, their external worship seems internal, and they do not acknowledge another worship that is internal.
Mark 9:1 And he said to them, "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power.".	“Tasting death" means rejecting the "good news" of new internal worship now available, the result of which is spiritual death, or eternal life in the hellish parts of the human mind. Those who "are standing here" are our thoughts and feelings when in a state of inner worship. These phase 2 thoughts and feelings are entirely different from our thoughts and feelings in phase 1 external worship. Instead of leading to hell, this inner worship leads to Heaven, which is "to see the kingdom of God coming with power,” that is, with the reality of truth. These are those who “do not taste death.”
Mark 9:47 And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell.	"To be thrown into hell" is to stay in external worship which leads to corruption of character or "sin" (e.g., sectarianism, hatred, literalism, intolerance, pride, meritoriousness). This process delivers the person to hell after the death of the body. The "eye to be plucked out" refers to our self-intelligence which is inside all our religious concepts in the state of external worship, and is attached to a virulent virus called "meritoriousness" or egotism. "Two eyes" means unreformed sectarianism, stuck in external worship which is merely natural and egotistical.
Mark 10:14 When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.	"Little children" refers to a mental state of reception to truth, that is, a lack of resistance to truth. Resistance to truth is something we acquire as we leave off being children, part of which involves a motive on self-reliance. When, as adults, we hear the "good news" of internal worship and dualism, we have a resistance to it. To overcome this resistance, we must revert to a state of innocent acceptance of inner worship revealed to us in the Word ("kingdom of God"). This "belongs to children" means that inner worship is available only after we reject our former Moses-phase of fundamentalist sectarianism, which is based on salvation by performing external rituals, not on internal recognition and adoration of God as one’s personal Savior (phase 2 “Personalism”). “Little children” represent this inner worship on account of their innocence and absence of egotism and self-reliance.
Mark 10:23 Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!"	"The disciples of Jesus" refers to our acceptance of the new revelation of inner worship (phase 2 Personalism). "The rich" refers to the intellectually rich, those who rely on secular humanism and materialistic science, and have gathered much knowledge that arouses resistance to dualism and the inner state of eternal heaven. The Moses-phase is called "the rich" because it attributes to self what belongs to God (merit and holiness gained by performing prescribed rituals). This reliance on self is spiritually deadly because it opposes inner worship, hence leads only to life in hell forever.
Luke 6:20 Looking at his disciples, he said: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.	“Disciples” of Jesus refers to His followers, those who accept the “good news” of inner worship. They are called "poor" because they give up the external worship that keeps self at the center, and God on the side (or outside). The "poor," that is, those who give up self-reliance and merit, are "blessed" which means that they are undergoing the mental or spiritual process of rebirth, reformation, and regeneration, the result of which is eternal life in Heaven.
Luke 7:28 I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."	"Those born of women" are the thoughts of our external worship, which is merely a natural birth, not spiritual, because it relies on literalism of revelation rather than a spiritual interpretation of it. The literalism leads to natural sectarian thoughts rather than rational universal thoughts. "John the Baptist" represents our Old Testament worship based on literalism and ritualism. John being "the greatest" designates the highest possible form of phase 1 worship. The "least in the kingdom" refers to the initial beginnings of phase 2 worship, and this is "greater than John" because it is in a new paradigm and cannot be reached by going further and further with the old paradigm of worship.
Luke 9:62 Jesus replied, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."	"Fit for service" refers to continued development in our New Testament Paul- phase of inner worship. It is not the ultimate phase. Continuing the process of development in this inner worship is necessary, for it is not the final purpose of our journey. To "look back" means to resist the inward journey after beginning it. It means to fall back on the Moses phase of external worship. To "put our hand to the plow" is our inward journey to the celestial mind that is within us. This inward journey is like tilling the ground of our mind. This represents our daily effort at improving our character. In this inward journey, we must rely exclusively on spiritual ideas, and if we fall back or "look back" to our former natural ideas, we cannot complete our journey to heaven.
Luke 10:9 Heal the sick who are there and tell them, `The kingdom of God is near you.	"The sick" refers to our external worship that prevents our rebirth and regeneration in preparation for Heaven. "To heal" means to begin the process of rebirth, that is, reformation and regeneration, and this is accomplished when we accept the good news that the state of inner worship we are seeking, is "near you," that is, it is no farther than our thoughts and feelings. We must abandon our current thoughts and values, which are grounded in self and the material world, and begin daily life with new thoughts and feelings, those that are "near you" or inside of you. Our mind has an outside (which is called the natural mind), and an inside, which is called the rational or spiritual mind.
Luke 13:28 "There will be weeping there, and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, but you yourselves thrown out.	"Gnashing of teeth" refers to false beliefs. Swedenborg witnessed the sound of grating teeth coming from those in the spiritual world he conversed with about their false beliefs, which they took as truths, e.g., "Gnashing of teeth in the other life comes from those who believe that nature is everything and the Divine nothing (AC 5568)." Abraham" and the patriarchs and prophets, designate our external imagination of Heaven in the Moses phase. In this external belief system, we will see ourselves falling into our old idea of hell as some corporeal prison camp where we are held against our will ('thrown out").
Luke 13:29 People will come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast in the kingdom of God	People from all compass directions indicate all the religions of earth. "The feast" refers to their admission into the inner spiritual realms of the mind ("kingdom of God"). The former sectarianism of history and race will be replaced by the personalism of humankind, where we can see all people as children of the One God. The Word of the Third Testament (or Writings of Swedenborg) reveals that the perfection of Heaven is increased by its multi-religious composition, each Heavenly religion uniquely and most appropriately suited to each "mental genius" dispersed through the Earths in the Universe.
Luke 17:20-21 Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, `Here it is,' or `There it is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."	"Pharisees" refers to our Moses phase of external worship. Our religious idea in that state, of what is spiritual ("the kingdom of God"), is so external and materialistic, that it requires Heaven to be a natural phenomenon, in physical time and space, for us to see it, and hence to believe that it's something real. But the inner world of spirit, or Heaven and hell, cannot be perceived with the physical senses ("with your careful observation"), because it is a mental state ("within you"). The mind is the spiritual world. When the mind, or spirit, is extirpated at the death of the body, it is resuscitated within 36 hours, and awakes in a spiritual body in the spiritual world.
John 3:3 In reply Jesus declared, "I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again."	"To be born again" means to abandon our exclusive reliance on thoughts and feelings based in the natural mind (Moses-phase). We cross the threshold into the personalist New Testament Paul-phase, when we reject the idea that our Heavenly place is assigned to us in accordance with our merit, or personal effort at performing strict rituals of religion. We are reborn when our thoughts of ourselves begin to accept the new idea that all humans are God's children and that God does not show preference to a racial or religious group. Inner worship is personal, because spiritual, while outer worship is sectarian, because only natural.

Innumerable scientific revelations are contained in just these few verses of the New Testament. Let’s mention a few:

(1) There are demons and they can keep us from heaven.

(2) There is hell and we have to take care not to end up there.

(3) Only the Lord can defeat the demons, and therefore we must turn to Him to do it in us.

(4) To have an enlightened consciousness, we need to abandon sectarian thinking and feeling.

(5) To prepare ourselves for a life in heaven we must focus on reforming or elevating the inner life of thinking and feeling.

(6) There is external worship of ritual and tradition, which we get first, but then we must replace it with internal worship which looks to the reformation of our intentions and delights, that these may become purified for heavenly life.

(7) God gives us the choice of choosing spiritual death, which is life in hell, or life in heaven.

(8) Preparation for heavenly life is a gradual process of daily struggles to shun evil thoughts and feelings.

(9) Heavenly life is for the entire human race, regardless of religious denomination.

(10) Heaven and hell are in the mind, which overlaps with the spiritual world. They are not “places” or “locations” but states of mind.

(11). The only condition that makes heavenly life possible is the reformation and regeneration of our character, that is, our thoughts and feelings.

As we mature in our intellectual potentials, and to the extent that we cultivate discipline of character and conscience, we enter the Paul-phase of religion or spiritual consciousness. Now our religious behavior extends inward to our thoughts as well as our external conduct. We become intent in keeping our mind from being polluted or corrupted by selfish tendencies that are harmful or, are inconsiderate of others. Consider this earth-shattering, evolution-splitting statement by the Lord in the New Testament:

But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matt. 5:28

The mind of the Pharisees, that is, our mind in the external phase 1 worship, cannot fathom this Divine statement. How can we equate a sexy daydream with actual adultery in the act. What are the limits of this amazing statement? Does that mean that if I enjoy sexy movies, novels, or magazines and feel aroused, I'm committing adultery and will go to hell unless I change my mind about it? Yes, that's what it means. This is one of those "hard sayings" the Lord's audience was complaining about. Indeed, Swedenborg once accompanied a group of newcomers in the spiritual world for a visit to one of the Heavenly cities. After the men talked to some celestial husbands who greeted them, they were introduced to some young women, still not married. The men silently admired their grace and beauty. But the women quickly withdrew themselves. Later, one of the angel husbands explained that the young women ran away when the men started having lustful thoughts. To which they replied: How is it possible to see and appreciate such beauty of the female sex and not feel aroused? Indeed, one cannot--unless you have trained yourself to do it, while still in the physical body in this world before you pass on.

Such training of oneself is crucial because it confronts our Moses-phase thinking, and challenges it to a death duel. This kind of inner battle is called a spiritual temptation. In the Moses phase we have only natural temptations. The Old Testament gives us a number of episodes called temptations, as in these:

q Joseph resisting the seductive advances by Potiphar's wife

q David giving in to his unlawful union with Uriel's wife Bathsheba

q Abraham binding Isaac to sacrifice him according to God's directive

q Samson giving in to Dahlia's entreaties and revealing to her the secret of his hair

Our natural mind, bound to the literal meaning of these events, sees each of them as a trial by God to test the people’s loyalty to the ritual command of God. Keep yourself holy means keep yourself separate. The Jewish soldiers were commanded to avoid any intimate contact with women prior to battles in order to keep their body pure and unsoiled by corporeal desires and contact. Uriah touched the Holy Ark that was on a chariot being transported back to the City of David. He was trying to stop it from tumbling to the ground. He died for it, because it is not the intention that is regarded in this Moses phase, but the deed itself. It is an external view that fails to make internal distinctions, and thus gives a false view, an imagined view that fits with one's prejudices, and delights us in them.

Similarly, in the Moses phase we are not capable of understanding the personalist, universal, and symbolic idea that "neighbor" means "any human being" and therefore one is not allowed to mistreat strangers and enemies. In the external natural Moses phase, "Love thy neighbor" means love your family, friends, and all those that we like or share a fate with. To the extent that we accept the New Testament re-definition of "neighbor" as universalist and personal, namely, excluding no one, to that extent we have crossed into the inner worship, the spiritual worship of the New Testament.

The circle of application for being considerate to others now greatly expands. In the Moses-phase we define "neighbor" as those who are of the same ethnic or denominational group ("tribe", “blood relation”). In the Paul-phase we turn more inward towards the race's common humanity and feel compelled to give the status of "neighbor" to all human beings, irrespective of ethnic-denominational identification. As we be begin to think more interiorly we focus less and less on the external features of culture and religious ritual or regulation. The sentences of Scripture are understood in a more spiritual and personal sense, and one is affected more by the spirit than the letter. Compliance to faith becomes more personal and individual rather than congregational or public. In the Moses-phase "holiness" of a person corresponds to consciensciousness of obeying all regulations with religious fervor. In the Paul-phase holiness is detached from "religious works," that is, from merit or reward, and instead is seen as something imparted to all the faithful through membership status (e.g., those who are baptized). In the Swedenborg-phase (to be discussed later), holiness is no longer seen as a quality of the individual and one's membership, but of God's conscious rational presence within the individual when engaged in striving for good and truth for the sake of character reformation and regeneration.

Quoting from the Writings:

When the disciples could not heal the lunatic, Jesus said unto them, "O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you?" And Jesus healed him. And he told the disciples, that they could not heal him by reason of their unbelief (Matt. xxvii. 14, and following verses).

Jesus came into his own country, and they were there "offended in him, he said, A prophet is not without honor save in his own country, and in his own house. And he did not many mighty works there, because of their unbelief" (Matt. xiii. 57, 58).

The reason why the Lord called, the disciples men of little faith when they could not perform miracles in His name, and why He could not perform miracles in His own country on account of their unbelief was, that the disciples did indeed believe the Lord to be the Messiah or Christ, the Son of God, and the prophet of whom it was written in the Word. They did not yet, however, believe in Him as God Omnipotent, and that Jehovah the Father was in Him; and so far as they believed Him to be a man, and not at the same time God, His Divine, to which Omnipotence belonged, could not be present with the disciples by faith. For faith causes the Lord to be present, as said above; but faith in Him, as a man only, does not cause His Divine Omnipotence to be present. This also is the reason why those cannot be saved, who, at this day in the world, look to His Human only and not at the same time to His Divine; as is the case with Socinians and Arians.

[8] It was for a similar reason that the Lord could not perform miracles in His own country, for they there saw Him from infancy, as any other man; and therefore they could not attach to this the idea of His Divinity; and if this idea is not present, the Lord is indeed present in a man, but not with Divine Omnipotence; for it is faith that causes the presence of the Lord in man according to the nature of the perception concerning Him. Other things a man does not acknowledge, and so he rejects them. For, in order that the Lord may accomplish any thing in man by faith, His Divine must be present in man, and not out of Him.

In John:

"Many of the people believed on" Jesus; "and said, When Christ cometh, will he do more miracles than these which this man hath done?" (vii. 31).

In Mark:

"These signs shall follow them that believe; In my name they shall cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. They went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following" (xvi. 17-20).

Divine Human Person

Spiritual Sun

IMMEDIATE INFLUX

OF GOOD

MEDIATE INFLUX

OF TRUTH

6. Phase 2 – Mystical Faith or the Paul-Phase (Personalism, Universalism)

6.2 New Testament Sayings of Jesus and their Spiritual Meaning