Silas Leger
Psychology 499,
University of Hawaii
Dr. James, Instructor
8.8.03

The Lord’s Divine Providence

Table of Contents

 

Introduction

About Swedenborg and Scientific Dualism

Background on Swedenborg

Findings

Understanding the Dual Universe

The discrete separation between nature and spirit

The Ancient Human Race

The present Human Race

As-of self Freedom

A map of the universe and human mind

Our life from God – The rational idea of as-of self

The permission of Evil

Another map of the universe and the human mind

The spiritual societies of Heaven and Hell

Introduction

This essay is a map of my understanding of God’s work in our universe and his role in our lives. I have gained my understanding of God’s function from reading Divine Providence written by Emanuel Swedenborg along with A Man of the Field and Moses, Paul, and Swedenborg: Three Steps in Rational Spirituality, by Leon James. In addition I had weekly consultation with professor Leon James, to gather information on the subject of God’s role in our universe. The subject of God is normally placed in terms of religion, but Swedenborg’s Divine Providence is a scientific examination of God and His function in our universe.

The specific details of what God’s role in our universe are only sensible from a theistic viewpoint, which establishes the existence of God. The theistic viewpoint Swedenborg formulated is scientific theism. This is science that accepts God and understands His relationship and interaction in our lives. If an atheistic standpoint were introduced it would simply deny the existence of God and therefore his role in the universe.

This strain of thinking leads us to conclude that natural occurrences created the universe and that humans evolved over billions of years from their ancient predecessors. The theistic viewpoint maintains that God created the universe and everything in it, including the human race. Emanuel Swedenborg was a scientific expert on the subject of theism and he made scientific discoveries about God, human life, our spirits and the human mind.

Before embarking on this journey of scientific spiritual questioning about God’s role in our reality, I was unsure as to the answer I might find. The answer that I found was nothing I could have imagined. The truths about humans revealed in the book are useful to all humans.

About Swedenborg and Scientific Dualism

At age 57, Swedenborg a serious Christian, was visited by Jesus Christ and instructed to write the last testament of the Bible. To achieve the writing of such a Scripture, Swedenborg was granted the special privilege of dual consciousness – that is he was allowed mental consciousness of both the natural world, and the spiritual world. Humans are not consciously aware of the spiritual world until they depart from their bodies on earth. Once the physical body dies, the mental consciousness of humans is awakened in the spiritual world, and there in the spiritual world the person lives on eternally. Jesus also granted Swedenborg the ability to interact with the spirits in the spiritual world. Since Swedenborg was an avid and distinguished physical scientist on earth, Jesus gave Swedenborg a spiritual laboratory for him to carry out scientific experiments to learn more about the spiritual world.

Background on Swedenborg

Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) was a scientist who worked for the government of Sweden. He was on the Swedish board of mines and was an expert in chemistry and mineralogy. Swedenborg was a successful scientist during the age reason in Europe and was internationally known as a reputable scientist. When Swedenborg was visited by Jesus Christ and informed that he was to write the word of God in books to be published by him and then distributed to the public, he retired his profession as a natural scientist and started his career as a spiritual scientist and begun to form theistic science. In theistic science God created a dual universe, one part natural and one part spiritual. These two parts work in tandem to create the universe, and are functionally tied to each other by the Divine laws of correspondences.

With his special ability to access the spiritual world on demand, Swedenborg learned the truth about life and God’s Divine Providence for all humans. In the history of the present human race, no other person has been allowed the special consciousness awareness that Swedenborg was given. This means that we only have valid information about the spiritual world from Swedenborg because he has been the only person able to access this type of information.

Swedenborg’s work involving his consciousness of the spiritual world is a boon to the human race because no one else has ever produced this information. The spiritual information that Swedenborg presents to the scientific community on earth are new findings about the existence and creation of the universe as well as detailed descriptions of the spiritual world and its God managed connection to the physical world. The spiritual scientific laboratory that God granted Swedenborg brought a new wave of information into our natural world.

Prior to Swedenborg humans created various explanations of how they thought the world came about, but with the scientific spiritual discoveries Swedenborg made, humans were no longer in need of creating a theory for the creation of the universe, because Swedenborg verified that God created and forever powers the universe and all of it components. Swedenborg provides a scientific report of the laws by which God manages the phenomena in the natural and spiritual worlds. His account of the spiritual world is based on His first hand experience of and objective data collection from, the spiritual world.

During his dual consciousness whereby he had direct consciousness and observation of the spiritual world, Swedenborg authored a total of 27 volumes in which he shares his collected scientific data from the spiritual world. Swedenborg proved that the observable phenomena in the spiritual world appear as natural phenomena, just as in the natural world or in our mental world of dreams where space, time and matter appear to be natural while they are only spiritual imageries. Swedenborg also discovered that the New and Old Testaments were full of spiritual meaning undiscovered yet because the laws of correspondence governing the relationship between the spiritual world sense and the natural sense were not unknown to humans and so they could not decode the spiritual from the physical. The book Divine Providence is one of the 27 volumes Swedenborg wrote as his series of scientific investigations in the spiritual world.

The collection of these volumes is commonly referred to as The Writings. These books are the word of God written through Swedenborg and represent the final Word to be given to the human race by God. Most of the books are Bible analyses that decode the hidden spiritual sense of the stories in the previous Testaments. My task while reading the book was to understand and relate back in essay form how God manages the universe.

Findings

My discovery of how God manages the universe is simplistic and positive. God’s management of the universe is based on His Divine Providence. God’s Divine Providence is God’s arrangement of all the parts of the universe into an ordered system that produces the end that God wills. The end that God wills is the creation of an ever-increasing Heaven from the human race. God’s love for the human race is infinite and is the motivation behind Divine Providence. He loves us so much he even constructs our bodies out of his Divine Love and Wisdom. Divine Providence is God’s real-time 24/7 architecture behind the universe and how humans interact with themselves.

In the spiritual world God’s operation of Divine Providence is everywhere and evident to spirits there, but for human on planet earth, we can not detect God’s operation of Divine Providence because it is not a physical operation, rather a spiritual operation, working on our minds. Divine Providence includes a detailed plan of the universe and of the human experience.

Understanding the Dual Universe

God is independent of the universe and chose to create the universe and to support its life and function forever. This is within God’s reach and ability because theistic science accepts that He is omnipotent and infinitely able in multi-tasking. The created universe is a composite of two worlds: the natural world and the spiritual world. Reality is a combination of these two worlds acting in unison. These two worlds make up the universe. If you think about the universe in terms of an object, the natural world is the exterior of the object relative to our external physical senses, and the spiritual world is the interior of the object having relation to our mind, spirit, or soul. The natural world is physical matter or made of "material" things, while the spiritual world is "substantive" made of love and truth which form the substances of our thoughts, and feelings.

That the spiritual world is inside or the interior of the natural world, is not meant in common terms as in physically inside, I mean rather that the purpose, power and existence of the natural world comes from within it from a different source other then itself– that there is something inside the physical that is not physical but substantive—that which is the sub-stratum of the physical and is its "substance." The source of the substances that form the interior framework of physical matter and space, is the spiritual world, that is, the Sun of the spiritual world that Swedenborg was able to see whenever he entered the spiritual world in his mind. The spiritual world is not like the natural world. The spiritual world is infinite and has no time or space. It is the interior portion of the universe and is where our minds live. In the spiritual world our minds image an exterior body that looks exactly like the natural body, only our mental image of our body is perfect because it is thought based and not limited by nature. The source of natural phenomena is the spiritual world since whatever phenomena occur in the spiritual world act into corresponding phenomena in the natural world. This how the natural is generated, is it because of its spiritual cause. Hence the spiritual world phenomena are the actual causes of natural phenomena. Swedenborg published a lot of material on these "laws of correspondences."

At the center of the universe in the most interior point of the spiritual world is God amidst the spiritual Sun. God is an omnipotent and infinite spiritual Human Person, in whose Form and Image human beings were created, and supplies all the necessities of life moment by moment. There, amidst the spiritual sun, God radiates spiritual substances that power our minds to think and direct our physical and spiritual selves. Just like our physical bodies need nutrients and energy to subsist, our minds in the spiritual world need power and activation to think and have feelings. The mind relies on the spiritual organs of the will and the understanding to complete mental activity. Both of these spiritual organs are in-filled by God’s love and truth streaming continuously into the spiritual or mental receptors called the will (for love) and the understanding (for truth). The spiritual organ of the will requires the inflow of love to will anything and the spiritual organ of the understanding requires the inflow of truth to understand or think anything.

These spiritual substances (love and truth) are real things in the spiritual world. They are mental substances that form the concepts that power our thoughts. The spiritual substances of love and truth are the building block of the universe from the inmost (spiritual Sun) to the outmost (natural sun and earths). At first upon their dispersion from God these substances are spiritual, later when these substances have reached the end of the spiritual world they become are transformed by correspondence into natural phenomena natural and form the physical matter in the natural world.

God as Creator of the universe has established a systematic way of maintaining the universe according to His goal and intention of creating an ever-expanding heaven from the human race. The initial structuring of the universe into a two-world system is God’s architecture for achieving this great goal. God created the universe to function in a particular fashion, with spiritual or mental activity causing physical reality. The relationship between the two worlds is one of cause and effect – the spiritual world is the cause of the natural world or the natural world is the effect of the spiritual world.

In our natural bodies we are temporary, but in our spiritual bodies (our minds) we are immortal and eternal. The life our spirit body as well as our natural body receives is the life that is radiated by God from amidst the spiritual Sun. The order of flow of God’s radiated life is key to gaining insight into the geography of the spiritual world and its relationship with the natural world. There are maps of the universe later that will explain the ordered flow of God in throughout the universe from firsts to lasts.

God’s life is what the entire universe is constructed out of. His life of love and truth are spiritual substances that form our mind and are required by our minds (our spiritual bodies) for feeling and rational thought. God’s life radiates first from Himself and into the closest area of the spiritual world then into areas of the spiritual world that are successively more distant from God. Finally once the life reaches the external layer of the universe it manifests itself into physical form. This manifestation is not magic it is simply a function of the spiritual world interacting functionally with the natural world in accordance with the Laws of Correspondences that have now been revealed to science through Swedenborg. Our brains are physical matter and do not do our thinking. Instead our thoughts are produced by the interior portion of us which is our mind existing within us in the spiritual world. The exterior of the universe is caused by the interior, since the flow of life is from inmost to outmost, and the exterior is the outermost.

Ultimately, God is the cause of the universe from the moment of its inception to its every moment of existence thereafter. The universe and all its contents are held in existence by repeatedly receiving life from God at every moment. This life is directly from God. This categorizes God as the source of all things in the universe, since from him everything has received, and still currently receives its cause. If there were no God we would not exist nor would the universe we live in. God is the creator and maintenance worker of the universe. God is the power plant of the universe; if he were to shut down operations the universe would cease to exist, due to its dependence on the power of life it receives from God. The existence of anything, including the universe, is the continual re-creation of that thing by God at each moment of life. This is also true of events and occurrences.

God manages the vast amount of details related to the history and biography of objects, people, and civilization continuously. Without His management of these details and drama of all events, everything would collapse into chaos, then into nothingness, disappearing forever. The orderliness and rationality of human events are therefore to be attributed to God’s direct and perpetual intercession, and not to the rationality and competence of human beings, even though Human do enjoy the benefits of rationality and an ordered reality. God implants the appearance or illusion of self-determination, and independence in all living things for the sake of giving each individual the feeling of freedom, hence happiness.

This is true of all things, spiritual or natural. The acceptance of God as the manager of the universe shows us that he is in control of things at every level not just a macro level. He is directing and managing generals as well as details of life. Not one thought or thing is outside of God’s control and he is involved in every action that we take. It is not true that God only acts on the large scale of management, only handling things like the weather patterns and political structures of present governments and other macro level things, because His work is everywhere not just as overseer from afar.

For anything to exist, be it a mental thought or a physical object, it is approved by God for existence and then given existence in the form of life influx from God. The natural world is caused into effect by the spiritual world. Our spiritual orientation to life is presented to us in physical form, and this is the effect of our spiritual life. The translation and presentation and our mental reality into physical reality is the basis of our physical life. Our entire physical life is based on this principle because the spiritual causes the natural. Our natural life is caused by our spiritual life in accordance with discoverable scientific principles called the "laws of correspondences." This runs contrary to modern day science which points to the cause of mental life as being a mass of brains cells "collectively" starting to think and life. Obviously modern day science is unaware of the truth and the dual nature of the universe.

The discrete separation between nature and spirit

The separation of the spiritual and natural worlds is discrete in description. This means that on a single scale of measure both of the worlds could not be measured accurately. The physics of each world is drastically different, and their cause and effect relationship is not simple or plain, rather governed by Divine Laws of correspondence, which are part of God’s functional structure of the universe. These laws of correspondence are the interlocking codes that translate spiritual reality or phenomena, into physical reality or phenomena. The laws of correspondence are important to humans because they allow us to decode the spiritual meaning (cause) of physical events and phenomenon.

The reason for the construction of the universe into a two-world system is to establish a reality that perpetuates the growth of Heaven from human spirits. The physical life that humans live is the starting point of human awareness and consciousness. At the beginning or our lives we are introduced to the exterior of the universe – The natural world. Although, unaware of it, at birth we have a spiritual body born in the spiritual world, which is inside of us on a discrete degree of existence, inside which is God at the center of the spiritual world supporting life in a non-stop fashion.

We associate life with the effects of the spiritual operations and thoughts that take place within the interior of the universe. This is to say that humans are not, during physical life, aware of their own mind. This awareness is disallowed in us. Swedenborg was granted special permission by God to have dual consciousness, but this was a rare permission that was necessary for forwarding spiritual truths to the single consciousness of the humans living in the physical world.

The Ancient Human Race

Swedenborg did discover through his investigation of the spiritual world that not always was the human race disallowed direct awareness of their mind in the spiritual world. According to Swedenborg, there existed a race of humans that did have dual consciousness. These people were capable of communicating with others in the spiritual world and were aware of their spirit body (their mind), as well as having physical awareness of the natural world. God gave this ancient race of humans their ability of dual consciousness. The current human race is a genetic divertive of the ancient human race. The physical difference between the ancient and us is the state of our brain: ours is split and the ancient brain was unified. The unification of the of the brain allowed dual consciousness of the natural and spiritual worlds.

The ancient race of humans who preceded us, experienced a fall and their race eventually died out. Our race is the successor of the ancient race. Our origin is from them, only we were born differently than they were. The ancients were gradually eliminated from earth by God disallowing them to reproduce, while only allowing a few births toward the end of their existence of new humans with split brains. The fall of the ancients was a result of them using spiritual knowledge to intelligently acquire the goods of others in the natural world. We as children of the fallen ancients, have as part of our mental inheritance, built-in lust and desire of what others have as well as the desire to take it away from them, including murdering them for it. This unfortunate thinking is based on the animal mind within human mind and is clearly pre-rational, and is a perversion or deflection contrary to God, love, and truth.

From early childhood we are aware of only the natural world and therefore we become distorted in our mental construction of the universe, because without consciousness of God we consider him nothing. This excerpt from Professor Leon James puts into words the challenge, reward, and consequence humans face today.

"To progress into a race of Heaven, as in olden times, we need to transform ourselves into rational human beings motivated by love and arranging all things in accordance with the truth that flows in from God. This personality modification from irrational to rational, and from selfish to altruistic, is called ‘regeneration.’ Those who are willing to put up this effort of conscience in their lives arrive at death into the spiritual world prepared for a life in Heaven. But those who have not regenerated themselves in this life arrive in the spiritual world and sink into a low mental state called Hell. Life is very different for those who are in Heavenly states of mind vs. those in Hellish states. Swedenborg was able to confirm this by numerous explorations of those who live in these contrastive states in the other life (or spiritual world)." - Taken from essay revisions Dr. James made of this paper.

To listen to our mind and heed what it tells us is not an intelligent thing to do because our ancestors became a fallen people following their own intelligence and since we are based on their DNA we have inherited their genetic predisposition of wanting to take the goods of others Slavery is a perfect example of taking the goods of others. This is to say that each of us is born with a genetic impulse to abuse and use others in inhumane ways.

The present Human Race

The humans of today are cut off from consciousness of their spirit body in the spiritual world. We have physical consciousness so that we can navigate and negotiate the physical environment. This means that the humans of today are unaware of the spiritual interior of the universe and therefore are unknowledgeable of the cause of the physical world. It is normal for the current race of humans to establish natural thinking that prescribes the cause of the physical world as something physical. This is the case with the scientific theory of the Big Bang, which says that the universe comes from a special physical natural occurrence. This is wrong, because we know now from The Writings of Swedenborg that the cause of the natural world is the spiritual world, not some big bang.

Today science has run into a major stumbling block due to our inability to have direct knowledge of the spiritual world. We have fallen into the trap of only accepting a reality that we can directly experience and measure. Even though we know that not everything is physical, such as love, emotion, and feelings. Concepts like these are spiritual and are not expressed as physical things or objects. Due to human’s inability to have direct consciousness of the spiritual world in which concepts are real, have substance and govern the life there, we consider them pseudo-phenomena that is somehow created by a neural network of natural brain cells.

For us being only physically aware people, this creates a situation that allows only physical data and observations as valid observable reality. This is a major problem, because this is not the truth and will never lead to it. Our denial of the spiritual world because we don’t have direct contact with it, has created a world where the idea of God is optional not integral.

This could not be more distant from the truth. The truth is that God is the creator and maintainer of the universe. By design God has made the spiritual world as the cause of the natural world. To fabricate a knowledge system based on only our physical consciousness results in a knowledge base that is opposed to the true reality of the universe. At this point in time, we are submerged in false science, which denies the existence of God. True science is the total acknowledgement and acceptance of God as the creator and constant provider of life that perpetuates the universe.

As-of self Freedom

On a personal level, God implants humans with the feeling of being able to co-create our life with him, even though this is not truth because we are not the source of our own life and power. God supplies us with life, and we are afforded the feeling of having liberty to choose what we do with that life as well as the feeling of having rationality to make responsible, reasonable, and wise decisions. We have the feeling of liberty and rationality because these are qualities that are in us from being constructed from the spiritual substances of love and truth.

We are made to think by God that we have a self, because if we did not think this, we would not be happy viewing our position as a puppet to God, ironically because that is exactly what we are. God supplies us with the feeling of freedom of will, and the feeling of freedom of understanding. This means that we think we are free to will what we please and we think we are free to understand what we please. This does not mean that everything we understand and will is human produced, because we have no production abilities of our own.

This only means that we think we can choose to do what we please, be it right or wrong. God will not hold us back from thinking that we are capable of doing what we want, because He maintains in us a level of self-security by always hiding His constant involvement in our lives. If what we think is rooted in evil and falsity, He will work in the background to subtlety and slowly coax us into truth and love, but he will never directly intervene because this would be taking away the feeling of human freedom. Is it plain that humans are not in control of their life, because they don’t have life of themselves. God considers this aspect of human life and creates the feeling of freedom and rationality in humans to allow them the feeling of having a self of themselves so they don’t feel externally controlled and thus like robots functioning off some source of life that is not theirs.

A map of the universe and human mind

The order of the universe helps us understand the dual existence of human life. At the center of the universe is the spiritual Sun amidst this Sun is God. The spiritual sun radiates life in the form of love and truth outward or downward. The flow of life from the spiritual sun is represented below in diagram 1.

Diagram 1 – Concept and instruction for design from consultation with Leon James about his web article Spiritual Geography. Available at website - http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy/instructor/gloss/geography.html

Each ring of this picture represents a level into which life flows. The center ring is the source of life, which is God amidst the spiritual sun at the center of the spiritual world. From amidst the spiritual sun God is constantly radiating life outward from himself in all directions. The life God is radiating is a compound of love and truth, which are spiritual substances.

 In the diagram, the barriers in-between the levels indicate a discrete degree of separation between them. Each ring represents a level of mental function with in the human mind. Any level that receives the flow of life from God receives it in different understanding and thinking. The mental reception of God’s radiated life is done first by the celestial mind of humans. The center circle in the drawing is God amidst the spiritual sun, indicated by the number 1, and the next three circles closest to God are the levels of the spiritual world. The spiritual world is the native home of the human spirit-body, which is the mind of a person.

There are three spiritual levels of the human mind: the celestial rational mind, the spiritual rational mind, and the natural rational mind. These minds are ordered in accordance to their proximity to the spiritual sun, amidst which is God. The closest, represented by the number 2, is the celestial rational mind, which operates at the highest rational level available to man; this level of life reception is closest to God only because of its ability to comprehend spiritual truths with full understanding. God is a rational human being who has as his goal the creation of eternal heaven from the human race. Rationality is the highest form of mental function. God is higher than humans in his rationality and His Divine Rational is the source of our rational, just as His Divine Life is the source of our life. We share rationality with God and this is why we can understand His explanation of Himself to us through the writings of Swedenborg.

We can understand God if we operate mentally at a rational level. One discrete degree out from the celestial rational mind is the spiritual rational mind, represented by the number 3. This mind is a level of the human mind and due to its order in the discrete degrees of flowing life is less rational then the celestial rational mind. Rationality defines this level of the mind as it does with all the levels of the human mind. Since this level of the human mind is separated from direct contact with God Himself amidst the spiritual sun by a barrier of discrete degree, it receives God’s radiated life only after it has passed through the celestial rational mind.

What the spiritual rational mind receives from God as life is less rational then that received by the celestial rational mind. The waning amount of rationality passed to each successive discrete degree of the human mind is only a function of the lesser ability of the levels of the human mind to understand rationally the life that flows into them from God. The levels of our mind have different abilities of rational thinking. The celestial rational mind is in sync with the pure rationality of God’s radiated life. The life that God amidst the spiritual sun radiates is love and truth. These spiritual substances are the source of all life, because life is mind based and truth and love are what a mind needs for thought.

The next discrete level of the human mind is the natural rational mind. This mind is some distance from the spiritual sun, represented by the number 4. This mind thinks in rational terms about the natural world. The usage of the mind at this discrete degree is to think about the world and natural surroundings in an abstract way. The reason why this level of the mind is connected to thinking about life from the worldly natural perspective rather than from the spiritual mental perspective is that it is the first degree of rational thinking in the human mind, and so it must serve as a bridge between the lower degrees of the human mind and the upper degrees of the human mind. The lower degrees of the human mind, numbers 5 and 6, are the minds that are concerned with the physical aspects of having a body in a physical environment. The red line on the border between levels 4 and 5 indicates the end of the human mind and the start of the animal mind.

These minds are the sensuous mind, number 5, and the corporeal mind, number 6. These minds are very far away from the spiritual sun, and thus are not endowed with the capacity of higher order thinking required for rational or cognizant thought. They are not called the sensuous rational mind and the corporeal rational mind, rather only the sensuous mind and the corporeal mind. Humans share both the sensuous and corporeal mind with animals, but when it comes to rational mental reception of God’s life animals are not equipped with the upper levels of the mind that humans have. This is what separates humans from animals: the ability to receive God’s life and understand it rationally and therefore fully without question or doubt. This is because God’s message to us is in rational terms – the highest form of mental function.

The outmost degree of the flow of life from God at the inmost is the physical manifestation of our bodies and the planet we live on. The human mind first receives life from God in the spiritual world then the flows onto the lower regions of the mind. The lowest levels of the human mind are the animal levels of the mind, the sensuous and corporeal minds operating within the natural world. The actual physical existence of matter is the most distance from the source of life, because it comes after all the mental operations that bring it into being.

Our life from God – The rational idea of as-of self

The spiritual world is the cause of the natural world. Looking at diagram 1 the flow of life from the center of the mind to the celestial rational mind and all the way to the outmost portion of the mind, the corporeal mind, and then to the physical reality of the planet Earth, it is evident that being human starts at the natural rational level of the mind. Even though the human mind is able to think from its built-in animal mind, as it does with the sensuous and corporeal minds, being human does not truly start until one engages the use of their rational abilities that are possessed within any of the rational minds. There are levels of rational minds and these are separated by the ability to understand in detail the life that flows into them.

With increasing closeness to the spiritual sun, the more pure and true are the love and truth that the spiritual sun gives off. At the level of function of the corporeal mind, one cannot think of the world in a rational sense and is lost as to the truth. To understand the truth requires rationality because God’s life is given to us in rational terms.

Humans are faced with a bit an ego problem while alive on Earth. We are lured into thinking that spiritual life is non-existent because we have no direct contact with it. This is because the natural world, perceived by the animal mind is not capable of rational thought, and rational thought is required for understanding and accepting the existence of the spiritual world. The animal portion of the mind is dead set on being king of the mental playing field. The natural denies the existence of the spiritual, suggesting that it could not exist if it is not physically present or apparent. This is the approach to spirituality that modern day science had adapted – If you cannot measure it by some physical method, it isn’t real.

As humans who are under the circumstance of being disabled in our conscious awareness of our own life in the spiritual world, we struggle to come to terms with a reality that seems incomprehensible. The natural mind will never see human life as a dual existence because it is above the understanding of the natural mind to accept God without physical proof of Him. We only know that humans live a dual existence because Swedenborg has revealed it to us from God.

The natural mind has no interest in reading and believing Swedenborg, rather the natural mind is focused on experiencing this dual existence so it can verify its existence.

Modern day science is what tells us that God does not exist. The only shortcoming of modern day science is that it only accepts natural observable events as real or having validity. This is a major problem because modern day science limits itself to the natural world and therefore is only asking us to use the animal levels of our mind, which will always turn to natural events as causes of other natural events. Science is missing the mark on providing real working solutions for today’s serious global problems like abuse, sickness, societal problems, racism, poverty, intolerance, hatred, and disease because science fails at assigning appropriate cause and effect relationships. Science points to natural causal factors, which are incorrect and lead us down a path of no progress in understanding or changing the real cause of the problems which are always spiritual, not natural.

Our 5 senses are all handled by our animal minds, just as is the case with other animals – The knowledge they gain about their world comes from looking outwardly, only using their natural senses to receive information. Human are enabled to do this simple information processing of external stimuli, but the human minds are not engaged at this level.

The human mind is first engaged at the natural rational level, because no longer is this mind dependent on external input for computation and thought. It does not look outwardly for life’s information, rather inwardly towards God amidst the spiritual sun radiating his love and truth, which are life itself. The first level of rational mentality is the natural rational mind; it thinks rationally about the natural world and is the first phase of becoming rational. The next phase of rationality is the building of our understanding of hidden spiritual meaning embedded in our surroundings and the events in our lives. This phase enters us into spiritual rational mental function rather then the natural rational function. The spiritual rational minds in the human mind are the spiritual rational mind, and the celestial mind and are not dependent on natural concepts and reality.

The truth is that humans receive their life from God and appear to use it as they wish, but in reality are still under the control of God because it is He who progresses our lives forward creating every detail of every instance. God is infinite in His ability to multi-task enabling Him to manage the universe with ease and pleasure. His radiated life is constantly streaming into our spirit bodies (or mind—will and understanding) in the spiritual world giving minds the energy and power needed for them to effect into reality the natural world. That humans have a self that is their own is wrong, because a self is connected to life and the life we have from God is not ours but His and at no point in time does God’s life ever become appropriated and converted into our life.

The idea of humans having a self of themselves is an irrational thought because we only have life due to the inflow of life we receive from God and this means that if we experience the feeling of a self it not self generated, but God generated. Humans are therefore given the appearance of having a self so they feel like individuals with personal (their own) freedom and not creatures control by a force other then themselves, even though this is what is happening.

The concept of as-of self is important to theistic science in that it helps us label the feeling of self we have as humans. Rationally we know that God is still in control of us even when we are in total freedom, because it is impossible that He is not, since he is creating every single thing, occurrence, and object in the universe no matter what importance we assign to it.

God has granted humans the qualities of liberty and rationality, these two qualities are what differentiate humans from other animals. These abilities of liberty and rationality are not independent of God and require His life for existence and therefore are not ours and therefore we don’t actually posses these quality of our selves, rather as-of our selves, meaning that we think they are of our self, but in reality there are of God.

The idea of as-of self is essential and required for rational thought about God and his role in our lives, because we need to correctly define our strong feelings of having a self that is free and reasonable, even thought we know rationally that humans can have no self. In other words God has granted humans the feeling of having freedom to do what they think is right, and the feeling of having freedom to desist from what they think is wrong. Accompanying humans right to do what they think is right, is their feeling of having rationality so they can make educated and informed decision based on the truth and love powering our lives. Since humans have been granted a rational mind, which is divided into three levels – celestial rational, spiritual rational, and natural rational – God allows humans to think and feel as if they have freedom of choice so that they progress in their own way according to how they understand the love and wisdom He radiates into their mind from amidst the spiritual sun in the center of the spiritual world.

Due to the fact that God gives us a supposed feeling of freedom and rationality, His allowance of evil thoughts and deeds is required, because people use their freedom and rationality to will and understand things that are not true, thus things that are opposed to God since He is truth. A good example of this is the current scientific position that humans hold now. It denies the existence of God, which is totally wrong and clearly opposed to God, even thought he has allowed the existence and development of this science from its inception. The idea of as-of self allows us to have complete understanding of the self we feel and experience, even though we know rationally that a human self is not possible.

The permission of Evil

God controls the universe by a method of universal management that utilizes the laws of correspondence to translate the spiritual world into the natural world, or better said, laws of correspondence that translate spiritual meaning into natural meaning. For every spiritual event there is a corresponding natural event that carries with it encoded spiritual meaning. The spiritual meaning is coded in a fashion as to change it in to natural meaning. By applying the laws of correspondence that govern the process that transforms the spiritual meaning into the natural meaning, we can educate ourselves about the interior spiritual meaning of our existence and the events that make up our life.

The obvious human challenge is to rise above the animal level and to hold mental concepts dear to our hearts, for it is our ability to reason and discern right from wrong that will never guide us ill. The innermost point of the knowledge we have is God inside us in the spiritual world. Our life comes directly from God Himself and it is only for this reason that we still persist on earth to date. Our entire life is dependent on God.

During the days of the ancients there was not a Hell in the spiritual world. There was only an ever-expanding Heaven, minus the world of spirits. The mental foundations of the ancients were strong and rooted in the truth. They were internally informed about the spiritual world because they had dual consciousness. Every day of their natural lives they were vividly aware of the spiritual world. The spiritual world was completely understandable, joyous, truthful, knowledge providing, and loving to them.

Reality can be perfect in the spiritual world because thoughts are reality in the spiritual world – the spiritual world does not face the limitations inherent in the natural world, such as gravity, death, decay of existence, and the physics of the structural arrangement of atoms and all that. Natural knowledge can only lead to more natural knowledge unless it is examined using the laws of correspondence to decode the spiritual meaning from the natural meaning. Swedenborg reveals these laws of correspondence to us in the books he wrote on his first hand scientific examination and study of the spiritual world. We are now empowered to know the spiritual meaning of natural phenomena.

Since our life is null without God’s constant nourishment and involvement we face a situation and must come to terms with the fact that we are God’s creation NOT Gods ourselves. We have absolutely zero power over our reality and we supply no life to ourselves. We are minds receiving truth and love from God. Our varied understanding and gauge of the truth and love we receive from God is the determining factor in where we are in our mental functioning. If we don’t see spiritual meaning in the things around us, it means that we are looking at these things with animal sensing eye that are limited and cannot observe the interior spiritual meaning coded by the laws of correspondence.

To elevate our mental activity is to uncover the spiritual meaning in things and to begin to understand the spiritual world better. The goal of raising our mental functioning is preparation for a life in Heaven by the time we pass over to the other side, because once you are over your loves from your natural life stick to you and are what you will love forever, unless you undergo rigorous spiritual training to change loves. Unfortunately ignorance is not a valid excuse at the pearly gates. We cannot shake off our loves once we enter our spiritual consciousness after our physical detachment. They are who we are and make up every bit of us. We exist for them. They are our loves. We would disintegrate without them. This is the whole Swedenborgian philosophy – That everything is love and truth, and that these two elements in the spiritual world of our minds create the material of the natural world. And that Humans are no different; we too are built of love and truth in the spiritual world. This is of no surprise in the spiritual world, because it is evident.

Our problem is that we have been blocked in our ability to have direct consciousness of the spiritual world. This makes us less knowledgeable on the subject of spirituality and consequentially on knowing that God is at the center of the universe supplying its life at all moments. We can easily become unaware of God for large amounts of time, even our entire life if we don’t pay attention to the truth. God is truth and God is Love and Heaven is on earth now. These are all true statements that have been verified by Swedenborg, the scientist of the Heavens.

If God is truth and God is Love and Heaven is on earth now, then why is there evil in the mix of activity? Why is there a hell, if love is all there is? Why might God will evil if he is good? This is the question that seems to have the greatest ability to potentially undermine Swedenborg’s complete account and description of who and what God is. If the answer to this question is weak or a scam then it appears as if there is no God or there is a God and He is both good and evil. There is no weak answer to this question, because the truth is clear that God does not will evil, nor is there no God.

The answer is best understood from the aspect of knowing that God’s relationship with our fallen race of people, who are born with ties to hellish loves from the perversion of our spiritual organs of thought, is a unique and special one, which involves the concept of freewill. This is that God gives all humans the feeling and sense of freewill. We know that humans alone cannot exist so it is God who powers humans. God does understand that if we think we have freewill we are inclined to seek out our loves from the world and to develop their meaning for us.

God also realizes that if we were able to recognize His involvement in our lives at all instances, we would not feel free, rather we would feel trapped and dictated. Due to our strong genetic pull we have come to agree to reject the truth about the existence of God, and we continue to hold intact old systems of governance that endorsed slavery as a favorable commercial activity. We still hold close in our heart the lust for the goods of others. This is a negative trait and resultant behavior we inherited from our ancient ancestors.

Upon the creation of the universe and the human race, God simultaneously generated a complex and efficient management system of the universe and its contained parts. One of these contained parts is the Human race and all the individuals of that race. Humans are the only creatures capable of understanding and comprehending the spiritual aspect of life. This ability is implanted in them by God and is a gift beyond fortune because the end result of the gift is the activation of the spiritual levels of the mind, the usage of which lead to ceaseless human life in the spiritual world. This is why we care about integrity and honor and valor. We have a language because we have a spiritual language that turns into our natural language through the laws of correspondence. These laws are the key to decoding the spiritual meaning of natural events, occurrences, and things. Just as there is laws governing the translation of spiritual meaning into natural meaning there are laws that govern human life and our relationship with God. There is a set of basic rules that spell out the human condition. The human condition must be view in context, because the human condition has experienced changes over time and these changes were drastic and long lasting.

The ancients were a different breed then us. They had the ultimate experience of life, because they had dual consciousness and were not fearful of death and dying (because they knew that they lived forever in the spiritual world), and they lived a totally different life then we live, under a paradigm of completely understanding God, the universe, and their place in all of it. All of it was as clear as day to them. But there was trouble in paradise and someone got greedy and started to lust after the goods of another. And then more people start following in suit, after seeing others execute marvelous conquests of the goods of others. Soon many people were into the idea of using others as leverage to get what they wanted. Slavery is a prime example of this type of spiritual insanity. If God allows slavery how can God be good?

The idea that God wills events is true, but it is also true that God permits events rather than willing them. In his interactions with humans, he is limited as to the amount of direct control He can place over anyone. This is due to the fact that he has already established the idea of freewill in the minds of humans, so He cannot contradict rules He had made. If God were to make us do all the right things, we would feel controlled and like robots, without self- direction. This is a symptom of our cultural and genetic inheritance that instructs us to love to take the goods of others with disregard to human rights and our ability to discern right from wrong. Our pre-programmed assumption of life is that there is no spiritual consequences connected to our physical behaviors. We have implanted in us the idea that we are our own masters and we are in control of reality. This is completely wrong and is a direct threat to our mental sanity and ability to lead truthful and uncontaminated lives.

Since the fall of our distant ancestors, we have been functioning under the paradigm of life that they fashioned and created. It is our duty as the next generation of humans to return to the truth of existence and the knowledge that God is here with us at all junctures of life. His involvement in our life is in the spiritual world, and so His involvement in our lives is also in the physical world, because the spiritual world causes the physical world.

When the ancients started to misbehave and use spiritual knowledge to rob the goods of others, God took notice of what was being done. He had granted these humans the ability of dual consciousness along with pure love and truth, and they found a way of perverting the love and truth He gave them into lies and hateful practices. Our ancestors fostered and sprung forth the idea that since we are allowed to engage in evil activities and God does not stop us from doing so, that we are in control of ourselves, and thus God is not in control of us.

This is why hell and dominance was introduced into the human experience. The ancients begun to adhere to the idea that God was not an integral part of their life and that he could not prevent human action, or reserve punishment for those who decided to do what they internally knew as wrong and hateful. God’s contribution to the universe and to humans as well is the constant flow of love and truth He gives off from amidst the spiritual sun in the spiritual world. To deny God the ownership of life is absolutely insane and complete falsity.

The powers of rational thought have been utilized to reason and prove falsities. A commonplace example is modern day science, which we know uses logic and reason to detect true causal relationships. But the entire scientific community is proving falsities all the time because they never point to any spiritual cause of physical effects. The absolute truth is that the spiritual causes the natural. Modern day science tells us rather that certain physical events or conditions cause other physical events or conditions. When it comes to scientific knowledge God is the most rational and clear in his ability to detect true causal relationships, of which the universe was built from and functions on.

Our ability to think in and deceitfully confirm falsities is a function of our past mental coding from our ancestors. When God disabled the ancients from reproducing, only allowing a few split brain children to be born, He redesigned the human experience because the new race of people were not allowed conscious access to the spiritual world. This meant that humans would not have direct knowledge of the spiritual world, and it meant that humans were to know about the spiritual world through other means of knowing that are not direct. The new race of humans would have to rely on their inner, interior, unspoken knowledge of God to have stable knowledge of God, without physically sensing Him or the spiritual world. This proved to be a compensational step in the human experience resulting from the adulteration our ancestors brought to the human consciousness.

We are suffering from the result of the ancients abusing their access to the spiritual world. This means work for us because we have a genetic pull to adulterate others by using them for our mental and material gain. At the core of who we are, is a voice that tells us that God is not real and that He has no control over the natural environment. This is a widespread problem that has a spiritual cause. The spiritual cause is the thinking style people have. They are lost as to the truth because they seek physical verification of God due to their engagement of the lower levels of the mind functioning on animal principles rather than human principles. At an animal level there can exist no mental concepts and so no concept of God has a change life. For people who think using their animal minds God is not a possibility. This is easily understood when think about weather a dog, a cat, or a horse could conceptualize anything, let alone God.

Under the direction of animal motivated thinking it is clear that many people don’t know the truth, and are at a disadvantage of discerning falsity from truth, because they reject the upper portions of their mind that can enable them to know the truth. Most people are easily lured into accepting as truth, something that is false, due to crafty mental methods of proving falsities. The use of crafty mental methods to prove falsities is a common occurrence. Science even asks us to engage in and support its view that God is null and that humans grew out of (evolved from) electricity, water, and dirt. To a spiritual person this sounds like a joke because human life is not random and a growth of material things. It is rather mental and spiritual at its core and at its end it is material and physical. The true nature of life is not captured by science, and this is why we need to realize that Scientific Dualism is a needed paradigm that is actually the truth of the function of the universe.

For the spiritually aware person, there exists a rift between what the instruction we have in us from the past and the instructions we receive from God at all moments of our life. God is infilling our mind with love and truth at all moment of our life, while we have an inner desire to adulterate the goods that God gives us. We wish inside to reject God and to accept ourselves as gods. This is our root problem. The solution to this problem is the idea of as-of self, in place of our idea of self.  Our idea of self is based on the facts that we have a life that is independently supplied by us and we have complete control over that life. These facts are not true and so is the assertion that humans have a proper self. The better description of our notion of self is the idea of as-of self, implying that it is as-if we have a self, only because we know that it is rationally correct to define it in this way because don’t actually have a self.

What about the permission of evil? Does God will war, suffering and the creation of a hell in the spiritual world? It is known that God resides inside of all of us on a discrete level managing things in the mental realm of the spiritual world. Our usage of the varied level of our mind places us in a mental space that corresponds to a certain spiritual space. The outermost levels of the human mind are animal levels and the usages of these levels results in evil activity because there is a clear absence of the ability to incorporate God into mental understanding. Humans who engage the animals solely are missing the mark of being human, because they are not using their interior rational and spiritual minds to grasp the spiritual sense in the natural.

If a human thinks like an animal then that is exactly what he is. The degradation of the human mind to the false rational and animal levels is horrible. What is even worst is the activity of proving falsities. Such as is the case in science, as discussed above. The use of faulty but sophisticated reasoning and persuasion are employed to convince many people that false things are in fact true. Such as God does not exist, proven by a theory of evolution that says humans are from animals. This is mental madness, because the truth is being totally ignored, and the truth is being inverted and the opposite of it is being conveyed. Our perverted spiritual organs of thought, which we have inherited from our ancestors, do this flipping of the truth. This is what has us involved in and thinking about evil. We are born into love of lust of the goods of others. This is an unfortunate starting place for us, but as we grow-up we can begin to search for the truth that we have within us. The answers to our questions about life and human purpose are found within us in the spiritual world where our life begins.

God gives humans an allowance of perceived self-determination and independence from His involvement in their life. The love and truth that flow into the human mind is understood by humans to be of their own. This is not a valid reason to start to believe that it true. We must be informed about the reason why we are being mentally fixed by God to think in this certain way. His knowledge tells Him that if we were to always know that He is controlling us that it would be death to human life because everyone would feel like a robot with no self of its own. The reason why we would think this if we knew of His complete control of our life, is because we have a desire to believe that we have a self which defines us as independent of God, this of course is wrong and only an inherited ingrained mental thought pattern from our fallen ancestors.

In God’s management of the universe He has established laws of permission, which are His way of regulating His ability to intervene and stop people acting from evil motivations. It is more important to God to not stop people from being and doing evil then it is for Him to directly stop them. He permits the evil actions of humans because it is more important for people to learn about life and self-correct than it is for God to save them and deny them access to evil and darkness. This is because for the spiritual growth of humans now it is very important that they don’t experience God first hand, because they are learning how to experience and know God indirectly, more through getting in-touch with God by searching inside of themselves and seeking the Bible and the Writings of Swedenborg for that which will effectively tell us truths about the spiritual world.

The laws of permission are incorporated into Divine Providence and operate as a function of it. The laws of permission are a safety measure for securing the perceived mental freedom humans think they have. If humans were disabled in their ability to choose evil over good, then they would be without true freedom of choice. This is what God wants to avoid. His stopping our evil motives and thoughts is taking away our granted sense of having an authentic self and life of our own. He stops Himself from interfering in our life for our spiritual growth and long-term happiness. He supports our idea of sovereignty with all his heart and up holds it in us the best he can. So much so that he permits the occurrence of evil. The only other alternative is to intervene and not permit such acts, but this not an option for God. God does tame the tempers of evil people and constantly presents them with truth and love, but he never directly takes action to alter reality or the thoughts of a person.

Comment by Dr. James: God does not "interfere" directly, but He sets things up without our awareness. For instance, He manages what things we remember and what we forget, so that He might lead us to certain decisions and perceptions. God also intervenes by managing events that we acknowledge to be out of our own control, such as errors, accidents, luck, the weather, and so on with all probabilities, which allow Him to influence the outcome of events and decisions. This includes the macro events of evolution and history as well as the micro-events of biography with every individual in the universe --thinking, feeling, and experiencing moment by moment from birth to eternity. (End of comment)

People carry a huge responsibility because the faculties of reason and higher mental function they possess mixed with the freedom granted to them from God allows them to direct reality and even other humans around them. This ability as we know can be abused. The thirst for dominance over and control of others and their goods is abuse of this nature. War for territorial expansion is abuse of this nature. Thinking about designing a major slave trade is abuse of this nature. Manufacturing weapons of war is abuse of the freedom God has granted us. It is a mental inversion of the truth and love persistently flowing into our minds.

The permission of evil by God is regulated so that the evils that do occur can work out to be positive and useful in the long run to eternity. This is a quality that all evils permitted by God must have, for it is God’s overriding mission to enable things that will lead to an eternal good. God does mediate the degree of evil that people do express and exhibit. But he does not dispel evil from anyone. It is human’s responsibility to cast out the evils inherent in them from the past. This is accomplished by mental elevation from the lower levels of the mind to the upper spiritual levels of the mind where love and truth are the foundation of thought and God is clearly understood. The use of the rational levels of the mind to prove falsities shows us that not only do we need to participate in high mental function but we need to follow God’s instructions for us because left to our own devices we lead others a stray and away from the truth. God wills into existence love and truth. These spiritual elements raining into our mind and give us power to thinking and produce action. What we choose to think and do are up to us and can be evil if we choose. If evil is performed then it stands that God did not will it but rather permitted it, because he values maintaining our sense of freedom over directly intervening and stopping an evil course of action If we will and think evil it is us to attribute the responsibility of creating a hellish world or a movement of evil since God has granted us freedom which he respects at all times, while ever supplying us with love and truth so can have real knowledge.

Another map of the universe and the human mind

Divine Providence is the Divine arrangement of the universe by God. The way in which the components of the universe function together brings about God’s goal of expanding heaven to eternity. In diagram 2, a map of the universe appears and explains the different parts each receiving God’s flowing life within a different level of understanding and reasoning, each level of the human mind is defined by its distance from the God amidst the Spiritual Sun in the Spiritual world.

* Diagram 2 gathered from my consultation with Leon James about the structure of the universe and the flow of God’s life within it.

 

On the low end of the diagram is the natural world, which is the product of the animal mind. This world is a function of the sensual and corporeal minds. These minds are natural- only processing information from external sources. At the border between the sensuous and natural rational minds there is an important change in mental capacity – The natural rational mind is rational while the sensuous mind is not rational.

The spiritual world and the natural world are levels of human life. Both the natural and spiritual worlds are associated with different degrees of mental functioning. These differentiated degrees of mental functioning are defined by their distance away from the center of the spiritual world, where God is amidst the Spiritual Sun, radiating His Divine Love and Wisdom forward into the minds of all humans. The levels of mental capacity within the human mind are: the natural mind, the rational mind and the celestial mind.

Each mind exists by itself, or in other words these minds do not mix and are separated by discrete degree. The natural mind is not capable of rational thought and therefore has no understanding of God, and no way of coming to terms with his existence. It is only recognizes the natural world as existing.

The natural mind is fixed on using natural things as definers of reality. The rational mind is above or more inward then the natural mind, which places it a level closer to God and the truth. It is capable of analytic thinking and reasoning. The rational mind enables us to think about concepts and ideas that don’t now present themselves to us in our natural world. Above or more inward of the natural rational mind, which is the first level of the rational mind, is the spiritual rational mind. The spiritual rational mind is the second mind of rationality and is purely spiritual, not needing to contain natural thought or remnants of it, as is the case with the natural rational mind since it serves as a bridge between the spiritual world and the natural, or the animal mind and the human mind.

Next to God and above the spiritual rational mind is the celestial rational mind. This mind is the highest mental level of the human mind. The celestial mind is in contact with God, because this portion of the mind is the centermost and so is at the location where God is. This mind is where the highest angels reside. Maintaining mental function at the celestial level requires full understanding of the current human condition, which requires reformation of character, spiritual study, and regeneration of life, since we are offspring of a fallen race who chose to love themselves over loving God and his intentions for us.

The spiritual societies of Heaven and Hell

Using our minds to oppose God is the creation of falsity and irrational thought not based on reality. Within the spiritual world there exists heaven and hell and the world of spirits. Heaven is the location where spirits live, who had as people living in the natural world elevated their mental functioning to a rational or celestial level along with acknowledging that God is the source of all life and the universe itself. This is because maintaining natural mental functioning from birth to death is not ample preparation of the mind for life in heaven where truths and rationality are the atmosphere and basis of life.

Rationality is required to understand the mental concept of love and truth, and this understanding brings loving others and living a wondrous delightfully beautiful life while treating others as brothers to the forefront of our purpose in life, because this the instruction from God to us. The truth is that all people are admitted into heaven only those who cannot tolerate the truth and wisdom alive there travel themselves to Hell because they will not let go of their irrational thought patterns, premises and abusive ways of interacting with others. If we have however elevated how mental consciousness in the human able to understand the rational concepts required for live in heaven, namely that God exists and is the Creator and maintainer of the universe.

Those who did not elevate their mental functioning out of the natural levels of the mind and into the rational levels of the mind have not prepared themselves for a life in Heaven, because they do not carry with them a human character that desires love and truth, which are rational concepts. Instead these people have prepared themselves for life in Hell because they carry with them a character that desires falsity and hatred, the opposite of reality, which are the spiritual substances of truth and love. To be rational is to understand and accept the truth about the dual nature of the universe and God as omnipotent and the creator and constant supplier of live to the universe and mankind. The rational degrees of the mind are themselves heaven in varying degrees. Being rational is the unique human mental capacity and by being rational we can comprehend our relationship with our Loving God.

Hell is where spirits live, who had as people living on earth only utilized the animal minds. These people live in Hell because they are irrational; we know that usage of the animal minds is devoid of any rationality so the animal minds are securely irrational units. God does not place spirits departed from their physical bodies in Heaven or in Hell, the spirit is placed in Heaven or Hell is simply by the way one lives their life while on Earth. If one engages in mental activity that is rational having at its core the acceptance and understanding of God, they are humans and are qualified for life in heaven.

If people engage in irrational mental activity they are not human but pre-human or animal in mental function. The result of thinking from the pre-human mind is life in a lowered mental state called "hell". The spiritual environment of hell is a projection of animal thinking and appears dark, dreadful, scary, dangerous, decadent, hateful, and hostile. While our spiritual consciousness is dormant during our physical life on Earth, it resides in the world of spirits, in the spiritual world. The spiritual world has three parts to it: The world of spirits, Heaven, and Hell. These locations are not physical; rather they are areas or states of mind. After the physical body ceases to function, human life continues to eternity in a spirit-body in the spiritual world. When we become consciously aware of the spiritual world we are in the world of spirits.

The world of spirits is the arrival point of all humans switching over from physical awareness to mental awareness. When the physical body dies so does human’s physical connection. Our lives become purely mental at that point. We no longer have a tie to the most outward layer of the universe, the level that is the most distant from God amidst the spiritual sun at the center of the universe.

Once we crossover into our new conscious awareness we are taught about the spiritual world by angels. When we are ready to live life in the spiritual world on our own, the loves we brought with us from Earth and physical life are what determine our final placement, either in Heaven or in Hell. The option of staying in the world of spirits is not a choice. All spirits are initially pleased with their placement in a spiritual society be it in Hell or Heaven, because the spirits will always be placed into a society that corresponds with their loves. However, it was noted by Swedenborg that even though Hell dwelling spirits were in a colony of spirits that shared their love of falsity and hatred they suffered much from interacting with people like themselves. This makes the loves we have during our physical life special because they are the determining factor in our self-placement into either Heaven or Hell.

Swedenborg’s consciousness of the spiritual world tells us that human life is more the natural environment that we are accustomed to. He tells us that to know the world only through our five outward senses is animal like and unqualified as human. If we engage the natural rational mind, and start to use the inner or higher levels of the mind, this is when we become qualified as human. The highest form of humanity is the usage of the celestial mind. Every human is living a dual existence, but while alive in the physical body our dual existence is blocked from our consciousness. Swedenborg represents a rare occasion when God directly intervened and allowed him dual consciousness while alive on Earth.

When the physical body ceases to live, our consciousness shifts from the natural to the spiritual. Our consciousness is activated in our spirit body, which is our mind. Our spirit body is an image of our physical body, one representing the other. Our life in the spiritual world appears like our life in the natural world, physical and solid state. In the spiritual world we use our mind to construct our reality and we draw on the natural reality we have known from our past, so it makes sense that we carry on with life as human beings in the afterlife, just as we do now, not as airy spirits floating around or some ethereal entity hovering through time and space. The physical things that appear in the spiritual world are made of the higher order spiritual parents of atoms and material elements- the spiritual substances of love and truth.

Our life in heaven is threatened by our past of fallen ancestors who used their as-of self powers of liberty and rationality to create world of slavery and use of others for their own material gain. To right our inherited thinking from the past, that tries to keep us focused on the natural world by claiming it is the only reality, we must pursue a life of spiritual study, reformation of our fallen character, and the regeneration of our life from thinking irrationally to thinking rationally. At each moment of our lives, God is working with us to bring us into the truth so we might choose to think rationally about life and the universe.

God’s Divine Providence is His personal interaction with all the components of the universe so that Humans may live surrounded by love and truth with Him in Heaven to eternity.