Soul-Body Interaction, Believed to Occur either by a Physical Inflow, or by a Spiritual Inflow, or by a Preestablished Harmony.

§§1–2 / [Author’s Introduction]

1. §3 / There are two worlds: a spiritual world where spirits and angels live, and an earthly world where we live.

2. §4 / The spiritual world came into being and is kept in existence from its sun, and the earthly world, from its sun.

3. §5 / The sun of the spiritual world is pure love from Jehovah God,

who is at its center.

4. §6 / Warmth and light emanates from that sun; the essence of that emanating warmth is love, and the essence of the emanating light is wisdom.

5. §7 / Both spiritual warmth and spiritual light flow into us. The warmth flows into our will and gives rise there to a love for doing what is good, and the light flows into our understanding and gives rise there to the truth that leads to wisdom.

6. §8 / These two—spiritual warmth and spiritual light, or love and wisdom—flow together from God into the human soul, flow through our soul into our mind and its feelings and thoughts, and flow from there into our physical senses, speech, and actions.

7. §9 / The sun of our earthly world is nothing but fire, and is the means by which this earthly world came into being and is kept in existence.

8. §10 / This means that everything that emanates from the physical sun is in and of itself dead.

9. §11 / What is spiritual wears what is physical the way we wear clothes.

10. §12 / It is spiritual elements clothed in this way that enable us to live as rational and moral beings—that is, to live spiritually on this earthly level.

11. §13 / How receptive we are to this inflow depends on the state of love and wisdom within us.

12. §14 / Our understanding can be lifted into the light (that is, the wisdom) that angels enjoy to the extent that our rational ability has been cultivated; and our will can be elevated into the warmth, or love, of heaven, depending on how we live our lives. However, the love in our will becomes elevated only to the extent that we will and do what the wisdom in our understanding teaches us.

13. §15 / It is totally different for animals.

14. §16 / Unknown until now, there are three levels in the spiritual world and three in this earthly world, and these shape the way all inflow happens.

15. §17 / Purposes are on the first level, means on the second, and results on the third.

16. §18 / This shows us the nature of spiritual inflow, from its origin to its results.

§§19–20 / [Concluding Accounts]

13. 11 How receptive we are to this inflow depends on the state of love and wisdom within us.

I have already explained that we are not life but organs receptive of life, that love united to wisdom is life, and that God is love itself and wisdom itself and therefore life itself [§§5, 8, 10, 11]. It then follows that we are images of God or receptors of life from God to the extent that we love wisdom, or hold wisdom in the embrace of love within ourselves. Conversely, to the extent that we engage in the opposite love and therefore in madness, we receive our life not from God but from hell, a life that is called death.

[2] By themselves love and wisdom do not constitute life, although they are the realities that lie behind it; it is the delights that accompany love and the pleasures that accompany wisdom, which are feelings, that constitute life. The underlying reality of life manifests itself by means of these feelings. The inflow of life from God brings with it these delights and pleasures the way light and warmth flow in and affect our minds in spring. Light and warmth flow into every kind of bird and beast as well and even into plants, which then sprout and flourish. This is because the delights of love and the pleasures of wisdom open our spirits and prepare them to be receptive, the way joy and happiness relax our faces and ready them for the inflow of the soul’s good cheer.

[3] People moved by love for wisdom are like the Garden of Eden with its two trees, one of life and the other of the knowledge of good and evil [Genesis 2:9]. The tree of life is when we believe that love and wisdom come from the Lord; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is when we believe that these qualities come from ourselves. In the latter case, we are insane, and yet believe that we are as wise as God. In the former case we are truly wise, and believe that no one is wise except God and that people are wise to the extent that they believe this—and even wiser to the extent that they feel they want it to be this way. (There is more on this subject in the account in Marriage Love 132–136.)

[4] In support of this, let me add a secret from heaven. All the angels of heaven turn their foreheads toward the Lord as the sun, and all the angels of hell turn the backs of their heads toward him. These latter are receptive to an inflow into the feelings that belong to their will—feelings that are basically cravings—and constrain their understanding to go along. The former are receptive to an inflow into the feelings that belong to their understanding and constrain their will to go along. As a result, these enjoy wisdom, while the others are deranged.

Our understanding resides in the cerebrum, which is behind the forehead, while our will resides in the cerebellum, which is in the back of the head.

[5] Everyone knows that people who are crazed by false notions go along with the cravings associated with their type of evil and support them with reasons drawn from their understanding, whereas people who are wise see on the basis of truths the quality of the cravings in their will and hold them in check. The wise do this because they turn their faces toward God. That is, they put their trust in God and not in themselves. On the other hand, the deranged turn their faces away from God. That is, they put their trust in themselves and not in God. Trusting in ourselves is believing that we love and are wise on our own, and not from God. This is what “eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” [Genesis 2:17; 3:3, 6] means. On the other hand, trusting in God is believing that we love and are wise from God and not on our own; and this is eating from the tree of life (Revelation 2:7).

[6] We may gather from all this (though only dimly, as if by moonlight at night) that how receptive we are to the inflow of life from God depends on our state of love and wisdom.

We may further illustrate this inflow by the inflow of light and warmth into plants. They bloom and bear fruit depending on the way the fibers that form them are woven together and therefore depending on their receptiveness. We may also illustrate it by the way light flows into precious stones, which turn the light into different colors depending on the positioning of their component parts and therefore again on their receptiveness. Or we could mention prisms and raindrops that make rainbows depending on the angles of incidence and refraction, and therefore on the way they receive the light. Human minds react similarly to the spiritual light that emanates from the Lord as the sun; it is constantly flowing in, but we receive it in different ways.

11. 9 What is spiritual wears what is physical the way we wear clothes.

IT is widely recognized that every event involves both an active and a passive element, and that nothing happens if there is only an active element or only a passive one. The same holds true for what is spiritual and what is physical, because what is spiritual is a force that is living and active and what is physical is a force that is dead and passive. It follows then that anything that has come into being in our subsolar world and continues to exist at every moment comes from what is spiritual by means of what is physical. This is true not only of members of the animal kingdom but of members of the plant kingdom as well.

[2] A similar, widely recognized concept is that everything that happens has a principal and an instrumental component to it, and that when the event occurs these two components seem to be one, even though they are distinguishable as two. Therefore it is among the canons of received wisdom that a principal cause and an instrumental cause that are working together constitute a single cause. The same is true of what is spiritual and what is physical. The reason the two appear to be one when an event takes place is that the spiritual component lies within the physical component like a fiber within a muscle or blood within its arteries, or like thought within speech and feeling within tones of voice. In this way the spiritual component makes itself felt through the physical component. From this we can see, at least in a veiled way, that what is spiritual wears what is physical the way we wear clothes.

[3] The reason for comparing the bodily organism that the soul wears to a piece of clothing is that the body clothes the soul, and then the soul takes the body off and sheds it like a snake’s skin when it crosses by death from the earthly world into its spiritual world. Then too, the body grows old like a piece of clothing, but the soul does not. This is because the soul is a spiritual substance and has nothing in common with the changes we see in nature that progress from start to finish and end when their cycle is complete.

[4] If we do not consider the body to be a garment or covering for the soul, intrinsically dead and only adapted to receive the living energies that flow through the soul from God, all we can do is decide on the basis of our illusions that the soul lives on its own and the body lives on its own and that there is a preestablished harmony between the life within each. Or we may decide that the life within the soul flows into the life within the body or the life within the body flows into the life within the soul, and therefore envision either a spiritual or a physical inflow between the life within each. However, the truth proclaimed by all creation is that what is secondary does not act on its own but from what is prior to it—that is, its source. This too, then, does not act on its own but from something still prior, so that nothing happens except from a First that acts on its own, therefore from God. Further, there is only one life, and that life cannot be created; but it is in every way capable of flowing into forms organized and designed to receive it. Everything in the universe, great or small, is a form like this.

[5] Many people believe that the soul is life, and that since the soul is what gives us life, we are the source of our own life and live on our own, not from any inflow of life from God. If that is what we believe, we cannot help but weave a Gordian knot of illusions and entangle all the judgments of our minds in it. This leads to sheer insanity in spiritual matters. Or we construct a labyrinth from which our minds can never escape by following any thread of reason and retracing our steps. In fact, we actively lower ourselves, as if into underground caves where we live in eternal darkness.

[6] This occurs because the resulting illusions are beyond number, and some of them are appalling. We might believe, for example, that God infuses and transcribes himself into us so that each of us becomes a kind of demigod with independent life. This would mean that we did what is good and were wise from our own resources and in the same vein that we ourselves possessed faith and charity and therefore produced them out of our own storehouse rather than receiving them from God.

There are other grotesque notions as well, like those held by the people in hell who during their earthly lives believed that nature was alive or that its activity caused life. When they look at heaven, they see its light as utter darkness.

[7] I once heard a voice from heaven saying that if the slightest spark of our life belonged to us and did not belong to God within us, there would be no heaven and nothing in its place and therefore no church on earth and no eternal life. (There is more along these lines in the account in Marriage Love 132–136.)