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]

9. 7 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.

NATURE and its world—meaning the atmospheres, the bodies we call planets, including the globe of lands and seas that is our home and everything that adorns its surface year after year—are sustained by the sun that is at their center and is able to be present everywhere by means of its rays of light and its tempered heat. This is something everyone knows with complete confidence, from personal observation and knowledge based on sensory experience, as well as from written information about what makes our world habitable. Since the sun is how everything is constantly sustained, reason can with complete confidence conclude that it is also how everything came into being, since constant being is a constant coming into being in the same manner in which it originally came about. It follows that our earthly world was created by Jehovah God through the agency of the physical sun.

[2] I have already explained that there is a spiritual realm and a physical realm that are clearly distinct from each other [§3]; and that the origin and support of spiritual realities is a sun that is pure love, and has the Creator and Maintainer of the universe, Jehovah God, at its center [§5]. This means that the origin and support of the earthly realm is a sun that is nothing but fire. This latter sun comes from the former, and both come from God. This follows as a matter of course, just as what is posterior comes from what is prior, and what is prior comes from the First.

[3] As for the sun that serves the physical realm and all the worlds in it, all the evidence it provides shows convincingly that it is pure fire. For example, when its rays are focused on a point by a lens, the result is an intense burning and even open flame; the nature of its heat is like that of ordinary fire; the levels of its warmth depend on its angle of incidence, providing us with our different climates and the four seasons of the year; besides many other examples. Our reason can use this evidence acquired through our physical senses to prove that the sun of our earthly world is nothing but fire, and that it is fire in its essential purity.

[4] If we have no idea that spiritual realities originate in their own sun, if we know only that earthly realities originate in their own sun, then we will almost inevitably confuse what is spiritual with what is physical. Rational thinking based on sensory illusions will lead us to believe that what is spiritual is nothing more than something relatively pure on the physical level, and that wisdom and love well up from these purer physical substances when they are stimulated by light and warmth. If nature is all we see with our eyes and sense with our nostrils and breathe with our lungs, then we attribute everything to it, even our own rational processes; and we soak up materialism the way a sponge soaks up water. If we do this, though, we are like carriage drivers who harness teams of horses to the back of the carriage rather than the front.

[5] It is different if we draw a distinction between what is spiritual and what is earthly and see the latter as dependent on the former. Then we understand that the inflow of the soul into the body is spiritual. We understand that our earthly bodies serve our souls as vehicles and means so that they—our souls—can make things happen in this earthly world.

If you reach other conclusions, you are like a lobster moving backward by means of its tail, while its eyes are trained on where it has already been; and your rational sight is like that of an Argus seeing only with the eyes in the back of his head, while the eyes in front are asleep. Yet people like this think of themselves as being as clear-sighted as Argus when they reason. They say, “Can anyone fail to see that the universe comes from nature? What is God, then, but the deepest level of nature?” They say other irrational things as well, and take more pride in their thoughts than wise people do in thoughts that are actually rational.

19. [Concluding Accounts]

To this I will add the following account of a memorable occurrence. After the above material was written, I prayed to the Lord to be allowed to talk with some disciples of Aristotle, and at the same time with some disciples of Descartes and of Leibniz, so that I could learn their opinions on the interaction between the soul and the body. After my prayer, nine men were present: three Aristotelians, three Cartesians, and three Leibnizians. They stood around me: the ones who revered Aristotle on my left, the adherents of Descartes on my right, and the supporters of Leibniz behind them. Far off at a distance from us and from each other I saw three men who looked as though they were wearing laurel wreaths, and by an inflowing perception realized that they were the eminent philosophers, the founders themselves. Someone was standing behind Leibniz holding the hem of his garment, and I was told that it was Wolff.

When the nine men noticed each other they started by greeting and addressing each other politely. [2] Before long, though, a spirit came up from the nether regions with a torch in his right hand and waved it in front of their faces. At this the sets of three became hostile and glared at each other, overtaken by an urge to argue and debate.

The Aristotelians (who were also Scholastics) went first. They said, “Can’t everyone see that objects flow into the soul through the senses the way people come into a house through its doors, and that the soul has thoughts in response to this inflow? When a young man in love sees his beautiful young bride, is there not a gleam in his eye that carries love for her to his soul? When misers see purses full of coins, surely their senses all catch fire for them, and from their senses they bring this desire into their souls, provoking a craving to take possession of those treasures for themselves. When vain people hear someone paying them compliments, don’t their ears prick up and carry the compliments to their souls? Surely the senses serve as entryways that offer our only access to the soul. In the face of this and countless other examples, how can you come to any other conclusion but that inflow comes from the outside world and is physical?”

[3] While listening to this, the adherents of Descartes were holding their fingers to their foreheads; now they removed them and responded to these statements by saying, “Unfortunately, you are talking in terms of the way things seem. Don’t you realize that our eyes don’t love our young bride on their own? The love comes from our soul. So too, our senses don’t crave the coins in the purses on their own; the craving comes from our soul. Our ears seize on the compliments of flatterers in precisely the same way. Surely it is the faculty of perception that enables us to sense. And perception is a function of the soul, not of a physical organ. Tell us this, if you can: What makes the tongue and lips speak except thought? What makes the hands do work except the will? Our thought and our will are functions of our soul, not our body. What causes our eye to see, our ears to hear, and our other organs to feel things except our soul? These and countless other examples will lead anyone whose wisdom rises above what we sense with our bodies to conclude that there is no inflow of the body into the soul but an inflow of the soul into the body, an inflow that we call ‘occasional’ or ‘spiritual’ inflow.”

[4] When they heard this, the three men who were standing behind the other groups of three, the supporters of Leibniz, spoke up. “We have heard and compared the arguments on each side, and we feel that on many points the second group prevailed, but on many others, the first. So, if you will, let us resolve the dispute.” When they were asked how they would do this, they said, “There is no inflow of the soul into the body or of the body into the soul. Instead there is a total and instantaneous coordination of the two at any given moment, a coordination that our celebrated founder has given the lovely name ‘preestablished harmony.’”

[5] When they had all finished, the spirit reappeared, this time holding the torch with his left hand, and waved it behind their heads, and all their ideas became confused. They started exclaiming in alarm, “Our souls don’t know which way to turn and neither do our bodies, so let’s settle the argument by lot. We’ll accept whichever lot is drawn first.” So they took three slips of paper, wrote physical inflow on one, spiritual inflow on the second, and preestablished harmony on the third, and put them in a hat. They chose someone to do the drawing; the hand went in and pulled out the slip that had “spiritual inflow” written on it. When they looked at it and read it, they all said, “We should accept this because it came out first,” but some said this clearly and easily, while others said it vaguely and hesitantly.

[6] Suddenly an angel stood nearby who said, “Don’t believe that the slip for spiritual inflow came out by accident. This was providential. Since you were caught up in confused ideas, you were not seeing that it was the truth; but the truth itself presented itself as that slip of paper to the chooser’s hand so that you would accept it.”