spirituality

Spiritual questions and answers

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Deeper perception – What to do with it?

By Stephen Russell-Lacy.

The ancient mariners navigated their sea route at night by the stars. These tiny twinkling bits of knowledge high in the night time sky offer useful information. The same could be said for our spiritual journey. Likewise, navigation is important for finding a path for the soul. We need higher knowledge intuitively perceived. Something that provides deeper perception than the facts of science can provide.
This deeper perception might be an insight that comes during self-reflection. Or perhaps it is an intuition we become aware of during meditation. Alternatively, it could be an idea found in sacred writing.
It can be assumed that seeing what is good and true can help us steer a course through the complexities of life. Possibly enable us to find meaning and purpose in our troubles. Even offer encouragement and hope.
But is this certain? Is deeper perception of itself sufficient for transforming our lives?

Examples of deeper perception

I may pick up on the idea that there are two realms of reality – a realm of physical objects and a realm of consciousness or spirit, not limited by space or time. As a result, I may toy with the thought. Play around with it. Bring it into conversation. Moreover, I might even use it as a working hypothesis.
An intuition may come whilst meditating. For example, the sense of the oneness of all life; everything somehow connected; an essence of reality behind outward appearance. This insight may stay or depart.

Huge variety of spiritual knowledge and awareness

The world is teeming with tiny seeds of wisdom. We wake up to them again when we hear them clearly articulated.
Another deeper perception is self-knowledge. For example, knowing about one’s own strengths and weaknesses, successes and failings, dreams and fears. One weakness might be winning arguments, gaining status and impressing people without being concerned about the consequences. Personal development means living with consideration and integrity.
In line with the notion of karma, it is said that sooner or later we get what we give – what goes round comes round.
Realising the importance of compassion for oneself and for other people is another example. This is related to the so-called Golden rule. Wilson Van Dusen (mystic and clinical psychologist) has pointed out that a form of this idea is found in various religions.

Do to others as you would have them do to you (Christianity)

What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow man (Judaism)

No one is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself (Islam)

Do not do unto others what would cause you pain if done unto you (Hinduism)

Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful (Buddhism)

Regard your neighbours gain as your own gain and your neighbour’s loss as your own loss (Taoism)

Spiritual awareness and insight

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I ask this question because it seems that the work of human salvation is not finished. Thus, there is the spiritual addendum called the “Second Coming.”
Something further seems to be required for things to improve in the world.
Even orthodox Christianity states that the Lord’s act of taking on the sins of the world still requires an individual to go one step further and either believe (through Faith) that Jesus was the Savior or base this same belief on good works. Otherwise the Lord’s life and death affects nothing in our personal lives.
So what did the Lord actually accomplish while on earth? Start a new religion? Make his “Father” take notice?
I now turn to the unique spiritual doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg for the answers.
Swedenborg claimed that Jesus was Jehovah in the flesh! This concept runs counter to the belief that the Divine encompasses three distinct Personalities—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Without offering lengthy arguments to provide evidence for Swedenborg’s monotheistic claim, I will—for now—focus on the rational reasons for the necessity of a divine entity coming into the spacetime arena of human history.The world has many problems. Religion makes the assertion that these problems originate from Hell and the general population’s dismissal of God’s tenets. Swedenborg, taking a scientific approach to faith issues, pointed out that the finite powers of Hell could never directly oppose an Infinite God (there is no ratio between the finite and the infinite). The Hells can only go after finite terrestrial humans. So how can God duke it out with the devil?
The Lord God’s strategy of assuming a finite physical body and being born on earth created the proper medium and battleground for the Hells to attack the Divine. Swedenborg insisted that most of the Lord God’s activities were invisible to human eyesight because Jesus was reorganizing the Heavens and subjugating the Hells through His victories in resisting all possible temptations. (The final temptation was on the “Cross” whereby the Lord stayed put and resisted the flawed, ego-driven desire to rule by dominating through physical force—rather than through Heavenly Truth.)  During this inner battle, the Lord successfully unified his human nature (which he received from his earthly mother) with his Divine nature (Jehovah was the Lord’s soul). This unification was the “Glorification.”
God’s holy warfare did not directly save humankind from sin, but kept the door open for the possibility of salvation. We each must also decide to engage ourselves in a similar inner struggle during our life on earth and ask for the help of the Lord (who alone can—and did—conquer every possible evil allurement). Swedenborg also made the unpleasant claim that if the Lord God had not come into the world and taken on the Hells from an inner—or psycho-spiritual—battlefield, the entire human race would have morphed into gruesome monsters before finally perishing.
As a student of Swedenborg’s ideas (since 1974) I also came across one of his statements that without God storing innocent thoughts and feelings during our infancy to create a plane for angelic influences to gain a psycho-spiritual foothold in our inner world, we would also lose our humanness and morph into monsters of all description. Swedenborg called this inner plane where innocence is stored, the “remains.” (Nowhere else in worldly faith systems and religious doctrine is the idea of “remains” even acknowledged.)
This leads me to conclude that, while on earth, the Lord fought to keep this plane of activity—the remains—intact. Swedenborg also stated that the Lord’s saving activity operates only from a person’s remains because this inner plane acts as the soil for the future and genuine spiritual growth of an individual.
So what the Lord accomplished on earth was to regain top-down control of all universal processes and preserve the potential in all humans for angelic transformation.
The “Second Coming” (which the Lord promised was close at hand) represents the moment an individual allows the Lord to enter into our heart and mind and begin our personal battle against the forces of evil, and the vanities and allurements of the terrestrial globe. With this new inner engagement will come a greater and deeper understanding of the narratives of Holy Scripture—all of which refer to the development of one’s remains during the genuine process of salvation and purification.
In other words, the ball is now in your court.
http://www.provinggod.com

Why the devil cleverly promotes love

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Once upon a time the Devil was happily lying in a lounge chair trying to darken his tan from all the flames around him. Suddenly, one of his most trustworthy henchmen approached him in an absolute panic.

“Lucifer! Lucifer!” cried the evil sidekick, “the end times have arrived! An individual named Emanuel Swedenborg has been directed by the Lord God of heaven to write about the mysteries of faith to the people on earth! We will be exposed! We are doomed!”

Ha! Ha! Ha!” laughed the devil. “Relax, my faithful friend. I have already read Swedenborg’s writings very carefully and have determined that they will have a diminishing affect upon those silly humans on earth. The seeds of God’s truth will be planted in the wrong soil.”

“How can you be so sure?” asked the creepy cohort.

“I perfectly understand human psychology—after all, I helped influence it,” replied the shrewd master of deception. “Every human desperately wants to be seen as being a valuable and good person in society, thanks to a misguided principle of self-worth. So I simply let them have their way and keep them in a delusional trance whereby they will focus their attention on love, usefulness and community—apart from their inner predicament.”

“Isn’t love and compassion the opposite of what we want people to do?” asked the confused ally.

“Noble deeds are destroyed by the desire for affirmation and approval. The human need for affirmation is from the malignant principle of self-love. I am the undisputed leader of self-love, which opposes heavenly love! By helping to convince people that they will find self-importance by becoming more loving and caring, I cause the seeds of God’s teaching to be mis-planted,” said the smiling demonic leader.

“Please explain,” asked the cruel crony.

“It’s actually quite simple,” said Mr. Devil. “While I keep people’s attention on becoming more loving, they begin to overlook the actual process and lawful steps of spiritual transformation. Goodness and innocence only comes from the Lord God of heaven. Everyone born on earth has a small amount of this angelic goodness placed deep within their natural mind, during infancy. Mr. Swedenborg called this residue of heavenly innocence the ‘remains.’ I can tell you that not much attention is given to this piece of information. This convinced me that I still had room to operate and pursue my craftiness. Now listen carefully. When a person on earth learns of some heavenly truth, either from reading or attending a place of worship, these ideas of truth act like spiritual seeds. But because the average person is so hung up about being a good person and finding approval from others, these theological seeds fail to properly germinate. They never reach their intended soil.”

The Devil stops for a moment to quench his thirst with a swig from his bottle of hot sauce. Then he continues the discussion, “The misstep people take—even those who fervently study Swedenborg’s ideas—is that they rarely consider that these heavenly seeds must be planted in their God-given ‘remains’ to affect anything real.” Since genuine spiritual Love only comes from the Lord God alone, only the growth of one’s spiritual remains permits God’s Love to legitimately grow and change someone’s inner and outer life. So I put all my effort in helping push people into focusing on outward empathy and acts of charity as if this is something that can emanate from their own abilities, rather than from God’s. I have succeeded in making people believe that if they do good things, they will neither have to investigate nor directly deal with their character flaws of self-love—which, thanks to me, they all have in abundance! This oversight ensures that God’s seeds of truth have no place to germinate but in their fantasies. Only self-vigilance and self-conflict allow heavenly seeds of truth to reach a person’s remains or spiritual soil.”

The Devil then looked deeply into his associate’s eyes saying, “If you don’t believe me, ask any Swedenborgian you meet to explain the concept of ‘remains’ to you—even ask their scholars. Few can. But without grasping this important topic, all these sorrowful outward efforts of compassion by humans in the world merely become a form of hypnosis, trance and self-delusion.”

“You are brilliant!” said the Devil’s nasty devotee.

The two evil co-conspirators began laughing uncontrollably and slapping each other’s backs.

http://www.staircasepress.com

Spiritual awareness and insight

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The closing years of the nineteenth century witnessed the culmination of Formalism, and the spiritual reaction is now firmly established. Already “the end of old faiths and beginning of the new” is discernible to all who have removed from their mental vision somewhat of the textual dust of dying creeds, and have penetrated, however faintly, that sublime region of Truth which is discoverable only by practice, and which is made manifest by pure thoughts and holy deeds.

Spiritual awareness and insight

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HE DID COME TO MAKE AN ATONEMENT

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Time would fail me to quote the passages in which he plainly declares that He came to reveal the Divine truth to men, to bring the Divine life down to them, and to open their eyes to see it. He says nothing about satisfaction, about the payment of debt. He is the good Shepherd, the great Physician, the perfect Teacher, the faithful Exemplar in every work. He did come to make an atonement, to make us at one with Him and the Father who dwells within Him. He assumed a human Nature because He could not come to man in any other way. He did what a just, wise, and loving father would do. If one of your children had wandered from home, had spent all his living, was sick and dying, would you not do all in your power to save him? Would you not spend time, money, labor; would you not provide yourself with all the instrumentalities in your power that were necessary to reach him? And do you suppose that infinite love, compared with which your love is not so much as a drop of water to ,the ocean, would refuse to be reconciled to His lost and dying children until he had received full compensation for their sin; until there had been measured to Him, “eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe,” or an exact equivalent? It cannot be. Reason, Scripture, the perceptions of justice and mercy which the Lord has given us, and the deep, spontaneous yearnings of our own hearts, declare it to be impossible. No, the Lord did not come into the world to satisfy the demands of an inflexible and arbitrary justice. He came rather to satisfy the demands of infinite love; not to pay a debt, but to reach the dying soul, to cleanse it from its impurities; to heal its diseases; to mould it into His own image and likeness, and fill it with His own peace and blessedness.

Father Son and Holy Spirit, Are the three essentials, of the one God, Like body soul, and operation in man.
Emanuel Swedenborg

7 days of creation

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Spiritual awareness and insight


Introduction

From the literal meaning of the first chapters of Genesis, no one realizes that it refers to anything besides the creation of the world, the Garden of Eden which is called “Paradise,” and Adam, the first human to be created. Who thinks anything else? However, these things contain details that have never been revealed until now. . . . In this inner meaning, the first chapter of Genesis is about new creation of a human being.
In other words, it is about our rebirth.

It is a wonderful story to start out with in the Bible. You know how there is often a preface in a book, and the preface will tell you what the book is going to tell you. They always told us that in school: when you write a paper, first you tell them what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them. The Creation story is God telling us what he’s going to tell us in the whole Bible. He is summarizing the entire Bible, which is really, Swedenborg tells us, about our own spiritual growth. It’s about our process from when we first start to awaken spiritually to the time when we become angels in heaven. The Creation story is a wonderful summary, in just a little over one chapter, of the whole Bible story.

Briefest Summary:

Stages: External representation

Spiritual State: Internal

Initial state: without form and void Prior to rebirth: no spiritual form

First state: light and darkness Knowing that the good and the true are something higher.

Second state: heavens and earth Distinguishing those spiritual things from God (in the internal man), from those of oneself (in the external)

Third state: tender grass, tree bearing fruit Acting from knowledge, not from the heart

Fourth state: sun and moon Love and Insight begin in the internal

Fifth state: whales of the sea, birds of the heavens Actions to confirm oneself in truth and good: deep principles & rising thoughts

Sixth state: living soul, beast, ‘image of God’Actions from insight, and hence from love: alive at last – ‘spiritual

’Seventh state: day of rest Actions from love, and hence from insight: ‘celestial’

Site Map; Site Information7 Days of Creation ~ Spiritual Rebirth ~ The Word of God

Spiritual awareness and insight

Can the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost sit on three different chairs?

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This cannot be answered without a rational discussion of the Holy Trinity. This theological topic, more than any other, confuses the heck out of serious and religious thinking people.

Orthodox Christianity describes the Holy Trinity as three divine persons. Although they attempt to recover and restore the notion of one God (Christianity is supposed to be monotheistic) by saying that the three divine Persons of Trinitarian doctrine consist of one unified substance, still, one is left with the notion that these three Gods could sit in three different chairs.

When I have pointed to the illogicality of such an ambiguous notion of God, its defenders (including those with Ph.Ds) say that it is a “Great Mystery” and warn me that my mind should not even be going into such directions.

My answer to that is “zc@#$%*&>?+<#x<!”

Now that I have gotten that off my chest I can put my emotions aside and return to a more pragmatic discussion of this matter. When I say my prayers at night, I want to know exactly to whom I am addressing (and not have to guess whether I am focusing on the correct chair or the proper Deity).

I know that Jesus said that the only way to the Father was through Him (the Son) but then Jesus does an about face by teaching the Lord’s Prayer which completely bypasses the Son and allows us to pray directly to the Father.

So, with the Lord’s Prayer in hand, who needs Jesus?

But Orthodox Christianity, which embraces the sacred Trinity as three Persons, insists we are first to put our faith in Jesus. In this way the righteousness of the Son can be imputed to us humans by the Father, then the Holy Spirit shows up to set into motion the operation of justification, which magically wipes all our sins away, renews our spirit, and completes our salvation.

In other words, each Divine Person cannot claim to be fully God, as each does something that the other two don’t. If it takes three Persons to give us an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, well, to be frank, that is not my idea of monotheism.

I prefer Emanuel Swedenborg’s version of the Divine Trinity as ONE GOD manifesting three distinct operations and functions. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit represent not three persons but the three operations of Divine Love, Divine Truth, and Divine Activity.

Truth makes love visible. That is why the Lord came into the world – to make the Love of the Father visible to us by taking on a human form. Jesus is Jehovah!

One might wonder how God could take on an imperfect and gross human body. According to Swedenborg, that was God’s precise strategy for salvation. The purpose of coming into the world was to make His human form perfectly divine by doing the will of the Father (the Father was His Divine Soul) and combating the worldly desires of the flesh and worldly temptations.

Why did God have to implore such a strategy instead of fighting evil straight on?

Without taking on a human body an Infinite God cannot be realistically attacked by any evil. A human body provided the medium by which the Lord was vulnerable to attack by both people on earth and by the entire powers of hell. The appearance of the Holy Spirit (as a dove) when Jesus was baptized was a sign from heaven that the operation of harmonizing his human side by means of the higher influence of His Divine Nature was about to begin.

This process of overcoming the flesh and its proclivities (especially love of self and the world) involved profound humiliation before the Father (which represented His Divine Spirit and its ultimate dictates).

The Lord’s biggest challenge on the cross was not enduring physical pain or physical death but His not giving in to the human part of His nature – which tempted Him to get off the cross as a show of absolute strength to men and women and compel belief. By resisting this final temptation and achieving profound humility He united His human nature with the Divine Nature and made them one (the Alpha and Omega). What died on the cross were all His human imperfections.

This complete victory over the flesh gave the Lord full power over hell, which was increasing its deadly influence in the world at the time of His Advent. We were not saved by this event but the door to salvation was kept open. When we approach the Lord to change our lives His Divine Heavenly Spirit (not a dove) starts a similar process of renewal and regeneration within us. The Lord will help us combat our negative nature and find true humility.

If God chose to sit in three chairs we would see the same person (the Lord) on all three.

How does that sit with you? Did I pull a chair right out from under your faith-system?

http://www.provinggod.com

The Divine rope-a-dope

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Spiritual awareness and insight

With Easter approaching I was inspired to share a new “detail” with my readers concerning what the Lord actually accomplished on earth by his life and death. His coming into the world involved a most unique strategy that is not to be found among any of the current Christine dogmas.

Some students of the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg have humorously described the Lord’s strategy of coming into the world for the sake of human salvation as the divine “rope-a-dope.”

This cosmic maneuver by the Lord in fighting evil and falsity cannot be fully appreciated unless one realizes that most of the drama in the Lord’s struggles on earth took place behind the scenes. In fact, the real blow-by-blow action took place not on earth but in the spiritual world.

Without understanding this important detail, the real dynamics behind the Lord’s glorification will continue to elude current Christian theology.

What is not taken into account is that God’s sustaining influence (creatio continua) must pass through the spiritual world (top-down causation) before reaching the physical world. This means that God’s love and living force is actually intercepted by both the angels and devils in the a priori realm of heaven and hell, before reaching us humans in the form of various compulsions or noble strivings. (Just block out the world from your mind for a moment and you will notice the constant “chatter” taking place in your head.)

The Lord God wisely uses this situation to protect human free will, which is a gift from divine love. Free will is meaningless without real choices. But there must be a careful balance between these opposing influences or things will go haywire.

When evil is favored over good in the world, it will have an enormous effect on the populations of Hell as people die and take their proclivities with them. This puts human freedom in jeopardy.

At the time of the Lord’s arrival on earth this was the case and things were cosmically stacked against humans. What is not well understood by Christian orthodoxy is that Jesus was Jehovah in the flesh! The reason why the Creator and Lord of heaven came into the world was that nothing finite (like the hells) could engage the Infinite in a fight. By being born of a human female, and putting on a finite body of flesh and bones, the Lord provided the hells with a finite medium for combat. In other words, the Lord could suffer all the weaknesses of the flesh.

So, the hells were tricked into a fight with God, which they could not resist.

This spiritual combat is only alluded to in the literal narrative of Scripture (as when the Lord is tempted by Satan in the wilderness). But translated into its highest quantum vocabulary, all the events in the Sacred Word actually represent the step-by-step process by which the Lord conquered Hell’s influence (and made the Word flesh).

With every victory over temptation the Lord removed the human traits derived from his mother while making His human increasingly divine. This is why he never calls Mary “mother.” The removal of His mother’s genetic and human contributions consisted of profound humiliation before the Father.

Hell’s devious temptations consisted of influencing the Lord to resist humiliation in favor of dominance over others and to come under the intoxicating power of self-love. This combat was more subtle than evil simply attacking good. It included something much more sinister – flattery. But as the Lord defeated temptations of every kind, even his flesh was made fully divine. Glorification was a process by which the Lord became fully united with the Father from top to bottom (His heavenly essence became one with His human).

The Lord did NOT save humankind through the passion of the cross. This was his final and most severe temptation. Even more intense than the physical pain of crucifixion the Lord had to suffer the emotional pain of being rejected, compounded with the natural human urge to come off the cross and compel the world to worship Him and acknowledge His self-importance.

So, if the Lord had come down from the cross and not suffered total humiliation, the hells would have been victorious.

What the Lord did accomplish during his life on earth was to subjugate the Hells so that human free will could be preserved, keeping the door open for salvation.

In a future post I will address what making flesh “divine” means in terms of the laws of the universe. It has everything to do with my thesis that Love is the ultimate science.

Spiritual awareness and insight

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There is a curious passage in Holy Scripture (Rev. 2:11) that states, “He that overcometh shall not be hurt by the second death.”

Are we to suffer two deaths? Isn’t one enough?

We all worry about our physical death, so why does the Bible say that it is another death that we are to be more concerned about?

Actually our common language shows an intuitive acknowledgement that we can indeed experience two kinds of death.

We can also die internally if some idea or passion we cling to is proven wrong. In that case we see ourselves as “goners” even though our physical bodies may be quite healthy.

The Bible merely acknowledges that we have both a physical or outer life and a deeper inner life and that our inner lives are the most important. Unfortunately our inner lives often carry negative baggage, which must be removed so that new life can take root. When individuals say they are “reborn,” they are referring to the fact that something old has died within them and that something more important and vital has grown out of this “death.” A new inner life is the key to enjoying eternal happiness.

It is this same other death that Adam and Eve were warned about when they ate the Forbidden Fruit (swallowing whole a deluded worldview). Although they remained physically alive after that event (and thought they had dodged a bullet) something much deeper inside them was killed off.

If one doesn’t become more spiritual (overcome one’s inner flaws) this second death will be eternally hurtful because nothing noble has replaced it.