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 fl ow into us. The warmth fl ows 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—fl ow 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 infl ow 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 diff erent 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 infl ow happens.

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

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

§§19–20 / [Concluding Accounts]

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.)