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]

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.