Here we are in the 21st century. We know that the universe is an enormous place. We're just bursting with scientific knowledge. But how are we doing with the even-bigger ideas? Our human societies seem to be erasing them, or ignoring them - maybe we think we're too busy for them.

Here on the New Christian Bible Study site, we'll buck the trend. We want to explore the big ideas that give us a framework for living better lives. Here's a start on a list of big ideas from a New Christian perspective. For each idea, there is a footnote that lists some references in Swedenborg's theological works:

1. God exists. Just one God, who created and sustains the entire universe in all its dimensions, spiritual and physical. ¹

2. God's essence is love itself. It's the force that drives everything. ²

3. God's essence comes into being, that is, it exists, in and through creation. ³

4. There are levels, or degrees, of creation - ranging from spiritual ones that we can't detect with our physical senses or sensors, to the level of the physical universe where most of our awareness is when we're alive here. ⁴

5. The created universe emanates from God, and it's sustained by God, but in an important way it is separate from God. He wants it to be separate, so that freedom can exist. ⁵

6. God operates from love through wisdom - willing good things, and understanding how to bring them about. ⁶

7. The physical level of creation exists to provide human beings with an opportunity to choose in freedom, with rationality, whether or not to acknowledge and cooperate with God. ⁷

8. God provides all people everywhere, regardless of their religion, the freedom to choose to live a life of love to God and to the neighbor. ⁸

9. God loves everyone. He knows that true happiness only comes when we're unselfish; when we're truly motivated by a love of the Lord which is grounded out in a love of the neighbor. He seeks to lead everyone, but will not force us to follow against our will. ⁹

10. God doesn't judge us. He tells us what's good, and what's evil, and flows into our minds to lead us towards good. However, we're free to reject his leading, and instead opt to love ourselves most. Day by day, we create habits of generosity or of selfishness, and live out a life in accordance with those habits. Those habits become the real "us", our ruling love. ¹⁰

11. Our physical bodies die eventually, but the spiritual part of our minds keeps going. It's been operating on a spiritual plane already, but our awareness shifts - so that we become fully aware of spiritual reality. ¹¹

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479. A great deal of my experience has testified to the fact that we are our love or intention after death. All heaven is differentiated into communities on the basis of differences in the quality of love, and every spirit who is raised up into heaven and becomes an angel is taken to the community where her or his love is. When we arrive there we feel as though we are in our own element, at home, back to our birthplace, so to speak. Angels sense this and associate there with kindred spirits. When they leave and go somewhere else, they feel a constant pull, a longing to go back to their kindred and therefore to their dominant love. This is how people gather together in heaven. The same applies in hell. There too, people associate according to loves that oppose heavenly ones. On the fact that both heaven and hell are made up of communities and that they are all differentiated according to differences of love, see 41-50, 200-212 above.

[2] We may also gather that we are our love after death from the fact that anything that does not agree with our dominant love is then removed and apparently taken away from us. For good people, what is removed and apparently taken away is everything that disagrees and conflicts, with the result that they are admitted to their love. It is much the same for evil people, except that what is taken away from them is everything true, while for good people everything false is taken away. Either way, the result is that ultimately everyone becomes his or her own love. This happens when we are brought into our third state, which will be discussed below.

Once this has happened, we constantly turn our faces toward our love and have it constantly before our eyes no matter which way we face (see above, 123-124).

[3] All spirits can be led wherever you want as long as they are kept in their dominant love. They cannot resist even though they know what is happening and think that they will refuse. Spirits have often tried to do something in opposition, but without success. Their love is like a chain or rope tied around them, with which they can be pulled and which they cannot escape. It is the same for people in this world. Our love leads us as well, and it is through our love that we are led by others. It is even more so when we become spirits, though, because then we are not allowed to present a different love or pretend to a love that is not ours.

[4] It is obvious in every gathering in the other life that our spirit is our dominant love. To the extent that we act and talk in keeping with someone else's love, that individual looks whole, with a face that is whole, cheerful, and lively. To the extent that we act and talk against someone else's dominant love, though, that individual's face begins to change, to dim, and to be hard to see. Eventually it disappears as though it were not even there. I have often been amazed at this because this kind of thing cannot happen in the world. However, I have been told that the same thing happens to the spirit within us, in that when we turn our attention away from someone, that individual is no longer in our sight.

[5] I have also seen that our spirit is our dominant love from the fact that every spirit seizes and claims whatever suits his or her love and rejects and repels whatever does not suit it. Our love is like a spongy, porous wood that absorbs whatever liquids prompt its growth, and repels others. It is like animals of various kinds. They recognize their proper foods, seek out the ones that suit their natures, and avoid the ones that disagree. Every love actually wants to be nourished by what is appropriate to it - an evil love by falsities and a good love by truths. I have occasionally been allowed to see that some particular simple and good people wanted to teach evil people things that were true and good. Faced with this teaching, though, the evil people fled far away; and when they reached their own kind, they seized on whatever falsities suited their love with great delight. I have also been allowed to see good spirits talking with each other about truths, which other good spirits in attendance listened to eagerly, while some evil ones who were there paid no attention, as though they did not hear anything.

In the world of spirits you can see paths, some leading to heaven and some leading to hell, each one leading to some specific community. Good spirits travel only the paths that lead to heaven, and to the community engaged in their own quality of love. They do not see paths that lead anywhere else. On the other hand, evil spirits travel only the paths that lead to hell and to that community there which is engaged in the evil of their own love. They do not see paths that lead anywhere else; and if they do see them, they still do not want to follow them.

Paths like this in the spiritual world are "real appearances" that correspond to true and false [understandings]; so this is what "paths" in the Word mean. ¹

These proofs from experience support what was said above on rational grounds, namely that after death we are our own love and our own intent. I say "intent" because for each of us, our intent is our love.

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4658. To the inner parts of the ear belong those who have 'the sight' of the inner hearing, who obey whatever its spirit there tells them and make exactly right declarations of what it tells them. I have also been shown what these are like from the following experience. I became aware of a kind of noise coming through from below me, coming up on the left side of me into my left ear. I realized that they were spirits who were trying to work their way out, but I could not make out what kind of spirits they were. Having worked their way out, however, they then spoke to me. They said that they were students of logic and metaphysics and that they had confined their thoughts to these areas of knowledge with no other end in view than that they would be considered learned and so would acquire positions and wealth. They moaned about the wretched life they now led, for they had become steeped in those areas of knowledge for no other purpose, and so had not used this to bring perfection to their power of reason. Their speech was slow and muted.

[2] Meanwhile two were talking to each other overhead, and I asked who they were. I was told that one of them was a very renowned figure in the learned world, and I was led to believe that he was Aristotle. Who the second one was, I was not told. The first of them was at that point taken back to a state he had passed through when he lived in the world; for anyone can easily be taken back to a state of his life when in the world because every state of his life is present within him. But to my surprise he positioned himself at my right ear and there spoke in a hoarse yet intelligible voice. From the meaning conveyed in his utterances I became aware that he was of an entirely different disposition from those schoolmen who had emerged first, in that the things he had written were the product of his own thought and that this was the origin of his philosophical ideas. Consequently the terms which he invented and gave to different facets of his thoughts were verbal expressions by which he described the things of an interior kind. I also became aware of the fact that he had been prompted to engage in such pursuits by a great delight and a desire to know the ideas that are part of thought, and that he followed obediently whatever his spirit had told him. This was why he had positioned himself at my right ear. His followers, called the Schoolmen, ¹ are different. They do not proceed from thought to terms but from terms to ideas comprising thought, and so go down the road from the opposite end. Indeed, many do not even set off down it to these ideas but stay with terms; and if they use these it is to prove whatever they like, and to give falsities an appearance of truth, in keeping with their desire to convince people of these. Consequently their pursuit of philosophy serves to make them stupid rather than wise persons, so that darkness prevails among them instead of light.

[3] I talked to them after that about the science of analysis, and I was led to say that a small child speaking for merely half an hour presents more philosophy, analysis, and logic than he could have done in volumes describing them, for the reason that every detail of human thought and consequently of human speech involves analysis, the laws of which originate in the spiritual world. I went on to say that anyone who wishes in his thinking to begin in an artificial way with terms is not unlike a dancer who wishes to start to learn how to dance from what he knows about motor fibres and muscles. If in trying to dance he fixed his mind simply on his knowledge of these he could scarcely lift a foot. Yet even without that knowledge he moves all his motor fibres spread throughout the whole body, using them to operate his lungs, diaphragm, sides, arms, neck, and every other part of the body, to describe all of which many volumes would not be sufficient. Similar to such a dancer were those who wish in their thinking to begin with terms. He agreed with what I said and declared that if that is the way people learn they are proceeding in the wrong direction. If anyone wished to be so stupid, he added, then let him go that way; even so, let him always keep in mind what is useful and what is interior.

[4] After this he showed me what kind of idea he had had about the Supreme Deity. He had represented Him to himself as one with a human face and a halo around his head. He now knew that the Lord was that Person, that the halo was the Divine as this proceeded from Him, and that He flowed not only into heaven but also into the whole world, disposing and ruling over these. He added that the one who disposes and rules heaven also disposes and rules the whole world because the one is inseparable from the other. He also declared that he had believed in one God alone whose attributes and qualities had been designated by the same number of names as there were gods whom others worshipped.

[5] I saw a woman who was reaching out her hand, desiring to stroke his cheek. When I wondered at this he said that while in the world he had often seen a woman like this one who seemed to be stroking his cheek, and that her hand had been beautiful. Angelic spirits said that women like her had been seen on occasions by people in early times who gave the name Pallas to them, and that whoever had appeared to him had been one of those spirits who, when they had lived as people in ancient times, had taken delight in ideas and so had gone into the field of thought, though not into philosophy. And since such spirits had resided with him and had taken delight in him because he had begun in his thinking with that which was interior they had put forward such a woman to represent this.

[6] Finally he intimated what kind of idea he had had about the human soul or spirit, which he called pneuma, namely something living but invisible, like something ethereal. He also said that he had known his spirit would live on after death because it was his inward essential self which, having the ability to think, could not die. He then went on to say that he had not been able to have any clear thought about the soul, only an obscure one, because his only source of knowledge about it was himself and, to a small extent, what he had received from the ancients. Aristotle himself lives among intelligent spirits in the next life, but many of his followers dwell among people who are stupid.

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