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

അടിക്കുറിപ്പുകൾ:

180. It is even clearer that there are levels of love and wisdom if we compare angels' love and wisdom with our love and wisdom. It is generally acknowledged that the wisdom of angels is unutterable, relatively speaking. You will see later [267, 416] that it is also incomprehensible to us when we are wrapped up in our earthly love. The reason it seems unutterable and incomprehensible is that it is on a higher level.

319. The reason that everything we have justified in both our volition and our discernment stays with us forever is that we are our own love, and love is the substance of our volition. Or it is because we are our own good or our own evil, since everything good in us is a matter of love, and the same is true of everything evil.

Since we are our own love, we are also the forms of our own love and can be called organs of our life's love. I explained in 279 above that our feelings and consequent thoughts are changes and variations of the state and form of the organic substances of our minds. Now I need to explain the nature and quality of those changes and variations.

We can get a relative concept of them from our heart and lungs. Their changes are alternating expansions and compressions, or dilations and contractions. In the heart we call them systole and diastole, in the lungs they are our breathing, the alternating stretching and restraining, or the parting and squeezing, of their lobes. These are the changes and variations of the states of our heart and lungs. Similar things happen in the other organs of our bodies, and quite similar things in their parts, the parts through which our blood and life fluid is accepted and circulated.

[2] Much the same happens in the organic forms of the mind, which as already noted [279] are the subjects of our feelings and thoughts. The difference is that their expansions and compressions, their alternating motions, are relatively so much more perfect that there is no way to describe them in the words of ordinary language. Only the words of spiritual language are adequate, and these necessarily sound like whirlpools spiraling in and out like endless twisted coils joined together in forms that are wonderfully receptive of life.

[3] Now, though, I need to state what these purely organic substances and forms are like in evil people and in good people. In good people, the spirals face forward and in evil people they face backward. When they spiral forward they are turned toward the Lord and are open to the inflow from him. When they spiral backward they are turned toward hell and are open to its inflow. It is important to realize that to the extent that they are turned backward they are open behind and closed in front, and that conversely, to the extent that they are turned forward they are open in front and closed behind.

[4] This shows what kind of form or what kind of organ an evil person is and what kind of form or organ a good person is--they are turned in opposite directions. Further, since once a direction is established it cannot be twisted back the other way, we can see that we keep forever the orientation we have when we die. It is our volition's love that determines this direction, or that turns us forward or backward; for as just noted, each of us is her or his love. That is why after death we all follow the path of our love--to heaven if we have loved what is good and to hell if we have loved what is evil. We find no rest until we arrive in the community where our own dominant love is; and strange as it may sound, we all know the way. It is as though we were following a scent.