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

Footnotes:

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.

Footnotes:

280. The fourth memorable occurrence. Once from far away I saw paths that lay between rows of trees. Young people were gathered there in discussion groups to talk about topics related to wisdom. (This was in the spiritual world.) I moved in their direction, and when I was close enough I saw that all the others revered one person as most important among them because he excelled the rest in wisdom.

When he saw me, he said, "I was astounded when I saw you coming along on the road, because one moment you would be in view and the next you would disappear. One moment I can see you, and then suddenly I cannot. You are definitely not in the same state of life as we are!"

Tickled by that, I said, "I am not a trickster or a magician, but I do come and go! One moment I am in the light for you, the next moment I am in the shade. In this world I am both a foreigner and a native. "

The sage looked at me and said, "What you are saying is strange and amazing. Tell me who you are. "

"I am in the world you used to live in and have now left," I said, "which is called the earthly or physical world. I am also in the world where you are now, called the spiritual world. As a result I am in an earthly state and a spiritual state at the same time. I am in an earthly state with people on earth and in a spiritual state with all of you. When I am in an earthly state, you do not see me. When I am in a spiritual state, you do see me. This circumstance of mine is a gift from the Lord.

"As an enlightened man, you know that people in the earthly world do not see people in the spiritual world or the reverse. Therefore when I put my spirit in my body, you do not see me, but when I take it out of my body, you do see me. This happens because of the difference between what is spiritual and what is earthly. "

[2] When he heard me mention the difference between what is spiritual and what is earthly, he asked, "What is the difference? Isn't it like the difference between something more pure and something less pure? What is something spiritual then, except something earthly that is just more pure?"

"That is not the nature of the difference," I replied. "No matter how subtle something earthly becomes, it will never get close to becoming something spiritual. The difference is like the difference between something on a prior level and something on a subsequent level - there is no finite ratio between them. The prior level is present in the subsequent level the way a cause is present in an effect; and something on a subsequent level is the result of something on a prior level the way an effect is the result of a cause. This is why the one does not appear to the other. "

The wise person's response to that was, "I have meditated a great deal on this difference, but so far without results. I wish I could learn about the difference!"

I said, "Not only are you going to learn about the difference between what is spiritual and what is earthly; you will even see it for yourself. "

Then I said, "You are in a spiritual state when you are with your people, but in an earthly state when you are with me. You talk to your people in a spiritual language that is shared by every spirit and angel, but you talk to me in my own vernacular. When any spirits or angels communicate with a person, they speak the person's language. With a French person, they speak French. With a Greek, they speak Greek. With an Arab they speak Arabic, and so on.

[3] "To see the difference between spiritual and earthly language, do this. Go over to your own group and say something to them. Hold on to the words, return with them in your memory, and pronounce them to me. "

He did it. He returned to me with the words on his lips and pronounced them. They were totally foreign and bizarre words that do not exist in any language in the physical world. By repeating this experiment several times, it became obvious that all who are in the spiritual world have a spiritual language that has nothing in common with any earthly language, and that we all acquire that spiritual language spontaneously after we die. (On another occasion I learned that the very sound of spiritual language is so different from the sound of earthly language that no matter how loud it is, spiritual sound is completely inaudible to an earthly person, and so is earthly sound to a spiritual person.)

[4] Later on I asked the sage and the people around him to go back to their homes, write some sentence on a piece of paper, and then bring the piece of paper back to me and read it. They did so and came back with the piece of paper in hand; but when they tried to read it they could not, because the writing consisted of nothing but some letters of the alphabet with curved marks over them, each of which meant some aspect of the topic. (Because every letter of the alphabet has a meaning there, you can see why the Lord is called the Alpha and the Omega.)

Again and again they went back home, wrote, and came back, until eventually they realized that their writing involves and contains countless things that no earthly writing could ever express. Someone said that this was the case because a spiritual person thinks things that are beyond an earthly person's words or comprehension; those things cannot be translated into any written or spoken language.

[5] At that point some of the people there were unwilling to comprehend that spiritual thinking goes so far beyond earthly thinking that it is inexpressible in comparison. For this reason I said to them, "Do an experiment. Go to your spiritual community and think about something, keep it fixed in your memory, and come back and express it to me. "

They went home, had a thought, kept it fixed in their memory, and came back. When they tried to express what they had been thinking about, they could not do it. They could not find any idea in earthly thought that fit any idea in their purely spiritual thought; and because the ideas of thought become the words of language, they could find no words to express it.

By going home again and coming back again several times, they became convinced that spiritual ideas are supernatural, inexpressible, indescribable, and incomprehensible to an earthly person. Because spiritual ideas are this transcendent, the people said that spiritual ideas or thoughts, relative to earthly ones, are ideas beyond ideas and thoughts beyond thoughts, and they express qualities beyond qualities and feelings beyond feelings. Therefore spiritual thoughts are the initiation and origin of earthly thoughts. This made it clear that spiritual wisdom is wisdom beyond wisdom - it is inexpressible to any wise person in the physical world.

[6] Then a voice from a higher heaven said that there is a wisdom that is deeper or higher still, which is called heavenly wisdom. Its quality relative to spiritual wisdom is the same as spiritual wisdom's quality relative to earthly wisdom. These wisdoms flow in, heaven by heaven, from the Lord's divine wisdom, which is infinite.

At this the man who had been speaking to me said, "I now see that one earthly idea contains many spiritual ideas, and one spiritual idea contains many heavenly ideas. Another outcome of this is that something that is divided does not become simpler and simpler but instead more and more complex, because it comes closer and closer to the Infinite, in whom all things exist in an infinite way. "

[7] Then I said to the people there, "On the basis of these three experimental proofs, you see the type of difference that exists between what is spiritual and what is earthly. You also see the reason why an earthly person cannot be seen by a spiritual person or a spiritual person by an earthly person, despite the fact that all people of both kinds are in a complete human form. Because they have this form in common, it might seem that an earthly person would be able to see a spiritual person. Yet the factors that make up the form of spiritual people are inner things belonging to the mind; and the mind of spirits and angels is made of things that are spiritual, while the mind of people, as long as they are still alive in the world, is made of things that are earthly. "

After that a voice was heard coming from a higher heaven saying to one of the people there, "Come up here. " That person went up and came back and said that until then the angels had not known the differences between what is spiritual and what is earthly, because no one had had the opportunity to make the comparison by being in both worlds at once and those differences cannot be known without comparison and contrast.

[8] Before we parted company, we discussed this topic some more. I said, "The differences we are discussing come solely from the fact that you who are in the spiritual world are essential and nonphysical. Essences are the roots of physical substances. What is matter but an aggregation of essences? Therefore you are involved in primary structures and individual essences, while we are involved in derivatives of primary structures and composites. You are involved in what is particular; we are involved in what is general. Something general cannot climb onto the same level with something particular; therefore earthly things that are physical cannot climb onto the same level as spiritual things that are formed of essences any more than the cable that moors a ship could pass through the eye of a sewing needle, or any more than a nerve could fit inside one of the fibers that compose it. This then is the reason why a physical person cannot think or say what a spiritual person can. This is why Paul says that the things he heard in the third heaven were inexpressible [2 Corinthians 12:2-4].

[9] "Furthermore, to think in a spiritual way is to think apart from time and space, while to think in an earthly way is to think in terms of time and space. Every idea that comes out of earthly thinking has some aspect of time and space attached to it. This is not true, however, of spiritual ideas. The reason is that the spiritual world does not have time and space in the way the physical world does; instead the spiritual world has apparent time and space.

"Thoughts and perceptions also share this difference. This is why you are capable of thinking about God's essence and omnipresence from eternity, meaning about God before he created the world. You think about God's essence apart from time, and you think about his omnipresence apart from space, and therefore you comprehend things that transcend earthly human ideas. "

[10] At that point I related how I had once been thinking about God's essence and omnipresence from eternity, meaning that I was thinking about God before he created the world; and because I could not remove space and time from the thoughts I was having, I became distressed as I saw an idea of nature starting to replace my idea of God. Then I was told, "Remove the ideas of space and time and you will understand. " I was allowed to remove them, and I understood. From that point on, I have been able to think about God from eternity, but not at all about nature from eternity. God exists in all time independently of time and in all space independently of space. Nature, on the other hand, exists in all time in time itself and in all space in space itself. Nature and its time and space had to have a beginning; God, who exists apart from time and space, did not. Nature therefore comes from God. Nature came into being in time (not from eternity) along with its own time and space.