461. The third memorable occurrence. Once I was carried in spirit to a paradise in the southern part of the spiritual world. I observed that this paradise was more magnificent than all the rest I had seen up to that point. The reason for its magnificence was that a garden means intelligence, and all the people who are exceptionally intelligent are moved to the south.
The Garden of Eden of Adam and his wife has exactly this meaning. Their expulsion from the garden means being taken away from intelligence and therefore from wholeness of life as well.
As I was walking around in this southern paradise I noticed some people sitting under a laurel tree eating figs. I went over to them and asked if I could have some figs. They gave me some. In my hand, however, the figs turned into grapes! Since I was astounded by this, an angelic spirit who was standing next to me told me, "The figs became grapes in your hand because figs correspondentially mean good actions related to goodwill, and therefore to faith, in our earthly or outer self. Grapes, however, mean good qualities related to goodwill, and therefore to faith, in our spiritual or inner self. This happened to you because you love spiritual things. In our world everything happens, takes shape, and also changes according to correspondences. "
[2] At that point an avid desire suddenly came over me to know how people can do what is good from God and yet do it completely as if they were on their own, so I asked the people eating figs how they understood this. They said, "We have no other way to understand this except to think that God produces this effect inside us and through us when we are unaware of it; because if we knew about it and did it, the good we did would be only something seemingly good that was actually evil inwardly. Everything that comes from ourselves comes from our self-interest, which is evil from the day we are born. How could goodness from God and evil from ourselves become united and move together into action? When it comes to salvation, our self-interest is constantly seeking to earn merit. The more merit our self-interest seeks, the more merit it takes away from the Lord; this theft is the ultimate injustice and ungodliness. Briefly put, if the goodness that God produces in us were to flow into something we wanted and did, we would pollute and desecrate that goodness in every way, which God would never allow. We can of course think that the goodness we do comes from God and call it God's goodness acting through us, but we don't actually understand that. "
[3] Then I opened my mind and said, "You don't understand it, because your thinking is based on the way things appear, and thinking that is based on an appearance is mistaken. You have this mistaken view because you believe that everything we intend and think, and everything we do and say, is inside us and therefore comes from us, when in fact none of it is inside us except a condition that enables us to receive what flows in. We are not life in itself; we are just organs that receive life. The Lord is life in itself, as in fact he says in John: 'As the Father has life in himself, so he has also given the Son to have life in himself' (John 5:26; ; , ).
[4] "There are two things that constitute life: love and wisdom, or what is the same thing, goodness related to love and truth related to wisdom. These two qualities flow in from God. We receive them as if they were ours. In fact, because we feel them that way, they emanate from us as if they really were our own. The Lord grants us this feeling so that what flows in will have an effect on us, and be accepted and stay with us. All that is evil also flows in, not from God but from hell. We feel pleasure as we take evil in, because we were born that way. Therefore we receive no greater amount of goodness from the Lord than the amount of evil we have removed as if we were removing it on our own. It is our repentance and our faith in the Lord that does this removing.
[5] "Love and wisdom, and goodwill and faith, or (to put it even more generally) the goodness of love and goodwill and the truth of wisdom and faith, flow in. Things that flow in seem to us to be totally our own, and therefore they go out from us as if they were our own. The truth of this can be clearly seen by analogy with sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Everything that is perceived by the organs of these senses flows in from outside us but feels like it is inside us. The same is true for our organs of inner sensation, with just one difference: things that are spiritual and intangible flow into our organs of inner sensation, while things that are earthly and tangible flow into our organs of physical sensation.
"Briefly put, each of us is an organ that receives life from God. Therefore we become receptive to goodness depending on how thoroughly we stop doing evil. The power to stop doing evil is something the Lord grants to every one of us. He gives us the ability to intend and to understand. Whatever we do intentionally, based on our understanding (or to put it another way, using our free will and following the reasoning of our intellect) becomes a permanent part of us. The Lord uses these abilities to bring us to a state of partnership with him; in this state he then reforms us, regenerates us, and saves us.
[6] "The life that flows into us comes from the Lord. This life is also called the spirit of God. In the Word it is called the Holy Spirit. The Word says that the Holy Spirit enlightens us and brings us to life, and even that it works inside us. This life is varied and modified, however, by the structure that is created in us by what we love.
"nother way to tell that all the goodness of love and goodwill and all the truth of wisdom and faith flow in rather than coming from ourselves is this: People who think that goodness and truth have been in us since creation eventually cannot avoid thinking that God poured himself into us and therefore we are partly gods. Yet people who think this and believe it become devils. When they are among us, they reek like corpses.
[7] "Further, what else is human action except the mind acting? Whatever the mind intends and thinks, it does and says through its organ, the body. Therefore when our mind is led by the Lord, our words and actions are also led by the Lord; our words and actions are led by the Lord when we believe in him.
"If this is not true, tell me - if you can - why the Lord has commanded us in a thousand passages in his Word to love our neighbor, to perform acts of goodwill, to bear fruit like a tree, to obey what he commands, and to do all this so that we will be saved. For another thing, why did he say that we are judged by the actions and works we have done - people who do good things being judged to heaven and to life while people who do evil things are judged to hell and to death? The Lord would not say things like these if everything we accomplished was done to earn merit and was therefore evil. It is important for you to know, therefore, that if the mind is goodwill, then the action is goodwill; but if the mind is faith alone, which is also faith separated from spiritual goodwill, the action is also that same faith. "
[8] The people sitting under the laurel tree then said, "We understand that you have spoken the truth - we just don't understand what you said. "
"You understand that I spoke the truth," I replied, "because of the general awareness that people have from the light that flows in from heaven when they hear something true. You don't understand it because of your own awareness, which is something people have from the light that flows in from the world. These two kinds of awareness, an inner one and an outer one, or a spiritual one and an earthly one, become united in people who are wise. You too can unite them if you focus on the Lord and remove evils. "
Since they understood this point, I pulled some branches from a grapevine and held them out to these people. "Do you believe these are coming to you from me or from the Lord?" I said.
They said, "They are coming from the Lord by means of you. "
The branches in their hands suddenly grew grapes!
As I was leaving, I saw a cedar table that had a book on it. It was under a thriving olive tree that had vines wrapped around its trunk. I looked more closely, and the book turned out to be one written through me called Secrets of Heaven! I told the people that the fact that we are organs that receive life rather than life itself was fully demonstrated in that book; the book also shows that life itself cannot be fabricated, and thus cannot reside as a fabricated thing within a person, any more than light can in an eye.
