Generally speaking, people who are at lower levels of an organization serve those at higher levels. Bosses boss and their employees serve; coaches devise strategy and players do what the coach tells them to do; engineers design car parts and workers assemble them according to the engineers' instructions. Ideally, of course, it's a two-way street: A good boss knows he is really there to help his employees succeed; a good coach creates strategies based on his players' strengths. Even there, though, the boss and coach are really working in service of a higher goal, seeking organizational success. The same is true in the spiritual sense of the Bible. When someone serves another, they are in a lower state, serving a higher state (or a deeper evil, if they are being enslaved by people who represent evil). This can take many different forms, depending on the circumstances. In many cases, this creates a connection between "service" and intellectual things. This is because who we are is determined by what we love; our loves are the deepest part of us. What we think, our reasoning and intellect and the things we learn about, come from those loves and serve those loves.

573. Whose feet were like those of a bear. This symbolically means, full of misconceptions taken from the literal sense of the Word, read but not understood.

Feet symbolize the natural support which is the basis on which the heresy meant by the leopard rests and, so to speak, propels itself, and that support is the literal sense of the Word. A bear symbolizes people who read the Word but fail to understand it, so that they derive from it misconceptions.

That these are the people symbolized by bears became apparent to me from seeing bears in the spiritual world, and from seeing some people there wearing bearskins. They were all people who read the Word and did not see any doctrinal truth in it. They were also people who affirmed the appearances of truth there, resulting in misconceptions.

Some bears seen in the spiritual world are dangerous and some are not, and some also are white, but they are told apart by their heads. Bears that are not dangerous have heads like those of calves or sheep.

Bears symbolize people and things like this in the following passages:

A bear lying in wait for me has overturned my paths, a lion in hidden places has corrupted my ways... He has made me desolate. (Lamentations 3:9-11)

I will meet them like a bereaved bear..., and there I will devour them like a savage lion. The wild beast of the field shall rend them. (Hosea 13:8)

...there shall lie down... the calf and the young lion... The heifer and the bear shall graze. (Isaiah 11:6-7)

(The second beast that came up from the sea was) like a bear... and had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth. (Daniel 7:5)

The lion and bear that David smote, catching the lion by its beard (1 Samuel 17:34-37), have a similar symbolic meaning. So, too, in 2 Samuel 17:8.

[2] A lion and a bear are mentioned in these places because a lion symbolizes falsity destroying the Word's truths, and a bear symbolizes misconceptions that destroy them also, but not to the same degree. Thus we are told in Amos:

...the day of Jehovah...(a day of) darkness, and not light. It is as if one who flees from a lion comes upon a bear. (Amos 5:18-19)

In the second book of Kings we read that Elisha was mocked by some boys and called a baldhead, and that forty-two boys were therefore torn apart by two female bears from the woods (2 Kings 2:23-24). This occurred because Elisha represented the Lord in respect to the Word (no. 298), because baldness symbolized the Word without its literal sense, thus having no reality (no. 47), because the number forty-two symbolized blasphemy (no. 583), and because female bears symbolized the literal sense of the Word read indeed, but not understood.