124. At this point, I may add two secrets of angelic wisdom that will enable us to see what divine providence is like. The first is that the Lord never acts in any detail of our being by itself unless he acts in all the details at once. The second is that the Lord acts from the center and the boundaries at the same time.

The reason the Lord never acts in any detail of our being by itself unless he acts in all the details at once is that everything in us is so knit together and therefore so united in a single form that it does not act as a plurality but as a single whole. We know that we are knit together and therefore formed in this way as far as our bodies are concerned. The human mind is also in the same kind of form and has the same kind of all-inclusive connectedness, because the human mind is a spiritual person and in fact acts as a single person. This is why our spirit, the mind that is in our body, has a complete human form, so that after death we are people just as much as we are in this world. The only difference is that we have cast off the skin that made up our body in this world.

[2] Since it is the nature of the human form that all its parts make an inclusive entity that acts as a single whole, it follows that one element cannot be shifted from its place and changed with respect to state except with the consent of the others; for if one element were moved out of place and changed in state, there would be a gap in the form that was intended to act as a single whole. We can see from this that the Lord never acts on any detail without acting on all of them at the same time.

This is how the Lord works in the whole angelic heaven, because the whole angelic heaven is like a single person in his sight. This is also how the Lord acts on every individual angel, because every angel is a miniature heaven. This is also how he acts on each of us, most directly on our minds, and through them on everything in our bodies. This is because our mind is our spirit--an angel to the extent that it is united to the Lord--and our body is obedience.

[3] However, we need to be acutely aware that the Lord acts precisely, most precisely in fact, on every detail of our being while working through everything in our form. He does not, though, change the state of any part or any element in specific unless all the elements of the form concur. There will be more on this later, when I explain that the Lord's divine providence is all-inclusive because it deals with details and that it deals with details because it is all-inclusive.

[4] The reason the Lord acts from the center and the boundaries at the same time is that this is the only way the whole and all its elements can be kept connected. The things in between depend in sequence on the central ones, all the way to the boundaries, and they are all gathered together at the boundaries; for as explained in part 3 of Divine Love and Wisdom, there is a gathering at the boundaries of everything that comes from the First. This is why the Lord from eternity or Jehovah came into the world and put on the clothing of a human nature there in outermost form in order to be present in first and last things at the same time, and therefore from the first things to govern the whole world through the last things. This enabled him to save those people whom he could save under the laws of his divine providence, which are also the laws of his divine wisdom. This involves the fact acknowledged in the Christian world that no one could have been saved unless the Lord had come into the world (see Teachings for the New Jerusalem on Faith 35). This is why the Lord is called the First and the Last.

9776. 'And as for all the vessels of the dwelling-place, in all [its] service' means the truths and the forms of good on the level of factual knowledge which the external man possesses. This is clear from the meaning of 'the vessels' as factual knowledge, dealt with in 3068, 3079, 9394, 9544; from the meaning of 'the dwelling-place' as heaven, dealt with in 9594, 9596, 9632; and from the meaning of 'service' as the external or natural level in a person, dealt with in 3019, 3020, 5305, 7998. The external or natural level in a person is a servant because it ought to serve the internal or spiritual level in a person. For the human being has been created to conform to an image of heaven and to an image of the world, the internal or spiritual man to an image of heaven and the external or natural man to an image of the world, 9279. Just as the world ought to serve heaven, so the external or natural level in a person ought to serve his internal or spiritual. The external has also been created to be a servant; for it has no life of its own and so cannot do anything by itself. It is dependent on the internal or spiritual, that is, through this on the Lord. From this it is also evident that the external or natural level in a person is not anything unless it is a servant to the internal or spiritual, and that so far as it does serve the internal it is something. To be a servant is to be obedient, and the external is obedient when it does not take ideas stored in the understanding and use them as reasons to justify the evils of self-love and love of the world, but complies with reason and the teachings of the Church which dictate that what is good and true should be done not for selfish and worldly reasons but for goodness and truth's own sake. When all this is so, the Lord - acting through the person's heaven, that is, through the person's internal man - is the doer of those things. For all goodness and truth spring from the Lord, so much so that what is good and true in anyone is the Lord Himself. From all this it becomes clear why it is that the external man must be a servant to the internal.