Verse 6. And what He did upon the false doctrines which are derived in long series from perverted religious faith, which place doctrines or ceremonial in the place of a life of true charity and duty: how the common perception of truth, such as exists even with those who are out of the Church, helped the soul by showing the fallacy of these notions and swallowing up those false doctrines, with their appearances of truth and worship from good, together with all the apparent religious feelings and intelligence derived from them, out of the midst of the spiritual mind. (See Apocalypse Explained 764-765.) [Note.—The arguments even of those who reject revelation and who reason from nature only, assist the development of a real perception of truth in the soul by clearing the mind from the falsities of a blind persuasive faith; that is to say, of a persuasion that any dogma is to be believed unaccompanied by any internal and rational perception of its truth, and that such blind belief in any dogma can save without a well-spent life.]

4939. Once when I had been raised up to heaven it seemed to me as though my head was there, but that my body was below it, and my feet even further below. From this I had a perception of how the higher and lower things present in the human being correspond to the same in the Grand Man, and how one flows into another; that is to say, how the celestial, which is the good of love and the first degree of order, flows into the spiritual, which is truth springing from that good and the second degree of order, and then into the natural, which is the third degree of order. From this it is evident that natural things are like the feet on which the higher things support themselves. What is more, things in the spiritual world and those in heaven are ringed about by the natural world. Consequently the whole natural system is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, every individual part of it being representative, 2758, 3483. The natural system is kept in being by an influx conforming to that order, and without this influx it could not remain in being for even a single moment.