The Children of Israel were told to keep three feasts each year - the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of first fruits, and the feast of ingathering. Should we still do that?

In Exodus 23:14-16, Moses receives the instructions about these feasts. Those three verses in Exodus comprise our brief story. Their inner meaning is explained in Arcana Coelestia 9286-9296.

There are three feasts. In the Word, the number three represents a completeness, a sense of things being covered from beginning to end. Our thankfulness to the Lord is supposed to keep going - to endure.

The first feast, of unleavened bread, stands for worship, for our thankfulness for the Lord's action in our minds to get rid of false ideas. That enables us to start to receive good loves.

The second feast, of first fruits, relates to the planting of true ideas in that "soil" of initial loves for doing good.

The third feast, of harvest, or ingathering, stands for the time when, by applying our true ideas, we receive real good - loves of the neighbor and of the Lord - that become the middle of our lives. This is the state of rebirth, where we have - by working through the year (our lives), and enduring in thankfulness, allowed the Lord to get rid of our false ideas, and push our evil loves to the periphery, so that good can work, and be fruitful.

These feasts, then, represent the progress of our spiritual lives. In some manner, we need to keep them.

8630. Since the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter acquire intelligence in a different way than the inhabitants of our planet, and are in addition of different disposition by virtue of their life, they cannot stay together with them. If any from our planet come near they either flee from them or drive them away. Spheres exist, which must be called spiritual spheres, which constantly emanate from, indeed well out of each community. Those spheres flow from the activity of members' affections and resulting thoughts, and so are emanations of the actual life within them. Regarding spheres, see 1048, 1053, 1316, 1504, 1505, 1507, 1508, 1510-1519, 2401, 4464, 5179, 6206, 6598-6613, 7454, 8063.

[2] Associations in the next life are determined in every instance by such spheres. Those that agree with one another are fused together in the measure that they agree, and those that disagree are driven apart to the extent that they disagree. Each province in the Grand Man, to which some member or organ in the human body corresponds, has its own sphere, distinct and separate from the sphere of another province. So it is that those who belong to the same province are linked together, and those who belong to different ones are separated. Spirits and angels who come from the planet Jupiter correlate in the Grand Man with THE ABILITY TO FORM MENTAL IMAGES, and so with the state of activity taking place in the interior parts. But spirits belonging to our planet correlate with various functions performed by the exterior parts of the body, into which the ability to form mental images cannot enter, since those spirits wish to be in control. Hence the antagonism between the spheres.