39. Verse 20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth creeping things, living creatures; and let birds fly above the earth, upon the face ¹ of the expanse of the heavens.

After the great lights have been kindled and lodged in the internal man, from which the external man receives its light, a person starts to live for the first time. Till then he can hardly be said to have lived, for he had imagined that the good he had done he had done from himself, and the truth he had uttered he had spoken from himself. And since man functioning from himself is dead - there being nothing in him that is not evil and false - therefore whatever he brings forth from himself is not living. So true is this that of himself he is incapable of doing any good deed that is in itself good. The fact that man cannot begin to think about good or to will it, and so cannot do good, unless the Lord is the source, is clear to everyone from the doctrine of faith, for the Lord says in Matthew,

He who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. Matthew 13:37.

Nor can good come from anywhere else than the one fount itself of all good, as yet again He says,

Nobody is good but one, God. Luke 18:19.

[2] Nevertheless when the Lord is revitalizing a person, or regenerating him, He does allow him, to begin with, to imagine that good and truth originate in himself, for at that point a person cannot grasp anything else, or be led to believe and finally perceive, that all good and truth come from the Lord alone. As long as he held the former opinion his truths and goods were comparable to 'a tender plant', then 'a plant bearing seed', and after that 'a fruit tree', which are inanimate. But once he has been brought to life by love and faith and believes that the Lord is at work in every good deed he does and in every truth he utters, he is compared first to creeping things from the water and to birds which fly above the earth, and then to beasts, all of which are animate and are called 'living creatures'.

脚注:

5173. In the next life very many ways of harrying people are employed, and also very many methods that involve introducing them into a kind of spiralling. Harryings are represented in the body by the purifications of the blood, also the serum or lymph as well as the chyle, which too are accomplished by various refining processes, while introductions into spiralling are represented by the subsequent assignment of those refined fluids to particular services. It is very common in the next life for spirits to be brought, after they have been harried, into a state of tranquillity and delight, and then to be brought to those communities which they are to be introduced into and become attached to.

[2] The idea that the refining processes and purifications of the blood, serum, and chyle, and also of the food in the stomach, correspond to such processes in the spiritual world is bound to seem strange to those who presume that natural things hold no more than what is natural within them, and even stranger to those who are quite convinced that this is so and accordingly deny that anything spiritual, active or reactive, does or can lie within natural things. Yet the reality is that every single thing in the natural world and its three kingdoms possesses something acting into it from the spiritual world. If this were not so, nothing whatever in the natural world could accomplish any cause and effect, and therefore nothing would be brought forth. That which natural things hold within them from the spiritual world is described as a force implanted since creation began; but in fact it is an endeavour, and when that endeavour ceases, action or motion ceases. All this demonstrates that the whole visible world is a theatre representative of the spiritual world.

[3] The case is the same with the movement of the muscles and consequent action. Unless the movement of them held within it an endeavour originating in the person's thought and will, it would instantly cease; for laws well known to the learned world state that when the endeavour ceases so does the movement, and also that the person's entire direction of mind is present within the endeavour, as well as that nothing real other than the endeavour expresses itself within the movement. The force or endeavour within the action or movement is, it is plain, something spiritual within something natural; for thought and will are spiritual activities, whereas action and movement are natural ones. People whose thought does not extend beyond the natural world have no grasp of this at all; yet they are not able to deny it. Nevertheless what exists in the will, and from there in the thought, is the producer of the action, though it is not similar in form to the action which it produces. For the action merely represents what the mind wills and thinks.