Water is the basis of life, the essential ingredient in all drinks, and in the form of rivers, lakes and oceans supports life in myriad ways. The spiritual meaning of water is similarly basic: It represents truth in general, the ideas and concepts that guide us to do good things in our lives. In a more specific sense, it represents truth at its simplest level: the ideas we learn from the Bible and simply believe. Swedenborg refers to this as “natural” truth or “truths of faith.” They are not things we have explored, figured out or confirmed through life; rather they are things that we accept to be true because we’ve been told they are true. Like water, these ideas flow to us from other sources. And like water, they are ever-changing; to build something permanent we might look to the more permanent ideas represented by stones. But water is crucial to life, and so are these accepted ideas. Water can also, of course, be threatening. Rivers, lakes and oceans are inherently dangerous, and flooding was an ever greater threat in Biblical times than it is now. These aspects represent the opposite meaning – water as falsity, twisted ideas which support evil and can overwhelm and destroy us if we’re not careful.

26. The "likeness of God," after which man was made, is that he is able to live, that is, to will, to love, and to intend, as also to think, reflect and choose, to all appearance as of himself; consequently, that he is able to receive from God those things which are of love and those which are of wisdom, and to reproduce them in an image, as God does, of himself; for God says:

Behold the man was as one of us, in knowing good and evil (Gen. 3:22);

for, without the faculty of receiving and reproducing those things which proceed into him from God, to all appearance as of himself, man would be no more a "living soul" than the oyster in its shell at the bottom of the river, which is not in the least able to move itself out of its place: nor would he be any more an "image of God" than a jointed carving of a man capable of motion by means of a handle, and of giving forth sound by being blown into; yea, the very mind of man, which is the same as his spirit, would actually be wind, air, or ether, according to the idea of the present Church respecting spirit; for, without the faculty of receiving and reproducing the things flowing in from God, altogether as of himself, he would not have anything of his own, or any proprium, except an imperceptible one, which is like the proprium of a lifeless carving. But more about the image and likeness of God with man may be seen in a memorable relation in the preceding work (n. True Christian Religion 48), of which this is the Appendix.