The Bible

 

Genesis 1:9

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9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

Commentary

 

Morning

  
Two gorgeous red poppies -- one popped, and one just about to.

Morning comes with the rising of the sun, and the sun -- which gives life to the earth with its warmth and light -- represents the Lord in His divinity, bringing spiritual life through love and wisdom. Thus, the morning represents the coming of the Lord into our lives, and all the things that flow from it: the love, joy and enlightenment He brings; the peace and tranquility of passing the spiritual obscurity of night; the anticipation of the learning and usefulness of a new day; and the awareness of The Lord's renewed presence.

(References: Apocalypse Explained 179; Apocalypse Revealed 151; Arcana Coelestia 2333 [1-3], 2540, 2780, 5740, 8211, 8812, 10134, 10200, 10413; True Christian Religion 764 [1-2])

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Arcana Coelestia #5173

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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.

  
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Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.