589. The Equilibrium between Heaven and Hell
For anything to happen, there needs to be an equilibrium of everything involved. If there is no equilibrium, there is no action and reaction because the equilibrium occurs between two forces, one acting and the other reacting. The state of rest arising from equal agents and reagents is called an equilibrium.
In the natural world there is equilibrium throughout, in general in the atmospheres, with the lower layers reacting and resisting to the extent that the upper layers act and bear down. In the natural world there are also states of equilibrium between warmth and cold, light and darkness, dry and wet. Their median blend is the balance point. There is also an equilibrium in the members of all three of earth's kingdoms - mineral, vegetable, and animal; for nothing would occur in those kingdoms if it were not for the equilibrium. Everywhere, there is a kind of effort acting from one side and another reacting from the other.
[2] Every event, or every result, happens in an equilibrium, or happens by one force acting and another allowing itself to be acted upon, or by one force actively flowing in and the other accepting and yielding appropriately.
In the natural world, what acts and reacts is called force or energy, but in the spiritual world what acts and reacts is called life and volition. Life there is a living force and volition is a living energy, and the actual equilibrium is called a state of freedom. This spiritual balance or freedom occurs, then, between the good acting from the one side and the evil reacting from the other, or from the evil acting on the one side and the good reacting from the other.
[3] The balance between active good and reactive evil applies to good people, and the balance between active evil and reactive good applies to evil people. The reason the spiritual balance is between good and evil is that all human life has to do with good and evil, and our volition is their recipient vessel.
There is also a balance between what is true and what is false, but this is secondary to the balance between good and evil. The balance between the true and the false is like the balance between light and darkness, whose effect on members of the vegetable kingdom depends on the amount of warmth or cold there is in the light or darkness. You can tell that the light and shade themselves do not accomplish anything, only the warmth they bring, from looking at like amounts of light and darkness in winter and in spring.
The comparison of truth and falsity to light and darkness rests in their correspondence, since truth corresponds to light and falsity to darkness, and warmth corresponds to the goodness of love. Further, spiritual light is truth, spiritual darkness is falsity, and spiritual warmth is the goodness of love (on this, see the chapter on light and warmth in heaven, 126-140).
