When we eat, our bodies break down the food and get from it both energy and materials for building and repairing the body. The process is similar on a symbolic level in the Bible. Food represents the desire for good and the insight that comes from that desire for good – goodness and understanding that come from the Lord. But to put them to use we have to take them in and make them our own – which is spiritual eating.

2716. As for the second arcanum - that the obscurity with those who are spiritual is brightened by light from the Lord's Divine Human - it is an arcanum that cannot be explained intelligibly, for it is the influx of the Divine that would have to be described. But one may gain some idea of it simply from the consideration that if the Supreme Divine Itself were to flow into the kind of good that has been described - good that has been defiled by so many evils and falsities - It could not be received; and if anything were received by someone possessing such good he would experience hellish torment and so perish. But the Lord's Divine Human is able to enter into those persons and to brighten such good, much as the sun shining into thick clouds produces in the early morning lovely signs of the dawn breaking. Yet the Lord is unable to present Himself before them as the light of the sun, only as the light of the moon. From this it may be seen that the reason the Lord came into the world was to save those who are spiritual, see 2661.