The Children of Israel were told to keep three feasts each year - the feast of unleavened bread, the feast of first fruits, and the feast of ingathering. Should we still do that?

In Exodus 23:14-16, Moses receives the instructions about these feasts. Those three verses in Exodus comprise our brief story. Their inner meaning is explained in Arcana Coelestia 9286-9296.

There are three feasts. In the Word, the number three represents a completeness, a sense of things being covered from beginning to end. Our thankfulness to the Lord is supposed to keep going - to endure.

The first feast, of unleavened bread, stands for worship, for our thankfulness for the Lord's action in our minds to get rid of false ideas. That enables us to start to receive good loves.

The second feast, of first fruits, relates to the planting of true ideas in that "soil" of initial loves for doing good.

The third feast, of harvest, or ingathering, stands for the time when, by applying our true ideas, we receive real good - loves of the neighbor and of the Lord - that become the middle of our lives. This is the state of rebirth, where we have - by working through the year (our lives), and enduring in thankfulness, allowed the Lord to get rid of our false ideas, and push our evil loves to the periphery, so that good can work, and be fruitful.

These feasts, then, represent the progress of our spiritual lives. In some manner, we need to keep them.

8865. How to understand 'reigning universally' becomes clear from what has been stated and shown above in 8853-8858. What reigns universally with a person is that which is present in every idea of his thought and every desire of his will, consequently which constitutes his actual mind or life. That which reigns universally within a person should be the Lord, for that which reigns universally within the angels in heaven is the Lord, and they are for this reason said to be 'in the Lord'. The Lord starts to reign in a person when he not only believes that everything good and everything true comes from Him but also loves it to be so. Angels not only truly believe but also perceive it to be so, and that is why their life is the Lord's life within them. The life of their will is the life of love coming from the Lord, and the life of their understanding is the life of faith coming from the Lord. All this shows what is meant when it is said that the Lord is the All in all of heaven, and that He is heaven. When the Lord reigns universally with a member of the Church, as He does with angels in heaven, the Lord is within every truth and good of faith residing with him, just as the heart is within all the blood vessels, since they derive from it their origin, and the blood which is their life.

[2] In addition it should be recognized that the kind of spirits or the kind of angels who are present with a person is determined by the nature of what reigns universally in him. The reason for this is that what reigns universally is the being (esse) of anyone's life, 8853, 8858. All the cheerfulness and all the contentment a person has, even when thinking about other matters, springs from it. For in it the angels and spirits present with him reside and so to speak have a dwelling-place; their gladness enters the person and creates the cheerfulness and contentment. The person does not realize that they are the source of it because a person does not know that his life flows in, or that what reigns universally constitutes his life, or that when something touches this core of his life the effect is like that which visual objects have on the pupil of the eye, that is, pleasure when they are beautiful and pain when they are not beautiful. The term 'universally' is used because it implies every single thing within the whole, so that what reigns universally is that which exists in each individual part, see 1919 (end), 5949, 6159, 6338, 6482, 6483, 6571, 7648, 8067.