8. VI. Those two, heat and light, or love and wisdom, flow conjointly from God into the soul of man; and through this into his mind, its affections and thoughts; and from these into the senses, speech, and actions of the body.

The spiritual influx hitherto treated of by inspired men is that from the soul into the body, but no one has treated of influx into the soul, and through this into the body; although it is known that all the good of love and all the truth of faith flow from God into man, and nothing of them from man; and those things which flow from God flow first into his soul, and through his soul into the rational mind, and through this into those things which constitute the body. If any one investigates spiritual influx in any other manner, he is like one who stops up the course of a fountain and still seeks there perennial streams; or like one who deduces the origin of a tree from the root and not from the seed; or like one who examines derivations apart from their source.

[2] For the soul is not life in itself, but is a recipient of life from God, who is life in Himself; and all influx is of life, thus from God. This is meant by the statement: “Jehovah God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of lives, and man was made a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). To breathe into the nostrils the breath of lives signifies to implant the perception of good and truth. The Lord also says of Himself, “As the Father hath life in Himself so hath He also given to the Son to have life in Himself” (John 5:26): life in Himself is God; and the life of the soul is life flowing in from God.

[3] Now inasmuch as all influx is of life, and life operates by means of its receptacles, and the inmost or first of the receptacles in man is his soul, therefore in order that influx may be rightly apprehended it is necessary to begin from God, and not from an intermediate station. Were we to begin from an intermediate station, our doctrine of influx would be like a chariot without wheels, or like a ship without sails. This being the case, therefore, in the preceding articles we have treated of the sun of the spiritual world, in the midst of which is Jehovah God (5); and of the influx thence of love and wisdom, thus of life (6, 7).

[4] That life flows from God into man through the soul, and through this into his mind, that is, into its affections and thoughts, and from these into the senses, speech, and actions of the body, is because these are the things pertaining to life in successive order. For the mind is subordinate to the soul, and the body is subordinate to the mind. The mind, also, has two lives, the one of the will and the other of the understanding. The life of its will is the good of love, the derivations of which are called affections; and the life of the understanding there is the truth of wisdom, the derivations of which are called thoughts: by means of the latter and the former the mind lives. The life of the body, on the other hand, are the senses, speech, and actions: that these are derived from the soul through the mind follows from the order in which they stand, and from this they manifest themselves to a wise man without examination.

[5] The human soul, being a superior spiritual substance, receives influx directly from God; but the human mind, being an inferior spiritual substance, receives influx from God indirectly through the spiritual world; and the body, being composed of the substances of nature which are called matter, receives influx from God indirectly through the natural world.

That the good of love and the truth of wisdom flow from God into the soul of a man conjointly, that is, united into one, but that they are divided by the man in their progress, and are conjoined only with those who suffer themselves to be led by God, will be seen in the following articles.

THE HUMAN MIND

Definitions

1. It is the spirit see Divine Providence 196; 299; cf. Divine Love and Wisdom 199, 386, 387

2. Its laws are those of the spiritual world Divine Providence 299, 300. Cf. Divine Providence 307

a. Notice how the mind obeys those laws - time flies when you're having fun. The wish for spiritual distance. Turning our backs on the Lord - people forget Him or eternity soon after coming into eternity.

b. Positives - the ability of the mind to feel close to a far off loved one.

c. The mind is never old - for its laws are eternal.

3. The mind is spiritual, and the body is its external. Cf. Interaction of the Soul and Body 14; Heaven and Hell 356.

4. It is the intermediate between the soul and the body Conjugial Love 101; Interaction of the Soul and Body 8e

5. It is made up of will and understanding. Divine Love and Wisdom 372 et al.

a. These are now separated, but in the other world they are conjoined again Heaven and Hell 425; Arcana Coelestia 8250.

What makes up the mind?

1. Spiritual substances. Divine Love and Wisdom 257.

2. Made up, not of 102-odd elements, but of our loves and truths Divine Love and Wisdom 372; cf. Divine Providence 326:3; Arcana Coelestia 4390

3. Our affections and thoughts. Interaction of the Soul and Body 8

4. The human mind is nothing but a form of Divine good and Divine truth spiritually and naturally organized. True Christian Religion 224

5. The truth of faith and the good of charity constitute his more interior mind Arcana Coelestia 6158.

6. The soul is a superior spiritual substance, and receives influx immediately from God; the mind, an inferior spiritual substance, receives it from God mediately through the spiritual world. Interaction of the Soul and Body 8e.

7. Thus there are three influences on the mind: the soul, the spiritual world, and the natural world. Interaction of the Soul and Body 8.

a. Note the term natural nearly always refers to what comes to us through our senses, or through our heredity.

b. The term spiritual means what is living. It has spirit within it. Divine Providence 321.

So, what does this mean?

1. Think of knowledges as real substances.

2. They gather around affections. Bound into bundles around affection True Christian Religion 38.

a. The initial way we learn of something is from many different sources. Affections pull them together

b. First natural affections, later spiritual affections.

3. The mind has extension. It is like a landscape. When you learn new things, a new field opens up, and it grows grass and trees and flowers, and is peopled with animals and birds.

4. Think of a little child's mind as an empty space.

a. At first, its goods are a delight in toys, a love for his parents, a need for security, etc.

b. Note the hierarchy. Even to a little child, the security and love are more important than the toys.

c. As it learns, it receives fields into its mental landscape.

5. Journey to Brazil, Japan. A new field, a new set of affections and thoughts.

6. Get married, have a child, become grandparents, retire. Each opens up new vistas.

7. And when we are being regenerated, new loves are born of the Lord from within, creating new realms.

a. For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.

Can the mind be organized around the wrong affections?

1. Yes, indeed. We can learn the truths of the Writings because we are vain, and we are proud of ourselves above others. Then those truths gather around a selfish, maybe an evil affection.

2. Think of the great scientists who have used science for evil.

3. Such a mind, instead of being a heaven in least form, is a hell.

Memory

1. All memories are the storehouse of a sense impression (or a thought) together with the affection that belongs to it.

2. Note that through regeneration the memory is reorganized. We learned for bad reasons, and then the truths are shaken up and rearranged around good affections.

Degrees of the Mind

1. The mind is composed of discrete degrees of life

a. Delight in friendship is natural

b. Delight in love is spiritual

c. Things that belong to friendship are natural - communication, trust, shared ideas about values of this earth

d. Those that belong to love are spiritual - are not really articulate on this earth.

e. Degrees of attraction to the opposite sex.

2. Most general are natural, spiritual, celestial. cf. Divine Love and Wisdom 222, 236; 186, et al.

3. There are three degrees of the natural, and they are opened by education.

4. The higher degrees are opened by regeneration. Divine Love and Wisdom 237; Conjugial Love 305.

5. Note that the natural degree cannot flow into or order the higher degree, but the reverse can happen! It is called regeneration

a. A natural illustration: the rational mind can see that the sun doesn't set (while still enjoying the appearance that it does); but as Galileo found to his cost, the sensuous mind can only see the evidence on its level of thought.

6. The three degrees of the mind correspond to the three heavens. Divine Love and Wisdom 186; 239.

7. The spiritual mind is closed because of hereditary evil. It has to be opened by regeneration. Divine Love and Wisdom 269, 138, 270

8. How are the degrees of the mind opened? By receiving terminations into themselves. Arcana Coelestia 5145.

Summary

1. The whole education process is to allow the mind to assume an ordered form. If it comes to adult life in such a form, then it is prepared for regeneration.

2. The affections around which truths are arranged in the natural mind will be orderly, natural affections. These affections will have affinity for each other.

3. The truths in the interior mind will be remains, ordered around heavenly affections for truth. Inmostly there will be affections for good.

4. Through obedience to the Lord, and the temptations that follow, those natural affections become re-ordered around the spiritual affections which flow from within.

a. Note that there are spiritual affections hidden inside natural ones, because the natural ones correspond to spiritual ones!

b. The negative natural affections will be cast out. This is the story of the butler and the baker in Egypt.

5. Finally, this means that we cannot teach a spiritual truth! We can teach a natural truth which contains a spiritual one within, but only the Lord can inspire that life of truth from within and make it spiritual, living, in another person's mind! Divine Love and Wisdom 237; Arcana Coelestia 3185; 3207; cf. 5580, et al.

321. But these need to be explained in the order just given.

(a) If we convince ourselves of the appearance that wisdom and prudence come from ourselves and are therefore within us as our own possessions, it necessarily seems to us that if this were not the case we would not be human at all, only animals or statues; and yet the truth is just the opposite. A law of divine providence says that we are to think in apparent autonomy and act prudently in apparent autonomy but are to recognize that this comes from the Lord. It follows that if we do in fact think and act in apparent autonomy and also recognize that it is coming from the Lord we are human, but that we are not human if we convince ourselves that everything we think and do comes from ourselves. Nor are we human if we simply wait for something to flow in because we know that wisdom and prudence come from God. In this case, we are like statues, while in the former case we are like animals.

Clearly, if we wait for something to flow in, we are like statues. If all we can do is stand or sit motionless, hands hanging down, eyes either closed or open without blinking, neither thinking nor breathing--how much life do we have then?

[2] We can also see that if we believe that everything we think and do comes from ourselves, we are not all that different from animals. After all, we are then thinking solely with our earthly mind, the mind that we have in common with animals, and not with our spiritual rational mind, which is our truly human mind. It is this latter mind that realizes that only God thinks autonomously and that we think from God. Then too, the only difference our earthly mind can see between us and animals is that we talk and animals make noises. It believes that death is the same for both.

[3] Something more needs to be said about people who wait for something to flow in. The only people of this kind who actually receive anything are the few who deeply long for it. They occasionally receive a kind of answer through a vivid impression or a subtle voice in their thinking, but rarely through anything obvious. In any case, what they receive leaves them to think and act the way they want to and the way they can. If they act wisely they become wise, and if they act stupidly they become stupid. They are never told what to believe or what to do; otherwise their human rationality and freedom would be destroyed. That is, things are managed so that they act freely and rationally, and to all appearances, autonomously.

If some inflow tells us what to believe or what to do, it is not the Lord or any angel of heaven who is telling us but some fanatical spirit, perhaps Quaker or Moravian, and we are being led astray. Everything that flows in from the Lord flows in by an enlightenment of our understanding and by a desire for what is true, actually through the desire into the enlightenment.

[4] (b) It seems as though it would be impossible to believe and think in accord with the truth that everything good and true comes from the Lord and everything evil and false from hell, when in fact to do so is truly human and truly angelic. It seems possible to think and believe that everything good and true comes from the Lord as long as we say no more than that. This is because it is in accord with the official faith, and we are not allowed to think to the contrary. However, it seems impossible to think and believe that everything evil and false comes from hell, because if we believed this we would not be able to think at all. Still, we seem to think for ourselves even if it is coming from hell, because the Lord provides that no matter where our thinking is coming from it seems to be happening within us and to be ours. Otherwise, we would not live like humans. We could not be led out of hell and led into heaven--that is, reformed, as I have explained so often already [96, 114, 174, 210].

[5] So too, the Lord provides that we realize and therefore think we are in hell if we are bent on evil and that our thoughts are coming from hell if they come from evil. He also enables us to think of ways that we can get out of hell and not accept thoughts from hell but instead come into heaven and there think from him. He also gives us a freedom to choose. We can therefore see that we can think what is evil and false in apparent autonomy; and we can also think in apparent autonomy that one thing or another is evil and false. We can think that this autonomy is only the way things seem, and that otherwise we would not be human.

It is essentially human and therefore angelic to base our thoughts on the truth; and the truth is that we do not think on our own but that the Lord enables us to think, to all appearances autonomously.

[6] (c) Believing and thinking like this is impossible for people who do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature and who do not acknowledge that evils are sins; but it is possible for people who acknowledge these two facts. The reason it is impossible for people who do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature is that it is only the Lord who enables us to think and to intend, and if we do not acknowledge the Lord's divine nature, in isolation from him we believe that we are thinking on our own. The reason it is also impossible for people who do not acknowledge that evils are sins is that their thoughts are coming from hell, and all the people there believe that they are doing their own thinking.

We can tell from the abundance of material presented in 288-294 above that this is possible for people who acknowledge these two facts.

[7] (d) If we make these two acknowledgments, we simply reflect on the evils within ourselves and, to the extent that we abstain and turn from them as sins, throw them back into the hell they came from. Is there anyone who does not know--or who cannot know--that what is evil comes from hell and what is good comes from heaven? Can anyone, then, fail to see that we abstain from hell and turn away from it to the extent that we abstain and turn away from evil? On this basis, can anyone fail to see that we intend and love what is good to the extent that we abstain and turn away from evil, and that in fact the Lord releases us from hell to that same extent and leads us to heaven? All rational people can see this provided they know that hell and heaven exist and know where evil and good come from. If, then, we reflect on the evils in ourselves, which is the same as self-examination, and abstain from them, then we extricate ourselves from hell, turn our backs on it, and make our way into heaven where we see the Lord face to face. We may say that we are doing this, but we are doing it in apparent autonomy, and therefore from the Lord.

When we acknowledge this truth from a good heart and a devout faith, then it is subtly present from then on in everything we seem to ourselves to be thinking and doing, the way fertility is present in a seed at every step until the formation of a new seed, or the way there is pleasure in our appetite for the food that we realize is good for us. In a word, it is like the heart and soul of everything we think and do.

[8] (e) This means that divine providence is not charging anyone with evil or crediting anyone with good. Rather, our own prudence is making each of these claims. This follows from everything that has just been said. The goal of divine providence is goodness. That is what it is aiming at in everything it does; so it does not credit anyone with goodness, because that would make our goodness self-serving; and it does not charge anyone with evil, because that would make us guilty of evil. We make both of these claims out of our own sense of independence, because this sense of ours is nothing but evil. The claim to independence of our volition is self-love, and the claim to independence of our discernment is pride in our own intelligence; and that is where our own prudence comes from.