A "field" in the Bible usually represents the Lord's church, and more specifically the desire for good within the church. It's where good things start, take root, and grow. When you have a desire to be a good person and to do good things, the natural first questions are "What does that mean?", "What should I do?", "What can I do?". You look for ideas, concepts, direction. Once you figure out something you want to do or a change you want to make in yourself, you seek specific knowledge. If you want to volunteer at a food pantry, say, you'd need to know whom to call, when they need help, where to go, what to bring. Armed with that knowhow, you're ready to get to work. That process could be compared to food production. You start with a field -- which is that desire to be good. Then you plant seeds -- those ideas and concepts. Those seeds sprout into plants -- the specific facts and knowledge needed for the task (easily seen in the food pantry example, but also true with deeper tasks like "being more tolerant of my co-workers" or "taking more time for prayer," or "consciously being a more loving spouse"). Finally, those plants produce food -- the actual good thing that you go and do. The Writings also say that in a number of cases a "field" represents the doctrine, or teachings, of the church. This sounds markedly different. The desire for good is emotional, a drive, a wanting; doctrine is a set of ideas. But for a church to be true, its doctrine must be centered on a desire for good, and must lead people toward doing what is good. So sound doctrine is actually closely bound up with the desire for good.

4939. Once when I had been raised up to heaven it seemed to me as though my head was there, but that my body was below it, and my feet even further below. From this I had a perception of how the higher and lower things present in the human being correspond to the same in the Grand Man, and how one flows into another; that is to say, how the celestial, which is the good of love and the first degree of order, flows into the spiritual, which is truth springing from that good and the second degree of order, and then into the natural, which is the third degree of order. From this it is evident that natural things are like the feet on which the higher things support themselves. What is more, things in the spiritual world and those in heaven are ringed about by the natural world. Consequently the whole natural system is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, every individual part of it being representative, 2758, 3483. The natural system is kept in being by an influx conforming to that order, and without this influx it could not remain in being for even a single moment.