Soul-Body Interaction, Believed to Occur either by a Physical Inflow, or by a Spiritual Inflow, or by a Preestablished Harmony.

§§1–2 / [Author’s Introduction]

1. §3 / There are two worlds: a spiritual world where spirits and angels live, and an earthly world where we live.

2. §4 / The spiritual world came into being and is kept in existence from its sun, and the earthly world, from its sun.

3. §5 / The sun of the spiritual world is pure love from Jehovah God,

who is at its center.

4. §6 / Warmth and light emanates from that sun; the essence of that emanating warmth is love, and the essence of the emanating light is wisdom.

5. §7 / Both spiritual warmth and spiritual light fl ow into us. The warmth fl ows into our will and gives rise there to a love for doing what is good, and the light flows into our understanding and gives rise there to the truth that leads to wisdom.

6. §8 / These two—spiritual warmth and spiritual light, or love and wisdom—fl ow together from God into the human soul, flow through our soul into our mind and its feelings and thoughts, and flow from there into our physical senses, speech, and actions.

7. §9 / The sun of our earthly world is nothing but fire, and is the means by which this earthly world came into being and is kept in existence.

8. §10 / This means that everything that emanates from the physical sun is in and of itself dead.

9. §11 / What is spiritual wears what is physical the way we wear clothes.

10. §12 / It is spiritual elements clothed in this way that enable us to live as rational and moral beings—that is, to live spiritually on this earthly level.

11. §13 / How receptive we are to this infl ow depends on the state of love and wisdom within us.

12. §14 / Our understanding can be lifted into the light (that is, the wisdom) that angels enjoy to the extent that our rational ability has been cultivated; and our will can be elevated into the warmth, or love, of heaven, depending on how we live our lives. However, the love in our will becomes elevated only to the extent that we will and do what the wisdom in our understanding teaches us.

13. §15 / It is totally diff erent for animals.

14. §16 / Unknown until now, there are three levels in the spiritual world and three in this earthly world, and these shape the way all infl ow happens.

15. §17 / Purposes are on the fi rst level, means on the second, and results on the third.

16. §18 / This shows us the nature of spiritual infl ow, from its origin to its results.

§§19–20 / [Concluding Accounts]

12. 10 It is spiritual elements clothed in this way that enable us to live as rational and moral beings—that is, to live spiritually on this earthly level.

THE principle just established—that the soul wears the body the way we wear clothes—leads to the conclusion that the soul flows into the human mind and through it into the body, bringing with it the life that it is constantly receiving from the Lord. It therefore transfers life into the body by these means; and there, through the tightest of connections, it makes the body seem to be alive. This principle, along with the evidence of a thousand experiences, shows that what enables us to speak rationally and act morally is a spiritual element that is united to the physical, like a living force united to a dead one.

[2] It does seem as though our tongue and lips talk because they have a life of their own and that our arms and hands move for the same reason. However, it is actually our thinking, which is essentially spiritual, that is speaking and our will, which is likewise spiritual, that stirs us to action. Thinking and willing operate through organs that are thoroughly physical because what they are made of comes from the material world. The truth of this becomes as clear as day when we pay attention to the following: if we remove our thinking from what we are saying, our mouth is instantly silenced, and if we remove our will from our actions, our hands are instantly stilled.

[3] As for this uniting of spiritual and earthly realities and the consequent appearance that there is life in material things, we could compare it to fine wine in a clean sponge or the sweet liquid in a grape or the delicious juice in an apple or the fragrant aroma in cinnamon. All the enclosing fibers are materials that have no taste or fragrance of their own; the taste or fragrance is supplied only by the fluid elements that are in and among them. So if you press out those fluids, the fibers themselves are lifeless shreds. The same holds true of the organs of the body if we take away their life.

[4] It is spiritual qualities united to our earthly ones that make our rationality possible, as we can see from the analytical abilities present in our thinking. From our capacity for decency of action and propriety of behavior we can see that the same applies to our morality as well. We have these capacities because of our ability to receive an inflow from the Lord through the angelic heaven, which is the home where wisdom and love and therefore rationality and morality live. These examples let us see that we have the ability to live spiritually on this earthly level because what is spiritual and what is earthly are united within us.

After death it is much the same, though not exactly so, because then our soul is clothed with a substantial body, whereas it was clothed with a material body in this world.

[5] Many people believe that since the perceptions and thoughts of our minds are spiritual, they flow in as they are, without going through organized structures. People who dream up such things have not seen the insides of the head, where perceptions and thoughts occur in their primary forms. For example, they have not seen that there are brains there, intricately woven of gray matter and medullary matter, that there are little glands, recesses, and partitions, all enclosed in meninges and membranes, and that our thinking and willing are either sound or insane depending on the healthy or disordered state of all these elements. Likewise, we are rational and moral according to the organic shape of our mind. Without forms structured for the reception of spiritual light, our rational sight, the sight of our intellect, would have no attributes. It would be like physical sight without eyes. And so on.

4. 2 The spiritual world came into being and is kept in existence from its sun, and the earthly world, from its sun.

THE reason there is one sun of the spiritual world and another sun of the earthly world is that these worlds are quite distinct from each other, and a world has its origin in a sun. A world in which everything is spiritual cannot arise from a sun that yields only earthly things, since this would be a physical inflow, which violates the basic design.

We can be assured that the world has arisen from its sun and not the reverse by the relationship between cause and effect, noting that in every respect our world is sustained by its sun, and the way it is sustained shows the way in which it arose. That is why we say that “enduring is a constant coming into being.” We can see from this that if the sun were taken away, the world would collapse into chaos and then into nothingness.

[2] I can testify that the spiritual world has a different sun from the one in the earthly world because I have seen it. Like our sun, it looks fiery and about the same size. It is far away from angels, as our sun is from us, but does not rise or set. Rather, it stands still halfway between the zenith and the horizon, which gives angels a constant light and a constant springtime.

[3] Rationalists who are not aware of the spiritual world’s sun may readily develop insane concepts of the creation of the universe. When they think deeply about that creation, all they can discern is that it comes from nature; and since the source of nature is the physical sun, they can think only that creation comes from the sun as its creator.

Further, people cannot grasp anything about spiritual inflow unless they also know where it comes from. All inflow comes from a sun, spiritual inflow from its sun and earthly inflow from its sun. Our inner sight, the sight of our minds, receives an inflow from the spiritual sun; while our outer sight, our physical sight, receives an inflow from the earthly sun. The two kinds of sight are coordinated in their activities the way the soul is coordinated with the body.

[4] We can see from this the blindness, darkness, and folly that people can fall into if they do not know anything about the spiritual world and its sun. There is blindness because the mind that relies in its logical operations wholly and only on what the eye can see is like a bat that flies erratically and sporadically toward towels on a clothesline at night. There is darkness because when our mental sight is subservient to what flows into the sight of our eyes it is deprived of any spiritual light and becomes like the eyesight of an owl; and there is folly because although we go right on thinking, we think about spiritual matters on the basis of earthly matters and not the reverse, which means that our thinking becomes deranged, stupid, and foolish.