The Feeling: Preface

The Feeling - Preface

by Clayten Tylor

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PREFACE

The Feeling, by Clayten Tylor.

Swedenborg's writings were my anti-depressant medication during my midlife crisis. How a person with my background – having had no traditional religious education and raised by a single parent, non-believer Mom – could ever have been introduced to Swedenborg's spiritual writings was only by a miracle.

My peers were all drugged or drunks, and most of them materialistic and angry. The wild birds were my true friends. They would follow me on my runs, and occasionally land on my windowsill to encourage me in my quest for truth. I can hear them talk to me now from miles away. They helped me to open my inner hearing. And Swedenborg's writings brought acceptance to that bird-level awareness of knowing.

S wedenborg's writings also brought order, logic, and reason to my life. His was a sensible religion, in the sense that it awakened new feelings within me. It was his religion, but he allowed me to understand and interpret it in my own New Age way.

The only caution with having your mind fried with spiritual knowledge is to stay grounded and to not be led-astray or confused while the inner world is being revealed. It was revealed to me, first, through outside forces such as the birds and then through the synchronicity that happened everywhere in the little things. Only later was the inner world revealed through my dreams and visions.

My first vision happened in my living room at two o'clock in the afternoon. It was a vision of a tall, glowing white Guardian Angel. Just the feeling of its Presence brought me to my knees crying and kissing its feet. It was the first of many visions. A lthough I do not know what this vision really was, I think that it might have been what is described as seeing the “ burning bush” for it created in me a burning desire to be a better person.

Any other person would probably have been diagnosed as a mental patient as I would have been if I had ever tried to describe any of my visions to a doctor. Just mentioning the idea of seeing God , would have had me committed. Over time, I changed the terminology as I understood the experience more fully: it evolved from “I saw Jesus” to I saw the “Guardian Angel.”

At the time, I knew that my logical mind could not comprehend or interpret correctly the visions that I perceived. Though it may have been a hallucination and I was crazy , I did not tell a doctor. Had I done so, I am sure that I would have become another statistic – one of the many millions prescribed anti-depressant medication for feelings of unhappiness. And thus, I may have missed my own enlightenment experience, something meant to happen to everyone during the middle years of our life.

It has taken me twenty-five years to comprehend the visions and their accompanying feelings I experienced at the time I turned forty. I do not think that I would have understood any of my visions, which changed me for the better, unless I had comprehended them as I do today, that is, as spiritual experiences, and not as a mental disorder. I should note that I wrote a cookbook about seaweed and lost most of my friends in the process – so imagine telling a doctor that I thought I saw God.

I felt that I could talk to Swedenborg through his writings, and that I understood him differently than most people. This is because of my understanding of Numerology and knowledge of numbers from a spiritual perspective. Everything about Swedenborg's life captivated me. I was interested in everything from the spelling of his name, to his family's name change and the feelings associated with this process, as I too felt different after I changed my name.

Similarly, when my friends got married and changed their names, I noticed how they too changed: I could see the spiritual influences of the new numbers in their lives. I could see how a numerically difficult name, being popularized by a movie star, could create a whole generation of extreme egotists. I could also see how thinking a certain way about yourself can change how you appear to others. Now I understand why the disciples were given new names – they felt new inside.

My wise friend Kasandra once said to me, “Look at that person over there.” I answered, “Yes?” She replied, “No, really look at them. That is how they feel about themselves.” This new awareness of the inner feeling of numbers and spiritual correspondences allowed me to better understand and accept others. Although, not to necessarily like them. That came later with the “opening of my heart,” a process that involved a lot of inner searching for the feeling of the soul.

Swedenborg's writings taught me the spiritual meaning of planets, personal desires, and personality traits. As an Astrologer, his extensive work on these subjects had even a deeper meaning. This is because the Divine appeared to him as the Sun, signifying cel estial and spiritual love . That is to say, the light of the Sun is its Wisdom, and the heat of the Sun is its Love . Just knowing that about the Sun means the spiritual feeling of love, can animate us into being more than just human.

I soon understood that it was our personal response to an influx of spiritual love that determined whether our life here on earth was felt as heaven or hell. I began to imagine my own physical body as spiritual light. By symbolically imitating the spiritual feeling of the Sun, I too could become a radiating center of spiritual light, a flame of the vivified burning bush. Thereafter, I began to feel better about my life.

Swedenborg's orderly approach to writing had an immense orderly effect on my own thinking. Yet, my personal skepticism constantly looked for errors or inconsistencies in his writings, similar to how one looks for and can tell when something does not add up when numbers are involved. Well, with Swedenborg's writings, everything did add up to the spiritual feeling of one glorious vibrating whole number.

The spiritual realm contained in Swedenborg's writings helped me find explanations to things not spoken about in our society such as sex and death. When several friends of mine died too young, it was his philosophy that allowed me to see the workings of faith; love appeared all around me as a spiritual feeling. I learned to project that feeling of spiritual love at times when I felt as though I could not possibly make another depressing hospital visit. I had the sense of being able to radiate that luminous feeling of love, out like the Sun, which helped me feel less uncertain.

Although, Swedenborg kept his personal life somewhat secret, his writings revealed to me the feelings that he must have experienced in order for him to have witnessed this spiritual life. This led to a conscious freeing of my own creative energy as it developed into a source of concentration that grew.

Concentration is needed to understand both Swedenborg and the feeling of the inner spiritual world in order to accept the hugely disparaging, apparent disorder of the outer world.

I would like to note that I have never really been very happy being in a physical body. I could not understand why I was alive, as it felt to be a great punishment. To me, this was the most important question that I had to find an answer to, before I could ever be happy. Most of my friends seemed to love life, or at least pretended to. But when I outlived them all, I felt that too was a punishment.

Physical life is like that, but a spiritual life is actually reversed, which has helped me understand that as we become more spiritually sensitive, we also become more sensitive to the collective suffering of others. As human beings, we can never really be spiritually happy as individuals until everyone else is happy first.

If starvation and poverty is a collective cry from the Divine for charity, why can we not hear it? Humankind is at the phase where greed and ownership is making us more insular. Yet, we really cannot own anything, certainly not our spiritual feeling of life, which is only formed by the spiritual act of charity.

Nowadays, when it is said, “the meek shall inherit the earth,” everyone thinks that the earth is real estate . Y et, the spiritual earth is actually an influx of the spiritual feeling of a conjugial love experience . It is a momentary blissful union with the Divine.

To inherit the earth, is to embark on another life, which is when we are in posses s ion of the true earth. This book is an attempt to help the average person feel a conjugial love experience as a blissful union with the Divine. Spiritual love is accessible to all: both the sinner and the saint.

Therefore, it is by the discovery of our real inheritance, the spiritual “ earth,” which is the real spiritual love within. Then we are able to birth the feeling of the living soul, which is the exegesis of this little book about conjugial love.

Nevertheless, we are embarking on a dangerous journey of self-discovery filled with great peril and misunderstanding as we try to distinguish the true “Earth,” the true Love, from the false love. We are also assured that everyone by the mere fact of being a human, has been given the ability to accomplish this task. The task is to arrive at a sensual feeling of heavenly happiness, as a result of the affections of love and charity. Thus, “the person who is not regenerated is called a void and an empty earth” (17).

Swedenborg also says that absolutely everyone is able to perceive the exalted feeling of heavenly happiness, merely by the “potency given to us by love” (D. L. W. 413).

To better focus this topic so that we can embark on this new beginning together and experience the feeling of love spiritually, we must understand that the potency that we are seeking is the internal affection of good.

Thus, “the states of this love are innocence, peace, tranquility, intimate friendship, full trust and a desire shared by the disposition and heart of each to do the other all the good they can” (C. L. 180).

Essentially, this new beginning is a spiritual life of feeling happiness for others. It is accessible to everyone, because the difference between the feeling of a sensual life and the spiritual life of heavenly happiness can be learned.

This feeling of heavenly happiness that we are seeking is an inner marriage of the spiritual and celestial affections of radiating celestial love with the spiritual light from within becoming luminous. Heavenly happiness is the act of feeling loved spiritually.

Heavenly happiness is essentially an internal affection of love caused by an influx of spiritual love flowing into the body. The term “ feeling ” is used throughout this book to distinguish it from the term “emotion.” Our emotions must be at peace to feel spiritually. To feel spiritually is to love. Emotions are programmed to love only ourselves. Affections are programmed to love others as ourselves. Whereas, spiritual affections, feel all as One.

Throughout this book, the word “ f eeling” is used to define both the spiritual feeling that results from willing mutual-love to others , and the celestial feeling that is felt by willing love to the Divine . By blending these two love-feelings together in synchronicity to the inner spiritual rhythm of D ivine order, the two affections become One , as the feeling of a personal conjugial love experience with the Divine.

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The Feeling
by Clayten Tylor

eBook ISBN #: 978-1-365-97840-1
Printed Book (172 pages) ISBN #: 978-1-365-97834-0
Self-Published by Lulu.com
First Published as The Feeling of Love

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Includes over 100 sketches to demonstrate the Spiritual Feeling of Love.Order Printed Book @ Lulu.com: First Edition