Chapter Two: Book's Preview

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Chapter 2: Light Within

Within the “dark” feeling of being human is an inner redeeming feeling of spiritual light. Its awareness is the birth of the Christ, or Cosmic Consciousness, the spiritual light that battles the ego's perspective of darkness.

It is “the Divine rescue of the soul from the proprium illusion and selfishness” (E. R.). Thus, “the Word is like a diamond, by virtue of its spiritual light” (T. C. R. 216).

Think of the feeling of the redeeming spiritual light as a spiraling vortex of vibratory energy expanding outwards from within into time and space. It is a feeling of heavenly Joy, which reveals an opposing magnetic-attraction, a pulling-back into the center of self, instilling a feeling of peace. The result is an interactive whirling, spiraling feeling of celestial love and spiritual light.

In order for the first radiating impulse of light to be more powerful than the magnetic pulling-back into the center, there must always be another outward impulse developing. Thus, it begins by first returning into the center, and from that self-less center develops the ability to send a stronger impulse of spiritual light outwards.

Spiritually, this second pulsation of spiritual-light is said to have begun at the time of Swedenborg's writings, and with the discovery of the planet Uranus in 1781. This new-wave cycle that we are attempting to catch a ride on, is a brighter Aquarian Age feeling of the Divine, as conjugial love.

Thus, “the Lord then defends the Heavens, which is done by stronger influx from himself” (A. R. 761).

Yet this second pulsation of redeeming spiritual light is able to overcome the darkness or ego feeling in everybody. By attuning with this feeling of spiritual light within, we can transfer our possessive sense-of-self from the limiting, contracting, self-centered feeling of being separate, to the spiritual feeling of a new Proprium. We are transformed by the pleasurable feeling of a conjugial love experience.

The feeling of the Divine Name as the experience of conjugial love, has already been implanted in our memory as the celestial feeling, called our spiritual remains. They are the states of innocence, of love, of charity as feelings of good and truth, preserved in memory to keep mankind striving to be more than human.

The spiritual feeling of our remains, is similar to the concept of the Hebrew alphabet. Each letter gets made from the spiritual feeling of the first Divine letter, and all the other letters get derived from it. Just as man can feel God's love, our communication with heaven is by the same feeling of love as our Remains. Thus, “the second heaven with which heaven man communicates by means of remains” (5344).

Love of Darkness

The possessive feeling of our ego can overwhelm us. It happens when we buy something like a new car or new shoes, but then act with such excessive pride just because we can possess it. It took lifetimes of people who have gone before us to create just one part of the whole, which we then appropriate as our own. Therefore, it is very important to recognize the possessive ownership feeling that is growing a life within us, as a result of the sensation of pride. Thus, “to buy signifies to appropriate for one's self” (A. R. 211).

The ego's feeling of pride gets fascinated with ownership. It is programmed to possess absolutely everything. When it gets attached to you, it believes it is you and your body. It believes it owns your home and your spouse, and is severely threatened if they are taken away. So how can we face death under this assumption? We must let-go of the selfish feeling of pride to feel the love of the spiritual body.

The prideful feeling of ownership, acts as a garment on our body. We cannot let-go of it on our own, but that is what pain, depression, and illness are for. “To rend the garments signifies mourning for truth lost or destroyed, or the loss of faith” (4763).

Our pain is necessary for the process to remove the garments of pride. Pain enables us to perceive the feelings of love and happiness. Pain is the means to prolong the feeling of a spiritual influx, when a conjugial love experience happens in physicality.

Let us explore the guaranteed pain that results from directing our love outwards as love of the world. I was fortunate to have sold my home when I turned forty years old. It was a beautiful waterfront condominium that I had owned for ten years, but I had begun to use my equity to finance a new business that ultimately failed. I had to sell everything to pay off my debts. Despite this bittersweet relief, I was surprised that for the next ten years I kept returning to that home, night after night in my dreams.

I no longer dream of my old home, because I learned to fall asleep in the feeling of spiritual light, a much more permanent home. Yet, imagine what my afterlife would have been like if I had died while still emotionally attached to living there. I would be spending my entire after-life haunting it. What did I really lose, but a sensual memory? Letting-go of all of our other possessions will likely cause a similar kind of haunting pain. Therefore, being detached spiritually from all of our possessions is something that we must all learn to do while we are still in a physical body.

Thus, “the new man is in the affection of spiritual and celestial things, inasmuch as these constitute his delights and blessedness; whereas the old man is in the affection of worldly and terrestrial things, and these constitute his delights and satisfactions, consequently, the new man has respect to ends of heaven, but the old man to ends in the world” (4063).

Imagine the torment that we will all feel when we have to let go of our physical body upon our deathbed. Imagine the torment that Christ experienced — not that he identified with a home other than Bethlehem — but what would have happened had he identified with the pain that other people had caused him. That is what Jesus represents: the ability to overcome every painful illusion of the material world by seeing everything as spiritual light. Thus, “the internal of perception is closed when there is no intermediate [principle] through which influx will pass” (4692).

Once we perceive the feeling of darkness as being everyone's pain, including our own body's, we become wise enough to build our new “house” on light. As the feeling of the “Christ child” develops as spiritual light, a new ego gets born of spiritual love.

Yet, “This blessedness cannot be easily described, because it is internal, and seldom shows itself with anyone in the very body, thus seldom to the sense” (6408).

By adding the feeling of spiritual light to our self-perception of our physical body, we become a conscious living feeling of our true self. This is how the light-body is nurtured in the “manger” within. Thus, “manger signifies spiritual instruction” (A. R. 255); and “Bethlehem, signifies the truth conjoined with good in the natural man” (A. E. 449). Thus, “Child of light signifies the spiritual man” (A. C. 51). It is “through the Son that we come to the Father.”

Therefore, by imitating the spiritual light, we become a radiating source of light, a radiating center of spiritual love as a “morning star.” Thus, “the Lord is called a morning star from the light, which from him will rise upon the new church, which is the New Jerusalem” (A. R. 954). Since, “the learned, or wise, who shall shine as the stars, are they who are in good” (3820).

Conscious Thought Exercise #3

The only opportunity we as human beings ever get to see our body as “light” is in an X-ray. I used to imagine my own body as a shadow, as darkness. That said, to change the shape of our body or to lose weight requires that we first see our body as light and then to shape that light into the feeling of how we want our body to look.

The feeling of spiritual light is a symbolic suggestion to our subconscious mind as to how we want our body to look. Most people when they want to change some aspect of their appearance have already said that they hated their thighs, or they hated their stomach. They got exactly what they said, the feeling of spiritual darkness in the body part that they dislike. Yet, we do not want to be too attached to the physical body by concentrating on its outer appearance. Yet, getting the spiritual feeling of the body into shape is one of the first steps to avoid being overly concerned about it.

Focusing on the appearance of our body by dieting or bodybuilding is merely body admiration and self-love, which is a waste of time in relation to attracting spiritual love. Discover what the body needs nutritionally, and do it. Forget about talking to others about the benefits of good nutrition, because none of that works unless the food gets converted into spiritual light for our eternal life of attracting spiritual love. Nevertheless, that knowledge of generating spiritual light within the body only gets revealed after we give up excessive concern with both our appearance and our gain.

Exercise #3: Conscious Thought, the mind into the body.

The spiritual light in our food gets mixed with our saliva, while it imbues the food with the thoughts that we think. It then forms an ethereal chyle or “mother's milk” that is absorbed into the body through the upper intestines directly into the blood to create the magnetic feeling of the spiritual light in our aura.

Thus, “the chyle purification of the blood, corresponds to the various modes of spiritual vexation and inauguration” (5173). “The soul gives the blood its life, the spirit its bond of union, and the chyle its embodiment,” while “The chyle furnishes the serum, from which the blood derives its corporeal essence” (A. K. 155). Thus, the “Belly, signifies conjugial love” (A. E. 618); and “Milk signifies the celestial spiritual principle” (2184).

Therefore, in regard to the spiritual feeling that is generated by the sense of taste, be sure to observe your thoughts in respect to the holiness of eating food. Everything that you taste either goes to building the feeling of “heaven, converted to blood and flesh,” or to building the feeling of “hell, excrement and urine” (A. R. 204).

You can imagine the feeling of torment in our afterlife when we cannot get to taste our daily fix of chocolate. The feeling of taste is a spiritual appetite that is not satisfied by any physical food. Yet, the taste is the only one of our five sense-feelings that spirits cannot enter into, except for the “vagabond spirits” who are habituated to over-eating. I suspect they are the cause of our obesity problems.

The reason spirits do not have the sense of taste is because they would be able to enter a person's thoughts and feeling anytime a person tasted anything. Therefore, we must use a different kind of “food” to feed the appetite of the soul.

Imagine the body full of spiritual light, and then shape that light into the feeling of how you want your body to appear. It not only changes the physical body, but also suggests to the subconscious mind that you understand that the physical body is a vehicle for the spiritual body. The feeling of love within will then attract an influx of conjugial love, which is the spiritual “Life” essence of everything. Thus, “there is a spirituous fluid in which the life resides, and consequently the soul” (A. K. 637, 638).

This is the esoteric meaning of the Holy Supper. The “good” must first be present within as a feeling of spiritual love. Thus, “bread signifies the Lord himself, and of course his love toward the whole human race” (A. C. 2165); and, “wine signifies the good of neighborly love” (6377). Thus, “the Holy Supper is the primary part of external worship” (2811).

We are making ourselves feel “Holy” by being filled with the light of conscious thought. Thus, “El-Bethal is a holy natural principle; for when the Lord made his human divine, he first made it holy; the difference between making divine, and holy, is this, that the divine is Jehovah himself; whereas the holy is, what is from Jehovah, the former is the divine esse, but the latter, is what thence exists” (5449).

To feel holy we must first generate the spiritual light that then reveals the spiritual feeling of celestial love. Yet, to be divine, we must first feel ourselves as being divine, which then makes us feel “holy” and full of spiritual light.

Thus, “with those who are in celestial and spiritual love, good from the Lord flows in through the soul into the body, and thence the body becomes full of light” (2973).  

To link the spiritual light with conscious thought, let us link it with “the omnipresence of the Human of the Lord in the Sacred Supper” (N. J. D. 305). Since “it is the divine good, which sanctifies, and the divine truth is what is thence holy” (A. E. 204).

The following quotation states that the feeling of spiritual light, was sanctified by just an influx of celestial love. Yet, then it was unable to penetrate mankind until the Lord's human, was made Divine. This means that the spiritual light as conscious thought is still within us right now.

Thus, “the divine itself, before the Lord came into the world, flowed into the universal heaven, and by that influx from his divine omnipotence, light was produced; but afterwards that light could no longer be produced, to penetrate to the human race; till the Lord made the human in himself Divine” (4180).

Light as Food

The feeling of spiritual “light, is the divine truth of the Word” (A. R. 897). This means that the light has the properties of illumination. Yet, “this light, which illuminates the mind, flows from no other source but out of heaven” (A. R. 914).

Spiritual light is the result of the self-less feeling of celestial good. Symbolically, we are associating spiritual light with being an expanding substance, which reveals the good within as a celestial substance. I find it interesting if you think of nourishment as celestial food, which signifies those things that are of spiritual use.

By correspondence, “higher knowledge comes down with people on earth into those things that they eat” (4295); but only, if we think of “food as those things, which nourish the soul of man” (5293).

Thus, the “light” is within the spiritual feeling of love. Thus, “heavenly food in its essence is nothing else than love, wisdom, and use together; that is, use done through wisdom out of love” (C. L. 6).

Here is an example of glorifying the spiritual light in food as holy. I went through a time in my life when I began to imagine the handiwork of God, as all the hands that were involved in the growing and the preparation of the food that I was eating. One time while eating a sandwich, my mind began to fly over the wheat fields and to circle over all the people involved in packaging the food. It became a visual ritual every time that I ate anything. When my mind connected to the spiritual essence in all of those ingredients and in all of those people, I become One with them in feeling. This is what spiritual light does. It goes out ahead of us as conscious thought to unite us all as the feeling of being One mind and One body.

Let us connect by correspondence the feeling that flows through humankind’s two hands, which “signify the faculty of receiving” (3551); with receiving goodness and truth as Divine love and Divine wisdom.

“The Divine is in each and every thing of the created universe, and consequently that the created universe is the work of the hands of Jehovah; that is, the work of Divine Love and Divine Wisdom” (D. L. W. 59).

Therefore, more importantly than what we eat is how our food gets prepared and where our mind sits while we eat, as we receive the spiritual light as spiritual food.

Covenant of Love

Spiritual light gets absorbed from the atmosphere by the food that we eat, which attracts and receives into the body the celestial essence as a feeling of spiritual love. Essentially, conscious thought produces spiritual light from the ethereal chyle, which becomes the spiraling vortex of spiritual energy. It creates the feeling of magnetism as the celestial good, which causes the in-flowing spiritual feeling of a personal conjugial love experience.

Thus, “there is a general feeling emanating from God and flowing into men's souls that there is a God and that he is one” (T. C. R. 8).

The most important symbolism about receiving spiritual food is its correspondence to where we eat, and that is at a table – a symbol of our “royal birth,” as our spiritual virgin rebirth.

Thus, “Tables signify all things, which should nourish the spiritual life, because by a table is understood the food, which is upon them” (A. E. 325).

Even just the feeling of being able “to sit at a table, signifies to be spiritually nourished, because a table signifies heaven” (9527); and “to sit at a table signifies conjunction” (252).

Hence, “there are two tables, one inner and one outer.” And since, “tables signifies instructions” (340); then there are two ways to receive spiritual instruction: celestially, as the feeling of good as love; and spiritually, as the feeling of truth as light.

The instruction in the Decalogue states, “only one god is to be worshiped” and “evils are not to be committed.” When man feels that he does these things, then the “two tables are conjoined that they become one, and are called the tables of the covenant, and a covenant signifies conjunction” (D. P. 326).

The conjunction is when the celestial feeling of love and the spiritual feeling of light begin to radiate as One. It happens in a regenerated self-less spiritual body. Thus, “the natural man becomes like the spiritual, when the natural man feels the delight of use from the spiritual man” (D. L. W. 251).

Here is where it gets a little esoteric, but stay with me: First, conjunction requires an object, and that is you and me regenerated, for “Conjunction with God and man is only given by the union of the divine and human natures in the Lord” (T. C. R. 98).

The divine is the light, and the “human faculty and function” is to be able to perceive the celestial life of the soul. Thus, “conjunction of the Lord with man is according to the state of his thought, and thence his affections” (A. C. 4211).

Let me explain further: When someone is more of an intellectual type of person, as opposed to a feeling type of person, when they read the scriptures, their sensual energy moves to the top of their head. It is in the same way as when someone is thinking about sex, their sensual energy moves to the lower part of their body.

Yet, for a reader of scripture, they receive a good, devotional, religious feeling from reading the Bible, for example, and therefore they begin to believe in the Divine, but perhaps not yet as a spiritual feeling of love for others.

The perception of the Divine as spiritual light, must first be felt as truth. Thus, “when spiritual light flows into natural light with a man who is reading the Word, he is illuminated, and sees truths, for the objects of spiritual light are truths” (A. R. 911).

Although the good feeling makes the intellectual person feel relaxed and at peace, they never actually associate the good feeling as being living; therefore, never truly feeling the love of the Divine.

Thus, “the corporeal degree regarded in itself is the receptacle of sensations, thus, it is a corporeal living thing” (5077).

Let us say, “spiritual light is living, which illuminates the understanding” (D. P. 156). Then, when we associate the feeling of love with being spiritual light as conscious thought from the Divine, it begins to take on a spiritual life of its own.

Thus, it is “made flesh” by receiving an attunement of joy with the spiritual plane, thereby, taking on a higher celestial vibration. It is the “royal birth,” whereby the sensual feeling of love rises to the crown within, as a conjugial love experience.

“The angels of the Celestial kingdom imbibe the internal sense of the Word from the affections alone of man. But the angels of the spiritual kingdom imbibe the internal sense from the truths; therefore from the celestial kingdom proceeds joy of heart to the man who is in spiritual affection, and from the spiritual kingdom proceeds the confession of man from that joy” (A. E. 326).

Therefore, the “tables of the covenants” are the feeling-intentions in our mind while we eat. When they are made to correspond with spiritual laws, they can make our supper feel holy. Food is the handiwork of God. It is the light and life of the spiritual feeling of love. It is the new spiritual body as the feeling of love.

Thus, “a dinner, supper, and feast are the good of charity, in which the Lord cohabits with man” (A. E. 2371).

Conscious thought perceives spiritual light in everything. When the light gets imagined in the food we eat, it allows the spirits and angels to co-exist in our thoughts and feelings. Our body then grows into an evermore receptive vessel for the spiritual light and celestial love from within. All of this is because we began to imagine the spiritual light in our food as Holy.

My friend Kasandra once said to me regarding food that “we could eat candles and live to eternity, if we could just believe.” This means that spiritually, food has little bearing on our longevity.

Yet, faith does depend on our feeling, since faith is a response to what pleases us. Thus, the feeling of self-love forms an atmosphere of pleasure that blocks our faith and our ability to reason correctly about spiritual things.  

“Since every feeling has its own pleasure and every thought therefore has its own appeal, we can tell what goodness and truth are in their essence. Goodness is what pleases our feelings and truth is what appeals to our thinking. Together they are like an atmosphere or a wave that surrounds the whole human mind” (D. P., Dole, 195).

Thus, “nutriment is greatest when food is eaten joyfully” (5147).

Yet, enjoying food has already become a major sacred ritual in our society, hence the obesity problem. Because of its spiritual light or ability to receive the spiritual light from within, enjoying food sends the signal to the subconscious mind that the reason we are enjoying food has a spiritual correspondence. It counteracts the selfish feeling of enjoyment, which is the actual cause of weight gain.

Thus, “digestions of food represent temptations” (5174).

The heavenly affections felt while enjoying food are similar to the feelings of the initial perception of celestial love. “The essential ingredient in all love consists in conjunction, which we call pleasure, gratification, delight, sweetness, bliss, happiness, and felicity” (D. L. W. 47). Thus, “cake signifies the good of celestial love” (147).

I like to think that it is the spiritual light in the food that desires to unite with the celestial good that is within us. To thereby produce a mutual feeling of joy. Thus, “to eat signifies to be appropriated and conjoined by love and charity” (N. J. D. 172).

Although, “appetite corresponds to the desire to know (science) and be wise” (4792); and “sugar, adoration of the Lord, destitute of charity” (A. C. 1171). You can see how eating could become a desire that is impossible to fulfill. At least, not unless reason gets restored to eating as its rightful nutritional use, and not just for pleasure.

This is especially true since “melancholy, or sadness of mind proceeds from spirits who delight in things in-digested and putrid, such as meats corrupted in the stomach” (H. H. 299).

This is important to human evolution, for it says that the highest “use” for a human is to become rational and thereby able to receive a spiritual influx of conjugial love.

“By use here are meant all things, which perfect the rational of man, and, which cause man to receive a spiritual from the Lord; but by evil uses are meant all things, which destroy the rational, and cause that man cannot become spiritual” (D. L. W. 336).

Radiating as a Use

Everything that we do is measured by its use. To receive a spiritual influx of conjugial love is our highest feeling of use. To be able to radiate that spiritual feeling of love in “works of charity” as the feeling of mutual love to the neighbor is our second-highest use.

Thus, “the worship of God consists in a life of uses” (7884). For “works of charity are works from the will, which are uses” (5148).

The following quotation describes how to measure our use. Therefore, how to enhance our spiritual love by our feeling of being useful. “Heaven and the joy of heaven first begin in man when his regard for self dies out in the uses, which he performs” (A. C. 5511).

The higher the affections of love that we can receive and feel, the greater our feeling of use, because uses represent the delights of the spiritual feeling as an influx.  

“In uses, all the delights of heaven are brought together and are present, because uses are the goods of love and charity in which angels are. Therefore, everyone has delights that are in accord with his uses, and in the degree of his affection for use” (H. H. 402).

“The conjugial delight, which is a purer and more exquisite delight of touch, transcends all the rest because of its use, which is the procreation of the human race and thereby of angels of heaven. These delights are in these sensories by an influx of heaven, where every delight pertains to use and is in accordance with use” (H. H. 402).

The feeling of use has an accompanying external delight as love. Thus, “the delight of use derives its essence from love” (C. L. 5). Yet, “by good works are signified charity and faith in internals, and at the same time their effects in externals” (A. R. 949). For “works of charity are those, which flow from charity as their soul” (3934).

Swedenborg further explains here the spiritual difference between loving uses, which is the delight of doing; and doing uses, which is the delight of goodness:

“By love toward the neighbor is meant the love of uses, and by love to the Lord is meant the love of doing uses. These loves are spiritual and celestial, because loving uses and doing them from a love of them, is distinct from the love of what is man's own; for whoever loves uses spiritually looks not to self, but to others outside of self for whose good he is moved” (D. P.26).

The feeling of performing spiritual uses or natural use, depending on whether evil, or the love-of-self and the love-of-the-world are shunned additionally as well, will determine the measure of that use.

Essentially, the best way to change anything is first, to acknowledge that it is a sin and thus, make it into a spiritual issue. It means to put distance between something and yourself. To come into a different affection, which makes it easier to control the emotions, a new “feeling of aversion” needs to develop into a “sensible perception of the love of uses.” This is when the heart is averse to evil.

“When one who does this, flees from sins from a feeling of aversion, he then begins to have a sensible perception of the love of uses for the sake of uses, from spiritual enjoyment in them” (D. L. W. 426).

It is this spiritual feeling as a “sensible perception” that we are attempting to develop in regard to uses. In this case, it is the measurement of that celestial feeling as a result of radiating spiritual love to others, which is our means of developing this inner sensible perception.

It is a measurement of our spiritual use that develops into an interior spiritual perception, because this sensible “perception from the Divine is the same as interior perception” (4567).

Revelation & Enlightenment

It is always admirable to meet someone who has had a spiritual enlightenment experience without going crazy. In fact, everyone including you, has had a spiritual enlightenment experience, but perhaps just did not believe it. Thus, “illumination is an actual opening and elevation of the soul into the light of heaven” (10.330).

It is said, “at this day there exists immediate revelation, because that is what is meant by the coming of the Lord” (H. H. 1). Thus, “the Lord acquired to himself intelligence and wisdom by continual revelation from the divine” (3382).

Therefore, “true intelligence and wisdom consists in seeing and perceiving what is true and good, and thence what is false and evil, and in accurately distinguishing the one from the other, by intuition and interior perception” (H. H. 351).

The feeling of revelation or enlightenment should not be too hard to perceive, because “the Lord imputes good to every man, and hell imputes evil to every man” (T. C. R. 560). Thus, “the communication of thought, with a desire, which wills that certain thing be done, is influx, and on the part of the recipient is perception” (5732).

Yet, “revelations are made variously: by dreams; by visions of the night; by visions of the day; by speech, which man hears within him; by speech heard without from a visible angel; by speech heard without from an angel not visible” (6000). Thus, “the Lord sometimes presents Himself, but He veils Himself, which He does by means of an angel” (A. R. 938). Yet, “All are called” (A. R. 744, 816).

Therefore, it appears that spiritual revelations are a very common experience, yet not spoken about or treated by the medical profession. Otherwise, psychiatry and psychology would find other ways other than anti-depressants to deal with flashes of enlightenment.

As for those who can receive the spiritual feeling of love, “Enlightenment is an actual opening of the interiors of the mind, and elevation of them into the light of heaven” (N. J. D. 256, 35).

Love & Earth

Swedenborg says that heaven gets made of spiritual feelings of security, for “Security is the external delight of heaven” (A. E. 365). Yet, each of us is connected to heaven by our affections. It is this internal state of mind as a feeling. Thus, “heaven is in man, and is only so far an external place of abode, as it is an internal state of mind” (3884).

Yet, “Heaven is arranged into innumerable societies, all connected with each other, according to the differences of the affections; each society is one species of affection, and there they dwell distinctly, according to the propinquities, and affinities of that species of affection” (A. R. 883).

Therefore, “Heaven is not confined to any particular place, but is everywhere, with everyone, where the divine being is present in charity and faith” (8931). Essentially, heaven is where spiritual love is flowing as a feeling and being shared with others.

This flowing feeling of “Heaven is said to be opened, when the interior sight, which is the spirit of man is opened” (H. H. 171). For “One to whom the interiors of the spirit are opened gets at the same time a sensible perception of such things” (1879).

Therefore, heaven could be thought of as being a sensible perception of the feeling of celestial love flowing into the body as a feeling of joy. Thus, “heaven is no other than the divine flowing from the divine” (10.098); and “man is a heaven in the least form” (A. C. 5115).

Swedenborg makes a connection to the Joy of the celestial heaven as a pulsation. This is important in radiating the feeling of spiritual love. Thus, “Pulsating Instruments have respect to the joy of those who are in the celestial kingdom” (A. E. 863).

That “Joy” is felt as a spiritual feeling of love, particularly as a love-pulsation or “wave-offering” of love to and from the Divine in heaven. For a “wave-offering signifies vivification, by acknowledgment of the Lord” (10.091).

That spiritual love-pulsation is from the center of heaven within, as a veiled sensual spiritual feeling from the Divine. Thus, “the Lord is the common center, and everyone is a center of influxes in the heavenly form” (A. C. 3633).

Therefore, because everyone is their own center of heavenly influx, then when set into motion, just one wave-offering pulsation of the spiritual feeling of love can put everything into order.

“The Lord from the center, where He sets purification in action, reduces the disordered and tumultuous in the circumferences to order” (A. C. 5396).

Nevertheless, we need to make one further connection with the feeling of heaven as being the spiritual church, as the spiritual feeling of love on earth. “The Lord's heaven on earth is the church” (A. C. 9408).

The church is the feeling of being as One, since “the Church makes one with heaven, for they are linked together inseparably and are dependent each on the other. The Word is what joins them together” (A. C. 10131).

Essentially, first we need to become familiar with the sensual feeling of lust, to understand that “Conjugal is the conjunctive principle of evil and false” (C. S. L. 203). Then we can become familiar with the spiritually erotic feeling of conjugial love, as “Conjugial love is the conjunction of love and wisdom” (C. S. L. 65).

However, it is no point wanting to experience conjugial love without first deserving it, because it is not a comfortable feeling. Hence, first, we have to learn to love.

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