Our knowledge of what is true and good does not become faith until we are engaged in caring. Once we have a faith that is born of caring, though, that knowledge becomes a resource that gives form to our faith (Continued)

It is important to know, though, that faith is supported by knowledge of what is genuinely true and good; this is definitely not the case with knowledge of what is false. Faith is truth (see Sections 5-11 above), and since falsity contradicts truth, it destroys faith. Caring, too, cannot occur where there are nothing but falsities, since as noted in Section 18 above, caring and faith are united the way goodness and truth are united.

It also follows from all this that a total absence of knowledge of what is true and good makes for no faith; slight knowledge makes for some faith; and an abundance of knowledge makes for a faith that is lightened in proportion to its fullness.

The quality of faith we have as a result of caring determines the quality of our intelligence.

There are many people, too, who do not have an inner recognition of what is true but still have a faith that comes from caring. These are people who have turned towards the Lord in their lives and who have refrained from evil behavior for religious reasons, but who have been hindered from thinking about truths by worldly concerns and by their professional
responsibilities as well as by a lack of truths on the part of their teachers. More deeply, or in spirit, though, they are able to recognize what is true, because they are drawn to it; so, after they die, become spirits, and are taught by angels, they recognize what is true and are overjoyed to receive it.

However, it is different for people who have not turned towards the Lord in their lives and have failed to refrain from evil behavior in accord with their religion. Inwardly or in spirit they do not feel drawn to truth and therefore have no ability to recognize it. So when they become spirits after death and are taught by angels, they are unwilling to acknowledge what is true and therefore do not accept it. Inside an evil life there is a hatred of truth, while inside a good life there is a love for truth.

from Life/Faith: Teaching for the New Jerusalem on Faith, Section 29-30

Sections 5-11: Published 7/8/2022-7/14/2022

Section 18: Published 7/21/2022

Our knowledge of what is true and good does not become faith until we are engaged in caring. Once we have a faith that is born of caring, though, that knowledge becomes a resource that gives form to our faith (Continued)

Since we all not only look toward what is useful for our lives in this world but should also look toward what is useful for our lives in heaven (after all, we will get there after life in this world, and that is where we will go on living forever), from our childhood we acquire some familiarity with what is good and true from the Word, from the teachings of the church, or from sermons, and this knowledge is relevant to our eternal life. We store this away in our earthly memory, in greater or lesser abundance depending on our own desire to know, a desire that is both inborn and reinforced by various stimuli.

All this knowledge, though, no matter how much or how valuable, is nothing more than a resource out of which a caring faith can be formed; and this kind of faith is formed only as we turn our backs on evils because they are sins.

If we turn our backs on evils because they are sins, then this knowledge becomes part of our faith, which has some spiritual life in it; but if we do not turn our backs on evils because they are sins, then our knowledge is nothing but knowledge, and does not become part of a faith that has spiritual life within it.

This resource is of critical importance because without it no faith can take form. Our knowledge of what is true and good becomes part of our faith and strengthens it. If we have no such knowledge, faith does not happen. There is no such thing as an empty faith, a faith without content. If we have only a little of such knowledge, our faith is weak and needy. If we have an abundance of such knowledge, our faith becomes rich in full in proportion to that abundance.

from Life/Faith: Teaching for the New Jerusalem on Faith, Section 26-28

Our knowledge of what is true and good does not become faith until we are engaged in caring. Once we have a faith that is born of caring, though, that knowledge becomes a resource that gives form to our faith

Right from earliest childhood we are eager to know things. Because of this we learn a great many things, some of which will be to us and some of which will not. When we grow up, we get involved in some occupation and absorb information about it; and as we do, the occupation becomes a way for us to be useful, and we begin to love it. This is how our love of being useful begins; and this love leads us to also love the means that allow us to do our occupation and make it effective.

This process applies to everyone in this world because we all have some occupation to which we progress, beginning from the service we envision as a goal, through the means, to the actual service that is the result. However, since this service end its means have to do with life in this world, loving it is an earthly type of love.

from Life/Faith: Teaching for the New Jerusalem on Faith, Section 25

How People Seem to Accept Books (by Swedenborg)

I talked to spirits about how my books may seem to be accepted when they are published. Evil spirits sometimes insinuated that nobody would understand them, and that people would reject them. But while I was in the street talking to some spirits, the realization came to me that books are received in five different ways:

• some people totally reject them because they have a different belief system, or they are opposed to any belief. These people reject the books; they can’t accept them because the ideas do not sink into their minds.
• Some people accept them as knowledge. They enjoy the books for the information and unusual things they contain.
• Some people accept them intellectually, receiving the ideas eagerly enough, but they keep on living the same way they had before.
• Some people are influenced by them enough that the ideas sink in and change their lives for the better. This happens when they are in particular states of mind, and it is helpful to them.
• Some people accept them joyfully and gain confidence in them.

from Swedenborg Researcher’s Manual by William Ross Woofenden

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. (Continued)

 The following experience taught me what kind of a difference there is between and angels’ thoughts and our thoughts. They were told to think about some thing spiritually and then to tell me what they had been thinking. Once they had done this and tried to tell me, they could not, and they explained that they could not articulate it. The same thing held true for both their spiritual speech and their spiritual writing. There was not a single word of a spiritual speech that resembled a word of earthly speech, no element of spiritual writing that resembled earthly writing except the letters, and each of these contained a complete meaning.

Remarkably enough, though, they told me that they seemed to themselves to be thinking and talking and writing in the spiritual state the same way we do in our earthly state even though there is no similarity whatever. I could see from this that what is earthly and what is spiritual differ as to vertical level, and that they communicate with each other only through
correspondences.

from Divine Providence, Section 295

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. (Continued)

Since the elements that make up the sun of the spiritual world are from the Lord and are not the Lord, they are not intrinsic life but are devoid of intrinsic life. In the same way, the elements that flow out from angels and from us and form surrounding auras are not the angels or the people. They are derived from them but are devoid of their life. They are part of the angel or person only in the fact that they are in harmony with them because they are derived from those forms of their bodies that are forms of the life within them.

This is a mystery that angels can see in thought and expressed in speech with their spiritual concepts, while we cannot do the same with our earthly concepts. This is because a thousand spiritual concepts go to make up one earthly one, and we cannot resolve a single earthly concept into any spiritual one, let alone into several. The reason for this is that they differ as to the vertical levels discussed in part 3.

from Divine Providence, Section 294

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. (Continued)

I have also noticed that an aura flows out not only from angels and spirits but also from absolutely everything you see in that word–from trees and the fruits there, for example, from shrubs and their blossoms, from plants and grasses, even from soils and their particles. I could therefore see that this is a universal characteristic of a things both living and lifeless, that everything is surrounded by something resembling what lies within it and that this is constantly breathing forth.

The experience of numerous scholars informs us that something like this happens in the physical world. For example, an outgoing wave is constantly flowing from individuals and from every animal, also from trees, fruits, shrubs, and flowers, and even from metals and stones. The physical world gets this from the spiritual world, and the spiritual world gets it from Divinity.

from Divine Love and Wisdom, Section 293

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. (Continued)

I have fairly often been allowed to perceive that there is this kind of aura around an angel or spirit and that there is a general aura around groups in community. I have also been allowed to see this aura in various guises, sometimes in heaven looking like a faint flame and in hell like a harsh flame, sometimes in heaven looking like a delicate and bright cloud and in hell like a dense black cloud.

I have also been allowed to sense these auras as different kinds of aroma and stench. This has convinced me that everyone in heaven and everyone in hell is surrounded by an aura made up of substances distilled and separated from his or her body.

from Divine Love and Wisdom, Section 292

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it. (Continued)

One of the things explained in part 2, then, was this: that sun is not the Lord. Rather, it is an emanation from the Lord’s divine love and wisdom. It is called the emanation because the sun is brought forth from the divine love and divine wisdom that in and of themselves are substance and form; and Divinity emanates by means of it.

However, our reason by its nature will not consent to anything unless it sees the reason behind it, unless it sees how it has happened. In the present instance, reason needs to grasp how the spiritual world’s sun was brought forth, inasmuch as it is not the Lord but an emanation from the Lord, so something must be said about this as well. I have had many conversations with angels about this. They have told me that they grasp it clearly in their spiritual light, but that it is almost impossible for them to present it to us in our earthly light because there is such a difference between the two kinds of light, and therefore between their thoughts and ours.

They did say, though, that it is like the aura of feelings and consequent thoughts that surrounds every angel, through which angels’ presence is established for people both nearby and has a distance. This surrounding aura is not the actual angels, but it is derived from every part of the angel’s body. Coherent substances flow from it like a river, and the emanations envelop them. These substances bordering angels’ bodies, substances constantly energized by the two fountains of their life, the heart and lungs, stir the atmospheres into their activities, and in this way establish a sense of the angel’s virtual presence among others. This means that there is not a separate aura of feelings and consequent thoughts that go forth in connected fashion, even though that is what we called it, because the feelings are simply states of the forms of the mind within.

The angels went on to say that all angels have this kind of aura around them because the Lord does, and that the aura around the Lord is similarly derived from him. This aura is their sun, or the sun of the spiritual world.

from Divine Love and Wisdom, Section 291

The Lord from eternity, or Jehovah, brought forth the sun of the spiritual world out of himself, and created the universe and all its contents from it.

In the spiritual world, divine love and wisdom look like a sun (Sections 83–88). Spiritual warmth and spiritual light emanate from that sun (Sections 89–92). That sun is not God. Rather, it is an emanation from the divine love and wisdom of the Divine-Human One. The same is true of warmth and light from that sun (Sections 93–98). the sun of the spiritual world is seen at a middle elevation, as far from angels as the physical world’s sun is from us (Sections 103–107). The east in the spiritual world is where the Lord is seen as the sun, and the other directions follow from that (Sections 119-123, 124-128). Angels always face the Lord as the sun (Sections 129-134, 135-139).

The Lord created the universe and everything in it by means of the sun that is the first emanation of divine love and wisdom (Sections 151-156). The physical world’s sun is nothing but fire and is therefore dead; and since nature has its origin in that sun, it is dead. Further, the physical world’s sun was created so that the work of creation could be finished off and completed (Sections 157-162). There would be no creation if it were not for this pair of suns, one living and one dead (Sections 163-166).

from Divine Love and Wisdom, Section 290

Sections 83-88: Published 6/3/2018-6/5/2018

Sections 89-92: Published 6/6/2018-6/7/2018

Sections 93-98: Published 6/8/2018-6/9/2018

Sections 103-107: Published 6/12/2018-6/13/2018

Sections 119-123: Published 2/22/2019-2/24/2019

Sections 124-128: Published 2/25/2019-2/26/2019

Sections 129-134: Published 2/27/2019-2/28/2019

Sections 135-139: Published 3/1/2019-3/2/2019

Sections 151-156: Published 3/7/2019-3/8/2019

Sections 157-162: Published 1/3/2020-1/6/2020

Sections 163-166: Published 1/7/2020-1/8/2020