From Ephesians in the Bible: “But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore he saith, when he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.(Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things)”.
Light from the Lord can be compared to the scientific dynamics demonstrated in natural light: to our vision light is white, but when sent through a prism it is shown to have particular and unique colors with innumerable gradations. Within the light and heat from Jesus (proceeding from Him as the spiritual sun) is contained wisdom and love. In the intellectual or external thought of people, wisdom and love are thought of as abstractions. But they are not at all, wisdom and love are the very spiritual substance of the spiritual world and of our soul. ‘Wisdom and love’ sound like a simple binary, but like light in the spectrum they are full of an infinite variety that sustain the infinite variety in the souls of people and all life. They form the spiritual spheres by which the Lord governs all of life. The conjugal sphere is the pre-eminent sphere because it is the highest love between a man and woman, and it is this love which provides for the highest use – the eternal procreation of life, and the ultimately home of humanity to be angels in heaven, the Lord’s kingdom. There are many spheres such as the sphere of fruitfulness in plants, the sphere of parental love, of friendship, of love of country, the sphere of building – in both a natural and spiritual way. From the love of the end purpose (a deep desire, drive and yearning) emerges the intelligence to manifest the end purpose. (God in our ‘midst’, ‘the third spirit manifested between us’.) From this drive from the union of these springs forth the sphere which causes the building or manifestation of the end purpose. All of this originates from God but manifests and comes alive in people who receive it and grow reciprocally with it. (Swedenborg calls this driving force ‘conatus’. I wrote an article on how conatus is the force that science calls ‘Dark Matter’ – for dark matter behaves exactly like the intelligent force, conatus, that builds the structures of the universe, but that is a whole other story.)
Love and wisdom, or the conjugal sphere, when received in the will and the understanding of humans is expressed as innumerable spiritual gifts, talents, and uses. But people must be deeply prepared to receive this at the higher internal level. God only allows for the reception in the internals when He perceives the person will be devoted to it all the way to the end (eternally). This is also described in Revelation 21: “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations”.
The river is the Holy fire that proceeds from the Lord like a fountain to all life and is received in the soul’s of humans. The leaves of the tree of life and its fruit are all the particular truths and gifts that grow and come to fruition in humanity. In man to express wisdom is to express internalized and specific gifts of use to others. These spring forth from his divine soul to ours; this is expressed in the phrase, “But unto every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ”.
“He who descended is also he who ascended”: this is an extraordinary scripture that has an unfathomable depth of meaning, but I will characterize as I can. It is very similar to the scripture, “He is the alpha and Omega”. It means that in the culmination of the glorification process, (which I explain extensively on my blog), Jesus reached a state of love which had never existed before; the never before reached height of it corresponds to the neve before depths he descended. He went through an infinite crucible process of suffering from His battle and victory with all the forces of hell; He subjugated all the forces of evil and put them in their place (which is the meaning of ‘he led captivity captive’); He completely overcame all the temptations put upon him so that He utterly purified His body of all hereditary evil – and by this made His physical body divine. In doing this it is essential to see that He ‘drew all things unto himself’, meaning He paved the way for all mankind to be restored.
He completely restored the equilibrium between heaven and hell that had been lost, and in so doing restored the integrity of heaven. In doing this he also restored, one by one, all the avenues of connection between the psyche of man and the structure of heaven – for there is complete correspondence between the form of Man’s mind and soul and the whole structure of heaven. These connections in the psyche of man had atrophied and been lost by the hand of evil forces, evil had succeeded in closing man’s internals. ‘He who descended is also he who ascended’ also means that Jesus reconnected the spiritual of heaven to the natural of man; and, in a personal way, that the height of enlightenment corresponds in every detail to the depth of deprivation that prepares the ‘soil of the soul’ for reception.
This was the first time and only time God would ever be born in the natural world as a human. He humbled himself to do this and in the course of His life (the glorification process) He made his human body divine in the resurrection, which utterly defies all the laws of physics in the natural world. Defying the immutable laws of the physical world can only be done by becoming the innermost – thus new universal law of all things! This was an act of such love, wisdom and power it made the presence of the divine burn in the natural world exponentially brighter, and Jesus removed the obstructions. Light can come to Man only to the degree that evil is removed. Because so much had been overcome for such a profound use (saving all mankind) Jesus entered and opened a state of love that had never existed before, (which is expressed in the scripture ‘up far above the heavens’). This breadth of expansion in the natural world and the heavens brought liberty, and potential fulfillment, to the souls of men; and it brought astounding awe and joy to the angels of heaven, which is expressed in many verses in Revelation.
This is a description of the universal way Jesus redeemed Man but it is also a description of the personal way. He restored the lost avenues or channels in the psyche of man by which man can be enlightened, or receive the ‘crown knowledge’ of his being. A person’s whole life can be preparation for the littlest bit of this, or not. In the highest part of our soul God is in us, and by this we are always tethered to Him, and by this we can receive our crown knowledge of self that had been lost but that we are destined to have. I believe it is through this crown tethering that people receive the ‘descending force’. This connection is beyond our normal conscious perception, but in seminal moments it can be felt and known, as we remove the abstructions, and in time I hope consistently.
Jesus’ infinite process of growth is called the Glorification and led to the resurrection; Man’s process, being finite, is called regeneration and leads to eternal happiness in heaven from the development of internal skills.
After the resurrection because light was exponentially more available, it could be felt much more readily, and this is why the ‘Holy Spirit’ comes into awareness in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is the presence of the Lord; a very real presence and comfort in our life, and that which guides us to face our evils so we can make room in our soul for good. (The holy spirit could be called, perhaps, the aggregate of all the ‘spheres’ from the Lord.) After this, 1800 years later, the Christian and Catholic churches (also all mankind) had declined and man had again become mostly external, and so the second coming took place. The second coming corresponds to the enlightenment period in history, where the Lord restored the internal sense to Man that had been lost.
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