The Dumbing-Down of Truth

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with 25 pieces. It would be pretty simple to solve, right? It might be fun for a 5-year-old, but probably not for you. Now imagine dividing each of those 25 pieces into 10 pieces, making a grand total of 250 pieces. A little more complicated, but basically still for kids. But imagine you divided each of those 250 pieces into another 10, making 2500. That’s more like it. But imagine that when you’ve finished your 2500 piece puzzle, your five-year-old cousin comes up to you and says “I could have done that, easy!” You’re confused for a bit, but then you realize that your cousin can’t see the 2500 pieces but, instead, only the outlines of the initial 25. He can’t tell that each one of those larger pieces is actually a collection of 100 smaller ones!

This is like the nature of truth. Like the meta-puzzle in my parable, each true idea implies the millions/billions/+ of other true ideas that make it up. There are nuances and new revelations to eternity; truth in itself is more complicated than a human being can ever grasp. Swedenborg said this a lot: like how a human body gets more complicated with the higher level of microscope you use, he says truth gets more and more nuanced the deeper you look. There is no bottom here.

We need truth – that isn’t up for negotiation. It’s the only thing that saves us from our ignorance and our dangerous misconceptions – “the truth will set you free.” But if we can’t grasp truth in itself, what does that mean for our salvation? Absolutely nothing; God makes up the difference, and he does this by dumbing down the truth for us.

This is a lot like teaching Sunday School lessons to young children. If you were to teach them out of the Gospel Doctrine manual, you’d get nothing but blank stares and cheerios all over the floor. It’s only by using really simplified truths – the “Sunday School” answers – that you can make an impression on their young minds. And this is, crucially, true even though those Sunday School answers are relatively untrue compared with the more advanced “meat” of the Gospel. We’re all like those little kids. Every doctrine we receive from a church (or even scripture) is a simplification that adapts truth to our ability to understand. If doctrine didn’t get simplified like this, we would be just as confused as those little Sunbeams.

What does this look like practically? Well, it means that scripture is always “clothed” in details appropriate to the time and place it was written. That’s why Genesis talks about a firmament (basically an upside-down bowl that’s also the sky) dividing the ocean from heaven: that was a commonsense belief to Semites of the time, and God would have done nothing but confuse them if he’d mentioned dinosaurs, quantum fields, and primordial ooze.

We’re just as naive as those ancient Hebrews were, and we are just as convinced that we’re not. We know just a little more than we did then, like a fourth-grader coming home and bragging to his parents how smart he is after winning his science fair. This is as true with our doctrine as it is with our science. Does it upset me that there was a doctrine prohibiting black people from receiving the Priesthood in the LDS Church for a long time? A little bit, but not much; racism was a political institution in the United States for centuries, and if God didn’t adapt himself to that racism, He wouldn’t have been received. And yes, that does mean God can consecrate immoral acts to be done to worship Him. He doesn’t like it, but He does it often to help people trapped in widespread cultural immorality to come to Him. Swedenborg said that animal sacrifice was like this: the earliest people hated killing animals, but when they developed a taste for blood, he co-opted that grossness toward a good purpose. The violence in the Old Testament done for God was like this too. If people can’t help doing bad things, God might as well “bend” it toward a good purpose. Otherwise they’d reject the good outright and dive headlong into their evil.

Something else follows from this idea: the differing doctrines of the world’s religions don’t mean that one is true and the rest are false. It just means that the same truth “put on” the different assumptions and biases of the peoples who received it. It’s not surprising that India – with its repressive caste system – developed religions preaching the eternal insignificance of an individual personality (like with reincarnation). And it also makes sense that the Judeo-Christian God was portrayed like a Persian or Babylonian Super-King: that’s what mattered at the time. This works with the Book of Mormon too: so what if it was written in King James English with New Testament idioms all over the place? That’s what people in 1800s white America thought of as sacred; they wouldn’t have accepted anything else. The Book of Mormon is weird enough as it is without the immense weirdness that a direct translation of 4th century Native American culture would have brought.

And you can think of the “planet” weirdness of Mormon teachings like Abraham 3 in this way. The worldwide spiritual mindset from the eighteenth century till the early twentieth century was “planet-crazy”: Swedenborg spoke of “the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter” (who, oddly enough, resemble humans pre-Homo-Erectus in his descriptions), Rudolf Steiner said that human souls originally lived on the Moon, and Gurdjieff taught that the Sun and the planets in our solar system are spiritual organisms we “grow out of.” So if you’re a Mormon and you’re self-conscious about your weirdness, don’t be. “Planets” were exciting at the time; God facilitated our obsession and bent it toward a good purpose.

But what does all this mean about the people who stubbornly stick to the literal meaning of Genesis or who insist, despite everything, that every General Authority is infallible? According to Swedenborg, it’s the intent that counts, and I believe him one hundred percent. If it works for them and they’re in a good place, you have no right to claim that they’re doing anything wrong. God speaks unto people “according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Nephi 31:3), and that includes the language of concrete, literal-minded people. In the words of people who make fun of Christians for sticking with Bronze-Age nonsense, I hear nothing but pretentious intellectualism and more than a little contempt for the general mass of people. That’s why you’ll never hear me furiously raise my hand in a Sunday School lesson about Noah’s Ark: let people believe in whatever relatively untrue truths work for them, since that’s a luxury God gives to all of us.

The Play of Love

Now because every single thing remains in being from the Divine, that is, is constantly coming into being from Him, and every single thing from that source is inevitably a representative of the real thing by means of which it has come into being, the whole visible universe is therefore nothing else than a theatre that is representative of the Lord’s kingdom. And this in turn is a theatre representative of the Lord Himself. – Emanuel Swedenborg, “Arcana Coelestia,” 3483

Have you ever noticed that things in your life happen just the way they’re supposed to happen? You meet that person, you read that book, or you run into an idea at just the right time? Or maybe things don’t happen so easily; your boyfriend might break up with you or maybe you fail a class. But have you still discerned the way those painful events are good for you? I have. The world is on my side; if I’m on the wrong track, it will remind me in blunt or sometimes painful ways. But if I’m going in the way I’m supposed to go, things will happen in surprisingly easy ways. I’ll meet the right people, I’ll find the right books, and I’ll say the right things.

But though the world is on my side, the world isn’t what’s really on my side. The world is a theater. Every person, book, website, idea, or tree is a part played by something more real than it, something spiritual. The relationship between the spiritual world and our lives is the same relationship as between an actress and the character she plays.

‘Each grain of sand,

Every stone on the land,

Each rock and each hill,

Each fountain and rill,

Each herb and each tree,

Mountain, hill, earth, and sea,

Cloud, meteor, and star,

Are men seen afar.’ – William Blake, “To Thomas Butts”

In each “tender mercy” that pops up in your life, whether a smile from a stranger or a book that tells you just what you need to hear, there are “spiritual actors” doing their work in it. When that person smiled at you, they may not have known what they were doing, but you can bet that angels were subtly pushing her to help you in that way. Even chance meetings on the sidewalk are managed by those angels working together to help you. This means that you play a part in the “spiritual drama” as well. Though your conscious mind doesn’t know even a tenth of what’s going on, it “portrays” the purposes of angels in the actions you deliberately choose to do. Your good deeds are the deeds of higher, wiser beings than you.

And even these angels are “characters.” Like a play within a play, the angelic actors that play in our skins are also “acted out” by a higher being: the divine fire of love, what some call God.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces. – Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

Your life is a dance. This dance shows up in each “role” you play; it is the dance between you and the fire within every being, the fire you are, but which you have forgotten you are. This fire of God is like the man who, flinging you out as the woman, separates itself from you only to see you better. This fire loves you – it delights in you, finds every part of you infinitely wonderful. And the to-and-fro movement of that dance helps each rejoice in both the ecstasy of union and the delight of the gaze that can only come when you stand apart. Both positions are needed. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a dance.

This dance plays out in every moment of your life. Every time you are shown a tender mercy – in each smile, each synchronicity, each inspiring word – the divine fire is revealing itself to you. The parts are becoming transparent to the love that plays them; you are remembering who you are, or, to put it in another way, who you belong to. The dance is to and from that fire: toward the ecstatic oblivion of love and from it to the consciousness of being yourself. For we can’t be under any illusions: the life you are living – with all its faults, flaws, and weaknesses – is desired. The divine fire within you wanted it. But since that fire also wants what you want, and since you long for its flame wherever it shows itself, the divine shows itself to you.

Like two lovers meeting, the love within our heart merges with the love within the world. And in this meeting we realize that it is the same love: we are a part of the same oneness flowing into different forms and yet remaining one. Love shows us the illusion of separation and reveals the meaning of the interconnectedness that is all around us. Love can show us the patterns within life and what they mean. As love flows from form to form it leaves a trace of its source, a trace which we can see with the eye of the heart. This trace is the meaning of his love, the underlying purpose of life. When we recognize it, we become awake and directly participate in life’s knowing of itself. -Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Spiritual Power: How it Works”

There is a love deeper than words, deeper than thought, deeper than perception. We long for it in all our desires, though we almost never realize what we want. That love is our Being, and that Being desires us as the flawed people we are. But that love isn’t just in your heart. It is within everyone, in everything, but it hides itself from you both inside and outside because it doesn’t want to hurt you. But if you purify yourself, making yourself a clean and bright vessel, the fire of love can show itself to you in a way you never thought possible. Your Being will become transparent to you. You will see the love in all things that loves you more than life itself. And you will realize the innocent, blissful joy that plays in everything that happens to you.

“The Softer It Is, The More Firmly Does It Stand.”

Now that I’ve started grad school at BYU, I’ve started using their library to read everything of Swedenborg that before I lacked access to. One of the best things I’ve read is his Spiritual Diary, his private record of his private spiritual experiences over many decades. I found a passage in it that I felt impressed to bring to your attention:

Swedenborg Muses, and I Muse in Response

I was thinking about forms, and indeed about the form of the more interior things, which is the spiritual form. It is of such a nature that it resists every assault; and its properties are such that by means of anxieties and straitnesses, it can be reduced into all possible, thus infinite forms; it can be applied to all forms, even to those in a lower sphere, and indeed, as if it cared nothing about them, however much those who dwell in the lower sphere may suppose otherwise because they reason from themselves, and also because the more they are confirmed, so much the more are they straitened. One thing consisting of an indefinite number of things concurs and unites itself for the defense of another; for there is nothing in the general which is not defended by the single, indeed by the most single things, even to what is indefinite, yea to what is infinite; and many more things, deduced according to order from the constancy of that form, can be deduced in regard to its perfections. Its general defends the particular, and every particular conspires to the firm establishment of the general; and indeed the more it yields, or is yielding, and as I may say, the softer it is, the more firmly does it stand: for then the inmost in the universal and in the single things, which is its universal, binds together and so forth, etc.

This passage says that “the spiritual form” is itself free from assault by anything else. The spiritual form is the way everything in heaven appears, what makes heavenly things heavenly, so to speak. Just like everything red shares in a red form, everything spiritual shares in a spiritual form. This spiritual form “can be reduced to into all possible, thus infinite forms,” meaning that this spiritual form tries to manifest in everything else that exists.

It can only show up in things “lower” than itself “by means of anxieties and straitnesses.” This means that the spiritual can only manifest itself in “the natural,” or the world we live in, by painfully re-creating that natural world in its own image. For instance, when I undergo temptation, God – through this spiritual form – is “loosening” the way my bad habits and other things “out of place” in my mind are formed. Once loosened, those “natural” things can live from “spiritual” things instead of bearing their own weight. These “anxieties and straitnesses” are like healing a tense muscle: only by putting it under stress does it get exhausted enough to relax.

However, as Swedenborg points out, we often assume that we solve the problem on our own, when actually it is God working within us that solves our sin. The more we give up and accept his help, the easier it is to give up the unconscious tension we experience by holding onto ourselves in sin.

Next, Swedenborg says this:

One thing consisting of an indefinite number of things concurs and unites itself for the defense of another; for there is nothing in the general which is not defended by the single, indeed by the most single things, even to what is indefinite, yea to what is infinite.

This paragraph shows Swedenborg’s vision of the universe in very broad strokes. Every “thing” – every person, Ferrari, plunger, angel, political doctrine, or thought – is made up of an “indefinite” number of things. By indefinite, I take it that he means “infinite,’ but with a qualification – that however far you “go down” in terms of something’s parts, there’ll be more. Infinity is just a sign everywhere that says: “there’s more to see here.” The things that make up a plunger are the wooden handle and the rubber bit, yes, but also the trees that made the handle and the rubber, the nutrients that made those trees, etc. But each of those things is composed of other things, and each of those things by yet other things, and so on forever.

As a side note, as far as I can tell, Swedenborg says that each of these things is real both as a cause and an effect: an effect by virtue of its being formed by something else (a plunger as a product manufactured in a factory) and a cause by virtue of its forming something else (a plunger as a way to clean a toilet). Causes can be both spiritual or hellish, but by nature they exist in the spiritual world; the spiritual world is a world of causes. Insofar as I am in the act of doing something like plunging a toilet, I am in the spiritual world. But as long as I’m just “in the motion” of impulses toward action, I’m in the physical world. In other words, to intend what you do puts you in the spiritual world; to be acted on by what you do puts you on earth. And moreover, each cause-effect pair expresses a higher reality called the “end” or “purpose.” If a plunger changes a clogged toilet into an unclogged toilet, the plunger and the unclogged toilet are both expressions of the single “purpose” expressed by that action. The cause-effect pair of “plunger cleans toilet” is the physical evidence of a single reality of intention, purpose, and love (maybe cleanliness, helping the other people you live with, getting points with your wife, etc.) If a cause is a verb or action, a purpose is what “brackets” that action by linking cause and effect in the first place. Do you ever wonder why you light a match and fire comes about instead of something else? To avoid deferring the point to chemical explanations, the purpose explains what links cause to effect in the first place, how causes can cause effects at all. What links past and future, now and then? Simply the purpose: the timeless, love-based reality in which time exists.

Going back to our passage, Swedenborg says this:

Indeed the more it [the general or the single] yields, or is yielding, and as I may say, the softer it is, the more firmly does it stand: for then the inmost in the universal and in the single things, which is its universal, binds together and so forth, etc.

Like I said above about natural things obeying spiritual things, the more the general and the particular “yield” to each other, the stronger they are. Though he didn’t know it, Swedenborg was restating the main theme of the Tao Te Ching, like how it shows up in the 78th chapter of that book:

Under heaven nothing is more soft and yielding than water.

Yet for attacking the solid and strong, nothing is better;

It has no equal.

The weak can overcome the strong;

The supple can overcome the stiff.

Under heaven everyone knows this,

Yet no one puts it into practice.

Therefore the sage says:

He who takes upon himself the humiliation of the people

is fit to rule them.

He who takes upon himself the country’s disasters deserves

to be king of the universe.

The truth often seems paradoxical.

Be soft, be yielding, and you’ll be stronger than anything “solid” or “strong.” You know this in human bodies: the more supple your body, the more flexible it is. The more tense, the more easily injured. But why is this the case? Just because by doing this, you’re letting your being as an effect obey the causes that make up that being. The natural man – your body and your thoughts about this and that – are not meant to be in charge. By doing this, they don’t yield but instead cling onto themselves with fearful tension. But if you obey the higher thoughts in your mind – not a sentence you can utter but instead an intangible principle from which come many utterable thoughts – you begin to let the natural man obey what is higher within it. As an effect it begins to obey its cause instead remaining under the delusion that it can direct itself with any intelligence. For as a cause, my natural man drags my being into hell; submitting itself to be an effect, it helps raise it to heaven.

Why Does This Matter?

So, what’s the practical use of this paragraph? It’s actually very simple: obey what is higher within you. Don’t direct yourself. Instead of just bouncing around between natural impulses and thoughts, by obeying the stirrings of higher thoughts within you, you can let those higher thoughts organize your natural thoughts and impulses to become something better. Those natural thoughts loosen like exhausted, tense muscles, realizing that they were never meant to work so hard. Don’t obey effects – the already concretized things we see in our minds and the world. Don’t obey what “has become”; obey the becoming of those effects.

Imagine! Seeing the world not as a chess board of fixed pieces but as how the future of those pieces unfolds from the way they are now. See the lines branch out from any given thing to any other thing: see the moving, not what has already moved. Thus you don’t submit to whatever happens to move you at a given moment but instead move from that higher aspect of yourself in the fountainhead of your thoughts. So doing, you become a “thing to act,” not a “thing to be acted upon” (a paraphrase of 2 Nephi 2:14 in the Book of Mormon). In doing this, we then obey what expresses itself in both cause and effect, both in my higher thoughts and their results in the natural man: the purposes which compete to fill the whole of time with their presence. And above all, by being conscious of what moves you, you obey the purpose for which every other purpose works as a means: “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”