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.”
A Sea of Glass and Fire 