Title: Re: A Fresh Look at Heaven
Post by JudyEb on May 8th, 2005 at 4:34pm
Hi Freebird,
I was addressing Don because he has read “Heaven and Hell” and he had asked some questions about Swedenborg’s writings in the thread. When I wrote that Swedenborg wrote that the age of rationality was approximately 21, I did state, “approximately”. Certainly anyone who has studied child psychology knows that there are approximate ages when certain physiological traits begin to manifest in children – and modern psychology does recognize an approximate age of 18 to 24 years for a complete development – hence rationality. And of course, there are variances to this general rule of thumb – that’s most obvious. That in some individuals this rationality is not achieved until a much later age is apparent by the statements of some in AA who admit that they are only as mature as the age they were when they took their first drink.
The point I truly was making – without stating it per se – was that Swedenborg recognized a far more liberal age of spiritual accountability than is typically recognized in Christianity. As a minister, I believe that Don is aware that the Catholic Church teaches that this age as 7, and that many Protestant Churches teach that this spiritual age of accountability to be 10-12 years of age. I added that statement right after I mentioned the Columbine killers so that others would hopefully understand that I do not condemn them for their actions – they were unwittingly in far deeper than they ever knew. And no, I don’t believe that there’s such a thing as spirit possession against one’s will – that could never happen without the express approval of the one inviting the evil in – even though that express approval is often given with a complete naiveté regarding spiritual realities. You might be surprised to learn that Swedenborg wrote that no one is ever punished on the other side for our wrongdoing committed here in this world.
Shades of gray – absolutely. It’s a theme in Swedenborg’s writings. That is why he wrote in so many passages that we aren’t to judge anyone. We can judge (assess) their life, but we aren’t to judge them to hell for no one save God can look into the heart of another and know whether they are truly evil or not. Luke 12:48 also touches on the theme that those who have little in this life are not viewed in the same manner as those who have much in this.
It’s a major theme of Swedenborg’s writings that no human is born evil. Anyone can look at a baby and know with a certainty that a baby is not evil. Only the most hardened fundamentalist would ever suggest that a baby is evil. What we are born with is an inherited tendency to do evil. According to Swedenborg, every human being has an inner angelic nature that opting for evil does not destroy but closes off.
I cannot possibly condense accurately in a one-page posting what Swedenborg wrote in 35 volumes that were typically 500 pages each without a loss of the varied nuances that he discussed. Not only that – all people see the exact same thing as something slightly different.
Swedenborg used a marvelous allegory to explain this difference. He wrote that the sun shines down on a meadow of flowers in the exact same way. The sun’s light and warmth is received by these flowers, but the way in which the flowers reflect back the sun’s light and warmth is vastly different – accounting for the varied colors that we see in those flowers. The sun is symbolic of God – His Truth (light) and Love (warmth) flow out to all equally, but the way that people (flowers) reflect His Truth and Love are varied. And that’s okay – it’s better than okay. It’s what is beautiful – who wants to see only pink or red flowers in Heaven? Not me! I love the varied colors – and what is more marvelous, God loves those varied flowers. Heaven would be very boring if we all thought alike and talked alike. Not only would people be bored – God would also be bored, or so Swedenborg asserted. Another one of those novel concepts that makes me smile.
There is Absolute Truth and there is Absolute Love - God. No one will ever get to the point where they completely understand this Absolute Truth and Absolute Love absolutely – it’s not possible for a mere finite mind and heart to do so. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying to learn – throughout our life here in this physical world and then continue on throughout eternity. The more we ponder, the more we ask God questions, the more we will attain answers.
You also wondered why the different versions of the other side? Another theme in Swedenborg’s writings is “the filter of a person’s mind” – yes, Swedenborg was influenced by the filter of his mind; the culture of his times – no doubt about it. We all are – so? There are some things that Swedenborg wrote that I do not accept – when someone writes me – usually because of the bereavement site – I always tell them to “take what their heart feels is right, and leave the rest.”
I perceive a resistance to the idea of simplicity – which is not black and white thinking. Mankind has made God confusing when really God has made it easy for mankind to understand some basic spiritual realities. God is One and God is Love. That’s pretty simple – and it’s backed up by Scripture – yet Christianity has twisted it into a doctrine of three gods. When God is known as One, the insidious notion of the demented vicarious atonement disappears. God the Father cannot be angry if He Himself came into this world and lived among us and taught us love. When God is known as three, that most twisted, warped, demented and perverted doctrine of the vicarious atonement surfaces its ugly head and then you have thousands upon thousands of Christians wondering why God the Father is angry… and then they walk away from God which is so terribly sad and unnecessary and oftentimes involves great spiritual pain and anguish.
I read in a book about Quantum Physics that simplicity is elegant – and is more indicative of truth in a formula. When an equation goes on for pages and pages as they sometimes do, a physicist usually has to step back and completely rethink his theory. The more complicated the theory, the more likely it is incorrect – or so the book stated. Look at E=MC2 – the most revolutionary and awesome of all scientific equations. It’s stated so simply that a 4th grader can recite it – Energy equals Mass times Velocity squared. Yet, underneath that simplicity is some pretty powerful and complex stuff – enough to keep a scientist – thousands of scientists – pondering a lifetime – or an eternity. Well, God is One – that’s simple and a true reality –and yet under that simplicity is the vastness and complexity of God and God’s eternal creation – enough to keep us all thinking and pondering for a lifetime and throughout eternity.
I also said in my posts that the levels of Heaven were infinite – and gave a basic structural breakdown – and you wondered why all these levels? Well, it’s not much different than what we see here in this world – there are some in first grade and others in 10th grade and others still in graduate school. It’s up to us if we want to advance or not – in this world or the next world in whatever interests us. Look at physicists in this world – their level of understanding science is so much higher than mine – I admire and respect that; it doesn’t bother me a whit that they know more than me in that area.
You misperceive the reality of communication between the afterlife and this world – how angels and lower spirits are attached to people and how they influence us. It’s a fluid state – as our interests develop and our thoughts change, those angels and lower spirits move to and from us – depending on us. And one angel can be attached to a many people in this world; the same for the lower levels – it’s not necessarily a one-to-one relationship; it can be many to one. Again, it’s all based upon spiritual interests and likeness. If you are interested, there’s more information in Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell – a free online version is available at this link:
Regarding the question of evil and hell that you brought up – I am going to copy/paste a section of the book, “Freedom and Evil – a Pilgrim’s Guide to Hell” by Dr. George F. Dole. His style of writing is far more eloquent than mine.
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“It can be hard, especially emotionally, to reconcile the idea of hell with the idea of a loving and omnipotent God (in theological language, this is referred to as the theodicy problem, which I will deal with at greater length in the closing chapter). Marilyn McCord Adams, among others, argues that it is impossible to believe that a good and omnipotent God would consign anyone to hell, and I agree. The hell you are going to be reading about is not a hell inflicted by God on people who broke the rules. It is not a punishment for the things they did before they died. IT is simply a lot of people living the way they want to live, just as they did before they died. Before they died, their loving Lord was trying to get through to them, making the best of their choices, warding off the worst, and that still holds true after death.
…”Let me scale the problem down for a moment. I seem to have no trouble reconciling the notion of a loving God with my own failings. Paul cited God’s reaching out to us “while we were sinners” as evidence of divine love (Romans 5:8). If this is the case, then the theodicy problem begins to look like one of degree. How much evil can be reconciled with belief in a loving God? For some people, the death of a single child is too much – especially if the child is their own. For others, the death of millions in the Holocaust is not too much. Victor Frankl found eloquent faith in the death camp. For many, it must be granted, the idea of an eternal hell is too much, but equally thoughtful people have come to opposite conclusions in this instance as well. To the best of my knowledge, no one has managed to quantify evil; and even if we could, who would decide how much is too much? Who would pick the magic number?
“We cannot look at the daily news without at least suspecting that we are capable of choosing evil. When a child is abducted, tortured, and killed; when a man who has lost money day-trading goes on a killing rampage; when one tribe, clan, or ethnic group sets about the systematic elimination of another, it is awfully clear that we are capable of creating hell for each other. What Swedenborg asks you to believe is simply that we are capable of preferring hell to heaven not just form time to time, not just under the extraordinary circumstances, but forever – and when you look at how resolute and ingenious we can become in defense of the indefensible, this doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.
“Can we really hang onto that preference forever? That, for me, is the question. I reject categorically the notion that God would consign anyone to hell for a moment, let alone for eternity. That is actually wanting someone to be evil and is as demonic as love is divine. But can we ourselves become eternally, irredeemably evil? Nobody has been in hell forever yet, but that doesn’t mean that nobody will. It’s largely a theoretical question until we take it personally. There are several personal ways to ask the question. Can we completely kill our conscience? Can we wound our sanity beyond recovery? Can we so deafen ourselves that even the very voice of God cannot get through to us? Peck [M. Scott Peck] suggests that we can. He cites Gerald Vann’s statement, “There can be a state of soul against which Love itself is powerless because it has hardened itself against Love.” Universalists have always said we cannot – a loving God will make sure that eventually the pain and folly of genuine evil will convert even the hardest heart.
“Again, the hell Swedenborg is talking about is simply a place (loosely speaking) where we not only do evil but are in the exclusive company of people like ourselves. It may be a dangerous doctrine, but it is surely a realistic one to recognize that there are times when we enjoy evil…
“My father told of trying to help a parishioner who made all sorts of trouble for himself by periodic binge drinking. In his sober times, which I gather were long enough to enable him to function fairly well, he could see what he was doing to himself. Dad talked to him once right after one of his binges and asked him whether he knew why he had gone off the wagon again. His response was, “But I had a hell of a good time.” If we cannot admit that there is such a thing as a hell of a good time, we are (a) likely to follow the universalist line of reasoning and (b) be seriously out of touch with reality.
“In the framework of Swedenborgian theology, it makes sense that there are “delights of evil.” For Swedenborg, evil is essentially a matter of our priorities. In the hierarch of loves I outlined in the last chapter – love of the Lord, love of the neighbor, love of the world, and love of self – all the loves are good provided they are in that order. Love of self becomes evil, tyrannical, when it is put in first place, when we become so absorbed in it that it drowns out everything else. Love of the Lord does not drown out love of self for the simple reason that the Lord loves us and therefore wants us to love ourselves as well as each other: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ (Leviticus 19:18) For the same reason, love of the neighbor does not drown out love of self. In fact, as we become aware of the reality of other people and of the extent to which we actually internalize them, the whole line between self and other becomes increasingly permeable. We find our boundaries to be movable, not fixed, with some people we let in and others we do not, with times to open the doors and times to close them. We realize more and more the extent to which we are interdependent – in David Bohm’s marvelous phrase, “relatively autonomous subtotalities” and can actually believe that our own happiness is important to others, as theirs is to us.
“Because our own happiness is important, there is pleasure in pleasing ourselves, even when we do so at the expense of others. We would not do these appalling things if they cause us nothing but pain. To imagine Swedenborg’s hell, then, is to dismiss all the caricatures, all the images of eternal barbecues, and to look squarely at the nature of the hells we make for ourselves here and now. Their fire is not literal fire, but the fire of anger or hatred. Their torment is not inflicted by God sitting in judgment but by the people who return our hatred with hatred of their own, by the way in which we have set ourselves against reality. It is to imagine communities made up entirely of people wholly wrapped up in themselves, seeing everyone else as enemy. But it is also to admit that sometimes that is just what we are looking for.
“… We need to come down from the heights of metaphysical abstraction and take seriously two recurrent features of our own experience – that evil is really bad for us in and of itself, and that we are perfectly capable of enjoying it.
.”… the vanishing of the physical world has another effect, as Swedenborg experienced it. What he describes is a kind of shift in the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. On the one hand, when ‘There is nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known’ (Matthew 10:26), major obstacles to accurate, objective perception would seem to have been removed. On the other hand, the inner world that comes to light is our subjective one. If we have inwardly found evil attractive, it will look attractive to us.
“…If, through, the spiritual world is the uncovering of our present inner world, we need to allow for the fact that resentment and malice can be attractive to us. We can bask in the flame of rage. I am sometimes inclined to fault Swedenborg for so often describing hell not as it looks to its inhabitants but as it looks “in the light of heaven.” It is all too easy to forget his reminders that it may be quite glamorous in its own light and to rest easy in the confidence that we would never choose anything so ugly and painful….
“The judgment Swedenborg describes, then, has these two components. First, there is the discarding of masks, the disclosure of hidden agendas, the emergence of the essential person. Second, there is the natural gravitation of like to like in a world where the only kind of closeness if affinity of character. There is the spiritual homecoming, the discovering of a community of shared values… For a Swedenborgian perspective, hell is no more a punishment for evil than death is a punishment for cancer. Evil is bad for us. That is why a loving creator tells us to stay away from it…
“Surely no one could deny the attraction of heavenly community, could resist its beauty. So it might seem, but that is not the way it works, as Swedenborg understands Scriptures. As we saw, according, to John 3:19-20, light came into the world, but the evil preferred the darkness to cover their wicked deeds, The evil are not shut out of heaven; rather, they are invited in–but at a price. Again, the price of admission is simply honesty to the point of personal transparency. It is genuinely wanting to be understood. Paul had it exactly right: “Then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (! Cor. 13:12).
“This means that, to the extent that we are attracted by hell, we feel repelled by heaven. The perceptiveness of genuine love is experienced as threatening…
It is wholly characteristic of Swedenborg that he distinguishes three basic levels of hell. This rests in the fact that he sees our human process as consisting of an ongoing interaction among intention, thought, and act (which are, again characteristically, ‘distinguishably one’). He sees this “trinity” as structuring the spiritual world as well. So the first – and mildest – hell comprises people who are focused on behavior, the second comprises people whoa re focused on the workings of the human mind, and the third and most vicious comprises people who are focused on the workings of the human heart. The first are the people who will break your kneecaps if you don’t pay up, the second are the people who will con you out of everything you own, and the third are the people who will work on your feelings until you have no will of your own. Read M. Scott Peck’s description of Hartley and Sarah [People of the Lie, 108-120.]
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Anyway… that is about as much as I want to type…
With Peace and Blessings to All,
JudyE
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