The purpose of a lifetime in this world is to make us whole. That is what regeneration is about. A young child is whole but incomplete. Completion requires that a child first become divided mentally, adding an external self as consciousness of the external world develops. This makes interaction with other human beings possible. This makes community possible, which makes expressing love to another possible, which makes heaven possible, which is the purpose of creation in the first place. If you wonder why God created everything, that’s why. To make a heaven with which He could communicate and express His love, which is God’s Being. God literally is Love.
History is full of ideas about existence. Philosophers have been debating our existence for millennia. People thousands of years ago were just as smart as we are, maybe smarter. We’ve just reached a point where our ability to manipulate God’s creation has developed to the point where we now have the ability to destroy it, at least on this our home planet. So we really need to question if we haven’t actually degenerated in terms of intelligence, or at least, its application.
There are, however, throughout history those who have sought to understand reality the way it actually is and to understand how we must choose to live in order to live in harmony with reality. That is what Emanuel Swedenborg’s intensive studies were intended to do. And he succeeded, with the Lord’s help. Swedenborg drew together a picture of how reality works that solved the big riddles of life. He was selected from all the human beings God created to be the messenger that brought the Lord’s Secrets of Heaven, which are His Second Coming, to us.
In the process, Swedenborg described how the different levels of reality that exist within us and in the Universe as a whole, actually work. The key to his explanation is to understand what correspondences are. This was Swedenborg’s, or perhaps we should say the Lord’s, explanation of what has become known as the Mind/Body Problem in the study of philosophy.
If you read much philosophy, you may have noticed that a lot of philosophers like to make their writing as dense as possible in order to display to the world their own immense wisdom and intelligence. I was fortunate enough to have a philosophy professor in college who, as one of his student’s pointed out, was not a philosopher, but a sage. But even he was unable to break through my own density. It wasn’t until I began studying Swedenborg that I was able to begin to grasp some of the ideas philosophers are trying to express.
Robert Kirven, in his Concise Overview of Swedenborg’s Theology defines the Mind/Body Problem and makes it easier to understand. He says we must look at the fields of ontology and epistemology. Simply put ontology is the study of being and epistemology is the study of knowing. In other words, ontology studies what is, and epistemology studies how we know.
If we begin to examine the implications of these studies it can get very confusing very quickly. We see objects outside of us, and even our own bodies, and we acknowledge that they are real. We can sense them, feel, smell, taste, hear and see them. Hence the old adage, seeing is believing. “What you see is what you get” was pointed out over and over again by that great twentieth century philosopher, Flip Wilson. Just look at how things have changed since he first appeared on television. He had a gift for philosophy that made it something people wanted to hear. “The devil made me do it” became one of the most repeated phrases of the twentieth century. Flip Wilson, comedian, philosopher, and theologian all in one man. But no match for Swedenborg, who wasn’t just fooling around.
But I digress. Things are called real because we sense them as being real. But what about our thoughts and feelings? Are they real, or part of our imagination. Or, and here’s where it gets trickier, are the things we imagine real?
Two camps named Idealism and Materialism have existed in this mind/body controversy. Idealism says that thought is real and the material world is an illusion, not real. Materialism says the opposite, the physical world is real, thought is not.
But these answers are unsatisfying, because in some way we experience both the physical world and our thoughts as being what we call “real”. Real, to us, means actually existing, and surely our thoughts and feelings actually exist, even if they don’t exist outside of us.
Rene Descartes tried to answer this question but ended up, according to Kirven, merely describing the process we go through in identifying things rather than determining what is actually real. Descartes’s explanation has come to be called Occasionalism. Occasionalism says that if an extended body, that is, one that takes up space in the physical world, experiences an extended object that experience of the object causes an idea. An idea of the object, unlike the object itself, is not extended in space. That happens, but it doesn’t explain why or how it happens, only that it happens. The mental event is occasioned by the physical presence. Note that I didn’t say it caused it. That’s why Descartes is only describing the process, not explaining how it happens. Swedenborg did that.
Gottfried Leibniz sought to improve on Descartes’s explanation by saying that creation caused a pre-existing harmony of everything. Simply put, he meant that God set everything in motion and everything that has happened followed in due course. This makes results of one event seem to cause another event or thought, but that actually all of creation already existed. As Kirven points out this sounds like pre-destination. But we don’t need to worry about that, because we are assured by Leibniz that although it sounds like predestination, it isn’t. He would like us to accept this because he says so. Good, solid philosophical reasoning. He had to insist on this because if everything was pre-destined we would have no ability to make choices, which is essential to our being human and having a sense of self.
Emanuel Swedenborg presents a very different solution to the mind/body dilemma, one that IS based on good, solid reasoning that exceeds the limits of pure philosophy due to his unusual experience of reality. He tells us that both material things and mental things are real, but they exist on different levels of reality. Physical things are on a lower level of reality than mental things. Physical things exist on the material level of being, while mental things exist on the spiritual level of being. Both are contained within what is Reality, or God’s Great Design.
God creates the physical world and the human beings in it in order to create a heaven. This is the true purpose of the material world, and it is the purpose of each individual person to develop within the material world to the spiritual level so as to join and contribute to heaven.
This happens by the process of regeneration. God brings together the material and the spiritual in a person. As we grow, we become, unlike the animals, more spiritual in that our minds develop further after we are born. Our minds are our spirit or the spiritual aspect of our being. The material world and the spiritual world are connected within each human being. Without us human beings there is no connection of the material world with the spiritual world. This is why we are called upon to regenerate.
Everyone is called upon to regenerate except those whose brains are damaged or somehow deficient, for whom special provision is made by the Lord, as it is for those children who die before they have lived long enough to fully develop. Their development is completed in the spiritual world at the direction of God, through the ministry and care of angels, a fact that Swedenborg witnessed many times.
Regeneration is the process by which what we desire is brought up to the level of what we understand to be good and true. In describing this process, Swedenborg tells us that the material world and the mental world are both real, but they are exclusive of each other. However, they do interact. They correspond to one another through what Swedenborg describes as correspondences. This explanation of how the material and spiritual worlds relate carries none of the burdens present in the other explanations proffered by Descartes and Leibniz and the philosophical developments proceeding from their work.
Swedenborg’s explanation provides that everything that seems real is real, both physical things and mental things. Swedenborg’s motto could be “Get Real!” In Swedenborg’s world view there is no mysticism of some magical world that only a few exceptional wizards can interact with. There are no mystics in the sense of having mental powers that are outside the natural order. Every one of us has the potential to experience higher levels of consciousness or higher levels of being. It is a capacity available to all who regenerate to a higher level of being. All of our reality, material and mental, is one whole, separated by distinct levels.
When we are born into the material world in our spirit’s physical body we are undeveloped spiritually or mentally speaking. That level in us above the basic physical level is only a potential. As we grow, our mental level grows. But so does our attraction to external things. We first must learn of the external world and how to exist well in it, what Gurdjieff referred to as being a Good Housekeeper. This brings us to a point in our development when we must look inward and examine what we are becoming. There is a division in us between our external self and our internal, or spiritual self. We are not born whole. We must be brought together into one person, regenerated in love for the Lord and our neighbor, who is the Lord present in every person.
Remember the line in the Anne Murray song, A Little Good News? The good news is that “everybody learned to love everybody in the good old USA.” Just think what a wonderful world this would be if we all loved everybody else. There is a place like that. It is called heaven. Growing, changing into being a part of heaven, requires obedience to the Lord’s commandment to learn to love one another in all that we say and do. This is regeneration. Making us whole is the purpose of regeneration, because only those whose desire and understanding are centered on following the Lord can be admitted to a heavenly community. Only then are we able to help the Lord complete His purpose of creating heaven. This is heaven, this state of living in harmony with the reality that is God. We know God as the Lord Jesus Christ. It is to Him we must turn. Nothing else, for it is our relationship with the Lord that determines the state of our being when we are released from the bondage of these physical bodies to be the spiritual person we were born to become. What kind of a person that is, is what choice is all about.