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The following question was posted in response to a reading from the work Heaven and Hell…

The Question

This section repeatedly tells us that the Lord, and heaven as a whole, and each society, and each individual angel, is in the human form. It tells us (#82) that “it is instinctive in everyone who accepts any inflow from heaven to think of the Lord in a human guise… no one enters heaven without some concept of the Divine Being.”

Then #85 begins with “But people who judge everything on the basis of their outward senses have great difficulty in grasping that God is a person.”

This confuses me. In order to accept the presence of the spiritual world, we have to let go of our natural idea of God as “a person” and heaven as a “place,” but the Writings are telling us that we MUST have a concept of the Lord in a human guise. So what, then, is a “human guise” in terms of our spiritual states of mind, while we are clothed in our natural bodies?

My problem is that I keep reading these passages and can’t get past what seems to be the emphasis on the natural, so that I can move on into the understanding of the spiritual meaning. Is it just a matter of practice, practice, practice?

The Response

We are told that we must think of the Lord as a Human but that anyone who thinks of the Lord’s Human must not do this from the senses. This is about keeping levels clear in our minds when working with what presents in the text. Being natural we struggle to think of person apart from a body and natural attributes, although when we reflect on it, especially in the case of a loved one, it is the inner things about them that we are drawn to and connect with. What we don’t see, unless we reflect on it, is that these inner aspects of a person are independent of their physical attributes (they are different levels or discrete degrees) with the physical merely serving to make their inner quality visible on the natural plane of existence.

We are able to separate a person’s physical form from their personality/qualities etc (mental or spiritual form) and we do that by holding both levels together in their proper relationship to one another, i.e. held together but kept distinct. The sense based image we carry (of physical person) serves to anchor our thought which allows for higher thoughts and affections that are focussed on the qualities or the essence of the person to be present with us in our awareness. The lower, in this case, serves the higher by providing a door through which the higher can be accessed.

The same principle applies in terms of how we think about the Lord. In essence, the Lord is Divine Love and Wisdom – or Divine Goods and Truths or Heavenly Heat and Light – all this is rather abstract for us on the natural plane so we have an image offered, through the Gospels in particular, of the Lord as a person subject to finite limitations just like us. We can carry this image either as the Lord as He actually is or see it as representational.

If our idea of the Lord is embedded in the natural imagery and goes no further than this sensual imagery then we cannot avoid projecting finite attributes onto the Divine being. However, if we see that all manifestations of the Lord are merely accommodations to finite comprehension then we can see that the finite attributes belong to the representation and not to the Lord as He is in Himself i.e. Divine Love and Wisdom. So as in the case of the example of our thought regarding a loved one so too we come to the Lord via the natural imagery we carry of Him as a person in the knowledge that this is a representation through which we gain access to a deeper appreciation of Divine Love and Wisdom as the essential person of God.

Love and Wisdom are attributes of consciousness and as such are conveyed through affections and thoughts. These things don’t exist as living elements outside of the minds of sentient self-aware beings. However, we do have representations of them on the physical level in the form of spoken words and actions that pass between people. These can be further represented in the form of written language so that others can access and be affected by them long after the person who was inspired to record them laid them down in writing. Divine Love and Wisdom, being the essence of the Lord’s Being, has come to be represented for us in the medium of human language represented as text because this is what affections and thoughts, or the stuff of consciousness corresponds to on the physical plane.

Now because the Word (as text) is from the Lord it conveys His affections and thoughts and makes them available to beings that dwell on the material plane. In the Heavenly Doctrine, it says that because the Word (as text) is from the Lord it is the Lord (AC 9405). But it only becomes the Lord for us when we understand that the form it takes on a literal level is representational – when we see it as representational then we can move past the appearances of space, time, person, place in the letter of the Text and enter into its internal meaning that is solely concerned with the operation of Goods and Truths within the human mind. If we didn’t have the letter of the Text to anchor our thought we wouldn’t have the means of access anything deeper because every internal requires a corresponding external to bring it to awareness, just as we need contact with the idea of a loved one as to their external person for their deeper qualities to appear in our awareness.

One way of getting a better sense of this is to transpose the word “Word” wherever the word “Lord” occurs in the Text (it won’t work every time but can be quite illuminating in most instances) – this can help to break away from natural associations in our thought belonging to a finite idea of person when we read the term Lord and direct the attention toward something more spiritually alive.

The following is offered to reflect upon…

Spiritual Experiences (Minor) 4609.2

The more interiorly anyone is elevated into heaven, the farther he or she is removed from the mental image of time and space; and the more deeply one is removed from heaven, the more one comes into the image of time and space – thus the farther away one is from a mental image of the infinite and eternal, thus from faith.

Time and space are what fix human mental imagery and cause it to be entirely earthly and to relate to other imagery, of which the person is unaware. And they constitute the earthly person, who reasons.

The same applies to the Divine Humanity of the Lord, whose finite image we conceive of from the bodily properties in ourselves and in others. Unless we are removed from this image, we cannot conceive otherwise than that the Lord is just as any other human being.