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In the work Heaven and Hell 491-520 the reader is offered a description of the experience of awakening from death into the World of Spirits. The premise that underpins the Logopraxis approach is that what’s described in these numbers can provide insights into our own awakening to spiritual life through the practice of the Word while still in the natural world. That the same principles that govern the awakening of a newly arriving spirits to life in the spiritual world also govern the processes everyone must pass through if they are to awaken to spiritual life. The structures and practice method of the Logopraxis approach have been intentionally modeled on this section of Heaven and Hell with the aim of supporting practitioners in their work with the Word as the basis for their individual and collective spiritual life.
Introduction
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was toward God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning toward God.
All were made through Him; and without Him not one was made that was made.
In Him was life; and the life was the light of men.
(John1:1-4)
In Logopraxis, we seek to honour the potential for awakening to spiritual life through the Word, the Logos, by placing the practice of Sacred Texts at the centre of individual and collective spiritual life. Logopraxis is an intentional spiritual approach specifically focused on the practice of the Word as the basis for self-examination and repentance and as such is a process orientated approach for engaging with Sacred Text. Engaging with the Word in this way produces insights born of direct experience, into the processes involved in the regeneration of the human mind. The material produced through each person’s practice forms a rich source of nourishment which, when shared with others, builds a deeper sense of what it means to be a spiritual community. This is especially the case where there is a collective acknowledgement that the Lord is continuously revealing Himself through the shared experience of the Word working in people’s lives.
The core teaching that organises the structures and activities of Logopraxis is the profound idea, expressed in John’s Gospel and affirmed throughout the Heavenly Doctrines, that the Word is the Lord. This is not meant in a metaphorical sense. The teaching is that the Word in the form of Sacred Text is actually the Lord. The implication is that through engaging with the Texts of Divine Revelation as the basis for spiritual life, the conditions are created whereby an encounter with the Lord as the Word is made possible. A leading principle that we work from in Logopraxis is that the Texts of Divine Revelation have been provided to bring about the regeneration of the human mind. It is the regenerating human mind that is meant by the phrase, a “new Church” in the Heavenly Doctrines.
In simple terms, the restructure of the human mind takes place as the Lord’s love flows in and organises truth, bringing light so that evils and falsities can be identified and shunned as sins against the Lord. This is what the term charity means when applied inwardly. This process sees new beliefs and affections implanted, which give a new form to the natural mind so that it is better able to receive the influx of the Lord’s life. What people find when they consciously look to the Word with a view to self-examination and repentance, is that the Word becomes psychoactive.
But what does it mean for the Word to become psychoactive? What we know from the opening chapter of John’s Gospel is that it is the Word that brings, “all that have come into being into being.” And while this is true so far as the external world is concerned, which is where material thinking places its focus, it is equally true for that which is brought into being so far as the inner world of the human spirit is concerned. It is the role the Word plays in bringing this inner world into being that is the primary focus for Logopraxis. In Logopraxis, we find that as we engage with the Word in an effort to apply it’s truths to the inner life of the mind, it actually unfolds within the mind in such a way that we are often given a direct experience that illustrates the very thing the stories describe as to their inner or spiritual meaning.
The inner meaning of the Word isn’t concerned with historical peoples or events or even what we take to be the external world around us. The inner level of meaning is only concerned with the inner realities of the spiritual world, this being a world made up of states of mind, and their openness and/or resistance to the inflow of Divine Life. As something psychoactive, the Word creates what it speaks of within the inner world of our mind as we take in its truths and apply them to examine the quality of the mental states that arise over the course of our day. In describing states of consciousness, which are states of affection and states of thought, the inner or spiritual meaning of the Word offers profound insights into those things that belong to our inner mental world. This world is the world of our spirit or what is referred to in the Heavenly Doctrines as the spiritual world. It is to this dimension of reality that the internal sense of the Word is directed and so needs to be applied.
In short, we need to learn to read the Word in its letter but think in terms of its inner application to the life of the mind. This is what it means to read spiritually or apart from space and time. Logopraxis asks us to read the letter but to think in terms of states of mind so that we have a way to access those things that need to be drawn out into awareness, if we are to be spiritually reborn. To think in terms of mental states, or states of affection and thought, specifically means that when we engage with the Text we do so with a view to receiving insight into the quality of what passes for our mental life. It is such insights into our mental processes that gives us the ability to respond in a way that supports our awakening to spiritual life. As soon as we remove ideas of person, place, space and time from our thought in regard to an experience or situation, or with regard to the Text itself, we are immediately brought back to how things apply at the level of our mind. This is what it means to think spiritually or to think apart from space and time from a Logopraxis perspective.
So, when we read in Heaven and Hell about awakening to life in the spiritual world after death, we know that what it describes literally is an event called death that everyone living in the world will experience at some point in their future. But if we read it again with the idea that spiritual Texts deal primarily with states of mind and not events in time, then we may see that the Text simultaneously offers us at least two distinct levels of meaning to which the term ‘death’ can be applied. There is a natural meaning, where the focus is on a future event in time that involves the death of the body and there is a spiritual meaning, where the focus is in the present on the state of mind that is dead to the spiritual realities that lie within the Word. As soon as we see that the future event called death is also a state of mind here and now, then we can see that the phrase “awakening from death” also has more than one level of meaning and application. The Texts of Divine Revelation are then seen as something given to support the awakening of the human mind from its state of death where spiritual realities are concerned.
Once this connection between the descriptions of an awakening in the spiritual world and an awakening to the inner world of our mental life is made, then the works of Divine Revelation in the form of Sacred Texts can be understood in a completely different way. They become eminently practical so far as their application to the life and spiritual transformation of the human mind is concerned. Through the practice of truths, the power of the Word to raise us from the death of a spiritually destitute existence can be realised, not at some point in the future, but in the here and now. Logopraxis seeks to support this end in the hope that the Lord might be known as the ALL in ALL.
The Three States of Awakening
There are three states that man passes through after death before he enters either heaven or hell. The first state is the state of his exteriors, the second state the state of his interiors, and the third his state of preparation. These states man passes through in the world of spirits. (HH 491).
Man, from infancy even to adult age, is in the world of spirits as to his spirit, because he is successively in different states, and is then in freedom, so that he can be reformed. (SE 5163)
The process of awakening to spiritual life is described in the work Heaven and Hell (HH 491-520) where it is broken down into three general states. These are:
1. “the state of exteriors” (HH 491-498)
2. “the state of interiors” (HH 499-511)
3. “the state of preparation’ or “instruction of those who come into heaven” (HH 512-520).
Spirits enter the spiritual world in various states of preparation related to the life they cultivated for themselves in the natural world. This means that there are those who can enter heaven almost immediately, whereas there are others who, in order to complete their transition, will have to be processed by passing through a series of states in the World of Spirits…
The good spirits who are to be instructed are brought by the Lord to these places when they have completed their second state in the world of spirits, and yet not all; for there are some that have been instructed in the world, and have been prepared there by the Lord for heaven, and these are taken up into heaven by another way-some immediately after death.
… some after a short stay with good spirits, where the grosser things of their thoughts and affections which they had contracted from honors and riches in the world are removed, and in that way they are purified.
Some first endure vastations, which is effected in places under the soles of the feet, called the lower earth, where some suffer severely. These are such as had confirmed themselves in falsities and yet had led good lives, for when falsities have been confirmed they inhere with much force, and until they have been dispersed, truths cannot be seen, and thus cannot be accepted (HH 513).
In general, each of the three states of awakening to spiritual life unfold as the previous state reaches completion. The transition through spiritual states is an ordered process where every subsequent state is built upon a prior state. When that which is prior has reached a point of completion, it can then support the movement forward into the new state.
Each state moves the spirit through its own series of sub-states that reorganise the psycho-spiritual structures of the mind. All spiritual processes that effect these changes and hence reformation and regeneration, are governed and facilitated by the operation of the Word, this being the Lord.
No one can think their way into the next state, nor can anyone enter a state through sheer force of their will, any more than a person can hasten their developmental progression from childhood into adolescence or adolescence into adulthood.
We might also remind ourselves that this process of the three states of awakening is not a perfectly linear process. Each spirit’s path is unique and develops in the way that is just right for them. The implication being that each spirit’s experience won’t always match that of another’s. It is the case however that the general pattern is one common to all even through there is likely to be fluctuation back and forth between the three states and also cycling through them at different levels of depth. This is essentially the dynamic eternal unfolding of spiritual processes of the Word as the Lord within the individual and collective human minds.
