Transcription
Hey everybody, welcome to News From Heaven. This is a show where we try to figure out life and the mind by taking an annotated journey through Swedenborg's works and today we're looking at how angels disclosed the meaning - the secret meaning - of the Tree of Life. And what we're gonna do to get to that meaning- How would you not want a scoop that angels are giving you? You may be saying, "The Tree of Life? I don't care about the Tree of Life." You will. It's- it's a more relevant tree than you might expect.
The steps to get there are: we're gonna take a look at the blazing light, a tree means... Ah - spoiler alert: there's a meaning. It's more metaphorical. Eating eternal life. Yeah, can't make this stuff up. Or did we? No, we didn't! These are the steps to figuring out what this potent symbol means and the symbol you're gonna find is not just relevant to your understanding of some kind of sacred text from a long time ago; this tree is going to show up here in the mind.
Because we walk around - I don't know about you, but I do - beset by the mind; our own thoughts of feelings trying to make us feel miserable all the time. They say nasty stuff about us. They say nasty things about the- the amount of fear we should have about life or the things that could potentially happen to us. They try to dissect events that have happened and spin them in a light in which it makes you feel like you're hopeless or you're the only human being that's- that's not worth existing. So how is the tree.. let's get my drawing skills out here already, We've got this tree hovering out here. How is that thing gonna get in here and somehow be a conduit to remind us that, no, the actual reality of life is beautiful and it's something to be hopeful about. It's not something to be worried and distracted about.
Are you o- have you been okay this week? What've you been going through? Let me know. What are your dark clouds? We've got these dark clouds here. What are yours? What's trying to get you down? What are we gonna use the tree of life to smash out of the way? Like and subscribe, please - this is like, super helpful for our program. Thank you to everyone who has been. Like, subscribe, comment. That's the fuel for the fire.
And we're gonna go now to the stars of our show, which are two trees, dun dun dun two for the price of one. We've got the Tree of Life and the Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. And these trees really got their big break when Genesis came out. They got that Bible bump when you had the story that focused on them - that was a story that was a start of everything. And Genesis came out a long time ago but they're still relevant to the culture today. How so? Is it going to get psychological? I think it is. So how do we explain what the Tree of Life is? How does it relate to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and how does that relate to us and our minds and the dark and the light? Read on.
Download Swedenborg's book True Christianity, scroll down to number 48. You may see here I've got 48 written because we're - I had to remember which number we're in 'cause we're in such a long number that we're in subsection 16 right now. And, right away, we're getting into the angelic side of it. Because this is Swedenborg doing what is sometimes called a memorable relation - relation, which is him describing what he saw in the spiritual world. So this is groups of angels trying to explain the nature of life, and we're like a little fly on the wall that gets to hear that. How could you not want to know what they said, or what his paraphrasing of their spiritual language is?
We begin: "Then the participants picked up the document" - these participants being this group of angels - "...picked up the document and read the third topic for a discussion." You want to see the other topics, go the previous number. "What does the Tree of Life mean?" We already- we've got to a tree and we've also got to the fact that a tree can have a meaning. You think a tree is just an object that's described in a story, but it means something. And "what does a tree of the knowledge of good and evil mean..." The knowledge of good and evil also has a meaning, and we'll just throw it in, "Eating." Because Adam and Eve famously eat from a tree. What does that mean? Why tell the story this way? "They all asked the group on the east side to unravel this mystery," because east in the spiritual world has got some really good mojo, "since, they said, it is a matter of deeper understanding and you who are from the east have a blazing light..." This is our first key word and it lets us know that it's not a light, like it's not an LED panel; this is something about the way they understand things which actually paves the way for the way we can understand these trees. "You have a blazing light, meaning-" just in case you didn't get that we were being metaphorical, "...meaning you have a wisdom that comes from love." It's not just a knowledge about stuff; this is knowing stuff out of a desire to make life better for the human race. "This kind of wisdom is in fact what the Garden of Eden means, where the two trees were situated."
So already we're not gonna waste any time. Bam! We've already got that the Garden of Eden is a description of the state of our minds or the potential description of the state of our minds and that these angels in the spiritual world had this wisdom coming out of love; that they not just cared about what needed to be done, but have gathered all of these knowledge - all this knowledge and all these facts to be able to get things done. The best thing in the world is not just a nice doctor, but a nice doctor who knows how to fix you at the same time. They were that. So that's what the Garden of Eden is. That is this idyllic paradise little state. It's not that the best thing in the universe would be to sit around in a garden, no matter how nice it was; the best thing in the universe is to be inside a mind that loves and has wisdom from that love. That's where these two trees grow. The mystery deepens. Let's go on.
"The people on the east replied, 'We will give an answer,'" And.. Aw man, I gotta finish this sentence. I'll finish the sentence, then I'll tell you what it means. "We will give you an answer, yet because human beings receive everything from God and nothing from themselves, we will give you an answer from him, although we will still give it as if it were our own." We have ourselves here a genuine meta moment because in their answer about how- what The Tree of Life means, they demonstrate what it means. And of course we're going to unpack that but, "human beings receive everything from God." "We will give an answer, although it will still be as if it were our own." That right there. The good- these were the right people to ask about the Tree of Life because, as they answer, "Okay, we'll tell you the answer of the Tree of Life" and they're- they're Tree of Life-ing right here as they answer that first question. Tree of Life-ing is a dance you can learn and if we watch how these people do it we can pick up a few tips on our own.
And they begin with a declaration. "'A tree means" - which was one of our keywords - "a human being,' they said." So right here, we've got the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. We know both of these are trees, so these trees are us. Human being. Now, they obviously are two different kinds of human beings, and it's probably gonna be that the Tree of Life is something good and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is something not as good because, you know, you can tell it's a little darker. But what is the actual distinction between the two beyond just "be good, don't be bad"? They're gonna describe it to us. "Its fruit means the good done by that human being's life." So the fruit factors so centrally in this story. And what's the fruit? If a tree is a person, the fruit is what you do that's good. "'Therefore the Tree of Life means" here we go "someone who lives from God." Okay, there we go. We could already fill out our diagram. We're done. This tree lives - bear with me as I write this stuff - from God. Okay.
Thanks so much for watching the show today. That's the News From Heaven. But what does that mean, "lives from God"? It just sounds like a theological thing - go live from God. Go live from God. That's the answer to all your problems. What does it mean to live from God? It's Swedenborg, so we're gonna get a technical breakdown definition. "Because love and wisdom... love and wisdom, along with goodwill and faith -- or rather goodness and truth --" You have three things. This grand duality, this grand pairing happens in three places here. "...are God's life in us, the Tree of Life means people who have those things from God and who have eternal life as a result." Starting to get some pieces to move. So you have coming in to the Tree of Life let's say you have love and wisdom as can also be said goodness and truth. These are the coolest things that you can get, and also love and faith. These things are streaming into this person. And that is what leads to, oh, right! We get a little something called eternal life. So there's the conditions.
"Much the same thing is meant by the Tree of Life from which people are allowed to eat." And this - I just was puzzling over this when I was reading it because they're describing the Tree of Life and then they say, "Oh it's a lot like the Tree of Life in the book of Revelation." I mean not Revelation. Oh, yeah Revelation. Okay. So this- this is a thing that occurs often enough that it's not just you could only learn about it from the Bible, but you have the same sort of tree appearing in the beginning, the same sort of tree appearing in the end, and because they're centering a discussion around it I would think you get stuff like this in the spiritual world. So here we have these potent symbols; you could open and close the story of existence of life in the Bible with these trees. They must be a pretty good descriptor and they've got to have some kind of relevance to this fray we find ourselves in. Somehow, this tree is a tool or our knowledge of this tree is a tool to having God get to us around the negativity of the black clouds of the mind.
So the tree... we've got the Tree of Life, and part of the way you can know something good - it seems good; it leads to eternal life, it's goodness and truth coming in - part of the way you know something good - and this is not just me speculating; this is, Swedenborg says it's blatantly - is that you know it's opposite. You know what is not it. That makes it more distinguishable. So let's learn a little bit about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Change highlighter color.
"The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil means those who believe that they live on their own rather than from God." Because it's not that the human beings on this side don't receive love and wisdom, goodness and truth life and faith from themselves, but they don't... while the Tree of Life acknowledges that partnership and acknowledges that source, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is ignoring who actually did the work; noticing just the things inside. Oh, like, oh I have the conscious ability, I can do things and I seem to accomplish things, and saying, "Wow check me out. I'm good. I am independent. I am an island." No one is an island. Well, I am an island, you know, in terms of my internal experience. And it might not seem like a very dire difference but let's read on and see if we can't get some insight into how does that lead to - 'cause you know this mindset has got to have something to do with treating the neighbor well, and this mindset has something to do with making the neighbor unhappy. So how does that affect that? The mystery deepens and deepens...
"The love- That the love and wisdom and the goodwill and faith--or again the goodness and truth that are in them are their own and not God's. They believe this because the likeness and appearance of their thinking intending and speaking and acting on their own is completely convincing." I'm not saying that you couldn't feel God doing stuff inside you. Although I would say the experience of consciousness, when you examine it, does make you feel like there's something missing in the equation if you're just doing it from, uh, an isolationist perspective. Because I'm sitting here, and I've made this point I think before on the show, I'm sitting here talking and thinking and I get sort of the back end of the process, but I definitely don't understand how these thoughts are pieced together. I don't know how.. what- what's the underlying mechanics of the wellspring of consciousness. Very much so. It's very much like the experience of walking in your body. You kind of know you want it to happen, but the mechanics of it are not yours. There's definitely a partnership, and that we could argue that it's just, this is the stuff that doesn't come to your conscious awareness but your body is somehow doing, which certainly opens the door for that God is flowing in and that things like wisdom.. when you get a new idea, when you understand something better, just like I just did now; understood how- better how to explain this to you, don't you feel like "Where did that come from?" Suddenly you have enlightenment on this thing that you've been sitting around and trying to figure out forever and then something clicks. You're- you're that guy. Was it Einstein? I don't know who it was; they were.. Newton in the bathtub, and they looked at how the water went up and they're like, "It's displacement!" And they figured out everything else about life. Where did that aha moment come from? That we so obviously, and this is even more evident, I think, for artistic achievements when you're trying to write songs and things like that and something just comes to you. I've had musicians, you know that "In My Life" by the Beatles - I saw this quote by John Lennon where he's like, "Ah, I tried to write these clever lyrics and then the whole lyrics just kind of showed up." Isn't there some evidence that we experience of some kind of partnership?
But this Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is saying, Well, oh this thing just landed on my doorstep. Well, that's nice. I must have done that somehow. Let me use that. Rather than feeling like - and here I'm starting to get, I think, insight into how this.. how this plays out - Rather than "Oh man, I- I freely receive this." As we may see over here. These things are coming in to me freely so I'm going to give them out freely without credit and aggrandizement. Uh... Here it's saying, "Well, look at this. This further increases my ability to think I'm awesome and so further increases my justification to live life in a way in which I am the most important thing in my life." Whereas if you know here that you're not even the most important thing in your mind - no offense - that naturally leads to a willingness to pass this along, and which clears the way for more and more happiness coming in. Man! That's hip.
"Because they use this appearance to convince themselves that they are in fact God, therefore the serpent said, God knows that on the day you eat some of the fruit of the tree your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." And I don't think it necessarily means that any of us at any time well you could, but go around saying, "I'm God." Because it's pretty obvious that we have limitations. But it's more about a subtle juxtaposition of us in the place of God; that Swedenborg's theology, really, a lot of the foundation of that is um there's one real origin; one real doer, and that we're participants in that, versus we're the origin and we're the doer and that's where existence starts. That does... to put yourself in that position and- and to think your own gratification and your own view of life is how things must happen rather than there's a divine plan, that happens. And sometimes it happens without even tagging those theological-sounding things on it but you don't trust; you instead want to control things. How does that work out for the rest of us? Do you like it when other people do that?
"Therefore the serpent said, 'God knows on the day you eat some of the fruit of that tree, your eyes will be opened, you will be like God, knowing good and evil.'" How is that mindset working out for me? I sit here and a lot of the time, this is - do not- do not tell anybody I said this - but a lot of the time I'm over here, meaning I'm thinking, "Hey, I'm Curtis and in a sense, it's me against the world because I'm trying to make life go how I want it to go." And you know who loves that? These dark clouds. I think we could go for a little reset on this picture. These dark clouds love that. Because when you've decided you know, in my conscious world it's just me. I don't have any kind of partnership with God, or if I do it's just sort of out there and off there and it's certainly not that I'm receiving all life and ability to do anything from God, these clouds love it because then they can point at events and things that are actually outside our control and say, "Look at that - you messed that up. This bad thing is gonna happen. Oh, well, you know what I can do is, what if your treasured self underwent this thing you don't want it to undergo? You've failed in the pack..." They love it! Because that's... an isolated being is a being that they can attack.
But one who's aware of the actual reality of the situation, which is that you know, you are- you're in this family of God, into heaven, into all these angelic communities, into us and we're sharing this amazing interconnected web of love, and that credit is not the thing that's going to save us and make us happy, but it's rather the joy of making other people happy; that is an invincible position. And the- the dark clouds do not like that because suddenly you've got nothing that they can attack, you've got nothing they can latch onto. And in the moments when I find myself as a Tree of Life, when I am over here and feeling like, well, let's see how God wants this to turn out, and really that's a very theological-sounding way to do it; the actual Tree of Life experience is more like I'm not so super caught up on myself and my reputation and having things turn out exactly like I want; more the- the- the nature of God is hey, how about this next person down the line? What can I do for them or what can I do to be useful without worrying too much about the specifics of how it turns out? That feels great. I would say 100... no, I would say 90 percent of the time It's better to be Tree of Life. And that other 10% when it feels good to be Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and it feels like it's sort of a competitive world is when things are going really well for you, but I've learned by now that that's just getting ready to cycle back down when things don't go well and when the- the new shiny thing you've acquired in life suddenly has some kind of issue with it. So really, this does balance out to a hundred but even though it seems like, oh, sometimes the Tree of Life is the- I mean Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the way to go.
Finally we get to our last keyword; eating eternal life. So "eating from those trees" 'cause it wasn't just that the trees were hanging out but that we would eat from them - "means accepting and internalizing." Because isn't eating this act where not just you're evaluating the quality of something, but you have to be really sure this is something that I want to put inside myself and have it be part of me; my bodily makeup. You - to eat something... there's a lot of things you would hold in your hand that you wouldn't eat, and there's a lot of things you would look at that you wouldn't eat. To get into that eating phase, you really got to really love something. "Eating from the Tree of Life means accepting eternal life." So if you accept that mindset, you're accepting eternal life. "Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil means accepting damnation." And isn't that an interesting phrase? I almost feel like I want to double highlight this accepting part because there's this whole issue people have with religion in the first place, which is this idea of God who takes people, throws them into somewhere where they don't want to be that we call Hell, it's this giant punishment... Accepting damnation- damnation is just this mindset of every- I like bad things and I want, I don't care about the impact I have on people... I don't have to list 'em off for you; accepting it. You ate it! You have that stuff, you know what it's like and you love it. You don't- it's not that you get tricked and you end up somewhere you don't want to; the spiritual destinations that we all have is a result of us finding things, knowing what they are enough that you eat 'em and you eat 'em over and over. That's what it is. That's the- that's the eating from the trees. It's not something you're gonna accidentally do once and then you're there. This is something that everybody ends up exactly where they want to be. And I'd say Tree of Life is a better, uh, better strategy, even though the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil really tries to sell itself on you.
"The serpent means the devil." The devil! Oh, the serpent is the devil - got it. So this little guy down here - I don't know if you even noticed him, sometimes when you approach the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you don't see that serpent there. When it seems like hey, I'm gonna just take a little time to get revenge on people or to try to buy into this egoscape of hierarchy and survival of the fittest, you don't even notice that right here there's a serpent and just FYI, the serpent is the devil. Okay, so the devil, right. The serpent is the devil; this mythological - I'm not mythological, right? It's got to be real there; this being, what? That's the embodiment of all evil. What does that mean to be the devil? "...which is loving ourselves and having pride in our own intelligence. Love for our self owns the latter tree." And if you go.. If you are student of Swedenborg, you'll know that he doesn't mean love of self isn't good self esteem; love of self is the greatest thing that could ever exist. Narcissism, pathological narcissism, the desire to control and dominate all other beings and subjugate everyone - that desire, that when it erupts in the human race we all sit back and say that's terrible; that thing actually has a lease on this tree. That's the thing that's powering it, right? "If we have pride" and this- this is a good clue that that's what he's talking about - "if we have pride because we love ourselves, we are the Trees of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." So it's not about having good self-esteem or having bad self-esteem; it's about, rather than recognizing that we're all in it together, which is the mode of The Tree of Life - How much scribble can I put on this page? Instead of recognizing that it's looking - instead of looking outward, looking up to God, looking out to the neighbor, it's just focusing more and more inward - that's the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And let me tell you, the more we plant that tree in our mind as I said, the more vulnerable we are to every fear and worry that comes along and wants a piece of us. Whereas the more we plant the Tree of Life, the more we open up to the truth, which is that you don't gotta worry about any of that stuff. The promise of the trees is "I got you. I got your back. Everything's gonna be great. Everything actually already is great." That is what the Tree of Life is, and eating that is coming into that state of life forever.
That's the News From Heaven. How'd it work? Do you find yourself being able to take any useful tools from these ancient stories about these trees? Is there anything in this episode that you feel like you could use in your life? Write a comment because if you found something valuable, hey, remember, it is all coming in from God. So we've gotta... every- every good idea does; it doesn't mean you're something special. All right, you know. Every good idea does - share it! Because that's the- you can practice being the Tree of Life by sharing what you learned in the comments because that way you're freely passing it along. And we hear everything that comes to me, I know this is coming from heaven in some way. Here you go. Would you like it? Because the more all of us have it the more we get into this good state of mind that allows us to focus and build a good life that allows us to then reach out and help other people and we benefit from the good work everyone else is doing. It's a good deal. So let's create a miniature of that, yeah, in this show. Let's share what we learned. Let me know in the comments, like and subscribe. That's not so much a Tree of Life, but I would appreciate it. Thank you so much, and hopefully, this gives you something you can take out into your week and you're thinking, what am I right now? What am I eating right now? Am I.. how often- you're never gonna be a ?Tree of Life all the time, but how often am I Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, where I'm just feeling like, okay I'm sort of head down, me against everything, and how often am I thinking, "Okay, I've got God right here. This is the partnership, love and wisdom coming in. Remember, it's that wisdom from love; that blazing light - when am I doing that? When am I the Garden of Eden in my mind?" Hopefully you find yourself in the garden throughout the week as we go. Thanks everybody for hanging out. See you next time and we'll explore some more cool stuff.