Transcription
Hey, I am standing in the heart of the Bryn Athyn Cathedral, and it's pretty fancy in here. There's a lot of stone and arches and fancy carvings, and I don't even know how they got that wood all the way up there. The stained glass, they made that all custom. It took a ton of work.
And this was all done with the intent that when you come in here you feel like, wow, God is powerful. And it kind of... it pulls it off. When I first got in here I was like, this feels great. I love it in here. How would you like to be in this building? It feels great. Hey, would you want to be in this cathedral forever?
There's a lot of people who think that's what heaven is. There is this idea that's been with Christianity and religion for centuries, which is that heaven is continual worship. Do you know what happens if you go into the afterlife taking that idea of what heaven is with you? Well here's exactly what happens.
Newcomers into the afterlife who had believed that heaven consisted of perpetual worship services glorifying God were allowed to try out that experience. After 2 days of perpetual sermons, prayers and religious rituals, many of the worshippers were fast asleep. The people who were still awake were yawning and yawning. Because they were constantly lifting their thoughts toward God and never allowing those thoughts to come back down into their bodies, some of them had the feeling that they were faces disconnected from their bodies, and that was also how they appeared from the outside. Some of them, whose eyes were rolled back into their heads as a result of looking upward all the time, looked insane. Briefly put, the hearts of all were depressed, and their spirits were fatigued with boredom.
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All right, so if we're going to talk about religion and worship, we've got to make sure we know what we're talking about. Don't worry, by the way, all the people in that story eventually were allowed to leave, and they were taught what what heaven is actually.
But the idea that they had -- that heaven is perpetual worship, that there's perpetually worship services in heaven -- where did they get that? Well there are a lot of people that have that idea, and there's a lot of places that that comes from in the Bible. You know Revelation, chapter 4? You guys remember that? There is a description in that zany book (I say zany with great affection, because I love Revelation) there is a description, though, of a throne room, and in that throne room there are four what are called "living creatures" and then there's 24 elders around them, and it says they're constantly praising God, praising God, constantly praising God. And then in Revelation 7 a multitude of people comes and joins that praying party, a multitude from all nations, and they join in that praise.
Maybe that's what people think: "Well, if that's what they're doing, they're just praising and glorifying God, maybe I need to get there. That's the greatest thing in life." But all throughout the Bible there's a lot of quotes that are, like, talking about eternal... I'll praise you eternally, praise God forever. Okay, it's in there. I'm not going to argue that. But what does it mean? What does that mean to "praise God"? Are you sure that it means just, "You're God, you're so awesome, you're very great God, you're better than me"?
Jesus Christ may want to quibble with that. This is what he said in John 15: "My father is glorified by this..." So you want to glorify my Father? Do this. "...that you bear much fruit and be my disciples." He didn't say, my Father is glorified when you glorify him, like, when you say he's great. "When you bear much fruit and you are my disciples."
Swedenborg, when he went and visited heaven and observed these people who are in this state of eternal worship, it's not eternal prayer. It goes like this, and actually there's three bangers of definitions about this. "The essential divine worship in the heavens does not consist of going to church regularly and listening to sermons, but a life of love, thoughtfulness and faith." That's worship: a life -- so, what you do all the time -- of love, thoughtfulness and faith. And if that's not enough, here's a couple of other places where he hammers this home.
What is genuine worship? From Secrets of Heaven: "The most genuine way of worshiping the Lord [I want the real stuff] consists in a life of neighborly love, not a life of religious devotion without a life of neighborly love." You know, religious devotion can be good, but if you don't have the main thing, it's not worship -- you're not worshiping the Lord. Again in Secrets of Heaven: "When I speak of that life by which we mainly worship the Lord, I mean living by his commandments in the Word, which teach us what faith and neighborly love are." And then finally, "When goodness and truth have formed a bond in us, we have a new will and a new intellect, so we have a new life. This is what it is to be reborn. When that is the sort of person we are [when we get to there] there is worship of God in every deed that we do."
Well then, it's kind of just like falling off a log to eternally worship God, if in every deed you do there's worship of God, which is where you get when goodness and truth become who you are. God is concerned about how we live our lives rather than whether we engage in religious rituals or singing hymns or something like that. How you live your life affects your own happiness, and affects the happiness of other human beings. That's what God is in the game for. That's what he cares about. Are you helping people be happy? Or are you trying to take that happiness away? Religious rituals, that can be good. It can symbolize something. The hymns... But it's not what really matters to conscious beings.
So to worship God forever, yeah, people in heaven do worship God forever. It means living a life of neighborly love forever. That's the way in which heaven is a life of perpetual worship. None of this church, going-to-church stuff. But, people actually do go to church in heaven, according to Swedenborg. He went and visited... And even though, yes, it's all about living that life of love, there are church buildings. There are church services. There is religion in heaven.
As we've mentioned before, there's a ton of variety in heaven. I can't say this is how it is for everyone. No two individual experiences in heaven are the same. But here's some broad observations about how the religion thing does happen. Now there's two main... There are two main categories of how you can do the heaven thing. We've talked about these before. There is the spiritual kingdom, which is focused on learning truth and figuring out how to apply it. If you have a life that's about "I'm seeking the truth, and how do I apply the truth?" you might be spiritual. There's the heavenly kingdom, which is focused on goodness and love, and from that there's an intuition about the knowledge of how to live life. If that's what you're focused on, you may be on a heavenly track there. Let's look at those two. They're complimentary. Like it was just saying, you've got to have a will and an intellect, love and truth, in you. There's got to be a heavenly kingdom and a spiritual kingdom in heaven. They're united. They love each other. But they're different, and the kind of religion that exists in each part of heaven is different. Let's take a look at how people worship. Come on, let's do it! That'll be fun.
How people worship in both of those areas -- at least, how they did it when Swedenborg was visiting there in the mid 1700s. And I think that... That may seem like trivia, but I think that not only will we get a clearer picture of what the life after death is like, but that will give us more insight into what role religious practices can play for us in our earthly life, too.
[Music]
Get used to church. It's not going anywhere. You might think church is something people do here because they don't really know what's going on with God, or they're trying to figure that out so they go and have church. But when you're in the afterlife, you just, like, you're already there so you don't... Church is here to stay. Not everybody has to do it, but there's plenty of people... Just like this world has got a ton of religion in it, the spiritual world has got a ton of religion in it.
What's it like in the spiritual side of heaven? This is from Heaven and Hell 221. "Outwardly, divine worship in the heavens is not unlike divine worship on earth, [so you would recognize the forms] but inwardly it is different. People there, too, have doctrines and sermons and church buildings." So you could walk past and be like, oh this is the same thing. But the difference is, everybody there knows what worship is actually about. Some of us do here. We go in and out of it. But you can have people in religion here that, they're actually not there to live the life of worship to God, which is of love and following the commandments of God. Sometimes people are there, it's like a social thing, or it's like an in-group versus out-group, or they want to, like, judge each other's outfits. I'm just saying, in heaven everybody is there because they want to keep the main thing the main thing.
We had a recent video, Why Jesus Called Himself A Temple, where we talked about how there's houses in heaven, and the houses in heaven reflect the thoughts and feelings of the people who live in them because the nature of the spiritual world. The spiritual world is consciousness-based. What's going on in you is what dictates the environment. That's how it goes for church buildings, too. You could go by a church in some community, look at it, and learn something about the inner qualities of the congregation or the people who gather in that church building.
In the spiritual kingdom they're made out of stone. Swedenborg says they're generally made out of stone because stone represents the kind of doctrinal truth that they focus on. And as compared to the heavenly kingdom, they're fancier looking. They're more ornate. They're more majestic. This is from Heaven and Hell 222. "Angels have told me that outward religious practices are worth doing, but that they are ineffective unless there is something within from which they flow, and that this something within is a life according to the principles that doctrine teaches." So in the spiritual heaven you're focused on truth. It makes you build this certain kind of church. But you're never into "I want hear this and learn this but not apply it." Everybody there that you're sitting next to, it's like, "I'm hungry to get something that is going to help me go live this life of charity for the rest of the week."
Swedenborg visited some churches in heaven. He listened to the sermons there. And his descriptions that he gives to those are examples not only of the outside of the buildings and of the inside of the structure and everything, but also how you do church. Like, there is an order to where people sit and what people do when they're inside the building, and everything happens... Just like it happens in the layout of any community, it's symbolic of the individual states of mind of the people who participate in it. So here's the layout of one particular, uh, Sunday or (I don't know if they do it on Sunday or not) church service thing. The preacher in the pulpit is stationed in the east. Directly in front sit the people who are in greater light of wisdom than others, while to their right and left are the people in less light. The seating is laid out in a circular form so that everyone can be seen by the preacher. No one is off to the sides and out of the preacher's sight. Newcomers stand by the door at the eastern end of the church, to the left of the pulpit. No one is allowed to stand behind the pulpit. If anyone's there [Hey, get out from behind the pulpit!] the preacher loses the train of thought. The same thing happens if anyone in the congregation disagrees, so anyone who does is obliged to look away. Like, I know you're not into this. Can you just look over that way? Because if you don't it destroys the preacher's train of thought.
A lot to unpack there. Yeah, there's not... There's unanimity. People agree on stuff. It's not a debate situation. There are debates in heaven. Swedenborg went to quite a few of them, where people wrangle over the meaning of wisdom. That's there. There's freedom of thought, freedom of speech, all that. But once you get into this particular service of worship, if you're not into it, just... Can you please look away? Because it's like the preacher needs the congregation, and the congregation needs the preacher. There has to be people sitting in the right spots. Nobody can be behind the preacher. And when all those conditions are met, truth can come through that preacher. Fascinating.
Moving on, "The sermons there are given with such wisdom that their earthly counterparts cannot be compared to them. People in the heavens actually experience a more inward light." And that's because, before when I was saying everybody who's in those sermons is like, "I'm going to soak up every..." or in those services are like "I'm going to soak up everything that this preacher says and go apply it," you might think you can walk into a church and just not agree at all, or not get anything out of what is said there. I think there's a lot more quality control in heaven. Because of the layout, and because everybody's in heaven, because of the unanimity of community, what comes out of that teacher's mouth is going to be really useful, and that's why people can trust, "I'm going to go there and get something that I can use; that's why I go there."
One more thing. The occupation of preacher only exists in the spiritual kingdom. There's no preachers that that's their job in the heavenly kingdom. This is from Heaven and Hell 225. "All preachers are from the Lord's spiritual kingdom, and none from his heavenly kingdom. The reason they are from the spiritual kingdom is that people there are attuned to truths that stem from what is good, and all preaching comes from truths. The reason none is from his heavenly kingdom is that the people there are attuned to the good of love and see and grasp truths on this basis, but do not talk about them." I said the two kingdoms need each other. Sometimes you can read Swedenborg and get the sense that the heavenly kingdom is so much better, and it's just like a step up. But they need each other. They're different. The spiritual kingdom, actually people from it come and teach the people in the heavenly kingdom. Because heavenly people, they're like all about doing, and they get it, but they're not chewing it over in their mind. They need something to inspire them. They need something to prompt that insight, and that's why the preacher from the spiritual kingdom can come over and do them a solid.
Speaking of the heavenly kingdom, let's look a little bit more at what worship is like there and how it differs from the fairly familiar picture I just laid out in the spiritual kingdom.
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Hey did I ever tell you that you're awesome? The fact that you're still with me as we're into part three of talking about what's church like in the afterlife, thank you. Thank you for staying with it. It's... I mean it's cool. Just, nobody else gets it except you and me. Okay.
This is church in the heavenly kingdom. This is the religion in the love-centered side of heaven. What does it look like there? And it's really a yin-yang kind of thing with the spiritual side. So the first thing is... We talked about church buildings, you know, like the stone, ornate stuff in the spiritual heaven. Well, the heavenly heaven must be really fancy. Actually, church buildings in the heavenly kingdom or the innermost heaven are made of wood, because wood represents goodness. Truth represents stone, wood represents goodness, and there's a kind of goodness that people that live there focus on. And the buildings themselves are simple. They're simple, they're more humble, and they're not even called churches. Swedenborg said they're called "houses of God." So there's a little wooden house of God in this place of great depth and wisdom.
Heavenly angels, which is just... By the way you can become a heavenly angel. This is just a person with the third level of their mind opened. They have intuitive knowledge, almost like instinct, because they have this love for God that opens them up to this really deep wisdom. But that doesn't mean that they've got everything they need. Angels are learning forever, people are continuing to progress. That's the way that life is. That's the joy of life. So the wisdom keeps increasing, and it seems like one of the ways that these heavenly angels can get new insights that fill out their understanding of goodness is through listening to a talk -- listening to a sermon which is spoken through a... from God spoken through a preacher who came from the spiritual heaven into the heavenly heaven.
"Even though the angels who are in the heavenly kingdom grasp and see truths, there are still sermons there because sermons are means of enlightenment in the truths that the angels already know and lead to further perfection by means of many things they have not known before." A lot of you, when people who come and find Swedenborg through these videos, they say "I'd always believed that. Now someone is finally saying it." The difference is that in the spiritual kingdom... And this is the fundamental difference between the two different ways of life. Spiritual kingdom, you hear an idea, you take it into your mind, you kind of weigh it. Is it true? Is it not? You discuss it, you kind of think it out. And then you get to the point where you think, "I can act on this" and "How do I put this into practice?" and then you do it. Heavenly angels, because of the kind of love they're in, they instantly have an intuitive resonance if it's something that fits for them. They just know, "Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. Maybe not that, but that. I'm going to go for it."
This is Heaven and Hell 225: "The moment they hear them, they acknowledge them and therefore grasp them. ['Them' being truths.] The truths they grasp they also love, [you think about that, like, ah, that's so great] and by living according to them they make them part of their life. They say that living by truths is loving the Lord." So this is how they make their life a life of worship. Their doctrine is kind of a... just, "How do I love? Okay, good." This is processed right through their heart.
"The doctrine of the inmost heaven is more full of wisdom than that of the intermediate heaven, and this in turn is more full of intelligence than that of the outermost heaven. The doctrines are in fact suited to the grasp of the angels of each heaven." So no matter what level of religious knowledge any individual angel has or connects with, it is designed to be the thing that's going to best serve them. So it's not going to be over your head or it's not practical enough. Some people want big-picture, kind of esoteric stuff; some people really want hands-on. All that is available. That's why there's these different kinds of worship in these different parts of heaven. But all of it is united, because it's all about how to live the life of worship, which is a life of love to other human beings in accordance with wisdom. That's what all religion is doing in heaven. That's why it's there in heaven in the first place.
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Let's end with an anecdote. This is a story of when Swedenborg was talking to one of these preachers in heaven. This is Heaven and Hell 224. "He said [the preacher said] that there is something reverent, devout, and holy in all of us depending on the deeper levels of our love and faith, since there is something holy within our love and faith because the Lord's divine presence is there." So I'm talking about the external forms that worship takes, or religion or this seeking-of-God takes in the afterlife, but it's... God's inside you. God is connected to the deepest things in you. And all this stuff -- going into a big stone church, going into a little wooden church, living the life of love -- all of that is just realizing it's there, just opening that connection. It's just like, "Oh yeah, you're there, and let's do something."
So we can... There's infinite different ways that you can realize that connection. You can praise and worship God by living a simple life of love and service. Many people do, and are deeply and fully happy. You can praise and worship God with meaningful outward rituals. You can add rituals to that. Also, a life according to the principles that are taught in revelation by the Divine. That can expand and bring to life certain things about it. Any of that works. Any of that is good as long as it's moving you toward the life of worship, which is a life of love.
There's only one kind of worship that doesn't connect with God. It doesn't work. It is a hypocritical worship. Anytime you separate the external trappings of religion, go through the motions of "I'm going to listen to a sermon, I'm going to do these rituals" but I don't see those things as a calling to live the life of neighborly love that love wants you to do, and God is love... God is not going to be mad at you for doing that. It's just not going to work. It's just not going to work. It's not going to connect. You know, "religion," everyone says "religion" comes from the word to reconnect, or something. (I'm not a linguist.) You can't reconnect if you're not moving through this religious stuff to what God is, which is love for other people. So as long as you're trying to do that, it's good. You're doing a great job. And yeah, enjoy it! Enjoy it. See what's a value for you in the external manifestations of religion, because it is something that is there in heaven, and it's something that can help you to make that true connection. But just don't mistake the external packaging for the actual life of worship which is: go out there and be good. Be good. Follow the truth. That's what makes heaven.