Transcription
And those other things I just mentioned -- the churches and everything else -- that can be an aid to what's going on inside you, but it does not define. The real church is inside your heart. Yeah, that's right. Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Yeah, someone... That has a nice ring. Speaking of that, of Jesus... So oh, is that who's... That's what... What does that have to do with everything? Why are we talking about this in relation to the second coming? So we know what the purpose of creation is. Yes. Got that down pat. Heaven from the human race. And we also know that there's a sub-purpose, which is to have the church strong, because the church is what connects... Sort of the farm team. Yeah, that's right. With the NBA G-league of heaven.
So if we've got that down you can't understand what the second coming is without understanding the history of the church in the world. Because the second coming... The "church" as we've just been talking about it. Big scale church. That big scale church. Right. The human race's spiritual state. The second coming is not just an isolated thing, like, there was all of history and, whatever, some stuff was going on there, nobody knew what they were doing, now Jesus is going to come back and it's going to change everything. This is the culmination of a plan and plot line that's been unfolding for thousands of years.
And what's wild is that -- and this is very much, in my experience, something about who God is -- that it's very much about every individual story. Every individual story is absolutely a focal point to God. And yet there's also these massive collectives. Every individual is part of these grand epochs of time and these huge movements, and if you stood back and looked at all of that, that would be like the ages of a single individual. It's like both trying to do this process, this heaven-izing with individuals, but also doing it collectively with the entire human race, which is so wild. But the whole human race can get better. Like, the whole thing can be better than it is.
You folks watching at home may say, "You guys are just making this up. You're just saying, oh, God does stuff at an individual level and then a collective level at the same time just 'cause it sounds cool." Oh yeah? Look at everything. Look at your own body. How does the body work? The body is a collection of a tra-zillion individual cells. I think that's the exact number. Yeah. Yes! Or maybe it was a tra-zillion and one? It has all those cells, and each of them, if you zoom in, they're individuals. And you can talk about the state of this individual cell, and you can say this cell, its cell membrane is being pierced by a virus, or it doesn't have... Its mitochondria is broken. You can talk about that cell. It even has its own nucleus that's kind of like its brain. Isn't it? Yes. It has a brain and a body and it has its own autonomy. It says, well, I want more salt from the bloodstream, or I want more of this hormone or... We do want more salt. We love salt. OK, sorry go ahead. Or we want to give up this waste matter. You're absolutely right. It functions that way. And yet our experience is, oh, no, I'm one thing. Because you can zoom in and look at that, you can look at the health of the cell and talk about the health of the cell, and that's absolutely true. But you can also zoom out and talk about the health of the body, and that is the aggregate of the health of all the cells, and that is true.
So the progression of the "church", or the human race's spirituality on Earth, as you just mentioned, it is just like a single person. And what's striking me right now about that is that even in us as individuals, we had a whole set of cells when we were little. We have almost none of those now. Some parts of the body have very high rates of turnover. You know, your stomach lining, or various different things get sort of rejuvenated, and some cells stick around. But basically we've already been through whole populations, huge turnovers, and yet we still feel like one thing. This is me. I remember my childhood, you know. Here's a picture of me 25 years ago. That's me even though none of the molecules, none of the cells right that were there are here. I never thought about that. That's exactly like the human race. But that is kind of what we're talking about with these grand periods of time, where we've rolled through several of these, and yet you're still talking about an individual.
Okay, so this individual, this human race in the aggregate, the church in the aggregate... Yeah. Because yes, there's a lot of parts of us. What really matters is the church part in us. Because as we said: what's the point of creation? It's heaven, and the church is the way to get to heaven. Yeah. So if you look at the history of the human race, it has grown up through these different church phases like an individual person has different phases as they grow. You have your infancy, you have your childhood, you got your adolescence, you got your young adulthood.
According to Swedenborg there have been four major eras in human spiritual history that are like those things. There was what he calls the Most Ancient Church, which was like the infancy of the human race. Then there was a new phase that was what he calls the Ancient Church. I don't know if he needs better branding on these. But the Ancient Church, that was more of like a childhood state. Then he talks about the Israelitish Church, which was the phase in which the Old Testament was written, and that we... See our other episodes for how that fits in. And then he says there's the Christian Church, the Christian era, even though obviously not everybody's in Christianity but this is the era of the particular connection that's... We don't have time to get into that now. Those are all like these different phases of growing. However, the second coming of Jesus is going to lead to adulthood for the human race.
And this is like, when you're a little baby you don't really know who your parents are. I mean, you feel great being around them, but you don't... You see them as different than they really are. Yeah. Same thing growing up. When you're an adolescent you think your parents are like... "Why you putting these rules on me? I don't like you. I would do fine on my own." (You really wouldn't.) Even making fun of the parents is... You know. They're they're pretty hopeless... And when you're really little they're... Like, when when I was about to have my first child, I sort of panicked because I thought, "How am I going to turn into what I saw my dad as in the next week?" And I didn't realize, oh no, that's through the child's eye. Like, that little child is like, "This is a miracle worker! This is an amazing, amazing person who can do so many different things I remember thinking about just hearing some of the details of how my dad got to move to the state where I was born and stuff and I was like wow he's so amazing how did he do that just hey man that's then in just a few short years you have no respect no wait no wait wait wait just wait because the thing is a lot of kids that will you know when they get to be teenagers or something are like my parents aren't cool but the thing is I'm a parent now and I and I'm cool I stayed cool you are cool that's right so they're just wrong they're wrong well yeah like sure like my you know my daughter isn't isn't even 10 and doesn't really want me to walk next to her when she's coming home from school but that's that's neither here nor there but it's a great analogy for how your understanding changes you know I think the earliest the earliest era was just in love with God like like was just very very present uh God was very present and it was a magical the world was magical just the way for little children everything's alive and they're going oh here comes the pen and here comes the piece of paper oh the piece of paper doesn't like the pen and you know everything's sort of animated in their minds and and uh uh and and how that changes as they age where that rationality develops and and then they have a different perspective and to think of the whole human race going through that without even necessarily knowing that that was what was happening but that was was that's sort of a God's eye view of what was going on let let me give you the reason why or or the reason why all those other phases of human spirituality were missing something that the phase we're going to enter that is kicked off by the second coming of Jesus will have different okay okay so it'll be so even lump all those four together this new thing will be different than any of the above we're going beyond where we've ever been before and actually in a very clear non-mystical sounding practical way okay this is from true Christianity 786 all right all churches depend on the recognition and acknowledgment of the one only god with whom the individual in the church is able to form a partnership so that's the key thing the church is a church because it lets you form a partnership with God it should have been in our inventory of what what heaven is but heaven really is that partnership like there's a relationship there's some sort of living relationship yeah uh with God and and a loving exchange and more conscious awareness that different levels for different angels and so on but that partnership is what makes you happy is being that close to God who is goodness and love and everything itself yeah just like it's it's life it's humor creativity yeah good things okay so that's what's essential all to be a church you really got to have that right right however no shade at the previous churches yet all four churches so far on this Earth have lacked this truth therefore it follows that after these four will come a church that will recognize and acknowledge the one only God God's Divine love had no other purpose in creating the world than to unite human kind to himself unite himself to humankind and live with us in a partnership like this and I notice humankind there like it's a collective yeah this is this is God interacting with the entirety it applies to the individual as well but this is having a relationship with that this whole this whole thing yeah somehow can do it at the same time he can have a relationship with you I have I have like anxiety about that sometimes I feel a little bit just between you and I okay I'm a little like hey did we go off the rails with how many people there are there's so many people there's a lot and I'm saying it's exploded in in my I mean I have lived for a very very long time but still it's like I don't know fivefold what it was believe there's not archaeologist here right now studying you for doing that yeah that's right they should be asking me questions so fourfold in your lifetime but even so the the the the six-year-old part of me is like I can do math there's G to be if if if God is supposed to love me there's going to be less love to go around with all these people like can you really like you're going to be stretched a little thin I know your attention I just you I know you're thinking about everyone else at the same time you're thinking about me what are you doing with all these people but somehow God is able to because he's infinite what I do to get the antidote to that is I think about like how okay how much love do you need okay well I need like a million uh units to feel good okay 1.6 I'd say 1.6 yeah yeah well some need more than others so um so like a million units of love from God is what I need to be happy and I can imagine God is like okay how about if I give you a 100 trillion because you you don't understand what Infinity means yeah if if I give you 100 trillion and I'm giving everyone in the universe 100 trillion uh we haven't scratched a surface of infinity infinity is actually Infinity yeah there's a nice picture of this in the sun in the sense that it's just throwing off such a ridiculous amount of energy every second you know radiating in every direction and it yeah they they think across a time scale of billions of years at some point it it'll it'll run out of fuel but basically it's just crazy how much energy that thing is creating all the time and that's just a finite version of this Infinity that's that's forever just inexhaustible and another one I never thought about it like this but um there you there's more love for you than you would want yes that's true there there's absolutely Swedenborg describes how you there if you have get more love than you can handle it becomes unpleasant I I'm laughing because sometimes I've had the mental image that if you could you know I felt so much in my life that I'm I'm longing to know God have a connection, all this kind of stuff, and then every so often I get this picture of, like, if you could pull back the veil and you realize there's this smiling face, like, so uncomfortably close to you, just, oh, just adoring everything about... I planned out our whole day together! First we're going to go do this, and then we're going to make snow angels... It's too much love. Yeah. And so that's why Swedenborg talks about these atmospheres in the spiritual world. There are clouds and atmospheres to try to knock it back to the point where it's just sort of, you know, this nice mild temperate climate instead of being cooked with so much love.