Transcription
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Hey, welcome to News from Heaven. This is a show where we take an annotated journey through the writings of Swedenborg to try to figure out life and the mind. And today, we're gonna be looking at how to love like God.
Today, we're gonna break it down like this: the focus, the partnership, and the blessing. What are those? Are they just buzzwords? Do they mean something? And how does this tell us about how God loves things and how we could mimic that in a positive sense?
If you have any positive sense about this show, like and subscribe. That's the only way the show keeps going. Please do that. It means a lot to us. And hopefully, this means a bit to you and what we're trying to do here today. By looking at stuff like how God does things, often the, you know, the great mountains of existential reality, all we're trying to bring all that back down to make it so that you and I can find a way to bust out of the negativity that surrounds us and out into the truth of something greater.
Hey, what's getting you down? What are you trying to break through today? Take a look. Write in the comments because I know other people can see what you're going through and they'll be inspired to share what they're going through. And then together, that's what really gives us some traction against these negative weather systems we find ourselves often caught in.
All right, today we're going to Swedenborg's book, True Christianity. Download it from the link in the description. Scroll down to number 43, where we're just gonna, you know, dip our toes into the essence of God and God's love.
So Swedenborg is beginning with a definition here. The essence of love is loving others who are outside oneself. Hear, you use the word to define the same word. I got to give you a minus four for that, Swedenborg, but you could still get an A on the thing. That's a little circular. In defense, the word love is used so broadly that it's almost impossible to describe love without using love. But so, we've got the essence of love is loving others who are outside oneself, particularly outside oneself, wanting to be one with them, and blessing them from oneself.
So we've got the setup for our partnership and for our blessings here. Let's take a look at how these components fit together. And what does it mean? Two things: love and wisdom. And you're gonna hear about these all the time in Swedenborg, so you better get familiar with them, or just click a different YouTube video. Constitute the essence of God. But three things constantly. Okay, this is starting to get too confusing. We got to diagram this out.
Okay, so you've got God here. Mmm. Nope, that's too small in the margin. Unfortunately, this is a little early to do it. We're gonna have to go fullscreen diagram. So first of all, we've got two things, love and wisdom, constituting the essence of God. So if God is here, what is God made up of? What kind of atoms? It's love and wisdom. This is at the heart of God and at the heart of all reality by proximity. So those constitute the essence of God.
But three things constitute the essence of God's love. And this is what we just had up here: his loving others who are outside of himself, his wanting to be one with them, and his blessing them from himself. So, in order for God's love to be loved, you got to have others outside of God. And that is, you guessed it, this is us. Here we are, the object of the Divine Love, which is not such a bad thing to be. So here's us, and we are outside of God. God wants to be one with us. First, right? Like I said, loving others who are outside of himself. So this is love at first. It's just love going out and just like an intense fondness for us, or whatever that feels like. There's a part of it that's just God loves us. Just see this in us. Like, look at that, they're so awesome. I love that so much. They're so cute.
Then there is not just, it's not just a, you're cool over there. Really, really hope you have a good life. There's a wanting to be one. So there's this divine gravity. Always there is this effort on the part of the strongest, smartest, most loving thing in the universe to pull us into a lifelong partnership. If that matters to your weather system here, when your negative thoughts and feelings are sitting around and telling you, you don't matter, nobody cares about you, if you disappeared, nobody would notice, and that you haven't done anything useful. Just FYI, the biggest, most important thing that ever could possibly exist is doing nothing other than trying to pull you in all the time to a life of happiness together. You know, so you maybe just be a little bit special there.
So then finally, blessing them from himself. Because it's not just that it's enough to take your really great, I want you over here. If it doesn't, if you don't end up making the person happy, then what's the point of the whole thing? So here we have blessing. But getting in there and whatever makes each of our hearts sing. And the net effect of this blessing. So this is a sense Swedenborg is using blessing because it's this religious term. What does it mean? It's make him happy. We want us to end up, even if our head doesn't connect on top, with a smile on our face. That's the point.
The same three constitute the essence of his wisdom. Because in God, love and wisdom are united, as was just explained. You missed it. It was earlier in the book, but this is a super important thing. Love and wisdom go together. It's actually the same thing. Pulling love and wisdom together is a mirror of all connection on earth. And somehow these two are working together. That sounds a little bit like philosophical abstractness. That's not really word. Philosophical abstractness. But what would that look like? Tsumo says it is love that wants those three things. However, and wisdom that brings them about.
So love knows that to make a conscious being happy is the best thing you can do. It spies us here and those, look, I can make them happy. I can do something. But love can't reach out and change anybody's life. Love can't. It sounds weird. You think all love is the greatest power. But Swedenborg is really saying it's love and wisdom together. Love goes to its partner, wisdom, and says, "Hey, I got this great idea. Let's be really cool to these people over here." And wisdom says, "I got you. I know what to do." And it's wisdom with love inside it. So it's love is sort of the driving force behind what wisdom does that allows each of us to get exactly the things that will lead us to the greatest lasting happiness.
Your tell. This is a pretty intense love and pretty forceful, complex, but intuitive and knowing who we are and what we are. So now, as, as Swedenborg does, we're gonna go through and break down each one of these. So number one, which is actually number two in his brackets, but this is the first essential. The first essential: God's loving others outside himself. And that word, outside, that you get to the heart of the love Swedenborg describes, which is important for God to have. And you're gonna see everything we're doing talking about how God does things, this is something we can mirror. And actually, as you'll see, it's part of the partnership that God's seeking with us.
But the outside is important. And you might think, well, of course, you love somebody outside yourself. But it gets more and more because it's just yourself. Everyone else is outside. But it gets more and more meaningful the more you can step outside your it's just seeing certain people as more like you. And so you love them more. That actually Swedenborg describes a world in which you can be loving a bunch of people, but it's just because you think they're like you, or they think like you, or they do what you want, which is actually just loving yourself. But to go outside and really love someone, not because there's some kind of reflection of you, because they are themselves, that's the essence of the God love.
Loving others outside himself is recognizable in God's love for the whole. Now, which part of it? The entire human race. FYI, that includes you. You are part of it. Nothing you can do to shed that label as loved by God. Which is good news when you're trying to deal with these thoughts that are trying to tell you nobody likes you. And as those who love the purpose also love the means. God also loves all the other things he created because they are the means to accomplishing this goal. All people and all things in the universe are outside God in that they are finite, and God is infinite.
So the distinction really, and not just that I don't know how to play sports well or music, and God can probably do those things. But it's that God, you could draw all of us people and everything else that was created in mountains and forests and televisions and those kinds of things. And you could draw that. You could say this is a scale map. It will say this is a thousand miles or something. You cannot say that that scale applies to our God. So, and we did end up getting to use here because God is infinite. And not just not infinite in size, infinite in knowledge, wisdom, power, presence, but in a non-spatial way. The point is the difference. One way to look at it doesn't sound super romantic, but the difference between us and God is that we have limits, and God is forever in everything.
God's love goes out and extends not only to the good people and good things, but also to evil people and evil things. And you may be saying, oh, those evil people. But I think we all have states that we go through where we are in a state of not-so-goodness. So pay attention that even that part in you, which again, you get endless criticism from from the weather that's which says like, hey, you know, you had a bad thought, you did something bad in your life, you're nothing, you're nobody. But really, this is saying it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Even if you were, which I don't think you are, evil, but even if you were, even then, God is not gonna stop loving you. It goes not only to the people and things, but it God has his limits. You know, everybody's got their limits. So well, you could maybe love some evil people, you're not gonna love hell, you know, which is this conglomeration of people who are set on harming other people. So that that's where it stops. It goes not only to people and things that are in heaven, but oh, oops, nope. I was totally wrong about what I just said. Also to those that are in hell. God loves everyone everywhere. Sounds really nice, right? Not only to Michael and Gabriel, the arch-angel, archangels, but also to the devil and Satan. For God is the same everywhere from eternity to eternity. As he says, he makes to sunrise on good people and evil people, sends rain on the just and the unjust.
Now, this is slightly, I wouldn't say annoying, but it's something that Swedenborg does here, which is definitely would be familiar to his audience. He's here talking about Michael, Gabriel, like those are, there's a lot of people who believe that those are archangels who are individual people. And he talks about the devil and Satan, and there's a lot of people who believe that those are maybe two names for the same individual being who opposes God. Swedenborg doesn't assert that any of that's true. He says that Michael and Gabriel are these representations of these communities, devil and Satan, there's love of self and love of the world. But he just talks here like he's not deviating at all from standard Lutheranism. He doesn't. Sometimes I think it's when he's getting a little poetic, and I'm not critical of it, but it's something you got to know if you're reading through Swedenborg is that he doesn't, there's more there, but he talks like there's not more there. And that's just part of it if you're trying to describe something really complex.
Despite this, the evil people and evil things are still evil. This is a result of what is in the people and the objects themselves. What's you harping on here? You'll see right here. Evil people and things do not receive the love of God as it truly and most profoundly is because God is the love of someone outside yourself. And some of us are not interested in others outside themselves doing anything but doing exactly what we want. And in some cases, not existing anymore. But they receive the love of God according to their own nature, much the way thorns and nettles, no offense, receive the heat from the sun and the rain from the sky. The point is that he's making there, as you see biologically, there's this energy source from the sun, all these photons are going down, and there's plants of all kinds, some of which from a human perspective can be very painful to interact with, some of which can be beneficial and medicinal. It's the same energy source, but the organism itself dictates the form it takes. He's saying that even though God's love is here radiating out to everyone, just because some people take that and do harmful things with it doesn't mean that the love itself was the problem or that they they don't receive its colleague money. You can do great things with it, you can do bad things with it.
The second essential. We made our way over here to number two. Is his wanting to be one with others. Is recognizable in his partnership. There's our keyword. With the angelic heaven, with the church on earth. Well, this is cool. This is cool enough to erase our two for partnership with the angelic heaven. So let's get some highlighting here. What would an angelic heaven be? I just used red, but we'll go red. Angelic heaven. So here you've got the angelic heaven. Then with the church on earth. Earth is green. So we've got the church on earth right here. With everyone in the church. Yep, everybody in there. And with everything good and true. It forms and constitutes an individual and a church.
So I was like, I'm gonna do my little pattern here, but I forgot to do the last two runs of it. So there's, there are these sort of repeating, progressively smaller and smaller patterns all throughout all of existence, says Swedenborg. And it works like this. You have heaven, right? So if this is heaven, this is the largest partnership and the deepest partnership between God and the human race possible. This is where the love and wisdom over here got exactly what it wanted, and it ends up linking with these people. That's heaven. But just like heaven is this partnership with God, there's a similar iteration of it in what Swedenborg calls the church. And again, this is Swedenborg fills in this term to mean everybody, not within a particular religious organization, but who has this same kind of love and wisdom inside them. Right? So this is the group of those together, even if they may not know each other, are participating in it. He calls that the church. He says that's organized. That partnership of God and the people. It's basically really nice people in heaven are having really nice people on earth are the church. And it's the same kind of partnership, just on different levels with God.
But then you go down to the individual. Because the church is really just a bunch of people who have love and wisdom united in them. That's us. We are the same experiencing the same kind of partnership with God on our individual level. But then, then it's not even enough to go like community down to individual. The stuff inside your heart and mind, everything that's good and true. I'll just give it the old GMT, the gin and tonic of life. That is all in the same kind of arrangement. There's partnership at the microscopic, mental, spiritual level. Again, this is how God wanting to join with people, doing it at every level, but in similar ways. Just like, you know, you look at an atom and the way that the electrons orbit reminds the other way planets orbit. There's that thing. But spiritually as well.
In fact, seen in its own right, love is nothing but an effort to forge a partnership. Which is a cool thing about it. That love is all about like, you're cool, but I want to work with you. I want to be with you forever. In order to fulfill the purpose intended by the essence of his love, God created human beings in his own image and likeness, characteristics with which he could forge a partnership. So if you ever look at yourself and you think, what's so great about me? Here's one thing so great about you: is that you are what's up with us? You are the form that receives God. This is the form that can, whatever God's outreach looks like here, it looks like yellow marker, but whatever that is, you are just the right form, mentally, spiritually, physically, to take on that partnership. That's we are. We're like the little components in a radio. Do people still know what radios are? That receive the radiating FM or AM waves of God's love. Divine love constantly aims to forge a partnership with us, as is clear from the Lord saying that he wants to be one with people, he and them, and they in him. And he wants the love of God to be in them.
The third essential of God's love, his blessing others from himself, is recognizable. Yet, what is a blessing? Well, here's the Swedenborgian definition. Is recognizable in eternal life. We live forever, which is the unending blessedness. So I think you could safely juxtapose that with happiness, good fortune. Which I think is hilarious. Not hilarious, but tickles me that that's in there. You just don't think of it as, okay, I'll be happy forever, but good fortune. That wanting your life events to go well and good things to come to you. That's exciting. I like the idea of some good fortune and happiness, right? Happiness being, of course, a big one. That God gives to those who let his love in. Interesting. Let's seems like, of course, I want all this stuff. So, oh, but you got to let God's love in. And I don't know what that is. That's a weird thing. You do know. It's right up here. We just looked at it. What is God's love? I'll give it to you. It is loving others who are outside yourself, wanting to be one with them, and blessing them from yourself.
Because when God gets in there and gets this partnership, it's not that we've made the partnership. Hooray! And now it's over. It's done. Because as soon as you get that love and wisdom from God, they are begging you to go and do the same to the next person. That that's what the partnership with God is. Is like, I want to bless everyone, make them happy, make them eternally in bliss and blessing. Let's do it together. That's the partnership. And then we'll go from that to the next person, and we'll keep going forever and ever.
And this is the focus that we were talking about at the very beginning. Because love isn't about the feeling. It isn't really. It isn't about the means. It's about who you're doing it to and for. God, this is the, the focus is the entire human race, the people outside of God's self. And we can similarly look where somebody out there who could use help and interaction. And we can focus on that. That's the essence of getting, getting us to mimic the partnership. Just like we saw here, that everything moves in these levels, right? The things have to look a bit the same in the big and the small forms. In the same way, you have God's love for the human race being the big form. But then us coming down to, you know, just try to be cool to the people we're around, making that our focus. That is what gets us to partner with God.
As God is love itself, he is also blessedness itself. And every love, and this is cool, exudes pleasure. So divine love eternally exudes blessedness itself, good fortune itself, and happiness itself. God gives these blessings to angels and people after death, which we die and want this love, accept it, and try to live it. And it's the same thing. You're an angel then, through his partnership with them. So the partnership, yeah, it's about helping other people. But it's also this is how God can give all this love and truth and happiness he wants to give to us. And that's the News from Heaven.
How'd it go? Do anything for you? Let me know in the comments. If this picked up your mood, let me know how. If you've got something useful out of it, you're gonna use, let us know how so we can look, take it into our own lives. Like and subscribe if you had any fun. That that helps us. I already said it, but I'm saying it again. Like and subscribe. Thank you so much. And we hope that you'll join us next time. And in the meantime, hope that you've got some good love coming in and good love moving through.
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