17.2 Spiritual, mental and physical

If we collect together the retained loves of all persons, then they may be said to form a ‘realm’. Similarly, the set of all retained thoughts form another realm. Again there is a realm of all the actual effects. In this sense, creation has three realms: the first, a reduced and distributed image of divine love; the second, a reduced and distributed image of divine wisdom; and the third, a reduced and distributed image of divine power and action. More detail will come in Part IV, but I now argue that these three realms should be identified as the spiritual, the mental and the physical. So:

• The spiritual realm contains the separate loves in creation, including desires, loves, affections, motivations, purposes, dispositions, etc.
• The mental realm contains the separate carriers of wisdom, including thoughts, ideas, understandings, rationality, plans, ideologies, beliefs, etc.
• The physical realm deals with all the separate final actions and effects, including the entire sets of things we know from external observations and physics.

In this and the next chapters, I will argue that God, the spiritual, the mental, and the physical are four levels of a generative structure. Before that we must discuss what we really mean by a realm.