8. The Spiritual

Summary points for Week 8: Chapters 23, 28 and 29

Chapter 24: Spiritual Discrete Degrees (#1)

· The spiritual degree is the processing of loves, which then act by means of mental thoughts to finally give physical actions.

· This is a mental degree. Its operations are conscious, and in someone’s mind.

· It initiates and intends actions.

· Religion should investigate and discover about this final degree.
It probably already has discovered many aspects of this degree and its parts.

The spiritual is not:

the whole, or the cosmos altogether, or ‘the all’, or elevated minds, or another physical dimension, or infinite space, or a vibration, or harmonics, or absence of time, or a fifth element, or fine physical substances, or polarities, or the ‘inner’, or the ‘first person view’.

The spiritual is:

a causal discrete degree that can not be continuously transformed into the physical.

Like: end with cause+effect, or heat with light, or energy with motion, or virtual with actual processes, or desire with thoughts and actions, or soul with mind and body.

Sub-degrees

Like the others, it contains three sub-degrees (1.1, 1.2, 1.3), even sub-sub-degrees.

They all have specific functions:

1.1 First sub-degree: love of loving -- receive loves from God.

1.2 Second sub-degree: love of truth -- maintain stable spiritual truths

1.3 Third sub-degree: love of doing right -- produce the final intentions

The spiritual is our inmost love.

It appears that we develop this progressively as we grow and mature.

Heavenly states

Mostly we do not experience or live in this spiritual degree, only moments of grace.

When we do, as in mystical experiences or the deeper near-death experiences, this degree appears as heavenly: delightful, fully-awake, full of love, the happiness of our dreams.

I think the main functions of the spiritual degree are by people who have once lived on earth, but then have physically died, and now live regularly in these heavenly states.

They have some connection with us (as our ancestors) and so give us influx of loves that are good and suitable for us.

Chapter 28: Spiritual Growth

· Permanent spiritual development is based on what loves have deliberately entered into the actions of our lives.

· The important actions are the joint action of our own loves and our own deliberate thought.

· Such actions become part of our selves and contribute to making up what we are.

Spiritual growth is not only:

belief, or knowledge even of truths (wisdom), or blind obedience, or good intentions alone, or suffering, or personal imputation of the suffering of others, or elevated, expanded, rotated, vibrated (etc.) consciousness:

Stages of spiritual growth:

1. Breaking into to the ‘inner rational’: to 2.1 from 2.2 – first light.

2. Understanding of spiritual action, 2.13 – separating spiritual ‘water’ from our own.

3. Understanding of spiritual truth, 2.12. – repentance to bring out first fruits

4. Understanding of spiritual love, 2.11 – actions from illumination (not from heart)

5. Love of spiritual action, 1.3 – actions to confirm oneself in truth and good.

6. Love of spiritual truth, 1.2 – actions from insight, as image of God

7. Love of spiritual loving, 1.1 – actions from love (peacefully!)

That is, like creation in seven days.

Chapter 29: Errors and Evils

There are limits on Divine Omnipotence, if God is to only do what is good, and to not destroy anyone. That is, equivalently, to not destroy the inmost loves of anyone permanent.

So God cannot:

A1. Create beings that live from themselves. 

A2. Create theistically-sustained beings suddenly de novo. 

A3. Remove all evil from the world existing today. 

A4. Remove all the evil loves from inside all existing persons. 

A5. Stop all persons from choosing evil, even though they still can do it.

A6. Stop all persons intending all evil, even though they love it and still can do it.

The real question is:

Could God not create a world in which all persons (no matter that they evolved gradually biologically, developed gradually psychologically, and regenerated gradually spiritually)

· still never made decisions against God,

· still never entertained false thoughts or evil intentions, and

· still never de sired delights that cannot come from God, and (moreover)

· never aspired to be gods but always knew that they were separate from God ?