The Point of Creation: Swedenborg and Finding Heaven Through Struggle

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The point of creation is a heavenly society, both in
the spiritual realm and in the material at least according
to what I believe is the great mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Now there are many great mystics throughout time, people who
come and teach us profound wisdom, insight into human nature,

(00:26):
the human brain, love even just nature. Sages come and
teach us about many different things. But Emanuel Swedenborg for me,
stands out because not only did he write extensively in
the scientific realm throughout his career as a scientist, not

(00:51):
only did he create the genesis of many of our
ideas about the brain, such as neuronal theory, or many
ideas about the solar system, or many ideas about psychology.
Young was a great fan of Swedenborg. Suedenborg also shared

(01:12):
what I believe was the heart the root of many
of the spiritual ideas that are good within the Enlightenment,
within the Transcendentalists movements, within a New Age thought. Especially Yes,

(01:34):
Swedenborg was a Christian mystic who, funny enough, believed that
all people's, all types of religion, for the most part,
go to heaven. I'm sure there's some guy out there
who creates his own religion, it's not interested in having.
He'd rather dominate and control people in Hell for the

(01:55):
rest of the time, or at least for you know,
another one hundred years, who knows. Because Swedenborg, yes, also
believed that Hell is a place of our own making. Yes,
in connection with other quote unquote evil spirits, but it
was a place that we felt like we loved in
the spiritual world. And as we are exposed to our neighbors,

(02:20):
so to speak, we might find that we're not so
in love with Hell as we thought. And so Swedenborg's
a good place to go. A guy who has been
quoted by many Nobel laureates, by many tremendous scientists, people
who've come up with amazing things in almost every field.

(02:46):
When it comes to the point of creation, he's a
good guy to ask, well, why is anything anything? He
said something interesting about why creation exists. He believed it
was to create you in the image and likeness of God.

(03:10):
Funny enough, Genesis one is the point of creation, and
it's also the point of why everything in society and
in physics, and in community, in technology, everything works the

(03:32):
way it does so on the smallest level, we have
disparate energetical we call them particles, we call them waves.
They're neither. Obviously, waves is a function of how something moves. Right,
A particle, at least in physics, is something that happens

(03:53):
microscopically fast, and then it's never a particle again until oh,
that microscopic second where it is. Right, And so both
are actually just descriptions of behavior. And yet we like
to think that's what matter is, whereas in reality it's

(04:13):
more simple than most of us would believe. But we'll
get there. In a way, you could say the material
realm expresses community on a microscopic level. We know there
are particles because we're or whatever you want to call them,

(04:36):
because we're made of them. Right, we can interact with them,
we can test them. That's how we know they're there.
Things become more interesting the more variety of these particles
get together, and the bigger the structures. No two atoms
are the same, it's crazy, right, No two atoms are

(04:58):
exactly the even two entangled protons are in different places, right,
And so it's interesting that we have this type of community.
On the base level of existence, these things come together
and make a quark. Let's say these quarks and other

(05:21):
things come together to make let's say a photon. The
other these photons and what have you come together and
make a proton, an atom, a molecule. Then we start
calling it a rock or a substance, a liquid, a gas,
And then those things come together we call it an asteroid,

(05:45):
a planet, a star, a solar system, a galaxy, a
local cluster, a big part of the universe. Right and
on every level we see the these beautiful waves of

(06:05):
community making beauty. And because we have that at the
smallest level, we have community making on the human laws,
you and me can sit here reflecting about how the
Kingdom of Heaven is apparent in every level of creation.
It's just the way it is now. Unfortunately, when we

(06:30):
get into the weeds of what makes something grow, we
come to the need for friction, the need for what
we call evil, for decomposation, for things falling apart, sometimes
seemingly on purpose. And yet in human history at least

(06:55):
we see how some of the most dastardly acts can
eventually be used for learning, for good, for nobility, nobility
of spirit. We have some of the most beautiful poetry
and books out of holocaust. But even more so, we

(07:20):
have that vision of never again. And when that vision
stands firm, we have the greatest examples of heroes that
we could ever imagine. Now today, we can get lost

(07:42):
in the weeds of this friction as the pearl, or
as the clan. Right, we're bothered by the sand that's
making us bigger, making the pearl, making us better, because
it can be hard to see the that's just what's
coming from this really intrusive piece of sand. And in fact,

(08:09):
as we wrap this piece of sand with our need
to grow, our need to get space from someone, our
need for good healthcare, for good psychological care, for good
spiritual care, we can, you know, naturally keep focusing on

(08:33):
the root of the problem, or what we think is
the root of the problem. And in a way we're
right to point it out, because a lot of what
causes issues today hasn't seen the sun in a long time.
When it's seen the sun, we call them conspiracy theories,
those ideas. And yet when we totally focus on the negative,

(08:58):
we lose the pearl, at least feels like it, right
when we totally are consumed by that thing that no
one else knows about or maybe people know about it,
but no one's doing anything about it. That can be
just as frustrating. Right, we're missing the pearl of creation,

(09:20):
the pearl of our lives, that piece that comes from
having to grapple with that couple nights ago and you know,
coming to a place where we found some wisdom, found
some love. Sometimes when we encounter that person we hate

(09:40):
so much, maybe we hear their story. Honestly, we hear
their whole story, and we have compassion for how much
they've gone through because unfortunately, some of our biggest quote
unquote villains have gone through terrible things that most people
will never understand and see or hear, because unfortunately, often

(10:07):
what's hidden are those personal traumas, those things that have
fueled disparity, those things that have fueled evil in our world.
Those things are often relegated to basements, bedrooms and closets.

(10:32):
And so, yes, there's the sand, right, but it's up
to us to be more sand for other people. And
sometimes we're set upon, you know, according to many things,

(10:53):
we have programs on the government level of many nation
states that are creating monsters. Let's say you can read
into that, how you will but we know this, right,
We know our governments are often doing terrible things with

(11:14):
military folks forcing them to do terrible things. Sometimes they
don't know why they're doing it, what they're exactly doing.
Sometimes they do know that if they don't do it,
they're killed, their families are killed. This happens in countries, right,

(11:35):
may or may not happen in yours or mine. But
we know this exists. And the better a country is
at doing that, the more secretive it is about doing it,
the worse they are, the more obvious everyone knows. Right,
we condemn them on a world stage, they eventually get

(11:57):
assassinated or what have you. No, some of our worst
actors are really good at keeping secrets for that reason exactly.
But as the Lord said, I do everything in the lights,

(12:17):
and you do what you do in the darkness, hidden secret.
And so we are called as human beings with the
world full of sand, but carrying a lot more pearl,
if you'll believe it, to lean in on shining into

(12:42):
the pearl, lean into accepting the reality of the greatness
that's come from whatever bad history. And although our tendency
can be to focus again on this bad and that
bad or just to shut it all out and say, well,

(13:06):
I'm into sports, okay, or I'm into TikTok, or I'm
into whatever. It's actually best to accept the reality of
a situation and the possibility that it's worse than we think,

(13:26):
much worse, perhaps while also continuing to return to how
amazing the pearl is. Not using one to dismiss the other.
That would be false, That would be fake, because indeed
they're inextricably did I say right? Linked? They're linked? And

(13:55):
in fact, the more we can shine light on both
the pearl and the sand, the more power the good
has because shining a light on something, being open to
something in our minds, being agreeable enough to say, you
know what, maybe not all other religions are terrible. Maybe

(14:18):
God speaking through people in other ways, Yes, allowing for
other people to have their pearls too, It's okay. Christ
is the way, the truth to life. Mohammad is the
ultimate prophet. Krishna is God incarnate, so Shiva. So's everyone,
perhaps maybe some part of everyone. Well, at least we

(14:41):
can agree all the good is from God? Does that
mean male and female? While I heard those were both
made in God's likeness, I hear some female things are
pretty good. I heard some male things might be okay too,
So maybe there's some God in both. Right. The more
we're willing to do that, the more it is, the

(15:07):
more the more we see Heaven for what it is.
We see God for what he is, what she is,
what we are, what the one life? It's one life.
Can't pull life from the rest of life. Try to

(15:30):
pull someone out of the universe, and you just get
another part of the universe, another dimension full of life.
There's no way to cut life off from itself. Now
for those who believe they love destruction and hurt and harm,
for those minds distorted enough to be super addicted to it. Right,

(15:56):
there is a level of death coming, because it's already there.
That is death itself, the level of let's call it withering, right,
hopefully coming to each part of our minds that love
destruction of other people, that love ourselves so much that

(16:20):
anyone else can go burn? Right, That part of my thinking,
if it exists, should burn. I think it makes sense
in fact, that part of our thinking, especially with things
going the way they're going, is going to find itself
really hard pressed to find a breath. And although that sometimes,

(16:47):
you know, seems debatable. Right. We all know that in
our own lives we've run into tough situations where that
part of us that is always worried is is that
tipping anxiety is blown this way and that way and

(17:07):
just scattered. That angry part of us is just triggered,
and it can feel like we don't have any control.
And that's why returning to some of our ideas about
creation is important, that perhaps the point of creation is
God made manifest both physically and spiritually in community. Then

(17:35):
we start to see that, you know, perhaps this part
of me that doesn't behave like it's part of any
type of heavenly paradise is a passing thing. It's something
I'm watching. Maybe the sense of myself that's so obsessed
with this thing that I keep doing that I don't
think is healthy, isn't really me. Maybe I'm just saying

(18:00):
that need right, Because we can see ourselves do something,
and then we can see ourselves do something like I
can watch myself walk down the road just walking down
the road, or I can kind of notice that I'm
a person with an idea of themselves walking down the road.

(18:20):
When we start to get that kind of breath, that
openness to see the pearl of our bodies, to see
the pearl of our minds more not totally identified with it,
but taking a step back, we might find we have
more freedom from that position. Oh I watch myself fall

(18:44):
into that again and again, not just seeing myself fall
into it, but actually seeing that sense of myself that
thinks it needs that. It can be a little heady
at times, but we all know what it's like to
feel the sense of self. We all know what it's
like to be like, well, I'm up to it again,

(19:06):
and so just realizing that that's a mode of mind,
not ourselves. It's coming like a cloud might come a lot.
We live in a stormy area, but it's still just passing,
and it's not really us. It's actually the thing that
maybe was given to us thanks to genetics, thanks to

(19:31):
traumatic past, thanks to so many things come together. Perhaps
God needed a little bit of sand in your life,
and so today we're blessed to be the pearl with
the sand. And funny enough, I think our planet has

(19:56):
maybe more sand than most. So biggest pearl ever, you'd
better believe it