Goodwill, Spiritual Trial, and Shedding the Outer Dimension | NCE Spotlight

Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:

3463:4  

Anyone can see how the case stands . . . simply from this general rule concerning neighborly love: “Everything whatever that you want people to do for you, you do likewise for them” (Matthew 7:12). People who do this by command do good to others but only because it has been ordered, not because their heart seeks it. Whenever they do, they start with themselves, and in doing good they are thinking of their own merit. On the other hand, people who do it not by command but out of neighborly love, or because they want to, are operating from the heart, in freedom. Whenever they act, they start with goodwill itself and therefore with something that gives them pleasure. Since this pleasure is their reward, they do not think of taking credit. From this you can see what the difference is between doing good from faith and doing good from charity. 

3469:2.  

The inner levels, or rational dimension, have been reborn in people with the goodness that comes of truth (that is, people who live according to doctrine), but not yet their outer levels, or earthly dimension. Our rationality is reborn before our earthly part . . . , because our earthly part lives entirely in the world and acts as a base on which our thought and will are founded. That is why we sense conflict between our rational, inner self and our earthly, outer self when we are regenerating. Our outer part regenerates much later and much more reluctantly than our inner part. Nothing that is close to the world and the body can easily be pressured into offering obedience to the inner self, only over a long period of time. The process also requires us to be introduced by the struggles of spiritual trial into many new stages of acknowledgment about ourselves and the Lord—that we ourselves are pitiful, and the Lord, merciful. So it requires many new stages of humility. 

2994 

As long as we are living in our body, we are incapable of sensing or perceiving much of this. With us, heavenly and spiritual entities are translated into the earthly attributes of our outer self, and there we lose the ability to sense and perceive them.

Representations and correspondences as they exist in our outer self also do not appear like the traits of our inner self that they correspond to and represent. So these inner traits cannot impinge on our awareness until we shed the outer dimension.

When we do, those of us who are in correspondence—that is, whose outer self corresponds to our inner—are very fortunate.