Was Napoleon an advanced theologian?

It is well known that Napoleon Bonaparte was a military genius. But the other day I came across a quote attributed to Napoleon, which reads, “The Bible is no mere book, but a living Creature…”

Wow! This statement is worthy of deep contemplation because it must ultimately span both the mysteries of faith and science! So let’s take a quick shot at it.

The Holy Word refers to itself as God’s living truth and that our Lord Jesus Christ came into the world as the Word and made it flesh. By calling the Bible a “living Creature” the famous French ruler may have hit on an idea that few theologians have articulated on.

A “Creature” is a living organism. How is a book full of inspired writings equally as organic as Jesus? One simple explanation that might be offered by today’s theologians is that the Lord made the Bible stories “flesh” simply by fulfilling the prophecies of Scripture.  Others might say that the Bible offers inspirational words to live by. However, terms like “Creature” or “living truth” suggests true bio-complexity. Could the famous stories of the Bible represent God’s clever portrayal of Infinite Wisdom and Life?

Something even more mind-boggling needs to be addressed as well. This subject also deals with the laws of the universe and creation.

Both God and the Holy Word existed before the creation of time, space and the physical universe. Furthermore, God and the Holy Word are ONE (John 1:1-3) and were fully formed in heaven from eternity. This means that the narratives of Scripture have their origins in an Infinite Living Form existing in a non-physical (spiritual) realm! Since all things in the created universe were “created from the Word,” this living document must also contain the top-down patterning principles for all causal processes in the universe (which display an incessant compulsion for self-organization and bio-complexity).

I do not know what Napoleon Bonaparte had in mind when he stated that the Bible was a living Creature. But scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg claimed that Scripture and all its stories portrayed a perfect analog of the human anatomy and its myriad processes. The Lord Jesus Christ enacted every little detail of this process when He was in the world. Or, should I say, the Holy Word consists of nothing other than what represents Divine Life.

I know this information seems incomprehensible, especially within the limited space of a short post. That is why I tackle this important topic in my upcoming book Proving God. If this topic is important to you please feel free to snoop around my website: http://www.provinggod.com

A new kind of solar energy

Solar energy is often touted as a wonderful source of sustainable energy. In our current energy crisis, which is caused by our dependency on finite fossil fuels, sustainability of energy to keep the wheels of our economy running and preserve our quality of life is a high priority.

But true sustainability and quality of life must extend to the world beyond this one. If humans do not enjoy eternal life and blessedness then sustainability is meaningless.

There is another kind of alternative and sustainable energy source that can keep the wheels of economy running and improving the quality of our lives for an eternity. To tap into this infinite source of energy requires a new type of solar panel. This new solar panel represents a new array within the human mind.

What is unknown to most theologians (not to mention scientists) is that God’s heaven has its own source of light and heat. It is called the Spiritual Sun. Rather than giving off physical light and heat, it emanates God’s Love and Wisdom. The human spirit is sustained by this energy source in the same way that one’s physical body is sustained and maintained by the astronomical sun’s thermodynamic processes.

We sense the ontological reality of this Spiritual Sun when some passion or love generates inner “warmth” in our hearts, and when we “see” mental concepts from a rational source of light that affects the mind’s eye. Human intelligence (and interiority) is different from that of other animals because our minds are constructed to be more sensitive to the influence of the Spiritual Sun. Without such a metaphysical source of heat and light we would not be able to think or feel in a human way.

But growing up in the physical world only prepares our mind to act as a “low-tech” solar panel when it comes to tapping into the inexhaustible energy of the Spiritual Sun. There are special instructions available for those who wish to upgrade the efficiency of this spiritual technology. It amounts to an upgrade in the values we choose to guide our hearts and minds.

These special instructions, mentioned above, are generally made available to us in the form of “religion.” But more specifically, these instructions represent following God’s tenets of sincere spiritual love. (Any doctrine that separates knowledge from love is a false doctrine.) When we adopt God’s tenets of Love into our lives we fine-tune our spiritual solar panels to be more sensitive to the Spiritual Sun and the sustaining influence of the warmth of God’s Love and enlightenment from God’s Truth.

Those who tap into this non-physical sun will have access to an energy source that can sustain a noble quality of life through this world and the next! The angels of heaven are simply humans who have traded their worldly behavior for an upgrade.

Website: http://www.innergardening.net

Is Jesus a physicist?

Last night (Oct. 15) I happened to be listening to the radio program Coast to Coast AM with host George Noory.  One of the guest speakers was Naturopathic physician Dr. Richard Bartlett. Barllett had personally experienced a miraculous healing event in 1997 and was promoting his new book The Physics of Miracles: Tapping into the Field of Consciousness Potential, which was based on his further research.

One of the most interesting claims made by Dr. Bartlett in his interview was that “Jesus was a physicist.”  In other words, miracles are not the suspension of scientific law but the tapping into laws of higher-dimensional physics (something that Jesus would know about). Since I have made a similar claim in my own book Proving God: Swedenborg’s Remarkable Quest For The Quantum Fingerprints Of Love I was delighted to hear his interview. I applaud the boldness of Dr. Bartlett’s theory.

There is a growing movement consisting of theologians, scientists and other academics to unify science and theology. I am a part of this movement and belong to two organizations that have embraced this goal as their corporate purpose (Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences and the Swedenborg Scientific Association).

It is currently believed by many physicists that nature’s laws governing the universe on the fundamental level operate with greater freedom. In other words, on the causal level of first principles, processes operate under less constraint. Some physicists even believe that these higher dimensions are psychical and consist of a universal (morphic) field of consciousness.

My new book takes this idea further. The causal force (first principle) operating and directing this universal field of consciousness is God’s Divine Love. Viewing LOVE as the primal “stuff” of reality and creative force in nature requires abandoning the current materialist philosophy of science that there is nothing beyond the physical nor is anything purposeful.

But such a challenging topic as unifying all knowledge requires serious thinkers to question their current assumptions about both science and theological dogma. Both sides of the argument will have their ox gored!

For instance, not only did Jesus understand and make use of these higher-level laws, they are actually woven into the very fabric and scaffolding of the Bible’s top-down architecture (the Holy Word is a multi-level document containing the secrets to universal order and causal processes). I demonstrate this in my own book.

I will order Bartlett’s book (I hope you do, too). I will be curious to find out what his understanding of higher dimensional physics is, and, if it leads to the non-local and non-temporal kingdom of heaven. Because the greatest miracle of all is not healing the corporeal body of disease, it is obtaining eternal life and happiness.

My book Proving God will be available March 2010. In the meantime, if you want to snoop around, checkout http://provinggod.com

Humans are highly evolved stomachs

If you were to challenge the statement above by insisting that the evolution of the human brain puts men and women (and their unique intelligence) far above the mundane and mindless operation of digestion, I would still insist that you were completely wrong.

Human reasoning is nothing more than highly evolved digestion. Whereas the human stomach digests terrestrial or physical food, the human brain (and its mind) digests information. This is what makes the human species unique over other animals—we can digest and assimilate information in a way that animals cannot. Creative or abstract thought in the human species is nothing more than breaking down image-inputs from the world and reconstituting their deeper essences into new and more dynamic combinations. But whereas terrestrial food contributes to the support, maintenance and growth of the physical body, information serves the nutritional needs of the human spirit.

Let’s explore this analogy some more.

Both the human mind and stomach have appetite. For instance, it is often said that we hunger for knowledge (and thirst for truth). Both types of hunger, physical and mental, represent affinities. We each develop a taste for certain types of food just as we develop a taste for certain types of knowledge. These tastes are derivatives of what we love—our heart’s desires, inclinations and values.

Human nature consists of free will (love) and the intellect (discernment). Appetite belongs to the human will and its disposition (savoring). This is just half of the process. Analogies between the process of digestion and the mental process of discernment can be made between chewing, ruminating, absorbing, and even eliminating (we cast out information which has no personal value to us). The phrase “biting off more than you can chew” refers to a mental oversight and lack of mental preparation. Too much raw data can lead to mental indigestion.

These metaphors are not simply a product of poetic creativity. Each analogy represents the ontological reality and self-similarity between two distinct levels of living process – the physical and the psychical (spirit). God’s created world not only contains distinct levels but these levels all follow the same rules of causal process. They correspond to each other.

Now let’s move up a notch!

Angels have the same advantage over us humans as we do over animals. Angels possess more highly evolved mental stomachs than terrestrial humans. Why? Because angels can digest information more deeply and completely than we ground-dwellers do. Whereas we can look at the physical world and distill from it novel creative ideas, angels can take every idea of human imagination and distill it further into theological or doctrinal ideas by means of their correspondences.

How humans and angels read God’s Holy Word quite differently provides us with a good example of angelic digestive superiority. Terrestrial or worldly readers of God’s Holy Word view the sacred stories as an historical account of humankind’s relationship with God. The Seven-day Creation story in Genesis is seen by most people as a literal description of how God created the physical universe and brought humans into this world of space and time.

However, angels distill the events described in this story to a higher, spiritual interpretation. Rather than a physical event, angels can spontaneously identify the spiritual analogy contained within the storyline. Angels understand the seven days of creation in Genesis as the lawful steps by which humans are created anew by God (epigenesis).

Spiritual beings understand Sacred Scripture and its narratives as taking place within the arena of the human heart and mind (where it counts). In this way, the stories of the Bible remain relevant to people of all eras. This rarefied understanding of Scripture is sorely needed in today’s post-modern world that embraces science as having the “enlightened” view.

Angels accept the idea of evolution—but not on Darwin’s terms. Evolution is a purposeful and spiritual process. An angelic interpretation of Holy Scripture reveals that human evolution continues through the re-ordering of the human mind (which operates beyond spacetime) to adapt itself to the conditions of God’s heavenly kingdom and mutual love.

Divine Love, which is the very essence of life and universal agent in all causal processes, flows into every created form and disposes everything into God’s order—whether this is a galaxy of stars or the ideas contained within the human heart.

This is a complex topic to explain adequately in a blog post. That is why I have written a new book, titled Proving God, to show how each one of us has the spiritual capacity to live and evolve the digestive powers of angels. Right now!

Website: http://www.provinggod.com

Irreducible chance or irreducible life?

A theoretical quantum physicist sees fundamental reality as consisting of irreducible chance. However, a theologian, believing that an Infinite God is the primal reality and Being, must believe that the universe consists of irreducible life.

Quantum physicists view the fundamental world as possibilities and tendencies to exist. This means that at its origins the universe consists of pure endeavor.

Similarly, a theologian can easily view an infinitely potent and wise God as the source of all those possibilities and dispositions. Both the scientist and the theologian can agree that the laws of the universe are fine-tuned in a way to be profoundly bio-friendly. They even agree that fundamental reality is non-local and non-temporal but use different words to describe this non-physical realm. (This leads us to the awkward question of what kind of “stuff” makes up a possibility or endeavor?)

So the conflict between the two is that the natural sciences suggest that complex structure and organic life is an outcome of pure chance, whereas the theologian believes that life comes from conscious life (God). For the record, there are a few brave pioneering scientists who are looking at the possibility that consciousness is the basis for the physics behind the causal structures and the order of nature. (Consciousness is a living function.)

While quantum physics is purely phenomenological and does not give us a theory of causal principles, or help us grasp where time and space come from, theologians offer no rational insights here either—other than that God did it. So first principles elude the scientists, while theologians possess a first principle that does not lead to a rational or scientifically plausible theory.

The passion of my life is to unify science and religion. I have just completed a new book, Proving God to share with you the results of my efforts. This blog, which goes under the title of Love is the Ultimate Science, has provided some short articles about my various approaches to this highly challenging (and emotionally-charged) topic.

My challenge throughout the book was to show that love not only powers the causal processes of the universe but that the physics ruling the universe on the fundamental level is based on the dynamics of God’s Infinite Love and divine order. In other words, physical laws come from spiritual laws!

Today, one of the biggest mysteries to theoretical physicists is how the quantum microworld of indeterminacy leads to the deterministic and rationally ordered systems of larger scale structures including the higher-level structures that make up bio-complexity. I provide evidence for why love is the causal nexus between the non-physical or psychical realm of spirit and the deterministic realm of classical physics and biological science.

Love brings people together, countries together and quantum potentials together. It is the universal living agency that unifies all things into common equilibrium and is the secret unifying force behind the mystery of self-gravitating systems (gravitational order).

The book will also provide new insights for resolving the conflict between creationism and evolution and demonstrate how salvation and eternal life in heaven is a lawful extension of evolutionary science. The latter has relevancy for providing important insights towards finding happiness and improving the spiritual quality of our lives.

Interested? Check out http://www.provinggod.com

Sibling rivalry in the womb?

While sibling rivalry is a common thing among children, it seems farfetched that their struggle for primacy would begin early in the womb. This is the scenario we are presented with in Genesis 25:21-23, where Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, conceived two male sons, who struggled while in her womb!

Jehovah even tells Rebekah that her younger son would prevail over the older. Children don’t become competitive in the womb before they become conscious to the outside world and its spoils. And why would God play favorites? So what goes here?

According to scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, God’s Holy Word was written for both the minds of terrestrial humans and the superior—or spiritual—minds of angels. Whereas humans grasp these biblical stories simply as historical accounts, angels distill higher spiritual meaning from the same words.

Angels interpret the story of the birth of Esau and Jacob and their struggle for primacy as the conflict that takes place in every individual, of every era, who is being reformed and regenerated by God for life in a blessed and eternal kingdom. The two brothers symbolize the birth of a new heart and mind, that is, both love and truth coming into existence within the inner reality and essence of a spiritually evolving individual.

That Jacob is curiously holding onto Esau’s ankle while Esau comes into the world symbolizes that truth (or knowledge) must be attached to goodness for an individual to be spiritually reborn.

While love comes first as to spiritual importance (Esau was born first) it is truth (Jacob) that takes over the process of spiritual development. The struggle between the two brothers represents the struggle people must go through to become conscious of the proper order for spiritual evolution. The human intellect first needs to accumulate knowledge. Next, as the human intellect matures spiritually, it recognizes the importance of love.

Understood literally (materialistically) it seems as though Jacob tricked his older brother into giving up his birthright for some “slop” (pottage) to eat. However, when spiritually understood, this represents that the process of spiritual regeneration requires bringing proper order to the knowledge amassed (slop) in one’s mind. If knowledge isn’t evaluated and prioritized, it cannot be attached to true goodness.

So Esau’s giving up his birthright to his younger brother and feeling he is “going to die” symbolizes that love understands that humans must first learn truth before becoming good. Esau’s premonition of death represents that although love takes a backseat to truth at the beginning, it rises up again from this “death-like” state to gain primary importance.

Even Isaac, their father, also understands Esau’s ultimate importance. This is evidenced by his prophecy that his older son will escape his younger son’s yoke and regain dominion (Genesis, 27:40). I have left out many details of this deeper interpretation of Scripture because it goes well beyond the scope of this short post.

Why am I sharing with you how angels understand Scripture? The answer is that the Lord God wants to share this rarefied knowledge with humans on earth—now! This is how the Lord will make His triumphant return and make all things “anew.” The Second Coming will commence within the hearts and minds of willing individuals.

Visit: http://www.provinggod.com

Or visit: http://www.innergardening.net

The “sacred” within sacrifice

It is curious that the word sacrifice hints at some deeper spiritual principle. The word is usually associated with something “given up” or “lost.” However, upon reflection, it can easily be seen that individuals will give something up for something greater.

It is the act of giving something up for a higher cause or purpose that allows us to begin to understand the sacred principle and dynamic within sacrifice.

For instance, a person understands that to become a pianist, he or she must sacrifice parts of their normal living routine and spend those hours practicing diligently. An athlete knows that that one must sacrifice pleasure for pain and train hard to get the physical body into maximum performance condition. A child actor must often sacrifice childhood to gain star power and celebrity. Parents will sacrifice many things for their children. A student who wishes to succeed in college and later in life must be willing to “hit the books” while others are out on the town enjoying “beer blasts.”

What goes unnoticed in all these endeavors is that sacrifice involves the quality of one’s love (which is one’s spirit). Or to put this more precisely, this involves sacrificing one type of love for another. In a universe created by a God of Infinite Love, humankind has been given the spiritual gift and the cognitive capacity to choose one form of love over another. These loves follow the hierarchical design of the universe—from the physical all the way up to the spiritual.

An individual will sacrifice worldly or corporeal pleasure if he or she believes, in their heart, that making lots of money trumps physical pleasure. A person who wishes to become a politician will sacrifice making money because of a love for power. A person will sacrifice the love for power and domination for the love and good of society.

Since love of society brings us closer to the more noble principle of loving the neighbor, which is one of God’s tenets, we can begin to see how religion plays an important part in helping men and women to reach their human (angelic) potential. Further up the ladder is love of God, which is also a religious tenet. Love of God is the highest form of “loving the neighbor” since it is more inclusive and includes loving everything in the created universe.

In each case, to adopt a superior and more inclusive principle of love, we must let go of an inferior form of love. This is the principle behind many religious doctrines that we must be “born anew” or “reborn.”

What Darwin missed (as well as today’s neo-Darwinian synthesis) is that evolution continues through the human heart and mind. Religion is God’s grand scheme to help humankind (and thus the biosphere) to evolve properly into the non-physical, spiritual realm (called heaven). The human heart and mind, since they operate beyond time and space, are sacredly designed to evolve into non-physical bio-complexity—according to the organizing power of the love that rules their thoughts and deeds.

Ultimately, this requires doing “God’s will,” which is the greatest sacrifice one can make.

Any thoughts?

Website: http://www.staircasepress.com

Dawkins v Swedenborg

I enjoy unfair contests—especially if the advantage goes to the person no one is betting his money on. Such an unfair contest would be between sociobiologist Richard Dawkins’ ideas concerning evolution versus those of the 18th century scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg.

Since Dawkins has been considered by some people to be one of the three smartest men in the world, his belief that evolution somehow proves that God does not exist should easily trump any theory embracing a metaphysical principle that leads to intelligent, purposeful design.

However dazzling Dawkins’ modern credentials are, the relatively unknown Swedenborg may have been the smartest thinker of the last 2000 years. Robert Ripley (Believe It Or Not) seemed to think so when he stated, “No single individual in the world’s history ever encompassed in himself so great a variety of useful knowledge” and was known as “The Living Encyclopedia.”

Swedenborg wrote enough scientific and theological books to easily fill up an entire bookshelf. So Swedenborg has the unfair intellectual advantage over Dawkins.

Dawkins believes that at its core, evolution is directionless, purposeless and can be explained purely by randomness and physical events. Intelligent Design theory is out of the question for him. God is simply not needed in such a materialistically “enlightened” paradigm.

Swedenborg would have viewed Intelligent Design (as it is currently portrayed) as not going far enough in demonstrating God’s ultimate purpose. Intelligent Design fails to provide the big picture in a scientifically plausible way. Swedenborg declared that the ultimate purpose of both creation and evolution was for the creation of a heavenly kingdom from the human race.

The Swedish seer’s cosmological and cosmogonic model portrayed creation and causal process as starting from non-physical (spiritual) first principles, descending into the constraints of inert matter, then ascending back up again towards spiritual principles, through the evolution of the human heart and mind by means of religion and humankind adopting its values (God’s tenets).

Serious scientists, who are concerned with foundational issues, are now attempting to explore the possibility that the physics ruling the universe on its most fundamental level are non-physical and pre-geometric. Amazingly, Swedenborg has beaten everybody to the punch on this matter!  He not only demonstrated how mind creates brain activity (rather than brain activity creating mind) but the process by which the mind adopts spiritual values to organize ideas into a coherent structure is God’s purposeful scheme to extend the evolution of the biosphere and complexity into a non-physical and spiritual realm.

To save you the time (and expense) of going through armloads of Swedenborg’s books, I have condensed his wide-ranging ideas into a single volume entitled Proving God. This book, which will be available in Spring 2010, will offer new challenges to Dawkins’ statement that, ”Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

If you are interested in this important, but highly charged and contentious topic please visit www.provinggod.com

Mythos and Logos: Armstrong v Dawkins (v Swedenborg)

The other day a post on “The Hannibal Blog” caught my eye. It was entitled “Mythos and Logos: Armstrong v Dawkins.” I knew that Richard Dawkins is considered the most famous atheist but Karen Armstrong, a religious scholar, only recently has come to my attention.

Armstrong has written a new book entitled The Case For God.  I am sure it will become a bestseller (like her previous books). Armstrong’s inevitable success excites me because I have a similar book coming out in Spring 2010 entitled Proving God. Not only will Armstrong’s sales numbers convince the book industry that this is a big and important genre but her ideas that science and faith should be complementary rather than in conflict is the exact same goal of my book.

The recent post on The Hannibal Blog addressed an interview between Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins with The Wall Street Journal. Each was asked, “Where does evolution leave God?”

Dawkins never pulls punches, saying that evolution “leaves [God] with nothing to do, and no achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution is God’s redundancy notice, his pink slip.”

Armstrong counters that evolution only deals a blow to fundamentalist Christians and the concept of a benign creator if we merely understand God only from the literal meaning of sacred texts. Her research has convinced her that past cultures embraced two paths of finding truth – called mythos and logos. Loosely interpreted, logos deals with worldly knowledge and mythos with knowledge of oneself. Sacred texts deal with mythos and do not have the potency of their message based on historical accuracy (the message is timeless and always relevant). Armstrong believes that such texts and stories represented an early form of psychology.

My upcoming book, Proving God brings the ideas of scientist/theologian Emanuel Swedenborg into the debate over mythos and logos, or better yet, between science and religion. Richard Dawkins fails to see evolution as a spiritual process and that human beings are uniquely adapted to take the trajectory of evolution into a non-physical realm. The human mind and its ideas operate beyond the constraints of the physical world and can find ontological coherent structure (higher-order complexity) based on one’s life-choices and values (something that God places all His focus on).

Religion is God’s strategy for the human race to take evolution and the biosphere into a non-physical realm (called heaven). So Armstrong is right in her assumption that mythos and sacred texts address human psychology but she does not go far enough or deep enough. Proving God starts where The Case For God leaves off.

Venus with a horn – Laussel

As an example, both our books make mention of the symbolic powers of a Neolithic sculpture of a pregnant woman (called a Venus figurine) holding a carved bison’s horn over her right shoulder with one arm, and, her bulging belly with the other. Armstrong suggests that this carving could be symbolic of the endless and inexhaustible process of the creation of new life in defiance of death and entropy.

But the symbolism goes deeper.

The “Venus” statue also represents a psycho-spiritual process—the “re-birth” of a new spiritual life that can only take place in the human heart and mind. Deeper still, the Palaeolithic sculpture symbolizes the Lord’s coming into the world by means of a woman. The Lord’s advent was anticipated by many ancient cultures since the fall of man.

Another example is Chapter Five of my book, entitled “Did Noah’s Ark Travel Across Possibility Waves?” Here I illustrate how mythos, when properly interpreted, unifies biblical exegesis with the foundational elements of quantum theory. I suspect that Karen Armstrong could very well embrace this augmented approach to mythos, but Richard Dawkins would have no coherent response to this new and unexpected data.

Swedenborg claimed that Holy Scripture (God’s Word) is a multi-dimensional document with deeper layers of meaning and contains not only a detailed map of how humans can obtain eternal happiness (and escape the second law of thermodynamics) but also describes the patterning principles of all causal process in the universe. This knowledge needs to be reintroduced to the academic world—even if it leads to a painful upheaval for our present scientific and theological paradigms.

For additional info on this growing topic of interest check out http://www.provinggod.com

Physics, Miracles & Magic

Physics, God’s miracles and magic are closely related topics. All three deal with foundational issues, that is, the deepest knowledge of reality.

Two of the three, God’s miracles and magic, address causal processes as having their origins in the non-physical realm of spirit and mind. While most physicists embrace a materialistic philosophy concerning fundamental reality, some brave pioneers are now beginning to suspect that the laws of nature and very structure of the universe have their origins in a nonmaterial and conscious beginning. The surprising non-classical behavior of quantum entities opens the door for such plausible speculations.

The closest analog we have to describe the quantum world is the human mind, which consists of intentions, possibilities and tendencies to exist (human ideas are in a perpetual endeavor to find formal existence in outcomes of physical measurement).

According to scientist/theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg, every created thing in nature is a recipient form (receptacle) of God’s spiritual influence. This is why the universe has a rational and knowable structure – it emerged out of Infinite Mind. It also means that all form is adapted to some conscious disposition or intention.

Swedenborg claimed that miracles were not a suspension of nature’s laws but the result of a deeper knowledge of the inner workings of the universe. Since the visible objects of nature were analogs (correspondences) of spiritual drives one could manipulate nature in a way to make it more conductive to spiritual causal processes. The more conductive a physical form is to spiritual flux or flow, the more effectively non-material laws and intelligent forces can supervene.

When Jesus walked on water, He was demonstrating that His Holiness and love towards saving the human race made his physical body more conductive to heavenly order and thus was no longer under the classical constraints of physical gravity. He did not suspend gravity but by becoming more conductive to spiritual forces, simply changed the place of his body’s equilibrium. The Lord employed real knowledge—not hocus-pocus.

All miracles and magic are based on this knowledge of the top-down and hierarchical structure of reality, which has its first causal principles in a non-physical realm. Swedenborg also stressed that in past times, magic was abused to pervert God’s spiritual order for personal and evil ends. Since true magic involved real spiritual wisdom, its power diminished over time as evil intentions replaced wisdom.

My upcoming book Proving God provides additional details to this lost knowledge. For more info check out http://www.ProvingGod.com