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“A universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary…. Seek only this, and do not let theology delay you.” [M73/77]
“Truth can only be experienced. It cannot be described or explained.” [T139/150]
“We place faith in the experience that comes from practice, not the means we use. We wait for the experience, and recognize that it is only here conviction lies.” [W323/331]
“If you are not a body, what are you? You need to be aware of what the Holy Spirit uses to replace the image of a body in your mind. You need to feel something to put your faith in, as you lift it from the body. You need a real experience of something else, something more solid and more sure; more worthy of your faith, and really there.” [W155/157]
“One vision, clearly seen, which does not fit the picture as it was perceived before will change the world for eyes that learn to see, because the concept of the self has changed.” [T615/661]
“Words will mean little now…. For now we seek direct experience of truth alone.” [W388/398]
“I am not asked to take salvation on the basis of an unsupported faith. For God has promised He will hear my call, and answer me Himself. Let me but learn from my experience that this is true, and faith in Him must surely come to me. This is the faith that will endure, and take me farther and still farther on the road that leads to Him.” [W455/465]
“I am leading you to a new kind of experience that you will become less and less willing to deny.” [T192/207]
“…perhaps you will succeed in going…through the interval of thoughtlessness to the awareness of a blazing light in which you recognize yourself as Love created you.” [W112/113]
“If you are succeeding, you will feel a deep sense of joy and an increased alertness.” [W129/131]
“The body should not feel at all. If you have been successful, there will be no sense of feeling ill or feeling well, of pain or pleasure. No response at all is in the mind to what the body does.” [W252/260]
“There is a kind of experience so different from anything the ego can offer that you will never want to cover or hide it again.” [T55/61]
“If God‘s Will for you is complete peace and joy, unless you experience only this you must be refusing to acknowledge His Will.” [T133/143]
“To fulfill the Will of God perfectly is the only joy and peace that can be fully known, because it is the only function that can be fully experienced. When this is accomplished there is no other experience. Yet the wish for other experience will block its accomplishment….” [T131/141f]
“You cannot understand how much your Father loves you, for there is no parallel in your experience of the world to help you understand it. There is nothing on earth with which it can compare, and nothing you have ever felt apart from Him resembles it ever so faintly.” [T261/281]
“In the holy instant there are no bodies, and you experience only the attraction of God.” [T301/324]
“As God ascends into His rightful place and you to yours, you will experience again the meaning of relationship and know it to be true.” [T336/361]
“Like everything about salvation, the holy instant is a practical device, witnessed to by its results. The holy instant never fails. The experience of it is always felt. Yet without expression it is not remembered.” [T337/362]
“There is no violence at all in this escape. The body is not attacked, but simply properly perceived. It does not limit you, merely because you would not have it so. You are not really “lifted out” of it; it cannot contain you. You go where you would be, gaining, not losing, a sense of Self. In these instants of release from physical restrictions, you experience much of what happens in the holy instant; the lifting of the barriers of time and space, the sudden experience of peace and joy, and, above all, the lack of awareness of the body, and of the questioning whether or not all this is possible.” [T361/387f]
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The Lord Jesus Christ is the one God of heaven and earth.
The New Church teaches that the essence of God is pure love and wisdom. He is eternally compassionate and forgiving, and wishes to bestow as much love on us as we are willing to receive. His love manifests in the desire to draw us closer towards Him and infuse our lives with the joy which results from this relationship. His wisdom is the means by which His love is realized.
The New Church recognizes that there is one God who goes by many names. A story in the Old Testament tells of God presenting Himself to Moses as the ‘I Am’. His self-given name in this story expresses the essence of His identity: He is the beginning and the end of all things — the Divine Consciousness that gives life to the universe. Knowing that the current of God‘s love runs through all that is, we are reminded that He is fully present in our lives, overseeing every moment, regardless of how seemingly insignificant it may be to us.
We believe that God is both fundamentally Divine and Human. There are not three gods, nor three persons in one God, but rather one God with three aspects to His being. Just as we all have a soul, a body and the actions of our lives (and are one person), so it is with God. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are names given for the soul, body and activity of the Lord God Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit corresponds to the Lord’s activity in the world. The New Church teaches that the Lord has a divine design in all that He creates. The nature of this order is laid out in the Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg as the rules of Divine Providence. The goal and purpose of Divine Providence is to create heaven from the human race and to allow each human being to live a life that leads towards heaven. Everything that the Lord does is in service of this goal. He leaves us in our freedom to make decisions that will either lead us closer to or further away from His love. This freedom is one of his greatest gifts to us, for it enables us to choose our own life-paths.
Read more about God…
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