Instagram: Swedenborg on Why You Don't Have a Testimony Yet

For #SwedenborgSaturday, here's #Swedenborg talking about the internal meaning of Genesis 42:4, where Jacob is reluctant to let Benjamin go down to Egypt. Symbolically, it's about lending #spiritual life to your testimony. You may read the #Bible or the #BookofMormon dutifully, but still have no testimony. You can search and plod along its verses without getting a feeling sense. This is natural and it always happens for a time. When Joseph (who *is* the divine truth you can't feel) can recognize his brothers (your beginner's testimony) but not vice versa, that's what it depicts. It's as if that divine truth thinks to itself while you're reading #scripture in this unfeeling way: "Why don't they see me?! Isn't it obvious who I am?!" #Divine truth can see you; you just can't see it. To fix this, you need an "intermediate" principle: Benjamin, whom the brothers "left at home." For he is the "bridge" between divine light and your everyday mind. If light flows into your testimony, Benjamin is the pipe in which it flows. He's like a slide from inner to outer, making the transition smooth. As such, he's very similar to what #RudolfSteiner says about the "#ethericbody." Like Benjamin, the etheric is the presence of the internal *in* the external. You feel it/him as a quality of attention, of presence. When you feel your body at every moment, the #etheric is strong. So also when your handwriting is good. Spiritually, it's the quality that lets you act and speak with spiritual spontaneity, from the #Spirit - an unblocked throat, an automatic transmission. To heal, you need to be starved like Jacob in the seven-year famine. When you prevent the etheric from coming out, it's as if you're a scared parent trying to keep your son from danger. But if you can only get (spiritual) food from letting him go, you can be sure that it'll be easier to do so at some point, if only from desperation. By freeing your life from your body's grasping tension, you'll feel so much better than you did before. You can feel where before was only fear. There is a #light that wasn't there before. Brittleness becomes flexibility. Death becomes life. #spirituality #LDS #Mormon #Christ #faith #love

A post shared by Christian Swenson (@swensonthechristian) on May 13, 2017 at 12:56pm PDT