Spiritual Temptations.

by David Simpson 

While I was driving home from a rather routine day at the office I passed through the familiar and unaltered landmarks of my typical suburban neighborhood. On one particular occasion my attention was drawn to words that were being spoken by a radio preacher, whose sermon was being broadcast on the Christian station that I occasionally had playing in the car. I won’t try to repeat the portion of the sermon verbatim and the fact is, I can’t confess to really remembering most of it, but the utterance that did penetrate my normally media filtered ears is still fresh in my mind.

“The moment you have acquired an understanding of God’s truth and can see it clearly and acknowledge it as truth; you will be at war with yourself. God’s truth will attempt to shine into some dark inner recess of your mind; or knock at the door of your cherished misconceptions, and you will be in a spiritual combat.”

File that.

Spiritual Emergence and Spiritual Emergency.

O.k., I was never good at mathematics. I guess some people just aren’t. That’s the best excuse I can offer. But I was aware of the affinity that others had for the subject, especially for the manner in which it can be learned by introducing and building upon concepts in a linear and progressive way. New ideas can be built up in stages, illustrated by examples and added on, just like the successive phases in the building a house. Furthermore, the assimilation of a new concept often brings the so-called “eureka” or lightning flash when we suddenly “get it”. These are affirming and motivating experiences (which I unfortunately had too few of trying to learn that subject).

Notwithstanding my lack of skill in becoming a mathematician I did realize that I too had a certain predisposition to the learning of new things in a progressive and linear way. I often thought that our regeneration and capacity to increase in Love and Wisdom from the Lord could be accomplished in the same way as learning a new subject, such as mathematics. Every new spiritual truth we learned could be built upon what we already knew, complete with lots of affirming “Eureka’s” along the way. In the early years, this was my experience and from that I assumed that as we gained more understanding through our study and meditation on the word, our use and disposability to the Lord’s Will would just naturally and painlessly increase, and of course our corresponding affections would also just naturally “fall into line”. We would convert gradually and completely into the full use and expression of our spiritual potential through a kind of “spiritual emergence” that was a “grow as you go” experience.

 As a young person this was my perception of how spiritual regeneration occurs, happening almost unconsciously, as spiritual impulses, when they occurred, blended with daily life in the world. When I got older and certain events erupted in my life I found that this model of spiritual emergence no longer seemed to apply. Through explorations in Swedenborg's Writings I discovered that Swedenborg is clear when he tells us plainly and many times that spiritual regeneration is accomplished by temptations and temptations are replete with internal anxieties. I won’t try to define temptations as they are different with each of us and therefore affect us differently. Swedenborg however does make a distinction between natural temptations and spiritual ones. He tells us that temptations can be distinguished according to their objects. Perhaps more to the point, he also indicates that natural temptations do not accomplish any spiritual benefit for a person, even if they are not yielded to for various reasons.

 I would like to quote him on this:

“Interior anxieties are also experienced by those who are not in goods and truths; but they are natural, not spiritual anxieties; the two are distinguished by this, that natural anxieties have worldly things for their objects, but spiritual anxieties, heavenly things”. [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 189]

 The subtle nuances of western culture continually suggest that we should worship our work, work at our play and play at our worship. This prescription seems to provide for that self-paced and self-directed “spiritual emergence” which is non-threatening and fits conveniently into our schedules and priorities. It is a good way of avoiding having to deal with issues that may be rooted in matters that are broader and further reaching than the natural temptations we encounter, which in themselves seem absorbing and challenging enough, even if enduring them accomplishes nothing.

 It occurred to me that most of us live lives of rather routine predictability. Much has been said about this. We might complain about it occasionally and mitigate our boredom through distractions but most of our energies are put into maintaining the predictable linear routines that provide security and insulation from instability. It is hard to conceive of any other way of living in face of the vagaries of this world but also I came to think that this is also the basis of natural temptation. We want the security of what we have and we are afraid to loose it. We find our motivation in what we want and we are afraid that we won’t achieve it. This can be clearly seen in the behavior of children. There is anxiety embedded in these forms of fear or apprehension. But usually the “objects” are material or pertain to matters of status or reputation, solvency, having to put up with seeing our plans deferred or thwarted altogether and attachments to other possessions and pursuits that ultimately won’t alter the person we really are when we arrive in the spiritual world. For this reason Swedenborg indicates clearly that natural temptations have very little redemptive value.

 I had to ask myself: “Why was my attachment to a gradual spiritual emergence so strong?” Well, when my life began to get difficult, I discovered that I didn’t want sudden incursions in the form of events that will disrupt, destabilize or adversely affect my circumstances. I really didn’t want them. I think that is generally true of all of us. We don’t want crisis. We don’t want to fight the internal battles they bring which, while they last, have the potential of depleting our attention and energy and rendering us, if not in fact at least in appearance, of being outwardly incapacitated. Life is simply complicated enough on the external level as it is. Nevertheless if we return to Swedenborg he tells us that it is only through spiritual temptations that we are regenerated.

 “Those only who are being regenerated, undergo spiritual temptations; for spiritual temptations are pains of mind induced by evil spirits, with those who are in goods and truths. While those spirits excite the evils that are with them, there arises the anxiety of temptation. Man does not know whence this anxiety comes, because he does not know its origin.” [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 189]

 Swedenborg continues to tell us that within spiritual temptations a person is in anxiety; interior anxiety that results from the drawing forth of both his goods by good spirits and his evils by evil spirits, who are always with him and that in the state of spiritual temptation a person’s goods and evils collide and combat each other. This cannot occur unnoticed and is a combat that is being fought for a very important outcome.

 He tells us more:

In temptations, the dominion of good over evil, or of evil over good is contended for. Evil, which wills to have dominion, is in the natural or external man, and good is in the spiritual or internal man. If evil conquers, the natural man has dominion; if good conquers, the spiritual has dominion” [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 190]

 The outcome is serious. The experience of spiritual temptation, particularly if it is extreme is not that of a steady state spiritual emergence. It can take the form of a spiritual emergency. A state from which we will emerge, but better or worse in relation to what has dominion over our lives.

 If man succumbs in temptation, his state after it becomes worse than before, because evil has acquired power over good, and falsity over truth. [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 192]

 That is the potential for the bad outcome. Nevertheless the purpose of spiritual temptation is the regeneration of the person, to liberate him from the control and dominance of the evils within that would otherwise render him spiritually unprepared for use in this world and a place in heaven that is as close to the Lord as he could possibly be and thus able to receive the greatest happiness that can be bestowed upon him. The good outcome, which is the real purpose of spiritual temptations, is also described.

Temptations conduce to acquire for good dominion over evil, and for truth dominion over falsity; also to confirm truths, and conjoin them to goods, and at the same time to disperse evils and the falsities thence derived. They serve also to open the internal spiritual man, and to subject the natural man to it; as also to break the loves of self and the world, and to subdue the lusts that proceed from them. When these things are effected, man acquires enlightenment and perception as to what are truth and good, and what falsity and evil are; whence man obtains intelligence and wisdom, which afterwards increase continually.” [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 194] 

The combats must be carried on by the truths of the word. Truth fights against the evils and falsities that reside in the natural man in order to conquer them. It is only the Lord who fights for man in temptations but without the truths of the word that have found a place within him a man is powerless to cooperate with the Lord for the purpose of his own regeneration. Swedenborg indicates that it is for this reason that a person is not admitted into spiritual temptations until they are “in the knowledge of good and truth and has thence obtained some spiritual life; therefore such combats do not take place till a man has arrived at years of maturity”.

I returned to what my radio preacher friend had said. His view was that spiritual truth leads immediately to combats. I am not so sure this is true with everyone at every stage of his or her spiritual growth. It seems to me that during the initial periods of our lives there is indeed a kind of spiritual emergence while we are learning truths and perceiving goods from the word. But often we don’t really comprehend them in their essence although we feel that we do. We take them as our own; meaning that we alter them to fit our preconceptions from our predisposition to confirm what is agreeable to us. Merely assimilating what is agreeable into the structure of our existing beliefs and motivations, without having to alter that structure does not induce anxiety. However, when we have been introduced into spiritual life from the Lord by the appropriation of goods and truths from the Word we will someday be called into spiritual combat to confirm them in their essence or rather have them confirmed in us for what they really mean. Nevertheless, the Lord only admits this combat when a person is potentially ready, which is usually later in life. We know that evils within are not static. Neither are the truths or the goods that are admitted into us which can open up our spiritual life. But the dominion of good and truth and thus the opening or “emergence” of the spiritual man can only occur when the evils within have been removed, for ultimately Spiritual life and Spiritual death cannot reside in the same consciousness. They simply cannot.

We might prefer that this combat is an invisible process that occurs without our conscious participation, in the same way that the body defends itself involuntarily through the operation of the immune system against unfriendly invaders, while all we feel is the fever or sluggishness that results from what is going on. Or perhaps we would prefer that our regeneration takes place in the way we can learn mathematics in a sequential and programmed approach, if we just commit to completing the assignments and pay attention in class, struggling occasionally when we have to. In processes like that there is no need to tear down the existing structure in order to add on to it. The body does not have to die to itself to ward off an invader and, if we have been well taught by our teachers we do not have to “unlearn” what we have already learned in order to perceive the quintessence of a new idea.

Nevertheless, spiritual temptations are for the purpose of stripping away or tearing down the false ideas and evil affections that are an integral part of a person’s love of self, their beliefs and desires, their perceived identity which, as far as it flows from a love of self is in direct opposition to love of the Lord.

In Ezekiel, chapter 13 the Lord contends with those who have built a wall. In the first place the Lord chastises those who have “not gone up into the gaps to build a wall for the house of Israel to stand in battle on the day of the Lord.” Instead, the false prophets had built a wall of their own and plastered it “with un-tempered mortar”. The Lord predicts that this wall will fall when it is subjected to the un-tempered fury of the elements that will pound against it: great hailstones, a stormy wind and flooding rain. Clearly the wall that was built by the false prophets represents the ego structure of a person, which is constructed, from false ideas and evil affections. The storm that destroys it is a representation of what goes on during spiritual temptations.

“So I will break down the wall you have plastered with un-tempered mortar, and bring it down to the ground, so that it’s foundation will be uncovered: It will fall, and you shall be consumed in the midst of it. Then you shall know that I am the Lord”. (Ezekiel 13: 14.)

 Spiritual temptations become Spiritual emergencies and they are tempestuous. 

 Swedenborg clearly demonstrates what a person experiences during a spiritual temptation. He says that:

 “…the truths of faith which a man believes in his heart, and according to which he loves to live, are assaulted within him, especially when the good of love, in which he places his spiritual life, is assaulted. Those assaults take place in various ways; as by influx of scandals against truths and goods into the thoughts and the will; also by a continual drawing forth, and bringing to remembrance, of the evils which one has committed, and of the falsities which he has thought, thus by inundation of such things; and at the same time by an apparent shutting up of the interiors of the mind, and, consequently, of communication with heaven, by which the capacity of thinking from his own faith, and of willing from his own love, are intercepted. These things are effected by the evil spirits who are present with man; and when they take place, they appear under the form of interior anxieties and pains of conscience; for they affect and torment man's spiritual life, because he supposes that they proceed, not from evil spirits, but from his own interiors. Man does not know that such assaults are from evil spirits because he does not know that spirits are present with him, evil spirits in his evils, and good spirits in his goods; and that they are in his thoughts and affections. These temptations are most grievous when they are accompanied with bodily pains; and still more so, when those pains are of long continuance, and no deliverance is granted, even although the Divine mercy is implored; hence results despair, which is the end”. (Italics mine).

 I have quoted this passage at length in order to show the disruption to maintaining the routines of normal life brought on by spiritual temptations. We can see that someone in the throes of spiritual temptation will exhibit outward signs of what often appears as clinical depression or other forms of incapacitation that has it’s root in what is going on inside his or her mind; within their spirit. A depressed mood, or loss of interest or pleasure in activities; feelings of overwhelming sadness or fear or the seeming inability to feel emotion (emptiness); Feelings of guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, anxiety, or fear which can lead to trouble concentrating or making decisions or a generalized slowing and dulling of cognition, including memory.

Spiritual temptation or Mental Illness?

It is hard to imagine that such states endured by the people going through them would not come to the attention of the helping professions particularly when the ability of the person to function in their everyday life was noticeably impaired. Subsequently there has been a new category included in the DSM-VI (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, Version VI) under the rather simplified heading of “religious or spiritual problem” (V62.89). This category was created in order to explicitly differentiate psychiatric mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, major depression) that require clinical attention from profound personal religious concerns that are not mental disorders, though they were previously thought to be. The impetus for proposing this new diagnostic category came from transpersonal clinicians whose initial focus was on crises triggered by meditation and other spiritual practices.

 Certain members of the psychological profession came to distinguish states of Spiritual emergency or Spiritual Crisis, as being unique. Quite apart from the fact that their patients did not fit the patterns of typical onsets or clinical severity associated with textbook disorders, the Profession noticed the tendency for the state to subside, with the result that often (though not always) the patient was “recovered” or healed without the normal and extensive regimens of therapeutic interventions or the prolonged need for psychotropic medication usually associated with therapy. What was more remarkable was that “Spiritual emergency”, seemed to be a temporary “psychosis” that often brought the person to a higher state of function than where they were before.

 Karl Menninger observed:

"Some patients have a mental illness (or seem to) and they get well and then they get weller! I mean they get better than they ever were...This is an extraordinary and little-realized truth." (Menninger cited in Silverman, 1980, p. 63)

This agrees with what is generally said about the phenomenon of “initiatory illness” in shamanic traditions, that the person is not just healed, but is brought to a state of higher spiritual perception and personal integration, and thus of being able to release capacities for higher service to the greater group or society, which they generally tend to do. Geo Cameron in her essay on Spiritual Crisis in early Irish Literature demonstrates the common aspects with those who had gone through severe temptations and ordeals of the soul, expressed in mythological terms. The purpose of these initiatory illnesses was to re-make the individual. After the “temporary psychosis” was over he or she returned to society to fulfill a role of service to the community. Quoting Cameron, “When it is over, the message for the mystic is often as simple as "Okay, now go and serve.”

 Cameron also cites Arnold Mandell, in his article Towards a Psychobiology of Transcendence: God in the Brain. In his article Mandell discusses how severe stress may induce transcendent experience. Mandell refers to the earlier research of Pavlov.

 “When his dogs nearly drowned in a flood, he discovered that a curious thing occurred. Some of them seemed in a beatific state. Put under severe stress, (they were nearly up to their noses in water when they were rescued) the hippocampus in the brain had shut down all external stimuli and amplified the internal. This may have created the sort of grand unified experience described by mystics, sometimes after severe penance, fasting, and so forth. All the dogs did not react in this way to the stress, but the ones that did were much more receptive to learning, i.e., they functioned better, and more tranquilly, in their day-to-day reality. It had, however, wiped out all their past conditioning, an important finding.”

What could be happening during Spiritual Temptations?

Wilder Penfield III, the Montreal neurosurgeon, in his work related to epilepsy stimulated portions of the temporal lobes in the exposed brains of his subjects with electrodes passing mild electrical currents. In each of these experiments where the subjects were fully conscious they reported, “reliving” some event or occurrence that he or she had previously experienced. The patient could “see”, the setting of the room they were in when the experience occurred, smell the lasagna that was cooking in the oven at the time, re-enact the muscle movements and gestures that they had made, hear the voices and see the other people they had been talking to and feel the emotions that they experienced. In other words, past experience in all of its sensory and mental aspects was “relived”. The patients described the experience as being “in” a play and “watching” it at the same time. Penfield described the memories he discovered from his experiments in this way: "They were electrical activation's of the sequential record of consciousness, a record that had been laid down during the patient’s earlier experience. The patient "re-lived" all that he had been aware of in that earlier period of time as in a moving-picture ‘flashback’."  

 Neurobiologists have since come to regard one function of the brain as a giant recording device which begins filing and registering all the internal and external input it receives from the moment we are born until the moment that physical organ no longer functions. All of our experience is locked away in our brain which is an organic “book of life”, our life, complete in every respect. The question isn't can you retain memory; the question is can you retrieve it? Most of us cannot, at least not consciously. But sometimes certain triggers will evoke the recall of experience in a manner that seems often random. But let’s assume that these “recollections” are not random but rather play a part in the process of our spiritual regeneration.

Eric Berne in his book on transactional analysis presents a case history of a woman in her forties who was walking down the street and rather suddenly felt overwhelmed by a state of melancholy, which she could not explain. After 3 days her feelings of sadness and melancholy worsened and she sank into a deep depression. She was incapacitated and in almost unbearable despair. It was then, three days later that she made the connection between the onset of her depression and what she had experienced at the time. As she had been walking down the street she had passed the open door of a music store, through which the sound of someone playing the piano on the inside could be heard. She remembered hearing it and also that the particular piece of music was a piece that she had heard her mother play frequently on the piano when she was a child. The woman’s mother had died when she was a girl of 5 years old. She had slipped into a depression as a child at the death of her mother and although her mother’s family had tried to provide for her needs the best they could, she did not emerge from her depression until many years later.

One can easily see the relative impossibility of a child being able to “process” the experience of losing a parent. The emotional trauma or traumatic emotions felt by the child would have nowhere to go except into the record of the experience that was locked away in her brain, stored up in the cells of her body. Berne points out that unprocessed emotions, when released by a “trigger” can be “relived”, perhaps over and over again, as the woman re-experienced the depression feelings of her childhood before she actually “remembered” the experience that caused them. We can assume that unprocessed emotional states resulting from trauma will continually have a diminutive effect on the development of the personality as well as influencing the choices that we make for career, marriage or other life decisions. They can lead to more serious mental problems and most certainly will present a kind of barrier to our ability to progress in our spiritual life.

Once while attending a seminar on teambuilding, during the break I had occasion to talk to the presenter, who was a very affable and engaging speaker with a markedly gregarious manner. He commented to me about what he felt was the natural inclination toward leadership responsibilities that some people seem to be born with and indicated that these “born leaders” distinguish themselves very early in a team environment. He spoke about his wife, who in his opinion was an example of a born leader. She was tireless and ambitious; traits she had demonstrated since she was a child and that continued to serve her well as she was a national sales manager for a large branded clothing manufacturer. Her capacity to orchestrate the sales and to personally and professionally engage the buyers from national retail chains, while tirelessly striving to meet their needs was the talk of her company’s achievement awards program, which she consistently won. She was clearly a remarkably competent and confident woman. Then he paused and said, “but you know, when my mother-in-law comes over for thanksgiving all she has to do is comment that the turkey was a little dry, and my wife will disappear crying into the kitchen. It’s very strange.”

Actually it’s not that strange. It is behavior that is perfectly consistent if he would consider the possibility that his wife’s selfless and tireless ambition, which she had since she was a child was a condition imposed upon her in order to win the approval of her mother, and she is still doing it. Likely for a mother, who withheld approval from her child, criticized everything she did that did not make her mother proud and is still doing it.

That unfortunate woman is replaying her childhood drama, striving to recover what was lost or never achieved through the acceptance of her mother while “reliving” childhood emotions of abandonment and isolation, crying in the kitchen without perhaps “remembering” the childhood experiences or admitting the reality that produced them. There is a deep problem here that will not persist forever before something somewhere has to break. One more award for outstanding achievement will not fill in the gaps or serve as an adequate sacrifice to an “idol” parent. Crying in the kitchen while her husband doesn’t understand any better than she does what brought that on won’t help either. Sooner or later, if there is some appropriation of spiritual life within the person, there will be a spiritual emergency, whose purpose it will be to tear down the walls, or the idols, even the idol of a parent, in order to clear the way for the opening up of spiritual identity and potential that would otherwise remain dormant and closed. It is not a planned event. Cameron notes, “a constant feature of shamanic initiatory illness is that it comes unsought”. Maybe a piece of music will come casually through the air. Maybe it will be the death of a spouse, a child or a parent. The loss of a job, divorce or some other event which itself will not be the explicit cause of the states that follow in it’s aftermath, except that through such an event an unleashing of spiritual forces will come.

Generator or reducing valve?

The idea that life itself is a chemical process gives rise to the perception that the brain, as the seat of electro-chemical activity is the generator of consciousness. However, we know that life flows in from the Lord, who is life itself and that the brain is the organ that is structured to receive it. Influx from the Lord, which gives existence, animates, and binds all things, flows into all things according to the form that they have been created for receiving it. For this reason we are compared to a vessel and the Lord is the potter. The prophet Jeremiah observed a potter’s careful work in making a clay utensil, and he noticed that the potter could take a defective pot and redo it into another one, taking the malformed clay while it was still malleable and reducing it to the primal lump that it was before, in order to reshape it. This is an example of what the Lord accomplishes in spiritual temptations. When the clay is reduced, which is necessary in order for it to be reshaped there is a loss of identity. Identity, our individual identity is the filter or separator, which protects us from the uncontrolled incursion or flood of the thoughts and affections that animate our consciousness from the spiritual world. Wilson Van Dusen illustrated that there are two times each day when we loose our conscious identity, namely when we are falling into or emerging out of sleep. He called these states, hypnogogic states and then concluded that they are periods when our minds are susceptible to infiltration from the spiritual world while the shield of our conscious identity is down.

 In accounts of spiritual emergency the persons identity is in flux while it is being reshaped and consequently does not serve to protect us against the collision or combat of the goods and evils within us, which would otherwise flood and overload our everyday consciousness. Normally, the function of the brain, via the filter of our identity, is to reduce all the available information and maintain us in a limited experience of the world. In spiritual temptations, the brain is likened unto a reducing valve that has been necessarily opened up to allow the flow of influx from the spiritual world in a way that the shield of our individual identity would not allow.  Swedenborg indicates that:

“For there are both evil and good spirits with every man; the evil spirits are in his evils, and the good spirits in his goods. When the evil spirits approach they draw forth his evils, while the good spirits, on the contrary, draw forth his goods; whence arise collision and combat, from which the man has interior anxiety, which is temptation.” [New Jerusalem and it's Heavenly Doctrine 188]

We can assume that this is always going on, except that outside of spiritual temptations we do not feel it. There may be pangs of conscience from time to time, which psychologists consider to be normal self-reproach. We may stop to question our motives and the propriety of our actions but these occasions of self-examination are at our discretion and from our own disposition to them, which is subject to the maintenance of our identity in the way that we want to perceive ourselves. In a state of spiritual temptation or spiritual emergency it will come unsought and we cannot avoid feeling the combat within us, nor can we dismiss it. These combats and collisions create confusion and anxiety that is more than the capacity of our identity or self-constructed image of ourselves can handle.

 Roberto Assagioli,MD observed the connection between spiritual emergences and psychological problems in these terms:

 “Instances of such confusion are not uncommon among people who become dazzled by contact with truths too great or energies too powerful for their mental capacities to grasp and their personality to assimilate”. Self-realization and psychological disturbances Assagioli, R. (1989) (p. 36).

 In order for the vessel to be freed of its defects the potter must reshape it and this often happens by taking the malleable clay and collapsing it in order to build it up again.

The stone that the builders rejected.

We know that the Lord is always trying to lead us into the truth, which is also the truth about ourselves. We need to approach him for who he really is in order to know him. Our understanding of what we really are often impedes or hinders how we can approach him. Truth will open our understanding and in the Word truth is given the correspondence of a stone. The cornerstone is the representation of the truth upon which the church is founded and in the ultimate sense, the Lord himself. The builders who rejected the cornerstone were the members of the Jewish church who had adulterated the goods and truths from the Word for the sake of their traditions and arrogance and for this reason rejected the cornerstone that was the Lord. But are we not all in ourselves representative of the church? Swedenborg states that each person is a miniature of the church in themselves. If in the process of taking the truths of the word we have “modified them” to meet our own personal preferences for the sake of our personal “traditions” or ambitions in this world, are we not also like the Jewish church that rejected the cornerstone? The Lord’s work at our regeneration will not leave us in the fantasies and illusions that we have built up and desire to maintain, especially about ourselves. The cornerstone will become the stumbling block and when we trip over it someday we will be broken. If the stone falls on us, through the agency of some event that precipitates a spiritual temptation we will be ground into powder. It is interesting to note that the word for powder the Lord used is the same word that signified the “dust” from which man was created. Our return to dust, as prescribed in Genesis is an indication that the spiritual life of man, our individual spiritual life will involve the spiritual temptations that are necessary to take us back to our primal selves for the purpose of reshaping us.

What are my chances?

A man who has cancer must submit to a curative therapy that will debilitate him in a manner that will not only seem, but will actually be worse than the disease itself when it is first detected. If he submits to the cure he will be cut into, burned from the inside out and weakened with drugs that attack the healthy cells in his body as well as the bad ones. He will ask the physician, what are my chances? If I endure this, will I live free of my disease or will the cancer return with greater force and ultimately consume me anyway?

He wants the physician to assure him that if he submits to the ordeal he will be completely healed. He wants to know that the pain of the cure will not be in vain. He wants to know that the real choice he is making is between life and death, not between death that is immanent and death that will come regardless, even after enduring the terrible pain necessary to ward it off, if only for the moment.

The doctor will say, “I do not know. I cannot really promise you anything. This is best that we can offer you but you must decide on your own.” That is all that a human physician can say, if he or she is being honest.

We want assurance that what we submit to, especially if it is painful and causes us to suffer will ultimately bring us to a place where we are free, or healed. Who wants to be the ship that was lost in the storm at sea?

 Spiritual temptations may be like the cure that seems worse than the disease but we have the assurance that if we ask that question to the Grand Physician the answer will be positive. We will be healed. The grip of the natural or the external man where evil and falsity resides over the spiritual creation the Lord wants us to become will be broken.

 The good news is that spiritual temptations have a limited duration, no matter how dire or severe they seem. The Lord permits them and they come to an end. The breaking of the loves of self and the world, and the subjugation of the lusts that proceed from them is the work of regeneration itself.  We can be confident that the outcome will be enlightenment and perception. We will obtain intelligence and wisdom, which afterwards increase continually. Our capacity for service and use will increase. Our relationship with the Lord will be closer and more meaningful, as will our lives and our relationships with the others that we will be better able to serve.

I close with an oration from "A Prayer Book for the days of Awe"

Self-deceit is a strong fort

It will last a lifetime  

Self-truth is a lightning bolt lost as I grasp it.

And the fires that it grasps can raze my house.

You ask me to yearn after truth, Lord,

But who would choose to be whipped with fire?

Unless in the burning there can be great light,

Unless the lightning that strikes terror

Lights enough to show the boundaries

Where terror ends,

And at the limits, still enduring and alive,

Shows me myself

And a hope no longer blind.

For Comments please E-mail: information@swedenborg.ca

[Top]

Introduction   

[1] Where temptations come from    
[2] The Lord's temptations    
[3] All kinds of temptations
[4] The struggles of temptation   
[5] Inward, rational and worldly    
[6] Evil from Hell and Good from Heaven
[7] The mechanics of temptation    
[8] The use or purpose of temptation    
[9] Transformation
[10] The Lord's help in temptation    
[11] It all applies in our daily lives
[12] The necessity of self-examination and repentance    

Appendix
An investigation into the implications of Spiritual Temptations