LOVE OF ABUSES

Most people do not realize that when they are engaged in any sort of abuse, such as alcohol, tobacco, drugs, food, hoarding or sex, that they are in a hellish state. This is because they also do not know that Heaven and hell are eternal states of heart and mind.

The universe is not just physical; it is higher-dimensional. And these higher dimensions are states of mind and spirit. Our physical body may be in space and time but our spiritual body is in an eternal state of mind and spirit. And this eternal state is defined by our dominant love and its corresponding beliefs.

The reason many of us are presently in states of abuse and addiction is because the human race is in a fallen state of being, disconnected from the harmonic fields of Heaven and affiliated with the distorted fields of hell. These discordant fields were generated by our human ancestors who engaged in love of self, love of the world and love of abuse.

God gave human beings the gift of spiritual freedom or Love. As a consequence, humans are free to reciprocate this Love by loving God, their neighbor and uses or they can choose to love their own self, the world and abuses. However, when we make the latter choice, we generate our own inner hell of bondage and suffering. On earth, we can readily notice how alcoholics, drug addicts, sex addicts and hoarders become a slave to their addiction.

Our delights flow forth from what we love and, when we are in love of abuse, the delights that we experience are infernal or hellish. And, if we continue to engage in such abuse, when we die, we will be attracted by some hellish society which corresponds to our form of abuse and its corresponding delights. This is the reason the Lord advised us to repent and resist our selfish urges.

How the delights of everyone's life are changed after death into things that correspond can be known from a knowledge of correspondences; but as that knowledge is not as yet generally known I wish to throw some light on the subject by certain examples from experience. All who are in evil and who have established themselves in falsities in opposition to the truths of the Church, especially those who have rejected the Word, flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves; and this because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caves and clefts of rocks, as well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those who have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such caves; and they frequent rooms so dark that they are even unable to see one another; and they whisper together in the ears in corners. Into this is the delight of their love changed. Those who have devoted themselves to the sciences with no other end than to acquire a reputation for learning, and have not cultivated their rational faculty by their learning, but have taken delight in the things of memory from a pride in such things, love sandy places, which they choose in preference to fields and gardens, because sandy places correspond to such studies. [3] Those who are skilled in the doctrines of their own and other Churches, but have not applied their knowledge to life, choose for themselves rocky places, and dwell among heaps of stones, shunning cultivated places because they dislike them. Those who have ascribed all things to nature, as well as those that have ascribed all things to their own prudence, and by various arts have raised themselves to honours and have acquired wealth, in the other life devote themselves to the study of magic arts, which are abuses of Divine order, and find in these the chief delight of life. [4] Those who have adapted Divine truths to their own loves, and thereby have falsified them, love urinous things because these correspond to the delights of such loves. Those who have been sordidly avaricious dwell in cells, and love swinish filth and such stenches as are exhaled from undigested food in the stomach. [5] Those who have spent their life in mere pleasures and have lived delicately and indulged their palate and stomach, loving such things as the highest good that life affords, love in the other life excrementitious things and privies, in which they find their delight, for the reason that such pleasures are spiritual filth. Places that are clean and free from filth they shun, finding them undelightful. [6] Those who have taken delight in adulteries pass their time in brothels, where all things are vile and filthy; these they love, and chaste homes they shun, falling into a swoon as soon as they enter them. Nothing is more delightful to them than to break up marriages. Those who have cherished a spirit of revenge, and have thereby contracted a savage and cruel nature, love cadaverous substances, and are in hells of that nature; and so on. Emanuel Swedenborg [HH 488]