Why All the Dead Stuff?

Why All the Dead Stuff?

"Everything natural from its origin is lifeless" DLW 164

Death. Decaying stuff. Lifeless matter. These phrases tend to evoke a negative reaction because we think dead=bad. But dead stuff is essential to our natural existence. For example, dirt, which is composed of dead plant matter, is necessary for the plant life that we live off of. Metal and plastic, which are in no way living, are an integral part of our lives. Our bodies, and so our very natural lives, are composed entirely of lifeless atoms. Even though all natural substances are lifeless, they are necessary to our natural life. But why do we start with a natural life at all? We could be born straight into the spiritual world, and since all life comes from there, this lifeless, natural world can seem pretty pointless. So what use does it serve? Why all the dead stuff?          

                We can assume the dead stuff serves a purpose, otherwise the Lord would not have created it. To see why it was created, we need to look at the Lord’s goals. The Lord created humanity so that He would have someone to love. For example, He created Fred. Fred is a normal guy, and is part of the Lord’s goal in creation. The Lord’s essence is love, so His very nature is to love Fred as someone outside of Himself, for the sake of conjunction with him. Conjunction can only happen if Fred reciprocates His love (DLW 47). To reciprocate love, Fred has to have a certain degree autonomy. He has to be distinct from the Lord for the Lord’s love to be realized. Fred also cannot have anything of the Divine existing in him, because then the Lord would just be loving Himself, and love of self is the opposite of real love (DLW 49). When we see all this, it is clear that we cannot be created directly from Him because then all we would have is His life, and we would be no different from Him, and He would just be loving Himself. There would be no ‘us’, only the Lord, and there would be no one for Him to love. To prevent this situation, Fred was created from substances that are lifeless and therefore constant, but created such that the Lord’s life ca n be received by him (DLW 4). All life comes from the Lord, but if Fred was created from that life instead of a recipient of it, the Lord’s infinite love would be pointless because there would be no one to receive it. Having the natural world is imperative to the Lord because without it we could not be distinct from Him.

                Though it is necessary to be distinct from the Lord, it is philosophically a strange concept. He is the source of everything. He is present in and continually sustaining every speck of existence, but somehow Fred was created as an individual with free will. What makes Fred different from the Lord is that he is finite. The fact that it is possible for an infinite Being to create from Himself anything that is finite seems like a paradox. How can He squash down His infinite nature to make something finite from it? Creation means making something outside of Himself, and anything outside of Him is apart from Infinity and therefore must be finite. Since He is love itself, and love can only love others outside itself, the only option for His infinite power was to create something finite. He could not create anything infinite because the infinite is indivisible (DLW 49). Creation by definition is finite, and this supplies distinction from Him.

                We can see how it is that finite creation makes people autonomous beings, so now we must take a look at the process by which the Lord creates the natural universe. For something to be finite, it must come to an end. Never ending is the definition of infinite. The Writings describe the way creation terminates. Everything is created from the spiritual sun because it is the first outflowing of the Lord’s love and wisdom (DLW 154). The atmospheres radiating from the spiritual sun gradually descend and decrease by discrete degrees, becoming more “compressed and inert” until they stop radiating and rest in their final forms. At this point they become the physical substances which make up the natural universe (DLW 302). The fundamental principle of this process is that everything receives Divine life by a discontinuous connection (DLW 56). Discontinuity creates gaps in the life radiating from the Lord, making it possible for His life to gradually cease, until His outflowing life reaches a state of inactivity. It is as though the spiritual sun is a picture of the Lord, and the first degree of life emanating out of it is a photocopy of that picture, and each subsequent degree is a photocopy of the degree before it, until eventually the picture gets so blurred that it no longer looks like the Lord. The natural universe comes from the Lord but all of its contents are constant, fixed, and lifeless. In this way it is largely insulated from the Lord’s will.

Now that there are elements that are devoid of the Lord’s life in itself, Fred can be created as an autonomous being. We were created after the substances of the natural world (LJ 9), which supports the theory of evolution. One explanation of the origin of life is that amino acids, the building blocks of protein, were created from chance events of inorganic molecules, in the right conditions, being struck by lightning.[1] Once the building blocks of life were created, it would just take a bunch more chance events (aka: Divine providence) and a few billion years, and, voilà: people exist! This natural process illustrates how it is possible for Fred to be created from substances outside the Lord (but still ultimately from Him). Fred has a lifeless component, which makes him so drastically different from the Lord that he is an autonomous being.

                The creation of beings outside the Lord accomplishes part of the His goal, but we need to be able to love the Lord in return for it to mean anything. Loving someone has to be a free choice, otherwise it is slavery, not love. Without spiritual freedom, Fred has no way of reciprocally joining Himself to the Lord (TCR 845). Spiritual freedom is simply the ability to do what is good and true (DLW 240). In theory, this should not be hard. The Lord is constantly flowing into Fred with His good and truth, so it should be easy for him to choose to act from them. That does not seem very free, though. Is he not just a brainwashed puppet doing what the Lord tells him to? Well, to really be able to choose what is good and true, Fred has to have the option to choose something else. There is no choice if he only has option A.

Fred needs to have an option B in order to be free, and this option comes from having a sense of self. Even though it seems like we should not be able to choose something other than the Lord (the source of all being), choosing Him is only real if we have the option to choose something else. Option B is simply the option to not do what the Lord wants. We are only led by the Lord if we choose to follow heavenly loves, but we are led by love of self if we choose to follow our proprium, which is entirely evil (TCR 400). We have a choice between our proprium (evil), and the Lord. Out proprium is just a sense of self, which comes from being created into the natural world (DP 219). We are surrounded by lifelessness, and because that is all we can see, there is no way for us to truly believe that our life comes from the Lord, so we have the sense that our life is our own. This creates something higher and something lower—self and the Lord—that we can choose between. The necessity of the choice between higher or lower things explains why equilibrium between heaven and hell is so important, and why our freedom is dependent on it (TCR 477). If that equilibrium were completely destroyed, Fred would not be able to return the Lord’s love and so the Lord could not achieve conjunction with him. The natural world makes it possible to be born with a sense of self and thereby have freedom.

                We are free to choose the higher things that conjoin us to the Lord because we start with things from the natural world. Fred was born into the natural world where he started with the lowest things so that it is possible for him to advance into higher things (DP 220). If he started with any good from the Lord attached to and defining his life he would be controlled by that predetermined quality.[2] The lowest things that Fred started with are the goods and truths that are associated with the bodily senses (AC 3691). The physical world around him is lifeless so it does not exercise any influence on him. It is like a toy that he can play with, and how he reacts to it is what matters. He can choose to make it serve him, or to figure out how to serve others with it. When he uses the lowest things for good, the Lord flows into him with good loves, raising him up to higher things. In this fashion he ascends from lowest things to higher things, like climbing up a ladder, step by step (AC 3701). If we decide to work our way up the ladder, we are working towards heavenly loves. This fundamental choice of whether or not to choose good is one that can only be made in the natural world. The natural level of Fred’s mind actually has the most freedom, because it gets to choose whether or not to make the good flowing in from heaven part of his life (AC 3043:2). This is why the natural world is so important. It allows Fred to have eternal conjunction with the Lord in heaven, by choosing that life for himself. Whether we go to heaven or hell is based on the quality of his dominant love, and this love cannot change after he die because it is his very being (TCR 399). He can change this on earth, and so natural life is a relatively short trial to see if he will make something outside himself higher than his own desires, even though his evil nature would have him do otherwise. If he did not start with the lowest things, he could not freely choose prioritize the Lord’s good.

                The natural world gives Fred externals, and this is how he can change his dominant love. But since his dominant love is his very being, how can he choose to do something that goes against it? Changing our dominant love from good to evil is profanation and is rare, but changing it from evil to good is the task we all have. The first step for Fred to become a good person is rejecting evil, but this has to happen in his internal self (TCR 437). Only the Lord knows anything about the countless elements in his internal self (DP 120), so that seems like a hopeless endeavor—he cannot see his internals so how is he supposed to see what is good and what is evil and know what to reject? It is imperative that Fred cannot see his internals. Because he starts with lowest things and has to work his way up to higher things, he would have no desire to remove the evil things in himself. He would see evils as his being and want to protect them. For this reason, only the Lord sees our internals and only He can act on them. However, He can only remove our evils if we decide to resist them in our external self (DP 119). The action of Fred’s body is an expression of his internal and external self (DP 103), so it is through this that he has influence over his dominant loves. The external actions that he does can happen apart from what his loves want him to do. He may dislike resisting evils, such as apologizing to people or not saying spiteful comments, but if he does it the Lord can change his spirit. When he removes evils in his actions the Lord removes countless evils in his soul (DP 119). This process cannot happen in the spiritual world. When people die they leave their externals behind with their bodies, so people in the spiritual world act from their internals (AC 3489). There is no part of them that can be anything other than what their loves are. The lifelessness of the natural world allows for our externals to be different from the life of our internals.

                Though it is necessary to start with, Fred’s natural body has a shelf life. Through death, he has to lose the lower natural elements he thinks of as himself in order to receive the spiritual and eternal elements he was made to receive (DP 220). The natural world is lifeless, so it is limiting. But it is these limits that allow Fred to have life at all. The natural world gives him the ability to freely choose heaven. It allows him to make higher goods and truths part of his life. It allows him to have being that is distinct from the Lord’s, and therefore to receive the Lord’s love if he chooses to reciprocate it. And even after death Fred needs the natural world in order to keep being a person. When he becomes an angel, Fred still retains the purer substances of the natural world, because without it he would lose connection to creation (DP 220). Without connection to creation Fred could not receive the love and wisdom from which the Lord gives life. From beginning to end, and then into eternity, this lifeless world allows us to have life.

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[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14966-volcanic-lightning-may-have-sparked-life-on-earth/

[2] This does not describe remains, which are not attributed to our life because we have not chosen them from freedom.