Swedenborgian Community Interfaith Podcast

A meditation for inner and outer peace.

Coming into harmony with the universe and our Higher Power sounds aspirational and nice, but I think many people believe it’s beyond human capability or, at least, their own. Sometimes when we assess our mental or spiritual situation it may seem disheartening due to our lingering issues, or we may feel that there’s too much chaos going on to ever tap into a true beingness at harmony with the play of the natural realm and God. The trick, though, seems to be realizing that the part of us that says it’s impossible and feels at odds with things isn’t us and really isn’t even a friend, it’s a voice that we feel is intimate but it’s also an illusory manifestation of us not understanding our true selves. Instead, we must turn to Beingness itself within to learn our true nature and give up our attachment to listening to that false teacher we’ve come to call “me.”

The world strives to convince us of the necessity of how we often do things: with an anxious headiness and a desperate grasping, saying that one day all our striving and yearning might get us what we need to feel at ease and fulfilled. But this cause and effect doesn’t add up, as Jesus said, God’s yoke is light and easy. In actuality we are already fulfilled where we sit, no other cause is needed. Jesus served and serves as an embodiment of Divinity, the very thing that we are all called to by birthright, asking us to turn away from our distortive thinking. Unfortunately, with our adopted sense of division and false selfhood, we grasp at our minds’ illusions and yearnings, not realizing we are much greater than our picture of ourselves – meant to be aware of our oneness with the Father, with Jesus, with the Buddha, with each other, and they with us.

Why we should let go of our false ideas of self, according to Emanuel Swedenborg's book Divine Providence and our host, Cory. We continue our exploration of this fantastic book, which you can download on our website SwedenborgianCommunity.org.

As we start to awaken to the Divinity at our core, it’s typical that we begin by realizing there are greater truths out there than we may have thought, and come to centre on a specific set of spiritual truths that are helping to wake us up, deepen our walk, and that have spoken to us in a way that may make more sense to us than others we’ve heard about. According to the 18th-century scientist-turned-sage, Emanuel Swedenborg, these spiritual-natural truths are represented by John the Baptist in the well-known biblical story – calling us to let go of our sins and be baptized, promising that there are greater truths, a greater connection to Jesus, to come. Indeed, Swedenborg believed that all the Biblical stories (or any truly scriptural story, for that matter) represent more universal things than we often give them credit for and are not limited to describing one religious walk, he supported these claims by exploring all the ways our scriptures keep saying just that!

A meditation for inner peace and reconnecting with our Self.

The key reason we treat these feelings and thoughts as vastly important is because we have (and are often encouraged to have) a false idea of ourselves and what’s important. Worry and fear arise when we feel a threat to our existence, something we inevitably feel all the time when we identify with our idea of our reputation, our fleeting sense of glory, our inevitably passing bodies, our thoughts and intellect, as well as all the other false derivations and morphing images we have about ourselves and what’s important. The sages tell us that these false ideas of self and our yearning for the things that feed them, disconnect us with our true selves, fogging up our inner life because we centre on the passing mist instead of the sun of consciousness within.

The angel in our reading said, “Do not be afraid, I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people,” but who exactly is this reading referring to when it says “all”? Often, the Christmas story’s impact is understood to be limited to “Christians.” But perhaps this understanding is missing the point entirely – that God’s Advent in history and continuing Advent in each of our lives is meant to uplift everyone, a phenomenon that’s always present, working to empower hope, peace, love, and ultimately, our joy. Moreover, this statement starts by enjoining us to release fear, pointing to God’s call to let go of our false ideas of self and turn to the reality of God’s Advent within us, no matter our tradition.

This guided meditation is designed to encourage a reconnection with our inner connection to peace, clarity, and transcendence - to wake us up to the present moment and our intrinsic connection to Divinity as the core of our awareness.

I find it interesting, or perhaps devastating, that so many groups within traditions that espouse a loving God turn toward an interpretation of it that damns or condemns all others. Whether it be large veins of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or others, we all have a tendency to identify with our judgmental, dismissive, and controlling mind and let that guide our religiosity (or atheism) and life at times. When we start to let this go the shared centre between many of our traditions, the importance of being oriented toward loving compassion, is easily revealed. This week’s Christian Advent theme is exactly this topic, and today we explore how love is intrinsic to our very consciousness and how God is love and the light of consciousness itself, repeatedly asking us to come into our similarly loving and non-divisive nature.

We all hope. We hope for this desire or that, for this justice or that award. And we hope we are safe in any situation. The hopes that we have can paint a picture of what we are about in our lives, what our gods are. Unfortunately, most hopes undermine our sense of peace and compassion as they are centered on fleeting things: our bodies, our reputations, our lust, our memory, and on. Indeed, the scriptures of many traditions share in the idea that our shared hope should be on the increase of love, peace, and wisdom itself, since, as we come to hope for these things, they naturally become more apparent within us and then, our hope transforms into the confidence and trust inherent in these eternal attributes.

Both the U.S.’s Veterans’ Day and Canada’s Remembrance Day celebrate and/or mourn the veterans in our midst and those that have passed. What it means to be a soldier is different for many people, and I’m honoured to have had a number of veterans in my family share their various experiences and wisdom over the years. Both my grandfathers, my aunt, two of my uncles, and my brother, all have had both inspiring and critical things to say about the armed forces, and all have seemed to believe that serving their country helped to craft them into who they are. No matter our politics, this week we ought to honour the sacrifices and efforts made by our soldiers of all stripes, as well as honour the peace that most of these strive and yearn for as we seek to dispel the violence that so often takes their lives.Read more here: https://swedenborgiancommunity.org/blog/remembrance

Today we dive back into the 18th-century mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg’s book Divine Providence – exploring the section where he tries to explain the connections between providence and our rationality and freedom as human beings. Download the book for free here (pdf): https://swedenborg.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/NCE_DivineProvidence_portable.pdf

With roots in both paganism and early Christianity, Halloween (meaning “Saints’ Evening”) is a fascinating holiday that I think we shouldn’t be shy about celebrating. Many of the various, seemingly random elements of our Halloween rituals seem to have roots in the past, from bobbing for apples to going door to door asking for treats. Even its more disparaged aspects have roots in ancient ceremonial practices, such as dressing up like the dead (“saints”) and even putting on skimpy outfits (many ancient ceremonies were in the nude or semi-nude, albeit not necessarily Christian ones for All Hallows’ Eve). Further, the roots of the tradition tie into a celebration and mourning for our lost loved ones - our personal saints - and into an awareness of our own mortality, with a hope for personal transformation: transcending, avoiding, and escaping evil spirits and deathly habits.

Are there many paths to heaven, or is it only through one faith? We share the mystic Swedenborg's perspective that all of us have a deep connection to heaven within, informed by his many visions of the afterlife as we continue to explore his book, "Divine Providence."

Our pets bring blessings beyond description through their loving connection and by just being an example of being, enough so that perhaps we should all start calling them our companions, compatriots, or family, as many already do! Whether we recognize it or not, the beingness of pets is a key way that pets bring greater health into our lives, helping to settle our minds, comfort us, and ground us more in the moment. Of course, all their loving cuteness, connection, and fun, as well as the other blessings they bring, help with that too! This is also why it can be so harrowing to lose a pet, missing that comforting, individual presence, and love.

Most of us carry some amount of trauma and trauma response with us, even if we don’t realize it. Traumas aren’t always as easily diagnosed as X, Y, or Z, and can even be sourced from general social structures, such as the negative impacts of capitalism or of certain social norms that haven’t held space for us. Lesser known or appreciated, however, is the growth that can be found through healing from trauma and using the challenges in our lives as a springboard for positive transformation. Unlike the negative effects of trauma, these positive responses aren’t typically immediate, and often take years or lifetimes to grow and fruit, although they can be helped along through mindfulness work and the power of our God-given presence. Similarly, our earth is now poised to continue its plunge into humanmade disaster through global warming and our negative transformation of ecosystems, or we can accept this earthly trauma as an opportunity to wake up and engage with our natural selves and world to create a time of gr

For such a relatively unknown mystical sage, the 18th-century’s Emanuel Swedenborg sure has had a huge impact on the realm of Western art, partly due to his interfaith-Christian writings being some of the first known Western literature that took very seriously the deep integration and expression of the Divine in nature. He believed that all natural forms were symbolic of facets of God(dess), with all created things expressing aspects of the vast divine unity of love and wisdom, expressed in form and function. William Blake, George Inness, Helen Keller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hilma af Klint, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name a few, were artists deeply inspired by Swedenborg’s writings and some were the spearheads of new forms of art, among other monumental achievements. Through the inspiration of Swedenborg and especially from their lives walking with Divinity, these artists expressed in different ways how the God known-by-many-names is expressed throughout the world around us, and particularly, how each of us is

We continue our exploration of Emanuel Swedenborg's 18th-century book, Divine Providence, free to download on our website.

Trust can be a tricky thing, especially when we’re talking about trusting Divinity itself, the God known by many names. Is God real and does God care? What are you entrusting her/him with? Ultimately, trusting Divinity amounts to trusting the present moment, while letting go of anxiety and yearnings for the future or anything outside the present moment itself. It amounts to letting go of our controlling natures, our judgmentalness and tendencies to hold others and ourselves against the grindstone – especially when we think we have a good reason. Trusting God is trusting life itself, which invites us to enter the present moment with fuller awareness of our unity with everything but with less rambling thought, noting the transient and almost dream-like quality of our own perception of the world, and coming into a sense of greater peace, wholeness, and compassion.