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with apes. However this may be, the “flood” itself came through a drowning by
self-suffocation. It sounds horrible. But as we all know, thought goes together
with breathing, even today. “It is similar with every person: when anything
opposes his loves, there is a choking of the breath.” (Ibid. 1119) That was the
real flood.
During the ‘flood,’ this became lethal. For all their thoughts were
accompanied by breathing, so closely parallel that they could not think
differently from their breath, nor could they breathe properly if their thought
strayed into a false idea. (Ibid. 607.2,3, 805.2) Their faces shone with their
loves; they could not simulate in the slightest, nor did they wish to. (Ibid. 1118)
But the beginning of ‘evil’ was a human invention. In freedom, human
beings began to wonder if they could discover truth by verifying empirically
what they knew to be true, by experimental input. By saying in effect, “Stop
talking, God. I want to see if what you are saying is true, by myself!!”
They turned away from God, and “looked to themselves” (Charity 204),
and desiring to feel life in oneself (Arcana Coelestia 146), thus by “turning
away from God they implanted the origin of evil in themselves. (Ibid. 444.4)
Evil arose from “the opposite side” – and it is evil even though it is nothing of
good, “not nothing” (Ibid. 444.3), i.e., it has its own malignancy.
With this invention, began the decline we have been tracing, down
through Cain and Enoch, and it now came to a culmination: the thought that
God exists nowhere but in oneself. (Ibid. 1268) This grossest of heresies was
more and more confirmed.
Imagine how this affected their breathing, even more so than with us.
They literally choked to death on the idea that “God exists only in me.” Thus
the Lord let that church “extinguish itself.” (Ibid. 586, 5910) “They became
extinct of themselves.” (Ibid. 607 805) That is how “God destroyed all living
things on the face of the ground” in the flood. (Genesis 7.23) That was the
real flood. Those were the “giants” and the Last Judgment upon them. (Arcana
Coelestia 4183, 4333)
The Lord who alone IS God was, of course, preventing destruction: that is
why He began His Advent at that time! Did you know that? “Lord’s presence
with Noah” meant by “God spoke to NOAH” (Arcana Coelestia 903-905 added
emphasis), was the start of the Advent.
“The Lord would have been obliged to come into the world immediately
after the fall of the Most Ancient Church, called Man or Adam, for there was
an immediate prophecy of the LORD’S Advent. (Genesis 3.15). And what is
more, the human race of that time could not otherwise have been saved.”
(Arcana Coelestia 2523)
So the Lord began His Advent, preserving from destruction by
simultaneously instructing the remnant of the Most Ancient Church and
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