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New Jerusalem about the inner and outer self instead. Note the presence now
of a flow from one statement to the next, with connective tissue and logical
markers that I have italicized here – in fact you can ignore the references and
read this as regular prose.
The outer things in us are relatively remote from the Divine, so they are more
obscure and general: 6451. They are also relatively disorganized: 996, 3855. Inner
things are more perfect because they are closer to the Divine: 5146, 5147. There are
thousands upon thousands of things in our inner self that appear as one general
thing in the outer self: 5707. So the more inward our thinking and perception are,
the clearer they are: 5920. It follows then that we should concentrate on what lies in
the deeper levels: 1175, 4464. (New Jerusalem 47:2)
So, given that Swedenborg wrote a rough copy and then a fair copy of the
works he published, was it not enough that he wrote out the 4,563 pages of
Secrets of Heaven by hand, with a quill pen, twice? No, he also went back and
indexed it three times.
We are welcome, of course, to omit the resulting material, but let’s at least
hold in our hearts that a lot of work went into it. It is like a couple, and one
says to the other: “Did you by any chance throw out the stuff in the brown pot
from the fridge in the basement?” “Yeah, it was just old cabbage.” “Well, that
old cabbage was actually sauerkraut I was making! I pounded that for hours
and it has been brewing for three weeks!” “Oops! Sorry about that.”
Likewise with Swedenborg’s indexlike material. It may look at first like old
cabbage to us, but we should at least realize that he worked hard on that and
felt it was important.
New Content
But even more significant than the sheer amount of work it took is that the
resulting material contains things Swedenborg didn’t say anywhere else. This
is not generally recognized. But anyone who has worked at checking cross-
references in Swedenborg’s works can attest that doing so is a nightmare! Why?
Let me give you an example from a parenthetical cross-reference in Secrets
of Heaven 9410. Note the wording here in the redesigned standard edition:
(That regeneration goes on up to the end of man’s life in the world, and afterward to
eternity, see n. 8548-8553, 8635-8640, 8742-8747, 8853-8858, 8958-8969.)
So here is a statement followed by not one, not two, but 36 references in
five groups. Imagine you are the reference checker. “Okay, here we go!” you
say to yourself. “To verify these references all I need is to find that statement in
those passages and put in a checkmark.” So, you read No. 8548. Well, it is about
the need for rebirth in order to go to heaven. But the passage says nothing
about regeneration going on throughout our life and after death to eternity.
Nos. 8549, 8550, and so on are also about regeneration, but say nothing of the
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