When Tiger Woods turned pro and won his first Master’s tournament by such a wide margin I remember a sportscaster saying, “Tiger is playing on a different course from everybody else.” In other words, Tiger seemed to be playing on par three holes while all the other golfers were playing par five holes.
This is the same feeling I get when reading theologian Emanuel Swedenborg’s profound interpretation of the biblical narratives. He is simply “reading a different document” than everybody else.
So like Tiger Woods, who was actually playing golf on the same course, but from a higher level of God-given ability, Swedenborg read Scripture from a higher level of mind, also from a God-given ability.
Because inwardly, we humans are spirits living in a physical body, we all possess a spiritual mind deep within our natural—or worldly—mind. While living on the terrestrial orb called planet earth we tend to use our natural mind and its cognitive function when reading Holy Scripture. However, angelic beings read God’s Holy Word from the cognitive abilities of their spiritual minds.
In God’s Infinite Wisdom, He designed Scripture to be read by both men and angels—its stories contain deeper levels of meaning so that it can be interpreted literally by man’s natural mind and spiritually by angel’s minds.
What does it mean to interpret Scripture from a higher spiritual mind?
Angels live in a realm beyond time and space, therefore they can have no understanding of the physical events described by the literal meanings of the words used in the Bible stories. Instead, they derive an elevated meaning by which the biblical narratives remove themselves from all physical descriptions.
In the same way that the human spirit rises up after the death of the physical body, the literal words of the biblical stories pass away and their higher meaning arises when contemplated by the spiritual cognitive functions of angelic minds.
A simple example of this process of mental distillation is the phrase in Genesis “Let there be light.” Angels understand this statement not as God creating physical light in the universe but as God’s spiritual activity to bring humans out of the mental darkness in our inner world through enlightenment. In other words, angels interpret everything described in Scripture from a psycho-spiritual equivalent. Therefore the Genesis story of creation can serve God’s higher purpose of describing the spiritual process that takes place in a person’s inner world when he or she is being re-created and made anew.
It is the Lord God’s ultimate hope that the human race will someday make the extra effort to tap into their spiritual minds and have access to the deeper revelations given to angels. Such an event would bring about the Lord’s Second Coming—not as a cosmological event but a paradigm shift and upheaval within the human heart and mind.
As chef Emeril Lagasse says on his popular cooking show, “kick it up a notch!”