Love & Light

By Clayten Tylor

This book examines Swedenborg's spiritual experiences of Heaven and Hell from an esoteric perspective as a feeling, the language of angels and spirits. To perceive this spiritual feeling, begins the regeneration process that develops an inner perception of celestial love, as spiritual light. When we can perceive love and light as a feeling as it expresses through our physical senses, we can start to affect our own psycho-spiritual development to evolve from a sensual to a spiritual feeling of conjugial love. As we examine love and light as a spiritual feeling through heaven and hell, we too begin to experience a deeper spiritual awareness, which can initiate a personal communication with the Divine, as a Conjugial Love experience. With creative self-expression as our goal, we can take regeneration into our own hands to speed-up our own evolution, while we transmute the forces that block the spiritual feeling of the Brotherhood of Mankind, and thereby, together, manifest the feeling of Heaven on Earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365979729

Book preview

Table of Contents

Love & Light

Copyright © 2017 Clayten Tylor

Dedication

Acknowledgment

Preface

Ten Practices

Introduction

Remembering Dreams (Exercise #1)

Useful Garden

Light is Darkness

1 Sphere of Light

Acknowledging Love (Exercise #2)

Perceiving Love

Denying Love

Casting Hell

2 Hell is Our Feeling

Heaven & Hell are Feelings

Thoughts Create Hell

Expanding & Contracting

Measuring our Use

The Ego (Proprium)

Purification

Terror & Dread

Inundation of Temptations

3 The Heartbeat

Separation of Heaven from Hell

The Devil & his Crew

Intention (Exercise #3)

Profaning Holy Things

Logic is Hell

Sacrifice is False

Zeal vs. Anger

The Dread of the False

Lust causes Falsity

Distinguishing Good & Truth

Freedom through Influx

The Influx of Peace or Anxiety

Love as Peace vs. Lust as Anxiety

4 Spiritual Senses Guide us

Sense of Smell

Sense of Sight

Hearing Love

Sense of Taste

Touched by Love

Love as a Jewel

Demons Within (Exercise #4)

Primogeniture

Self-derived Intelligence (Exercise #5)

Acknowledging Good

5 Here Now

Birthing Love from Lust

Effort

Safety in the Ark

Wisdom & Intuition

Casting-out the False (Exercise #6)

Mind-Chatter Puffed-up

Mind becomes Transparent

Two become One Mind

6 Heaven or Hell a Choice

Faith Created Anew

Feeling & Silence (Exercise #7)

Lust & Falsity

Selfishness is Hell

Lust is Self-Love

Pride in our Love of Self

Self can be Saved

Faith is Power

7 Entering Hell

Mates in Hell (Exercise #8)

Letting Spirits Be

Devil & Satan

Power & Wisdom

8 The Equilibrium

Elevated Feeling

Love on Earth

Heart & Breath (Exercise #9)

Love & Innocence

Two Gates

The Eight Ways

Compassionate Soul

9 Measuring Goodness (Exercise #10)

Language of Love

Communicating Love

Love & Faith Become One

Faith Must Become Love

Spiritual Rainbow

Our Aura

Twelve Colors

Twelve States

Twelve Feelings

Common Mother

Summation: Our Daily Exercise

Abbreviations & Bibliography

Glossary of Terms

Love & Light

by

Clayten Tylor

Copyright © 2017 Clayten Tylor

Love & Light

OEBPS/images/image0001.jpg

All rights reserved

Ninth Edition

ISBN#: 978-1-365-97972-9

Standard Copyright License

A special thank you to the Swedenborg Foundation for their generous approval to use the copyrighted material quoted in this book.

Dedication

To my mother, Mary, and to my friend, Kasandra — my two earthly Angels!

Also, to Todd and Maria — my two earthy Devils!

Acknowledgment

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Emanuel!

Preface

Emanuel Swedenborg first came to me in a dream and wanted me to write a book. He said that he had been trying to communicate with absolutely anyone, but no one could hear him. He had been waiting for me to become familiar enough with his writings so that I could write about my spiritual experiences.

During that time, Swedenborg kept saying that due to the opposing factions most people had become less interested in true spiritual experiences. Therefore, he wanted me to self-publish — as he did with his own writings. He said, it was because the book would probably never sell, or ever be accepted as a realizable truth within my lifetime. But at least it would be in print on earth as an idea, if only ever as a spiritual fantasy.

I did not think that I could write the kind of book that I thought Swedenborg wanted, because I did not know enough about religion. However, he told me to just start by writing about my own personal spiritual experiences, and he would then direct me to the most appropriate quotation.

I had already been preparing for about twenty years to write a book about my spiritual experiences. I had amassed hundreds of pages of notes about my dreams and visions, and I began to sort them into chapters. Furthermore, I would start writing by describing a dream or other experience, and then get dumbfounded when I would open one of Swedenborg's books to find the perfect quote.

While writing, I would first ask myself a question, and then a word or a quotation from one of his books would jump off the page. Sometimes I would just look at a specific word, and immediately that word would be spoken out loud on the radio. I would gasp at the coincidence, which continued day after day for several years.

In my experience, writing or talking about spiritual subjects can be a very alienating topic in our society. We have lost our desire, to communicate with the spiritual realm, and therefore, our ability. Thus, a materialistic person, who might not yet be able to perceive these higher love influences, scoffs at anyone who talks about these things.

Swedenborg tried to explain to me at the very beginning that there were opposing factions, and that each side had a different understanding of spiritual things. Yet, neither side had actually experienced anything that might be considered spiritual, or thought that they might even need to develop their abilities to communicate with angels or spirits — or even him. Eventually, what I think that he meant by the opposing factions was actually an inner battle between heaven and hell.

Although, all of Swedenborg's writings are about spiritual experiences that he personally witnessed, he said in a dream that no one in the church were actually believers, just readers of the Word, as they could not actually hear him. (Funny, I bet all spirits have this issue with humans, not being able to perceive them).

Spiritual experiences cannot be confirmed with any real credibility. Therefore, Swedenborg's writings offer me a means to verify spiritual truths without having to prove them to the scientific community. I understand now that the opposing factions are also between science and religion, of which Swedenborg's writings, as well as his own life seem to straddle both of these two opposing viewpoints: the first half of his life spent in science, and the latter part of his life writing about spirituality.

Personally, because of my interest in spiritual development using esoteric Astrology and Numerology as guides, I am well aware of the skepticism of people who have never been exposed to this line of thought before. Especially, regarding the idea that spiritual awareness, as foresight and insight, is something that can be learned, particularly after our discovery of the feeling of conjugial love.

Intuition is perhaps the closest acceptable term that can be used to define this kind of spiritual awareness, which flows in directly from within. To me, self-improvement is the spiritual development of an intuitive awareness of this guiding spiritual feeling of good as an inner state of peace and silence.

This book does not require that you have any previous spiritual enlightenment experiences to perceive past the appetites and pleasures into the more exalted spiritual affections of conjugial love. When the rational mind opens to the spiritual affections, the whole personality gets changed automatically.

Not to confuse the word affection, with the word emotion, I have chosen to use the word feeling. I use it to indicate when the rational mind is in a peaceful spiritual state of knowing. In this sense, it should be called as esoteric feeling, because it exists even without knowing it does.

I do hope that my interpretations of Swedenborg's quotations, and the personal experiences that I use as examples to describe the feeling of conjugial love will offer you some insight to bring about your own enlightenment experience. In this way it will convince you, and through you benefit others, which will eventually reveal the perception of the Divine as the spiritual feeling of mutual love — and thereby bring about a global conjugial love experience for absolutely everybody.

Ten Practices

OEBPS/images/image0002.jpg The common mother, is a term used to describe the effect of the prolific principle. It states that everything in the spiritual and natural worlds is insertable. It means that everything gets implanted by an influx to make possible inherent life.

The insertable aspect, is the common father or masculine principle of multiplication. It gives circulation to everything. The common mother is the receptive feminine principle of fructification. It responds to the active force, by exhaling a subtle penetrating spiritual essence.

The spiritual perception of the common mother, is obtained at the end of the regeneration process. It happens after the ego has been transformed through regeneration from selfish to selfless. The common mother then gets called the spiritual Earth because we perceive her in our body of flesh and blood, as love. When that love emits light, it is then called the spiritual Church, because we perceive love as the underlying essence of all physical form.

The soul is from the father, and the common mother is the feeling of the Soul's body. She is called the spiritual earth, when we first perceive Her, but the spiritual church when we share Her love. She is the principle of affection, on the path of return to the feeling of Divine love.

The common mother, has been ignored and mistaken, or perhaps just unrecognized until these words have been linked. She is the spiritual sense of the Word. She is the affection of good, flowing into the affection of truth on her return path through the physical earth into the spiritual feeling of love, and reuniting as One, in an affection of conjugial love.

To that end, this book contains ten exercises, or ten spiritual practices to help perceive the spiritual influx of the common mother. Our ego has been created from a possessive love; and the common mother is just below that separate sense of self. The state of separateness is why the body requires a full night's sleep to restore to a state of wholeness. Doing these exercises, is a reprieve from the exhausting pull of the ego, and over time the pull becomes less. Eventually, we can restore ourselves to a state of peace by a momentary attunement. The ultimate attunement is to the affection of conjugial love, and it transforms our ego into being more than just human. When we learn to become silent, the effortless feeling of the eternal moment breaks through as an influx of conjugial love.

I cannot guarantee that you will experience the very highest heavenly state termed, conjugial love. But the one thing I can promise you is that once a personal communication begins through your dreams, you will start to feel your true self, as the affection of love. Then, you will always be guided by the intuitive spiritual feeling of the common mother.

Our goal is to experience the common mother, first as the spiritual earth, and then as a spiritual church, and finally, uniting in a conjugial love experience with the Divine.

Ten Practices: Attunement to the Common Mother

  1) Remembering Dreams

  2) Acknowledging Love

  3) Intention

  4) Demons Within

  5) Self-derived Intelligence

  6) Casting-out the False

  7) Feeling and Silence

  8) Mates in Hell

  9) Heart & Breath

10) Measuring Goodness

Introduction

After writing my first book, called The Feeling, which was similarly about Swedenborg's theology, but from an esoteric or feeling perspective, I had absolutely no intention of ever writing a second book using his quotes; and especially not after the first copy got sold, and the person requested a refund. (It has since undergone many revisions).

Swedenborg's writings are not, very well known by the general population; and they are not read by anyone that I personally know today. I am also not a great writer, and therefore, I am the last person who should try to give a modern day interpretation to the religious terminology used in his writings. Yet, I would also like you to know that since someone who is religious would never read this book, and anyone who is spiritual would never read anything religious, then this book in itself is an act of love.

As an Esoteric Astrologer, I am accustomed to the isolation of being misunderstood. Swedenborg experienced a similar isolation, when he switched from writing about scientific topics to writing about his spiritual experiences.

I enjoy reading Swedenborg's writings. Yet, if it were not for the life-changing dreams that I experienced because of also understanding his writings, I might have never written either of these books. In fact, it was my most recent dream that made me think that perhaps I had no choice in the matter. Maybe my dreams were prodding me-on though my sleep since this particular dream was about a terrifying bus accident.

OEBPS/images/image0003.jpg Every occurrence in life, however accidental, is brought to pass by some cause originating in the spiritual world (D.P. 70).

In this dream, it was a dark and rainy night. I got onto an empty bus and decided to lie down on the bench seating on the right-hand side near the back. The bus headed downtown and had to go over a bridge. When the bus approached the bridge on-ramp it had to make a slight right-turn, but since we were going quite fast, and the road was very wet, we began to slide sideways. I could feel the bus was about to rollover. In my dream I began to pray, asking, please don't let the bus roll over. Yet, the bus did roll, but not once or twice, but three times as it slid towards the edge of the bridge. I prayed again asking, please don't let the bus slide off the edge of the bridge. Miraculously, the bus came to a stop on its side. The windows were all smashed and the broken glass was all over the pavement. Surprisingly, I was still lying comfortably on the bench seating, only now, because the bus was on its side, I was actually lying on the back part of the bench seating, and everything else on the bus got destroyed.

I realized that if there were anyone else on the bus, even a driver, they would have been thrown out of their seats and killed. Yet, I was still lying-down very comfortably with my hands folded over my heart. I was both unhurt, but more particularly, undisturbed. In fact, because of my position laying-down on the bench seating, I hardly noticed anything as the bus rolled. I did notice my body shifting to the back part of the bench seating as the bus rolled repeatedly three times while I prayed.

OEBPS/images/image0004.jpg When I did wake up, I felt that it was just a very terrifying dream. Yet, as I thought about it during the day, and began to draw the angle of the bus on some paper, I realized that there was not another seat on the bus where I would have been safe. In fact, if I had not been lying down, I would have been killed.

While thinking about the importance of dreams, I realized that my unconsciousness had devised a dream that could have had such dire consequences if it had been real. If only as a mathematical equation, based on the chances of my survival, then this dream was spectacularly symbolic. Moreover, since I had never prayed in a dream before, to me, it was a sign that my life was no longer my own. Perhaps I needed to devote the remaining years of my life to interpreting Swedenborg's writings.

Let us look at this dream without the fear, to examine how I arrived at this. Since the bus was on its side, it says side signifies good (A.E. 336), as well as, signifies spiritual love (A.E. 365); and to lie down, signifies conjunction and consociation (A.E. 252). Yet, for the term conjunction it says, the conjunction with man is according to the state of his thought, and thence of his affection (A.C. 4211).

The term consociation implies a feeling as a vibration. Thus, it says, all things are consociated most exquisitely, according to all the differences of love, and of mutual love and faith, originating therein: and in the hells, according to all the differences of lusts, and of fantasies, thence derived (A.C. 2449).

The closest spiritual correspondence for the term to roll is to roll away signifies the removal, of all the falsity, which intercepted and hindered approach to him, and thus to open divine truth (A.E. 400). Therefore, to roll away the stone from over the Wells' mouth signifies to uncover the Word as to its interior contents (5798).

In this book we are talking about an essence of spiritual light being revealed to us as a spiritual feeling of love through our dreams. Thus, here it says, once that small membrane of the eye has been rolled away a kind of light appears, though dim, experiences a state of calm (184).

By remembering our dreams helps us to perceive the vibration of the Word as the feeling of conjugial love. It is the feeling of love made holy by a spiritual knowing. It is sanctified with light while we dream until it becomes a feeling of love for others. Yet, whether dreams are important, or we make them important by trying to understand them, I do not know, but the first thing to do is to start the habit of remembering them.

Remembering Dreams (Exercise #1)

I was not always able to remember my dreams; I actually had to teach myself. Teaching yourself to remember dreams is not easy to recondition yourself. Yet, all dreams need to be noted. Some people remember only some of their dreams, while others do not remember any. I had to pray before sleep to ask, please let me remember my dreams. I also had to train myself to write them down immediately, just a word or a picture in my dream-diary that I keep handy beside my bed.

I like to spend the day trying to remember different aspects of a dream to discover what it really means spiritually. Then I would write an interpretation of the dream, as if deciphering a personal communication from the higher self. Remembering dreams by writing them down quickly is an important tip to begin to make a deeper connection to the spiritual world. Without a dream re-call there can be no real sense of personal communication with the spiritual feeling of conjugial love as being from a higher consciousness. I examine dreams as if they are a message from my future self.

Through the process of remembering my own dreams, I uncovered the memory of many re-occurring dreams. One of those dreams was that I was always running down the street in slow motion trying to catch a bus, or being on a bus that was going nowhere. This slow-motion bus dream ended after I realized that the bus meant cannabis. Thus, smoking flax, signifies a little truth from good (A.E. 951).

Yet, even alcohol, caffeine, sugar, prescription drugs, or any other blood-altering substance can distort spiritual truth and block a clear memory of a dream. Especially, in the case of a dream with a spiritual message. The blood needs to be pure to remember dreams, or to be able to feel the birth of spiritual love, which strengthens through the feeling of dreams. All non-food substances affect each of us differently, but try to do without them to feel the withdrawal effects for yourself.

Swedenborg seemed to live on coffee and bread, but there is also not much mention of his personal habits regarding alcohol, other than it was used for social occasions. His dream-diary mentions many dreams with fanciful figures lurking in the background, and one of those dreams does mention him drinking wine during a feast-full dinner. Thus, to make a feast signifies worship of the Lord from a joyful mind (7093); also a feast signifies the adulteration of good and truth (A.E. 481).

There are not many details regarding Swedenborg's meditative process used in his spiritual practices. He seemed to begin by first interpreting some religious text, and then have many inner spiritual visions take place as a result.

At first, it takes time to meditate. You might have to give up pleasures or even divert energy from making money to make the time. I used to spend all of my time working and making money, but meditation was difficult during those times. Yet, just like with dreams, with meditation you realize that you are the one that is being meditated, by being brought into an attunement with the spiritual realm, into a spiritual feeling without time. Yet, once that spiritual feeling has been established, it can be recalled at any time, and then meditation takes no time, but becomes a state of being.

Useful Garden

OEBPS/images/image0005.jpg During those times, I would spend my free time doing inexpensive creative pursuits, such as painting with watercolors, or gardening. For several years, I lived in a rental apartment and spent my free time on my balcony growing flowers. I built