Divine Gravity,

going with the flow, and self-help psychology

Everywhere Present

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

Church last week offered a lesson in gravity. We learned about the continuous pull of the Lord’s Divine Love in our lives, how it lifts us upwards, drawing us ever towards Him to whatever extent we’re willing to go. The text was John 12:32:

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to Myself.”

Who knew He meant that so literally? But in the doctrinal work titled True Christianity, Emanuel Swedenborg describes the reality of Divine gravity:

In actual fact there is a kind of field that constantly emanates from the Lord, which pulls all toward heaven. It fills the entire spiritual world and the entire physical world. It is like a strong current in the ocean that secretly carries ships along. All people who believe in the Lord and live by his commandments come into that field or current and are lifted up. Those who do not believe, though, are not willing to enter it. They move themselves to the sides and are there caught in a flow that leads down into hell.

Photo by Timur Romanov on Unsplash

So we have the choice to place ourselves in that Divine current and go with its gentle, powerful flow . . . or not. We can decide instead to keep to the edges, move with the counter-current that will take us to a very different eternity, one ruled by unexamined self-absorption and unrepentant rancor—by the desire to control, to force our will on other people, trying to be the god of our universe and theirs. A “resting” place in hell. (Kind of like this world, but with no hope of anything better. Shudder.)

To make his point, the minister first offered a brief lesson in natural gravity noting that it’s actually an invisible force of attraction between objects of mass. He pointed out that Divine gravity, too, is an invisible force of attraction—that of the everywhere-present Divine Love. And he emphasized that to be brought along . . . which is to say, uplifted . . . by its current we need only to let go of what weighs us down—resentment, discontent, fear, lack of trust in God. Yes, “only” those pesky inner demons that hold us in thrall to our worst selves.

It didn’t occur to me until I’d left church that the minister never mentioned repentance, normally standard fare when discussing the path to heaven. But then it also occurred to me that the concept was embedded in his point. Because how else do we let go of any of our burdens if we don’t first stop to examine our heart and mind, to see what’s weighing us down? It’s only when we recognize and acknowledge whatever self-centering thoughts and feelings inspire our words and deeds that we can make the choice to give them up, seek to do better. It’s a different framing, but that laying down of our burdens at God’s feet is the activity of repentance: when we decide to reject the dark allure of self, when we endeavor to let go of hell-inspired attitudes and patterns, we turn ourselves towards His Love and Light. We allow ourselves to be drawn by the Divine gravity, uplifted, in time, into His promised peace.

It’s not for nothing that people say Let go and let God.

That dying to the self is the whole work of repentance.

On a Hay ride

Recently I started reading Louise Hay (1926 - 2017). She’s considered one of the originators of the self-help movement and her 1976 book, Heal Your Body, launched her to fame as the queen of positive affirmations. As you can imagine, optimism was her wheelhouse.

I’ve always held a squeamish view of the affirmations approach to problem solving, not because I think gloom and doom get us further or positive thinking is useless, but because I’ve worried that something crucial might be missed by looking too insistently through rose-colored glasses.

Plus . . . it feels . . . naive. Like deciding to live as a sweet, innocent lamb, trusting, vulnerable, unwaveringly optimistic . . . who might get led to slaughter for lack of a grasping the reality of harsh reality. Skepticism has always seemed the savvier, safer, more obvious bet.

However . . .

I’ve been pondering the personal costs of looking through the glass too darkly. And I’ve found myself surprisingly intrigued by what I’m reading. Because Louise Hay, scorned “pseudoscience” champion though she is, was on to something with her insistence that our suffering is really a manifestation of our inner woundedness, of our inability to see and accept ourselves as worthy. As enough.

The basis of her idea regarding “dis-ease” (as she termed it) is that all our natural world experiences are really the expression of our inward thought patterns, so healing can be found from within by becoming conscious of those patterns and changing them. She speaks in vague terms of God, steers clearly in a New Age direction of the Universe as the divine cosmic force that leads awakening souls to their highest potential through a series of lifetimes.

I don’t share her belief in reincarnation and my concept of a higher power is God Incarnate, but I do think she understood the metaphysical connection between the natural and spiritual worlds—that the spiritual world is the realm of causes and the natural world the realm of effects. As Swedenborg puts it in his work Divine Love and Wisdom #134:

For all things which exist in the natural world are effects, and all things which exist in the spiritual world are the causes of these effects. No natural thing exists which does not derive its cause from the spiritual.

Louise Hay believed that our thoughts create our reality. In fact she claimed that we literally (albeit unintentionally) think ourselves into “dis-ease” and so we can think ourselves out of it. Sounds a little nutty, I know. I don’t totally buy it, because how would you explain a newborn who contracts a severe illness or a child born with a congenital disorder? How would you understand this for someone harmed through an accident, natural disaster, or childhood abuse? I suspect she believed that in such cases unresolved past life issues are manifesting in the present one and can be resolved through awakening to that fact. But as I said, I don’t believe our spirits are repeatedly reborn into this natural world, so that explanation wouldn’t do it for me.

Setting aside that most radically extreme claim, though, and sticking with the basic—that our natural world, all its phenomena and experiences, are manifestations of spiritual realities—I see truth in her ideas.

For one thing, we’ve all heard miracle stories of people facing health catastrophes who overcome the odds, seemingly by embracing a resolutely positive outlook. In fact I recently heard an astonishing story of Jordan Peterson’s wife, who was diagnosed a few years ago with a very rare form of lymphoma that has a 100% mortality rate. Or it did. She beat the cancer, and one major change to her life was wholly embracing prayer through the rosary. It’s a pretty remarkable story, especially in the details.

Something that stood out to me is what Tammy Peterson says happened when she broke the news of her terminal diagnosis to their son: “I saw terrible grief in his eyes, and somehow that grief reflected back to me his love for me, and I realized that I did not have that same feeling of worthiness for myself.”

Louise Hay’s core claim was that “Everyone suffers from self-hatred and guilt. The bottomline for everyone is, ‘I’m not good enough.’” All of her philosophy was built around awareness of the fundamental sense of unworthiness that all people deal with. And she believed it is the underlying cause of all “dis-ease.” In You Can Heal Your Life she says:

The only thing we are ever dealing with is a thought, and a thought can be changed. No matter what the problem is, our experiences are just outer effects of inner thoughts. Even self-hatred is only hating a thought you have about yourself. You have a thought that says, “I’m a bad person.” This thought produces a feeling, and you buy into the feeling. However, if you don’t have the thoughts, you won’t have the feeling. And thoughts can be changed. Change the thought, and the feeling must go.

I’m totally with her in her assessment of how pervasive and pernicious is our inner woundedness as humans. In fact, I would posit that the struggle to experience worthiness is an inescapable part of our spiritual journey here because none of us comes out of childhood unscathed. None of us experiences perfect parenting or enters into adulthood whole-hearted and free of spiritual work. The only perfect parent is the One Whose eyes we need to learn to see ourselves through.

Interestingly, Swedenborg’s revelation aligns with Hay’s perspective that our minds are the key to our healing path. In True Christianity 156 we learn:

Our "spirit" really means nothing else but our mind. Our mind is what lives on after death. It is then called a spirit. . . . For each one of us, our mind is our inner self, our true self. It lives inside our outer self that constitutes our body. When our body is cast aside, which death does for us, we are in a complete human form.

People are wrong, then, to believe that our mind exists only in our head. Our mind is present in our head only in its primary structures. Everything that we think with our intellect and do from our will first emanates from these primary structures. In the rest of our body, our mind is present in extensions of these primary structures that have been designed to allow us sensation and action. Because our mind is inwardly connected to the parts of our body, our mind supplies those parts with sensation and motion and also inspires awareness as if our body thought and acted on its own. . . .

The “extensions of these primary structures that have been designed to allow us sensation and action” are, presumably, the central nervous system with its connection, (as the main operating system) to all the other physiological systems that run our body and allow us to function, have health, enjoy life.

What’s interesting to me is that we see in this the basis for Hay’s idea that we can help to heal our bodies using our minds. Our thoughts can be harnessed, directed intentionally to generate positive feelings—helpful energy. Through this process we can develop a constructive, trusting outlook that allows healing of our inner pain, such that any spiritual, or causal, energy that is involved in, or providing for, our natural world suffering ends up positively altered.

I realize this comes close to sounding like I’m possibly endorsing faith healing, and honestly I don’t know enough about that philosophy to say whether that’s where I’m going. I’ll say my gut, based on my understanding of Providence, is that sickness, suffering, and healing are complex, complicated processes. So while root causes are in the spiritual world, the effects here cannot be drawn reliably as straight lines. I do, however, believe that spiritual reality is all around us, everywhere present, and the energy of Love is a genuinely real force, for which we are created to be receptacles, so to speak. So when we hear those spectacular stories of improbable healing and recovery, I think we are seeing the power of that spiritual energy—love—manifesting in our natural world, making miracles happen.

I’ll leave you with two more ideas that Louise Hay built her philosophy around:

Every thought we think is creating our future. 
The point of power is always in the present moment.  

I have thoughts (haha) about these points of her philosophy, but I’m going to save them for next time because I’m trying not to write endlessly and I’m already failing. So—apologies for the abrupt ending; hopefully it feels like a cliff-hanger!

Photo by Maksim Shutov on Unsplash

In the meantime, I’d love to hear any reaction or reflections—positive or negative— you might have on the topics here. Do share if you feel inclined.