Chapter Il. The Spirit Two-fold, Mind and Spiritual Body.

The mind is the primal organism. The spiritual body is formed from it and is its organ of sense and instrument of action in the spiritual world. These together clothe themselves with the material body.

The mind being first in the order of creation and formed of purer spiritual substances is placed at the head of the successive series in this diagram and is drawn in white.

The spiritual body, formed of grosser spiritual substances and being lower in degree is drawn in dull white. Not only is the spiritual body the mind's organ of sense and instrument of action in the spiritual world but it is also its containant, and is as necessary, to preserve it in form and function as are the solids of the material body to preserve its softer parts and its vital fluids.

When the mind, the spiritual body, and the natural body have been thus successively produced, they then subsist simultaneously one within another, - the highest in successive order becoming the central in simultaneous order and thus the essential organism and the first recipient of life in the series, while the lowest becomes the outmost, the containant and the preservative of those within. (AC 6465, 3739, 9211; CL 313, 314)

Things superior and inferior are the same as things interior and exterior; superior and inferior relating to the order of creation, interior and exterior to the order of preservation. (AC 3739, 3695, 5897, 6451 8603, 10099; AR 900.),

That the mind, the spiritual body, and the natural body are produced in successive order and sustained in simultaneous order, was shown above.

Conceive now the existence of these two orders in the work of regeneration and salvation.

Love and wisdom, good and truth, charity and faith are implanted in the mind as the first and fluent principles of the new. These are from "the breath of the LORD" and are breathed life into the mind in their initial forms when the LORD creates man anew in the womb of the Church his spiritual mother. And being too evanescent to abide in form without a firmer clothing than is supplied by the delicate substances of the mind, they descend into the spiritual body and take on therein a more ultimate form suited to sensation and action in the spiritual world; and descending a step lower, even into the material body, the very ultimate plane of human life, they there clothe themselves with a form suited to the natural world, and thus become fixed and enduring. The order has now become simultaneous. Within the renovated natural body exists the renovated spiritual body and within the spiritual body the central forces of the regenerate mind. Surveying this regenerate state from within out we behold love and wisdom in the mind their primal abode, love and wisdom clothed in their firmer organism in the spiritual body, and lastly love and wisdom embodied in fixed form in the very outmost degree such that it can and will preserve the interior and the inmost in form and order to eternity.

The reader should study well the nature and universality of these two orders of discrete degrees, that he may obtain a thorough and familiar comprehension of the structural philosophy of the spiritual and natural universe and especially of man and the heavens.

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