Recommend Meditate | Who's Watching? Finding Access to the Lord (Email)
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Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor
The term ‘intermediate self’ is used because the heavenly and spiritual traits in us, which belong to the Lord alone, supply us with an internal self, as shown earlier. Our rational processes, on the other hand, supply us with an intermediate self, or one midway between internal and external. And our responses to goodness, and the facts in our memory, create an external self for us…
The reason that reproducing and multiplying have to do with the intermediate self—the rational self—is that we do not feel the operation of the internal self except in a very general way, at that intermediate level. A single general impression or even a comprehensive general impression is created in our intermediate self by a boundless number of individual components. Just how far beyond counting they are, what they are like, and how they create a dim, general impression can be seen from the demonstration offered earlier at §545. (Secrets of Heaven 1015)
Going with the language of the passages quoted, if I’m having good thoughts, true ideas or good feelings, that’s not me experiencing the internal self—that’s me receiving influx from it into my intermediate self. This is a revelation to me, that if I’m feeling these things, then the goodness and truth that live in the internal self actually have already made the trip to my intermediate self! The connection is there and open or I wouldn’t be feeling those things. That’s a comforting thought.
Let me draw you a scene: We’re at our little, wooden dinner table. There are toys strewn about on the wooden floor. It’s dinner time. The sun has set in the cold winter sky and the shades are drawn in our warm dining room. We’re all hungry and just sitting down to the meal at hand. Kids are yelling, melting down, and I’m grumpy, bursting with short-tempered directives, all the while having negative thoughts about myself and the situation because of it. Hit pause. Take a step back, a step deeper within my mind—who’s noticing all this going on?
