Trinity

TRINITY & OTHER DOCTRINES OF GOD:
PROF. M. M. NINAN
There's another phenomenon very closely related to this. Listen to the following
description from Soul-Body Interaction (n. 1).
Since the soul is spiritual substance, and by reason of order is more pure, more primary,
and more inward, while the body is material and therefore more crude, more secondary,
and more outward, and since it is in keeping with order for the more pure to flow into the
more crude, the more primary into the more secondary, and the more inward into the
more outward, it is therefore in keeping with order for the spiritual to flow into the
material, and not the reverse. This means that the thinking mind flows into the sight,
subject to the state imposed on the eyes by the things that are being seen-- a state
which that mind, further, organizes at will. In the same way, the perceiving mind flows
into the hearing, subject to the state imposed on the ears by words.
Swedenborg is saying that we are neither passive receptors nor sheer hallucinators. He
is saying something that is in part obvious-- that sensory experience is a process of
intersection, but he is insisting that the primary energy of perception is from within. To
put it another way, there is no such thing as purely subjective or purely objective
perception. Perception is the intersection of subjective and objective forces, with the
subjective ones being primary. The primacy of the subjective forces is consistent with
the principle already cited, that immediate influx is primary and mediate influx
secondary.
But there is another quite challenging way in which waves differ from particles. Waves
have no boundaries. If you think of a sine wave-- the perfectly regular wave that
represents among other things a pure tone in sound-- you can measure it, sort of. That
is, you can measure the distance from crest to crest. But you can also measure the
distance from trough to trough, or from any point to the corresponding point on the next
wave: it makes no difference. And if you happen to think of a sine wave as a
two-dimensional view of a spiral, then you realize that every point on it bears just the
same relationship to what precedes and follows it as every other point does. If you were
climbing a spiral staircase in a featureless tower, every step would look like every other.
Beyond that, waves just go on and on until they bump into something. If that something
is in the same medium, then the wave is altered-- that's the interference pattern-- but
in a very real way it is still there. There is a tendency for waves to decay over distance
in a physical medium, and the more viscous the medium, the more sluggish the wave,
as anyone can tell you who has ever stirred white sauce while it was thickening. We'll
come back to that later, though. Now let's see what is implied about our own wave
properties by this lack of boundaries.
I'd suggest that it turns out to be a very appropriate image for the ways our ideas work.
This whole lecture, for example, is using things I've seen and heard and read. It's using
them in a particular way, a way no one else could use them, if you want to be
persnickety about it. I'll readily grant that someone else might have very similar ideas,
in fact, I'll insist on it before too long; but I defy you to imagine anyone but me sitting
down and coming out with these particular words in this particular sequence. This
means that it is awfully hard, probably impossible, and quite probably pointless to try to
draw a boundary between what's "mine" in this lecture and what is "others'." These
ideas are how I intersect with some aspects of my environment, to put it crudely. To be
more precise, this lecture represents some of the ways in which immediate and mediate
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