The 3 Levels of Consciousness

This passage is found in the work, Arcana Celestia n. 3747, by Swedenborg

I have spoken on several occasions to spirits about the learned of our own day who know of

the distinction in the human being between internal and external but nothing more beyond this;

nor do they know even this from reflecting on the interior aspects of their own thoughts and

affections but from the Word of the Lord. They do not know what the internal man is, and what

is more very many doubt and even deny the existence of it, the reason being that they are not

living the life of the internal man but of the external. I have also spoken to those spirits about

many a thing that may lead the learned astray, such as the fact that animals seem to be like

themselves so far as organs, viscera, senses, appetites, and feelings are concerned. It has

been said in our discussions that the learned know less about such matters than the simple,

even though they seem to themselves to know far more. For they argue about the interaction of

the soul and the body, and indeed about what the soul itself may be, whereas the simple know

that the soul is the internal man and that it is a person's spirit which is going to live after death

of the body, and also that it is the real person himself who is within the body.

[2] It has been added that the learned more than the simple equate themselves with animals,

ascribing all things to natural forces and scarcely anything to the Divine. Nor do they stop to

reflect that man, unlike animals, is able to think about heaven and about God, and in so doing

to be raised above himself, and consequently to be joined to the Lord by means of love; and

that for these reasons they must inevitably live for ever after death. We have gone on to refer to

their particular ignorance of the fact that every single thing with man traces back to the Lord

through heaven, and that heaven is the Grand Man to which every single thing in man

corresponds, as does everything in the natural system. And when perhaps they hear or read of

these things they will be to them so paradoxical that unless experience proved the truth of

them they would reject them as something delusive. It is similar when they hear that there are

three degrees of life in man just as there are three degrees of life in heaven, that is, there are

three heavens, and that man corresponds to the three heavens in such a way that in image he

is a small-scale heaven when he leads the life of good and truth and through that life is an

image of the Lord.

[3] I have been told the following about those degrees of life: The ultimate degree of life is that

which is called the external or natural man, which makes man similar to animals so far as his

pressing desires and his delusions are concerned. The second degree is that which is called

the internal or rational man which makes man superior to animals. For by means of the internal

man he is able to think and to will what is good and true and to govern the natural man by

controlling his desires and disregarding his resulting delusions, and on top of this by reflecting

within himself about heaven, indeed about the Divine, which animals are quite incapable of

doing. I have been told that the third degree of life is one which is totally unknown to man, and

yet it is the degree through which the Lord enters into the rational mind, from which he has the

ability to think as a human being, to have conscience, to have perception of what is good and

true, and to be raised up by the Lord towards Himself. These considerations however are

remote from the ideas of the learned of this present age, who do no more than dispute whether

the internal man exists at all. And as long as they cannot be sure that it exists they are even

less able to know what it is.