Daily Quotes

Heaven’s union with us and our union with it are of such
a nature that each relies on the other.

One purpose of our trials is to subdue our external qualities and make them obedient to inner qualities.

Everyone who is being reborn undergoes trying times.
Trials are struggles against evil and falsity, and when we
are in the thick of them, the Lord exerts his influence
on us from within and fights for us. This we can tell by
the fact that when we are being tested, deep inside us
we stand firm, because if we did not, we would succumb
rather than conquer.

We are never tested until we are capable of contemplating what is good and true and perceiving it on our own terms.

When truth is being incorporated into earthly goodness,
it hurts to begin with. It weighs on our conscience and
worries us, since we have cravings that spiritual truth
fights against. But this initial pain slowly lessens and finally
disappears. It is like a sick and feeble body that can
be restored to health only by a painful cure; in that state,
it has pain at first.

During the phase called our reformation, we come to
mentally see and admit that evil is evil and goodness is
good, and make the decision to choose what is good.
When we actually try to abstain from evil and do what is
good, the phase called our regeneration begins.

A state of understanding does not commence in us till we
think for ourselves instead of being guided by a teacher. It
is at this time that faith commences, because faith is not
our own until we have confirmed our beliefs by means
of our own thoughts and ideas. Prior to that, our faith is
not ours; it is someone else’s faith present in us, because
we have believed not in the beliefs themselves but in a
person.

Very few today realize that doing good deeds without
seeking repayment contains heavenly happiness. They do
not know there is any other kind of happiness than rising
to high position, being waited on by others, abounding in
riches, and living a life of sensual pleasure. That there is
a higher happiness than those, a happiness that touches a
person’s inner depths, they are profoundly unaware. Nor
do they see, therefore, that such happiness is heavenly
happiness and that it is the happiness of genuine neighborly
love. This characteristic is embedded in a new will
that the Lord gives as a gift to people who are being reborn,
because the new will is the Lord’s in us.

The goal of rebirth is for us to develop a new inner self and
therefore a new soul, or spirit, but our inner self cannot

be remade or reborn unless our outer self is too. Although
we are spirits after death, we take with us into
the other life aspects of our outer self: earthly emotions,
doctrines, facts—in short, all the contents of our outer,
earthly memory. These form the groundwork on which
our inner depths rest. Whatever priorities determine
their arrangement, then, those are the priorities that inner
things take on when they flow in, because inner
things are modified on the outer plane.

In people who are being reborn, the Lord implants the
heavenly qualities of love and the spiritual qualities of faith
not all at once but gradually. When these qualities turn
our rational mind into something that is open to receiv-
ing them, we are first reborn—largely through inner struggles
in which we win. When this happens, the moment
is ripe for us to shed our old self and put on a new one.

If we could be reformed by force, there would not be a single soul in the universe who would not be saved. The means are countless. But since what is done under compulsion is not wedded to us and therefore does not become part of us, it is absolutely alien to the Lord to force anything on anyone.

We ought to force ourselves to do good and speak truth. The secret here is that when we do, the Lord grants us a sense of autonomy that is heavenly in nature.

What does not come of freedom, of voluntary choice or willingness, is in no way pleasing to the Lord.

The whole process of rebirth exists in order for us to receive new life, or rather to receive life at all. It exists in order that from being nonhuman we may become human, or from being dead may become alive.

There are two states that we all inevitably enter into and
go through if we are to turn from an earthly person into
a spiritual person. The first state is called reformation, the
second is called regeneration. The first state is a state of
thought that occurs in our intellect; the second state is a
state of love that occurs in our will.

The old self must die before the new self can be conceived.