What Influx Is, and What Its Effects

Excerpts from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

Sing, O heavens; and be joyful, O earth; and break forth into singing, O mountains: for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted.  >But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me.  Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.  Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are continually before Me.   Isa 49:13-16

The ultimate state is such as is the successive order from which it is formed and exists, is a canon which in the learned world should be acknowledged, because of its truth; for thus it is discovered what influx is, and what its effects.

By influx is meant all that precedes and composes what follows, and through the things following in order, the ultimate — as all that precedes with man and constitutes his wisdom  — or all that precedes with a politician and constitutes his prudence — or all that precedes with a theologian and constitutes his learning — in like manner all that proceeds from infancy and makes the man — so also what proceeds from the seed and the shrub and makes the tree, and afterwards from the blossom and makes the fruit. ... This is meant by influx.

That all things which precede in minds form series, and that the series bind themselves together, one beside the other and one after another, and that these together compose the ultimate.... For by this it is discovered what the influx effects, and what is the quality of the ultimate, wherein the series just spoken of successively formed coexist. ...

A different state, from a different order, is formed with the spiritual from that with the natural, because the spiritual proceed in right order, and the natural in a wrong order; for the spiritual look to the Lord, and the Lord provides and leads the order; but the natural look to themselves and thence proceed in inverted order. ...

...there is successive order and simultaneous order; the latter is from the former and according to it. This is adduced as a cause confirmative of the preceding. That there is what is successive, and that there is what is simultaneous, is known; but that simultaneous order is from the successive and according to it is not known.

And yet how things successive insert themselves into the simultaneous, and the kind of order they form there, is extremely difficult to present to the perception, since there is not yet with the learned any idea that will serve for the elucidation of it; and as a first notion of this arcanum cannot be given in few words ... it may serve sufficiently for illustration to quote what is briefly said respecting these two orders, the successive and the simultaneous, and of the influx of the former into the latter, in The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning the Sacred Scriptures, where are these words:

"There is, in heaven and in the world, successive order and simultaneous order. In successive order one thing follows after another, from the highest even to the lowest; in simultaneous order, however, one thing is beside the other, from the inmost to the outermost. 

Successive order is as a column with steps from the highest to the lowest; simultaneous order is as a work cohering from the center to the circumference.

Successive order becomes simultaneous in the ultimate, in this manner: The highest things of successive order become the inmost of simultaneous order; and the lowest things of successive order become the outermost of simultaneous order. It is comparatively as if a column of steps by subsiding becomes a cohering body in a plane. Thus what is simultaneous is formed from things successive, and this is so in all things and in every thing of the spiritual world, and in all and every thing of the natural world." 

[See n. 38, 65, in that work; and very much more on the subject in Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom, n. 205-229.]

... He who knows the influx of successive into simultaneous order can comprehend how the angels can see in a man's hand all the thoughts and intentions of his mind ... The reason is that the hands are the ultimates of man, into which the deliberations and conclusions of his mind are determined, and there make what is simultaneous. And therefore it is said in the Word that it is "written upon the hands." (Is. 49:16; Rev. 13:16; 20:4)

(Conjugial Love 313,314)