OUTLOOK
ISSN 0969-1049 INCORPORATING THE SWEDENBORG MOVEMENT NEWSLETTER
- Levitas
- WB Yeats and Swedenborg
- Books that might have been
- A town built on a hill
- Keeping the score
- The Big Bang
- Jesus, man or God ? the Easter Question
- Promise of Spring
- Science and truth
- The Millennium
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Levitas is the opposite of 'gravitas', and it means lightness, i.e. lack of weight. It also means smoothness, but can mean inconstancy. Gravity weighs us down, and this is largely due to the great mass of the earth. But this sense of heaviness is counter-balanced by the rotation of the earth which would send us into a spin if it became too fast. This is called the centrifugal force, which literally means 'flying away from the centre'. These forces have all sorts of implications for our life. Let us start with the most unusual ones, namely, the forces on our personality.
Through the spiritual insight which Swedenborg enjoyed, he was able to show that the feminine sex gravitates towards the deep centre, the womb, the home. This is sometimes rudely described as the 'nesting instinct'. The masculine sex is definitely more centrifugal and levitational. It wants to fly away (often at a tangent, to be hopelessly lost), but away from the centre - to hunt, to explore, or to fly to the Moon or Mars, because they challenge him. On the sexual level it means a ready-made philanderer who wants to shoot his arrows at as many conquests as he can without being tied down. But this also makes him a lost soul, 'of no fixed abode', and in order to survive he needs a centre where he can rest, and find joy and ecstasy in true love. The feminine principle does not deprive the masculine of his freedom, for she too can find excitement, even security in the thought that her own life will not be engulfed in sameness. Through her loved one she too can explore new truths and rejoice in applying them to life.
On the surface, we may think that the partners are working in opposite directions, but if we consider our earthly conditions, we realise that the two opposing forces of gravity and levity are so well balanced that we can walk and even jump with comparative ease, and neither are we weightless like the poor astronauts who have to hang on to something solid to stop themselves floating around aimlessly and bumping into everything and everyone. Neither are we clamped to the surface of the earth, when every movement would be a terrible effort.
We seldom realise that our life is always experienced in a very narrow band in which gravity and levity are balanced; in a fine zone between the extremes of heat and cold, high and low atmospheric pressures; and on a higher plane, we live in the intermediate zone between good and evil. The pressures on us are so well balanced that we can enjoy real freedom of choice.
We can even think of levity as a spiritual influence which helps us to overcome the heavy burden of our heredity, because when the Lord offered us his "easy yoke and light burden", he did not imply that we can live altogether yokeless and weightless. We can't live without connections. Spiritually we have to be 'on-line', but the nature and character of that connection is our choice.
The heavy burden of evil which we all carry will eventually imprint itself even on our face unless we curb its hold over us. The lines and wrinkles are clearly pulled downwards on the face of malice and cruelty. The heavenly influx, on the other hand, raises the corners of the mouth to form a smile, and lifts the eyelids, so that even the wrinkles of old age reveal inner happiness, in sharp contrast to the down-ward gloom of the selfish and ever-grumpy person. That is why the word levity also means lightheartedness, jollity and cheerfulness. In one sense heaven is always above us and hell below us, and we are making a choice whether we shall levitate to the one, or gravitate to the other.
Unless the Lord ruled both the heavens and the hells there would be no equilibrium; and if there were no equilibrium there would be no heaven or hell; for all things and each thing in the universe, that is, both in the natural world and in the spiritual world, endure by means of equilibrium.
Heaven & Hell 592
Once evil spirits wished to reprove me, but the angels were present and kept my face, especially the region around the lips, elevated, with the mouth open, and my face continually cheerful and laughing. Later I was told that when the angels are present, the people of that region are cheerful, and not sad.
