The body includes the brain, so the brain is not the person either, despite the fact that we speak of "brainy" people, as if their intellectual superiority was entirely due to their brains alone, as if the brain (made of physical matter) and the mind (made of spiritual substance) were identical.
That overemphasis on the physical seems to prevail in materialistic philosophies such as logical positivism, whose adherents propound the theory that the mind is not a thing at all. It is simply a word, they say, a word used to describe the functioning of the brain. The mind is therefore said to be a mere abstraction, while the brain is favored as something tangible and perceptible. Those who think in this way are what Swedenborg calls sensuous people, because they believe only what they can see with their eyes and feel with their hands (Secrets of Heaven §§5094, 7693).
Swedenborg describes the brain as the organ or link by which the mind acts into the body as a whole; it is the entrancepoint of the mind into the body. Divine love and wisdom, he says, descend from heaven through the internal mind, into the external mind, and from there into the cerebellum (where our affections live) and finally into our cerebrum, where our understanding is (Revelation Explained §61). Thus, he sums up the relationship between mind, body, and soul in this way: "Since the human soul is a higher, spiritual substance, it receives an inflow directly from God. The human mind, though, being a lower spiritual substance, receives an inflow from God indirectly through the spiritual world; while the body, being made of the earthly substances we refer to as matter, receives an inflow from God indirectly through the earthly world" (Soul-Body Interaction §8).
Throughout this book, the parts of our self that are closest to the Lord will sometimes be referred to as the highest, and sometimes as the inmost. In Swedenborg's writings, the two are one and the same. Diagram 3 illustrates this concept more clearly: While the levels of our being have a definite order, with the most heavenly level being the highest, when viewed from above, the highest becomes the inmost.
Because all of our conscious thought and feelings—every idea and desire that makes up the personality that we think of as our self—take place in the natural mind, that will be the focus of the remainder of the book. The natural mind itself has many levels, and we will give an overview of those in the next chapter.
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