What is Reality?

“I experience reality through my senses” is an appearance of truth. A surface-level impression that feels completely natural and convincing from the standpoint of ordinary, everyday life. The Teachings for the New Church, however, reveal that this is only an appearance and that a deeper, more genuine truth lies beneath.

Why Is This an Appearance of Truth?

From childhood, we learn to trust our senses, what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. These senses provide us with a vivid, seemingly solid world. It feels to us as though our perceptions are the gateway to reality: what we perceive is what is real. The natural mind is fully convinced of this perspective. In fact, most philosophical and scientific frameworks based on material foundations operate under this very assumption.

What Is the Genuine Truth?

The genuine truth, as revealed in the Teachings for the New Church, is far deeper: our senses do not give us contact with reality itself, but only with its lowest, outermost forms. Our sensory experience is merely a vessel, but the actual flow and content of life, thought, and perception all originate from spiritual sources. Swedenborg writes that reality is first spiritual, not natural. The world we see and experience with our senses is a representative reflection, a shadow of the spiritual realities that stand behind it (Divine Love & Wisdom n.52, 119, 344)

For example:

• Our minds and souls are constantly acted upon by spiritual forces, from heaven or from hell, and our experience of thought and feeling flows in from those deeper levels.
• What we perceive sensually changes according to the state of our inner life: happiness, fear, love, and understanding all colour and filter what we sense.

Swedenborg states plainly that “sensual life” is the lowest state of human perception (TCR n.381). Spiritual perception, on the other hand, is the ability to see the causes and origins of things and to understand their deeper meaning, which is much higher. Angels experience reality through internal senses, taking in the spiritual causes, which are truths and goods, allowing them to immediately see, understand and communicate spiritual realities.

 Illusions of the Senses

• Optical illusions are a simple natural example that what the eye sees can mislead about what’s really there.
• Choosing our Response is the ability to escape the trap of our sense that says someone makes me angry or upset, and see that the anger is from within and does not come from outside us. 
• All Lives are Unique requires us to break free from the senses that assume another’s experience of life is like mine, and therefore, I can know what they are experiencing or thinking.

Why Does This Matter for Spiritual Life?

If we rely solely on our senses for understanding truth and reality, we risk remaining in materialism, which leads us to believe that only physical things are real. This perspective can cause us to overlook the existence of the inner mind, heaven, and the Lord. This state of spiritual darkness is often referred to in the Teachings for the New Church as the “sensual man,” who places trust only in what can be seen and touched.

The Lord, through His Word, teaches us that a genuinely spiritual person sees with the eyes of faith and understanding, not just with the body. As regeneration progresses, we gradually perceive the spiritual causes and purposes behind what our senses show us and recognise that sensory appearances are meaningful correspondences, not reality itself.

 The idea that “I experience reality through my senses” is merely an appearance of truth. According to the Teachings for the New Church, the deeper reality is that what we perceive through our senses is just the outermost layer of a much greater reality, a spiritual world that influences the natural world. True perception comes from seeing things spiritually and using discernment, recognising that the Lord is the source of all life and reality. As we undergo spiritual regeneration, we learn not to judge solely by appearances but to seek the inner, spiritual causes of things.