Article to accompany the audio: Removing Person — A Deeper Way of Loving One of the things that can arise when we first encounter the practice of removing person, place, time, and space and matter (PPTSM) from the centre of our thought is a sense of unease. It can feel as though we are being asked to become less human in our relating, colder, more distant, as though the particular person in front of us no longer matters. That unease is worth taking seriously, because it points to something genuine: a care for others, a desire not to reduce them to an abstraction. But the teachings for Spiritual Christianity invites us to look more closely at what we are actually doing when we hold tightly to “person” in our thinking and listening. When we stay fixed on the surface personality of someone, their history, their manner, the particular things they’ve said or done, we don’t necessarily see them more clearly. We see them through the accumulated filter of our own associations, our own proprium, our own familiar ways of relating. The heavenly teaching is that this kind of fixed thinking limits love rather than deepening it. Perception concentrates onto something finite, and the channel through which a fuller sense of divine love is able to be received begins to close.¹ What the practice offers instead is something closer to what the Text describes as angelic perception: in the heavens, it is not the person but the use or function they embody that is perceived. To see the “use” of a person is to begin to perceive the specific role they fulfil within the Divine order, their unique contribution to the whole. The teaching puts it this way: “persons limit the idea, and concentrate it upon something finite; whereas things do not limit and concentrate it, but extend it to the infinite, thus to the Lord.”² Far from reducing the person, this is the discovery of what is most real and most essential about them. There is a striking image in the doctrinal writings for what abstract thought actually does: it is like “the sight of the eye when it looks up into the sky without intervening objects.”³ Thought fixed on person, by contrast, “is fixed and stays”: it cannot move, cannot expand, cannot receive. The moment we release person from the centre, the mind opens in every direction. This reframes what it means to love the neighbour. When we love someone as person, as the particular, familiar self we have constructed from our history with them, we are in some measure loving our idea of them, the image the proprium has formed. But when we attend to the good and truth the Lord is working in them, we are loving something infinitely more real: the divine life seeking to be born through their struggles, their growth, their unique use in the Grand Man. A profound and simple definition of heaven is that it is the state of loving what is other. To genuinely perceive the ‘other’ requires the loves of heaven to be active in us. This is not merely a humanistic focus on the person, but the spiritual capacity to see and love the Lord in another. In practice, removing person is less an act of subtraction than an act of clearing, like cleaning a window. The glass is still there. The person is still there. But the distorting layers of accumulated association, judgment, and self-reference begin to fall away, and something truer comes into view. The angels, we are told, are unwilling to speak of persons precisely because to do so “would avert the ideas from a universal view of things, thus from the comprehension of innumerable things together.”4 The question the practice quietly poses is not whether we love others, but whether the love we are extending is as free, as rich, and as genuinely for them as it could be. Or whether it is still, in some measure, shaped by what is ours: our comfort, our familiar patterns, our sense of connection as we experience it. Removing person doesn’t ask us to love less. It points toward a love that, no longer fixed on the finite, extends, as the heavenly doctrine says, to the infinite and to the Lord. References for Contemplation ¹ Arcana Coelestia 6040[2] — On how spiritual language draws thought away from persons and fixes it on spiritual realities, enabling a broader and more universal perception; and how thought fixed on persons “diminishes the light of truth.” The reason why the expression ‘a perception by the truths in the natural’ is used and not a perception by people in possession of those truths is that spiritual language employs that kind of expression. For such a usage draws the ideas composing one’s thought away from persons and fixes them on spiritual realities; and those realities, which are truths and forms of good, are what possess life in a person and cause him to have life. For those realities are derived from the Lord, the Source of life in its entirety. That kind of usage also leads one’s mind away from ascribing truths and forms of good to a person. Such spiritual language also enables one to form an overall idea that extends further and wider than when the idea of a person is tied up with it. If for example one speaks of perception by people in possession of truths in the natural one’s ideas become fixed at the same time on people like that – a common occurrence – and so one’s ideas are drawn away from the overall idea, with the result that the light of truth is diminished. Furthermore, in the next life thought about persons disturbs such persons, for in that life all thought is communicated. These are the reasons why impersonal expressions like the one here – ‘a perception by the truths in the natural’ are used. ² Arcana Coelestia 5225 — On how in the spiritual world, persons limit and concentrate an idea onto something finite, while things extend it to the infinite and to the Lord; and why no person named in the Word is perceived in heaven, only the reality they represent. …in the spiritual world, or in heaven, not persons but things come into view, for persons limit the idea, and concentrate it upon something finite; whereas things do not limit and concentrate it, but extend it to the infinite, thus to the Lord. For this reason also, no person named in the Word is perceived in heaven, but in his stead the thing that is represented by that person; so also no people or nation is perceived, but only its quality. Nay, not even is any historic statement of the Word about a person, nation, or people, known in heaven; and consequently it is not known who Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the Israelitish people, and the Jewish nation were, but it is there perceived what Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the Israelitish people, and the Jewish nation denote; and the same in all other cases. Thus the angelic speech is without limitation, and is also relatively universal. ³ Apocalypse Explained 405 — On how the idea abstracted from persons and places “extends itself into heaven in every direction,” compared to the sight of the eye looking into an open sky; and how the idea tied to persons is proper to the natural mind. [2] The good of love to the Lord is meant in an abstract sense by “mountain,” because all things in the internal sense of the Word are spiritual, and spiritual things must be understood in a sense abstracted from persons and places; consequently, because angels are spiritual they think and speak abstractedly from these, and thereby have intelligence and wisdom; for the idea of persons and places limits the thought, since it confines it to persons and places, and thus limits it. This idea of thought is proper to the natural, while the idea abstracted from persons and places extends itself into heaven in every direction, and is no otherwise limited than the sight of the eye is limited when it looks up into the sky without intervening objects; such an idea is proper to the spiritual. 4 Arcana Coelestia 7002 — On why angels are unwilling to speak of persons — because to do so averts ideas from a universal view and from the comprehension of innumerable things together. Angels… are unwilling to speak of persons, because speech about persons would avert the ideas from a universal view of things, thus from the comprehension of innumerable things together. See also: AC 8985 (abstract thought diffuses through the whole of heaven; thought fixed on person or place is fixed and stays); AE 625 (the idea of person limits and confines thought, rendering it natural; abstraction from persons gives angels their ineffable intelligence and wisdom). AC (Elliott) n. 8985 The reason for saying that ‘the slave’ means truth and not a person imbued with such truth is that when angels speak they do so in the abstract, that is, without envisaging actual persons. For in heaven they think about matters without envisaging persons, because when their thought involves persons it brings to mind a community associated with the matter they are thinking about; and when this happens their thought is narrowed down to and becomes fixed on that community. [2] In heaven thinking about a place leads to being present in that place, and their presence in that community would attract towards itself the thoughts of those within the community, and so would disrupt the inflow from the Divine there. It is quite different when they speak in the abstract about some matter; their thought then spreads out in every direction in accord with the heavenly form which the influx emanating from the Divine produces, without causing disruption in any community. For it reaches into communities’ general spheres, yet without having an effect on or unsettling anyone within the community, and so without impairing anyone’s freedom to think in accord with the inflow from the Divine. In short, abstract thought can pass through the whole of heaven without hindrance anywhere; but thought narrowed down to persons or places becomes fixed and static. AE n. 625 …ang
