Friday, June 19, 2009

Neuroscience and Correspondences

In May I posted about a neuropsychologist's reflections on perception. I just read another intriguing post by that same neuropsychologist.

The post is titled "Quick! Where is Heaven?" and is an exploration of how neuroscience might support the idea that there are universal, underlying correspondences in everything.
One of the primary things Swedenborg talks about with respect to reading and understanding the scriptures is the idea of a “spiritual sense” and correspondences between things spiritual and things natural.

Certainly, from the beginning this idea was probably the most intriguing to me about Swedenborg’s Writings — the notion that embedded in the words of the Bible is a deeper meaning.

And that we “detect” that meaning in some way as we read, whether we know it or not.

But how could that be? Don’t different people use “symbols” and metaphors differently? And how can reading have an impact if we don’t consciously “get” the meaning?
She gets into a study of people's association of certain concepts with the directions up and down and into her own study of how people learn to do things based on underlying patterns that they can't explain. Fun stuff.

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