AE 548 - Space & Times & Feeding Five Thousand; AE 551 - The Gifts of Perceiving and Understanding

AE 548 [2, 8, 9]

. . . so long as a person lives in the world
he is in natural thought,
and natural thought derives its ideas from
spaces and times and also from numbers and measures;
for these are proper to nature,
because all things in nature are determined by them;
while spiritual thought is without any determinate idea
of space, time, number, and measure.

 "The fifth part" also signifies as much as is sufficient . . ..

That the Lord fed five thousand men
with five loaves and two fishes.
(Matthew 14:15-22; Mark 6:38-43;
Luke 9:13-16; John 6:9-13).
That they then took up "twelve baskets of fragments"
means fullness, thus full instruction and full blessing.

AE 551

. . . the faculty to perceive good,
like the faculty to understand truth,
is given to every person,
for truth loves good and good loves truth;
these, therefore, constantly wish to be conjoined,
and they are conjoined
like the will and the understanding,
or like affection and thought.
When they are conjoined
then the understanding thinks truth
from the affection of thinking it,
and then the understanding also sees the truth
and the will perceives it.
To perceive truth from the affection of the will
is to perceive good,
for truth is changed into good
when a person wills it or is affected by it,
that is, when he loves it;
and for this reason everything that is loved is called good.