How to understand crude references as to dung and urine in the Word

When in the Sermon on Evil Thoughts Jesus distinguishes between what goes out in the draught and what defiles the human, He touches in passing on the waste products solid and liquid of human beings.

That they are mentioned by name in the menaces of Rabshakeh against Jerusalem involves the denial of divine good and divine truth and of the Lord's capacity to save. It is like when the Pharisees and Sadducees referred to Jesus as having a devil, ie being possessed.

The meaning is very similar to the menaces of Goliath to David, whose flesh he promised to feed to the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air. It is in both cases like calling God the devil, or the Church heretic, or good desires (beasts) evil or true ideation (fowls) false. 

This has been related in order to give you a handle on how to understand these various references to the draught, dung, no one being left alive to piss against the wall etc. which occur in the Word. 

The most important significance of dung and urine for you and me lies in the choices that we make at times when the furnace is raging like in Babylon or boiling like the sea on which the Lord with Peter walked.

Are we making good desires and healthy ideation part of our spiritual bodies? Or are these rejected as waste products, as is the hardened custom of those in Hell?

If we reject evil desires and unhealthy ideation, rebuking them and holding them up to disapproving scrutiny on the inside of the human where the face is, then these go out in the draught. 

But if dung and urine go not out in the draught and the human is defiled, then it is as though people ate their own dung and drank their own piss.

This is why the prophet Ezekiel, who was a neon reprogrammable billboard for God, was commanded to eat bread with excrement in it. For this represented evil in the bread which is supposed to be the good of love.

That the Word contains crude references is the same as John the Baptist's rough garments; these crude vessels serve as bases or plinths for Heavenly truths just as dust particles serve as bases for condensation and rain. 

The most 'famous' example of this is the term war in the Word, which is graspable for our natural minds by its incidence in outer life. Obviously this is just a base or plinth for Heavenly truths about spiritual warfare.

By something which we can grasp we are anchored in the vicinity of a higher truth which must like a bird alight somewhere to rest; so that the dung and urine and war and famine and rape and murder and genocide and theft and cursing give that bird its perch.

We see rough garments on the outside, but within them is the soft raiment of those who dwell in palaces, ie the inhabitants of Heaven and many mansions in their perception of the spiritual sense of the Word. 

For every name, number, animal, bird, substance, gesture, or other thing in the Word is a set which proceeds from an underlying and ideal form which is to them in the index of their incidence as a hub to its spokes. 

By the  index of their incidence I mean the set of all mentions in the Word of sword; or the incidence of all mentions of bread, or Abel, or wine.

In many ways, we are considerably hampered by having only one item of a set; as hampered as a hydroelectric dam would be by having no difference in water levels to either side of it. When we have two items of a set, we rise above them like a drone rising out of a maze and come that much closer to the ideal form of that set. We can rise above these items to the set which overarches them; and from there it is easier to arrive at the ideal forms from which proceed spokes of subsidiary phenomena in externals or ultimates. 

It is by coming to a familiarity with the items of these sets, these mentions of crude outers, that we hurtle our drones above the labyrinth, coming to that essence which these disparate expressions share in common. 

We come to see the Sword in all the various mentions of sword. We come to see the Bread in all the mentions of eating and bread; and to see the Wine in all the mentions of drinking and wine.

We rise the easier above sword to Sword who read the Word with lights on in the room.

For it is with Sword and Bread and Wine that the Lord wrote the Word, and these rest on or fall into the sword, bread and wine which are sufficiently perceptible to us so that the bird stands a chance of alighting on its perch in the mind of the human.

The crude image drawn from natural life, like that which goes out in the draught, holds the attention of passerby just like a feature film conveying a moral while still being fascinatingly racy. If those willing to grow in love of God and the neighbor can be kept interested long enough for the crude outer to glow and heat, then they can gradually be taught to see Bread rather than bread. 

It is even as this explanation has done: for it has used crude outers like that which goes out in the draught to serve as a perch for Heavenly truths about ideal forms and correspondences and all of us and God. 

Godspeed on the Way.

Appendix:

" When king Hezekiah heard the blasphemies which Rabshakeh spoke against Jerusalem, he rent his garments and covered himself with sackcloths (Isa. 37:1; 2 Kings 19:1); because he spoke against Jehovah, the king, and Jerusalem, wherefore there was mourning; that it was against truth is signified by his rending his garments (n. 4763); and that it was against good, by his covering himself with sackcloth. For where truth is treated of in the Word, good also is treated of, on account of the heavenly marriage which is that of good and truth and of truth and good in every particular" (AC4779).