Consider This

     All the needed correctives can be had, of course, by our proper response to the cultural priests dispensing the commodities of salvation. Or, if none of this suffices our particular bent of mind, then we should cook up some healing salves of our own to peddle and not stand around complaining.
     The great accusers: governments, businesses, Pentagons, CIA's, churches, schools, jails have always been with us in some guise, and may always be. These things are culture and they are self-perpetuating. For every young person trying to "drop out," a dozen thoroughly programmed, well-acculturated students quietly go ahead training to sustain the system. The dropout makes news, but he makes no changes and he has nowhere to go.
     Though they change vestments with ease, the cultural priests have never changed functionally, nor can they. Our contemporary culture is maintained, however, by convincing you that you can change things. Our culture convinces you that you can "throw out the rascals in Washington," or wherever, or the robber barons or the egghead liberals, and by your energy help redress the wrongs. Our culture survives by keeping you filled with the hope for change and the notion that everything can be changed.
     A person is considered "normal" or properly aculturated when fear and guilt are his norm, and buffers to such "natural conditions" are his life pursuit. Most people who fault culture are convinced that great remedial changes are in the offing. This always means better buffers for all. These activities leave the central issue carefully untouched and spin the merry-go-round even faster.
     That we are left only with our intellect as "protection" against a hostile cosmos, and that our intellect is a semantic creation, with semantics subordinate and supportive of the cultural process, brings us full circle.
     This circular definition of reality can be summed up as the death concept. Every accusation of guilt is a threat of death in some guise: death of one's self-image; hopes of fulfillment; sexual prowess; attractiveness; security; ease; comfort; health and on it goes.
     Literal death is threatened indirectly. The war makers threaten death at the hands of the current enemy unless we properly prime the death machines with our energies and money; the disease makers threaten, in fact guarantee, death from every latest death fad, should the counteractions not be sought (regardless of staggering cost), the lawmakers promise more penalties and stuff the overstuffed prisons; the scientists assure us of death, not just of our life but of all life. If the big bang must be abandoned, there is the New Black Hole. Or as a last resort, though dull, there is always the second law of thermodynamics to fall back on, to get everything and everybody in the end. Insurance companies remind us of our death in the form of the worst fate for those left behind should we fail to apportion those companies their fair share of our energies and toil. The preachers remind us of our death and the fate of our elusive souls should we be the spiritual equivalents of high-school dropouts....
— Joseph Chilton Pearse, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg, pp. 104-105.

There is knowledge of the way through walking in it.
— Emanuel Swedenborg

     A related idea in Swedenborg is that of influx. All things exist by divine influx: "Every created thing . . . is a recipient of God," that is, "an image of God in a mirror." It is important to note that the divine influx, or divine life, is received according to the capacity of the recipient and thus presents infinite variety. This, however, should not be construed as pantheism, for "the created universe is not God, but is from God; and since it is from God, there is in it an image of Him like the image of a person in a mirror, wherein indeed the person appears, but still there is nothing of the person in it."
— Roberts Avens, "The Concept of the Soul Protected," in Crysalis, Winter 1985, p. 65.