Divine influx is not an occasional intervention but the continuous ground of all existence. Swedenborg is emphatic: the divine does not cause creation once and leave it to operate on its own — it causes it moment by moment. Life is not a property that creatures possess; it is received from God continuously. A creature that thought it had life in itself would be like a ray of sunlight that had forgotten about the sun and believed it was its own source of light.
This has implications for human freedom. Swedenborg denies that freedom is threatened by this continuous dependence. The person who receives influx into a love of good uses it to produce good; the person who receives it into a love of evil uses it to produce evil. The influx is the same in both cases — it is divine love and wisdom reaching toward the creature — but the vessel determines what comes out. God wills the good of all, but the quality of the reception is the creature's own.
Regeneration — the process by which the spiritual degree of the mind is opened — is, on this account, nothing other than the gradual removal of the obstacles to divine influx. The person does not generate their own spiritual life; they allow the life that is always flowing in from God to reach more of their inner being. Prayer, charity, and spiritual reflection are not means of earning grace but of clearing the channels through which influx naturally flows.
The doctrine of influx appears throughout Divine Love and Wisdom and is also treated in the shorter work Divine Providence. Swedenborg's concept has parallels in Malebranche's occasionalism and in the continuous creation doctrines of Descartes, but is embedded in a very different overall framework.
