Fluency in the Internal Sense

Children need to learn how to read the literal sense of the Word, much like adults need to learn how to read the internal sense of the Word. When children are learning to read they often carefully and painstakingly sound out and pronounce every word without much expression. “The... ball... rolled... down... the... hill.” Our process is very similar. We carefully and painstakingly sound out the correspondences of the internal sense. “Horse means understanding... chariot means doctrine... sword means truth...” In time children come to learn to read with more expression, and we can recognize that they understand the meaning of the word and the story that they tell, and are no longer simply decoding the sounds within the letters. The same can eventually be true of us as adults. As we get more fluent in the genuine truths and the correspondences of the internal sense of the Word, we too have the hope of reading the internal sense more fluently and with expression, as we begin to understand the meaning of the spiritual and heavenly stories there.