The Other Life/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
SPIRITUAL TIMES AND SPACES.
THE practical man, disgusted with metaphysical subtleties, turns impatiently away at the mention of time and space. Let him give us his ear. He will find much that is novel, beautiful and instructive in Swedenborg's presentation of these subjects. Swedenborg is not altogether free from mystery and obscurity. How could it be otherwise, when he deals with infinite themes and struggles to convey spiritual truths to natural minds? He has, however, delivered us from so many errors, dissipated so many clouds before us, led us to such clear and commanding heights, that we can trustingly follow him on the most difficult paths, assured that if we do not understand him, the fault will lie mainly in the feebleness and darkness of our own minds.
Some will say these things are very strange! as if the strange and new were necessarily impossible! Do you suppose that heaven can be, opened to you, and the laws and phenomena of the other life revealed, and that you will not be startled by anything strange or new? Is it not far more rational to suppose that everything will be novel and surprising and wonderful? Study Swedenborg patiently, ponder in your heart what seems doubtful or mystical, accustom your mental eyes to the great splendor of the light he gives, which almost blinds you at first, and you will gradually discover more spiritual truth in his pages than is contained in all the libraries of the world.
After all his glowing descriptions of our spiritual bodies, our spiritual senses, our surroundings and organizations hereafter, what are we to make of his assertion that there is neither space nor time in the spiritual world?
Sjmce with us is the very basis of our identity, and of the differentiation of one thing from another. Impenetrability, or the power of a body to occupy a certain portion of space to the exclusion of all others, is the fundamental physical property, without which nothing could exist. Nor can we imagine how events can succeed each other in regular order without originating the idea of time.
It is true that our thought and imagination leap over spaces and times without difficulty. Our heart is where our home is, though it be far away. The case of the young lady who at a London ball clasped her hands to her bosom in fearful agony at the very moment her lover was shot through the heart in Spain, and many similar cases, prove that sympathetic spirits are not really sundered, although their bodies may be, by the spaces of the material world.
It is true also that we make a certain mental estimate of time, whether it be long or short, according to our mental states—an estimate not at all concurred in by our neighbor who gets his information from the time-piece or the movement of the sun. And lastly, in our dreams, when the soul works in partial independence of the body, what a magnificent scorn she exhibits of the bondage of time and space and even of death itself!
These are faint foreshadowings of the spiritual laws revealed through Swedenborg.
Times and spaces are fixities in this life; they are appearances in the next.
What are appearances?
They are objects or events or motions or times or spaces which represent the changing states of the soul as to wisdom and love. They appear or disappear with these mental states, changing as they change.
Time and space are no exceptions to the law of spiritual creation that the objective world is produced by and represents the subjective. A spirit's body changes, his clothing changes, his house changes, his scenery changes, according to the changes of his mental state. Variations in time and space are with him the external signs and proofs of variations in his emotional and intellectual condition. They are modes of his own existence.
It is day or night to the spirit, cold or warm, summer or winter, not according to the relationships existing between a rotating earth and a central sun, but according to the state of the soul or frame of the mind, and a greater or less receptivity of the love and wisdom which are the heat and light of the spiritual world. That love and wisdom enter the mind by an interior way, and are made apparent to the perceptive faculties as heat or light in the external sphere.
So also objects are near or far off in that world, not on account of fixed spatial distances, but through the operation of the law of affinity which draws similar things together and drives dissimilar ones apart.
Swedenborg's statement, then, that there are no times and spaces in the spiritual world, is qualified by the statement, that they are not fixed times and spaces, such as we have here, but apparent times and spaces wholly different in origin and in signification from ours.
Time and space come with a finite creation. The moment souls are created, finited, placed apart from God and exist, time and space spring up about them. Why? Because they are finite. If any one of them were infinite, he would be God, without time and space. Man is finite; he feels limitations. He reaches forward; he collides with another finite. He looks abroad; he is met by the horizon.
The horizon has a deep significance. It is the badge, the type, the proof of our finiteness. It contracts or expands indefinitely according to our spiritual states. We can never get out of it. It is the periphery of our universe. There is no horizon, however, to the eye of God.
The fact that there are times and spaces in this world and apparent times and spaces in the next, is evidence of our finiteness, is proof that we are separated or discreted from God. He has no time, no space, no limitations, no progressions from one place to another, from one age to another, from one state of thought and affection to another, from one life to another.
His infinite love and wisdom, being above times and spaces and phenomena, have an infinite projection or extension. He therefore pervades every sphere without a horizon in any. He is therefore omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent.
The universe exists only by reason of its imperfection. It may grow more and more perfect for ever, but the absolutely perfect is unattainable, because it is the divine.
Now contemplate the two most profound and comprehensive laws of the spiritual world.
1st. The imperfect reception of the divine love in the will of the angels, and the infinite varieties of that reception, are the causes of all spatial appearances with their objects and phenomena.
2d. The imperfect reception of the divine wisdom in the understanding of the angels is the cause of the appearance of time and its succession.
These laws are evident; for if any soul were perfect in its reception of the divine love it would enter into or assume all the creative energies of God, and could pervade all epochs. If it were perfect in the reception of the divine wisdom, it would see the past, the present and the future as one.
Our imperfection is the pledge of our immortality, our progress, our happiness, as well as the ground of our consciousness itself.
The poet understood all this, who said:
"Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb,
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him?"
There is spiritual as well as physical impenetrability. It is our individuality, our identity. Each soul is a substance with specific qualities peculiarly its own, not to be displaced by any other soul or transmuted into it. Therefore it produces times and spaces peculiar to itself.
All things differ. No two trees are alike; no two leaves on a tree. No forms are ever precisely similar; no two thoughts; no two affections; no two human faces; no two spirits. Hence the infinity of the spiritual and natural universes, and the boundlessness of times and spaces both here and hereafter.
As all things differ, every state of affection and thought must have points of divergence from all other states, giving birth to some surroundings peculiar to itself. Therefore separations take place. Each thing has an individual sphere; each standpoint a different horizon. One thing stands apart from another in space; one thing succeeds another in time.
On earth and in heaven the appearances are the same. Similar impressions of time and space are made on the senses of man and angel, but the interpretation is different. This arises from the difference between natural and spiritual thought. Spiritual thought looks directly into the causes of things. It sees the origin of spiritual times and spaces, and sees that it is mental. The angel, therefore, is not surprised at the annihilation of his space, at the shortening or lengthening of his time, events which on our earth would be incredibly miraculous.
He thinks intently from love of some friend in the remotest spiritual society, and space is nothing; and he stands face to face with his friend. He has entered into a similar state of affection and thought, and therefore projects similar things around him. Nor is he astonished if any one vanishes instantly from his sight. He knows that he has simply passed into a different frame of mind. So of time. The sun may be shining in noon-day brilliance, but if the spirit sinks into a selfish or worldly state of thought, it will grow immediately dark and the sun will disappear. States shorten or lengthen the days.
From this point of view, we may understand that strange passage of Scripture, in which it is asserted that Joshua made the sun stand still in the midst of heaven, so that it hasted not to go down for a whole day. The skeptic mocks at this statement, and the Christian doubts it or is sorely puzzled to explain it. No one in this scientific age dares suppose that either the earth or the sun could stand still for a moment without precipitating the globe to destruction. The commentators have no refuge but to say with some, that it is "a sublime poetical trope;" or, with others, that God caused a great refraction of light in the sky long after the sun had gone down, enabling the Israelites to pursue their enemies—which, of course, is a paltry subterfuge.
All persons and events in the Jewish history represented spiritual things, the mysteries of heaven, the operation of God on the heart. In this fact lies the divinity of the Old Testament. The miracles are simply spiritual events interpreted in a natural manner. The sun shines in heaven for a longer or shorter period according to the states of the individual angel. To have the sun stand still until one slays his enemies, is, in spiritual language, to have the divine support and countenance in overcoming our evils, so long as we continue the warfare against them in his name.
The Jews were, no doubt, assisted by a miraculous light, but it came from within and not from without; from the spiritual Sun, not from the natural. The light that smote Paul on his way to Damascus did not flash from our terrestrial sky. Yet the phenomena in these cases were interpreted sensuously by Paul and Joshua; and the natural inference is, that they occurred in the physical sphere. This is one of the many instances where the letter killeth, and the spirit maketh alive.
Let us return to spiritual spaces.
When an angel sees another spirit close by, he knows that that spirit has something in common with himself, has entered into a state of life, thought and feeling similar to his own. When he sees spirits afar off unable to approach, he knows that no physical obstacles intervene, but that their dissimilar spiritual states keep them asunder.
Thus it was that the rich man saw Lazarus "afar off" in Abraham's bosom—that is, in a state of love to God and the neighbor incomprehensible to himself. This total difference of state is the "impassable gulf" which is fixed between heaven and hell—no material abyss, but a dissimilarity of mental states which produces entirely different worlds around them. Thus the angels and the devils are antipodal, standing feet to feet, each utterly and for ever beyond the horizon of the other, because their states of thought and feeling are fundamentally and eternally opposite.
Persons or societies in the spiritual world are more or less remote from each other according to the dissimilarity of their mental states. They approach or recede as these states vary and become more or less sympathetic. Husband and wife, being thoroughly united in spirit, occupy the same house and the same chamber. The spirit next resident to yourself will be the one more thoroughly congenial, and so on in all directions from yourself as a centre.
Swedenborg says:
"It has been permitted me to see how similitude of state conjoins, and thereby contracts the extension of space or distance, and how dissimilitude separates and produces an extension of space or distance. They whom the sight would judge to be a mile distant from each other, can be present in a moment when the love of one toward another is excited; and on the contrary, they who are conversing together can in a moment be removed a mile apart when enmity is excited."
In passing from one extreme state to another, from intense joy to intense grief, from great light to utter darkness, from faith to incredulity, from love to hatred, and so forth, the soul travels through a great many intermediate states, which, if they were all registered and presented to outward view, would almost give one a panorama of the spiritual universe.
How do they move about or travel in the spiritual world?
To advance from one person to another, from one society to another, from one kingdom or heaven to another, interior changes of state must occur in the mind, which changes are accompanied by corresponding progressions of the spiritual body in the apparent space of the spiritual world.
It is therefore possible for the spirit to remain in the same place in fact, and, by successive changes of state induced upon his affections and thoughts by spirits approaching one after another, to travel in appearance from place to place, from society to society, from heaven to heaven.
This organic law of the spirit renders credible the statement that Swedenborg was granted a survey of all parts of the spiritual world while still living in his natural body. His soul did not leave his body. His natural senses became quiescent; his natural mode of thought became dormant. His spiritual perceptions were opened; he entered into the sphere or states of the spirits or angels who approached him; and he saw around him the scenery or events which represented outwardly their spiritual lives. By having different spirits successively adjoined to him, his apparent external surroundings were successively changed, and he thus obtained that vast accumulation of spiritual experiences which will instruct and delight the coming generations of men.
To illustrate most forcibly this great law, that spiritual scenery, with all its objects, times and spaces, rises spontaneously about the unmoving spirit in correspondence with his successive changes of affection and thought; and also to show how the natural and spiritual worlds are connected; the spirit of Swedenborg, still resident in his natural body, was presented with a view of spirits from several planets of our solar system, and from worlds that revolve afar off in the sidereal abysses, and through them he saw the people and objects in those remote spheres.
Thus his little book, "Earths in the Universe," upon which the greatest ridicule has been heaped, and which is perhaps the most difficult fully to comprehend, is explained by, and in return itself illustrates the fundamental laws of our spiritual being.
In the spiritual world nothing ever separates us from those we love and by whom we are loved; for to think of one there intently from affection, is to bring him before our face. Affection is presence and thought is sight. God is, therefore, for ever shining as a sun before the faces of his children.
Another of the wonders of the spiritual life is that the sun is always in the east, and that the angels can never turn their backs upon it. Whichever way they turn their bodies the sun is always in front of them. This fact, apparently so strange, is only a part of the general law, that all objects which appear outwardly to spirits are representative of spiritual things within themselves. The sun without them represents the Lord as he is received in their inmost hearts. Their affections, the interior faces of the spirit are perpetually turned toward the Lord, and therefore the representative sun appears perpetually before the face of the body. On the contrary the sun of the spiritual world is always at the back of evil spirits. They do not see it because they are interiorly turned away from the Lord.
Morning, noon and evening come and go, not according to the rising and setting of the sun, for the sun of the spiritual world appears always at a middle altitude between the horizon and the zenith; but in obedience to the mutations of the spirit itself in its reception of the divine love and wisdom. It is morning when the Lord rises freshly and sweetly upon the heart with his married beams of goodness and truth. The light which illumines the world, illumines also with living radiance of thought the soul that surveys it. The celestial love accompanying this morning light stirs warmly the most secret fountains of the emotional life. The morning hour of the angels is their state of sweetest peace, innocence, trust and joy.
Every morning in the spiritual world is a new birth and resurrection; a passing away of old forms of thought and feeling and a flowering forth of a higher and better state. Every morning is a further revelation of the Lord, and a fresh coronation of love, fragrant with dews and flowers, as the guiding divinity of the soul.
The love of the Lord newly awakened into higher power stimulates the love of the neighbor, and the soul yearns to go forth, vigorous and joyful, into all the uses of life, social, civil and domestic. Then it passes on to its noon state, when the blended heat and light are greatest, and the spiritual activities are at their height. It pours out its life in genial labors.
But in the attempt to utilize the love and wisdom given it of God for the benefit of others, something of the selfhood creeps in, and the light begins to pale and the heat to decline, and the shadows of evening steal gradually over the soul. The morning and noon are long and brilliant according as the spirit can sustain its total surrender to God and the neighbor. As the soul turns partially away from the Lord to self, and approaches, though still remotely, those earthly states or modes of feeling and thought which we so well understand, a spiritual obscurity overshadows it, represented outwardly by all the phenomena of evening.
Thus it is that even the angels feel, like ourselves, the tender pensiveness of the twilight hour. The great sun seems to veil himself in a glory of amber clouds. The silver stars steal softly forth and light their humbler fires. Mysterious and beautiful shadows of heaven spread over the woods and waters. The echoes of purer loves and of nobler thoughts tremble on the air. And the golden depths of ether draw the soul into delicious reverie, with a beauty that saddens while it exalts, and with a divine intimation that the splendors of its morning hour are concealed but not lost.
But there is no night in heaven. That belongs only to the earth and to hell. For the angels never fall into states of thought and feeling so low, that they could forget or deny the Lord—never!
Lastly, they sleep.
Yes, they sleep and dream. They drop the activities of angelic life; they relax the high tensions of love and thought. They rest. They are blest with visions of transcendent beauty. Their dreams are the voices of higher angels talking above them on celestial themes. In the highest heaven it is the voice of Jehovah walking and speaking with his children in the paradise of the soul. In the deep slumber and unconsciousness of their selfhood, they are thus secretly fed with new life from above. They are drawn back to the Lord. Then comes the heavenly dawn again with its glimmer of pearl and gold. The joy and peace of a new and more innocent childhood burst upon them. They sing praises which are prayers, and they turn toward each other with that love which is both praise and prayer. Then the sun opens his palace-gates of cloud, and, renovated by his warmth and light, they consecrate themselves to the duties and blessings of another day.
Swedenborg says that the angels advance in perfection by means of these successive and charming alternations of state. We are apt to suppose that the angelic life will be one continued, unabated blaze of glory, and a steady advance from height to height, with never a look cast downward or backward. Swedenborg's disclosure is far more rational and beautiful, and founded, moreover, in the nature of things.
For there is an eternal and universal alternation and revolution impressed on spirit and matter; an attraction and repulsion; a going and returning; a rising and setting; systole and diastole; inspiration and expiration; contraction and expansion; light and shadow; heat and cold; day and night; sleeping and waking; summer and winter.
This eternal and universal alternation of states, the perpetual outflowing and indrawing of the breath of God, is the mighty force which keeps the orbs of heaven on their courses, turns the world on its axis, makes the ebb and flow of the tides, brings us June and December; causes the heart to beat and the lungs to breathe, excites and subdues the powers of the brain, impels us to labor and to rest, lifts us to heaven and permits us to recede to the earth.
Amid all the infinite variety of phenomena and the multiplicity of secondary causes, the one primary universal cause of all these things is, the tendency of the self hood, on the one hand, to recede from the Lord, and the attractive power of the divine love, on the other, which would draw all things back to the infinite bosom.
This apparent resolution or disintegration of the one great cause into the many, was in the mind of the far-sighted poet when he sang:
"All things
Are of one pattern made; bird, beast and flower,
Song, picture, form, space, thought and character
Deceive us, seeming to be many things,
And are but one."
Swedenborg frequently states that it is the inability of the natural man to think above time and space, or, in other words, his bondage to sensuous appearances, which causes his mental darkness, and compels him to construe the Word of God in a literal manner, against which the educated reason must finally revolt.
The Word of God is an imperishable record of the states of the human heart and intellect in their relations to the Supreme Being. These states cannot be comprehended by the mind which rests in the contemplation of the times, places, numbers and persons mentioned in the Bible. Those times, places, numbers and persons are representative of spiritual states, and nothing but a knowledge of those states can lead us to a true perception of the spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom.
To prepare the way for the comprehension of the spiritual sense, which he was commissioned to unfold. Swedenborg reveals to us the laws and phenomena of the other life, enabling us, in a great measure, to think spiritually and above nature; involving, also, a positive philosophy of the human soul which must supersede the dreamy metaphysics of all the ancient and modern schools.