Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 17

by Signe Toksvig

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"What Is a Spirit?"

SWEDENBORG continued devoutly to take down, as it were, the scriptural explanations that came to him, but he could not help also turning his attention to the new powers of mind which he was discovering. His curiosity asserted itself. Not content to be a "hand," he seemed to become aware that he need not be tied to the secretarial duty; he could (as Mrs. Willett did) get up and look around. He could "see" more and more as well as hear; he could, and did, interview the inhabitants and argue with them. "I inquired" became a common phrase in his diary, which swelled enormously. And wholesome doubt returned. About a year after his talks with alleged Old Testament characters and a couple of Apostles he wrote that during the several weeks while he was in conversation with them he could believe no otherwise than that it was so, but afterwards, "being taught by experience," he said he could perceive they had been spirits pretending to be those persons, perhaps authorized as spokesmen for the authentic characters, perhaps not. He cautiously added (November 29, 1747), "These things came today into my thought, but whether the matter be so with them as stated I do not yet certainly know." ¹

The names of Abraham, Moses, et al., slipped into the background though they remained part of the cast, and increasingly his acquaintance widened. Much more important for his sense of reality, so did his reacquaintance. He never was a man to put in names of actual persons (except toward the end of the diary a little), but he did note on a certain day that now he had talked to thirty people who had been known to him in life, and, a few months later, he added to the same entry that the number was now sixty.²

But before trying to follow Swedenborg in his extremely crowded and far more than merely double life, it might be well to consider what methods he evolved for putting himself into a state of dissociation or trance for the purpose of having such experiences.

Reference has been made (Chapter II, p. 129) to the fact that he seems to have accidentally stumbled on something similar to the old yoga technique of breath-control as a means of inducing such states, although at the time he was not conscious of doing so.

As early as 1744, however, in his so-called dream diary, he notes that he can produce certain effects by holding his breath, or varying the rhythm, and soon he was deliberately resorting to such practices. He says in his Spiritual Diary, "My respiration was so formed by the Lord that I could respire inwardly for a considerable time, without the aid of external air . . . in order that I may be with spirits and speak with them." ³

Reviewing the matter, he explained that this "tacit," or partly inhibited, breathing was not a new thing with him. "I was first accustomed thus to respire in my early childhood, when saying my morning and evening prayers, and occasionally afterwards, when exploring the harmonies of the lungs and heart, and especially when deeply engaged in writing the works that have been published [his Economy of the Animal Kingdom, etc.] . . .

"I was thus during many years from the period of childhood introduced into such respirations, especially by means of absorbing speculations in which the breathing seems to become quiescent, as otherwise the intense study of truth is scarcely possible. Afterwards, when heaven was opened to me, and I was enabled to converse with spirits, I sometimes scarcely breathed by inspiration at all for the space of a short hour, and merely drew in enough air to keep up the process of thinking . . .

"I have also again and again observed that when I was passing away into a state of sleep [here he undoubtedly means trance] my respiration was almost taken away, so that I would awake and catch my breath. When I observe nothing of the kind, I continue to write and think, and am not aware of my respiration being arrested, unless I reflect upon it. This I may say has happened in instances innumerable. Nor was I at such times able to observe the various changes because I did not reflect upon them." ⁴

This seems to be a description of the lightly entranced state of consciousness he was in while doing his automatic writing, which is borne out by what follows: "The design of all this was that every kind of state, every kind of sphere, and every kind of society [of spirits], particularly the more interior, might find in my own a fit respiration, which should come into play without any reflection on my part, and that thus a medium of intercourse might be afforded with spirits and angels." ⁵

But at times of course he did reflect on the various changes in the rhythms of his breathing and heart-beats. Once when the "more interior" spirits of "heaven," as he called them, were "operating" on his body, he said he noted a fourfold effect. One into the left temple, one into his lungs, one into his heart, and one, but obscurely, into his loins. He was clearly aware, however, of the effect on the systole and diastole of his heart which he particularly watched. The beats were "gentler and softer than at other times," indeed, so "soft and regular" were the pulsations, he said, that he could "count them one by one." And he noted particularly the coincidence of breathing and heart-beats. "The terminations of the heart's times closed in the pulmonic beats." ⁶

Elsewhere he observed that "when I wished the times of respiration to agree with those of the heart . . . then the understanding began almost to fade away . . ." ⁷

Now and then he mentions that the respiration is to his normal respiration as three to one, quick and shallow; it seems to be a preparatory stage for an almost entire withdrawal of breath. The entry is not very clear, but apparently this shallow breathing happened before the slowing down of his heart.⁸

Listening to the heart sounds is one way of reaching that condition of ecstasy which the Hindu yogins call samadhi, according to students of the subject; ⁹ in fact, measurements of such phenomena taken with the most modern recording instruments reveal in black and white the reduction of the voltage of the heart, as well as the shallow breathing preceding it.¹⁰

Whether one consults Hindu lore or electrocardiograms made of the yogins in samadhi, there seems to be some similarity between Swedenborg's more or less conscious technique for entrancing himself, and that of the East.

But of course when he said that the understanding began to vanish when he engaged in these practices. he meant that his awareness of sense impressions from the external world vanished, as he often made clear. He believed firmly that he entered into awareness of other worlds, other levels of consciousness. We have no means of knowing what they "really" were, but he has left descriptions in his diary of his several kinds of "visions" and the corresponding states.

(Incidentally, one of his entries mentions that some "spirits" from the "Indies" taught him a kind of breathing.¹¹)

Early in 1748 he was trying to distinguish between difierent kinds of "spiritual sight." He said there were four kinds. "The sight of sleep" was the first, by which he must have meant of the same clarity as the peculiar phenomena called "veridical dreams," for he adds that this "is as vivid as sight by day; so that in such sleep I should say if that be sleep wakefulness could also be sleep."

Psychologists might call the second kind "eidetic imagery"; it sounds like a very light trance. Swedenborg continues: "It is vision with the eyes closed, which is as vivid as with the eyes open, and similar objects, and even more beautiful and agreeable, are represented to view; the same kind of vision can also exist with open eyes, which I have experienced twice or three times." ¹²

In another reference he notes that he has sometimes, while thinking he was wide awake, though being in conversation with spirits, walked through city streets and country roads and yet been "in vision, seeing groves, rivers, palaces, houses, men and many other things. But after I had thus walked for hours, suddenly I was in the sight of the body, and became aware that I was in another place." ¹³

This corresponds to the so-called hallucinations of the sane, known to psychic research records, but Swedenborg was well aware that it was not objectively real as he considered other visions to be, for he expressly notes that this kind of vision is not the same as "the things I have habitually 'seen' . . . these are not visions but things seen in the highest wakefulness of the body, and this for several years." ¹⁴

The third kind of "spiritual sight" clearly implied awareness of what he considered the objective spirit world, without actual participation in it. "It is a state when the eyes are open, when those things which are in heaven, such as spirits and other objects, are represented. This is a representative vision which has been made most familiar to me, but it is rather obscure; it differs entirely from the common imagination of men." ¹⁵

Possibly this was the state in which the Danish General Tuxen found him many years later when Tuxen happened to enter unannounced in Swedenborg's cabin on board ship off Elsinore. "I found the Assessor seated in undress, his elbows on the table, his hands supporting his face, which was turned towards the door, his eyes open and much elevated. I was so imprudent as immediately to address him, expressing my happiness at seeing and speaking with him. At this he recovered himself (for he had really been in trance or ecstasy as his posture evinced), and, rising with some confusion, advanced a few steps from the table in singular and visible uncertainty, expressed by his countenance and hands, from which, however, he soon recovered." ¹⁶

(It is worth noting that in Of the Worship and Love of God Swedenborg makes one of his characters come out of a state of ecstasy in this way: "She briskly wiped her eyes with her finger, that her mind might recover its former ken." ¹⁷)

Swedenborg's description of the third kind of spiritual sight is as if he considered himself a stationary spectator (as indeed he always considered his physical body stationary in trance experience) with other-world visions being induced (or telepathized) to his brain, or, as he also put it, with mental images being represented to him. He was sometimes hard put to it to decide whether they were of symbolic significance or not, but he often says that his "conversation" with the more evolved spirits was by means of mental images.

All the other states he definitely distinguished from the one he called the fourth kind: "that in which a man is when separated from the body and in the spirit. In such a state a man cannot know otherwise than that he is in wakefulness, and in the enjoyment of all his senses, as touch, sight, hearing, and I cannot doubt respecting the other senses. The sight is more exquisite than in a state of wakefulness, nor does man perceive it any otherwise than such, except by this that a man [who is in such a state] relapses into the wakefulness of the body." ¹⁸

By this he clearly means that he comes out of the deep trance condition into normal physical wakefulness after having been, so it seems to him, actually in the other world in his psychic organism, "as a spirit among spirits," as he so often says elsewhere. But at that time (February 6, 1748), he added that he had only experienced this fourth kind three or four times "with much delight." In this connection it may be noted that in later years one of his London landladies and both his servants in Stockholm testified that Swedenborg would sometimes go to bed for three or four days and ask only for a basin of water to be placed by his bed, giving orders he was on no account to be disturbed. And, according to his friend Robsahm, they said he came out of these seclusions hale and hearty.

During the first year or two after he began automatic writing, Swedenborg was overwhelmed by the oddity of his experiences, but the diaries from 1747—49 are also full of evidence that he was increasingly trying to sift and weigh the happenings. In one entry, August 23, 1748, he seems to be trying to say that some of these scripts are obscure, and to be convincing himself of their origin. The latter, of course, was for the reason that he believed he was thus getting his interpretation of the Bible. He says: "It is to be held in general that all things which I have written in this book are written wholly from living experience, from conversation with spirits and angels, from thought, like tacit speech communicated (to me); also when I wrote of the things insinuated by them who were then together they experienced them to the fullest degree; and under their direction as to thoughts, writings, hand, so that everything which in these three books [The Word Explained] and elsewhere is written, though occasionally incoherent, still pertains to experience, and everything in its manner from spirits and angels; this is likewise directed by spirits next my head, for I have, as often, perceived their presence." ¹⁹

Swedenborg often expresses his despair of accounting for it; of getting people to believe him. Very early he said, "If I should bring forth my experience in these matters, besides being abundant, it would also be incredible . . ." ²⁰

And elsewhere, also early, "I am well aware that many will say that no one can possibly speak with spirits and angels as long as he lives in the body, and many will say that it is all fancy, others that I relate such things in order to gain credence [presumably for his theology], and other will make other objections. But by all this I am not deterred, for I have seen, I have heard, I have felt." ²¹

Emanuel Swedenborg was a brave man. Charles XII, the warrior king, was no braver. But Swedenborg might have flinched from publishing his other-world observations had he known that they would generally be taken as of things he had seen, heard, and felt materially. Even a psychic researcher has been heard to say, "Why, Swedenborg, he believed that there were actually palaces and gardens and food and drink and so on in the other world!"

Swedenborg claimed that before his "sight was opened" the idea he cherished concerning the other life "differed but little from that of others"; he thought it must be immaterial, and, being so, that either "no idea of it could be grasped, or it was nothing." Either incomprehensible or nonexistent. "And yet," he said, "the fact is just the reverse, for unless spirits were organized, and unless angels were organized substances, they could neither speak, nor see, nor think." ²²

He did not say or believe that the organized substance was material in any sense we know. He said it had "extension," not materiality. He had long ago convinced himself on scientific grounds that something could exist such as a magnetic field which had extension, although immaterial, and he had also made up his mind that "the animal spirits" constituted a subtle kind of organism used by the rational mind after withdrawal from the body. He scorned the idea of spirits having fleshly body and organs, but he insisted strenuously that they were capable of sensations, since it was the spirit in the body of the living man and not the body that was "having" the sensation. (That "psychic factors" or detached thoughts could drift around without either being part of a thinking subject or originating from one, he specifically rejected.²³)

In a passage that fits nicely into the idea that the psychon-system carries its sense impressions with it for a while after "death," he wrote: "Certain [spirits] greatly wondered that spirits had the sense of touch, and, indeed an exquisite one, when yet they were spirits, and it was contrary to all their opinion in the life of the body that spirits can have touch." Luckily Emanuel was around to enlighten them. As he modestly puts it, "It was given to tell them that this should by no means be wonderful, since man during life does not have the sense of touch, and the other senses, from the body, but from the spirit that is in the body from which the body has its life . . . Wherefore, after the death of the body a similar principle remains; for the spirit supposes itself to be certainly in the body, which opinion at last ceases. This is the reason of the corporeal touches, which only exist with them, who come recently from the life of the body into the other life. Subtler senses succeed, all of which must still be referred to the sense of touch, in order that they may be senses." ²⁴ (Author's italics.)

He never tires of saying that "the life of the body does not belong to the body" but only appears to do so. "Spirits take that life with them, because they have become accustomed to corporeals. . . ." But life is "formed in the body according to its organs," so, because spirits are accustomed to this, the old body-senses seem for a while to remain with them.²⁵

One is not surprised that he had vivid personal arguments on this topic. Inconsistency he soon discovered was no peculiarity only of the material world. "I conversed with those who in the life of the body believed that spirit was not extended," people who had such rooted phantasies (false ideas) on the subject "that they would not even admit the use of a term implying the idea of extension. Upon being aware of the fact, I inquired of one who was deeply rooted in this persuasion what he now thought respecting the soul or spirit, whether it was extended or not, reminding him that he saw, heard, smelled, touched and had appetite just as if he was actually in the body . . . He confessed that during life he had been of the opinion that the soul or spirit was not extended . . . He was then held a while in the idea in which he was when he thought thus in the world, and he then said that spirit was thought. But I answered him as if he were still living in the world by inquiring whether sight could exist without an organ of sight . . . [or] whether he could conceive of thought . . . apart from organs . . . He then acknowledged that he had during the life of the body indulged the phantasy of supposing that spirit was only thought, devoid of everything organic or extended." The phrase "or extended" was added by Swedenborg when he was commenting on this interview, and he also said that "this shows very clearly that the learned have no other conception of the soul or spirit than that it is mere thought, and so cannot but believe that it will vanish when they die." ²⁶

Apart from the ghosts of the learned professions, however, Swedenborg usually had the opposite opinion to combat, of which the following is a little example:

"A certain novitiate spirit, on hearing me speak about the spirit, asked, 'What is a spirit?' supposing himself to be a man. And when I told him that there is a spirit in every man, and that in respect to his life a man is a spirit, that the body is merely to enable a man to live on the earth, and that the flesh and bones, that is, the body, does not live or think at all; seeing that he was at a loss, I asked him whether he had ever heard of the soul. 'What is a soul?' he replied, 'I do not know what a soul is.' I was then permitted to tell him that he himself was now a soul, or spirit, as he might know from the fact that he was over my head, and was not standing on the earth. I asked him whether he could not perceive this, and then he fled away in terror, crying out, 'I am a spirit! I am a spirit!' " ²⁷

It must be admitted that when Swedenborg spoke of spirits and angels as being organized "substances," he laid himself open to misinterpretation. We find it hard to think of a substance as immaterial. What did he mean by the "form" of the spirit? Later he was to say that it constitutes the "cutaneous covering of the spiritual body which spirits and angels have. By means of such covering which is taken from the natural world, their spiritual bodies maintain existence; for the natural is the utmost containant; consequently there is no spirit or angel who was not born a man." ²⁸ (There are no wings on Swedenborg's angels.)

An angel, he came to believe, was a human spirit who had developed far enough to be admitted into a higher spiritual sphere (various kinds of "heaven"). As for the cutaneous covering taken from the "natural" world, here a backward glance must be taken at the conclusions he had arrived at in The Economy of the Animal Kingdom and in a lesser, unpublished, work, The Animal Spirit.

He had decided that the development of the embryo was determined by "a certain most fluid matter," which he also spoke of as "this substance or force." This was "the spirituous fluid" (or the "animal spirits") in which and by means of which the soul carried the pattern of a human being into materiality. It was "natural," or matter in its finest manifestation, that of force or energy; therefore it could create and govern the body; it was "spiritual" in that matter of this immaterial kind could be acted on by the still subtler energy of higher states of being or soul. It was the link between soul and body.

Swedenborg believed that when the outward material body died the "animal spirits" withdrew from it in the form of the human being which they had brought to it. This form served as the "organ of the soul," both in and out of the body.²⁹ But with men who had not cultivated their intellectual or spiritual capacities, or who had not done it in the right way, the spirit-body was hardly more than a body; it was still "natural," still obsessed by its corporeal experience—only a psychon-system, as Carington would say, a mere assortment of sense impressions, held together by consciousness.

After Swedenborg's "sight was opened," he was rather careful not to commit himself too definitely, partly, he said, because it was not "for various reasons" given to know "of what quality are the forms of spirits," but mostly because "natural terms cannot suffice to express them . . ." ³⁰

In any case, though their substance might be organized and still resemble a human body, the fact that this substance was now more obviously a kind of energy gave it a great many advantages and disadvantages from the material state. Swedenborg was industrious in recording his observations of these. The chief point noted by him, and indeed the key point for an understanding of everything he wrote on the subject, was what we now should call the almost fatal facility of telepathy.

Very early he discovered, he said, that "Thoughts are nothing but activities, and they become perceptible when the door is opened to heaven, this also has come clearly out in my own experience." ³¹

The chief trouble of the psychic organism in its new environment, according to Swedenborg, might be summed up in saying that it has to learn to tell the real from the unreal, imagination from fact. To use our terms again, the something in the human mind which can create persons and events in dreams, which can project hallucinations as if they were external, which can also succumb to suggestion by a hypnotist so that he can induce "sensations" on it—that something, called by Tyrrell "the stage-manager," becomes a main factor in the "world" observed by Swedenborg. Indeed it becomes a good servant or a bad master according to the spiritual state, one might say, of the "novitiate spirit."

In modern experimental telepathy, as has been mentioned, images of drawings have been transferred between "incarnate" minds without the aid of the usual sense mechanisms. Among discarnate minds, according to Swedenborg, something similar takes place; indeed, it is exactly the same but, being unhampered by the material body, it takes place on a grand scale. Here telepathy is an immense aid to communication. Really only newcomers use anything so clumsy as speech (and even then it is not what they think it is; Swedenborg took pains to explain to a spirit that the lips with which the spirit thought he spoke were not "real"). The more advanced inhabitants communicate by means of "representations"; that is, by mental images. But there is nothing vague about these, they can be made to appear as if they were "there."

"I also spoke with spirits by ideas alone, without words, and they understood as well as with words, by my merely representing from internal sight, as was the case when I ate," so Swedenborg entered in his diary June 8, 1748. "I represented merely from the internal sight what I ate without words, and they clearly comprehended; and if also at the same time [were represented] these things, viz., whatever a man has on his table or whatever is worn on the same occasion, or whatsoever it might be which was displayed to the sight, they were immediately understood and seen by the spirits by the discourse of ideas without words." ³²

Other sensations of his, he said, could be transmitted to the spirits; "thought" was not only visible, but "perceptible," he could (as a hypnotist can) transmit the taste of what he ate, etc., but he made careful note of the fact that unless he "reflected"—that is, gave his attention to—what he was perceiving, the spirits did not perceive it. When some of his new acquaintances had discovered, he said, that through Swedenborg they could reëxperience bodily sensations (their psychon-systems by now apparently having forgotten) they would sometimes pester him—such as the spirit "so goaded by a longing for a linen under-garment, that he said he could scarcely live if I did not put one upon him." The spirit showed nice psychological distinction, however. "I asked him whether he had a sensation together with mine, when I touched the linen for which he so much longed," Swedenborg noted, and "He said that he had no sensation himself, but he perceived that I had." ³³

Much more elaborate conversations were held, however, for small talk about physical sensations did not interest Swedenborg, and he rather disapproved of the spirits who would not move on to higher things. But that ideas could be made visible greatly interested him. In one entry he said that the spirits told him that his ideas "appeared before them as if alive . . . so that when peoples, camps, and the like were displayed representatively, they appeared before spirits just as if they saw them . . ." Here it is not clear whether he saw them himself, but he said, "In like manner representations of spirits very frequently have appeared to me, when my eyes were closed, entirely as alive, as if in the highest light." ³⁴

The more advanced spirits, or angels as he called them, were especially expert in this kind of communication, in fact he sometimes called it "angelic speech."

Connected with what might be termed the telepathic facility of the psychic organism was its extreme responsiveness to suggestion, or what Swedenborg spoke of as "induced phantasies." They could be good and they could be bad, they could be heaven and they could be hell. It was a case not of "seeing is believing" but very much of "believing is seeing."

He tells of one newcomer—a good soul—who "knew not at first where he was, supposing himself to be in the world altogether as if living in the body, for of this impression are all souls recent from the life of the body, inasmuch as they are not then gifted with reflection upon place, time, the objects of the senses and the like," but when he discovered how it was with him he began to feel "a certain anxiety," "not knowing whither he should betake himself, where he should dwell, etc."

Good spirits and angels came to his rescue, and by means of this suggestibility of his new form, they gave him "whatever he was prompted to wish and long for in his thoughts," "for they can give whatever is desired, inasmuch as such things can be represented, and thus can be made to appear to the person altogether as if he possessed them in the world," for, Swedenborg said subtly, "the possession of goods in the world is nothing else than imaginary, and when the imagination enjoys them to the full and has them in its eye, then it possesses them as in the world, and is delighted with them." ³⁵

Collective hallucinations were also formed. For those good spirits who still had the "phantasy" that heaven consisted in being in "paradise," paradises were arranged. They told Swedenborg concerning heavenly happiness; "and as I was ignorant about it, it was said that they have distinct houses, where those who are conjoined can live together and form societies; and from the still remaining phantasy or imagination heavenly pleasantnesses and delights appeared to them to be formed in which heavenly peace reigns. If they also desire it, paradises appear to be formed, with every variety of trees and shrubs; and likewise cities and palaces, and similar things . . ." ³⁶

He added a counsel of prudence to this entry in his journal: "but these things are not to be so written, or described to the world, lest they should seek heavenly things in such phantasies."

Induced hallucinations also accounted for the bodily punishments of the evil by the evil. "They can represent their associates by phantasy alone as being changed into various species of animals, as into serpents of various kinds; their companions being thus represented cannot deliver themselves from that phantasy . . ." ³⁷

But although phantasy, their sufferings were real.

Swedenborg looked around in this world of ecstatic or of dreadful make-believe, and he decided to describe it, since, as he said, "Man knows nothing more than simply, that there is a hell and a heaven; that in hell there is fire and torment and in heaven felicity, but in what these things consist he is profoundly ignorant . . . It is as though a man knew nothing more than the earth exists, without knowing anything of its kingdoms, governments and societies . . ." ³⁸