When Swedenborg sat in his library conversing with angels and gazing upon heavenly scenes, nothing was visible or audible to friends who might have been standing by. Nor did Swedenborg have any specific consciousness that he saw and heard with spiritual organs. So thoroughly, indeed, do our natural and spiritual organs correspond and fit into each other, that a man with his spiritual senses open seems to himself to see and hear everything, just as he always did, with the natural eye and ear.
Paul was elevated, he says, to the third heaven, and saw and heard things which were unutterable; but so similar is our spiritual body to our natural body, our spiritual senses to our natural senses, the spiritual world in external appearance to the natural world, that Paul was sorely puzzled, and declares that whether he was in the body or out of the body, he could not tell. His sensations told him that he was in the body; but his theoretic faculty demanded to know how he could be in the third heaven with angels and still retain all his natural faculties and sensations.
Swedenborg alone explains this and other biblical difficulties, by furnishing a true psychology, the result, not of metaphysical speculations, but of the observation and study of man from the spiritual
