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Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings

This list of Memorable Occurrences in Swedenborg's Writings was originally compiled by W. C. Henderson in 1960 but has since been updated.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Conjugial Love #355

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355. The second account:

When I once looked out into the world of spirits, I saw some men in a particular meadow, dressed in the same sort of clothing that people wear in the world, from which I recognized that they had only recently come from the world.

I went over to them and stood to the side, in order to hear what they were saying to each other. They were talking about heaven; and one of them, who knew something about heaven, said there were wonders there which no one could ever possibly believe unless he saw them. He cited as examples the paradise-like gardens; the palaces, magnificently constructed architecturally owing to the quintessence of the art there, shining as though of gold, with columns of silver in front, and covered with precious stones in heavenly forms; the houses, too, of jasper and sapphire, fronted by majestic porticos through which the angels enter; and the adornments inside the houses, which neither art nor words can describe.

[2] "As for the angels themselves," he said, "they are of both sexes. There are young men and married men, maidens and wives - maidens so beautiful that the world has nothing to match such beauty. Yet the wives are even more beautiful, appearing as veritable pictures of heavenly love, and their husbands as pictures of heavenly wisdom. The latter are also all youthful young men; and what is more, they do not know what love for the opposite sex is other than conjugial love. Furthermore - something that will surprise you - the husbands have a continual ability to experience its delights."

When those newly arrived spirits heard that they did not have any love for the opposite sex there other than conjugial love, and that they had a continual ability to experience its delights, they laughed among themselves and said, "What you are saying is unbelievable. Such an ability is not possible. You are, perhaps, making up stories."

[3] But then an angel from heaven stood unexpectedly in their midst and said, "Listen to me, please. I am an angel from heaven, and I have lived with my wife now for a thousand years, in the same flower of youth in which you see me here. I have this youthfulness as a result of conjugial love with my wife; and I can declare that I have had and continue to have the continual ability you are talking about. However, because I perceive that you believe it is not possible, I will speak with you on this subject in terms of its reasons, in accordance with the light of your intellect.

"You know nothing of the original state of man, which you call the state of his integrity. In that state, all the interior faculties of the mind were opened all the way to the Lord, and consequently were pervaded by a marriage of love and wisdom or of goodness and truth. So, because the goodness of love and the truth of wisdom are continually drawn to each other by love, they continually aspire to be united; and when the interior faculties of the mind are opened, this conjunctive, spiritual love freely flows down with its continual impetus and imparts the ability.

[4] "Because man's very soul is pervaded by a marriage of goodness and truth, it is impelled not only by a perpetual striving for union but also by a perpetual striving to be fruitful and produce a likeness of itself. So, when a person's interior faculties are open all the way down from the soul from that marriage there - since the interior faculties continually look to producing an effect in outmost expressions as their goal, in order to manifest themselves - as a result that perpetual striving to be fruitful and produce a likeness of itself, which is one of the soul, becomes one of the body. Consequently, because the ultimate operation of the soul in the body in the case of a married couple is into the ultimate expressions of love there, and these depend on the state of the soul, it is apparent why they have this continual ability.

[5] "They experience as well a perpetual fruitfulness, because there is a universal atmosphere of begetting and propagating the celestial attributes that have to do with love, the spiritual attributes that have to do with wisdom, and so the natural attributes that have to do with offspring - an atmosphere which emanates from the Lord and fills the entire heaven and entire world. Thus that heavenly atmosphere fills the souls of all people, and descends through their minds into the body, even to the outmosts of it, imparting a generative power. However, this power can be imparted only to those in whom a passage stands open from the soul through the higher and lower regions of the mind into the body and its outermost elements, which is the case in those who allow themselves to be led back by the Lord into the original state of their creation.

"I can declare that for a thousand years now I have never lacked the ability, or the power, or the virility, and that I have not experienced at all any diminishing of its forces, since these are continually renewed by the continual flowing in of the aforesaid universal atmosphere. They also then gladden the spirit, and do not leave it depressed, as happens in the case of those who suffer a loss of them.

[6] "Furthermore, truly conjugial love is altogether like the warmth of spring, whose flowing in inspires all things to burgeon and be fruitful. That, too, is the kind of warmth we have in our heaven. Consequently married partners there have springtime in them with its constant stimulus; and that constant stimulus is the impetus from which our virility comes.

"The fruits produced among us in heaven, however, are of another kind than among people on earth. With us the fruits are spiritual, which are the fruits of love and wisdom or of goodness and truth. A wife acquires from her husband's wisdom a love of it in her, and from his wife's love of wisdom a husband acquires wisdom in him. Indeed, a wife is actually transformed into an embodiment of love for her husband's wisdom, which is accomplished by her receptions of the propagations of his soul with delight - a delight arising from her willing to be an embodiment of love for her husband's wisdom. From being a maiden she thus becomes his wife and a likeness of him. As a result, too, love with its inmost friendship constantly increases in the wife, and wisdom with its happiness in the husband, and this to eternity. This is the state of angels in heaven."

[7] After the angel said that, he looked at the men who had come recently from the world and said to them, "You know that when you have felt the virile urge of love, you have made love to your married partners, and that after experiencing the delight you have turned away. But you do not know that in heaven we do not make love to our partners because of that virile force, but we have that virile force because of our love; and because we love our partners continually, that virility is continual in us.

"If you can reverse your state, therefore, you can understand this. When a man loves his partner continually, does he not love her with his whole mind and his whole body? For love directs all things of the mind and all things of the body to that which it loves; and because it is reciprocated, it so joins the two that they become as one."

[8] He said further, "I will not speak to you of conjugial love's having been implanted from creation in males and females, and of their inclination to a legitimate union; nor of the procreative faculty in males, which is tied together with a faculty for proliferating wisdom from a love of truth; nor of the fact that so far as a person loves wisdom from a love of wisdom, or truth from goodness, so far he experiences truly conjugial love and its accompanying power."

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Apocalypse Revealed #463

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463. To this I will append the following account:

I looked out in the direction of the seashore in the spiritual world, and I saw there a magnificent harbor. I went over and inspected it; and lo, I saw there seagoing vessels, great and small, and in them all kinds of merchandise, with boys and girls sitting on the rowers' benches and handing it out to any who wanted it. Moreover they said, "We are waiting to see our beautiful turtles which will soon rise up for us out of the sea." And suddenly I saw turtles, great and small, on whose shells and carapaces sat baby turtles, which were looking about at the surrounding islands.

The parent turtles had two heads, a large one covered with a shell like the carapace of their bodies, which gave them a reddish glow; and a small one, like the usual one for turtles, which they would withdraw into the foreparts of their bodies and also insert invisibly into the larger head. I kept my eyes, however, on the large, reddish head, and I saw that it had a face like that of a human being, and that it would speak with the boys and girls on the rowers' benches and lick their hands. The boys and girls for their part would pet them then and give them food and treats to eat, and also valuable gifts, such as silk usable for garments, sandarac wood 1 for tablets, purple for their ornamentation, and scarlet pigment as rouge.

[2] Seeing these things, I wished to know what they represented, as I knew that everything appearing in the world of spirits is a correspondent form and represents something spiritual descending from heaven.

Angels then spoke to me from heaven and said, "You yourself know what the harbor represents, and its vessels, and the boys and girls on the benches; but you do not know what the turtles represent."

So they said, "The turtles represent those members of the clergy there who divorce faith from charity and its good works totally, asserting to themselves that there is no conjunction whatever, but that the Holy Spirit enters into a person through faith in God the Father because of the merit of the Son, and purifies the person interiorly as far as to his native will. They make this will, then, into a kind of oval plane, and when the operation of the Holy Spirit approaches it, they say it goes around that plane on the left side and does not at all touch it. Thus the inner or higher part of a person's nature belongs to God, they say, while the outer or lower part belongs to the person, and thus nothing that a person does, whether good or evil, appears before God - not good because it is merit-seeking, and not evil because it is evil - since if these were to appear before God, they would both cause the person to perish.

"Moreover," they said, "because this is the case, a person is permitted to will, think, say and do whatever he pleases, provided he guards himself against the world."

[3] I asked whether they also declare that a person is permitted to think about God as being not omnipresent and not omniscient.

They said from heaven that this, too, is permitted them, because in the case of a person who has once been purified and thus justified, God does not look at anything pertaining to his thought or will, and yet in the inner recess or higher region of his mind or nature, he still retains the faith that he had previously received in its action upon him, and that the action can sometimes return without the person's knowing.

"This," the angels said, "is what the small head represents, which the turtles draw into the foreparts of their bodies and hide, and which they also insert in the large head when they speak with laymen. For they do not speak with them out of the small head, but out of the large one, which out front appears as though endowed with a human face. They speak with them from the Word about love, charity, good works, the Ten Commandments, and repentance, and they take from the Word almost everything that is found there on these subjects. But then they insert the small head into the large one, and this causes them to interpret within themselves that none of these things are to be done for God's sake, or for the sake of heaven and salvation, but only for the sake of the public good and personal good. Yet because they speak about these things from the Word, especially about the gospel, the operation of the Holy Spirit, and salvation, doing so agreeably and elegantly, therefore they appear to their listeners as beautiful human beings and wiser than any others in the entire world. That is why you saw the boys and girls sitting on the rowers' benches give them treats to eat and valuable gifts.

[4] "These, then, are the people you saw represented as turtles. In your world one can tell them apart from others to some small extent only by the fact that they believe themselves to be wiser than any others, and ridicule them, especially their colleagues, who they say are not as wise as themselves, and whom they scorn. They carry about with them a particular little seal on their clothing, to distinguish themselves from others."

[5] One of those speaking with me said, "I will not tell you their opinion regarding all the other tenets of faith, as for example, regarding election, free will, baptism, and Holy Supper, which are the kind of things they do not make public. But we in heaven know.

"However, because they are of such a character in the world, and because after death no one is permitted to speak otherwise than as he thinks, therefore - because they can speak then only in accord with the insanities of their thoughts - they are regarded as insane and expelled from one society after another, and at last are conveyed down into the bottomless pit and become carnal spirits having the appearance of mummies. For a callus was produced on the interiors of their minds, because in the world they had also interposed a wall.

"There is a hellish society of them bordering on a hellish society of Machiavellians, and they sometimes pass from the one into the other and call themselves comrades; but then they leave because of the difference between them, as they have among them some religion relating to faith in action, whereas among Machiavellians there is none."

[6] After I saw them expelled from one society after another and gathered together to be cast down, I saw a ship with seven sails flying in the air, and in it officers and sailors dressed in purple clothing, with magnificent laurel wreaths on their heads, and crying, "Look, we are now in heaven! We are professors robed in purple, and laureates greater than all others, because we are the foremost of the wise out of all the clergy in Europe."

I wondered what this was, and I was told that the figures were depictions of the conceit and the mental concepts termed fantasies emanating from the people who had appeared before as turtles, and who now, having been expelled from one society after another, appeared as insane and were gathered into a single group, standing together in one place.

At that I desired to speak with them, and I went over to the place where they were standing, and greeting them, said, "You are people who have divorced people's internals from their externals, and divorced the operation of the Holy Spirit as though in faith from its concomitant operation with a person as though apart from faith, thus divorcing God from man. Have you not by the same token removed not only charity and its works from faith, as many other learned of the clergy do, but also faith itself as regards its manifestation by a person in the sight of God?

"But if you please, do you wish me to speak to you on this subject in accord with reason, or in accord with the Holy Scripture?"

[7] They told me to speak first from reason, and so I spoke saying, "How can the internal and the external in a person be divorced? Who does not see, or cannot see, as a matter of common sense that a person's interiors all extend and are continued into the exteriors, and even into his outmosts, in order to produce their effects and accomplish their operations? Do the internals not exist for the sake of the externals, so as to terminate in them and subsist in them, and thus abide, much like a column upon its pedestal? Can you not see that if the continuity and thus conjunction did not exist, the outmost elements would disintegrate and drift away like bubbles in the air? Who can deny that there are millions of interior operations of God in people, of which a person knows nothing? And what help would it be for him to be aware of them, provided he is cognizant of the outmost ones, in which he, with his thought and will, act together with God?

[8] "But I will illustrate this with an example. Is a person aware of the inner operations of his speech, such as how the lungs draw in air and fill their alveoli, bronchia, and lobes with it? Or how they expel air into the trachea and there turn it into sound? Or how the sound is modified in the glottis with the aid of the larynx, and how the tongue then articulates it and the lips complete the articulation so that it becomes speech? All of these interior operations, of which the person knows nothing - do they not take place for the sake of the outmost effect, that the person be able to speak? Take away or divorce one of those internal processes from its continuity with the outmost effects - would a person be able to speak any more than a wooden post?

[9] "Take another example. A person's two hands are his terminal members. Do not the interior elements that extend into it come from the head through the neck, and then through the breast, shoulders, arms and forearms? And do these not involve countless muscular tissues, countless arrays of motor fibers, countless bundles of nerves and blood vessels, and a number of articulations of bones with their membranes and ligaments? Is a person at all aware of these? And yet his hands operate as a result of them. Suppose these inner processes took a wrong turn at the wrist and did not continue into the hands? Would the hands not fall off the forearms and decay like some inanimate object plucked away? In fact, if you are willing to believe it, it would be the same as with the body if the person were beheaded.

"It would be the altogether the same with a person's thought and will if the Divine operation should cease before reaching them and not flow into them.

"So much in accord with reason.

[10] "Now if you are willing to hear it, these arguments accord with the Holy Scripture as well. Does the Lord not say,

Abide in Me, and I in you... I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. (John 15:4-5)

"Are not the fruits good works, which the Lord does through a person, and which a person does as though of himself?

"Does the Lord not also say that He stands at the door and knocks, and that if anyone opens the door, He will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Him (Revelation 3:20)?

"Does the Lord not give minas and talents, that a person may do business with them and make a profit, and that in the measure of the person's profit He gives eternal life (Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 19:13-26)? Moreover, that He rewards everyone in accordance with the person's labor in His vineyard (Matthew 20:1-17)?

"But these are just a few proofs. We could fill pages with citations from the Word to the effect that a person should be like a tree and produce fruits, that he should keep the commandments, love God and the neighbor, and more. But I know that it is not possible for your intellectual acumen to have any real common ground with passages from the Word. Even though you quote them, still your ideas pervert them. Nor can you do otherwise, because you take away from a person everything having to do with God as regards any communication and so conjunction. What remains then but only all the rituals of worship?"

[11] After that I saw these people in the light of heaven, which disclosed and exposed the character of each one, and they did not appear then as before, in a ship in the air, as though in heaven. Nor were there any purple-robed figures in it, or heads wreathed with laurel. I saw them instead in a sandy area, in ragged clothing, and girded about their loins with nets, like those used by fishermen, through which their nakedness was visible. And they were then conveyed down into the previously mentioned society bordering on the hellish society of Machiavellians.

Footnotes:

1. Literally, "thyine wood." See Revelation 18:12

  
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Many thanks to the General Church of the New Jerusalem, and to Rev. N.B. Rogers, translator, for the permission to use this translation.

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