New Christian Bible Study

Commentary

 

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

 

True Christian Religion #25

Study this Passage

  
/ 853  
  

25. At this point I shall insert the following account of an experience. 1

Once on waking from sleep I fell into a profound meditation about God; and when I looked up, I saw in the sky above me a brilliant, oval-shaped light. When I fixed my gaze upon that light, it moved to either side and occupied the surrounding area. Then suddenly heaven lay open before me, and I saw wonderful sights, and angels standing in a ring on the south of the opening, talking among themselves. Because I was fired with a desire to hear what they were saying, I was first permitted to hear the sound of their voices, which was full of heavenly love, and later their speech, which was full of the wisdom which comes from that love.

They were talking among themselves about the one God, being linked with Him and salvation by this means. What they said was beyond words to express; most of it could not be put into the words of any natural language. But because on a number of occasions I had been in company with angels in heaven itself, and then, being in a like state, I could speak similarly with them, I was now able to understand them, and pick up a few points in their conversation which can be rationally expressed in the words of natural language.

[2] They were saying that the Divine Being is one, the same, the very self and indivisible. They illustrated this by spiritual ideas, saying that the Divine Being cannot be reduced to several, each of which is the Divine Being, and still remain one, the same, the very self and indivisible. For each would think from His own Being from Himself, and in each case through Himself; if He then thought from the others and through them in agreement, then there would be several gods of like mind, and not one God. For unanimity, being a consensus of several with each one agreeing of himself and through himself, is not consonant with the oneness of God, but with a plurality. They did not say 'of gods', because they were unable to, since the light of heaven which governed their thought, and the aura which carried their speech, offered resistance.

They said too that when they wanted to say the word 'Gods', and each as a Person by Himself, as soon as they attempted to say this it was instantly replaced by one, or rather the sole, God. They added that the Divine Being is the Divine Being in itself, not from itself, because from itself supposes Being in itself arising from another prior one. Thus it supposes a God arising from God, which is impossible. Anything arising from God is not called God, but Divine. For what is God arising from God, or God born of God from eternity, and what is God arising from God proceeding by means of God born from eternity but mere words totally devoid of heavenly light?

[3] They went on to say that the Divine Being, which is in itself God, is the same; not the same in a simple way, but infinitely the same, that is, the same from eternity to eternity. He is the same everywhere, the same with each person and in each person; but all the changes and differences occur in the person who receives Him, and it is his state which causes this.

To demonstrate that the Divine Being, which is God in itself, is very self they said: 'God is very Self, because He is love itself and wisdom itself, that is, because He is good itself and truth itself, and thus life itself. If these things were not the very Self in God, they would be as nothing in heaven and the world, because none of them would be related to the very Self. Every quality gets its quality from the fact that it is the self which is its source, and must be related to it to have that quality. This very Self, which is the Divine Being, is not in any place, but with and in those people who are located in accordance with their ability to receive it, since neither place nor movement from one place to another can be attributed to love and wisdom, or good and truth, and life from them, which constitute the very Self in God, or rather are God Himself. Hence God is omnipresent. That is why the Lord says that He is in the midst of them, and that He is in them and they in Him.

[4] 'Because God cannot be received by anyone such as He is in Himself, He appears as He is in essence, as the Sun above the heavens of the angels; the radiation emitted by Him as light is Himself as regards wisdom, and as heat is Himself as regards love. That Sun is not God Himself, but the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom coming forth most nearly from Him, all around Him, and these appear to the angels as the Sun. He Himself is in the Sun as a Man; He is our Lord Jesus Christ, both as regards the Divine origin and the Divine Human; since the very Self, which is Love itself and Wisdom itself, was His soul from the Father, and so Divine Life, which is Life in itself. This is different in the case of any person; in him his soul is not Life, but a receiver of life. The Lord teaches us this too, when He said:

I am the Way, Truth and Life, John 14:6.

and elsewhere:

Even as the Father has life in Himself, so too did He grant the Son to have life in Himself, John 5:26.

Life in Himself is God.'

They added that those who are at all spiritually enlightened can perceive from these statements that the Divine Being cannot exist in several, because it is one, the same, the very self and thus indivisible. If anyone were to say that this plurality was possible, there would be obvious contradictions in the qualities predicated.

Footnotes:

1. This is repeated from Apocalypse Revealed 961.

  
/ 853  
  

Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Conjugial Love #326

Study this Passage

  
/ 535  
  

326. To this I will append two narrative accounts. Here is the first:

After the question concerning the soul had been discussed in the school and answered, 1 I saw the people going out in order, the headmaster in front, after him the older men, with the five young men who had responded to the question in the midst of them, and after them the rest. As they left the building, they went around to the sides, where there were walkways surrounded by bushes. And gathering there, they broke up into small groups, all of them circles of young men conversing on matters of wisdom, with one of the wiser men from the balcony in each.

Seeing them from my place of lodging, I entered a state of the spirit and in the spirit went out to them. And there I went over to the headmaster, who a little before had posed the question concerning the soul.

When he saw me he said, "Who are you? As I watched you approaching on the way here, I was astonished to see that one minute you would pop into view, the next minute drop out of sight, so that one moment I would see you and suddenly then not. Surely you are not in the same life-state as our people."

Gently laughing at this I replied, "I am not a marionette, nor a chameleon, but I am one who alternates, being sometimes in your light and sometimes not, so that I am an alien and at the same time a native."

[2] At this the headmaster looked at me and said, "These are strange and extraordinary things you are saying. Tell me who you are."

So I said, "I live in the world in which you once lived and from which you have departed, which is called the natural world; and I live as well in the world into which you have come and in which you are now living, which is called the spiritual world. I am as a result in a natural state and at the same time a spiritual one - in a natural state when I am with people on earth, and in a spiritual state when I am with you. Moreover, when I am in a natural state, I am not visible to you; but when I am in a spiritual state, I am. To be as I am is something I have been given by the Lord.

"Being an enlightened man, you know that an inhabitant of the natural world does not see an inhabitant of the spiritual world, or vice versa. Therefore when I conveyed my spirit into my body, you did not see me; but when I conveyed it out of my body, you did.

"You also taught in your school exercise that you are souls, and that souls see souls because they are human forms. But you know that you did not see yourselves or your souls within your bodies when you were in the natural world. This fact is due to the difference that exists between something spiritual and something natural."

[3] When he heard me mention a difference between something spiritual and something natural, he said, "What is the difference? It is not like the difference between something more pure and something less so? So what is something spiritual but a purer form of something natural."

But I replied, "That is not what the difference is, but it is as the difference between something prior and something subsequent, between which there is no finite relationship. For the prior is in the subsequent, as a cause in its effect, and the subsequent exists from the prior, as an effect from its cause. That is why the one is not visible to the other."

To this the headmaster said, "I have reflected and ruminated on the difference, but so far in vain. I would like to have some concept of it."

[4] So I said, "You shall not only have a concept of the difference between something spiritual and something natural, but you will even witness the difference." Whereupon I spoke to him as follows:

"You are in a spiritual state when you are with your own people, but in a natural state with me; for you speak with your associates in spiritual language, the common language of every spirit and angel, whereas with me you speak in my native tongue. Indeed, every spirit or angel in speaking with a mortal person uses the person's customary language, thus speaking French with a Frenchman, English with an Englishman, Greek with a Greek, Arabic with an Arab, and so on.

"So then, to learn the difference between something spiritual and something natural in terms of languages, do the following: Go over to your associates, say something there and remember the words. Then with these memorized, come back and repeat them to me."

So he did as I said, and returned to me with the words in his mouth, but when he uttered them he did not know what any of them meant. The words were altogether strange and unfamiliar, being words not found in any language of the natural world.

After he repeated this experiment several times, it became clearly apparent to him that people in the spiritual world all speak a spiritual language which has nothing in common with any language of the natural world, and that every person comes automatically into use of that language after death. At the same time he also then discovered that the very intonation of spiritual language is so different from the intonation of natural language that the intonation of spiritual language, even when loud, is not at all audible to a natural person, nor the intonation of natural language to a spiritual person.

[5] After that I asked the headmaster and some others standing by to go over to their associates and write down some thought on a piece of paper, and with that piece of paper come back to me and read it. They did as I said, and they returned with the piece of paper in hand; but when they went to read it, they were unable to make out what any of it meant, since the writing consisted only of some alphabetic letters with curly lines over them, each of which carried some meaning connected with the subject. (Because every letter of the alphabet carries some meaning there, it is apparent from what origin the Lord is called the Alpha and the Omega.) 2 As they again and again withdrew, wrote and returned, they discovered that their writing included and contained a countless number of elements which no natural writing could ever express. But they were told that this is because a spiritual person thinks thoughts incomprehensible and inexpressible to a natural person, and these cannot descend or be put into any other form of writing or language.

[6] Then, because the others standing by were unwilling to believe that spiritual thought so far surpasses natural thought as to be inexpressible in comparison, I said to them, "Try an experiment. Go over into your spiritual association, think on some subject, and holding the thought come back and express it to me."

So they went, thought, held the thought, and came back; but when they went to express what they had thought, they could not. For they did not find any natural mental concept equivalent to any spiritual concept. So neither did they find any word to express their thoughts, since ideas of the mind take form as words in speech. At that they then began to withdraw and return, to prove to themselves that spiritual ideas were higher than natural ones, being inexpressible, ineffable and incomprehensible to the natural man. And because spiritual ideas are so transcendent, they began to say that spiritual ideas or thoughts compared to natural ones were the essences of ideas and the essences of thoughts, and that they therefore expressed the essences of qualities and the essences of affections; consequently that spiritual thoughts were the germs and origins of natural thoughts. It also became evident from this that spiritual wisdom was the essence of wisdom, thus unintelligible to any person of wisdom in the natural world.

They were then told from the third heaven that there is a still more interior or higher wisdom, called celestial, which has a similar relationship to spiritual wisdom as spiritual wisdom does to natural wisdom; and that these levels of wisdom flow in succession in accordance with the heavens from the Lord's Divine wisdom, which is infinite.

Footnotes:

1. This account follows on the one related in no. 315 above.

2. In Revelation 1:8,11, 21:6, 22:13. Alpha and omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, in the language in which Revelation was written.

  
/ 535  
  

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

©2024 New Christian Bible Study Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed from newchristianbiblestudy.org