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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

 

True Christian Religion #78

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78. The third experience.

The next day an angel came to me from another community in heaven and said, 'We have heard in our community that because of your thoughts about the creation of the universe you were sent for to a community near ours; and there you gave a lecture on creation, which they applauded and have since taken great pleasure in. Now I am going to show you how animals and plants of every kind were produced by God.'

So he took me into a broad, green plain and said, 'Look around you.' I did so and saw birds of the most beautiful colours, some in flight, some sitting on trees and some on the level plucking petals from roses. Among the birds there were also doves and swans. When these had vanished from my sight, I saw not far away flocks of sheep with their lambs, of goats both male and female, and around these flocks I saw herds of cattle with their calves, as well as of camels and mules. In a wood I saw stags 1 with lofty antlers, as well as unicorns.

When I had seen these, the angel said, 'Turn to face east.' There I saw a garden full of fruit trees, oranges, citrons, olives, vines, figs, pomegranates and bushes that produce edible berries.

Then he said, 'Now look to the south.' There I saw crops of various kinds of grain, wheat, millet, barley and beans. Around them were flowerbeds full of roses of beautifully variegated colours. To the north there were woods full of chestnuts, palms, limes, planes and other leafy trees.

[2] When I had seen these, the angel said, 'All the things you have seen are correspondences of the affections of the love on the part of the angels in the neighbourhood;' and he 2 told me to which affections each corresponded. 'Moreover,' he went on, 'not only those but all the other sights that present themselves to our eyes are correspondences; for instance, houses, the furniture in them, tables and food, clothes, even gold and silver coins, the diamonds and other precious stones which wives and girls in the heavens wear for their adornment. From all these things we can tell what each person is like in respect of love and wisdom. The contents of our houses, which serve a purpose, remain there constantly; but in the case of those who wander from one community to another, such things change depending upon the company the people are in.

[3] 'These things have been shown to you so that you can see creation on the scale of the universe reflected in these particular models. For God is love itself and wisdom itself, and His love contains infinite affections, and His wisdom infinite perceptions; all the things to be seen upon earth are correspondences of these affections and perceptions. This is the origin of birds and animals, trees and shrubs, crops and grain, plants and grasses. For God has no extension, but is everywhere in space; so He fills the universe from first to last. Because He is omnipresent, there are such correspondences of the affections of His love and wisdom throughout the natural world. But in our world, which is called the spiritual world, similar correspondences present themselves to those who receive affections and perceptions from God. The difference is that in our world such things are created by God in an instant in accordance with the affections of the angels. But in your world, although their creation is in principle similar, provision has been made for them to be constantly renewed from generation to generation, so that creation is continuous.

[4] 'The reason why in our world creation is instantaneous, but in your world continued a generation at a time, is that the atmospheres and soils of our world are spiritual, while those of your world are natural. Natural objects have been created to serve as clothing for spiritual ones, just as layers of skin clothe the bodies of men and animals, bark and bast clothe the trunks and branches of trees, the pia mater and dura mater and other membranes clothe the brain, sheathes the nerves, the neurilemata their fibres, and so on. That is why everything in your world remains constant, and is regularly repeated year by year.'

'Report,' he added, 'what you have seen and heard to the inhabitants of your world, seeing that up to now they have been in total ignorance of the spiritual world, and without knowing about it no one can know, nor even guess, that in our world creation is continuous, and was similar in your world too when God created the universe.'

After this our talk turned to various subjects, and at length to hell, where none of the sort of things that exist in heaven are to be seen, but only their opposites, since the affections of the love of its inhabitants, which are longings for evil, are the opposite of the affections of love on the part of the angels in heaven. In company with those in hell, and in general in their deserts, there are to be seen birds of the night, such as bats, tawny and horned owls, as well as wolves, leopards, tigers, rats and mice; also poisonous snakes of every kind, dragons and crocodiles. Where there is a grassy stretch, there is an undergrowth of brambles, nettles, thorns and thistles, and some poisonous plants, which come up and disappear by turns. Then there are to be seen only heaps of stones and marshes full of croaking frogs. All of these things too are correspondences, but as was said before, correspondences of the affections of their love, which are longings for evil. Yet such things are not created there by God, nor were they in the natural world, where similar things come into existence. For all things that God created and creates were and are good. But such things arose on earth together with hell, which was composed of human beings who, by turning away from God, became after death devils and satans. But because these frightful subjects began to distress our ears, we turned our thoughts away from them and recalled instead what we had seen in the heavens.

Footnotes:

1. The Latin has 'hinds'.

2. The Latin has 'they'.

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

From Swedenborg's Works

 

True Christian Religion #462

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462. The fourth experience 1

In the spiritual world I looked towards the sea-coast and saw a splendid port. On approaching I looked inside and there lay boats both great and small, containing cargoes of every kind; and on their thwarts sat boys and girls who distributed the goods to any that wished. 'We are waiting,' they said, 'for our lovely turtles to appear. They will come out of the sea to us at any moment.'

Then I saw turtles, both small and great, on whose shells and scales sat baby turtles, all looking towards the surrounding islands. The father turtles had two heads, a large one covered with shell like that of their bodies, which gave them a ruddy look; the other a small one of the sort turtles have, which they could draw back into the forepart of their bodies, and could make invisible by inserting it into the larger head. But I kept my gaze on the large, ruddy head, and made out that it had a face like a human being, and was talking with the boys and girls on the thwarts and was licking their hands. The boys and girls fondled them and gave them tit-bits and delicacies, as well as valuable goods such as silk for clothes, citron-wood for tables, purple for ornament and scarlet for dyeing.

[2] On seeing these I wanted to know what they represented, because I know that all sights seen in the spiritual world are correspondences, representing the spiritual effects of affection and the thought it produces. Then I was spoken to from heaven and told: 'You know yourself what the port and the ships represent, as well as the boys and girls on the thwarts; but you do not know what the turtles are. They represent,' they said, 'those of the clergy there who totally separate faith from charity and its good deeds, insisting to themselves that there is obviously no possibility of linking them, but the Holy Spirit by means of faith in God the Father for the sake of the Son's merit enters into a person and purifies him inwardly even as far as his own will, which they imagine as a sort of oval plane. When the working of the Holy Spirit approaches this plane, it twists aside around its left edge without touching it at all, so that the interior or upper part of the person's character is for God, and the exterior or lower part is for man. Thus nothing the person does appears in God's sight, neither good nor bad; the good does not, because this would be to acquire merit, and the bad does not because it is bad. Either of these, if it were presented to God's sight, would destroy the person, Since this is so, a person may will, think, speak and do whatever he pleases, so long as he takes precautions from a worldly point of view,'

[3] I asked whether they also held that one might think of God as not being omnipresent and omniscient. I was told from heaven that this too is allowed them, because in the case of one who has acquired faith and been purified and justified by it, God pays no attention to any thought or will on his part, but he still retains in the inward recess or higher region of his mind or character the faith which he had received by its activity, and that this activity may from time to time recur without the person's knowledge. 'These facts are represented by the small head which they draw back into the forepart of their bodies and also insert into the larger head when talking to laymen. For in speaking to them they do not use the small head, but the large one, the front of which has a kind of human face. Their talk with them is based on the Word, about love, charity, good deeds, the Ten Commandments, repentance; and they quote from the Word almost everything which is said there on these subjects. But then they insert the small head into the large one, which allows them inwardly to understand that these things are not to be done for God's sake or for salvation, but only for the sake of public or private advantage.

[4] 'But because they base their remarks on these subjects on the Word, especially in speaking with great charm and elegance of the Gospel, the working of the Holy Spirit and salvation, they seem to their hearers like handsome men endowed with wisdom beyond all others on the globe. This was why you saw them being given delicacies and valuable goods by the boys and girls sitting on the thwarts in the boats. So these are the people you saw represented as turtles. In your world they are hard to tell apart from others, except for the fact that they think they excel all others in wisdom, laughing at others, including those who hold similar views on faith, but are not privy to their secrets. They carry a seal with them in their clothing, by which they can make themselves known to others of their sort.'

[5] The person talking with me said: 'I shall not tell you their opinions on other matters to do with faith, such as the elect, free will, baptism and the Holy Supper. These are opinions that they do not divulge, though we in heaven know them. However, since this is the sort of people they are in the world, and after death no one is allowed to speak otherwise than he thinks, they are considered insane, because they are then unable to speak except for the mad ideas that fill their thoughts. So they are ejected from their communities, eventually being cast down into the pit of the abyss (mentioned in Revelation 9:2), becoming bodily spirits and looking like Egyptian mummies. A hard skin is drawn over the interiors of their minds, because in the world too they had set up a barrier there. The community they form in hell is adjacent to the one there composed of Machiavellians; they constantly visit one another and call themselves companions. But they leave them on account of their difference, in that they have some religious feeling about the act of justification by faith, while the Machiavellians have none.'

[6] After seeing them expelled from their communities and brought together ready to be cast down, I saw in the air a ship sailing under seven sails, and in it ships' officers and seamen dressed in purple with magnificent laurels on their hats. 'Here we are in heaven,' they shouted, 'we are purple-clad doctors, adorned with finer laurels than anyone else, because we are the leading wise men of all the clergy in Europe.' I wondered what this was, and I was told that they were pictures of pride and imaginary thoughts, known as fantasies, arising from those who previously appeared as turtles; now being cast out of their communities as insane, they were gathered into one group and were now standing in one place.

Then wishing to talk with them I approached the place where they were standing and greeted them. 'Are you,' I said, 'the people who separated people's internals from their externals, and the working of the Holy Spirit as in faith from the Spirit's co-operation with man outside of faith, thus separating God from man? Did you not by this take away not only charity itself and its deeds from faith, as many other doctors of the clergy do, but also faith itself in so far as it is displayed by man in the sight of God?

[7] But would you prefer me to talk to you on this subject by the light of reason, or by drawing upon Holy Scripture?' 'Speak first,' they said, 'by the light of reason.'

So I spoke and said: 'How can a person's internal and external be separated? Can anyone endowed with normal powers of perception fail to see, or fail to be capable of seeing, that all of a person's interiors extend into and are continued into his exteriors, reaching even to his outermost level so as to bring about their effects and perform what they want to do? Surely the internals exist for the sake of the externals, so that these may be where they end, and they may rest on them, so coming into being, very much as a column stands on its base. You can see that, if they were discontinuous and so not joined, the outermost layers would collapse and burst like a bubble in the air. Can anyone deny that the inward workings of God in a person number billions, all unknown to the person concerned; and what profit is it to know about them, so long as the outermost layers are known, the point at which he is in his thought and will together with God?

[8] 'Let us take an example to illustrate this. Surely no one is aware of the inward workings of his speech: how the lungs draw in air, which fills the vesicles, bronchi and lobes; how he expels the air into the trachea and there turns it into sound; how the sound is modified in the glottis by the help of the larynx, and how the tongue then articulates it, the lips completing the articulation, so that speech is produced. All those inward workings, of which the person is totally unaware, are for the sake of the end product, the person's ability to speak. Take away or separate one of those internal processes so that it is no longer continuous with the end product, and a person could no more talk than a block of wood.

[9] 'Let us take another example. The two hands form the extremities of the human body. But the internal parts which form a continuous link with them run from the head through the neck, then the chest, shoulder-blades, arms and elbows; and there are countless muscular tissues, countless rows of motor fibres, countless bundles of nerves and blood-vessels, and many joints of bones with their ligaments and membranes - is anyone aware of any of this? Yet it takes every single one of them to make the hands function. Suppose the internal parts twisted back to the left or the right around the wrist-joint and did not continue into the hands; would not the hand then fall away from the elbow and rot away like any lifeless part torn off? Or if you prefer the idea, it would be like what happens to the body when a person is beheaded. This is exactly what would happen to the human mind, together with its two kinds of life, the will and the understanding, if the Divine workings which have to do with faith and charity stopped mid-way, and did not extend without a break to man. To be sure, man then would be not merely an animal, but a rotten block of wood. Such conclusions are the product of reason.

[10] 'Now if you are willing to listen, the same things are in accordance with Holy Scripture. Does not the Lord say:

Remain in me and I in you. I am the vine and you are the branches. If someone remains in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, John 15:4-5.

Surely the fruits are the good deeds which the Lord does by means of man, and man does of himself under the Lord's guidance. The Lord also says that He stands at the door and knocks, and He goes in to anyone who opens the door, and dines with him and he with the Lord (Revelation 3:20). Does not the Lord give minas and talents for man to trade with and make a profit, and does He not give everlasting life in accordance with his profit (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:13-26)? Or again, does He not give each man his pay in proportion to the work he does in the Lord's vineyard (Matthew 20:1-17)? These are but a few examples; pages could be filled with quotations from the Word showing that man should produce fruit like a tree, should act according to the commandments, love God and the neighbour, and much more besides.

[11] 'But I know that your own intelligence cannot have anything in common, regarded as it is essentially, with these teachings from the Word. Although you talk about them, your ideas pervert them. Nor can you help yourselves, because you take away from man everything that is God's as regards communication and the linking it produces. What is then left, but merely everything that has to do with public worship?'

Later on these people appeared to me in the light of heaven, which uncovers and makes visible what sort of person each one is. Then they did not appear as before in a ship sailing through the air as if in heaven, nor did the people in it have purple clothing and laurels around their heads. But they were in a sandy place, clothed in rags, with nets like fishermen's round their lower parts, through which their nakedness was visible. Then they were sent down to join a community which was adjacent to that of the Machiavellians.

Footnotes:

1. Repeated from Apocalypse Revealed 463.

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

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