Correspondence

The receptacles of love and of wisdom, first exist with man at his conception and birth; from them by a continuous principle are brought forth and produced all things of the body from the head even to the soles of the feet; their productions are effected according to the laws of correspondence, and therefore all things of the body both internal and external are correspondences.

The organic parts of the body produced from various complicated fibres, are effects, which cannot live, feel, and be moved from themselves, but from their origins by a continuous (principle): to illustrate this by example; the eye does not see from itself, but by what is continuous from the understanding, for the understanding sees by the eye, and also moves the eye, determines it to objects, and gives intenseness to the sight; neither does the ear hear from itself, but by what is continuous from the understanding, for the understanding hears by the ears, and also determines them, makes them erect and attentive to sounds; nor does the tongue speak from itself, but from the thought of the understanding, for thought speaks by the tongue, and varies sounds, and exalts their measures at pleasure; in like manner the muscles, these not being moved of themselves, but from the will together with the understanding, which actuate them at their own disposal.

It is evident, that there is not anything in the body which feels and is moved of itself, but from its origins, in which reside the understanding and will, consequently which are in man the receptacles of love and wisdom. These are the first forms; the organs both of sense and of motion are forms derived from them, for according to formation is effected influx, which is not given from the latter into the former, but from the former into the latter, for influx from the former into the latter is spiritual influx, and influx from the latter into the former is natural influx, which is also called physical.

Those productions are effected according to the laws of correspondence, and all things of the body, both internal and external, are correspondences. Correspondence is between what is natural and what is spiritual. When anything derived from a spiritual principle as its origin and cause becomes visible and perceptible before the senses, there is correspondence between those things. Such is the correspondence between the spiritual and natural things appertaining to man; spiritual things being all the things of his love and wisdom, consequently of his will and understanding, and natural things being all things relating to his body; these latter, inasmuch, as they have existed, and perpetually exist, that is subsist, from the former, are correspondences, and therefore act in unity, as end, cause, and effect; thus the face acts in unison with the affections of the mind, the speech with the thought, and the actions of all the members with the will.

from Divine Healing: The Origin and Cure of Disease

II. Soul and Body

The soul, in a proper sense, signifies that in man which lives; consequently his life itself. That in man which lives is not the body, but the soul, and by the soul the body lives. The life of man, or his living principle, is derived from celestial love, and nothing living can possibly exist which has not thence its origin (Arcana Coelestia 1436).

The term soul, as used in the Word, signifies in a universal sense all life; for soul in a universal sense is that by and from which another thing is and lives, thus the soul of the body is its spirit; for by and from the spirit the body lives; but the soul of the spirit is its life still more interior, by and from which it has wisdom and intelligence (Arcana Coelestia 2930).

Every man has an internal and an external, for the internal is his thought and his will, and the external is his speech and his action. With those who are in the good of love and the truths of faith, the internal man is open, and by it they are in heaven; but with those who are in evils and the falses thence derived, the internal man is closed, and by the external they are only in the world; these are they of whom it is said that they are in externals without an internal. These indeed have also interiors, but the interiors appertaining to them are the interiors of their external man, which is in the world, but not the interiors of the internal man which is in heaven; those interiors, namely, which are of the external man, when the internal is closed, are evil, yea, filthy, for they think only of the world and of themselves, and will only those things which are of the world and which are of self, and think nothing at all about heaven and about the Lord, yea, neither do they will these latter things (Arcana Coelestia10429).

What any one does from love, remains inscribed on his heart, for love is the fire of life, thus is the life of every one; hence such as the love is, such is the life, and such as the life is, such is the whole man as to soul and as to body (Arcana Coelestia 10740).

The soul, of which it is said that it shall live after death, is nothing but the man himself, who lives in the body; that is, it is the interior man, who by the body acts in the world, and enables the body to live. The commerce of the soul with the body is the communication of the spiritual things of heaven with the natural things of the world, and the communication is effected by influx, and is according to conjunction. This communication, which is effected by influx, according to conjunction, is at this day unknown, because all things are attributed to nature, and nothing is known of the spiritual, which at this day is so remote, that, when it is thought of, it appears as nothing (Arcana Coelestia 6054, 6057).

There are two principles in the Lord, namely, love and wisdom, and those two principles proceed from Him; and inasmuch as man was created to be a likeness and image of Him, a likeness by love, and an image by wisdom, therefore with man there are created two receptacles, one for love and the other for wisdom; the receptacle of love is what is called the will, and the receptacle of wisdom is what is called the understanding: man knows that those two [receptacles] appertain to him, but he does not know that they are so conjoined as they are in the Lord, with this difference, that in the Lord they are life, but in man the receptacles of life.

from Divine Healing: The Origin and Cure of Disease

I. Introduction (Continued)

There are those who admit the propriety of Divine healing as a thing useful in former ages and as something quite probable in times to come. They are well grounded in doctrines about order, influx, and correspondence; but here they rest like the impotent man upon his bed. Continuous thought upon the Lord’s question “Whether it is easier to say, thy sins be forgiven thee, or take up thy bed and walk” does not occur to these partial believers. It would be a startling discovery to those who swallow Swedenborg whole, but never digest his system in detail, and who argue that sickness of body is not incompatible with health of soul, if they should realize the full meaning of both the Bible’s and Swedenborg’s teaching on the matter. In Divine Providence (Section 142), it is stated that “no one is reformed in a state of sickness, because reason is not then in a free state; for the state of the mind depends upon the state of the body. When the body is sick, the mind also is sick.”.

It quite often happens that a sphere of humility and goodness pervades the chamber of a sick person; but here again the teaching of Swedenborg and the Bible are in accord. The Bible would teach that the mind was weak and diseased, else it would affect its body with health; Swedenborg teaches that sicknesses, griefs, and misfortunes break the lusts and desires of the self-life and hold the man in a state of humility and acknowledgment of the Divine, but that reformation and advance cannot take place until the body and mind are well and act in correspondence, or else are severed so that the man enters a state of instruction in the spiritual world.

A sound mind in a sound body is the true order of man. Sin, or, what is better understood, all the elements of selfishness are the primal causes of disease of mind and body. If disease is contagious and may be absorbed by the guiltless, so health is more contagious and may be absorbed by the guilty. That we may receive and transmit life should be our ruling desire. The “tree of life” is in the midst of every soul, though the false conceptions of life, springing from placing the senses above the spirit, may seem to remove it to the borders or background of consciousness.

When we take our knowledge of the Lord’s Omniscience, Omnipresence and Omnipotence as a fact for conscious experience, when we believe influx to be not a theory, but our life, when the facts of correspondence of soul and body are employed in place of the theory, then again will the “tree of life” appear in the centre of consciousness, growing, not without our care, as in the Eden-Garden of childlike delight, but, springing from the thought-ways of an orderly and well-used mind, it will produce the fruit of all manner of spiritual satisfactions and will scatter itself abroad like leaves for the healing of nations, producing the universal “peace of God,”—the New Jerusalem.

from Divine Healing: The Origin and Cure of Disease

I. Introduction (Continued)

The power of thought is just beginning to be tested; as the means to Divine and orderly ends there is nothing that it cannot do. When Moses held aloft the brazen serpent, it was a sign to those who had been poisoned, that the only cure was to elevate the sensual man to his proper place. This could be done by constant turning of the thought to the Divine, that life might come in and eliminate death. When the Lord lifted up His Humanity, it was that we might also have a constant standard toward which to direct the thoughts, and in that attitude become recipients of a heavenly influx.

There is nothing miraculous, in the vulgar sense, about the cures effected through faith. Ignorance of the law involved causes wonder, sometimes doubt and rejection. It is not the mere belief or thought which is the salvation and cure; the thought is but the means, while salvation is the effect. The solution is here: Just as a current of electricity can flow only along the lines of a connected circuit, so the life-force can flow through the human mind only in the direction of unbroken thought,—the thought which indicates the secret ends and purposes of the life’s ruling love.

This may be made clearer by another form of illustration: Man is an organized spiritual being who possesses a material body. The body lives from the soul; the soul lives from God. The will and its loves, the understanding and its thoughts constitute the regnant principles of the soul. The heart and lungs reign universally in the body, but the quality of life imparted to the various organs is determined by the influx of the soul’s life from the will into the heart, and from the understanding into the lungs. That the heart and lungs correspond immediately to the reigning loves and thoughts of the soul needs no further proof than the most common reflection upon the changes in action of these two organs, when the feelings and thoughts are passing through marked states.

A change in the totality of consciousness means a like change in the physical organism. Do we fail in our attempts to have a sound mind in a sound body? It is because the thought of the Divine power and presence is transient and spasmodic, when it should be the sign of the life-stream’s direction.

When once the fundamental laws of our being are understood and embodied, the effort of one man to cure another will be a normal condition. There can be no help in merely making a verbal contradiction of another man’s disease. But the spoken word of truth will awaken the sickened mind of another, while the sphere of a heart overflowing with tender sympathy will penetrate both body and soul of the needy one. This sphere, in a highly developed state, can be extended and directed voluntarily, upon the same principle that the Lord is omnipresent, and that the angels nearest to Him in quality of life have a sphere which extends to the boundaries of heaven. Thought filled with love is quite enough to touch those who are already sensitive to spiritual influence; but where the disease has deadened the sensibilities of both soul and body, the life sphere must frequently be conveyed by the hand; for in the hand the whole nature of a man is ultimated.

To bring the subject to a practical issue: There is much in the illogical, unphilosophical statements of certain modern schools of mental healing which seems to act as a stumbling-block to those seeking light and life. However, it is not what we call things, but the use we make of them that determines results; it is not the pseudophilosophical falsity of ignorance, but the constant affirmation of the positive and known good which produces the salutary effect.

from Divine Healing: The Origin and Cure of Disease

I. Introduction

The questions concerning life and death, health and disease, have been and ever will be of all-absorbing interest;-because, “All that a man hath will he give for his life.”

With this new period of the world’s life comes the reawakening of humanity to its birth-right of spiritual, intellectual, moral and civil order; this needs no other demonstration than “the signs following.” Life is inflowing, we are feeling it; light is breaking through the clouds, men are working in it, -working to such good advantage that we say, “This is a New Age.” But the startling activity comes from the same fundamental principles which have generated the good things throughout human history.

True philosophy and theology have always taught the Unity of life, the subsistence of the creature from the constant expression of the Divine. Swedenborg has not added to this general idea, it was not necessary; but he has given it new meaning and force. He has broken the shell of the general concept and brought to light the complex but most orderly arrangement of all that lies within the totality of human experience.

No one can become aware of the purport of Swedenborg’s teaching of discrete degrees, the Maximus Homo or Greatest Man of the Spiritual heavens—as well as of the starry heavens with their spiritual and natural influences, and the correspondence or cause and effect relation now and forever existing between God, the heavens, man, and the lower orders of creation, without entering into both the knowledge of Divine order and the power to bring all things, even to the physical body, into order, harmony and consequent health and use.

The Transfiguration of the Lord upon the Mount was no mere symbol with only historic significance. The indwelling of love in the will, of truth in the understanding, and the exercise of charity in a life of use, represented by the Disciples John, Peter and James, now, as then, will lift any man to the summit of ideal conceptions of humanity.

When our intellectual ideas are buried and resurrected in true Religion, which is the totality of feeling or consciousness of the reality of the Divine and supernatural, together with a realization of absolute and momentary dependence upon the Divine, we shall have the faith that removes all “mountains” or obstructions.

There is no sickness which does not originate in the lusts of some person’s will acting through falsities in his understanding. The demoniac boy, whom the Lord healed when He came down from the Mount of Transfiguration, is the type of all who are in the “fire” of lust and the “water” of false imaginations. There are but two phases in our preparation to become embodiments and transmitters of the inflowing, healing life from the Lord,-namely, “fasting and prayer”: In terms of experience, all gratifications of the natural man are to be eliminated, in so far as they are indulged as ends in themselves; and all power is to be gained by constant, unabated turning of mind and heart to the Lord in His Omnipotence, Omniscience and Omnipresence.

from Divine Healing: The Origin and Cure of Disease

4. Slayer of the Real

It would not be difficult to draw comparisons between Swedenborg’s description of conditions in heaven, and other accounts of higher consciousness.  What strikes me as important here is that the difficulty Swedenborg had in retaining the significance of his angelic conversations did not necessarily lie in what those conversations were about, but in the slowness of our intellects and, perhaps more important, the inefficiency of our language, something that Swedenborg clearly recognized and experienced.  If angels can say more in a minute than we can in a half hour, and if they can convey more in a few words than we can in whole books, this must be because they have a language capable of doing this. 

But what they are saying is not necessarily ineffable. William James suggested that mystical states were simply an enlargement of our current state of consciousness, and this is supported by his remark that what he saw during his mystical experiences were “increasing ranges of distant facts” (my italics).  This was also true of Ouspensky.  His ashtray was an ordinary ashtray, but in his altered state he saw at once everything involved in it. There is nothing mystical about the fact that the copper had to be mined and that it had to go through several processes before it could appear on his table as an ashtray.

What had happened was that he no longer took the ashtray for granted, and in his altered state recognized all it was connected to.  And this was true of everything else he saw. The mystical state, it seems to me, is one in which facts that we normally blank out become vividly present, and the “ineffability” of these states is caused by the inability of our present language to accommodate this new information.

What James and Ouspensky experienced under nitrous oxide, and what Swedenborg perceived during his journeys to heaven, is that reality is infinitely more complex than we suspect, and seems to resemble something along the lines of the holographic model discussed earlier.  And this seems to be reflected in Robert Avens’s remark that “Swedenborg’s world of spirits and angels” is an expression of the “irresistible desire on the part of the Infinite to disperse itself in singular things so as to enable each thing to mirror the whole, to be a ‘world.’” If we remember that every part of a hologram contains the whole of it, just as Ouspensky’s ashtray contained all, we can begin to see how the sudden revelation of this truth could prove overwhelming. According to Swedenborg, angels seem not to have this problem, and exist in a state in which the infinite unity of things is perpetually present to them.  Hence our difficulty in understanding them. But if  Robert Avens is right, and an angel is a human being who has achieved “complete self-expression,” it may be possible, then, that at some point we too will share in this state.  And the accounts handed down to us by people like Ouspensky, William James, Swedenborg and others suggest that they are not as uncommon or unobtainable as we might think.

Swedenborg, however, did not offer any advice as how this might happen.  He did not leave any instructions so that others could come to hear the angels speak, and more or less asked his readers to take his word on the subject, and even warned them against trying to follow the path he had taken. We can accept or reject this advice as we choose.  My own inclination is to disregard the warning.  Having discovered Swedenborg, I am now inclined to follow him on that journey within and to find out just how much I can see and hear for myself.

from Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, Chapter 4 (Continued)

4. SLayer of the Real

On another occasion, Ouspensky found himself formulating another enigmatic clue to the strange world he had entered. Sitting on a sofa smoking a cigarette, he glanced at his ashtray.  “Suddenly,” he writes, “I felt that I was beginning to understand what the ashtray had was, and at the same time, with a certain wonder and almost with a fear, I felt that I had never understood it before and that we do not understand the simplest things around us.” Ouspensky’s ashtray “roused a whirlwind of thoughts and images.” It “contained such an infinite number of facts, of events; it was linked with such an immense number of things.” Everything connected with smoking and tobacco “roused thousands of images, pictures, memories.” Then the ashtray: how had it come into being? And the materials of which it was made? How had copper been discovered? What processes had it undergone, what treatment had it been subject to, how was it transported, who had done the work for transforming the raw material into the object on his table? These and dozens of other questions concerning the ashtray raced through his mind, and again Ouspensky tried to capture some of this in words. But he next day, when he read what he had written, the insight had vanished. What had Ouspensky written? “A man can go mad from one ashtray.” By this he had tried to convey the insight that “in one ashtray it was possible to know all.

In their mystical states, both Ouspensky and James, like Swedenborg, had entered a world in which time and space as we usually understand them no longer existed, and in which the dominant insight was one of unity.  It was also a world in which our usual categories of “subjective” and “objective” were transformed. Ouspensky writes that “In the new state all this was completely upset ….Here I saw that the objective and subjective could change places. The one could become the other…every thought, every feeling, every image was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence.”

That “every thought, every feeling, every image was immediately objectified in real substantial forms” strikes me as very similar to Swedenborg’s contention that heaven and hell are visual projections of our inner states. And that the “objective” world around us is really a “fiction,” created by our current state of consciousness, seems an equally Swedenborgian insight.

from Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, Chapter 4 (Continued)

4. Slayer of the Real

Another philosopher who followed James in the use of nitrous oxide to produce mythical states was P.D. Ouspensky. In a chapter called “Experimental Mysticism” in his book A New Model of the Universe, Ouspensky describes his own attempts at trying to make sense of the altered state of consciousness provided by the gas.

Under nitrous oxide, Ouspensky found himself “in a world entirely new and entirely unknown,” a world which “had nothing in common with the world in which we live.” Like James, Ouspensky experienced the essential unity of existence. He saw that “everything unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in turn explains another thing.  There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described separately.”  This inability to describe anything separately became clear to Ouspensky when he tried to explain to a friend what he was experiencing.  “ When I tried having someone near me during these experiments,” Ouspensky wrote, “I found that no kind of conversation could be carried on.”

I began to say something, but between the first and second words of my sentence such an enormous number of ideas occurred to me and passed before me, that the two words were so widely separated as to make it impossible to find any connection between them. And the third word I usually forgot before it was pronounced, and in trying to recall it I found a million new ideas, but completely forgot where I had begun.

Like James, Ouspensky too tried to find some way to recall some of the insights that flooded his consciousness. He writes that 

in a particularly vividly-expressed new state […] when I understood very clearly all I wished to understand, I decided to find some formula, some key, which I should be able to, so to speak, throw across to myself for the next day […] I found this formula and wrote it down with a pencil on a piece of paper.

On the following day O read the sentence: “Think in other categories.” These were the words, but what was their meaning?

from Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, Chapter 4 (Continued)

4. Slayer of the Real

In an essay called “A suggestion about mysticism,” the philosopher William James recounts his own experiences of “mystical states.”  “ in one instance,” James writes, 

I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether my interlocutor noticed my abstraction. What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belong with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant facts of which I could give no articulate account.  The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual— the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work.  There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace. The content was thus lost entirely to introspection— it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish when we awake. The feeling— I will not call it belief— that I had had a sudden opening, had seen through a window, as it were, into distant realities that incomprehensibily belonged with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake it off today.

The key phrase here is “the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant facts of which I could give no articulate account,” which strikes me as practically identical to what Swedenboy remarked about angelic speech, how it can contain “thousands of things that had no equivalent in concepts of natural thought, that were therefore expressible.” The content of James’s experience was not ineffable; the problem was that the connections he was making and the insights he was seeing (“The mode of consciousness was perceptual“) came at such an incredible speed that his mind could keep up with them.

On another occasion, James tried to salvage something of what he saw when under the influence of nitrous oxide. After speaking of the “immense emotional sense of reconciliation” that inhalation of the gas produced, James remarked on the central truth the experience afforded; that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher unity in which it is based, that all contradictions, so-called, are of a common kind, that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are literally in the midst of an infinite, to perceive the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.” In order to fix this insight in his consciousness, James made some notes. Yet when he went to look at these later, he was baffled by by what he wrote.  “What’s mistake but a kind of take? What’s nausea but a kind of — ausea? Sober, drunk, —unk, astonishment…Emotion—motion… It escapes, it escapes! But— what escapes, WHAT escapes.” And so on, until James arrived at the summation of his revelation: “There are no differences but differences of degree between different differences of degree and no difference,”

James recognized that in mystical states, consciousness experiences “a tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illustration,” in which “truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence.” The problem was how to capture this evidence in words.

from Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, Chapter 4 (Continued)

4. Slayer of the Real

Reading of Swedenborg’s angels made me think of other angels. There are, for example, the “terrifying angels” from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” the poet asks. “Every angel is terrifying,” Rilke tells us, and its “terror” is the exalted state in which it exists. In one of his best-known lines, Rilke tells us that “Beauty is nothing, but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,” and Rilke’s angels are beauty incarnate. If one pressed him against his heart, Rilke knows that he “would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.” Rilke’s angels live in such superabundant being that “they do not know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.”

A somewhat similar angel can be found in the Swiss novelist and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play An Angel Comes to Babylon. Here, the angel in question spends most of his time flying around the earth, marveling at its wonders. Like Rilke’s angel, he is a symbol of pure affirmation. He assures one of the characters that all apparent disorders in the universe are only temporary glitches. “Heaven never lies…. Only sometimes it finds it difficult to make itself understood by humans…. All that is created is good, and all that is good, is happy. In my travels throughout creation, I have never encountered as much as one grain of unhappiness.”

Another angel, perhaps more aware of life’s tragedies, nevertheless exists in a similar transfigured state. In perhaps his most oft-quoted essay, the German-Jewish literary philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote of “the angel of history.” The angel has his face turned toward the past, and where we humans can only perceive “a chain of events” he sees “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel, Benjamin tells us, would like to stay, “to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” But a “storm is blowing from Paradise,” which “irresistibly propels him into the future.” Benjamin was inspired to write of his angel by a painting by Paul Klee, Angelus Novus—but even a passing mention of the many angels in Western painting would take us far from our subject.

As I read of Swedenborg’s angels, I thought of these other super-beings, and reflected on Robert Avens’s remark that angels are humans who have achieved “complete self-expression,” which seems to suggest that the angelic state is one we can aspire to. I was also struck by one angelic characteristic in particular. Angelic speech, Swedenborg tells us, is utterly unlike that of humans. “Angels,” he says, “can say more in a minute than many can say in half an hour.

They can also set down in a few words the contents of many written pages.” “[A] ngelic language… has nothing in common with human language.” For one thing, “their speech is so full of wisdom that they with a single word can express things what men could not compass in a thousand words.” Given such a density of meaning, it is not surprising that retaining what has been gleaned from a conversation with angels may pose problems. “On occasion,” Swedenborg tells us, “I have been assigned to the state in which angels were, and… have talked with them. At such times I understood everything. But when I was sent back into my earlier state… and wanted to recall what I had heard, I could not. For there were thousands of things that had no equivalent in concepts of natural thought, that were therefore inexpressible except simply through shiftings of a heavenly light—not at all by human words.”

Swedenborg says a great deal about angelic speech and angelic language: how when their thoughts are made “visible” they look like delicate waves; how the speech of celestial angels is like a gentle stream, but that of spiritual angels is energetic and distinct; how writing in the inmost heaven is made up of various curves and rounded forms; how the “good” is communicated through the vowels u, o and a, and the “true” in e and i; and also how, much like in the Kabbalah, angelic numbers reveal even more than their alphabet. The idea that writing itself is somehow “magical” is old: the Egyptian god Thoth, later identified with the mythical Hermes Trismegistus, was the god both of magic and of writing, and both Kabbalists and philosophers like Martin Heidegger find in language itself the key to Being (Dasein). But what struck me most forcefully was Swedenborg’s admission that, after returning to earth from heaven, he was unable to remember what the angels had told him. Clearly this was because of the terrific amount of meaning the angels can infuse into their utterances.

Now, it is not uncommon for people who have had mystical experiences to speak of them as ineffable. The reason for this is usually explained by saying that the experience itself is supernatural, divine or somehow beyond human reason. But there are other accounts of mystical experience that offer a different view. Two in particular came to mind as I was reading Swedenborg’s account of angelic speech, and I would like to end this essay by relating these accounts to what Swedenborg has to say about the language of angels. For me, this seems to hold a key to unlocking the mysteries of mystical experience.

from Swedenborg: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, Chapter 4 (Continued)