Emanuel Swedenborg Quotes

Love consists in desiring to give what is our own to another and feeling his delight as our own

The sky is an enormous man.

Kindness is an inner desire that makes us want to do good things even if we do not get anything in return. It is the joy of our life to do them. When we do good things from this inner desire, there is kindness in everything we think, say, want, and do.

This I can declare: things that are in heaven are more real than things that are in the world.

Love comes into being through useful service to others.

The nature of heaven is to provide a place there for all who lead good lives, no matter what their religion may be.

We do need to realize, though, that it is the quality of our love that determines the quality of this life.

Everything good or true that the angels inspire in us is God’s, so God is constantly talking to us. He talks very differently, though, to one person than to another.

Man, before he is being regenerated, does not even know that any internal man exists, much less is he acquainted with its nature and quality.

The inner self is as distinct from the outer self as heaven is from earth.

for heaven is within us, and people who have heaven within them come into heaven. The heaven within us is our acknowledgment of the Divine and our being led by the Divine.

Peace has in it trust in the Lord, that He governs all things, provides all things, and leads to a good end.

Such as the love is, such is the wisdom, consequently such is the man (n. 368) (Divine Love and Wisdom, 1763)

Anyone can see that intending and not acting when we can is not really intending, and loving and not doing good when we can is not really loving.

People are unaware that spirits even exist, let alone that angels are present with them.

In the spiritual body moreover, man appears such as he is with respect to love and faith, for everyone in the spiritual world is the effigy of his own love, not only as to the face and the body, but also as to the speech and the actions

for every man’s soul is in a spiritual body after it has cast off the material coverings which it carried about in the world.

The spiritual idea of distances of space is the same as of distances of good or distances of truth, which are affinities and likenesses according to states of goodness and truth.

People who have intended and loved what is evil in the world intend and love what is evil in the other life, and then they no longer allow themselves to be led away from it. This is why people who are absorbed in evil are connected to hell and actually are there in spirit; and after death they crave above all to be where their evil is. So after death, it is we, not the Lord, who cast ourselves into hell.

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth—the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture.

Others work among the spirits that have just arrived in the world of spirits. Again others raise the children who have died in infancy. Swedenborg ensures the parents of these infants that 'All children whether born within or outside of the church, are adopted by the Lord and become Angels'.

A spiritual church first becomes a church when it acts as bidden by charity, charity being the true teaching of faith.

Man, when he is re-born, passes through the ages as he who is born; and the preceding state is always as an egg in respect to the subsequent one, thus he is continually conceived and born: and this not only when he lives in the world, but also when he comes into another life to eternity: and still when he cannot be further perfected, then to be as an egg to those things which remain to be manifested, which are indefinite.

All the ancient churches were churches representative of spiritual things; the rites, and also the statutes, according to which their worship was established, consisted of pure correspondence.

It is recognized that non-Christians live lives that are just as moral as the lives of Christians—many of them, in fact, live more moral lives. A moral life may be lived either to satisfy the Divine or to satisfy people in this world. A moral life that is lived to satisfy the Divine is a spiritual life. The two look alike in outward form, but inwardly they are totally different. One saves us, the other does not. This is because if we live a moral life to satisfy the Divine we are being led by the Divine; while if we live a moral life to satisfy people in this world, we are being led by ourselves.

It is amazing but true that it is easy for any of us to rebuke someone else who is intending to do something evil and say, “Don’t do that—that’s a sin!” And yet it is difficult for us to say the same thing to ourselves. The reason is that saying it to ourselves requires a movement of the will, but saying it to someone else requires only a low level of thought based on things we have heard.

What could be sweeter to us than to hear and persuade ourselves that we can be saved, even if we live like a savage beast? Even non-Christians see that this is false, and many of them shudder at Christian teachings when they observe how Christians live.

There are two loves that have been deeply rooted in the human race for a long time now: love for dominating everyone, and love for possessing everyone’s wealth. If the reins are let out on the first type of love, it rushes on until it wants to be the God of all heaven. If the reins are let out on the second type of love, it rushes on until it wants to be the God of the whole world. All other forms of love for evil are ranked below these two and serve as their army.

This new church is the crown of all the churches that have ever existed on this planet because it will worship the one God, who can be seen, within whom is the God that cannot be seen, like a soul in a body.

When they enter the church, and even more when they climb the stairs into the pulpit, I know that the people meant by Lucifer in Isaiah—the people of Babylon, especially those who named themselves the Society of Jesus—are overcome with passion. For many of them that passion comes from a hellish love. They raise their voices more vehemently and draw sighs from their chests more deeply than those whose passion comes from a heavenly love. There

Some hells present an appearance like the ruins of houses and cities after conflagrations, in which infernal spirits dwell and hide themselves. In the milder hells there is an appearance of rude huts, in some cases contiguous in the form of a city with lanes and streets.

Further still, heaven is where the Lord is recognized, trusted, and loved. The different ways he is worshiped—in variations that stem from the difference of activity from one community to another—do not cause harm but bring benefit, because they are a source of heaven’s perfection.

Later on, a long sheet of paper was given to me by some spirits from Mercury. It was irregularly shaped because it was made up of a number of individual pages glued together. It seemed to have typeset printing on it, the kind we have in our world. I asked whether they had that sort of thing in their world and they said that they did not, but that they knew that we had printed pages like that in our world. They did not want to say more than that, but I perceived they were thinking that knowledge in our world exists on paper and not in human minds. In fact, they made jokes about pieces of paper on Earth knowing things that the people there do not know. However, the reality of the situation was explained to them.

The angels also said, “When people arrive in this world from the physical one and hear that they are in another world, they gather together in many places to form groups. They ask where heaven and hell are, and also where God is. After they have been taught, they start arguing, disputing, and fighting about whether God exists. This is a result of the great number of materialists in the physical world today. When the topic of religion comes up, materialists start to debate about it with one another and with other groups. The ensuing proposition and debate rarely results in an affirmation of the faith that God exists. Materialists associate more and more with the evil, because only from God can one do something good with a love for what is good.” [3]

458 At times evil spirits have conjectured that some heaven other than the Lord’s could exist. They have received permission to look for it wherever they could. To their own chagrin, they have never been able to locate one. Evil spirits rush headlong into all kinds of craziness, both because they hate the Lord and because hell is so painful, and these are the kinds of fantasies they seize on.

De Emanuel Swedenborg, al que Kant llamó “visionario”, cuenta Borges que “hablaba con los ángeles por las calles de Londres”. Aunque fue un científico notable (hizo los planos de un avión y un submarino, descubrió el funcionamiento de las glándulas endocrinas, lanzó la hipótesis de la formación nebulosa del Sistema Solar, etcétera...), su verdadera especialidad fue el Mas Allá, la posvida en el Cielo y el Infierno. Explicó que al comienzo los condenados no son conscientes de su muerte y creen que continúan en su esfera cotidiana: les rodean los muebles y utensilios familiares, los paisajes conocidos. Poco a poco, van produciéndose desapariciones —la butaca favorita, el piano, una ventana, las flores del jardín...— y luego surgen en lugar de lo desvanecido formas equivocadas o amenazadoras. Por fin se dan cuenta de que no están en casa sino en el Infierno y empieza su eterna condena. Creo poder confirmar esta tesis de Swedenborg. Hace tiempo que las cosas de mi mundo se van difuminando, pierden sustancia. Los libros siguen presentes y tentadores, pero al abrirlos algo ha drenado su savia hasta dejarlos huecos, exánimes. Las películas nuevas son peores que las antiguas, las antiguas peores de lo que las recordaba: sentado ante el televisor con desasosiego ya no siento la expectativa feliz porque ahora nadie apoya sus pies en mi regazo. Se fue el disfrute... Y los sitios que recorrimos juntos están hoy cubiertos de sudarios, como esas sábanas que tapan las formas incómodas de los muebles en una casa abandonada. Los platos más sabrosos, crujientes, aromáticos... comienzan a deleitarme la boca pero luego adquieren insipidez y amargura de ceniza. Llega el infierno y se revela mi condena, la más atroz: creer que estoy vivo y que es ella la que ha muerto. Hoy hace ya dos años.

In the Protestant Christian world, active repentance, which is examining ourselves, recognizing and admitting to our sins, praying to the Lord, and starting a new life, is extremely difficult to practice, for a number of reasons that will be covered later. Therefore here is an easier kind of repentance: When we are considering doing something evil and are forming an intention to do it, we say to ourselves, “I am thinking about this and I am intending to do it, but because it is a sin, I am not going to do it.” This counteracts the enticement that hell is injecting into us and keeps it from making further inroads.

The importance of Jung’s discovery bears considering. Since the seventeenth century, we’ve been taught that what is “in our heads” is only “subjective,” that we are all island universes, separate worlds, and that everything in those worlds has been furnished with material taken from outside, from the senses, as if our minds began as empty rooms, waiting for the mental equivalent of a trip to Ikea. Yet anyone, like myself, who has had precognitive dreams or experienced synchronicities or telepathy or other “paranormal” phenomena knows this isn’t quite true. Jung knew this and is saying that there are things in our heads that have nothing to do with us or our senses. In his book Heaven and Hell Aldous Huxley made the same point. “Like the earth of a hundred years ago,” Huxley wrote, “our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.” And while the creatures that inhabit these “far continents” of the mind seem “improbable,” they are nevertheless “facts of observation,” which argues for their “complete autonomy” and “self-sufficiency.”18 Huxley borrowed the title of his book from another extraordinary inner explorer, the Swedish sage Emanuel Swedenborg, who was a powerful influence on Jung, and who, like Jung, was a practiced hypnagogist and developed a method of entering similar inner worlds.

People who do not examine themselves are like people with a sickness that closes off their capillaries and therefore corrupts their blood, causing their limbs to go to sleep and atrophy, and resulting in severe chronic diseases because their humors, and therefore the blood that arises from them, are viscous, sticky, irritating, and acidic. People who do examine themselves, however, including the intentions of their will, are like people who are healed from these diseases and regain the vitality they felt when they were young. People who examine themselves in the right way are like ships from Ophir completely filled with gold, silver, and precious stones; before they examined themselves, though, they were like barges loaded down with unclean freight, carting away the filth and excrement from city streets. . . .

Soon afterward I saw a spirit falling down from heaven. I went over to him and asked why he had fallen out of heaven like that. He answered that Michael’s angels had thrown him down, because he had said that God the Father and his Son are two, not one. He said that the entire angelic heaven believes that God the Father and his Son are one as a soul and a body are one—a point the angels support with many passages from the Word. They also use rational argumentation as support: they say the Son’s soul came from nowhere else but the Father; therefore that soul was an image of the Father, and the body that came from it contained that image. He added that when he was in heaven he of course spoke of one God, just as he used to do on earth; but because his verbal statements to this effect did not match what he was thinking, the angels said he did not believe in any God, because the two views cancel each other out. He said this was why he was thrown out of heaven.

Bishop of Skara) stimulated in the boy the nature which was to become so active in his culminating life-work. A university education at Upsala, however, and studies for five years in England, France, Holland and Germany, brought other interests into play first. The earliest of these were mathematics and astronomy, in the pursuit of which he met Flamsteed and Halley. His gift for the detection and practical employment of general laws soon carried him much farther afield in the sciences. Metallurgy, geology, a varied field of invention, chemistry, as well as his duties as an Assessor on the Board

The opposite happens if we remain earthly. Then we greatly desire to rule heaven from our world. All who have a love for power that comes from loving themselves are like this. If we are examined inwardly, it is discovered that we do not believe in any god, but only in ourselves. After death, we believe that we are a god who has greater power than others. This is the kind of insanity that exists in hell. It falls to such a depth that some there say they are God the Father, some say they are God the Son, and others say they are God the Holy Spirit. Some Jews there say they are the Messiah.

I heard the sound of a mill. As I followed the sound I came to a building that was full of cracks. The entrance went down underground. Inside I saw a man who was collecting [on slips of paper] a number of passages from the Word and other books concerning justification by faith alone. Copyists in the next room were writing out on a full sheet the passages he had found. When I asked him the topic of the passages he was collecting now, he said, “The point that God the Father lapsed from an attitude of grace toward the human race, and therefore sent his Son to make atonement and appease the Father.” By way of response, I said that it goes against Scripture and sound reason to think that God could lapse from an attitude of grace; that would be lapsing from his own essence, and that would mean he was no longer God. When I thoroughly demonstrated this, he became angry and ordered his copyists to throw me out. As I was walking out on my own, he picked up a book that happened to be at hand and threw it at me. The book was the Word.

At the end, the council brought all its discussions together into a single conclusion: The divine Trinity exists within the Lord the Savior; the Trinity is made up of the divine nature as an origin called “the Father,” the divine human manifestation called “the Son,” and the emanating divine influence called “the Holy Spirit”; therefore there is one God in the church. After the council came to an end, the participants were given shining clothing and were led to the new heaven.

Goodwill has something in common with each of these categories of love, because goodwill is by definition a love for usefulness of all kinds. Goodwill wants to do what is good for our neighbor, and goodness is the same as usefulness. Each of the categories of love just mentioned have usefulness as their goal: love for heaven has the goal of being useful in spiritual ways; love for the world has the goal of being useful in earthly ways, which could also be called forms of civil service; and love for ourselves has the goal of being useful in physical ways, which could also be labeled benefits at home for ourselves and our loved ones.

The angels sent one of their own down to the church to teach the congregation about redemption. This angel said that the suffering on the cross was not redemption. Redemption was a matter of gaining control over the hells, restructuring the heavens, and restoring all things that had lapsed in both the spiritual and the physical world. Without these achievements, no flesh could have been saved [Matthew 24: 22]. He said that the Lord’s suffering on the cross was the last step in achieving union with the Father at the deepest level. He also said that confusing the suffering on the cross with redemption entails thinking many unworthy and in fact horrendous things about God—that God locked the whole human race into damnation, but the Son took that damnation on himself, which appeased the Father; then the Son’s intercession restored the Father to his divine essence, which is love and mercy; not to mention many other qualities that are very wrong to ascribe to God.

Immigrants from Sweden contributed the writings of scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. His scientific discoveries are impressive, including advances in the understanding of the cerebral cortex, cerebrospinal fluid, the pituitary gland, metallurgy, and the nebular hypothesis in astronomy. But he also wrote detailed descriptions of the inhabitants and societies of other planets and dimensions, including heaven and hell, garnered from his visions, and from conversations he claimed to have had with spirits. In Swedenborg’s heaven, happily married couples combine to become one angel in the afterlife in the ultimate ecstasy of spiritual union.

The Lord created us to be capable of communicating with spirits and angels while still living in our bodies, as people actually did in the earliest times. After all, we are one with spirits and angels. In fact we ourselves are spirits clothed in flesh.

Because these judges do not see justice at all, we in heaven view them not as human beings but as monstrous human images: their heads are made of friendship, their chests are made of injustice, their arms and legs are made of supporting arguments, and the soles of their feet are made of justice. If a particular form of justice doesn’t favor their friend, they remove it and trample it. [5] You are about to find out what they are truly like inside. Their end has come.” Then

[6] Then the ambassador asked him, “Can you make it true that you yourself are insane?” The provider of arguments said, “I could, but I don’t want to. Who isn’t insane?” Then people asked the provider of arguments to say from the heart whether he was joking or whether he really believed that there is no truth except what people make out to be true. He replied, “That is what I believe, I swear.” Afterward

I asked, “What does a religion need to be like in order to save people?” They said, “We are going to divide this question into a number of subquestions. Before we have come to conclusions on these we will not be able to give a reply to your question. The points for discussion will be the following. (1) Is religion anything? (2) Does salvation exist or not? (3) Is one religion more effective than another? (4) Do heaven and hell exist?

El Señor no envía a nadie al infierno, es el mismo espíritu el que se arroja a él.

It is important to note, however, that these two loves can be more prevalent among commoners than among the great; more prevalent among the poor than among the wealthy; more prevalent among subjects than among royalty. The latter in each case are born into power and wealth. Over time, the latter come to view their power and wealth much the way people at a somewhat lower level—commanders, governors, admirals, or even impoverished farm workers—view their own households and possessions. It is not the same, though, when monarchs wish to exercise power over nations that are not their own.

[...]heaven is such that all people of every religion whatever who live rightly have a place there.

PARTICULAR CAUSES OF DISEASE That straitness of spirit is a state near desperation, may be manifest from this consideration, that they who are in a state near desperation have an external anxiety, and in such case are actually in straitness of spirit. Straitness of spirit, in the external sense, is a compression of the breast, and thence as it were a difficulty of respiration. In the internal sense it is an anxiety by reason of the deprivation of the truth which is of faith, and of the good which is of charity, and thence a state near desperation. A state of compression as to respiration, and anxiety on account of the deprivation of the truth of faith and the good of charity, correspond to each other, as a natural effect in the body grounded in a spiritual cause in the mind. That the deprivation of spiritual truth and good produces such anxiety, and consequently such straitness, cannot be believed by those who are not in faith and charity, for these imagine that to be tormented on such account is weakness and sickliness of mind.

Historical faith causes the Lord to be present, because it is an intuition of the Lord from the quality of His Divinity. That faith does not save, until man lives the life of faith, which is charity, for he then wills and does the things which he believes, and to will and to do is of the love, and love conjoins him whom faith causes to be present.

Masonry is a search after Light. That search leads us directly back, as you see, to the Kabalah. In that ancient and little understood medley of absurdity and philosophy, the Initiate will find the source of many doctrines; and may come to understand the Hermetic philosophers, the Alchemists, all the Anti-papal Thinkers of the Middle Ages, and Emanuel Swedenborg.

The Divine Human from eternity was the Divine truth in heaven, and the Divine passing through heaven, thus the Divine Existere which afterward in the Lord became the Divine Esse by Itself [per se], from which is the Divine Existere in heaven,

Every falsity is something we can convince ourselves of, and when we have done so it seems to us to be the truth:

We have two abilities that make up our life, one called will and the other understanding. They are distinguishable, but they are created to be one. When they are one, they are called the mind; so they are the human mind and it is there that all the life within us is truly to be found.

Many of the Fox family’s close friends were discovering their own gift for mediumship. Isaac Post found that if he entered a trance, he was guided by the spirits to write down their messages. In 1851, the year that Uncle Tom’s Cabin first appeared in serial form and Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables and Melville’s Moby Dick were published, Isaac compiled messages from William Penn, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Emanuel Swedenborg, and others into a three-hundred-page volume called Voices from the Spirit World; Being Communications From Many Spirits by the Hand of Isaac Post, Medium. The messages, Isaac said, had been transcribed through automatic writing that sometimes occurred in the presence of “A.L. Fish (a rapping medium).” In 1852 Charles Hammond, the Universalist minister who had watched in awe as the furniture danced and floated in front of him at one of the sisters’ early seances, produced a book called Light from the Spirit World; The Pilgrimage of Thomas Paine, and Others, to the Seventh Circle in the Spirit World.

We can see that this underlies all perfection from every instance of beauty, charm, and delight that moves both our senses and our spirits. Such instances arise and flow invariably from a harmonious agreement of many things that are in sympathetic concord, whether they are together simultaneously or follow in a sequence. They do not flow from a single unit that lacks plurality. So we say that variety delights, and recognize that the delight depends on the quality of the variety. We can see from this, as though in a mirror, how perfection stems from variety in heaven as well, since things that happen in the natural world offer us a reflection of things in the spiritual world.d

So anyone who has the quality of goodness from the Lord is an angel-person.g

By this faith instilled from childhood and afterward confirmed by preachings, it has come to pass that no one shuns evils from religion, but only from civil and moral law; thus not because they are sins but because they are damaging.

I foresee that many who read the narratives . . . will believe them to be inventions of the imagination. But I affirm in truth that they are not inventions, but were truly seen and heard; not seen and heard in any sleeping state of mind, but in a state of full wakefulness. For it has pleased the Lord to . . . open the interiors of my mind or spirit, whereby I have been permitted to be in the spiritual world with angels, and at the same time in the natural world with people, and this now [has happened for] twenty-seven years. Emanuel Swedenborg True Christian Religion 851

drew primarily on the ideas of their contemporary Andrew Jackson Davis, who in turn derived them from the eighteenth-century philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg—or from conversations, as Davis claimed, with Swedenborg’s spirit. Davis had already produced an astonishing body of lectures and books developing what he came to call a “harmonial philosophy” in which like attracted like. So great were the similarities and affinities between beings of both worlds, Davis had written, that the recently deceased often failed even to recognize that they had died. Naturally, they felt a profound attachment to the mortals they had left behind.8

just took their weighty German word for it. Jesus, Mani, Zoroaster, Gautama Buddha—at the very outset the leader did not offer his circle of followers a better state hereafter or an improved social order or any reward other than a certain “psychological state in the here and now,” as Weber put it. I suppose what I never really comprehended was that he was talking about an actual mental experience they all went through, an ecstasy, in short. In most cases, according to scriptures and legend, it happened in a flash. Mohammed fasting and meditating on a mountainside near Mecca and—flash!—ecstasy, vast revelation and the beginning of Islam. Zoroaster hauling haoma water along the road and—flash!—he runs into the flaming form of the Archangel Vohu Mano, messenger of Ahura Mazda, and the beginning of Zoroastrianism. Saul of Tarsus walking along the road to Damascus and—flash!—he hears the voice of the Lord and becomes a Christian. Plus God knows how many lesser figures in the 2,000 years since then, Christian Rosenkreuz and his “God-illuminated” brotherhood of Rosicrucians, Emanuel Swedenborg whose mind suddenly “opened” in 1743, Meister Eckhart and his disciples Suso and Tauler, and in the twentieth-century Sadhu Sundar Singh—with—flash!—a vision at the age of 16 and many times thereafter;