In this intermediate “world of spirits” one is “prepared” for heaven in a process of education that takes anywhere from a few days to a year (498). But “Heaven” itself, as described by Swedenborg, is not too different from the “world of spirits”, and both are very similar to earth (171). There are courtyards and halls as on earth, parks and gardens, houses and bedrooms for “angels”, with many changes of clothing for them. There are governments and laws and law-courts — all, of course, more “spiritual” than on earth. There are church buildings and church services, with clergymen who give sermons and who become confused if anyone in the congregation disagrees with them. There are marriages, schools, the raising and educating of children, public life — in short, almost everything to be found on earth that can become “spiritual.” Swedenborg himself talked with many of the “angels” in heaven (all of whom, he believed, were only the souls of the dead), as well as with the strange inhabitants of Mercury, Jupiter, and other planets; he argued with Martin Luther in “heaven” and converted him to his own beliefs, but was unsuccessful in persuading Calvin out of his belief in predestination. “Hell” is described as a similarly earth-like place where the inhabitants are characterized by self-love and evil actions.
One can easily understand why Swedenborg was dismissed by most of his contemporaries as a madman, and why even until quite recently his visions have seldom been taken seriously. Still, there have always been some who recognized that, for all the strangeness of his visions, he was in actual contact with unseen reality: his younger contemporary, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, one of the chief founders of modern philosophy, took him very seriously and believed the several examples of Swedenborg’s “clairvoyance” that were known throughout Europe; and the American philosopher Emerson, in his long essay on him in Representative Men, called him “one of the mastodons of literature, not to be measured by whole colleges of ordinary scholars.” Today, of course, the revival of interest in occultism has brought him to the fore as a “mystic” and “seer” not bound by doctrinal Christianity, and in particular the researchers in “after-death” experiences find remarkable parallels between their findings and his description of the first moments after death.
There can be little doubt that Swedenborg was in actual contact with invisible spirits and that he received his “revelations” from them. An examination of how he received these “revelations” will show us what is the actual realm these spirits inhabit.
The history of Swedenborg’s contacts with invisible spirits — which he recorded in great detail in his voluminous Journal of Dreams and Spiritual Journal (2300 pages) — reveal precisely the characteristics of one entering into contact with the demons of the air, as described by Bishop Ignatius. From childhood Swedenborg practiced a form of meditation, involving relaxation and intense concentration; in time, he began to see a splendid flame during his meditation, which he accepted with trust and interpreted as a sign of “approval” of his ideas. This prepared him for the opening up of communication with the realm of spirits. Later he began to have dreams of Christ and of being received into a society of “immortals,” and he gradually became aware of the presence of “spirits” around him. Finally, the spirits began to appear to him in a waking state. The first of these latter experiences occurred when he was travelling in London: One night, after overeating, he suddenly saw a blackness and crawling reptiles on the floor, and then a man sitting in the corner of the room, who said only “Eat not so much” and disappeared in blackness. Although he was frightened at this apparition, he trusted it as something “good” because it gave “moral” advice. Then, as he himself related, “during the same night the same man revealed himself to me again, but I was not frightened now. He then said that he was the Lord God, the Creator of the World, and the Redeemer, and that he had chosen me to explain to men the spiritual sense of the Scripture, and that he himself would explain to me what I should write on this subject; that same night were opened to me, so that I became thoroughly convinced of their reality, the worlds of spirits, heaven and hell.... Afterwards the Lord opened, daily very often, my bodily eyes, so that in the middle of the day I could see into the other world, and in a state of perfect wakefulness converse with angels and spirits.”20
It is quite clear from this description that Swedenborg was opened up to contact with the aerial realm of fallen spirits and that all his later revelations came from this source. The “heaven” and the “hell” which he saw were also parts of this aerial realm, and the “revelations” which he recorded are a description of the illusions of this realm which the fallen spirits often produce for the gullible, with their own aims in view. A look at some other occult literature will show us more of the characteristics of this realm.
3. The “Astral Plane” of Theosophy
19th and 20th century Theosophy, which is an amalgamation of the occult ideas of East and West, teaches in detail concerning this aerial realm, which it sees as composed of a number of “astral planes.” (“Astral,” meaning “of the stars,” is a fanciful term to refer to the level of reality “above the earthly.”) According to one resume of the teaching, “the (astral) planes comprise the habitations of all supernatural entities, the locale of gods and demons, the void where the thoughtforms dwell, the region inhabited by spirits of the air and other elements, and the various heavens and hells with their angelic and demonic hosts.... With the help of ritual procedures, trained persons believe that they can ‘rise on the planes,’ and experience these regions in full awareness.”21
According to this teaching, one enters the “astral plane” (or “planes,” depending on whether this realm is viewed as a whole or in its separate “layers”) at death, and, as in Swedenborg’s teaching, there is no sudden change in one’s state and no judgment; one continues to live as before, only outside the body, and begins to “pass through all the sub-planes of the astral plane, on his way to the heaven-world.”22 Each sub-plane is increasingly refined and “inward,” and the progression through them, far from involving fear and uncertainty as do the Christian “toll-houses,” is a time of pleasure and joy: “The joy of life on the astral plane is so great that physical life in comparison with it seems no life at all.... Nine out of ten much dislike returning to the body” (Powell, p. 94).
Theosophy, the invention of the Russian medium Helena Blavatskaya, was founded in the late 19th century in an attempt to give a systematic explanation of the mediumistic contacts with the “dead” which had been multiplying in the Western world since the great outbreak of spiritistic phenomena in America in 1848. To this day its teaching on the “astral plane” (although often not called by that name) is the standard one used by mediums and other dabblers in the occult to explain their experiences in the world of spirits. Although Theosophical books on the “astral plane” are filled with the same “sickening inanity and banality” that Dr. Jung finds to characterize all spiritistic literature, still, behind this triviality there is a basic underlying philosophy of other-world reality that strikes a responsive chord in researchers today. Today’s humanistic world-view is much more favorably disposed to an other-world that is pleasant rather than painful, that allows for gentle “growth” or “evolution” rather than the finality of judgment, that permits “another chance” to prepare oneself for a higher reality rather than determining one’s eternal lot by one’s behavior in earthly life. The teaching of Theosophy gives exactly these characteristics demanded by the “modern soul” and it claims to be based on experience.
20
R. L. Tafel,
21
Benjamin Walker,
22
A. E. Powell,