Emanuel Swedenborg: Hope and Action in the Birth of the New Mind

Emanuel Swedenborg:
Hope and Action in the Birth of the New Mind

I was having a conversation over lunch this week with a former Montessori colleague. We were animatedly discussing how to talk about cells with young people – what makes cells come alive, both literally and figuratively. In order to attempt an understanding of these mysterious beings, we must first look toward our experience. Our cells are all living systems within our bodies, communicating with one another and in telepathic communication with our Self. We think about moving our hand in a sweeping gesture and a sweeping gesture manifests itself in space and time. The miracle of all this is that the cause and effect are instantaneous and simultaneous. The thought creating the gesture and the gesture itself are outside of the confines of time and space. When did this telepathy, I wondered, become defined, delineated by our skin? Perhaps con-fined is a more appropriate word.

How did our cells learn how do communicate in such intricate and wondrous ways? Let us travel backwards in time to the molecules that produced these living cells. But another mystery awaits us there: How did these specific molecules know how to arrange themselves into complex proteins and DNA? How did such impeccable order arise out of such seeming chaos? Again, we travel back – to the atoms themselves that formed such complex molecules. A “simple” example is a water molecule – two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. We say, “Well, they bonded!” But as we probe further and ask a scientist how they bonded, what drew them together, they might answer with another concept like gravitational attraction or electromagnetic attraction. We probe further (most likely leading to the vexation of our scientist friend): But what is this attraction you speak of? How does it work? This is the stuff that drives all of creation. What is it? You will most likely get no answer, and if you do, it will be that you are asking the wrong questions.

I don’t believe that these are the wrong questions; quite the opposite really – I believe that they are probably the most important questions. I did have an answer for my Montessori colleague, but it was not discovered through traditional scientific empirical research. It was discovered through the mystics. What is this intelligence that pervades all of creation? What is it that attracts one molecule to another? What is it that has created life and consciousness? It seems to me to be Love – a pervasive love that guides the complex properties of the cosmos, from the grand to the minutia.

Again we can look to our own experience as an illustration: Emanuel Swedenborg describes one’s ruling love as one’s core values, and also “the vital force that pervades the soul and the body, both in general and in every particular.” (Johnson, 2003, pg. 17) If one then ascribes to Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondence then it would follow that we, as individuals and as a species, are reflections of the cosmos and that love is the core value of the cosmos. What I find most hopeful in all of this is the possibility of the redemption of the human species, and that redemption’s impact on today’s global crises. Teilhard, in The Phenomenon of Man, quotes J.B.S. Haldane in a footnote. He says, “Now, if the co-operation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the co-operation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being.” (Teilhard, 1975, pg. 57) What would this Great Being look like?

All around us we see the stirrings of great change. Marilyn Ferguson said, “The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind – the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought.” (Ferguson, 2009, pg. 1) Ferguson describes the forging of alliances with like-minded people; how these people seem drawn to one another through some mystical magnetism - not unlike the attraction of hydrogen to oxygen that forms our great oceans. Brian Swimme says that, alone, hydrogen atoms are just hydrogen atoms, but when enough of them join together they form a star. Swedenborg might describe this phenomenon as creating a correspondence of Heaven on Earth. It all goes back to ruling love. “We end up in the higher spiritual worlds in a society of people like ourselves because of our ruling love. Thus our ultimate spiritual function lies in our ruling or supreme love, which we can begin to realize in this world.” (Van Dusen, 2001, pg. 58)

How might one see this change coming about and how does the work of Emanuel Swedenborg play a role? First, I believe it is important to understand that, according to Jean Gebser, integral consciousness is irrupting in our species as a natural part of the process of evolution. Georg Feuerstein describes it in these terms, “Whenever the energic fluctuations within a given system (such as cells, stars, urban traffic) reach a critical point, they reorganize the system itself, giving rise to a new, more complex pattern, or higher-order whole .” (Feuerstein, 1987, pg. 136) Some, with this information, may take on a certain fatalistic perspective, that divine providence will lead the way and humanity can be allowed to simply float in its wake. This would be an example of the kind of action-less faith that Swedenborg advises against. “The essentials of religion are consideration for others and faith...Faith alone is mere thought, not sufficient in itself because it has too little of our life in it.” (Van Dusen, 2001, pg. 33) In Swedenborg’s own words, “According to angelic wisdom, unless volition and discernment, or desire and thought, or charity and faith, devote themselves to involvement in works or deeds whenever possible, they are nothing but passing breezes, so to speak, or images in the air that vanish. They first take on permanence in us and become part of our life when we perform and do them.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.216) I like to see this as manifesting our highest purpose, our “ruling love”, for the benefit of all of creation.

Swedenborg’s thought guides us in another philosophically important manner: Causes. According to Aristotle, there are four interacting Causes: material cause, formal cause, efficient cause, and final cause. The standard illustration for how these causes interact is in the building of a house. The material cause is the wood, the nails, the tools used to build the house. The formal cause is the design, the thought, and the planning that brought the house from an idea to an actuality. The efficient cause is the actual work that went into the construction of the house. The final cause is the Home – it’s purpose for being. In the Cartesian worldview, only the efficient and material causes are recognized as empirically valid: One dead atom strikes another dead atom and the detached observer recognizes an event. Swedenborg, on the other hand, draws a more recursive, systematically open, picture of the causes. The terms he uses are different but the meaning is the same: For Swedenborg they are called the purpose, the means, and the result, which would correspond, respectively, to the formal cause, the material/efficient cause, and the final cause. But an interesting thing happens in Swedenborg’s causal system – the final cause and the formal cause are basically the same. He says, “A purpose cannot exist in itself alone, but must exist in something that takes place because of it, something in which it can dwell with its total being, something which it can accomplish by its effort as long as it lasts. The reality in which it ‘lasts’ is that final end that is called its result.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.168) It is a reciprocal union, which corresponds to the fact that humanity is also a reciprocal union of spirit and matter. Nicolas of Cusa would have seen it as a coincidentia oppositorum. So for Swedenborg, the fact that our imagination is alive with possibility points to divine reality – it is the manifestation of “ruling love” in our consciousness that is already a fact in the celestial realms. But, the all too human paradox still haunts, it is not enough to simply let the idea rest idly in one’s waking dreams; it must be materialized in the means. It must be made manifest in life.

At this stage in history it is more important than ever that we attempt to restore the balance of our relationship to our selves, one another, our planet, and the divine. With that we also must reignite the awe and wonder of creation and realize that we are everyday, as Jung says, “tripping over the numinous”. Emanuel Swedenborg has provided us with a model (himself) and a roadmap in realizing the divine on Earth. “We need to realize that action and reaction are involved in everything in the universe, no matter how large or small, whether alive or lifeless.” (Swedenborg, 2003, par.263) We are witnessing the reaction of our all-too-earthly consciousness in the spasms of our Earth. The myopia of modern science, technology, and unlimited growth has created what Swedenborg would surely call Hell – a downward spiral, both literally and figuratively. But through our actions we can manifest reformation. Through our effort, time, and will, not to mention creativity and imagination we can reverse the “spiral characteristic of the action and reaction of the earthly mind” and reverse it into an upward spiral. “So before our reformation we are looking down toward hell, while after our reformation we are looking up toward heaven.” (Swedenborg, 2003, pg. 156) Swedenborg calls this change of state regeneration – it comes from our effort but it is a gift from God, or Grace.

On the threshold of reflection, Teilhard remarks, “The being who is the object of his own reflection, in consequence of that very doubling back upon himself, becomes in a flash able to raise himself into a new sphere. In reality, another world is born.” (Teilhard, 1975, pg. 165) Another world is born indeed.

It is happening right now. Another world is being born. We have the choice to usher it in with imagination, hope, love, and wisdom, or its birth can be a long painful one with the crush of labor wiping out most of the biosphere. Both possibilities exist; both possibilities are accessible to us. Swedenborg says that we always have the choice of living in heaven or hell. Even when we die, through God’s love, we are not punished by our actions, but are allowed to choose in which existence we feel most at home: heaven or hell. Personally I choose heaven. I know that each moment provides an opportunity to choose. Sometimes I choose wrongly and feel regretful, but I am also aware that in the next moment there will be another choice, and I will have gained wisdom because that is simply the nature of being alive. When I confessed to the universe my pain and emptiness, and my desire to live to my fullest potential, it lovingly replied:

Dear Paul,
It is human what you feel. So human. You are already there. Just believe it. You have the support of the whole universe to become who you are. You are loved.
Love, Ω

I take this to heart.


Sources:

Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser. Lower Lake, CA, Integral Publishing, 1987

Ferguson, Marilyn. The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time. New York, NY, Tarcher Cornerstone Editions, 2009

Swedenborg, Emanuel. Divine Love and Wisdom. West Chester, PA, Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 2003

Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York, NY, Harper Collins, 1975

Van Dusen, Wilson. The Design of Existence. West Chester, PA, Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 2001