Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was an advisor to the Swedish king on engineering issues that had a "substantive meaning." His files also contained the most serious calculations of a submarine and an airplane, not to mention such trifles as an air gun.
So it would be to serve him King Charles XII. But now a completely realistic thinking scientist, universally recognized, even an honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, was interested in sublime subjects. He suggested that "everything of the non-material plane also has an objective meaning." But what exactly should he expect?
Vague visions began that shook him mentally and spiritually, he began to speak: “… As if the words come from outside. However, I am fully conscious and wonder what this means? " And the visions become clearer. "Some spirit with which I can speak takes me away on a walk to unknown places, then I find myself in the same place."
He is more and more interested in the otherworldly "sphere of being". He, as a scientist, initiates many into his reasoning about the invisible reality, and into his state, in which he can, as it were, "reveal" to himself the most ancient people. Many believed, however, that he could only imagine them, but they were still interested in his spiritual connection with the dead.
"Can he speak to anyone or just a few?"
“I can talk to everyone I knew personally. So it is with those whom I recognize from their writings. And also with everyone I have an idea of, for example, with heroes of unimaginable antiquity."
A Dutch ambassador once died in Stockholm. After some time, the goldsmith presented the bill to the widow, but she got the idea that her husband paid, but did not find a receipt. And Swedenborg learned from the deceased about the secret shelves in the bureau where the receipts were kept. And similar stories that happened to him, for some time, too, seemed to be laid out for him on their shelves. And he boldly deepened his “walks” into that world.
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He was asked once, who of those present at the table would die first? “Olofson will die first. Tomorrow at four o'clock. " They checked, and Olofson did not disappoint. And his watch stopped at four. And in 1762, when Peter III died, on that day Swedenborg uttered: "The Russian emperor has just been killed."
All of his thirty folios tell about the visit of the spirit world by his "inner man". And although the first volume, "Heavenly Mysteries, and Thoughts about Them and Experiments" (640 pages) was sold at the lowest price in 1749, three copies were sold in a whole month.
Then a certain Charlotte von Knobloch paid for the publication of the others, she was shocked by the revelations: "My eyes are arranged in such a way that spirits can see through them what is happening in this world." The spirits must have looked so closely at von Knobloch that the last volume of "Heavenly Mysteries" was already published in 1756, but then comments on the folios followed, almost as many volumes!
And nowhere did he recognize the powerlessness of scientific thought before the transcendental. In that "pre-scientific" era of the mind's deference to heaven, whatever the heavens were, his conversations were perceived as dangerous idle talk.
Yet he could converse with absent people. The humble Swedenborg did not consider himself the discoverer of this world and reminded that Count Picodella Mirandola already in the 15th century deduces that there is a world visible and invisible. And with all this, the scientist fiercely praises reason, scientific rationality. It seemed to him that he was moving upward along a spiral with the logic of reasoning, so quickly that he left even Mirandola behind.
He, as if inhabiting two worlds, freely described the structure of the other world. People there communicate among themselves according to their inner, spiritual likeness, and not according to the commonality of time or space. The scientist exclaims - it's true! That he could never have invented all this is so self-evident.
Fiction and truth in the head of the Swedish scientist, exploring the mysteries with rational methods, is like playing blind man's buff. He verified harmony with algebra. Confident that he was understanding some kind of true state of affairs, he climbed to heaven "scientific research." And something limitless and outside of definition suddenly seemed to acquire for a moment certainty, accessibility for his comprehension.
Kant: "Direct knowledge of otherworldly worlds can be achieved only at the cost of giving up something from reason, the ideas of which are for the local world."
Swedenborg's learned name has become the name of a madman. The mystic thinker "served science" by conducting experiments with the completely incomprehensible. The idea of the existence beyond the grave acquired almost sanity, only so far inaccessible to a clue. Friends of the scientists laughed: "Emmanuel, possessing almost a model of the alien, thus can, probably, influence somewhat - first on the sky, and only then on this world."
Swedenborg understood that any world, of course, is not a pneumatic gun, but retorted: “For you all this is unknown. And it is given to me to hear, to see the afterlife as if in reality, and to comprehend. " One day he suddenly realized that he was not breathing. "Instead of me, someone else breathed in me, who kept repeating the ancient word" Al-Aaraf ", which meant the area between the Earth and Heaven."
The empty speculation of the partly insane? Or even this will in time form a kind of comprehension of everything by the mind? Nothing is known. Although Einstein suggested that "perhaps the XXI century will gradually become the century of mysticism."
We will remain with this uncertainty.
Maxim SIVERSKY
