by Colin Wilson
What made his works so unusual was that he claimed to have actually visited heaven and hell, and to have held long theological discussions with angels and deceased religious teachers. (He actually claimed to have converted Martin Luther to his own theology, but was unable to make John Calvin see reason.) This again might be dismissed as the fairly typical delusion of a religious crank, except that he was able to offer some impressive evidence that he really had been in touch with the dead. The queen of Sweden asked Swedenborg to give her greetings to her dead brother — probably in a spirit of mild mockery. At the next court reception, Swedenborg greeted the queen from her brother, and said that he wanted to send his apologies for not answering her last letter; he would now do so through Swedenborg … The queen turned pale and said: ‘No one but God knows this secret.’ The widow of the Dutch ambassador asked Swedenborg to contact her deceased husband because she had received a huge bill from a goldsmith, and she was convinced that her husband had already paid it. Swedenborg came to see her a few days later, and told her that he had talked with her husband, and the goldsmith’s receipt was in a secret compartment in a bureau. The widow knew nothing about any such compartment: but that is precisely where the receipt turned out to be …
Swedenborg also described at some length what it was like to be ‘possessed’ by spirits, and Van Dusen was struck by the extraordinary similarity between Swedenborg’s accounts and the hallucinations described by patients in the Mendocino State Hospital. Swedenborg says that spirits and angels can converse with man directly by entering ‘by an internal way into his organ of hearing, thus affecting it from within’. Swedenborg goes on: ‘To speak with spirits at this day is rarely granted because it is dangerous …’, which clearly seems to imply that there was some past age in which men could converse more directly with ‘spirits’. The explanation Swedenborg gives is that spirits do not normally know ‘they are with man’, because there is a kind of barrier between these entities and man’s own consciousness. If spirits get through this barrier — or are allowed through because a man has dabbled in ‘the occult’ — they are likely to become a nuisance. ‘Evil spirits are such that they regard man with deadly hatred, and desire nothing more than to destroy him, both body and soul.’ Swedenborg also mentions that the barrier between spirits and human consciousness may be broken by people who ‘indulge much in fantasies, so as to remove themselves from the delights proper to the natural man’. This, says Van Dusen, is a pretty good description of what we now call schizophrenia. (We should note that schizophrenia does not mean ‘split personality’ — as the modern misconception has it — but simply a withdrawal from reality.)
‘All of Swedenborg’s observations on the effect of evil spirits entering man’s consciousness conform to my findings’, says Van Dusen. And he mentions passages in Swedenborg in which the characteristics of the ‘lower order’ are described: their determination to destroy a man, their ability to cause anxiety or pain, their desire to destroy conscience, their hatred of religion, their tendency to bully, threaten, deceive and lie, and their curious skill at mimicry. All these characteristics of the ‘lower order’, as experienced by mental patients, are specifically described in the writings of Swedenborg. Van Dusen was particularly struck by their hatred of religion. ‘If voices are merely the patient’s unconscious coming forth, I would have no reason to expect them to be particularly for or against religion. Yet the lower order can be counted on to give its most scurrilous comments to any suggestion of religion.’ Swedenborg also notes the obsession of the ‘lower order’ with filth and obscenity, another point noted by Van Dusen.
Van Dusen also observed that although the lower order claim to be individuals, they seldom reveal any trace of real personal identity. Swedenborg explains that the personal memory is taken from them at death, so they are forced to rely on the memory and abilities of the person they are ‘possessing’. Another striking similarity between Swedenborg’s spirits and the ‘lower order’ is the attempt to possess some organ or part of the patient’s body. ‘Several worked on one patient’s ear, and he seemed to grow deafer. One voice worked for two years to capture a patient’s eye, which went visibly out of alignment.’ They often set out to possess the genitals. ‘One female patient described her sexual relations with her male spirit as both more pleasurable and more inward than normal intercourse.’
There is an equally striking correspondence between the ‘higher order’ described by mental patients and the entities Swedenborg calls ‘angels’. The angels are kind, helpful and wise. The reason that they are so sparing of words is that man’s ‘interior mind’ does not think in words, but in ‘universals which comprise many particulars’ — that is to say, in intuitive insights. They are, in short, a right-brain function. Or, to put it another way, ‘angels’ communicate through the right cerebral hemisphere, and prefer symbols — we may recollect Van Dusen’s gaspipe fitter who was shown hundreds of universal symbols in an hour by his ‘higher order’ mentor. Swedenborg also notes that ‘higher order’ spirits can see the lower ones, but not vice versa — which again corresponded to Van Dusen’s own experience.
Van Dusen was inclined to wonder why ‘higher-order’ hallucinations are so much rarer than those of the ‘lower order’ (approximately one fifth as many). Swedenborg suggests an answer. Angels, he says, possess the very interior of man, and their ‘influx is tacit’. So they are simply less apparent than the hostile spirits, who make sure their presence is recognised.
What are we to make of all this? Both Crabtree and Van Dusen insist that they try to function solely as observers, implying that the reader can choose which explanation he prefers — spirits or the unconscious mind. But we have seen that Van Dusen is inclined to wonder why, if the ‘lower order’ is merely the patient’s unconscious, they should show such consistent hostility to religion. And how can we explain the following story from Crabtree’s book? An acquaintance of Crabtree’s called Pat was invited by a girlfriend to spend a weekend at her grandparent’s farm. The grandparents turned out to be dabblers in the occult, and parts of the house, such as the attic, gave Pat peculiar feelings of uneasiness. Later, the grandparents suggested that Pat should try automatic writing, which she did with some misgivings. The moment she took the pen in her hand and relaxed, she slipped into a drugged, trance-like state, and experienced a numbness in her hand and arm. She seemed to see a woman who appeared behind her; the woman had a doll-like face, and wore a long mauve gown. Pat felt as though her energies were being usurped by this woman, and suddenly her hand wrote: ‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning here.’ (Her hosts had earlier mentioned Elizabeth Barrett Browning). There followed a long message which included the information that Mrs Browning and Robert were having difficulty getting used to their ‘new surroundings’. Slowly, the energy seemed to diminish until the writing stopped. But Pat felt oddly dissociated for the rest of the day.
Later that evening a second session was held. This time several different ‘entities’ used Pat’s hand to write, and the messages were of a ‘coarse nature’. At a third session, ‘Mrs Browning’ answered the question ‘Where do you live now?’. ‘Everywhere … nowhere. We are you and you are us.’ After that she seemed to become very cagey.
Then the handwriting changed to that of Pat’s deceased brother Tom, and there was a message of love and comfort. But when Pat said how moved she felt, her girlfriend snapped: ‘That wasn’t Tom. They’ll pretend to be anyone.’ Evidently she knew a great deal about ‘lower-order’ entities.
Later, one of the grandparents remarked that some entity no longer seemed to be in the house; it had left because it was attracted to Pat’s aura. Pat was disturbed at the thought that she had been used as a kind of sponge to soak up some dubious force.
Back home again, Pat began to hear ‘Elizabeth’ ’s voice inside her head, and she felt oddly detached from reality. ‘Elizabeth’ tried to persuade her to do more automatic writing, but she felt that if she did this, she would only be consolidating the
‘spirit’s’ hold. ‘We need you’, said ‘Elizabeth’. ‘If you refuse to speak to us we shall live in your room, in your walls.’
Pat’s girlfriend had told her that if she ignored the entity, it would soon go away. She found that it was not as easy as that. She tried reading a trashy novel and ignoring the voice, but a sensation that someone was pressing her face against her own made it hard to concentrate. In bed she tossed and turned so violently that she had to remake the bed several times. But she felt that her ‘starvation’ technique was the right one. After a few days, her ability to concentrate began to return; slowly, little by little, the influence of the entities (for she felt there was more than one) began to diminish. Finally, she had the impression that she could actually see the woman in the mauve dress receding, turning first into a mauve mass, then into a ‘low grade vibration’.
Pat may have been very suggestible, and her unconscious mind may have created the woman in mauve, but it must be admitted that this explanation seems less convincing than the alternative — that Pat had willingly opened herself to one of the ‘lower order’, and had to extricate herself as best she could. Descriptions of this type of possession are familiar in ‘occult’ literature. The American researcher Alan Vaughan describes how he himself became ‘possessed’ for a time. He had bought himself an ouija board, to amuse a friend who was convalescing. Soon he was receiving all kinds of messages, some of which seemed to convey information that was not available to Vaughan’s own unconscious mind — for example, when the radio announced the death of the newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, from a heart attack, they asked the board if this was true; it replied that she had actually died of poison. Ten days later, this proved to be true. (It was suspected — and still is — that she died because she knew too much about the John F. Kennedy assassination). Then, to his alarm, Vaughan found that a spirit who called itself ‘Nada’ (‘nothing’ — recalling ‘Elizabeth’ ’s answer to the question about where she lived) had ‘got inside his head’. ‘I could hear her voice repeating the same phrases over and over again’ — in the typical manner of the ‘lower order’. When asked about this, the board replied: ‘Awful consequences — possession.’
A friend who understood such matters undertook to help Vaughan, and another ‘spirit’ took possession of his hand and made him write a message: ‘Each of us has a spirit while living. Do not meddle with the spirits of the dead.’ Then the spirit seemed to cause an uprising of energy in Vaughan’s body which pushed both ‘Nada’ and the helpful entity out of the top of Vaughan’s head:
I felt a tremendous sense of elation and physical wellbeing … My mind began to race in some extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space. For the first time, I began to sense what was going on in other people’s minds, and, to my astonishment, I began to sense the future through some kind of extended awareness …*
Here again, we can see that Vaughan’s account seems to tally closely with what Swedenborg had to say about angels and spirits. ‘Nada’ repeated the same phrases over and over again, as the ‘lower order’ always do. She identified herself as the wife of a Nantucket sea captain, and Vaughan remarks that she seemed to resent the fact that he was alive and she was dead. The entity that helped to push ‘Nada’ out of Vaughan’s head sounds very much like one of Swedenborg’s angels.
But could not both entities have been a product of Vaughan’s ‘right brain’, as Julian Jaynes suggests? This is conceivable; yet again, there does seem to be a distinction between the manifestations of the right brain, and ‘lower order’ entities. The right brain is the intuitive self — the aspect of us that provides insight and ‘inspiration’ — such as the tunes that ‘walked into’ Mozart’s head. It has better things to do than repeat the same stupid phrase over and over again.
The distinction can be seen clearly in a case I have described elsewhere,** that of Brad Absetz, an American teacher living in Finland, who accidentally stumbled upon the trick of establishing contact with his ‘other self’. After the death of their child from cancer, Brad Absetz’s wife retreated into a state of schizophrenia. For hours at a time, she would lie on the bed, her eyes closed, struggling with guilt and depression. Brad would lie there beside her, waiting for her to emerge from these sessions of gloomy introspection so he could comfort and encourage her. He lay totally alert, waiting for the slightest movement that would indicate that she was returning to normal awareness. Yet clearly, a man who lies on a bed for hours at a time will drift into a state of relaxation. One day, as he lay there in this combined state of relaxation and alertness, he experienced a curious sense of inner freedom, of release from the body, almost as if floating clear of the bed. Then he noticed an impulse in the muscles of his arm, as if it wanted to move. Brad mentally gave his arm ‘permission to move’, and it floated up into the air. Soon both arms were making spontaneous movements, while he looked on as a bystander.
In the dining hall, where buffet meals were served, his hands showed a disposition to select food for themselves; for several weeks, he allowed them to select the food they preferred — it was seldom what he would have chosen himself — and noticed that he began to lose weight, and to feel fitter than ever before. His ‘hand’ later used crayons and paints to create an extraordinary series of paintings, and to make metal sculptures. It also began to write poems in free-verse form, and these poems were remarkable for a certain clarity and purity of language.
What had happened is that the right-brain self had begun to express itself; we might say that in the parliament of his mind, the member for the unconscious had worked up the courage to start making speeches. Psychologists refer to the right brain as the ‘non-dominant hemisphere’; in most of us, it behaves like a suppressed housewife who never dares to utter her own opinion. Brad’s hours of quiescence had taught her to overcome her shyness.
One day when he took up a pencil to allow his hand to write, the handwriting was quite different from his own. A woman named herself and briefly introduced herself. Brad’s immediate reaction was a powerful sense of rejection. He pushed the paper away, and said forcefully: ‘I will not be a mouthpiece for anyone but myself.’ The ‘communicator’ went away and did not return. Here we seem to have a clear distinction between the ‘voice’ of the right brain and some external communicator or spirit.
In short, whether we can accept it or not, it seems that there is a prima facie case for the existence of disembodied entities with which we can, under certain circumstances, communicate.
Let us, for the moment, give Swedenborg the benefit of the doubt on these matters, and consider what else he has to say. His views are very simple. According to Swedenborg, man is a spirit who inhabits a body, in precisely the same way that a driver sits in an automobile. The body is no more the man than the automobile is. At death, the man leaves his body behind, and continues to exist in an incorporeal form. When the heartbeat ceases, the spirit — that is, the man himself — passes on to another plane of existence, and this is described by Swedenborg at some length in his book Heaven and Hell.
Our first reaction to this is that it reveals a certain naivety. We are aware of personality as something that changes and develops over the course of a lifetime. H. G. Wells points out that every single cell in our body changes every seven years, so a man of forty is totally different from the same man at thirty or fifty. Moreover, personality can alter through some accident; for example, people who have received violent blows on the head may seem to turn into another personality. One leading investigator of the paranormal, Professor John Taylor, writes in The Shape of Minds to Come: ‘We recognise personality as a summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain.’ So to assume that the personality can survive death is a little like assuming that a house will somehow go on existing after it has been demolished, or that the ‘spirit’ of a ship will live on after it has been dismantled in the breaker’s yard. My personality wilts visibly when I get tired, and it goes out
like a light when I fall asleep. So the very idea of its surviving death seems a logical absurdity.
All these objections were beautifully summarised in an article Bertrand Russell wrote in the 1930s on ‘Do We Survive Death?’.* A person, he says, is simply a series of mental occurences and habits, and if we believe in life after death, we must believe that the memories and habits that constitute the person will somehow continue to exist. This leads him to state flatly: ‘It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life.’ He goes on to say that one feeling that encourages the belief in survival is admiration for the excellence of man. He quotes the Bishop of Birmingham on the subject. Man knows right and wrong. He can build Westminster Abbey. He can make an aeroplane. He can calculate the distance to the sun. So how can we believe that he will perish utterly at death?
This, says Russell (in effect), is emotional rubbish, the same kind of rubbish that stood in the way of Galileo and Newton and other great scientists when they wanted to investigate the universe. People like the Bishop of Birmingham said that the planets must move in circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve, and that all species must be immutable because God would not bother to create something that was imperfect.… And they were, of course, quite wrong.
Anyway, says Russell, it is only when we think abstractly that we have a high opinion of man. Civilised states spend half their revenue on murdering one another. Think of all the horrors that human beings have committed on one another … Surely if our world is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend?