Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/154

138 is, of an inmost connection." This was as high as man could go, consciously, but on a still higher level the origin of these loves and desires lay in the soul's wish to preserve its own kind for "more universal ends," and, of course, he saw this as an expression of the will of God.

Hence, for him, a dream of physical love, the lowest level of the series, could signify its origin in the highest level, that is, God, or "love for what is holy." No step in this ladder was "impure" to Swedenborg (though he noted that the world thought so), provided it really was part of the whole series, and not the last two bits broken off, unspiritualized by that love "lacking a name of its own." In his draft of the book on the Soul (De Anima, 1741) he gave it a name, calling it "conjugial love," as opposed to "conjugial hate," which he also described—a state worse than hell, he said, where lovers, who had been merely physically linked and then lost the illusion of passion, now loathed each other and fought like furies.6

What he saw as essential in the true union of minds and bodies was the feeling that each wanted to give all to the other. Self-abandonment. For this reason he, and many other mystics of East and West, have tried to describe the sense of union with the Infinite in the only earthly terms they knew which approached it—in Swedenborg's case "conjugial love." One of his dreams shows this.

But it was not really a dream, he said. He woke one morning "and lay awake, but as if in a vision; I could open my eyes and be awake when I wanted to, but yet I was in the spirit—there was an inward and sensible joy through my whole body; it seemed as if in some transcendent way all rose and hid in the infinite as if in a centre which was love itself, and which flowed out from there again and down through incomprehensible circles from that centre of love, around and back again. This love in a mortal body with which I was filled was then like the joy which a chaste man has when he is really in love and in the very act with his spouse, with such extreme delight was my whole body suffused . . ."

He noted, he says, that this real and inner joy lasted for half an hour or an hour, but that as soon as any self—love appeared it ceased, and he felt a chill shiver and a sorrow, and in this way he said he