Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/169

XII ] In neither contemporary reference is there anything about the Lord, although the first is from his private diary where it certainly seems as if he would have mentioned a new vision in which he was given a specific "commission."

The episode at the inn he evidently regarded as a separate incident, and so he did another ingredient of the Robsahm story—his "admission" into the freedom of both worlds. After the middle of April, 1745, he had, he said, "conversed with those who are in heaven the same as with my familiars here on earth, and this almost continuously," for, he reckoned, about eight months, at the time he was writing this.37 During the succeeding four years, Swedenborg made about twenty references 38 or more to his admission into the spiritual world as having taken place in the middle of April, 1745, but in none of these does he mention either the inn episode or the Lord giving him a commission.

Since 1743, whenever he was in a state of mystic ecstasy, he had now and then been conscious of "angelic voices," and in the summer of 1744, when he was writing about the sense organs, he noted from time to time that he had been "ordered" to write this or that. (An "angel" for him was a highly evolved spirit.) At the beginning of these experiences he was still rather vague about terms, mixing up "kingdom of God," "heaven," and "the spiritual world," giving rise to inconsistencies.

"The kingdom of God," however, was usually written of in the tradition of mysticism. About the end of 1745 he writes of "the heavenly sweetnesses and felicities" of the kingdom of God having been experienced so frequently by him "during the past two years that I forbear to count the occasions," also that it has several times been shown to him "first in the quiet of sleep and afterwards in midday or time of wakefulness," 39 which makes it clear that he dates his first experience of "the kingdom of God" from 1743. That also tallies with his dream diary from this time.

Also about the end of 1745, he writes of having been admitted into the kingdom of God "by the Messiah himself," and that there he has spoken with various heavenly personages, and "with the dead who have risen again," and "this now for a period of eight months."