Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/197

XV ] for him. He noted that he felt the "inner man" as "another than myself," and that he seemed to speak to himself as if to another.3

During this period he also noted that he had unusual physical symptoms, such as sleeping for ten or twelve hours at a stretch, and unaccountable sweats and tremblings. He practiced, as we have seen, self-invented breathing exercises (of a yogic kind) involving holding his breath, as a help toward "controlling" his thoughts. Whether because of such practices or not, he experienced "a swoon such as I had in Amsterdam six or seven years ago." 4

He was aware that most of his strange experiences seemed to come after he had just awaked in the morning, but one whole night, "I was neither asleep nor awake, but in a strange coma; I was aware of all my dreams; I kept control of my thoughts, which made me sweat now and then; I cannot describe that kind of sleep, through which my double thoughts were separated or were torn asunder." 5

It is evident that he distinguished between this conscious but trancelike state, characterized by inner strife, and his other states of mystic ecstasy, in which he felt as if he might be wholly dissolved in "the real joy of life." 6 Those he associated with "the only blissful Christ spirit." But at the end of the so-called dream diary he notes that he had discovered there are spirits of all kinds, and this is the first mention he makes of "spirits." These other spirits, he says, "take the form of our desires [amores]," which would make it seem as if he were trying to picture one set of his "double thoughts" as a kind of infernal crew symbolizing temptations. It must be remembered that Swedenborg to a high degree thought in images. Even in his strictly physiological works he is always illustrating his point with some very concrete simile as previously cited—"the grate-work" of the ribs, "the pipes, ovens and little bladders" of the body, etc. Everything was always like something else, something visual and specific.

But through this period he does not seem to have had, or at least recorded, more than one real auditory hallucination—one, that is, as coming from outside of himself. This occurred on an occasion just before he went to sleep. He says he was thinking hard about his current work (it was The Worship and Love of God) when "it was said to me 'shut your mouth, or I'll hit you!' " He says he was