Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/221

XVI ] a few years before, he had noted that ideas contained in words are "confused images which are disclosed as to their quality by nearer approach, by sedulous examination and by touch; meanwhile they are vague conjectures, vain and empty." 9

How could he now commit his life to such unexamined emptiness!

Some great novelist said that the most important things to examine in one's manuscripts are the transitions. They must be rightly understood and fully expressed.

Luckily Swedenborg left us the document of his transition period in the first draft of his first series of Bible commentaries, The Word Explained, as it came to be called. He wrote these notes so soon after he began having his other-world experiences that he had not yet arranged, trimmed, or dressed them up to suit his theories; he had not yet fully rationalized them. They contain the key to the puzzle.

He took most of what he wrote of Bible commentary as divine revelation, and therefore to be believed uncritically, because it came to him in a very special way, at least much of it; in a way nothing seems to have come to him before.

This began as far back as the winter of 1745, after he had settled into the quiet of his garden home.10 There something happened to him so startling that its influence can almost be compared to that of his Delft vision. It brought the same sense of utter conviction, the same sense of an external force.

His hand moved of itself!

And it wrote things which, he said, were "arcana"—secrets never known to anyone before, some of them almost repellent to him, yet at least others fitted into the whole background of his thoughts as it had formed itself for years. Twice convincing—to him.

There can be no doubt that it was through so-called "automatic" writing that Swedenborg obtained the bulk of his Bible commentaries, and much that to us seems inconsistent with his real self.

Automatic writing,11 it has been explained (see p. 198) is one of the forms in which alleged spirit communication comes to those individuals who are known as sensitives or mediums, capable of such dissociation.