Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/236

220 of sense impressions from the external world vanished, as he often made clear. He believed firmly that he entered into awareness of other worlds, other levels of consciousness. We have no means of knowing what they "really" were, but he has left descriptions in his diary of his several kinds of "visions" and the corresponding states.

(Incidentally, one of his entries mentions that some "spirits" from the "Indies" taught him a kind of breathing.11)

Early in 1748 he was trying to distinguish between difierent kinds of "spiritual sight." He said there were four kinds. "The sight of sleep" was the first, by which he must have meant of the same clarity as the peculiar phenomena called "veridical dreams," for he adds that this "is as vivid as sight by day; so that in such sleep I should say if that be sleep wakefulness could also be sleep."

Psychologists might call the second kind "eidetic imagery"; it sounds like a very light trance. Swedenborg continues: "It is vision with the eyes closed, which is as vivid as with the eyes open, and similar objects, and even more beautiful and agreeable, are represented to view; the same kind of vision can also exist with open eyes, which I have experienced twice or three times." 12

In another reference he notes that he has sometimes, while thinking he was wide awake, though being in conversation with spirits, walked through city streets and country roads and yet been "in vision, seeing groves, rivers, palaces, houses, men and many other things. But after I had thus walked for hours, suddenly I was in the sight of the body, and became aware that I was in another place." 13

This corresponds to the so-called hallucinations of the sane, known to psychic research records, but Swedenborg was well aware that it was not objectively real as he considered other visions to be, for he expressly notes that this kind of vision is not the same as "the things I have habitually 'seen' . . . these are not visions but things seen in the highest wakefulness of the body, and this for several years." 14

The third kind of "spiritual sight" clearly implied awareness of what he considered the objective spirit world, without actual participation in it. "It is a state when the eyes are open, when those things which are in heaven, such as spirits and other objects, are