Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/261

XVIII ] These spirits, by adding their passions to that of the man, make a double battery of emotions, good or bad, according to circumstances. Mostly bad, of course. They tend to enforce man's evil passions; "they smell them out as dogs smell wild beasts in the forest." Around every living being, alive or "dead," Swedenborg, like the ancient Hindus, claimed he saw a kind of "sphere" or "aura" indicating the predominant thoughts and affections, and "such as the sphere is, such are the spirits, whence it appears what kind of spirits are with those who think of nothing else and are affected by nothing else than cupidities, hatreds and revenges. Where the carcass is, there the ravens are." 30

As an example of how spirits confirm men in their desires or fears, Swedenborg mentions in his diary (while he was still abroad in 1748) that as soon as he thought of his garden, "of him who had charge of it, of my being called home, of money matters, of the state of mind of those who were known to me, of the state or character of those in my house, of the things that I was to write and the probability that they would not be understood, of new garments that were to be obtained, and various other things of this kind . . ." then, he said, the spirits would immediately add their "inconvenient, troublesome and evil suggestions" and thus fan his worries. But, he philosophized, "when I had not been in the thought of such things for months or years, I had no care of them, still less did they give trouble." 31

He also warned (as we should say) against getting a compulsion neurosis. He said it was bad to make up one's mind that something had to come to pass in a certain way, if it were only a trivial matter, because spirits might seize on the idea and add to it and induce the thought that it absolutely must be so, blowing it up into undue importance, and in that way man lost his liberty. This, he said, he knew also from experience.32

So overcome was Swedenborg at times by his sense of the interpersonal field in which man lived, this shower of discarnate influences affecting him continually, that he could sometimes say man had nothing at all from himself—all his thought was in a sense thought transference. But at other times he maintained that spirits also had many of their thoughts from men. In fact kindred spirits often associated themselves with men's thoughts and