Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/270

254 of state of the interiors; but still before the eyes of the spirits and angels they appear exactly like walking, going and departure. . ." 11

"That this is so can be confirmed by much experience in the other life, for I have walked there in spirit with them, and among them through many of their abodes, and this though in body I remained in the same place." 12

Innumerable times Swedenborg stressed that his physical body stayed in the one spot and only his mind roamed, and this not in our space but through "changes of state." When he went on those odd excursions which he termed visits to the spirit realms of other planets, he maintained that it took two days for all the necessary changes of state to occur in him.

Well aware as Swedenborg was that time can also be psychological—a good companion shortens time, a dreary one lengthens it—he was prepared when he came to converse with "angels" who had forgotten what calendar and clock time was. They had been so long dead to that kind of time, they had forgotten the alternation of night and day due to the earth's rotation about the sun, and Swedenborg had to explain all that to them. But though they had no notion of our kind of time they knew well enough, he said, "that relatively to the duration of state there is time, just as much as in the world" 13—a kind of local time, just as the appearance of three-dimensional space was local. Even angels had their ups and downs emotionally, he noted elsewhere; even for them there were states of greater and lesser joy and even some sadness—for otherwise than by contrast it is hard to seize those states.

However, he said, even the idea of time, any kind of time, perished with those who were of the innermost heaven, "because with them the natural [self] which is in the notion of time is put to sleep." 14

The aspect of time which most fascinated Swedenborg was memory—man's precarious hold on time. As early as in his first published writings on physiology he had maintained that memory was a change of state in the little "brains" (cells) of the cortex, not tablets stored in little boxes in the brain.15 Nobody surely believes that any more, he said about this theory, and he would have been surprised