Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/279

XX ] the normal self of Mrs. Willett, even though she had no idea what the "communicator" was driving at—just as Swedenborg said that his memory was tapped by the "spirits" who then used the topics for their own purposes.

But the process described by the Willett "communicators" was also said to be one of mutual selection. The "communicator" said he selected from the contents of both the "conscious and unconscious self" of the sensitive, and insisted that the sensitive selected "from such part of the mind of the communicating spirit as she can have access to."

Putting it briefly, the partially entranced Mrs. Willett is "shown" a number of ideas in visual form by the communicating "spirit" ("representations," as Swedenborg would say), and, say, ten of those stick in her subconscious memory. Telepathically the "communicator" then selects two of those and "pushes them up" to where they will be "grasped and externalized" by automatic writing or speaking. Incidentally, they say, the risk is run that some of the sensitive's own ideas will accompany the ones that have been planted in her telepathically, so to speak, hence the difficulty in disentangling such messages.

There was also the difficulty of language. Mrs. Willett became quite indignant when she had to repeat a long and abstract word with which she was unfamiliar, and even more worried if a Greek and Latin phrase had to be conveyed. "I can see the thoughts," she said once, "but it is so difficult to get the words."

Swedenborg would have diagnosed the trouble as consisting in the fact that the Latin or Greek verbal form of the thought was not already a part of the vocabulary in her memory. He believed that you can have thought without words; that thoughts are really images, mostly visual; and that this was how conversation was possible in the spirit world between people of different languages.

It should by now be clear that Swedenborg in relation to what he considered the spirit world did not sit with bated breath and his attention like a wide-open funnel ready to receive without objection whatever "spirits" told him about matters which he had studied for years.

As to speech, for instance, he stressed that in the spirit world it