Two Views of the Prophetic

For years now I’ve been sorting Swedenborg’s experiences, and I’ve concluded that he was genuine, meaning that he really did see into the regions beyond the border. His interpretation of that experience is my focus today. He came at it with assumptions based on his religious background. He assumed that no one could possibly see heaven and hell without God’s permission. An orderly reality with clearly demarcated rules, God’s rules, actively enforced by God, underlie his interpretations. A direct result of this assumption is that what he saw was shown to him, purposefully shown. It was therefore God’s intention to communicate, through Swedenborg, with humanity.

This view underlies all prophetic callings: God selects individuals through whom he intends to communicate. The experience is real, overwhelming, and, from the perspective of ordinary life, radically novel, indeed incredible. But the experience itself is, if anything, even more compelling that earthly life. If the person retains his or her mental stability and ordinary functioning in this world, that person will feel singularly selected. If that eruption overwhelms the person, he or she will be judged mad; the subject will feel mad too, in lucid moments.

An alternative to this view might be called naturalistic. Using that word we don’t deny God’s existence, creation, or an order ruled by law; but it throws a doubt on the prophetic as a “divine institution.” The naturalistic view assumes that while two realities certainly exist, the life manifesting in material bodies is shielded from the much greater Subtle World by, among other things, the circuitry of our brains and the “noise” of the coarse sensory input we must have and process, without distraction, to keep ourselves alive and well here. But that shielding can malfunction—like everything else in the material real. When that happens, and for whatever reasons—genetics, drugs, injuries, and even deliberate efforts—the usual consequence is madness; the very rare consequence is a visionary career; in the rarest of instances, a prophetic mission emerges. Is it a divine intervention? No more so than the failure of the shielding. I am, of course, far from asserting that what we call a higher world is just plain ordinary madness. What I propose, instead, is that there are ways to see into the subtle world; but when that event takes place, the results will vary. Those most able to manage the extraordinary influx of information, while also retaining a certain mental and physical control, will be those viewed as visionaries and prophets. And Swedenborg was one such figure.

I’ve known two schizophrenics intimately. One was a young man, another a man of my own age; I was then in my late forties; both have passed away, the young man by drowning, the other by self-immolation, burning himself to death in a closet in an asylum. The young man’s occasional ravings included astonishingly biblical-sounding Jeremiads; and he was essentially ignorant of religion beyond the conventional understanding of that word—pronouncedly so of the Biblical type. The other was a close friend and colleague of mine and a family friend for many years. When his dreadful time came, he sometimes called me long distance from the asylum where he died—and gave me passionate guidance reaching him from somewhere on things I had to do; these were also delivered in the same biblical manner. These two are representative of bad cases—in which our shielding fails completely and all control is lost.

The positive cases indicate great trials but have luckier outcomes. People see into that world, indeed travel and subsist there, do so consciously, and, as Swedenborg often says, “in the waking state”; consciousness, intelligence, judgment continue to function. How they interpret their experience much depends on their times, education, and backgrounds. A case like this, which might be yet another variant, is that of the American healer, prophet, and psychic Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Cayce underwent significant sufferings in his life directly related to these “gifts”—the gift of maladaptation.

What the testimonies of such figures provide our ordinary world are indications that something vastly greater than we know exists, that it is an extraordinarily complex world—and that being in a body confuses our understanding of it. The most extensive survey that any prophet has provided us, and in a systematic manner, is Swedenborg’s. But his vision, in detail,  is just as difficult of access for his readers as it was for him—but his readers do not have the experiences Swedenborg attempted to describe and to interpret.