Swedenborg’s cosmology and mine
When I read Heaven & Hell, I was struck by Swedenborg’s conviction that people delude themselves that they’re good. Few people are, he asserts, giving many examples of our perfidy. He argues elsewhere that we’re largely left to our own devices on arrival to the next world, although the angels try to orient and instruct us. Most of the dead find the light of Heaven unbearably glaring, and besides, they want to get on with their “loves,” as he calls them, their earthly pursuits, most of which are in Hell. Among themselves, their appearance is unchanged, but to actually good people, those who find Heaven compatible, they appear grotesque.
In Swedenborg’s Heaven, human activity persists and good works abound. We arrive intact, so procreation continues, producing new souls. Whether this is also true in Hell Swedenborg doesn’t say. The denizens of Hell have their own problems, since the deadly sins are its order of the day.
There are Swedenborgians in the world, with churches and study centers. I’ve never met them or visited these places, but I found the book compelling. Some reduce “the Sage of the North” (as Daisetz Suzuki called him) to a psychologist of the human, seeing his “as above, so below” idea of correspondence as a way to give his psychology an orthodox cover. What you’ll find in the next world, he says, is here now. Save yourself, as it’s not possible in the Afterworld.
Heaven, Swedenborg says, is rich in difference, each saved cohort finding its fellows. Despite its many portals, Hell is like a carnival, barkers at all of them extolling the glorious time you’ll have, doing what you love to be doing. And you’ll do it with myriad other sinners. As in life, toxicity is the norm. Being eternal doesn’t mean you won’t suffer, Swedenborg is clear.
When I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, I wondered more about the side-effects and less if it would kill me. That it could kill me crossed my mind, of course, but the oncologist said it was moving slowly. I put treatment off. Just before a blood test revealed a spike, I dreamt I was playing with small but living dinosaurs and then found it all reversed, me small, and them large and threatening. Cancer is like this.
The treatment’s side-effects played out bodily, but nothing proved debilitating, especially as seen now in the context of my aging body. The panic that arises in middle age is understandable. There’s a worldliness that midlife forces on us that masks or distracts us from our a growing sense that life is finite and being inevitably squandered.
“Forces on us” is delusory, of course, since we live for it and accessorize it to make up for deficits elsewhere, gaping holes where tradition promised life would be solid. A loss of solidity makes midlife harder and the approach of death makes it worse. We do what we need to do, a bit monstrous at times, and Swedenborg might shake his head and hold it against us, but I’m not sure. In a novella I wrote, Argentina, the character Leo, thinking back to her days hunting for company in gay dive bars, decides that what makes a sin fatal is its repetition. Her shorthand entries from this period speak to this.
The physics life hands us, with its specific limits of time and space: we do our best to elude it, but it’s not enough. The impulse that leads us to try in the first place has a strong, emotive power, and we’re loathe to give it up, but aware, again and again, that it doesn’t work and won’t ever.
Swedenborg’s visits to Heaven and Hell were due to revelation, not a conscious wish on his part. Once invited, he went and took elaborate notes. Emerson mocks him for writing later about the planets as suburban Heavens, but “Anyway, no one really knows,” as the Buddha put it. I certainly don’t, yet Swedenborg’s account is better than many. In another book, derived from his visits, he argues that adultery is acceptable if preserving a marriage demands it. He expects to hook up with a married woman he sees as the love match that didn’t happen. His private Heaven.
My own cosmology posits ties that persist across lives, the connected ones arriving out of order, so when they finally encounter each other, they’re aware of a tie but lack instructions about what to do next, despite the depth of the pull. Others figure, too, their roles and genders varying from life to life. This is a game, laughed over in the interludes, then played again.
