Minds Within Minds
Dr. Michael Stanley

A talk on Swedenborg the Philosopher

In my previous talk on Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th century scientist, philosopher and theologian, I outlined some of the remarkable and amazing insights he had concerning the fundamental nature of the physical world of matter - insights confirmed only in the modern nuclear age.  Briefly, he conceived of matter as atoms formed from the rapid circulatory motion of discretely smaller particles, which in turn were formed from the greatly more energetic motion of yet smaller particles, the smallest particles of all being formed from the infinitely rapid motion of infinitely small entities or singularities that he called 'natural points'. This linking of the infinitely small with the infinitely energetic he saw as the connecting link between the finite world and the Infinite creating Divine, or God.  So, with this insight into the graded and energetic structure of the basic building blocks of the world, Swedenborg progressed to the study of the forms that the life force built up from them.

The form he chose to study was the highest, most developed living form, the human body. And he chose to study not only the form of the body, but also the form of the mind, and that of the soul which he believed was within the mind and the body, linking man with his Divine Creator. Just as he conceived matter to have been created on different levels of organization such as the crystalline, the gaseous and the light carrying ether and so on, so he conceived the human body to be constructed from smaller units, and these from yet smaller units. For example, he was struck by how the nerves that form the all pervading nervous system are formed from bundles of unit nerves, which in turn are formed from bundles of single fibres. He was also struck by the way certain forms or organs in the body were subordinated to others, as for instance the main series of abdominal organs subordinate to the heart and lungs system which in turn is subordinate to the brain and nervous system.

So Swedenborg conceived of the life force from the Divine flowing into the human soul and drawing matter into series of forms in the embryo, one series subordinate to another, the whole forming a harmonious unity of many uniquely different unit forms. With the help of such conceptions of how nature is organized, and his detailed knowledge of the latest anatomical researches, Swedenborg was able to determine many functions of the brain and body long before medical science was advanced enough to confirm his theories.

For example, he deduced that as the lungs expire, so the brain expands within the cranium, and vice versa, as the lungs draw in breath, so the brain shrinks back again. Over a century later this was discovered experimentally to be true. Swedenborg was the first to place the seat of consciousness in the grey cortical matter of the brain, and to deduce that lower sections of the nervous system take over automatic control of some of the conscious operations of the brain. He was the first to propose that each of the various organs and tissues of the body select their own requisite nutrients from the blood supplied by the pumping action of the heart. The odd thing was that these and the many other physiological anticipations he made were not what he was really seeking - they were only 'spin off' from his desire to understand the structure of the mind and the link between soul and body.

How could studying the human body help Swedenborg study the mind and the soul?  Swedenborg believed that not only matter but all life is graded discretely and that higher level forms re-present their essential structure or organization in corresponding lower level forms. Thus the soul represents itself in the mind, and the mind in the body in corresponding structures or organisms. The structure of the body is therefore a representation of the structure of the mind. We can illustrate this by common examples. We talk, for instance, of a person having a 'good heart', being 'warm blooded', having a 'thick skull' or a 'nervous disposition'.  We use parts of the body in fact to describe states of the mind or spirit. But not only is the anatomy of the body used to describe the spirit, but states of the spirit may be observed in changes in the forms of the body. A person's feelings are frequently revealed in his face. A face is in one sense nothing but a collection of particles of matter, but when it changes, as with a smile or frown, the changes in its form represent some state of the person's outward mind, or spirit. Or take our ideas, for example: we may represent our ideas or thoughts in spoken words or in written characters on the page whose changing forms correspond to ideas or concepts they represent or symbolize. So we see how mental states - feelings and ideas - may represent themselves in changes of forms on the material plane of life. So likewise, Swedenborg argues, states of the human soul may be represented by changes of forms on the mental plane of life - that is, changes of feeling and thought.

And Swedenborg went further. States of the mind, he said, can influence states of the body for good or bad, and vice versa. But here, in all these new principles, Swedenborg is leaving behind the scientists of his day, who wished to regard the body only as an autonomous machine which should be studied only in isolation from mind and spirit. He talks about the anatomy and physiology of the mind as though it were a body, for he sees the mind receiving impressions and actions like the body, because of being structured like the body, having inner secrets to be uncovered analogous to the inner secrets of the human body he was so successfully exploring.

I mentioned earlier the three-fold graded structure that Swedenborg noticed to be so prevalent in the body. A corresponding type of three-fold structure he noticed in the mind in its capacity, firstly, to be aware of sense data, secondly, to organize these into thoughts and ideas, and, thirdly, to organize and judge its thoughts and ideas. These are the three levels of sensation, thought, and reason or judgment, each level discretely higher than the previous one and each having corresponding affections or loves, namely, sensual love, the love of knowledge, and the love of reason.

But Swedenborg did not stop at analyzing these three basic levels of the mind. His introspection led him to realize that there must be yet higher levels those of the inner spirit, for something must provide the power to reason, and to judge between one set of rational thoughts and another. This is a faculty Swedenborg called the 'pure intellect', normally above our consciousness, but sensed fragmentarily in this life in states of special spiritual illumination, and more directly sensed when the soul in its mind is freed from the material body of this world.

This upper level above the mind proper fascinated Swedenborg, for although he himself was no mystic, claiming none of the usual mystical type of experiences, his own deeply introspective perception revealed to him its existence and importance, and he more and more became filled with the urge to explore it scientifically and intellectually; but he found himself continually frustrated in his efforts to find an analogous, or correspondential, language to adequately describe its forms and structure.

We are now at the threshold of Swedenborg's third and final phase, when his underlying religious belief in God and Christianity surfaced, and led him to the realization that the highest truths of life are to be found, not in nature, though the same pattern is there in such lower forms, but in God's Word of the Scriptures, and in the operations of the world of pure spirit. But we shall see how much of what he was able to see of truth in the Bible was stimulated and guided by what he had already learned and come to see of God's truth written into the various forms of creation. Swedenborg had climbed from an understanding of the body to an understanding of mind with the aid of his principles of discrete degrees and correspondence. In his attempts to climb further to the origins of mind he was frustrated by the lack of direct awareness of the spirit that is the mind's origin or inner soul. Little did he know during his philosophical period that that deficiency was going to be overcome in a most unique and unexpected way - that a short time later he was to become directly aware of the sources of our inner desires and thoughts. These origins were to become as clear, real and objective to him as the outer, physical world we see and touch so clear, in fact, that he was enabled to describe and accurately describe countless details of the realm from which all man's best ambitions, his greatest insights and his worst lusts and delusions originate, the spiritual world itself.