Afterlife Read Online Free Page B

After all, one would expect to find as many different types of hallucination as there are people. For example, one might expect vets to have hallucinations that claim to be talking animals, engineers to be tormented by talking machines, gardeners to be haunted by talking plants or trees, librarians by talking books, dentists by talking sets of false teeth. Nothing of the sort. The ‘lower-order’ hallucinations were all strikingly similar; so were those of the ‘higher order’. This either implies some basic similarity in the part of our minds that create hallucinations, or something far stranger …
    Van Dusen is inclined to believe in something far stranger. Through his interest in ‘hypnogogic phenomena’ — the odd dreams and visions we sometimes experience on the edge of sleep — Van Dusen seems to have turned to the writings of the Swedish religious mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, whose
Journal of Dreams
is full of fascinating raw material for the psychiatrist. After a career as a highly successful engineer and geologist, Swedenborg went through a mental crisis at the age of fifty-six — in 1744 — during which he experienced horrifying nightmares: being caught in the wheel of a huge machine, feeling between a woman’s thighs to find that her vagina was full of teeth … Finally, he dreamed he was holding a conversation with Jesus. He abandoned science and became an obsessive student of the scriptures. The result was a series of remarkable works containing his own theology. He became one of the most powerful influences on the religious thought of his time.
    What made his works so unusual was that he claimed to have actually visited heaven and hell, and to have held long theological discussions with angels and deceased religious teachers. (He actually claimed to have converted Martin Luther to his own theology, but was unable to make John Calvin see reason.) This again might be dismissed as the fairly typical delusion of a religious crank, except that he was able to offer some impressive evidence that he really
had
been in touch with the dead. The queen of Sweden asked Swedenborg to give her greetings to her dead brother — probably in a spirit of mild mockery. At the next court reception, Swedenborg greeted the queen from her brother, and said that he wanted to send his apologies for not answering her last letter; he would now do so through Swedenborg … The queen turned pale and said: ‘Noone but God knows this secret.’ The widow of the Dutch ambassador asked Swedenborg to contact her deceased husband because she had received a huge bill from a goldsmith, and she was convinced that her husband had already paid it. Swedenborg came to see her a few days later, and told her that he had talked with her husband, and the goldsmith’s receipt was in a secret compartment in a bureau. The widow knew nothing about any such compartment: but that is precisely where the receipt turned out to be …
    Swedenborg also described at some length what it was like to be ‘possessed’ by spirits, and Van Dusen was struck by the extraordinary similarity between Swedenborg’s accounts and the hallucinations described by patients in the Mendocino State Hospital. Swedenborg says that spirits and angels can converse with man directly by entering ‘by an internal way into his organ of hearing, thus affecting it from within’. Swedenborg goes on: ‘To speak with spirits at this day is rarely granted because it is dangerous …’, which clearly seems to imply that there was some past age in which men could converse more directly with ‘spirits’. The explanation Swedenborg gives is that spirits do not normally know ‘they are with man’, because there is a kind of barrier between these entities and man’s own consciousness. If spirits get through this barrier — or are allowed through because a man has dabbled in ‘the occult’ — they are likely to become a nuisance. ‘Evil spirits are such that they regard man