Now imagine what would happen if you fed all the scientific data in the world into another gigantic computer and asked it the same question. The results, I suggest, would be very different:
The best way to keep something is to try your hardest to do so and never give up.
You cannot transform the world by wishful thinking — you must do something about it.
If you can avoid being found out and punished by your fellow man, there is no reason to suppose a providential order will punish you.
And so on. The implication is clear and confirms what we suggested earlier. We get very different results, two very different sets of laws, if we try to determine the structure of the world than we do if we try to determine the structure of experience.
This is a distinction that Tolstoy wrote about in his essay On Life. Though the same laws operate in the outer world of external phenomena and in our inner life with its concern for meaning and fulfilment, they seem very different when we consider them separately. As Abraham Isaac Kook, one of the great Cabalists of the twentieth century and the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine, put it: ‘God is revealed in the deep feelings of sensitive souls.’
The deeper laws can be discerned only if we view events in the external world with the deepest subjectivity, as an artist or a mystic might. Is it the subjectivity of these laws, the fact that they work so near to the centre of consciousness, that makes it difficult for us to keep them in focus?
Rainer Maria Rilke, the Central European poet, seems to come close to writing explicitly about these laws in a letter to an aspiring young poet. ‘Only the individual who is truly solitary is brought under the deep laws, and when a man steps out into the morning that is just beginning, or looks into the evening that is full of happenings, and when he feels what is coming to pass there, then all rank drops from him as from a dead man, although he is standing in the midst of sheer life.’ Rilke is using heightened, poetic language but he seems to be confirming that these deeper laws can only be discerned if we shut out everything else and concentrate on them over a long time with our subtlest and most intense powers of discernment.
IN THE COURSE OF WRITING this book I have met the young Irish mystic Lorna Byrne. She hasn’t read any of the literature that lies behind this book, nor even previously met anyone who might have passed its ideas on. Her extraordinary knowledge of the spirit words has come from direct personal experience. She meets Michael, Archangel of the Sun, and has encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the form of the Moon, divided in half yet pressed together and moving, she says, like the turning of pages in a book. She has described to me seeing in the fields near her home the group-spirit of the fox in the form of the fox but with human-like elements. She meets Elijah, who was once a human with the spirit of an angel, and she has seen him walk on water like the Green One of the Sufi tradition. Hers is an alternative method of perception, a parallel dimension that moves things around in our own.
IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY ANCIENT creatures began to stir in the depths of the earth, to slouch towards the appointed place.
Imprisoned since the first War in Heaven, the consciousness-eaters were on the move again.
27. THE MYSTIC DEATH OF HUMANITY
Swedenborg and Dostoyevsky • Wagner • Freud, Jung and the Materializing of Esoteric Thought • The Occult Roots of Modernism • Occult Bolshevism • Gandhi
EARLY ROMANTICISM’S JOY IN self-expression, in animal joy at being alive in the natural world, gave way to disquiet. The greatest of the German philosophers of idealism, Hegel, recognized this force in history: ‘The spirit cheats us, the spirit intrigues, the spirit lies, the spirit triumphs.’
Taken as an account of humanity’s interior life, the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century reveals a terrible darkening, a spiritual crisis. If materialist history explains this crisis as ‘alienation’, esoteric history sees a spiritual crisis. In other words it sees a crisis caused by spirits — or more particularly by demons.
The great exponent of this view was not someone revered in academia like Hegel or even the more frankly occultist Schopenhauer, but a man who rolled around the mud. Swedenborg saw demonic forces rising up from the depths. He prophesied that humanity would have to come to terms with the demonic in the world and inside himself.
Today the Swedenborg Church is the only esoteric movement admitted to Sweden’s National Council of Churches, and Swedenborg’s teachings remain influential on exponents of communal living, particularly on American groups such as the Shakers. In his own day, however, he was a rather more dangerous figure. Swedenborg’s exceptionally detailed and accurate clairvoyance made him world-famous. The spiritualists tried to claim him as one of their own. Swedenborg repudiated them, saying that his supernatural gifts were unique to him and heralded the dawn of a new age.
It was from his reading of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell that Goethe had derived his sense of the intrusion of evil, supernatural forces that afflicted Faust. It was from Swedenborg that Baudelaire derived his notion of correspondences, and that Balzac took his notions of the supernatural in Seraphita. But perhaps Swedenborg’s most important and far-reaching influence was on Dostoyevsky, an influence that would darken the mood of an entire era.
DOSTOYEVSKY’S HEROES ARE POISED over an abyss. There is always a heightened awareness of how much our choices matter — and also that our choices come to us in different disguises.
In Dostoyevsky we encounter the paradoxical notion that those who confront this evil, supernatural dimension, even if they are thieves, prostitute and murderers, are closer to heaven than those whose cosy world-view deliberately shuts evil out and denies it is there.
Eastern, Orthodox Christianity had been less dogmatic than its Western counterpart and it had valued individual spiritual experience more. Raised in this Church, Dostoyevsky felt free to explore the outer limits of spiritual experience, to describe battles between the forces of darkness and the forces of light that were taking place in realms of which most people were barely conscious. Dostoyevsky’s journey through Hell, like Dante’s, is partly a spiritual journey but it is also a journey through the Hell on Earth that humanity has created. There is in Dostoyevsky a new impulse which would come to characterize the arts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the desire to know the worst that can happen.
On Dostoyevsky’s death his library was discovered to be well stocked with Swedenborg, including his accounts of the many different hells that people with different capacities for evil fashion for themselves. Swedenborg’s accounts of the hells he visited are not fictional. They elude our conventional ontologies, our everyday working assumptions of what is real and what is not. Hell may at first appear no different from the world we live in, but then gradually anomalies show themselves. We might meet a group of genial and amusing men, libertines who love to deflower virgins, but they turn to greet us and we see they are ‘like apes with a fierce face… a horrible countenance’. Non-esoteric schools of literary criticism have missed the way that passages like the following, from Crime and Punishment, come straight from Swedenborg: