Hey everyone in today's video I want to talk about who was Emanuel Swedenborg?
How did he start talking with angels?
Did he think he might be crazy?
And uh... how do we know he wasn't just doing this to be famous?
All that and more coming up right now!
So who was Emanuel Swedenborg?
So think about if tomorrow Elon Musk posted on Twitter and said...
"I've started talking to spirits and angels and I'm going to spend the rest of my career teaching everybody about it!"
Or let's say... Who's the most famous scientist right now? Probably Neil de Grasse Tyson?
Let's say... that he suddenly put out a post that's like...
"Now I'm able to contact the spiritual world at will and I'm going to spend the rest of my scientific life trying to catalog that and produce an organized description of it!"
And that's not that far off! If you're into spiritual experiences of any time...
You've got to be interested in Swedenborg
He wasn't the richest person alive, but he was a significant inventor.
He was working in Sweden's mining industry, which Sweden was a world power at the time.
The mining industry was a big deal. He was like inventing machines that would make the digging more efficient.
He invented some military things. He was also a leading scientist in his time.
He was world-renowned anatomist. Started the scientific branch of crystallography.
Brought the first scientific journal to Sweden. He was a big enough deal that when he would go to Amsterdam...
Newspapers would say, "Swedenborg came to Amsterdam" And he was also in government.
He was in the Swedish House of Nobles. He was very well connected, very influential guy!
And then started absolutely changing his trajectory and writing exclusively about this spiritual side of life.
How did that get started for him?
Luckily I can talk about it with so much specificity because it was really well documented by him!
It was in his mid-50s. He began to have what we would now call spiritual experiences.
And he kept track of it in a journal. Because he was having a travel journal, so that was just keeping track of where he was going and when.
But then he started to... pretty abruptly record his dreams in it.
But as the experiences progressed it started to leak out of the dream world and into the the world that you and I inhabit.
And so from there he began to have what he called experiences in full wakefulness.
Which is when he's not even close to sleeping, but it's just... you can hear things.
See things. And that eventually he had this powerful experience where he believed that he met God.
And from then on he began to have lucid experiences every day of all kinds
Across what we would now call out-of-body experiences, spiritually transformative experiences, even one that was...
...like a near-death experience. That where he was... He says, "I was shown what it's like to die"
And he went through stages that are not exactly the same but pretty similar to what people now
describe when they're talking about near-death experiences. With his self-reported accounts
it's probably... it's certainly the most extensive set of spiritual experiences...
...that have ever been recorded. He was interacting with seeing, feeling, hearing, learning about the
spiritual world for the last 30 years of his life. And because he was so smart, and so well trained in
all these different fields of science he was able to catalog that stuff in a really organized way
He wasn't just giving you, "Here's... here's a trip to the afterlife". It's like, "These are the underlying physics of the afterlife."
This is how the afterlife works but also how life here works and what the point of it all is.
And so he ended up writing what's now 30 volumes all about this spiritual stuff.
Did he ever question his sanity during this process?
He knew other people were questioning his sanity
Right in the beginning of his first book in what people call his theological phase
He writes very close to the beginning, "I know that people will say...
...that you can't talk to spirits." I'm paraphrasing a little bit.
"That you can't talk to spirits when you're in the body. That I'm making this stuff up to get attention or that I've gone insane..."
"...but, by this I am not deterred. For I have seen, I have heard, I have felt.
He started off publishing the books anonymously right? Like how long was he doing that?
Because I mean that shows he wasn't obviously... He's obviously not doing it for fame.
He wasn't doing it for fame because he already was famous!
He lost... he lost... he lost his fame! He... there's... yeah.
People... He had a good reputation and then he was just like the butt of everyone's jokes from then on.
I think it was for the first 10 years or so, I don't know the exact number of years he never put his name on any of the spiritual books.
He never formed like a church. He never had followers. He never did classes where...
...people were like sitting in like, "You're so great Swedenborg!" All he did was publish and send the books out.
It wasn't structured right to be a publicity ploy. It wasn't working!
His books never sold!
He was... His first books that he wrote that first eight volumes...
He wrote some letter to somebody where he's like, "Yeah well I sold two copies in... in two months", or something like that.
But yet he kept at it!
You think he would have given up by then because his other stuff had been a lot more popular!
And he would bind his in really high quality binding.
I just know that because there's some accounts of people saying... People doing reviews of the books and saying...
...basically, "Ah this is... I don't know if I believe it, but it's a really nice cover on the book!"
And so he would do that... out of his own pocket. And he told the person who was selling his books
"If they make any money you can keep it!" Like the publisher
So if someone wanted to know more about Emanuel Swedenborg and his spiritual experiences like how would they do that?
We've got a youtube channel youtube.com/offthelefteye We have a thousand videos on there...
... going into just about every corner of what Swedenborg wrote.
The reason why I'm doing this is...
Swedenborg's material has been...
The most helpful, comforting thing that I've ever found.
And it has made a huge difference for me in places where I didn't know I could get help.
And where nothing else has been able to reach me, so it's like...
I feel a responsibility. I need to let people know it's out there.
For a lot of people there's material in there that can really benefit their lives.
It can work in with whatever they're already doing in their spiritual journey. It can be a different direction for them.
It can help! It's helped me, so I feel like what we're trying to do is make it accessible
So that you can at least... maybe you don't want to end up getting into it or looking at it.
That's fine, but we just don't want you to pass it by without realizing well there could be something good for you in there.
And I think that people who are interested in near-death experiences, there's such a satisfying...
... filling out of those awesome things by engaging with Swedenborg.
So that's why we're going to this work of trying to make it user friendly for anyone who drops by.
So I hope you enjoyed that talk there with Curtis Childs on Emanuel Swedenborg.
These are some of the videos that I personally recommend, but there's a lot of good stuff over there on the channel "Off The Left Eye"
I've been recommending this channel to basically everyone I know for the past year, year and a half
So check it out you might find something you like.
Talk to you next time. Bye bye