There's time yet to make you proud.
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Friday, June 19, 2015
Keep the Faith says a Prince of Bible Study
Colin Wilson has written: "Medieval culture was based on saints and visionaries; modern culture is based on Freud, Darwin and Marx. We envy Dante and Fra Angelico for having a heaven to soar into. And we recognize that men like Pascal, Blake, Swedenborg were attempting to reassert the basic reality of heaven, and so to create the conditions in which the spirit could soar. Our materialistic philosophy has made us slaves of the trivial. Yet how could Swedenborg and Blake begin to undermine this materialism? Only by asserting the solid "reality" of the visionary world. Blake said he saw a tree full of angels. Possibly he was lying--or exaggerating. But what of a man who says, "No, it is just a tree." Is he not lying too? Perhaps Blake's angels are closer to the truth..."
From a new translation (by George F. Dole) into modern English of the unique major work, Heaven and Hell, by the West's most remarkable philosopher and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg
After death, a person is engaged in every sense, memory, thought, and affection he was engaged in the world: he leaves nothing behind except his earthly body.
Manifold experience has witnessed to me that when a person crosses over from the natural into the spiritual world, which happens when he dies, he carries with him everything that is his, or everything belonging to his person, except his earthly body. For when a person enters the spiritual world, or the life after death, he is in a body the way he was in this world. There seems to be no difference, since he does not feel or see any difference. But his body is spiritual, and so is separated and purified from earthly elements. Further, when something spiritual touches and sees something spiritual, it is just the same as when something natural touches and sees something natural.
As a result, when a person has become a spirit, he cannot tell he is not in the body he had in the world, and consequently does not know that he has died.
Further, the spirit person enjoys every outward and inward sense he enjoyed in the world. As before, he sees; as before, he hears and speaks, he smells and tastes; as before he feels the pressure when he is touched. He still yearns, wishes, craves, thinks, ponders, is moved, loves, and intends as before. A person who enjoyed scholarly work reads and writes as before. In a word, when a person crosses from one life to the other, or from one world to the other, it is as though he had gone from one place to another and had taken with himself all the things he possessed in his own right as a person. This holds true to the point that one cannot say that a person has lost anything of his own after death, which is a death of the earthly body alone.
He even carries his natural memory with him. For he keeps all the things he has heard, seen, read, learned, or thought in the world from earliest infancy right to the last moment of his life. However, since the natural items that dwell in his memory cannot be reproduced in a spiritual world, they quiesce the way they do with a person who is not thinking about them. Still, they can be duplicated when it pleases the Lord.
From a new translation (by George F. Dole) into modern English of the unique major work, Heaven and Hell, by the West's most remarkable philosopher and theologian, Emanuel Swedenborg
After death, a person is engaged in every sense, memory, thought, and affection he was engaged in the world: he leaves nothing behind except his earthly body.
Manifold experience has witnessed to me that when a person crosses over from the natural into the spiritual world, which happens when he dies, he carries with him everything that is his, or everything belonging to his person, except his earthly body. For when a person enters the spiritual world, or the life after death, he is in a body the way he was in this world. There seems to be no difference, since he does not feel or see any difference. But his body is spiritual, and so is separated and purified from earthly elements. Further, when something spiritual touches and sees something spiritual, it is just the same as when something natural touches and sees something natural.
As a result, when a person has become a spirit, he cannot tell he is not in the body he had in the world, and consequently does not know that he has died.
Further, the spirit person enjoys every outward and inward sense he enjoyed in the world. As before, he sees; as before, he hears and speaks, he smells and tastes; as before he feels the pressure when he is touched. He still yearns, wishes, craves, thinks, ponders, is moved, loves, and intends as before. A person who enjoyed scholarly work reads and writes as before. In a word, when a person crosses from one life to the other, or from one world to the other, it is as though he had gone from one place to another and had taken with himself all the things he possessed in his own right as a person. This holds true to the point that one cannot say that a person has lost anything of his own after death, which is a death of the earthly body alone.
He even carries his natural memory with him. For he keeps all the things he has heard, seen, read, learned, or thought in the world from earliest infancy right to the last moment of his life. However, since the natural items that dwell in his memory cannot be reproduced in a spiritual world, they quiesce the way they do with a person who is not thinking about them. Still, they can be duplicated when it pleases the Lord.
Friday, June 12, 2015
Ruin Was Busting Out All Over
From
Albert Camus: A Life
by Olivier Todd
In the summer of 1939, Camus felt confused, as he wrote to Francine Faure, "I don't know if I'm going to take my vacation, and if I did, I'd want a month doing my own work in a place I liked. But I can't think about that today--I received the typed copy of Caligula [his new play] and on rereading it, I see I'll have to rewrite it all. Everything seems difficult to me, and I have to make an adaptation of La Condition humaine and get on with my novel. All that requires more energy than I've got, and how can anyone work when there's an ignoble threat of war?"
He wrote to Francine again a few days later: "Unless there's a miracle everything will collapse. I'm thinking of T. E. Lawrence's last statements: 'The world is waiting for a great movement of generosity or a great wave of death.' The wave is here, and for it to recede, each of us must do everything we can in his little circle to start the movement."
Although he was happily in love with Francine, Camus felt out of sorts with himself. After a brief vacation during which he worked on his own projects, from October 6, 1938 to October 28, 1939 he had learned the journalist's trade, helping to produce nearly four hundred issues of the Alger Republicain.
He was tempted by journalism because of the pressure of a daily deadline, the quickened pace of European history, and his penchant for being a moralist. The newspaper's politics were sympathetic to the working classes and Moslems and opposed Franco in Spain, Nazism, and fascism.
Albert Camus: A Life
by Olivier Todd
In the summer of 1939, Camus felt confused, as he wrote to Francine Faure, "I don't know if I'm going to take my vacation, and if I did, I'd want a month doing my own work in a place I liked. But I can't think about that today--I received the typed copy of Caligula [his new play] and on rereading it, I see I'll have to rewrite it all. Everything seems difficult to me, and I have to make an adaptation of La Condition humaine and get on with my novel. All that requires more energy than I've got, and how can anyone work when there's an ignoble threat of war?"
He wrote to Francine again a few days later: "Unless there's a miracle everything will collapse. I'm thinking of T. E. Lawrence's last statements: 'The world is waiting for a great movement of generosity or a great wave of death.' The wave is here, and for it to recede, each of us must do everything we can in his little circle to start the movement."
Although he was happily in love with Francine, Camus felt out of sorts with himself. After a brief vacation during which he worked on his own projects, from October 6, 1938 to October 28, 1939 he had learned the journalist's trade, helping to produce nearly four hundred issues of the Alger Republicain.
He was tempted by journalism because of the pressure of a daily deadline, the quickened pace of European history, and his penchant for being a moralist. The newspaper's politics were sympathetic to the working classes and Moslems and opposed Franco in Spain, Nazism, and fascism.
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