Swedenborg’s Alien Visions and Exploring the Function of Time in Heaven to Prove his Sanity
June 31, 2024
In modern times, humanity has sent men to explore the Moon, but they’ve found no life there, and neither have any of our high resolution images from modern, powerful telescopes revealed any signs of life anywhere in the universe but on the Earth. How come?
When I first learned about Swedenborg, I remember watching a YouTube overview of him by a secular author who did a summary of him and his life. My initial thought was that his theological teachings were solid and he seemed like a trustworthy person whose books would be worth looking into further…
But… hold on, I thought… what was this that he wrote about having visited aliens and other planets? Is he saying that there is alien life currently in our solar system? He must be crazy.
And what exactly did he say?
Upon further investigation I discovered that he wrote a book about it, called Other Planets (also translated as Worlds in Space and Earths in the Universe) and in the first few paragraphs of that book, he stated:
By the Lord’s Divine mercy I have had my interior faculties, which belong to my spirit, opened, so that I have been enabled to talk with spirits and angels, not only those in the vicinity of our earth, but also with those near other worlds. Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from other worlds. With some this lasted a day, with others a week, with yet others for months. I was informed by them about the worlds they came from and in the vicinity of which they were, about the life, behavior and religious practices of their inhabitants, and other matters worth relating about them. Since I was allowed to gain my knowledge in this fashion, I can describe them from what I have heard and seen.
It needs to be known that all spirits and angels are from the human race; they are near their own world and know what happens there; and they can inform someone whose interior faculties are open sufficiently to be able to talk and mix with them. A human being is in essence a spirit and associates with spirits at the interior level. Consequently anyone whose interior faculties are opened by the Lord can talk with them, exactly as a man can with another man. I have been permitted to do this daily for the last twelve years.
How do we, as believers, make sense of Swedenborg’s claims of life on other planets, such as Mars, when the NASA Mars rovers send us back photographs like this, showing nothing but barren, lifeless land?
The reason I at first thought this was crazy, and why it was a challenge of faith for me, was because I knew that Swedenborg lived in the 18th century, before the invention of modern telescopes, satellites, rockets, and space probes, and, since his lifetime, scientists have sent advanced satellites to other planets in our solar system, which didn’t exist in his time, such as to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the others. With Mars, in particular, NASA scientists have scanned and mapped the planet and run remote controlled rovers and helicopters over large portions of it, without finding (yet) any indication of life, let alone intelligent life. They’ve sent men to the Moon, several times, who also found no signs of life. On Google Earth, you can look at the actual topology of both the Moon and Mars, and that makes it appear that they are, in fact, entirely dead spheres.
Yet, Swedenborg goes on in Other Planets #2 and #3 to say the exact opposite of what we’ve since observed about these planets:
In the other life it is common knowledge that there are many planets with people on them and consequently spirits and angels from them. If a love of truth and therefore some useful reason prompts people there to want to talk with spirits from other worlds, they are all allowed to do so. This assures them that there is indeed a plurality of worlds and informs them that humankind exists on not just one earth but countless planets. It teaches them also about the character and life of these people, and about their worship of God.
I have talked with spirits from our earth about this a number of times. We concluded that anyone with a capable mind can see, on the basis of things that are well known, that there must be many planets and they must have people on them. That is, we can determine on rational grounds that bodies as large as the planets — and some of them are significantly larger than our own — are not uninhabited lumps created only to be carried along on a wandering course around the Sun and shed their feeble light for the benefit of just one planet. Their function must be more worthwhile than this.
If we believe, as everyone should, that the Divine created the universe for the sole purpose of bringing humankind into being as the source of heaven (because humankind is the seedbed of heaven), then we cannot help but believe that wherever there is a planet there must be people on it.
As for the objects visible to our eyes because they are within our solar system, we can obviously tell that they are planets from the fact that they are bodies of physical matter. They reflect the light of the Sun, and when we look at them through a telescope they do not look like stars, which twinkle because of their fire, but appear earthlike, with darker and lighter patches. There is also the fact that they, like our own planet, travel around the Sun along the path of the zodiac, which must cause years and the seasons of the year called spring, summer, fall, and winter. Similarly, they rotate on their axes as our planet does, which must cause days and the times of day called morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Not only that, some of them have moons called satellites, which have their own periodic orbits around their sphere the way our moon orbits our planet. The planet Saturn, which is farthest from the Sun, has a huge luminous ring around it that gives a great deal of light to that planet, even though it is reflected light. Can any rational individual who knows all this maintain that these bodies are uninhabited?
“Then we cannot help but believe that wherever there is a planet there must be people on it” and “Can any rational individual who knows all this maintain that these bodies are uninhabited?” Hmm… okay… how do we square this circle?
In the last few decades, the powerful Hubble Space Telescope has allowed scientists to observe the planets in our solar system, and regions beyond, with far more detail than what was available from the small, Earth-bound telescopes in that existed the 18th century.
Is the lack of any modern evidence regarding this fact an indication that Swedenborg was lying? Or, perhaps, was he crazy or making it all up? Or was he simply misinformed due to some degree of ignorance and the lack of observational knowledge available to him during his lifetime?
After all, do the the planets in the solar system need to have life on them in order to be considered useful? We know today, for example, that one of the purposes that Jupiter played in the formation of the universe, which allowed life to thrive on Earth, was that its immense gravity allowed it to pull large asteroids and comets into it so that they didn’t smash into Earth. Its gravity, and that of the other planets, helps keep Earth’s orbit around the sun stable, thus keeping it in the Goldilocks or Habitable Zone, the distance from the sun that is the most conducive to temperatures and atmospheric conditions able to sustain the formation of plant, animal, and human life. The other planets in the solar system could also serve other purposes for mankind into the future, such as for mining minerals and raw elements for space travel and colonization.
Swedenborg was aware, however, of the more powerful telescopes of his time and what they were able to observe, such as the one at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, and may have tinkered with a few of them.
One of those conclusions — that Swedenborg was crazy, lying, or misinformed — may be what you decide on after first seeing what he wrote about alien life in the solar system — at least at first. And, if you were being gracious, perhaps you could stretch your imagination a bit to believe that he met aliens from extra-solar planets outside of our solar system (as he also claimed), but not that he met them here within our own backyard, such as on the Moon and Mars. Many scientists admit, and in fact think that it is extremely likely, that extra-solar life exists, given the huge mathematical odds in favor of it, but that intra-solar life (within our own solar system) doesn’t, based on the available observational evidence. And you may be tempted to stop reading there before continuing onward.
But, before you do, let me challenge you on a few things by telling you the story of how I resolved this apparent issue and I’ll share a few of the conclusions and conjectures I’ve come to that have helped me align modern facts of science along with what Swedenborg claimed he experienced. I decided this was important to do rather than writing him off as a lunatic. Even as I struggled with this part of Swedenborg’s writings, I could not deny that everything he wrote was incredibly well put together, logical, sound, good, and true, and knowing that what he said about humanity was of so much spiritual worth, it warranted taking a deeper look at what he said about visiting other planets as well, to see if I could understand it without simply tossing it aside.
I encourage you to do the same as we begin, and give him and his accounts of the afterlife a fair shake.
I realize many will claim that no one can talk to spirits and angels as long as bodily life continues, or that I am hallucinating, or that I have circulated such stories in order to play on people’s credulity, and so on. But none of this worries me; I have seen, I have heard, I have felt.
Faith Must be Built First on Principals of Love and Only Second on Principals of Science
As we dive into the subject of alien life and of other planets, it can be easy for us to get caught up in the thickets and accidentally try to build our faith based on scientific facts alone. It’s okay to use science to bolster faith, and it’s okay to explore how it makes sense in light of it, which is what we’re exploring today, but not to base the foundation of our faith on it. As Swedenborg often stated, the exercise of building faith on knowledge alone, or on science alone, is fruitless. We must first want to believe in the Divine, as greater than ourselves, and approach life and our understanding of it with a degree of humility that says, I am finite, and so is my brain and my capacity to understand; and, as a finite being, I can never, and will never, be able to fully comprehend an infinite universe so long as I set myself up as the point of origin for truth.
Swedenborg’s revelations regarding the inner sense of the Word accomplish that because with them we’re able to take the Bible not as a scientific book, or examine it under a naturalistic lens, but instead under a spiritual and poetic lens, and then build our understanding of science on that, rather than pitting it against it.
When the Lord’s coming occurs, scholarly study, rationality, and spirituality are going to become one. Scholarly study will then serve rationality, and both of them will serve spirituality.
One of Swedenborg’s callings by the Lord was to make it known that, when examined under the proper light, there is no contradiction between science and spirituality.
And, regarding his book, Other Planets, we should keep the spiritual revelations within it as our ultimate test of authenticity, regardless of any lack of understanding regarding the natural science which Swedenborg may or may not have gotten correct. If some small mishaps regarding the natural science causes us to forgo faith entirely, then we aren’t ready for the Lord to reveal to us his Inner Word. These very mishaps, perhaps, or the mistaken perception of them, act as protection against damage occurring towards heaven by those who are unprepared to enter into its mysteries, since what is natural means nothing to heaven beyond its use for what is spiritual, and what is spiritual is everything and is of the greatest importance.
The worldly and bodily-minded man says at heart, “Unless I am taught about faith and about things that belong to faith by means of sensory evidence so that I see for myself, that is, by facts so that I understand for myself, I am not going to believe.” And he confirms himself in this attitude from the consideration that natural phenomena cannot be at variance with spiritual. Consequently it is from sensory evidence that he wishes to learn about heavenly and Divine matters. But this is no more possible than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. The more he wants by this method to become wise, the more he blinds himself, until in the end he believes nothing, not even in the existence of anything spiritual or in eternal life. This arises out of the basic assumption he makes. This is eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the more he eats of it, the more dead does he become. But the person who wishes to be made wise not from the world but from the Lord says at heart that he must believe the Lord, that is, those things the Lord has spoken in the Word, because they are truths. This is the basic assumption of his thinking. He confirms himself by means of rational, factual, sensory, and natural evidence. And things that are not confirmatory he sets aside.
With regard to Other Planets, following this process is why, despite the apparent inconsistencies in natural science which I first assumed were there, I didn’t allow it to become a block or a barrier of my faith in the Heavenly Doctrine that the Lord revealed in Swedenborg’s works, but instead, I searched out ways to make rational sense of it, based first on core principals in the Word.
Rather than taking it at face value.
The first commandment centers against minor scruples of faith as non-consequential relative to the love of the Lord.
This process of building faith leads to understanding over time. Faith should be affirmed via rational truth vs mere blind authority. The authority that truly builds faith comes from the rational mind within the Word from its center.
This belief in the Word hinges on the love taught in the Word, first, which then helps one inform the science; rather than first needing to inform the science before informing the love (Arcana Coelestia #2588). This is the “affirmative principle;” an attitude you take when outward things are affirmed by inward things, rather than the other way around (Arcana Coelestia #2568).
Some not so upright spirits who were once with me for quite a time were constantly introducing doubts that were based on the illusions of the senses and went against the idea that all things can flow in from a single source, and so from the Lord. But I told them that so many doubts could not be removed in a short space of time, on account of the illusions of the senses which had to be dispelled first and on account of their lack of knowledge of countless things which they needed to know first. Indeed I told them that with people who have a negative frame of mind, that is, who are ruled through and through by a negative attitude, doubts cannot by any means be removed; for with these people one small difficulty has more validity than a thousand proofs. With them one small difficulty is like a grain of sand placed right in front of the pupil of the eye, and although it is only a single grain and very tiny it nevertheless blocks one’s entire field of vision. But people who have an affirmative frame of mind, that is, who are ruled through and through by an affirmative attitude, turn away small difficulties which are based on the illusions of the senses and go against truths; and any things they cannot grasp they cast aside, saying that they do not yet understand them, and in so doing hold fast to their belief in the truth. But the spirits mentioned above paid little attention to what they were told because of their negative frame of mind.
This is crucial with regard to the issues I presented regarding Other Planets: The issues I pointed out above, I believe I’ve solved below in this article, and I will explain them, but even if I haven’t solved them adequately enough to convince you, the argument remains that they would remain as insignificant scruples placed off to the side, as we know based on the inner sense of the Word that Swedenborg explains, which is all loving, spiritual, moral, and civil — and which I’m fully confident in — that misunderstandings regarding the natural science that may not yet be fully understood will be explained in time, whether in this life or in the next.
Recently I had a discussion with someone on YouTube about this. He said in the comments, “Swedenborg also saw that little men with Swedish caps live on the Moon. Why does anyone still believe in his visions?”
My response was:
He wrote about people living on the Moon in the spiritual world, not in the physical world. A strange particular of faith like this, however, has no bearing on religion. In heaven, the only thing that matters is love and wisdom, and that forms the core of the doctrine there.
The Pale Blue Dot
The fact is, no matter how smart or how educated we become, we’ll always be, as the astronomer Carl Sagan once said, nothing more than a tiny little spec of dust on a tiny blue marble, a “pale blue dot,” in a huge sea of space that spans trillions of light years.
The tiny little dot to the right of the image, is Earth, as was seen from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990.
“Looking Back from Space” by Cary Judd, was themed after Carl Sagan’s quote. (Link)
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Unfortunately, until we realize this, we’ll never be able approach the subject about other life in the universe with the degree of humility and acknowledgment necessary to accept that the Lord is the point of origin for it all and that we’ll never be able to understand or prove his existence in its entirety, neither the lack of it, based on science and facts alone. No matter how much we learn, there will always be something new to learn.
It is, however, a common saying that no one can comprehend spiritual or theological matters because they transcend human understanding. Yet spiritual truths are as comprehensible as natural ones. And if they are not clearly understood, still, when they are heard, it falls within its scope of the intellect to perceive whether they are true or not. This is especially the case with people who have an affection for truths.
“To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
—Carl Sagan
And, since we can’t use science and facts to prove that he exists, then we need to look to something deeper, that is, towards caring, intentionality, and love.
Whether you believe Swedenborg, including whether you believe in the Word or not, and thus in the Lord, has little to do with whether or not you can piece together the science, unless you have first pieced together the spirituality. Faith, in order to be sincere, has to be based first within principals of love from the Word.
To put it another way, do you believe what the Lord taught was good? If so, do you think that is the most important thing?
Love really is the point of origin for everything, because as we seek to understand the universe more, and as we seek to understand other humans and ourselves more, then we are also seeking to understand the Lord more, and without that point of origin, everything is meaningless. The very act of placing our point of origin in love towards the Lord allows us to understand him better, because the more we love him, the more we learn and seek to understand him with an open heart and mind, making him and his infinite wisdom our point of origin rather than ourselves and our tiny source of finite wisdom. This allows us to grow into his infinite wisdom one step at a time. But without that, we block ourselves from progressing.
Today certain people even wanted to enter into the innermost mysteries of faith…
And I was allowed to portray to them the little seed of a tree by a symbolic mental image, saying that if they were told that the little seed produces an entire blossoming tree, which was also portrayed to them live, with branches, leaves, and fruits — indeed, that such a little seed can produce even an entire field full of trees, thus if they were told that such a little seed would produce all that, and nevertheless they cannot see anything in the seed nor know the causes by which all this comes forth, it should not on that account be denied, for the truth has been demonstrated.
So the truths declared by the Lord, and those concerning the Lord, must be believed even if we do not fathom them with our reason. And to want to deny them because we do not penetrate them with our reason is the same as wanting to deny the procreation of trees from seeds, and of animals from eggs — so in a thousand other cases. This shows what the faith of people is like when they believe nothing except what they see, which is the usual thing today, especially among the doctorates of the world.
If you get that far, then it makes more sense to go forward with science, trying to piece together how it does, or might, fit in with the Logos of the Lord and his plan. Once you reach that point, you’ll be able to make sense of it while also taking in everything you hear about science, or the lack of it, with a grain of salt, because, although interesting and still potentially useful to explore, it’s all relatively trivial in comparison to the principal goal. With this realization, despite any confusion about how life in the universe all came together, you trust that everything in the universe is working together for the good of life, even if it doesn’t make sense yet.
You’re an interesting species, an interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.
You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone.
In all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
But, “Just Have Faith” Isn’t Quite the Answer
It’s not enough with the New Church and Swedenborg to simply say, “just have faith.” That is, insofar as “faith” is thought of as mere acceptance of your church’s dogma, without further exploration on your own.
It’s one thing to choose to believe based on spiritual truth, as we spoke about above, but it’s another thing to stop short there and not continually investigate what is true, and prune the tree of one’s mind and life.
Real faith is nothing else than an acknowledgment that a thing is so because it is true. For someone who possesses a real faith thinks and says, “This is true. Therefore I believe it.” For faith is a faith in the truth, and truth is the object of faith.
By the same token, if the same person does not understand a thing to be true, he says, “I do not know whether it is true. Therefore I do not yet believe it. How am I to believe what I do not comprehend? Perhaps it is not true.”
Sure, we can center our faith in love, but without wisdom, we can still be mislead. After all, just because somebody says something doesn’t make it true. Some skepticism is healthy because this is how we build wisdom and thus deepen the application of our love.
We’ve all been burned by charlatans at some point in our past who’ve tried to sell us snake oil for some selfish agenda; and so, given that, it’s understandable if, at first, you’re a bit skeptical and curious regarding exceptional claims. Malicious people have often twisted the Lord’s words towards false ideas in a million different ways, hampering many people’s trust in the truth and openness towards new ideas.
Swedenborg wrote:
Let me take this opportunity to tell how things work out in the other life for scholars. On the one hand I wish to say how it is for those scholars who gain understanding through their own reflections and are motivated by a love of knowing what is true for its own sake and therefore for some purpose beyond worldly considerations. On the other hand I wish to say how it is for the scholars who base their work on what others have done without reflecting on it for themselves. This latter practice is typical of people who want to know what is true solely for the sake of their own reputation as scholars, to get from it respect or wealth in this world; and therefore for no purpose beyond worldly considerations.
He then went on to write about Aristotle, and how Aristotle himself did his own thorough research, proving out each concept in his own mind; whereas many of his followers (who later became known as Aristocrats) simply read his books for the sake of sounding wise, and so would repeat them to others, often without deeply understanding them.
If I had done that whenever anyone told me, “just have faith,” I may have well remained a Mormon and continued being a member of it despite all of the odd teachings within the religion, such as the things written about in the Pearl of Great Price about Egyptology and about the planet Kolob (which is a rabbit hole that I’d rather avoid diving into for the moment so that I don’t get off topic). If I were to take that route, everything Swedenborg wrote would just become science fiction for me, not reality; not true spirituality. We’d be at risk of being deceived as well if we were to take what Scientologists claim at face value without deeper skepticism, not to mention many other religions. The reason I believe Swedenborg, today, and not Joseph Smith, is because, although they both taught things that, on the surface, might appear crazy, Smith taught things that were immoral and, despite their appearance, were fundamentally focused on the material world, and Swedenborg taught things that were moral and were fundamentally focused on the spiritual world. It’s not much more complicated than that, since what is spiritual derives its source from the Lord and thus becomes a testament of his influence. The same is true of everything the Lord said in the Word, and is the principal behind why I believe in what Swedenborg wrote.
First of all one should get to know what the Church teaches; then one should discover from the Word whether such teaching is the truth. For things are true not because they are what leaders of the Church have so declared and their followers uphold. If that were so one would have to say that the teachings of any Church or religion were the truth simply because they are those of a person’s native soil and are those into which he was born. Thus not only the teachings of Papists or Quakers would be true but also those of Jews and of Mohammedans too since their Church leaders have so declared and their followers uphold it. From all this it is evident that one should search the Word and there see whether what the Church teaches is the truth. When an affection for truth motivates the search a person receives light from the Lord so that he may discern, though unaware of the source of his enlightenment, what the truth is, and may be assured of it in the measure that he is governed by good.
…But very few at the present day proceed in this way, for the majority of people who read the Word are not motivated by a desire for truth when they read it but by a desire to endorse the teachings of the Church in which they were born, no matter what those teachings may be like.
…From all this it may now be evident that factual knowledge should not on any account be cast aside from the truths of faith but should be joined to them. But one should go the primary way, that is, the way that begins with faith, not the secondary way, that is, the one that begins with factual knowledge.
So, in the pursuit of examining unfamiliar subjects about the science of the universe, we must, of course, base our faith on first principals from the Word that go deeper than what science can reveal to us, but with that established, we will also explore the science around the issues I’ve mentioned and conjecture how it is plausible that what Swedenborg said and experienced occurred, and open our minds towards its viability and truth all the way to understanding the natural truth as much as we can. In doing so, we’ll be able to build what Swedenborg said about other planets and aliens upon our faith, rather than having it linger on the periphery, so that we can make it all the more complete.
So, buckle up, we’re about to do just that, and find out, where possible, where spirituality and science coincide.
High resolution image of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft.
How I’ve Resolved These Issues
Swedenborg didn’t actually say that he saw the physical aliens from the planets he mentions, only the spirits of those departed from them.
Under the Lord’s guidance I was taken by angels to a world in the starry sky, where I was allowed to look at the world itself, but not to talk with its inhabitants, only with spirits from it. All the inhabitants or people of each world become spirits when their life in the world is over, and they remain in the vicinity of their own world. I was, however, able to gather information from them about their world and the condition of its inhabitants. For when people leave the body, they take with them their whole previous life and everything in their memory.
And so this makes it clear that he was talking about an ability to see into those spirits’ memory, and the condition of their planets during the time they were alive, before they entered the spiritual world, not the condition of their planets as they currently are. He may not have known what the condition of their planets currently are in his time, or was not allowed by the Lord to write down those details so that it wouldn’t accidently interfere with the natural scientific progress of the Earth’s timeline.
Neither did he say he actually saw the physical planets of our solar system in his spiritual experiences, only the spiritual analogues of them.
Being taken to worlds in space does not mean being taken or traveling in body, but in spirit. The spirit is guided through varying states of inner life, which appear to him like travels through space. Agreement or similarity in states of life determines how close people come, for agreement or similarity of life links them, disagreement or dissimilarity separates them. This can allow it to be seen how travel in spirit takes place, and how one can approach distant places, while the person still keeps to his same place.
There is ample evidence from around the world of people having near death experiences and experiencing worlds beyond ours, and so believing in spiritual worlds with life on them in our solar system, rather than the physical worlds, is a much easier leap of faith to make, because the world of the mind and spirit is not limited by the laws of physics.
However, that still leaves a gap in reasoning that we need to solve because the spirits that he met from those worlds still had to have lived a mortal life at some point, so they still needed to inhabit a physical world prior to passing on.
We’ll deal with that below when we talk about the reality of how time works vs how it appears to work. For now, bear with me.
Our solar system, being billions of years old, may have supported humanoid life at some time in its distant past on planets other than Earth, even though it doesn’t appear to today. The sun and our solar system, when it was younger, was in a different state of formation which may have allowed for life to form on planets closer to it, such as Mercury and Venus.
Mercury may have once, in its distant past (think billions of years ago), had a different orbit, perhaps one that was further out from the sun. And, perhaps the sun was smaller, cooler, or had fewer solar storms or less radiation, such that it may not have blasted away Mercury’s atmosphere back then as it has today. With an ancient atmosphere, Mercury may have been able to regulate the heat from the sun more evenly across its surface. An interesting tidbit: From NASA’s website, you can read that a full day on Mercury is equivalent to about 88 Earth days. Knowing this, if humanoid life once lived there, or will live there, it’s possible they’ll be nomadic, living in tents for example, as the people from Mongolia once did on Earth, and that they’ll follow the incidence of the sun, always staying out of its direct heat, allowing them to bear that heat. Swedenborg mentioned in his writings that the spirits who had lived their lives on Mercury are nomadic, except for they roam the spiritual universe now (instead of what may have been their own planet). (Other Planets #24)
About Mercury’s climate, Swedenborg wrote:
They went on to say that their climate was temperate, neither too hot nor too cold. I was allowed to tell them that this was the Lord's providence, to prevent an excess of heat due to their world being nearer the sun than the other planets. Heat is not the result of proximity to the sun, but depends on the thickness and density of the atmosphere, as is plain from high mountains being cold even in hot climates. Temperature is also regulated by the directness or obliquity of the incidence of the sun’s rays, as is evident from the seasons of winter and summer in any one region.
NASA experiments on Venus have given scientists clues that it may not have always been as hot in its ancient past as it is today, and contained elements supportive of life, such as water on its surface. Venus has undergone an extreme version of global warming, or a runaway greenhouse effect due to an excess of gasses accumulating in its atmosphere. But this may not have always been the case, or may not always be the case in the future. As was mentioned above, the sun was not always in the same state millions or billions of years ago as it is today, and whereas the Habitable Zone is today aligned perfectly with Earth, perhaps it had once been aligned with Mercury, and subsequently with Venus, before it expanded towards its present position. And perhaps in the future humanity will find clever ways of terraforming it that we haven’t thought of yet, so that it cools back down.
On Earth, for example, we know that variations in our orbit and axial tilt can cause shifts in temperature even over a few thousand years, let alone millions or billions of years. We have evidence of this due to rock samples that have given geologists information about past ice ages, which can change the landscape of huge portions of the globe. If the Earth’s temperature can change that radically over such a relatively short period of time — a few thousand years — who’s to say that Venus and Mercury couldn’t have a completely different temperature than what it appears to have today, over the course of thousands or millions of years?
The Moon may have at one point been its own planet.
One of the hardest things to wrap your head around regarding what Swedenborg wrote about other planets in our solar system, is what he said about the Moon, since he said that other lifeforms actually lived on it. Since Swedenborg’s time, and like Mars, we’ve sent rovers to the Moon and have photographed its surface in high resolution. And we’ve sent men to the Moon who’ve set foot on it. Not only did they not find life there, but we also know that it has an extremely thin atmosphere which is incapable of supporting life as we know it.
Like with Mercury, you might speculate that the Moon may once have had an atmosphere that it eventually lost, which is one possibility, but an interesting fact is that since the ‘70’s, NASA scientists have believed that the Moon may have, at one point in its distant past, been its own planet, called Theia, before it collided with the Earth. When it collided, it mixed some of its material in with the Earth, making it smaller and the Earth larger, and in the process, also lost whatever atmosphere it may have had. They think this is likely because when astronauts returned from the Moon after the Apollo missions, they brought back rock samples and, upon analyzing them, found that the mineral composition of the samples matched those of Earth, closely enough as to rule out the correlation as merely coincidental.
Regarding Swedenborg’s reports about the Moon, one possible hypothesis is that life may have once lived on the Moon, when it was Theia, before it collided with Earth and thus before it became our moon. And that, in the spiritual world, it’s now referred to as our moon, as it is here in the physical world as well, even if when it held life in the physical world it wasn’t yet orbiting us.
I have another theory about the Moon with regard to what Swedenborg wrote about the spirits from it, that I think is even more plausible, given his descriptions of them, which I’ll touch on below. However, I wanted to at least mention Theia in order to open your mind up to the idea that there are a lot of complex interactions between celestial bodies that take place in the universe, and a lot of events that took place within our solar system’s past, some of which may not be immediately apparent prior to scientists having the opportunity to dig into the soil, run more theories and tests, and experiment against a wider variety of speculative ideas before landing on the truth. And many events may have taken place in our solar system’s past that we may never be able to find adequate evidence to prove.
The sun, as it grows older, larger, and hotter, will one day, billions of years from now, support life more adequately on the planets in the distant solar system, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.
The star known as Betelgeuse, a red supergiant, is an example of just how large stars can become as they age. From Wikipedia: “With a radius around 640 times that of the Sun, if it were at the center of our Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.”
Just as life may have formed in the past on Mercury and Venus, and then those planets died out as the sun, or their orbits around it, changed, so too, planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest, may be awaiting the sun to approach them, as it grows in size, so that over time they become warmer, and thus more suitable for life.
We know that Jupiter, for example, is what’s called a gas giant. It’s so large, and its gravity is immense, to the point that it would crush any mammalian life form that got too near. It has no solid surface at the moment, and, like many of the planets in the outer solar system, has ongoing torrential storms with massive winds beyond anything seen on Earth. If, by some miracle, you were to survive all of that, its radiation would then fry your cells and kill you within a matter of minutes to hours. All of this hardly seems conducive to supporting humanoid life.
That said, perhaps the reason for all of this is simply because it’s undergoing a change in state, and that it once did, or once will, support life in the future. Additionally, when Swedenborg wrote about life from Jupiter and Saturn, he may have been referring to life from their moons, such as Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, and others, which are far more likely to have supported life at some point in the past, rather than within the atmospheres of the outer planets themselves. The large outer planets are each like their own mini solar systems, with dozens of moons around each, some of which, could have supported life along similar points of reasoning as those that I made above about Mercury and Venus. We really don’t know what state those moons were in billions of years ago, or what gravitational, elemental, or atmospheric forces may once have affected them. Imagine a moon around Jupiter with an atmosphere as thick as Venus’s atmosphere, but since it was further from the sun than Venus, didn’t heat up as much. Those conditions could, theoretically, have caused it to be just the right temperature for life to have formed sometime in the distant past.
To be “human” doesn’t mean to have a physical body, but rather, to have lived a mortal life which provided for free will, and to have a spirit, with the capacity for rational thought about God.
In Swedenborg’s terminology, a “human being” is any life form that acts as a living container receptive of love flowing in from the Lord.
For a human being is a human being by virtue of the will… And as the will is really the human being, “human being” therefore means the good of love, since it belongs to the will, perfecting and composing it.
And the “human form” is any intelligent form of life capable of contemplating God, that takes on a physical shape of some sort, and need not, therefore, necessarily look just like we do on Earth.
Whereas “a man” is such by virtue of the understanding… For the meaning of “a man” is the power of understanding and consequently the truth of faith.
And since understanding and wisdom are what make people human, not shape, good spirits and especially angels are more human than people who still have their bodies, because they have more of wisdom’s light.
That said, the Lord’s human shape is important because it makes up the idea of the Grand Human, in which all of heaven symbolically resides.
The reason he distinguishes the idea of the human form from something which is not of the human form, is because many people in the 17th and 18th centuries — and still, today — believed that after death, people didn’t live on with a substantial form as they did during their mortal lives, but become something ethereal, like a wisp or a feather, which couldn’t be fully visualized or pictured in one’s mind. Many people also believed that angels are from a separately created race.
Swedenborg clarified that all angels once had a mortal body, and whether or not that mortal body lived on Earth or on another planet, they all lived a mortal life, like we all do on Earth, before dying and taking with them their spiritual form, similar to a blueprint of the body they had adhered to during their mortal life, albeit with new, spiritual brilliance and enhanced senses and abilities. Since there are so many different races of species in the universe, he wrote, “they’re all from the human race,” in order to emphasize the fact that they all lived a mortal life before they received an immortal one, and that they all exist within the Grand Human of the Lord, rather than having been created as immortals in some pre-existent state before the Earth was created. The idea of a pre-existence, he wrote, isn’t true.
They (spirits from Jupiter or one of its moons) also said that very many inhabitants of their planet believe that the spirits within their bodies have existed from eternity, being instilled into the body at conception. But they added that they now knew that this was untrue and that they regretted having possessed such a false notion.
The idea of a pre-existence is not mentioned in the Bible, except perhaps for Isaiah 14:12-15, which some interpret literally as a person named Lucifer being cast down before the creation of the earth, but Swedenborg pointed out we are supposed to interpret the words of the Biblical Prophets poetically rather than literally, and Lucifer represents an entire group of people who profane the Word, rather than a single, literal person, and to fall away from heaven means to distance oneself from God. And so, it really has nothing to do with a pre-existence, but rather, about the state of people’s hearts during mortal life and thereafter.
Rather, the idea of the pre-existence most likely got its start from the pseudepigrapha, such as The Book of Enoch, which describes the rebellion of certain angels (the Watchers) who descended to earth and took human wives. This act led to their punishment and casting down. While it does not describe a war in heaven before the creation of the earth in the same way as later Christian texts, it does depict a significant rebellion and subsequent divine retribution. These ideas from the pseudepigrapha found their way into Christian fictional books such as John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, twenty-one years before Swedenborg’s birth. Although not a scriptural text, Paradise Lost is one of the most famous literary works to describe a pre-existent war in heaven. Milton vividly portrays the rebellion of Lucifer and his followers against God, their defeat by Michael and the loyal angels, and their subsequent expulsion. Subsequently, the narrative of a pre-existent war in heaven has caused confusion among Christian believers since, who have taken the storyline from it literally, perhaps not even realizing that it didn’t originate in the Word itself. The problem that was created was that it became fixed in the Christian psyche as if it was scripture; a problem that is still perpetuated today, such as in the LDS Church’s Book of Abraham, which follows a similar fictional thread. And Christian fantasy authors, such as JRR Tolkien, have incorporated similar ideas into their stories, such as the battle between the Valar and Melkor in the Silmarillion at the beginning of the creation of the Earth, likely also inspired by Paradise Lost and the pseudepigrapha. All of this is to say, there was a good reason Swedenborg mentioned that angels embody a human form as something distinct from all of the ideas mentioned in those books, because the Lord wants us to understand how the spiritual world truly works — rather than the fictional version — so that we’re able understand how his divine providence affects us and our lives, and our role within him, so that we can do away with false notions derived from those fictions, even as we enjoy their symbolism. One such false idea that we are at risk of falling into if we aren’t wise enough to distinguish between fiction and true spirituality, is the insidious doctrine of predestination.
Swedenborg wrote:
There is no predestination, or fate, but man has freedom; and Providence does not necessarily follow in order, but, like an architect about to build a house, brings together materials not in order, 6487.
That said, in the universe, there is undoubtably an infinite variety of species, as Howard Storm mentioned above, and so to describe them all perfectly would be impossible, and apparently, there are species of life form that have bodies that have different shapes than ours. Swedenborg wrote that he was not yet able to picture the idea of life living on planets with a different, or no, atmosphere, but that he was able to keep his mind open to other forms of humanoid life he had not yet seen. The bottom line, however, is that whether those life forms had a typical humanoid shape or not, they all lived a mortal life at some point in their past and had the capacity for free will and rational thought about and from the Lord.
For because I am unable to form a picture of people other than those who live on planets surrounded by an atmosphere, therefore, although this is unknown to me because I cannot imagine it, I do not want to reject it out of hand. For bodily shapes are entirely according to the condition of the atmospheres and many other circumstances on the planets where they are.
There may be Latin to English translation errors from Swedenborg’s original meaning — planets don’t need to be currently supporting life in order for them to have the purpose for supporting life overall.
As Swedenborg wrote above, a planet doesn’t need to have an atmosphere, or at least not one we’re familiar with, in order to support life. However, even if it did, one can’t expect a planet to support life at every moment of its lifespan. Most planets start out in a state of volcanic chaos, and undergo various states of formation prior to them being suitable for supporting life. Every planet, like every building, must first be built before it can be reasonably inhabited and perhaps may also go through seasons of renovation. And, as quoted above, divine providence doesn’t necessarily follow in order (Index to Arcana Coelestia #16).
Even when each planet in our solar system is undergoing a state whereby it’s void of human life, as appears to be the case for all of them but Earth at the moment, each nonetheless has the purpose for it overall. And even if a planet or any celestial body is destroyed before ever being inhabited or used directly by human beings, it still has a universal purpose for human life according to the Lord’s eternal purposes and foresight, all of which are not apparent to us in the moment. Many stars and their orbiting planets are recycled, for instance, via supernovae, which afterwards produce rare minerals that seed other planets with elements useful for life and civilization.
With this in mind, I believe each of the English translations from the Latin from section #3 have a couple of similar mistakes. The first is from this clause:
From the 1892 translation of Earths in the Universe: “he… must needs believe also, that wherever there is an earth, there are men.”
From the 1997 translation of Worlds in Space: “he… must inevitably believe that, where there is a world, there must be human beings.”
From the 2020 translation, Other Worlds: “…then we cannot help but believe that wherever there is a planet there must be people on it.”
Each of those translations doesn’t take into account the subjunctive mood, by using the terms “are” and “must be.” The subjunctive often implies possibility, potential, or uncertainty, rather than what is indicative.
The Latin is: non potest non credere, quam quod homines sint, ubicunque aliqua Tellus.
Taking the subjunctive mood into account, this should be translated as:
He cannot but believe that there may be humans wherever there is any land.
This preserves the sense of possibility or conjecture suggested by the use of the subjunctive sint. The subjunctive here introduces an element of uncertainty, implying that the existence of humans in these places is not an established fact but rather a plausibility.
The second problem is with this clause:
From the 1892 translation of Earths in the Universe: “Who that knows these things and from reason thinks about them can say that these are empty bodies?”
From the 1997 translation of Worlds in Space: “Can anyone knowing this and able to think rationally still claim that these are empty masses?”
From the 2020 translation, Other Worlds: “Can any rational individual who knows all this maintain that these bodies are uninhabited?”
The Latin is: Quis usquam, qui haec novit, et ex ratione cogitat, dicere potest, quod haec inania corpora sint?
The word for the original Latin for “empty” is inania, which, like the English equivalent of inane, can also be translated as meaningless, purposeless, or worthless, rather than empty.*
So an alternate translation that solves the contradiction with the Moon and Mars’s current empty state is:
Who anywhere, who knows these things and thinks from reason, can say that these may be worthless bodies?
A person using his reasoning ability must conjecture that even if they are empty they aren’t all worthless and have a more important purpose to exist as they do other than to simply rotate around the sun.
Elsewhere, Swedenborg’s emphasis is anchored more on each planet’s purpose rather than its present population. Remembering that he saw populations on spiritual planets, but not physical planets:
Man is the purpose for which a world exists, and the supreme Creator made nothing without a purpose.
*See “inanis” in A Lexicon to the Latin Text of the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg
Evidence that Mars once had an atmosphere indicates a possibility that life may have once existed there, as it does on Earth.
Scientists have recently discovered that there used to be water on Mars. This alone is amazingly encouraging for Swedenborg’s readers, as it indicates that the idea that life may once have existed on other planets in the solar system, or that it’s possible in the future, is not quite so far-fetched as we may have imagined.
One theory that currently exists among scientists about Mars is that it also once had a much thicker atmosphere, but that as the planet grew older, its iron core, which once used to be closer to the power of Earth’s iron core, cooled off, and calmed down, resulting in a diminished magnetosphere. As Mars’s magnetosphere diminished, its atmosphere could no longer withstand the radioactive solar winds coming towards it, so that its atmosphere was gradually brushed away, and its watery surface evaporated into space.
Why the Lord allowed that to happen to it is a mystery, but it doesn’t negate the fact that it was, nonetheless, a planet designed with the purpose for life to form on it. It may also be because the Lord has given Mars to humanity as a challenge. The challenge of settling on and terraforming Mars will unite us as a human family in our peaceful efforts to do so. Many people today, such as Elon Musk and the teams at SpaceX, are very optimistic about Mars’s future as a symbol of human fortitude and unity.
Even though, from what we have observed, human life doesn’t exist on other planets in our solar system yet, it will, and soon.
An artist’s rendering of how a terraformed Mars may one day look like Earth and support human life.
Perhaps it looked like this in the past as well?
Mankind will colonize all of the planets in our solar system eventually. Given modern technology, we can say with confidence that this will happen, and that we will terraform them as we’re able. As such, it’s assured that all of them have a purpose for supporting human life at some point, whether life once lived on them or has yet to live on them.
SpaceX is currently developing a spaceship designed to take humans to Mars. Even though currently (as of 2024), humanity exists only on one planet in the universe, that is going to change, beginning in the next few decades. Today’s generation is passing into a new epoch where we will become a multi-planetary species.
Since Swedenborg wrote that all of heaven is from the human race, one theory is that the Earth is the first planet to have formed human life in the universe (or one of the first) and that we will populate all of the planets in our solar system, and then planets beyond that into infinity. Humanity is currently working on settling Mars, and then will eventually terraform it. Once that’s achieved, then the human race will evolve on Mars and other planets in our solar system so that they look differently than those currently living on Earth. However, all of the races that Swedenborg described may have, nonetheless, been derived from the human race on Earth, as their origin, and many of them will have a similar form (two legs, two arms, two eyes, etc). Perhaps it’s possible that just as Africa was the stem of human civilization on Earth, so will the Earth become the stem of human civilization in the cosmos. Swedenborg’s exact words were, “ex humano Genere sint” or “they are from the human genome,” because “Genere,” like “Genesis,” indicates to be derived from the birth of the species. And, although Swedenborg wasn’t aware of all of the details we have today regarding modern genomic science, he knew the foundational concepts for how human features and traits propagate and evolve from one generation to the next (Divine Love and Wisdom #269).
To quote him again from Other Planets #2:
The Divine created the universe for the sole purpose of bringing humankind into being as the source of heaven (because humankind is the seedbed of heaven).
“Seedbed” comes from seminarium, which means nursery or breeding ground.
This theory would help explain, as well, how and why, out of all of the planets in the cosmos, the Lord chose to be born here on Earth, and why the Word was written here, which Swedenborg said was then carried out into the cosmos, because we who have been born on Earth are the root or the stem of the cosmos, and the Lord is the human image that all alien species base their worship towards, it being the sacred shape of mankind from which they are all derived. Swedenborg wrote that, “everyone who worships the Divine in human form is accepted by the Lord” (Other Planets #7).
Time in Heaven Works Differently Than Time on Earth.
To scaffold a few frameworks for this portion of the discussion, first we need to wrap our heads around a few important concepts about time and space.
When Swedenborg wrote about visiting the spiritual world, including when he was allowed to speak with spirits from other planets, he said that he entered into a realm outside of time itself.
In space, all time is relative.
Even though things keep happening in sequence and progressing in heaven the way they do in the world, still angels have no notion or concept of time and space. The lack is so complete that they simply do not know what time and space are.
The reason angels do not know what time is (even though everything for them moves along in sequence just the way it does in our world, so much so that there is no difference) is that in heaven there are no years or days, but only changes of state. Where there are years and days there are times, and where there are changes of state, there are states.
Since angels have no concept derived from time, as we in our world do, they have no concept of time or of the things that depend on time. They do not even know what all these temporal things are, like a year, a month, a week, a day, an hour, today, tomorrow, or yesterday. When angels hear these expressions from one of us (angels are always kept in contact with us by the Lord), they perceive states instead, and things that have to do with state. So our natural concept is changed into a spiritual concept with the angels. This is why expressions of time in the Word mean states, and why things proper to time like the ones listed above mean the spiritual things that correspond to them.
It is much the same for all the things that occur as a result of time, such as the four seasons of the year called spring, summer, autumn, and winter; the four times of day called morning, noon, evening, and night; our own four ages called infancy, youth, maturity, and old age; and with the other things that either occur as a result of time or happen in temporal sequence. When we think about them, it is from a temporal standpoint; but an angel thinks about them from the standpoint of state.
Even though everything in heaven appears to be located in space just like things in our world, still angels have no notion or concept of location and space. Since this can only seem like a paradox, and since it is highly significant, I should like to shed some light on it.
All motion in the spiritual world is the effect of changes of inner states, to the point that motion is nothing but change of state. This is how I have been led by the Lord into the heavens and also to other planets in the universe. This happened to my spirit, while my body remained in the same place. This is how all angels move about, which means they do not have distances; and if they do not have distances, they do not have space. Instead they have states and their changes.
This is what many people report from their near death experience stories, after they return to earth, so it’s not only Swedenborg reporting this.
And something that we know from recent scientific experiments since Swedenborg’s time, such as those performed by Albert Einstein, is that space and time are relative, rather than absolute. Even though it appears absolute from what we can see, and within Newtonian physics, if you peer into the science of light and electricity, it’s proven to be relative; a matter of state rather than mere time, or rather, that time is an illusion of the senses.
In a famous thought experiment by Einstein, he described a hypothetical scenario between you and a train. In the scenario, you imagine you are standing still and view the train pass by you extremely fast and then see two strikes of lightening occur at the exact same time, 100 meters apart. Next, you imagine yourself in the train and looking out at the countryside, while the train is moving near the speed of light. Then, the lightening strikes in the same way as it did before, but this time, while you were passing by the middle of them. Under this scenario, you would actually perceive the two strikes of lightening to have occurred sequentially, one after the other, because it would take longer for the light from the first strike to reach you than it would for the second strike. This is because of the speed you were traveling — away from the first strike and towards the second, which would require the light from the first strike to catch up with the second one. Because of your speed of movement, the space between you and the first strike would be expanded, whereas the space between you and the second strike would be compressed.
Because light is the fastest known medium in the physical universe, and the primary means by which we perceive the universe, it is the standard or definition for time, and because our perception of it depends on speed and location, time is therefore relative and not absolute. Additionally, if in the example of the train, you and the train were traveling exactly at the speed of light, rather than simply close to it, then time would essentially “stop.” You would, perhaps, be in something analogous to Swedenborg’s description of the spiritual world, a world of “state” rather than “time.”
As was said, in reality, time as we know it on Earth doesn’t exist for angels, only changes of state. And, taking our understanding a step further, time doesn’t actually exist for us in the physical world either; as Einstein discovered, it’s an illusion for us, too, simply a more convincing one because we are bound to Earth in a constant motion around the sun, which he proved with the Eddington experiment. If we had spaceships that could travel extremely close to the speed of light, we would all quickly realize just how much of an illusion time is. To put it into perspective, imagine you’re in a spaceship that is capable of traveling at 99.99999999% the speed of light and you take a journey to a neighboring star that takes ten years round trip for you to reach at that speed. By the time you got back to Earth, thousands of years would have gone by and everyone you once knew would have been long dead. Approximately 707,107 years would have elapsed.
And if you were traveling exactly at the speed of light, an infinite amount of time would elapse on Earth; or rather, what would appear to be no time at all, from your perspective, because now everything in the universe becomes relative to you, rather than you to it.
For this reason, it’s impossible for physical matter to travel at the speed of light.
But what about for spiritual matter, such as a spiritual body made of light itself?
In Dante’s poem, Paradiso, his love, Beatrice, is giving him a tour of heaven and explaining to him how it works.
He wrote:
The fire of the sun then seemed to me
to kindle so much of the sky, that rain
or river never formed so broad a lake.
The newness of the sound and the great light
incited me to learn their cause — I was
more keen than I had ever been before.
And she who read me as I read myself,
to quiet the commotion in my mind,
opened her lips before I opened mine
to ask, and she began: “You make yourself
obtuse with false imagining; you can
not see what you would see if you dispelled it.
You are not on the earth as you believe;
but lightning, flying from its own abode,
is less swift than you are, returning home.
—Canto I, 79 - 91, from Paradiso, Translated by Allen Mandelbaum
The speed of the lighting from a cloud to the water, as observed on earth, is relative, but the light from the lighting itself, as observed in heaven, is absolute, or instantaneous, because heaven is within the light. Dante was traveling swifter than the lighting and didn’t even realize it.
Swedenborg visited people from the future.
In our physical universe, there are limitations of time and space imposed upon physical matter, so, as was said, physical matter can never travel faster than the speed of light. It’s been attempted several times, such as at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. The closest scientists have been able to get to it is 99.99% (with many more nines tacked on).
The Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland, propels fundamental particles to near the speed of light and smashes them together in order for physicists to study the effects.
However, what about after we die?
I had an interesting debate with ChatGPT about this. I know it’s Generative AI, not true AI, and it took me a while to “convince” it, but I eventually got it to acknowledge something that sounded like Swedenborg, without actually mentioning his name in the queries. When asking it about some of these subjects, it responded:
Time Perception: A photonic or digital consciousness might perceive time differently. While photons don’t experience time, a digital consciousness could potentially simulate time perception, allowing for interaction with temporal events in novel ways.
Swedenborg wrote:
The natural world contains time and space, but the spiritual world does not really, though it appears to do so.
And it’s fascinating to me that he knew this long before Einstein did.
Ray Kurzweil’s books, “The Singularity is Near” and “The Singularity is Nearer” explores this subject in depth.
It’s also interesting to note that every planet and star in our galaxy and every galaxy in our universe is moving through space at a different speed and orbit. Because of this, every planet has a different relative time dilation to that of another, and so each planet has its own state of time. Therefore, to travel to another planet is to travel forward through time. Knowing this, the alien species Swedenborg visited may have lived many years into the future, or, as I mentioned, outside of time itself, with little notion of what past or future really are anymore, beyond a spiritual idea of the state of their existence with each passing feeling of it. If you live to be thousands of years old, and you know you’ll never die, before long, you stop counting the years and you simply remember how you felt and with whom you felt that way.
Perhaps this vantage point is the one that angels enter into after death once they become one with God? In Hebrew, they are called Elohim, which means God as both the Lord and his community of angels (Arcana Coelestia #4402 [5]). This would be similar, or perhaps closer, to that of the Lord’s perspective on eternity. As Swedenborg reported in his writings, all of the angels of heaven dwell within the Lord and serve various functions within the metaphor of his body. Thus, for them, physical time essentially stops, and perhaps they can see into any point in our time as the Lord permits them. As Swedenborg wrote, and as I got ChatGPT to eventually realize, in that state, time still apparently ticks along, but this is only an illusion.
Whereas Mars and the Moon are not occupied with life today, perhaps the Martians Swedenborg visited were evolved human decedents, who will live on Mars in the future? That could then explain how he visited people who claimed to have both once lived on it and to be of human origin.
In an article by Alfred Acton II, he mentions this theory as well:
The Futuristic Theory. This theory states that since there is no time in heaven, people from the moon could have lived there after the time of Swedenborg. People from our Earth or some other planet may some day inhabit the moon, and these people may be the people with whom Swedenborg spoke.
The problem with this theory is that although there is no time and space as we normally think of them in the spiritual world, there is also no future. The future as such is infinite and uncreate, and people of the future are equally non-finite. No person exists until he has been born in time and space. To think of future people as already existing seems inconsistent with this general principle.
I would counter that last argument by Acton, however, and say that, yes, although there is no physical future for spirits, there is a physical future for humanity on earth, and once our physical decedents die, even those who will live many years from now, they will enter into the spirit world just as we will when we die, and thus be outside of time. Once outside of time, they’ll be able to see through all of our time, both our past, our present, and our future — if the Lord permits them — because it all converges into one singularity. This is called the Relativity of Simultaneity.
From all that scientists know about the fundamental laws of nature from Einstein’s theories, it’s evident that human existence actually transcends the passage of time, aligning with Biblical testimony. There is a timelessness about the information that makes up everything that exists in the universe.
Because the spiritual world is made of light and exists at the speed of light, it exists outside of Earth-time. As a result, the Lord and his angels can see through all of time, because all of time is relative to them, rather than them to it.
Some people may suppose that this timelessness has something to do with quantum physics, and maybe there are more mysteries to be discovered, but what they don’t realize is that we’ve already come to understand the fundamentals of how the spiritual world is able to function, because we can already conceptualize it by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.
Time as we know it doesn’t exist. In this world, we live in what’s called linear time… In heaven, all time is there. When I was with Jesus, we went back in time, we went forward in time, we traveled through space to other worlds — with no transitional time. We would go across the universe to different places. We’d be here, and then we’d be there. There were different physics than what we know in this world.
—Howard Storm (video about the Heavenly Realm)
By Swedenborg:
But although angels have no care about things of the past and are not worried about those of the future they nevertheless have a most perfect recollection of things of the past and a most perfect insight into those of the future, because their entire present includes both the past and future within it.
With the Lord, and consequently in the angelic heaven, the future and the present are one and the same, for what is future is already present, or what is to take place has taken place.
And if so, was Swedenborg given this ability as well during his spiritual journeys, even though he was not able to articulate it in light of more recent modern discoveries such as electricity, microchips, and computational sciences? “Singularity” can be thought of as “conforming to one” and the Lord is one.
After writing a few of these things, this morning, I heard these words in a dream: “I have seen what you have seen, through the mighty eyes of God.”
You may then wonder: what then happens to free will, does what you just said infer predestination?
As we touched on earlier from Swedenborg’s writings, there is no such thing as predestination. As he wrote, everyone is “predestined” for heaven — that is, set up by God with everything they need for success — and none for hell. However, you and I do have free will so long as we are still alive, “in time,” that is, while living out our mortal lives, and there are definitely people who wind up in hell. Every moment you are living, you are making your own decisions — but think of your life like a video tape that, once over, has been fully recorded. While it was being recorded, you truly made your own decisions. But, God, since he exists outside of time, always had the video tape and could always watch it unfold. The fact that he exists outside of time means that he could always see what you did. Swedenborg wrote that each person has a fixed place in heaven or hell into all of eternity, but even so, that doesn’t mean that God predestined your decisions and location. You still made them and are making them, non-deterministically, even as you read this article. He simply always has the power to see them from his infinite vantage point.
When I was talking to angels about the Lord’s Divine Providence, spirits were also present who had convinced themselves of some idea about fate or absolute necessity. They imagined that such necessity determined how the Lord acted since He can proceed only with due regard for things that are utterly essential, that is, only by observing the requirements of utterly perfect order. But those spirits were shown that a person possesses freedom, and that if he possesses freedom what happens does not arise out of necessity. A house that is going to be built was used to illustrate the point. The bricks, clay, sand, and stones serving as plinths and columns, also planks and beams, and many more such materials, are not gathered together in the order in which the house is constructed but in whatever way one pleases, the Lord alone knowing what the house will be like that is built from them. All the things one receives from the Lord are utterly essential; yet they do not follow one another in any necessary order but with special reference to the person’s freedom.
In case I’m bending your mind a little bit too much, let me try to unbend it just a little bit with some examples. If you haven’t seen the movie, Interstellar, I highly recommend it. It’s an excellent movie and will give you a strong conceptual understanding regarding what Swedenborg taught about time, space, and alien life. Many of the ideas within the movie brush up against the subjects we’re exploring; a narrative backdrop that will help you to understand some concepts surrounding how time unfolds.
As you watch this clip, remember what was said earlier, that within New Christian theology, love comes first and centers our understanding of the universe, from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.
In the video clip above, Cooper, (played by Matthew McConaughey), says:
All of this, every moment, is infinitely complex. They (the alien species) has access to infinite time and space, but they’re not bound by anything. If they can’t find a specific place in time, they can’t communicate.
Imagine Cooper as if he were an angel. As he looks through the bookcases, he can see his daughter in time, but he can’t directly interact with her. He has to find a way of communicating with people on Earth, one that doesn’t violate the timeline, nor their free will.
Swedenborg wrote that the reason that the Lord can’t appear to us in person “is that ever since he ascended into heaven, he has been in his glorified human manifestation. In this he cannot appear before any human beings unless he has first opened the eyes of their spirit… No one can see angels through physical eyes.” (True Christianity #777)
In the movie, Cooper communicates using love as a method. This, too, is how Swedenborg said the Lord and his angels communicate with us, particularly those of the celestial heaven. “Love” being not merely a sentimentality, but a passion of the will for helping us and doing good. The Lord had to find a specific place in time from which to communicate — through which his impact for good would be the greatest — which as we know from his story, he did when he was born in the first century. His life and death created a ripple effect that spread throughout eternity, balancing the forces between heaven and hell so that we still had the ability to choose heaven.
Whenever he needs to communicate with us again, he is still able to, by opening up our spiritual senses. Often this is accomplished by prophets with a talent for writing, such as Swedenborg, who he grants the ability to see more deeply into the spirit world, using angels as messengers.
Cooper continues:
Don’t you get it yet… they’re not “beings.” They’re us. What I’ve been doing for my daughter, they’ve been doing for me, for all of us.
Every angel, Swedenborg said, once lived a mortal life, but now that they have entered the spirit world they’ve become immortal and thus live outside of our frame and reference of time. Some angels once lived on our planet, and others lived on other planets, but regardless, they live beyond our limitations of time, and the way they most often communicate with us through love is by a method that Swedenborg termed, “correspondence.”
We often think of correspondence as symbolism, but it’s more than that. Thought about more thoroughly, it’s closer to the idea of synchronicity, as described by the famous psychologist, Carl Jung, who was also a student of Swedenborg’s writings, having read many of them. Since Jung’s works were published a couple hundred years after Swedenborg’s, and are incorporated directly into many university psychology courses, they commonly influence modern films, such as Interstellar. But the same concepts originated from the Lord himself, into people like Swedenborg and Jung, and then into films such as Interstellar. Synchronicity is used to “describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection.”
Think of everything in the universe as linked to the spiritual world where angels can sense your thoughts and feelings and then influence you, or you them, the way that the bookshelf works between Cooper and his daughter, except for in your life, it’s everything, not just a bookshelf, including your entire life.
A tesseract, created digitally by Jorge Fernández.
Every moment is infinitely complex and interlinked with every other.
These experiences established the idea that we were created to live in heaven among the angels at the same time as we are living on the earth among people, and vice versa. If that happened, heaven and earth would come together and form a single whole. We would know what was going on in heaven, and angels would know what was going on in the world. When we died, we would then be crossing over from the Lord's kingdom on earth to the Lord's kingdom in the heavens. It would not be as though we were passing into a different kingdom but into the same one we inhabited while we were living in our body. Instead we have become so body-oriented that we have shut heaven off from ourselves.
Think for a minute, that if you were an angel, how exactly would you influence someone on earth without interfering with their free will?
Would you give them clues? Through dreams and symbols, perhaps?
Those clues would allow them to piece the solutions to their problems together as if on their own, if they wanted to, but not if they didn’t want to. With this technique, you’d give them the tools for success without compelling them.
Since we’re referencing a fictional movie, here, it may seem like this idea of spiritual correspondence with angels across dimensions is also fiction. The idea in the movie about gravity crossing dimensions may be fictional (or may not be), but the idea about love transcending and communicating across dimensions with angels isn’t.
“These things have been shown to you so that you can see creation on the scale of the universe reflected in these particular models. For God is love itself and wisdom itself, and His love contains infinite affections, and His wisdom infinite perceptions; all the things to be seen upon earth are correspondences of these affections and perceptions.”
“When people are governed by the good of love and faith, such correspondence exists with them. The Divine composes everything residing with them, for the Divine is the source of the good of love and the good of faith. All the miracles referred to in the Word were accomplished through correspondences. The Word has been written in such a way that all the details there, even the smallest, correspond to things in heaven. Consequently the Word has Divine force; it links together heaven and earth. For when the Word is read on earth the angels in heaven are stirred by the holiness contained in the internal sense. This happens because of the correspondences that all the details possess there.”
The things that are good and true in these ideas themselves may allow you to communicate with angels as you contemplate the messages within it, as will any work of art inspired by truths in the Word, even if you are barely aware that its root influence is the Lord.
I think for most of us, if we stop and think for a minute, we can remember moments where something correspondential, or other-worldly, occurred to us. For example, something we were hoping or praying about, which came true, which was just a little bit too serendipitous to be written off as coincidental. Or a voice we heard, a dream we had, a thought that popped into our mind that saved a life or introduced us to a life-long friend, or help from a stranger at an opportune moment. Something metaphysical.
One of Swedenborg’s pivotal teachings is that the Lord Himself, who is infinitely God, was born in time. The Lord’s life was one perfect correspondence with heaven, which allowed heaven to be linked to earth once again. Because of this, New Christians don’t believe that there are three separate people in the Godhead, just one, and that the one God simply took on a human form in time, which didn’t mean that he divided himself into two or three people, but that he simply manifested himself in a new way.
I realize that many people will be saying to themselves, “How can anyone grasp something on a deeper level of rationality, something that has nothing to do with space and time? How can anyone grasp the notion that this not only exists but is the All, the very source of everything?” Think more deeply, though. Think whether love or any of its desires, whether wisdom or any of its perceptions, whether even your thought itself is in space and time, and you will discover that they are not. Given the fact that Divinity is love itself and wisdom itself, then, it follows that Divinity cannot be conceived of in space and time, so neither can the Infinite.
There are reasons why God typically doesn’t let spirits and angels talk to us directly except through dreams and correspondences and why they’re hidden behind a veil and can only communicate with us this way, reasons that Swedenborg lays out in Divine Providence, that have to do with spiritual development and protection against hell (Divine Providence #175). Life is like a stage, and these secrets are not revealed all at once because most people would reject or misuse them. The fact that you’re reading this may be evidence that you’ve opened your heart and mind up enough that the Lord is able to begin to reveal these truths to you (Secrets of Heaven #5006). If they’re not making sense to you yet, it’s important to study the Word and then return (True Christian Religion #208).
The movie, Arrival, is a fascinating story that also brilliantly depicts the concept of time we touched on earlier whereby the Lord’s providence doesn’t follow in order, and yet we nonetheless maintain free will. In the movie, Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams) meets with an alien species who live outside of Earth-time. They have a special form of writing that, once read, unlocks an ability within her spirit to understand their perception of time. She then realizes that time isn’t strictly linear, but fluid. Any one single decision may appear to be built upon the last, but in reality, and like Swedenborg said, it doesn’t follow in order. The alien writing works for her sort of like the Word works for us, embedding itself into her subconscious in a way beyond her direct perception at the moment but that only later becomes more clear to her.
I think we, as a human species, are starting to pick up on this ability, as we enter into a new age of enlightenment, which is why this theme is appearing more often within our movies.
We are allowed to see divine providence from behind but not face to face, and when we are in a spiritual state, not in a materialistic state.
Spiritual speech is universal, from mental images, but its sound, or rather its articulation, flows from the affection itself which is natural to it, so that the affection expresses itself through sound, that is, it is articulated through those, just as every affection has a natural gesture along with it. Accordingly, the sound of their speech, that is to say their words, flows from the whole spirit. Mental images are born of the affections, which also are similarly formed in the spiritual body. But for the most part what spirits speak among themselves cannot be expressed in earthly language or speech, for it does not fall into words or into the sensory mental images of the thought that a person has when in a material body; when in the body they are of a general nature.
About our Moon and about human willingness to think outside the box.
Of course, Arrival is a fictional story, but it’s eerie to see how similar it is to some of the things Swedenborg illustrated in his writings. He wrote about spirits who “boom when they speak; sometimes they do this all together, like a column of troops… I have been told that these spirits correlate with the shield-shaped cartilage which is situated in front of the cavity of the chest and which serves as a support for the front of the ribs and also for various voice muscles” (Arcana Coelestia #5564). He described those spirits as short, and from our (future) Moon (Other Planets #111), but of course, movie directors like to use imagery that is big and scary for a more solemn effect. Although “belching” spirits on the Moon makes a lot of people laugh when they read it — seeing and hearing similar ideas as this depicted with visual and auditory effects in movies like Arrival allows us to realize that such forms of life could exist, and that the idea is not as far-fetched as it may appear to be in written text. Given a unique atmosphere, different gravity, and different conditions of time and space, who is to say what is crazy and what isn’t?
Although the Moon only has a very thin atmosphere right now, perhaps it could be terraformed with future technology to generate a denser one. And its future atmosphere wouldn’t need to consist of the exact same mixture of elements as Earth’s atmosphere. A thicker mix of heavier gaseous elements, such as argon, krypton, xenon, radon, and others, in addition to enough oxygen, may be more suited to it and allow it to hold to its gravity, for which humans from Earth who will colonize it and live in underground shelters would gradually adapt to over many generations of evolution.
Most people have experimented with inhaling helium from a balloon and then exhaling it, and how that makes their voice high-pitched. This is because helium is much lighter than nitrogen and oxygen, which is what you usually inhale. However, if you inhaled a gas that was heavier than nitrogen and oxygen, like krypton or xenon, and then spoke, your voice would sound lower. If these heavier gases would be more suitable to the Moon, and used there for its atmosphere in the future, it would make sense that the beings from there would have deeper, booming voices, even if they were shorter than us.
Swedenborg wrote that:
The inhabitants of the Moon do not speak from their lungs like the inhabitants of other planets, but from the abdomen and therefore from some air that is stored there. This is because the Moon is not surrounded by the same kind of atmosphere as other planets are.
Swedenborg tried to explain futuristic concepts using 18th century language.
This sometimes makes understanding his language in modern English difficult because:
The Latin he wrote with doesn’t always adapt itself well to modern terminology.
He had to write about things that did not have any specific terminology in the language yet, because they hadn’t been taught or invented yet.
For example, he wrote about angels being shown movies that help them understand the Word, but the best term in the Latin lexicon that was available to him was “repraesentativis” or “representations” (Heaven and Hell #170) and for TVs (or something similar, such as, perhaps a holographic projection) he wrote about “technica super parietibus” or “technical things on the walls” (Conjugial Love #76 [6]). What other words in ancient Latin could he have used to describe a movie, since movies weren’t invented until the 20th century?
He said that angels write using numbers (Heaven and Hell #263), which sounds a lot like computer programming.
An IP Address is a modern example of a form of writing that uses numbers. Every website has a number like this that it corresponds to.
I have also seen written materials in heaven comprising nothing but numbers arranged in a pattern and series, just like the writing of letters and words; and I have been told that these writings come from the inmost heaven, whose heavenly writing (described above in 260-261) comes out as numbers for angels in the lower heavens when thought from the higher heaven flows down. I have also been told that this numerical writing enfolds mysteries, some of which cannot be grasped by thought or expressed in words. All numbers do in fact correspond and have meaning depending on their correspondence, just as words do, but with the difference that numbers represent general entities and words specific ones. Since one general entity involves countless specific ones, numeric writing enfolds more mysteries than alphabetic writing does.
Those that are “arranged in a pattern and series” and that “represent general entities”, sound a lot like how programming languages work. “One general entity that involves countless specific ones” is called a variable, an array, or an “object.”
Most computer code would look like some crazy advanced angelic language to me, too, if I lived 250 years ago.
Of course, most of this code is hidden to the average person as it runs. As it “flows down” or is compiled and run by the computer it’s transformed into images and text that are more accessible, like the English format you’re reading right now. In a similar way, Swedenborg describes correspondences between the realms of heaven.
Whereas those that “cannot be grasped by thought or expressed in words” sound like machine code. Every computer operates on the most fundamental level by processing machine code, but no human can read it (at least, not without a great deal of effort), only a computer can make sense of it. Low-level machine code is called hexadecimal and is a mixture of both alphabetical and numeric entities, but on the lowest level it is called binary, which is composed of a series of zeros and ones.
An example of hexadecimal code.
In computer science there are millions of variables, or “truths” that go into forming a virtual space, and the science of virtual spaces themselves are based on boolean logic, which means that every fundamental element of a computer program is composed of either a 0 or a 1, indicating something as either false or true, and Swedenborg wrote that correspondences in the Word sum up in a similar way using allegories, using truths and falsities in an infinite complex pattern of symbols that link together in your mind as you read and study it, like a program that the Lord embeds into your subconscious.
In this kind of writing in heaven the number on which the following numbers depend in sequence is always put first, as though it set their theme; for this number is a kind of title of the matter under consideration, and the numbers that follow serve to delimit the matter more specifically.
This concept is used extensively in computer science and is called a protocol or a header. The protocol defines the type of language format and logic that will be taking place and how to break up the sequences of numbers that follow into secure commands. In fact, one was used when you loaded this website, called HTTPS, which, in the browser, has a numeric signifier behind it that delineates it from other protocols.
A web browser, in itself, is a sort of virtual world, a portal of “spiritual” communication, if you will.
There are also instances where he described the experience of the spiritual world as being synonymous with what we may experience within virtual reality. For example, a world wherein we can change scenes simply by thinking and willing it (or, in our case, by tapping a button on a controller) and with “spiritual substance” as if it was a digital body and “spiritual light” as if it were digital light. Like machine code, all of reality can be broken down, or represented, into zeros and ones, that is, a series or combination of falsities and truths. A TV screen, for example, is simply a series of states of “on” or “off.” On meaning, “show this color” and off meaning “turn off this color.” In the spiritual meaning of things, falsities and truths have to do with deception or honesty, not zeros and ones, but as heavenly patterns fall down through the heavens and eventually reach the physical realm, they are manifest by fundamental particles and switches, here, too, on the most basic, or outward, form of reality.
What other wonders did Swedenborg see about the future that we have not yet invented, things beyond the 21st century? The ability to live outside of time and space or the ability to reach back in time? Or, perhaps, the ability to reach back so far as to preserve the mind, memory, and DNA of our ancestors, thus making them, and us, immortal? Perhaps, then, everything is one circle, and all time is singular? Was there a singularity in the past that kicked off the Big Bang, or was the Big Bang kicked off by a singularity in the future? In other words, is all time composed of one entity outside of time, and, as we said, space and time are an illusion?
Everyone who thinks in the light of clear reason sees that the universe was not created out of nothing, since he sees that something cannot be produced from nothing. For nothing is nothing, and to make something out of nothing is self-contradictory. Furthermore, anything that is self-contradictory is contrary to the light of truth that emanates from Divine wisdom, and whatever does not accord with Divine wisdom also does not accord with the Divine omnipotence.
Everyone who thinks in the light of clear reason also sees that all created things have been created from a substance which is substance in itself, for this is being itself, from which can spring all things that are. Consequently, because God alone is substance in itself, and so being itself, it follows that the origin of things is from no other source.
Many people have seen this, because reason grants them to see it. But they have not dared to assert it, fearing that if they did so they might perhaps end up thinking that the created universe, being from God, is God, or that nature exists from itself, and thus that its inmost component is what we call God. As a result, even though many have seen that the origin of all things is from no other source than God and His being, still they have not dared to venture beyond their first thought concerning it, lest they entangle their understanding in a so-called Gordian knot from which they would afterward be unable to extricate it.
They would be unable to extricate their understanding for the reason that they have thought of God and about the creation of the universe by God in terms of time and space, which are properties of nature, and no one can comprehend God and the creation of the universe from the perspective of nature. On the other hand, everyone whose understanding possesses some inner light can comprehend nature and its creation from the perspective of God, because God does not exist in time and space.
In subsequent discussions we will see that although God created the universe and all its constituents out of Himself, still there is not the least particle in the created universe that is God.
Swedenborg wrote that God is not bound by time, and exists outside of it. In some respects, this idea aligns with the most widely accepted theory of the Big Bang, which is that space and time came into existence only after the Big Bang occurred:
Before the creation of the world space and time did not exist in God or in His presence, but they did after this event.
That said, a problem with the Big Bang Theory is that scientists have conceptualized it as a dense point of mass that existed at the beginning of the universe — the one that they think exploded and kicked off the universe’s expansion — and that it existed as a singularity of physical matter. And they think of it as if this “thing” — whatever it was — was just a phenomenon of nature. However, this idea is deeply flawed. They may have some of the math correct, but they have the wrong theory.
By Swedenborg:
It is acknowledged by many that there is an only substance and that this is also called the first substance (the singularity), the source of all things; but the nature of this substance is not known. It is believed to be so simple that there is nothing simpler; that it may be compared to a point with no dimension; and that from an infinite number of such points the forms of dimension came into being. This, however, is a fallacy, originating from the idea of space; for in accordance with this idea, there would appear to exist such an object of this minimum size. Nevertheless, the truth is that the simpler and purer a thing is, the more complex it is and the more it contains. For this reason the more interiorly any object is examined the more wonderful, perfect and beautiful are the things seen in it; and thus in the first substance are the most wonderful, perfect and beautiful of all.
The Lord meets with a woman within the Heavenly Sun, from the documentary, Near Death, by Angel Studios.
This is because the first substance is from the spiritual Sun, which, as has been said, is from the Lord, and in which the Lord is. Therefore that Sun is itself the one only substance; and as this Sun is not in space it is the all in all, and is in the greatest as well as in the least things of the created universe.
If we think it’s probable that a wide variety of life forms exist in the universe — as most scientists do — couldn’t there be one form of life that has an infinite form, such as the Lord says he has, and who forms us spiritually within him?
Wouldn’t he then be life itself, having created it, rather than it having created him?
Swedenborg wrote that the material universe is not God, but it is a reflection of him.
Then too, there are people who claim to believe in an invisible Divine called the Being of the Universe and reject any faith in the Lord. When they are examined, it turns out that they do not believe in any god at all, since this invisible Divine of theirs is actually like the first principles of nature. This is incompatible with faith and love, because it eludes actual thought. These people are banished to the company of those called materialists.
After all, if we, on earth, can create virtual spaces (aka “spiritual” spaces) using computer technology, how come it’s such a huge leap in reasoning to believe that the Lord can’t — or already hasn’t — done the same thing and called it heaven and hell?
The video, below, shows a digital rendering of an environment created entirely within a computer using software called Unreal Engine, which is used for creating cutting edge computer games and movies. If I hadn’t told you, would you have guessed that it was a virtual environment created in a computer and not real footage of a forest? (Look closely at the water droplets, in particular, and you can just barely tell.)
What is reality anyway other than an idea?
The truth or verity, as Swedenborg wrote about, is a concept, or a cognition, not merely an item of material matter. What is the underlying truth of a rock or a tree? That truth exists inside of you, in your mind, in your idea of it, not necessarily in the rock or tree itself.
If people have no concept of heaven and do not want any concept of it other than one of some insubstantial atmosphere in which angels fly around like intellectual minds without the senses of hearing and sight, they cannot believe that angels have language and writing. They locate the entire presence of everything in matter. Yet the things that one finds in heaven occur with just as much reality as those in our world, and the angels who are there have everything they need for life, and everything they need for wisdom.
In just a year or so from when this article is published, these graphics will seem rudimentary, as more powerful graphics processing chips, processing techniques, and artificially intelligent algorithms will emerge. This has been the trajectory of human progress over the last few decades, referred to as Moore’s Law. Human intelligence and computational power has exploded in technological progress and sophistication on an exponential scale.
Most people know about virtual reality today, but how many people have actually linked it in their minds to the concept of the spiritual world that the ancients wrote about? When we die, whose to say that we won’t enter a realm just like this, albeit with far better graphics that are yet to be invented hundreds or thousands of years from now?
About time in heaven being a matter of state rather than of predictable motion, in computer science, and in physics, there is a similar concept called A State Machine, which can be mimicked in video games and virtual reality. Virtual worlds are often built as a series of objects, which can be acted upon, created, or destroyed at will, rather than merely as a set of constants. Within digital spaces, the laws of physics can be rewritten and manipulated however you please, and its interesting to contemplate how that may correspond with how Swedenborg describes such spaces being instantaneously crafted within the afterlife. In a virtual space, for example, gravity is no object, nor is time and space. If you want to go somewhere, you simply go there. Like in a computer program, you’re only limited by your own wishes. If you want to change day to night or night to day, you can do that in an instant. And, although you can manipulate your environment however you please within virtual reality, you still bring your personality with you. Those who love others, continue to love others, and those who hate others, continue to hate them. For this reason, you can imagine that in a future where everybody enters into the Matrix, so to speak, mankind would naturally create their own iterations of heaven and hell, their own governments, laws, and communities, just as they do within virtual spaces today, and that you will bring with you your essential, internal nature, whether good or evil. Swedenborg wrote exactly this, that in the afterlife, people take with them the character they formed during their mortal life.
Spirits have exactly the same affections and inclinations as they had when they lived as human beings in this world. For everyone’s life accompanies him. This being so, it is possible to know the character of the people of any world by reference to the spirits from it.
Every piece of who they were — particularly their will — remains intact to eternity.
In NDE stories, many people describe the spiritual world as seeming even more real than our physical world. It’s as if they’re describing a world where their eyes have been upgraded to see more colors and more pixels than our eyes can perceive, which is possible, perhaps, because they’ve been transported into virtual reality, where the laws of physics, and its interactions with the human mind, can be tweaked and modified for an even better sensual experience, beyond what we can even imagine today. Swedenborg called it “substance” or “real substance” (Divine Love and Wisdom #42). How else would he describe it? So long as you experience it in your mind or “spirit,” it’s real to you.
Base Reality Is Spiritual, and The Fermi Paradox
The author of the blog, Wait But Why, did an interesting article about The Fermi Paradox, which explores this question: why, with all of the planets in the universe, have humans from Earth never heard from alien species? Although he posits several possibilities, one possibility may simply be that we are the first species to evolve on the most outward, or most physical, plane of existence, and that the rest of the species in the cosmos evolved, or will evolve, in or near to something analogous to the spiritual world, such as what Swedenborg wrote about. To quote Elon Musk, “The odds that we are in base reality is one in billions” — meaning, the odds are extremely high that we are a subset of another reality. Perhaps “the spirit world” will be something that mankind iterates on, and that we will then inhabit that reality rather than the actual planets in the cosmos. We would send probes and robots to the planets to map them out and send us back the data, but without actually needing to step foot on them, just as we’ve already begun doing with Mars rovers and helicopters. We won’t need spacesuits to visit all of them, and although we will want to physically visit them anyway, most of us may choose, for the most part, to travel and live there in virtual reality.
One explanation, which Swedenborg himself wrote, is that the planets that he described are different than our physical planets. That is, our planets were like spiritual copies of theirs, or vice versa, and perhaps people in the spirit world simply gave them the same names as our physical planets, such as Mars, Jupiter, etc, because something about them corresponds with our planets and with reality in the physical realm.
While describing the inner meaning of the Book of Revelation, Swedenborg wrote:
“From whose face the earth and the heaven fled away” signifies that those heavens, which they had made for themselves, as described above, together with their planets, were dissipated; for there are planets in the spiritual world as well as in the natural world… but the planets, like all other things there, are from a spiritual origin.
If we are to assume that the Lord exists and is divine (which, as believers, we do), and that he is omnipresent and exists outside of space and time, then we can safely assume that an afterlife exists, and thus, a spiritual world. And if one spiritual world exists, such as the one modeled after our own Earth, then why not many other worlds as well, such as those modeled after Mars, the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and the rest? Why not the whole universe, and many versions of it, which scientists have coined the term, the multiverse? And who’s to say that our physical universe isn’t merely an illusion built over the top of those spiritual worlds? This is a concept that some physicists are toying with today, called superposition.
We also know that in the world of quantum physics, not everything is what it appears to be in the realm of classical physics, and that there is quite a bit we still have to learn about it which may shed light upon the existence of a spiritual world. And, with all of this knowledge, perhaps we can suspend disbelief more than we thought we could, and can crack open the door of our minds with regard to the plausibility that a spiritual world exists, and let some light in, without at first shutting it tight at the first mention of it.
Most of the Species Swedenborg Visited were Primitive because They’re More Loving Than Us
In Howard Storm’s retelling of his near death experience, he said that the Lord showed him what the Earth would be like in a couple hundred years, or around the year 2185 AD. In that time, humans will live in harmony with nature in such a way that it won’t appear that we live among technology, like we do today, even though we’ll have far greater technology. It’s very possible that this form of simple living will exist on other planets that we populate as well, which may explain how it was that Swedenborg saw them as living in what appeared to be primitive surroundings.
On most of the planets Swedenborg visited, he described the people as living a relatively primitive lifestyle. This is because they were living within the Lord’s order, and selflessly, and for people in a selfless state they aren’t as motivated for constant expansion, domination, and thus technological progress, as are self-serving people like us on Earth.
The pattern tends to be that only the most evil of species are motivated to form into large cities, civilizations, and empires necessary in order to invent advanced technology, because so much of it is funded and invented during war time, as a function of competition and the pursuit of dominance between them. The Moon landings in the 60’s and 70’s, for example, may never have occurred without tensions first arising between the United States and Russia, which acted as a catalyst for advancement. And Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other scientific minds and their inventions, including the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, would never have emerged if it weren’t for the pressures put on them and on society during World War II.
This isn’t always the case, and people with good motivations can and definitely do invent many advanced things, too, but it’s not as common. The more altruistic a community is, the more they tend to be “content with their lot” and with a simple, rural life with their families.
However, even though the selfish state of mankind has been the condition of most of humanity’s recorded history for several thousand years now, the Lord has been able to use the advancements that came out of it for good, nonetheless, and will continue to do so. As Swedenborg wrote, the Lord ensures that everything, even what is created from evil, he bends towards a useful and good purpose, so that it benefits humanity for the better in the end, even if the people who invented advanced things, driven by their love of self, wind up in hell. This explains how the Greek and Roman Empires, although very corrupt on the whole, led to a lot of important human advancements in science, literature, architecture, and so forth. The same with Spain, France, and Great Britain, during their expansion and conquests around the globe. And the same is likely true of the United States today.
About Miracles vs Science
From Swedenborg’s writings, it appears to me that he had an understanding of the general concept of the Theory of Relativity, and of the Theory of Evolution, and how their corresponding truths fit within the Lord’s creative process. But, he was just reporting what he saw and communicating it to us the best that he could, given the scientific knowledge he was acquainted with from his day. It’s also possible that he knew more than that, but wasn’t allowed to write down all of the details (as he hinted towards in his writings) because the world wasn’t quite ready for all of it yet, and our scientists needed to discover it as if on their own.
This is usually the way the Lord operates; rather than simply handing humanity things, he wants us to do some of our own searching, work, and discovery process so that when he reveals it to us, it was done seemingly as if on our own.
For example, Swedenborg wrote about 6 solar planets, which were the planets in the solar system known in his day: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This doesn’t necessarily infer that he didn’t know about Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto from his spiritual experiences — I think it’s possible that he may have — but either way, he wasn’t allowed to talk about them yet. Why? Because if he did, then scientists would later have evidence (or something closer to it) that he had this knowledge from heaven, and this would be perceived as a miracle rather than a point of faith. Why is that a problem? Well, as Swedenborg wrote about in his books, after the Lord’s resurrection, miracles began to cease because nobody was being reformed by them; they were doing more harm than good. When people see miracles, they tend to believe because of the miracle itself rather than because of love and wisdom inherently evident in the Gospels. As a result, because they don’t love the essence of the Lord as he appears in the Word, they lose faith, and discount miracles as mere coincidences, forget about them, or make up some other excuse or justification for them. The Lord wants people’s beliefs to be motivated by heavenly love, not by evidence; because evidence is not a function of love, it’s simply a function of physics. When people believe because of a miracle, their faith isn’t rooted, and nothing of true value is generated within them. Whatever confidence they obtained quickly fades away because it wasn’t anchored in love for the Lord.
I believe this is why, in quantum physics, there are strange things that occur which our scientists are not yet able to completely comprehend, such as the odd phenomenons observed — or not observed — with the Double Slit Experiment. It almost feels to me like the Lord is deliberately hiding deeper truths from us, precisely because of the above reasoning. Perhaps some of the mysteries of quantum physics will soon be revealed, but I imagine, only once the world spiritually develops further than it currently has, so that such revelations do more good than harm to our inner lives.
This Church is not instituted and established through miracles, but through the revelation of the spiritual sense [of the Word], and through the introduction of my spirit, and at the same time of my body, into the spiritual world, so that I might there know what heaven and hell are, and that I might imbibe from the Lord immediately in light the truths of faith, whereby man is led to eternal life.
—An Invitation to the New Church #0
The question is asked today why miracles do not happen as they once did; for people think that if they took place, everyone would acknowledge them in his heart. The reason why miracles do not take place at the present time as they did formerly is that they compel and take away free will in spiritual matters, turning a person from a spiritual man into a natural one. Everyone in the Christian world since the Lord’s coming has been able to become spiritual; and the only way to be made spiritual is by Him through the Word, and the ability to undergo this would be destroyed, if he were brought to believe by means of miracles. As I said before, they compel and take away his free will in spiritual matters; and everything in such matters done under compulsion lodges in the natural man, shutting off the spiritual man as if with a door. It is the spiritual who is the real internal man, and this deprives him of all power to see any truth in light. After this, therefore, his reasoning about spiritual matters comes solely from the natural man, who sees everything which is truly spiritual back to front.
The reason, however, why before the Lord’s coming miracles took place was that at that time the people in the church were natural men, to whom spiritual matters to do with the internal church could not be disclosed. For if they had been, they would have profaned them. All their worship, therefore, was confined to ritual acts, which represented and symbolised the internal matters of the church; and these people could only be induced to carry out the rituals properly by means of miracles. Because these representative acts had a spiritual internal, not even miracles could at times induce them to carry them out, as is plain from the Children of Israel in the desert, who, despite seeing so many miracles in Egypt and then the greatest one on Mount Sinai, still after Moses had been absent for a month danced around the golden calf, crying out that it had brought them out of Egypt. They behaved in much the same way in the land of Canaan despite seeing the outstanding miracles performed by Elijah and Elisha and in due course the truly Divine miracles performed by the Lord.
The main reason why miracles do not happen at the present time is that the church has taken away all free will from people. It has done so by decreeing that man can make no contribution to the reception of faith, nor to his conversion or his salvation as a whole (see above, 464). Anyone who believes this becomes more and more natural; and the natural man, as I said before, looks at everything spiritual back to front, so that in thought he opposes it. The higher region of the human mind, the chief seat of free will in spiritual matters, would then be shut off. Spiritual ideas, which would have received a sort of confirmation by the miracles, would occupy the lower or purely natural region of the mind, while false ideas about faith, conversion and salvation stayed on top. This would make satans live above and angels below, like vultures living over hens. Then a little while later the satans would burst the bolts and rush furiously on the spiritual ideas occupying the lower position, not only denying them, but cursing and profaning them. So the person's last state would be much worse than his former one.
Swedenborg On Human Evolution
Because I am unable to form a picture of people other than those who live on planets surrounded by an atmosphere, therefore, although this is unknown to me because I cannot imagine it, I do not want to reject it out of hand. For bodily shapes are entirely according to the condition of the atmospheres and many other circumstances on the planets where they are. 1748, 23 March.
These considerations also show that before the organic forms of the body came into being, their purpose existed, and that this purpose brought those forms into being and adapted them to itself, rather than the other way around. Once the forms have been produced, or the organs have been adapted, useful activity comes out of them. From then on, it looks as though the forms or organs precede their purpose, but they do not. The purpose originates in the Lord and flows in through heaven. In doing so it adheres to the pattern and form in which the Lord organized heaven, so it adheres to correspondences. That is how we come into being and that is how we survive. Again you can see why it is that the human being corresponds to the heavens in each and every detail.
This, in fact, shows that he had a grasp of how human evolution works, and had an open mind about it, even though Charles Darwin hadn’t been born until about three decades after Swedenborg’s death, and the Origin of Species wasn’t published until 110 years after Swedenborg wrote these words in Acana Coelestia (Secrets of Heaven). Although many Christians deny the science of evolution and natural selection, and take a literalistic interpretation of the creation story in Genesis, this was not Swedenborg’s approach or understanding of it, because he was shown from heaven that their literal interpretation of it was false (Secrets of Heaven #1020, Secrets of Heaven #66). Swedenborg wrote that the first 11 chapters of Genesis are fully allegorical; that it’s a story about the creation of the human mind and spirit, the inner man, not a story about the creation of the outer man. Genesis, and the Word by and large, is a spiritual, not scientific, book. He wrote that after chapter 11 of Genesis, the events and miracles described in the Word did actually take place and are historical fact, but even so, it’s the spiritual and celestial love and wisdom within the words themselves where the true value lies, not within the literal historicity (Secrets of Heaven #1410).
So, think what you will about whether the literal sense of the Word took place, it doesn’t change the value of the inner sense.
With that said, Swedenborg was very careful to emphasize the importance of recognizing that all life, all matter, and all existence is derived first from the spiritual world, from the Lord from that world, and from the Lord’s creative power, not from ourselves, and not from nature. Charles Darwin, although technically correct about the science of human evolution, didn’t appear to fully understand that behind every natural force in the universe, even those driving human evolution forward, was divine providence, and that all things, even natural things, are derived from spiritual things. While Darwin did not entirely reject the possibility of a divine role in the origin of life, his theory of natural selection emphasized natural processes over direct divine intervention. His personal beliefs became increasingly agnostic over time. In his letters and private writings, Darwin expressed more nuanced views. He sometimes suggested that a Creator might have set natural laws in motion, but he largely refrained from making definitive statements about God’s role in evolution. This hesitancy, or lack of full acknowledgment of God’s involvement in the creation by Darwin and by atheists in general, is no doubt why many Christians feel threatened by what Darwin wrote. However, Darwin wasn’t wrong, he simply explained the natural science, without context to the spiritual existence which lies out of the sight of physical eyes and natural observations. The two ideas, however, are not mutually exclusive, when you come to understand and accept that everything in nature is derived from the Lord, and yet even so, the Lord operates through natural forces, mathematics, and physics at the outermost borders of creation, such as here on Earth and in our physical universe.
The key difference between Swedenborg and Creationists, is that Creationists believe that God did something as simple as snapping his fingers and that then a man stood up out of the mud, as if his entire form was created in an instant. In reality, it took millions of years for God to form man, but man didn’t become truly “human” — the spiritual way we’ve described it — until he had reached a point within the divine design whereby he was able to act as a vessel of divine love and wisdom. The transition between when man changed from an ape to an enlightened human may have happened in something as simple as a mere instant of spiritual inspiration, when the first man became aware of God — the first spark of divine light in his mind — thus marking the point in human evolution whereby the human form became complete, that is, fully in alignment with the form of heaven. If you were to travel back in time and observe that moment, you may have seen nothing more than a person standing in a field, looking up at the sky, who had a mere thought, because the shift or evolution described in Genesis was spiritual, whereas the physical shift is forever ongoing. From that point, onward, humans have and will continue to evolve and continue to change in ways, perhaps, that we can’t fully anticipate, but not so completely as to verge away from the heavenly purpose.
Never Tell Me the Odds!
I want to touch again on the theory that the Earth is the first planet in the universe capable of sustaining intelligent life technologically advanced enough to spread out into other worlds. Although my points below are, partly, conjecture, it’s the most likely solution I’ve found so far to solve the paradox of why the Lord chose to be born here instead of on another planet, with as vast as the universe is.
Let me know in the comments what you think and what your theories are.
Points for this theory:
Perhaps the Lord wanted to seed just one planet, for this purpose, to start with, so that he could introduce himself into it, and thus introduce the Word into it, before it spread out into the universe. Swedenborg mentions this is true regarding the Word. Where my speculation comes in is with regard to humans from Earth colonizing other planets (outside of our solar system), but to me, it makes sense that the Lord would wait to seed life on other planets, derived from one species, until that species first developed in maturity and until he was confident that they’d worked through their most serious problems.
There are many reasons, as I was informed from heaven, why the Lord was pleased to be born and take on human nature in our world and not in another. THE CHIEF CAUSE was for the sake of the Word, which could thus be written in our world; and having been written, could be circulated throughout the world; and once circulated, could be preserved for all posterity, thus enabling it to be made plain that God became man, even to all in the next life.
That would make sense as to why he chose to be born here as a human, and in a human genetic form, because the human genome would then spread across the universe and become the most populous, and then evolve from there, giving the inhabitants of future worlds a common genomic ancestor.
The Word, once written, could be preserved for all posterity, that is, for thousands and thousands of years. As is well known, it has been so preserved.
There was a conversation about why the Lord was born on this earth and not on some other, [and it was said] that the reason was that the doctrine made known from heaven could be spread abroad through the whole world and remains for thousands of years. This is because on this earth since ancient times such things have been entrusted to writing and after this to type, and it is possible to spread these abroad through the whole globe and for them to remain. This is possible because there are such forms of communication and permanence on this earth and not elsewhere. Elsewhere the inhabitants are divided into tribes, families, and households, and do not know how to put the things that they know into writing, nor how to share them with others. Besides this, it is also the case that when the heavenly doctrine about the Lord is known on one earth, the rest can know about it when they become spirits and angels.
The Earth’s recent progress in computer science only adds greater evidence towards the validity of what Swedenborg said with regard to the Lord’s purpose for being born here, so the Word would be preserved through type, because now it’s being done digitally, in addition to on paper.
This may solve the problem of the improbability that out of all of the planets in the universe, he chose to be born on ours and not on another. So, a solution is to take these two concepts: 1) that the Word was written for all posterity and 2) that the Word was designed to be shared with all other worlds, and link the two into the probable conclusion that we are the most technologically advanced world in the universe. As Swedenborg said, other planets don’t even have writing.
In this way it could become clear that God had become a human. This is the first and foremost purpose of the Word, since no one can believe in a God and love a God who is incomprehensible because he has no specific manifestation. This is why people who worship God as an invisible and therefore incomprehensible entity lapse into thinking of nature as God and consequently believe in no God at all. For this reason it pleased the Lord to be born here and to make this fact clear by means of the Word — so that it might not only be known on this globe but could also become clear as a result even to spirits and angels who have come from other planets, as well as to non-Christians who have come from our own.
Radio telescope arrays, scanning for indications of alien life, have found no radio signals indicating it. So if aliens are out there, they may not be advanced enough to have developed either writing or digital technology yet.
And, although it may still seem unlikely that Earth is the only planet with advanced writing and technology currently on it, the Fermi Paradox may act as evidence for it, since, so far, our scientists haven’t detected any other signs of life in the universe other than on Earth.
This would also explain why it is that Swedenborg often alluded to our planet being the least spiritually mature planet, since, if it’s the root planet, it’s also likely one of youngest, since all of the future generations that stem from it will learn from our errors, thus becoming much more wise. This may indicate how it turns out that they end up living their lives in states of being that are more spiritual than ours, since they’ll have tapped into digital technology that more closely imitates a spiritual world, as well as love and wisdom, which will more likely allow for spiritual existence to be opened to them — perhaps so much that they replace our conception of time with theirs.
This would solve the riddle of the Grand Human, or the Universal Human, that Swedenborg wrote about, because he wrote that the Universal Human corresponds to all of the parts and organs of the human body, but if other species in the universe evolved on their own, or on a separate path from humans on Earth, then they would have parts and organs which may not correspond to ours, thus, how would they be in the Universal Human? An answer for that would be if all of them branched off from the human genome, and so, even if they evolved over time to look differently than us, they would nonetheless correlate with the human qualities that developed on Earth, the human form which the Lord inhabited, the Lord’s human form being like the vine of the branches (John 15:5).
It makes sense to me that the Lord would only want to be born into corporeal form once, otherwise it would break several patterns of his design for human life and could result in people worshiping multiple gods (Last Judgement #21). That said, there is nothing stopping him from adapting his appearance in various ways to different people, which I believe he does (and which I wrote about in my article “Not God the fathers, God, Father”), but that he only lived one mortal life, which he then made immortal, having been resurrected into the substantial form of a body. And, if he chose to be born only once, it may as well have been near the beginning of the physical universe, on our world, if he foresaw that humanity on Earth would become the root of all future species that would later colonize and evolve on other uninhabited worlds.
This solves the question of why the Lord was born here, and the odds of it, but not necessarily why you and I were.
Current estimates are that there are two hundred sextillion planets in the universe. Written out, it looks like 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 — don’t stare too hard at it, just know it’s a big number.
Out of that gigantic number of planets, I just happened to be born on the root planet? The odds seem astronomical. How in the world is it the case that we, on Earth, happen to have been born on the same root planet that the Lord was born onto?
Thinking through this puzzle, I realized that, as was mentioned earlier by Elon Musk, there are almost certainly many iterations of reality, and that we are not in base reality. Given the concept of multiple universes in different dimensions, one could postulate that the Lord built this specific universe for us to explore and inhabit. Thus, the two hundred sextillion planets that exist, or more, may well have all been created specifically for us. In other universes, other planets may have been formed for those species under their own unique circumstances and variations of physics.
That still left a sharp gap in reasoning; it still felt improbable. The only way I finally made sense of it was by thinking about how exponentials work relative to each other. Although I was born on the root planet, I was still born several billions of years after the creation of the universe, and several thousands of years after the introduction of the Word. And I live among billions of others on Earth, on a separate continent and country than the Lord was born, and on the other side of the planet. So, although it’s improbable on the scale so many planets, somebody still had to fill the role, and it just happened to be us who are presently here. For either one of us, or for somebody who has yet to be born, life had to be improbable before it could become probable. Just the same, imagine a person who is born billions of years from now, when many of those planets have been colonized. At that point, an enormous number of additional planets will have been discovered with an even greater number of zeros tacked onto their estimates, making the odds that that person was born on their planet relative to the many others seem similarly as unlikely as it is that you and I were born on Earth. The great question of faith for them may then end up being: what are the odds that the Lord was born in our corner of the universe rather than another corner?
No ratio exists between what is finite and what is infinite.
As you keep zooming in on the graph, the graph simply just gets larger, and the improbability remains. On an infinite scale, everything and anything that comes into form could appear to be just as improbable to exist as anything else does.
You can obtain some idea of this by looking at the animations for the Mandelbrot Set:
Swedenborg wrote:
There are very many proofs that the reproduction of the human race will continue for ever; some of these were demonstrated in my book Heaven and Hell, especially these:
1. The human race is the foundation upon which heaven is built.
2. The human race is the seed-bed of heaven.
3. The extent of the heaven for the angels is so immense that it cannot be filled to all eternity.
4. The numbers in heaven so far are comparatively small.
5. The perfection of heaven increases as its numbers grow.
6. Every work of God reflects infinity and eternity.
The odds of any significant event happening among people grows as the population grows, and so the probability paradox is easily solved by taking exponential proportions and relative statistics into account. If there are currently other planets in the universe with intelligent life, or if there was in the past, such as in our early solar system, perhaps they’re relatively few at present, and the Lord foresaw that among those few that it would be our planet that would persist and colonize other planets, as we’re currently working on doing with Mars. This, then, would be one of the many reasons why he was born here and not there.
There is also something that feels very correct about it that we can get a sense from in storytelling. In science fiction, for example, such as in Star Trek, this theme of, “what is humanity?” is often explored. The crew of the Starship Enterprise often teaches alien lifeforms what makes them unique or what gives them a special edge, and the show doesn’t term it as “love and wisdom” as Swedenborg does, but more or less comes to the same conclusion, that what makes us unique as humans is our emotion, ingenuity, courage, and creativity, which all sums up to the same as love and wisdom. Star Wars does the same. In the original series, the idea of the Force is almost spiritual. As does the remake of Battlestar Galactica, as the crew struggles to find their humanity as they strive to survive on the limited vehicle that is their starship, and after making every mistake imaginable, they eventually find their way home and what makes them human in the end.
Many other sci-fi shows explore the same theme of “what makes us human?” It’s almost universal, like a boomerang, sci-fi show creators can rarely escape that theme and still gather attention because they know it resonates so deeply with audiences. If they veer too far from it, and miss the story, the episodes become shallow, with nothing more than violence and explosions, lacking any substance. At the root of that theme, is, of course, the essence of the Lord himself — rather what he represents — even if his literal name is never mentioned, and that is what spiritually resonates.
