Observations placeholder
Swedenborg, Emanuel - The Infinite - Discord
Identifier
003138
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The addictiveness of overload as a way of life
A description of the experience
Emmanuel Swedenborg
All motion or mode in the animal and living microcosm comes either from the subtler world and tends through the contiguum to the grosser, that is to say from the soul to the body; or that the inverse movement takes place viz from the body to the soul.
If the origin of a given motion be in the soul, then it passes into the grosser world by connection of contiguity, and this harmonically, and where the harmony is true and perfect, the passage to the other end will be effected freely and instantaneously and will be felt at the other end as well in the means.
Nevertheless in tending from the subtler to the grosser sphere the mode or motion will become gradually grosser, more impure, less perfect, comparatively indistinct and rude. And if the origin of the motion be not adequate to the substances of the grosser world, piecemeal and gradually it may vanish away and perish before it can arrive at the ultimate end.
And if in the gross and imperfect world, or in the field of means there be aught that is still less perfect and greatly discordant, dissonant or dissimilar, or if the contiguum be not sufficiently harmonic … it will be confused, disperse, perish and die away before it has reached its destination................
Continually discordant modes and their frequent use and employment, may produce a peculiar habitude, whereby at last the soul will seem to love discord in motions more than harmony, and to seek delights in dissonance and contraneity; so that it will begin to be formed upon the model, or to the modes of the body, and to be assimilated to the grosser and impurer world, in which case its harmonies are discords