To Live in Eternity
Swedenborg was regarded as one of the greatest scientists if his age. From the age of 56 he began work on an enormous series of weighty tomes that he claimed were the fruits of direct experience. Either he was delusional, or else his work is well worth taking seriously. He certainly did not have any other features of mental illness, so I go for the latter: he’s worth taking very seriously…
“Man is so created that as to his internal he cannot die; for he is capable of believing in God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and love, and to be conjoined to God is to live to eternity.”
–Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Scientist, Mystic and Philosopher, 1688-1772)
Eternal WIsdom
“Eternal Wisdom: ‘I go forth to meet those who seek Me, and I receive with affectionate joy such as desire My love. All that you can ever experience of My sweet love in time is but as a little drop to the ocean of My love in eternity.”
–Henry Suso (a.k.a. Amandus, a.k.a. Heinrich Seuse, German Mystic, c.1300-1366)
“The Soul Afire: Revelations of the Mystics: an Anthology” (H. A. (Editor) Reinhold)
Moving Beyond False Dualities
“When I gained the unshakable belief that there is no death, that all life is indivisible, that the here and hereafter are one, that time and eternity are inseparable, that this is one unobstructed universe, then I found the most satisfying and convincing philosophy of my entire life.”
–Norman Vincent Peale (American Cleric, Writer and Self-help Expert, 1898-1993)
Life Endures
“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away – an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into the transitory one.”
–Carl G. Jung (Swiss Psychologist and Psychiatrist, 1875-1961)
