ory to such an extent that they believed them to be their own, especially since, generally speaking, they were wholly unaware of their [telepathic] association with men. Swedenborg said this was due to a kind provision of the Lord's, for if evil spirits knew they were with human beings they would set out to destroy them directly, so great was their hatred and cupidity.
But in Swedenborg's case he claimed he could live consciously in both worlds. He could so change his plane of awareness that he knew of the presence of his motley companions, and they of his. His faith in the Lord kept him from being hurt by them, he said, though he often lamented their attempts to hurt him.
His life was not always "double." One morning he noted some facts about that in his diary. He said that this morning he was in his former familiar state, before he began to converse with spirits; that is, he was vividly thinking about some subject, "so that I spoke, as it were, with myself." He was like this too, he said [not aware of spirits] when he was talking with his friends, or at table, or writing letters. In short, while his attention was directed closely to the business at hand.
But then, he said, his state changed, he became aware of spirits, and was told by them about the state in which they were when he was, as he thought, alone with himself. They thought they were he, thinking his thoughts. This illusion depended, however, on the "nearness" of the spirit—that is, Swedenborg explained, on the spirit's degree of affinity with the subject on which he was meditating. And, he added, with people who think abstractly there are many spirits present, but with men who are only led by the senses of the body and who cannot keep their minds on any one thing there are only a few spirits associated.33
Corresponding to the encyclopedic range of his interests and knowledge, Swedenborg felt conscious of almost the entire hierarchy of discarnate beings. At the beginning especially, he studied the ways in which they affected his life in the world. He was evidently not a little preoccupied by whether a spirit could enter into and possess or obsess a man's body, and one catches glimpses of his crisis period in London in 1745. Among the gossip collected by his enemy Mathesius in later years from a former landlord was some to the effect that Swedenborg had once run out into the street in his
