when "all the others who are near" would understand and perceive what he was thinking about, but he soon asserted that all men in the body were aspects, as we should say, of interpersonal fields, made up of both the living and the dead, the incarnate and the discarnate. He said:
"All men whatever are kept through the medium of subjects in some society of spirits—apart from which one could not live—and that too in a society suited to the nature of each; so that if we suppose a thousand men at once, each of them is kept in his society." 26
"There was a certain spirit who believed that his thought was independent of all else, neither diffusing itself beyond himself nor communicating with other societies. To convince him of his error, all communication with the societies nearest to him was cut off, whereupon he was not only deprived of thought, but fell down as if lifeless, except that he threw his arms around like a new-born infant." 27
Each society was itself a facet of still larger aggregations in the spirit world, and, through these, man was even linked with the societies of hell and heaven, those states into which he would be irresistibly attracted by the law of affinity. Some time after death he was to step into his ultimate society as naturally as an absentee member into a club to which he had long paid dues. Whether he would like the members was another matter, but it was one which he had a chance to provide for by his good or bad behavior in the earthly body. "For in the life of the body they (men) are much more left to themselves than after the life of the body . . ." 28
Swedenborg maintained that man could by the right kind of mental effort cultivate the right kind of emotions, and the importance of this was that good or evil feelings "conjoined" man with similar spirits. Ordinarily neither party was aware of this. It did not usually imply obsession of man's body by spirits. As Swedenborg generally explains this, it resembles an association of feelings as well as ideas (both "psychons," of course!) between minds. He speaks of the many changes of understanding and affection in the mind of man, so many as to vary every moment, and "into whatever state a man passes or comes, spirits with whom a like passion was dominant in their lifetime correspond and cooperate . . ." 29
