CHAPTER EIGHT
Dissecting Rooms Abroad
WILLIAM PENN, at the age of about twelve, is said to have had an experience in which an ecstasy that seemed to him of another world left unforgettable traces that ultimately shaped his life.1
Perhaps something similar happened to Swedenborg, but he never published his intimate experiences, whether of sacred or profane love. There are, however, his later references to the insensible breathing he said be practiced "purposely" in childhood, when at prayer, and he seems to stress that this brought about a kind of rapt state.
Some such experience may have been at the root of the desire to be rid of his ego, a desire which never left Swedenborg entirely. It can of course be explained in as many ways as there are points of view about existence. Was it for "God," or was it for "escape"? No laboratory method can prove the correctness of either explanation. Some great force there must be, innate or acquired, to make a man choose to travel the narrow road—the "razor's edge" of the Hindu mystics—which seems to be the only way to the complete abandonment of self and absorption in the complete fullness called God by some and Nirvana by others.
It seems less likely that Swedenborg sought God because he did not marry than that he did not marry because he had a need to seek God. With his analytic intelligence it was precisely that need which drove him from his father's egoistic piety and tawdry miracle-mongering, making him so keen to welcome the universe of law which science opened up for him.
Swedenborg was well aware that he had parted from his father. Not only does he date the beginning of his spiritual enlightenment from 1710, the year in which he left his father's house to study science in England, but in 1748 he recorded a dream in which he says he told his father, who had appeared to him in the dream, that "a son need not recognize his father for father after he has be-
