T.L.Harris, & Swedenborg the Blake Connection

[Bruce Michael]

Dear Friends,
Thomas Harris studied Swedenborg - from a young age I believe.

I was first turned on to the Oliphant story when I heard a lecture by Paul M. Allen many years ago. Oliphant appears in the Karmic Relationships lectures, and you can see that Swedenborg is discussed just prior to this.

While incarnated as Ignatious of Loyola, he (Swedenborg) was under the influence of a "Mars Genius". As a balance to this it appears he was more under the inspiration of a Venusian influence during his stint as Swedenborg. Swedenborg, says Steiner, had a deeply intense love for knowledge, his clairvoyance however was not attained by means of exercises as recommended in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.
Swedenborg attained his higher knowledge by means of what Steiner calls "erotic forces". Of course we don't have to take Steiner's word on this because Swedenborg tells us this himself:

Why Mrs. Blake Cried

That article explains how Blake also was a follower of Swedenborg.

"Also attending the Fetter Lane services was Emanuel Swedenborg, who periodically lived in London while working as a secret intelligence agent for the pro-French, pro-Jacobite party in Sweden (called the "Hats") [27]. Since his student days, Swedenborg had access to rare instruction in heterodox Jewish mysticism, which included the more erotic and visionary theories of the Sabbatians, secret disiciples of the seventeenth-century "false messiah," Sabbatai Zevi [28]. In his diaries, Swedenborg recorded many of the lurid sexual ceremonies of the Moravians, which initially attracted but later repelled him. Like Zinzendorf, Swedenborg sought out Jewish Kabbalists in the East End, and he soon came under the spell of Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk, known as the "Baal Shem" of London (master of the magical names of God). Verendum."

Dr. Steiner spoke of Sabbatai Zevi as a "False Christ".

From the above webpage:

"through the sublimation of his sexual energy into visionary energy. By meditating on the male and female potencies concealed in the vessels of Hebrew letters, by visualizing these letters in the forms of human bodies, by regulating the inhalation and exhalation of breath,"

Swedenborg progressed along the above lines.

Thomas Lake Harris was able to develop extraordinary abilities in respiration, so much so that a doctor declared that he had never encountered the like of before.

Swedenborg:

"Journal of Dreams (1744-45)

...the will [male sephira] influences the understanding [female sephira] most in inspiration [breathing in]. The thoughts then fly out of the body inward, and in expiration are as it were driven out, or carried straight forth; showing that the very thoughts have their alternate play like the respiration... therefore when evil thoughts entered, the only thing to do was to draw to oneself the breath; so the evil thoughts vanished.
Hence one may also see the reason that during strong thought the lungs are held in equilibrium...and at this time the inspirations go quicker than the expirations... Also, of the fact that in ecstasy or trance, the man holds his breath "




-Br.Bruce