5. But without the Lord's aid not a soul can possibly see that this is the case. As a result, it is proper to reveal in these preliminaries that the Lord in his divine mercy has granted me the opportunity for several years now, without break or interruption, to keep company with spirits and angels, to hear them talking, and to speak with them in turn. 1 Consequently I have been able to see and hear the most amazing things in the other life, which have never before come into people's awareness or thought.
In that world I have been taught about the different kinds of spirits, the situation of souls after death, hell (or the regrettable state of the faithless), and heaven (or the blissful state of the faithful). In particular I have learned what is taught in the faith acknowledged by the whole of heaven. All of these topics will, with the Lord's divine mercy, be explored further in what follows.
Footnotes:
1. Swedenborg here, writing in late 1748 or early 1749, mentions that his consciousness of the spiritual world began "several years" ago and has continued in an unbroken fashion. (He uses the same phrase, "several years," in similar contexts elsewhere in the present volume, in §§59:2, 67, 70, 150, 227, and 322:1, although in the last two of these instances he adds the nuance that his dual consciousness throughout that time has been "almost" continual.) Nevertheless, fixing a particular date to the shift is difficult, because Swedenborg gives somewhat conflicting evidence. In discussing it, he never gives a range of dates; he invariably assigns it either a single date or a fixed number of months or years before the time of writing. Yet the stated or implied date generally recedes the older he gets; that is, in the late 1740s, he places it in 1745; in the 1750s through 1766, he places it in 1744; and after 1766 he places it in 1743. See Tafel's recapitulation (Tafel 1877, 1118-1127). This receding date may have been the effect of simple forgetfulness, or it may have been the result of an evolving understanding of the significance of various turning points and changes in consciousness he experienced between 1743, 1745. [JSR]
