I discovered the eighteenth-century spiritual world explorer Emanuel Swedenborg from reading a booklet Insights into the Afterlife by Nora Spurgin. Online, I found the Swedenborg Foundation, who are a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to help people learn about Emanuel Swedenborg.
From the Swedenborg Foundation websites Where to Start page I decided to read the book A Swedenborg Sampler. (You can download a free PDF or EPUB of the book or purchase a paperback copy from the website).
On the Where to Start page are two video’s Who was Swedenborg (below) and Swedenborg 101: The Basic Nature of Everything – Swedenborg and Life.
The first a 8 minute quick into (below), the 2nd a hour and a half doco (visit the Swedenborg website). I watched and enjoyed both of these video’s and was excited to start reading Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings.
I found Swedenborg’s writings very hard to digest. He seemed to be very repetitive and cryptic in his writings, some of it just didn’t even make any sense. I understand that he was writing for a audience of 200 years ago and so I persisted and read the whole book. The Swedenborg Sampler contains writing from 5 of his books. I noticed that the obscurity of some of the books was less than others, so maybe there are other easier titles available.
But All is not lost, There is Value!!!
Some of the writings I did understand, and it was very enlightening, thought provoking and a different way to view life. So Swedenborg is an author that you have to work hard at to get any value, but the value is there. Maybe I will follow some of the video podcasts the Swedenborg Foundation has on its YouTube Channel offTheLeftEye. It seems that long time readers of Swedenborg’s writing can digest the material and present it so that it is easy to understand by the modern reader.
Finished Reading 29 Jan 2019.
I have given this book 5 stars. Though I found it hard to read, and much of it obtuse, I still found lots of value in the parts that I could understand, and I want to continue to learn about Emanuel Swedenborg.
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