Kant and other writers have referred to the “numinous,” but as far as I know,
Swedenborg does not use the term; and in the Writings the word “phenomena”
applies to things in both worlds, the spiritual as well as the natural.
But terminology isn’t the important thing. Whatever it is called, most
people have experienced a sense of holiness at one time or another. Not a
vision, or a voice, or an out-of-body experience, but just a strange sensation,
however vague, that there is some higher reality – uncanny, otherworldly and
powerful – that transcends but also touches and affects this world.
Why some people are more prone to religious feelings than others, I do
not know. Perhaps some need them more than others for their regeneration.
Strong, ecstatic religious feelings are rare, and appropriately so, because
during our life in the world we need to concentrate on our work here. The
risk of profanation, or mental unbalance, are also reasons why spiritual
experiences are relatively rare in modernity. In any case, they should not be
sought as an end in themselves.
On the other hand, total and unrelieved immersion in the natural stifles the
spirit, and we do need to see, and feel, the sun of heaven breaking through the
clouds occasionally. We need to have enough awareness of spiritual reality to
bolster the belief that God is present and working in the world. The “Moses”
in us needs an occasional “burning bush” experience to inspire us to leave the
“Egypt” of merely natural life.
All people are capable of religious feelings, because of the life that flows
into every human mind from the Lord. It is because of His presence within us
that we are able to sense His presence in the world outside us. Even those who
deny God, or at least a personal God, may have an intuitive sense that there
is a mysterious force of some kind behind the order and beauty of nature that
we can see.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,” Einstein
wrote. “It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion
is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as
good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
Religion did not arise out of lame attempts by scientifically ignorant people
of ancient times to explain natural phenomena, as our skeptical, supercilious
age supposes. Religion is a response to a reality that people even today are
able to detect and are affected by. Religious ideas are so maddeningly (to the
materialists) persistent because they are inspired by religious feelings, which
are intrinsic to human nature.
(WEO)
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