The higher correlative of physical distance is a difference of state or condition, according to the Norwegian seer. “Those are far apart who differ much,” he says “and those are near who differ little.”  Distance in the spiritual world, he declares, originates solely “in the difference in the state of their minds, and in the heavenly world, from the difference in the state of their loves.”  This immediately suggests the Oriental teaching that the place and human environment into which a man is born have been determined by his own thoughts, desires, and affections in anterior existences, and that instant by instant all are determining their future births.  The reader to whom the idea of reincarnation is repellent or unfamiliar may not be prepared to go this length, but he must at least grant that in the span of a single lifetime thought and desire determine action, and consequently, position in space.  The ambitious man goes from the village to the city; the lover of nature seeks the wilds; the misanthrope avoids his fellowmen, the gregarious man gravitates to crowds.  We seek out those whom we love, we avoid those whom we dislike; everywhere the forces of attraction and repulsion play their part in determining the tangled orbits of our every-day lives.  In other words, the subjective, and (hypothetically) higher activity in every man records itself in a world of three dimensions as action upon an environment.  Thought expresses itself in action, and so flows outward into space.

Observe how perfectly this fits in with Swedenborg’s contention that physical remoteness has for its higher correspondence a difference of love and of interest; and physical juxtaposition, a similarity of these.  In heaven, he says, “Angels of similar character are as it were spontaneously drawn together.”  So would it be on earth, but for impediments inherent in our terrestrial space.  Swedenborg’s angels are men freed from these limitations.  We suffer because the free thing in us is hampered by the restrictions of a space to which it is not native.  Reason sufficient for such restriction is apparent in the success that crowns every effort at the annihilation of space, and the augmentation of power and knowledge that such effort brings.  It would appear that a narrowing of interest and endeavor is always the price of efficiency.  The angel is confined to “the narrow prison of the breast” that it may react upon matter just as an axe is narrowed to an edge that it may cleave.

MAN THE SPACE-EATER