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SWEDENBORG AND BENJAMIN
THE DEVELOPING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE: Spiritual Growth According to Emanuel Swedenborg. Interview of Brother Benjamin by The New Jerusalem in Finland.
FOREWORD
This site can improve your intelligence, but the way is not an easy one. In fact this way is rather difficult and dangerous. But if you follow the instructions of this site you will be not only a wholly new creature but also a member of a new human race – homo bonus – or a good human being which is many times more intelligent than homo sapiens. This site can be a real revolution on your life. Good journey!
This site is an unusual one. It does not contain anything but interviews with a modest Finnish man who has studied Swedenborg´s works for many decades and not only studied but also lived according to them. The purpose of this site is to help others to find some facts not found in any other Swedenborgian sites. This man will be anonymous and will simply give answers to all who love Swedenborg´s Writings or the Heavenly Doctrine. His only authority is a 45-year-period of strong temptations which he has overcome with the Lord’s help. He has not any merit of his own in conquering his temptations. Benjamin means a spiritual-celestial man who usually has grievous temptations.
The publisher of this site is a Finnish society which is behind these interviewing questions: Nova Hierosolyma ry (ry means a registered society in Finland) or The New Jerusalem in English. We hope that many other Swedenborgian people will pose questions to this man whom we call The Humble World Teacher or just Brother Benjamin. But to begin with, there will be a brief theoretical discourse about the term Benjamin. This matter is fully treated of in Swedenborg’s Apocalypse Explained, 449. The quotations from the Bible are from the New King James Version if not otherwise mentioned. This site will not be a perfect explanation of any spiritual phenomena. It is only a kind of a study advisor. The English in the answers can be sometimes incorrect. If some native speaker is interested in correcting or emending the text, please contact us.
Question 1: Dear Benjamin, please tell us a little about your life and how you discovered the New Church Doctrine?
Answer:
I do not want to bore you with my childhood or adolescence, but I will tell you some facts which have been important for my spiritual development.
Philosophy and especially the problem of the human intelligence began to attract me when I was still quite young. This lead later to studying philosophy and psychology in university. I also got membership in Mensa which is a society for people with high IQ. But both university and Mensa were disappointments. I did not get a solution to the problem of the human intelligence. The university and Mensa were a certain kind of kindergartens which have failed in explaining human intellect. The human intelligence was more complicated than I had expected and academic psychology could not fully explaine it.
One night in July 1973 I experienced a strange phenomenon: the internal sight of my right eye suddenly opened on the night of the 21st of July. The experience was surprising. The exact time was at 4.56 (Finnish time, 2:56 UTC) in the morning. I looked at myself in the mirror but there was not any physical change in my right eye. However, with my right eye I saw some kind of symbolic significance in things, colours and pictures. I called this a secret code at that time. I opened my Bible, which I did not use to read because I was an atheist and a member of the Finnish Communist Party in those days. I saw a secret code in the text of the Apocalypse, too. At the same moment I ceased to be an atheist and was certain that God existed. I looked at the calendar and noticed that on the 21st of July 1969 man from our planet first set foot on the surface of the moon (at 2:56 UTC). Then an astonishing idea came to my mind from an unrecognizable source: I felt that I was the king of the earth and the moon in some inexplicable way. At that time, I was studying psychology at the University of Helsinki and I did not have any mental problems and I realized that the king of the earth and the moon should mean something symbolic, which I did not understand yet. Many kinds of geometrical figures also appeared in front of my eyes: squares, triangles, heart-shaped figures etc. All the figures were perfect and very pleasant to see. I saw the heart-shaped figures with the tip of the heart upwards and later I understood what it meant: I was in a state of inverted order, that is, I was unregenerated. I then remembered the moment when man first stepped foot on the moon. My father was watching television and asked me to come and watch the event, too. I was lying in my bed and could not raise either my hands or my feet. A strange current was flowing into my body. I lay for a few minutes without being able to move. There was a peculiar vibration in my room. Later, after many years, I understood what had caused this experience.
The internal sight in my right eye lasted about two weeks, after which it left me gradually. For those two weeks I was in an exceptionally intelligent state. I understood many laws of physics and mathematics which I had not understood before. For example, I saw the solution to the great sentence of Pierre de Fermat. Later I tried to write down this solution, but I did not succeed in it because the solution required a three-dimensional construction and I had lost the key to the solution.
I finished my psychology studies (I had already taken a BA degree) and began to study parapsychology, religions and mysticism in order to find out the explanation of the phenomenon I had experienced. I read dozens of books about these subjects, but I did not make a find. In July 1975 I caught one of Emanuel Swedenborg‘s works, Heaven, its Wonders and Hell. When I started reading it, I suddenly experienced the same phenomenon as two years before and I understood that I had come across what I had been searching for. Swedenborg explains that secret code which he calls the internal sense of the Word. I also realized what the king of the earth and the moon meant: in the Word the king of the earth means a spiritual man as the priest means a celestial man, and the king of the earth and the moon means a spiritual-celestial man whom the name Benjamin also signifies. The spiritual-celestial means something between the celestial (the sun) and the spiritual (the moon), as the moon is between the earth and the sun. The task of the spiritual-celestial man is to teach spiritual-celestial truths and to reveal corresponding infernal influx to the spiritual and natural man. In the Revelation 12:1 this also is mentioned: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.”
I did not know anyone acquainted with Swedenborg. From the library of the University of Helsinki I borrowed books written by Swedenborg and translated into English. I began to study them with enthusiasm. In about one year I had read most of the theological books of the New Church. This theology flowed easily and most pleasantly into my understanding. I enjoyed everything I read. Everything was true and clear. The theology of the New Jerusalem opens the understanding and is the opposite of the old Christian theology which closes the understanding. The sense of the Word I experienced was not exactly the same as in Swedenborg’s works. In fact I understood two kinds of senses. The one was exactly the same as in Swedenborg’s books but the other one was different and referred to myself and worldly and natural things. Later I understood that the other sense was the spiritual-celestial sense. This sense is marvellous because one experiences that it refers to oneself and to worldly things in the present time. This experience arises from the fact that the spiritual and the natural are conjoined in this sense.
In the autumn 1976 I got into strong temptations as does everyone who eagerly follows the Doctrine of the New Jerusalem. But I resorted to the Lord and I conquered all the temptations which are attacks of evil spirits. Every conquered temptation increases spiritual intelligence. If man resorts to something else but to the Lord in temptations, he will lose. It is especially dangerous to resort to psychology or psychiatry, which are infernal doctrines and cause great damage to mankind because of their iniquity. Materialistic and atheistic psychology and psychiatry are not familiar with spiritual or celestial temptations; they do not even know the existence of the soul and this is a proof of total spiritual ignorance.
In the spring 1977 I sold all my property and travelled with my wife and our young daughter to Great Britain for the purpose of studying the Heavenly Doctrine in a college there. I met many ministers and members of the New Jerusalem. I found that the New Jerusalem in Great Britain was under control of the Dragonists (the ones who believe but do not follow the instructions of their religion). There were also genuine members of the New Church, but the leaders of the church broke the first Commandment of the Decalogue, that is, they made the world more important than God. In fact Swedenborg predicts this (Apocalypse Explained, 764). The same observation was later made by a friend of mine who examined Swedenborgian organizations in the USA.
From Great Britain we moved to Gothenburg in Sweden where I became familiar with Swedish Swedenborgian organizations. In Sweden the New Jerusalem also was under control of Dragonists. However, we wanted to be formal members of the New Jerusalem and a minister baptized us, gave us the Lord’s Supper and married us according to the Canons of the New Jerusalem in Stockholm on the 4th of May 1978. A few weeks earlier the skull of Emanuel Swedenborg had unexpectedly put up for auction in London. The skull was buried into the sarcophagus of Emanuel Swedenborg in Uppsala Cathedral on the 3rd of May 1978. The burial and our wedding did not take place so simultaneously by chance but were a work of Providence. Swedenborg’s body had been a temple of the Lord when he had been writing his theological works. Swedenborg’s body symbolized the Spiritual New Jerusalem. But the skull was stolen from the body and used in the rituals of the Freemasons. It meant that the New Jerusalem was without its celestial head. Through our wedding a new celestial heaven of the Lord was opened. A new church always starts with one married couple and this couple opens the door to a new conjugial heaven for others. “All creation commences from one man and his consort; and since, as was said, this new creation could not come into existence from Adam and his descendants, therefore Noah was chosen and was reformed that it might commence from him, he being like a new ground which had long been prepared to the end that this new harvest might be brought fourth. But here there are many things which are among the deepest arcana of Jehovah God.” (Word Explained, 3239).
In Gothenburg we were persecuted by the Jews and the Freemasons and were ejected from our apartment. At that time we had three children. The city of Gothenburg offered an apartment for my wife and our children but not for me. This was an attempt to destroy our marriage. The reason for our eviction was that I used to play the violin at home. I am a professional violinist, educated at Sibelius Academy. Some of the neighbours complained about my playing and after a long legal procedure the Swedish Supreme Court decided that I was not permitted to play the violin at home even though the health board had measured the volume of the sound, which showed that my playing could not disturb anybody. The trial was a ridiculous farce. Before the eviction I had been accepted as a violinist to the symphony orchestra of Vaasa, in Finland, and we moved to Finland. My 200-year-old violin was stolen in connection with this eviction. I asked for two weeks of postponement in the orchestra to get a new violin. It was not approved of and I was forced to be unemployed before I had even started as a violinist. Later I learned that the employer was a high degree Swedish Freemason. In Vaasa a drunken Freemason told me that I had been made a victim of the Freemasons and that I could never get any professional work or even be socially successful in my life. Since I had no work, I started to deepen my studies in the theology of the New Jerusalem and I wrote a book about the New Church Doctrine and Swedenborg. With some friends of mine I also established the Finnish Swedenborg Society. Later I understood that my unemployment was of Providence because the Lord Himself was guiding my theology studies and I needed to experience strong temptations, during which normal work could not have been possible.
My book about the theology and philosophy of the New Jerusalem was completed in 1985, and the Finnish Swedenborg Society published it in January 1986, titled Brother Benjamin: Developing of Intelligence; Spiritual Development According to Emanuel Swedenborg. The book sold well. A Finnish physician considered the book as the best he had ever read, and he bought a hundred copies of it and donated them to people. This doctor died soon of mysterious causes. After the book had been sold for two months, the Central Council of Finland’s Jewish Congregations reported the book to the police. In the book there were some pages about the Jews and Zionism: Swedenborg’s view on the religious role of the Jews and a short presentation of the Zionists’ international power in the chapter The Present Age in the Light of the Science of Correspondences. The police did not find anything illegal in the book and the prosecutor did not take a juridical act. After that Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper in Finland, published a wide review of the book. The review was totally untrue: The book was branded anti-Semitic. The false critique reduced the sale of the book considerably. The Finnish Swedenborg Society sued Helsingin Sanomat but a high degree Freemason who acted as chairman of the court defended Helsingin Sanomat and the society lost the case. In the trial the writer of the review admitted that he had written it “at the request of his Jewish friends”.
In 1995 I and my family immigrated to Norway and I got a job as a violin pedagogue. Two years later the Norwegian Freemasons caused the budget of the music school where I taught to be reduced, and I lost my job. Although I am a qualified violin teacher, Norwegian Freemasons kept me unemployed as a teacher for many years. This happened in spite of the fact that I had ten children at that time. Norway is not an independent country; it is tightly under the supervision of the Freemasons and the Jews even though the Norwegians themselves do not know that. In Norway there are more Freemasons per inhabitants than in any other country. There are also many organizations of Israel’s friends. It is a custom of the Jews to blacken their opponents as anti-Semites: anybody who is opposed to Israel and Zionism in some way is branded anti-Semitic.
Being persecuted by the Jews, Freemasons and Israel’s friends has not damaged me at all; on the contrary, it has been of great advantage. In fact, it has promoted my spiritual development because the Lord protects everyone who is being regenerated and He always conjoins better and better angels to the one who is being persecuted: “A Psalm of David. The Lord said to my Lord, ’Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool’. The Lord shall send the rod of Your strength out of Zion. Rule in the midst of Your enemies!” (Psalm 110: 1, 2). God changes the attacks of evil spirits into an advantage to the one who is being regenerated. My temptations have now lasted over 45 years and I have overcome hundreds of temptations with the Lord’s help. Now I am ready to begin to teach spiritual-celestial truths and disclose influence of the deepest hells for the New Jerusalem. The spiritual-celestial heaven is the opposite of the satanic-devilish or Jewish hell: “A wicked and adulterous generation” (Matthew 16:4). That is why the Jews have a special religious role on our planet. As the spiritual sense of the Word often concerns Christian Churches, the spiritual-celestial sense of the Word concerns the Jewish Church and the Jews in the present time. The Jews can cheat the spiritual and natural man but not the spiritual-celestial man. The power of the Jews on our planet rises out of this reason. That is why the Lord Himself was born as a spiritual-celestial man and that is why the New Church cannot become the Wife of the Lord without Benjamin.
In 1977 I intended to study at the New Church College in England but the Dragonistic teachers did not accept me. Now I am a teacher guided by the Lord Himself (Psalm 110: 4-7). My studying consists in temptations and self-tuition, that is, submitting to temptations and reading the Word and the Writings. In my life there have been hundreds of events which prove the wonderful guidance of Providence through correspondences. I will mention just a few: At sixteen I went to confirmation classes. I was an atheist at the time and had lost my childhood faith in God. Our clergyman gave me a Bible as a confirmation present. On its front page he had written a passage from his own Bible for my future life: Paul’s second letter to Timothy, Chap. 2: 11-13. I began to look for this passage in my gift Bible, but I did not find it. The clergyman did not find it either because this sheet (technically folio) was missing. It had been excluded in the printing house. No other sheet was missing. In that letter Paul writes: If we deny Him, He also will deny us. After my enlightenment (on the 21st of June 1973) I also understood the verse 13 in the same letter: If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself. The missing of the sheet did not happen by chance, but it was of Providence.
Once I was playing the violin at a festival on the 22nd of November 1963. I was then 17 years old. My violin teacher had lent me an old and valuable violin bow with a nut of gold and tortoise bone. When I had stopped playing, a small boy stepped on this bow breaking it. I was shocked. When I came home and switched on the radio, I heard that President Kennedy had been shot. My borrowed violin bow had broken at the same moment as President Kennedy had been assassinated. This event led me to study international politics and the international power of the Jews: I found the Jews guilty of the assassination. After that I gave numerous lectures about the power of the Jews in Mensa, a society for people with a high IQ. A book published in 1993 in the USA shows that the Jews really were behind the assassination (Michael Collins Piper: Final Judgment). Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu also told the same fact in the summer of 2004. President Kennedy was assassinated because he resisted Israel’s nuclear weapons programme. Here I must mention that I do not have anything against common Jews who are just normal and decent people, but I do not accept politics of the so called Secret Jewish World Government whose existence I know with certainty. I do not accept any kind of racism. Judaism and Zionism are the most malicious kind of racism. Despite of this the regenerated Jews become angels.
After my enlightenment I had to change my surname. I felt that my name had to be Stone corresponding to Daniel’s Book 2: 34. In 1995 my family moved to Norway into a town whose name means Stone Dear (Steinkjer) in English. It has been marvellous that the address of my house has nearly always corresponded to some symbol or to some Psalm so that it has signified what kind of temptation I have had to overcome there. All numbers have a spiritual meaning and prime numbers often refer to Psalms (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, …,149).
When I wrote my book about the New Jerusalem and Swedenborg my intuition ordered me to take the brother Benjamin as my pen name. Benjamin is the same as ”the king of the earth and the moon” in the science of correspondences. Benjamin signifies the conjunction of truth and good in the natural man and also in the earthly spiritual-natural church or in the New Jerusalem (see Arcana Coelestia, 5822). I was born in a place called Niska (Neck in English) and it was a correspondence (Arcana Coelestia, 6033). My profession as a violin teacher also corresponds to the function of Benjamin: a violin is played between the head and the body. In January 2005 the Lord took away my ability to play the violin by paralyzing two fingers of my left hand. This happened by cervical radiculopathy in my neck. I had been practising on the violin excessively for recording Bach’s solo works, but Providence had other plans for me. Benjamin also means the right hand, which signifies the Divine Power. It has been odd that people who have tried to hurt me have often injured their right hand later. So the Lord leads a regenerated man through correspondences.
I have never talked with spirits but sometimes by meditating my breathing has slowed down and my insight has increased. My insight has been related to theological, philosophical, scientific and political matters but not with the problems of everyday life. In this state of enlightenment, I also have seen societies of angels in front of me in the form of regular geometric figures. In these states I have a pleasant feeling of certainty. Only once I have seen into the spiritual world: I saw distinctly the face of the former head of the state of Spain, Francisco Franco on the 20th of November 1976 when I was looking at our wedding picture. I have had severe temptations, but I suppose that few people can understand spiritual-celestial temptations. But everyone has to know that nobody can be regenerated without temptations and one will lose temptations if one resorts to anything else but to the Lord. In my sleep I have often seen the Lord as the sun, up on the right-hand side of my sight.
Before I was born a clairvoyant woman had told my mother a long prophecy, which has come true except the last words which were astonishing and had reference to my life. I do not believe in clairvoyants, but Providence can use them to aid the process of regeneration. This prophecy has given me courage of starting my duty as a teacher and a reformer in the New Church.
The Jews (the Mossad I suppose) have tried to hurt me and even murder me. In Gothenburg they made a false report of a serious crime to the police. An angel told me about the report in a dream on the previous night and I left home for a few minutes before the arrival of the police. My cars have damaged three times dangerously and two attempts have been made to poison me. But nobody has been successful in hurting me because of the protection of the Lord. My last severe temptation was when my wife died in an accident on the 25 November 2006. All that was of Providence and for the benefit of the New Jerusalem.
I have told these stories in order to show the wonderful guidance of Divine Providence. I also hope that the reader of this text would do the same as I do: to recognize the Divine Trinity in the Lord Jesus Christ and to live according to the Decalogue as the Doctrine of the New Jerusalem teaches (see DECALOGUE). These two principles include the whole Christian religion. I do not expect or want any kind of authority over my texts. I do know that many people dislike them, especially what concerns the Jews whose role is not generally understood in our days. But I only want that some people will understand the following new truths and will be benefited by them.
“It shall be shown that the greatest power is in correspondences; because in them heaven and the world, or the spiritual and the natural, are together. That for this reason the Word was written by mere correspondences; wherefore, through it there is the conjunction of man with heaven, and thus with the Lord. The Lord also by this means is in firsts and at the same time in ultimates. On this account the sacraments have been instituted through correspondences, and therefore there is the Divine power in them.” (Invitation to the New Church, 59).
Finally, I will tell you a revolutionary idea from the heavenly Doctrine: According to Swedenborg the hereditary evil from new-born parents is diminishing in the next generation and so after many generations the hereditary evil is diminishing more and more until it gives birth for a totally new human race – Homo bonus. This is a revolutionary idea for the New Church. This prophesies a new form of human race which is connected with the New Heaven. It is fully interpreted in Isaiah 65: 17-25. This new human race begins in Finland and continues probably in Western Intelligencia and then in South America and all over the world. I and my wife are the first conjugial pair which forms the beginning of this new race. We are not better than others, just the first couple which has had many severe temptations. To bring forth a new human race is the holy commission of the New Church Clergy. The present New Church Clergy does not understand this, but the Clergy from the Finnish New Jerusalem does, and this is in fact the beginning of the International New Jerusalem. I hope that a part of the present New Church people will conjoin us. I am sure that this Finnish New Jerusalem is that Jerusalem which is fortold in Revelation, but I am not sure where it begins as a large organization. Maybe in South America. The peoples in Western civilization are so degenerated that very few persons can be regenerated and be a member of the New Jerusalem.
Benjamin as a spiritual function in the Word of God
Why are the present New Churches (Swedenborgian) not the Church mentioned in Revelation 21:2? My answer to this most important question is that the name Benjamin is not spiritually understood. Without this understanding the New Church cannot come into existence on the earth as a real Wife of the Lord. See Psalm 68. The unacquainted can find this part of the text incomprehensible partly because some terms by Swedenborg have a different meaning in the present-day language. For the unacquainted I recommend the following web site:
https://newchristianbiblestudy.org/swedenborg/ On this site you can find online versions of Swedenborg’s theological works. But you should keep in mind that all the Swedenborgian churches and organizations except Nova Hierosolyma (Uusi Jerusalem, The New Jerusalem) in Finland are in hand of the Dragonists, i. e. in hand of the persons serving the world more than the Lord.
This text is an unusual one. The purpose of this text is to help others to find some facts not found in any other Swedenborgian texts. But to begin with, there will be a brief theoretical discourse about the term Benjamin. This matter is fully treated of in Apocalypse Explained, 449. The quotations from the Bible are from the New King James Version if not otherwise mentioned. This text will not be a perfect explanation of any spiritual phenomena. It is only a kind of a study advisor. The English in the text can be sometimes incorrect. If some native speaker is interested in correcting or emending the text, please contact us.
”But we said, ‘We cannot go down; if our youngest brother is with us, then we will go down; for we may not see the man’s face unless our youngest brother is with us.’” (Genesis 44:26). This means that unless the intermediate that accomplishes the joining together (Benjamin) is with them there is no conjunction. This is clear from the representation of Benjamin, to whom the youngest brother refers. Benjamin represents the intermediate between the celestial and the spiritual. Benjamin also signifies the conjunction of truth and good in the natural man and in the earthly spiritual-natural church or in the New Jerusalem (see Arcana Coelestia, 5822). This also means that a spiritual church cannot be joined to God without influx from the higher heavens and this influx is spiritual-celestial or intelligence from the celestial heaven. Joseph means the Lord Himself. Benjamin means the intermediate and the ten other brothers mean natural men in the world. This also means that the first journey of Joseph’s brothers represents the first Swedenborgian Churches without Benjamin because in this connection the words refer to the end of the days, that is, to our days. The second journey with Benjamin, which has now begun, will lead the New Jerusalem, that is, our days’ Swedenborgians into the eternal conjunction with the Only God.
”Benjamin is a ravenous wolf; In the morning he shall devour the prey, And at night he shall divide the spoil.” (Genesis 49:27)
The night is the end of the days, that is, the Swedenborgian Churches. Benjamin will then divide what the Church has taken, that is to say, he will separate the living Swedenborgians from the dead. This is one of the functions of Benjamin. In general, in the last days Benjamin’s role is decisive. Only he is a spiritual-celestial man who, with the help of the Lord, can separate and snatch men away from the jaws of the Devil. Spiritual and natural men perish gradually without influx from the higher heavens. They cannot defeat the devils who originate from the hells contrary to the higher heavens. That is why all spiritual churches have perished on this earth. Therefore, the Lord Himself was born as a spiritual-celestial man which quality Bethlehem also signifies. An eternal church can live only with Benjamin. See Psalm 68: Benjamin’s function is to be the leader of the New Church.
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