There couldn’t be a more appropriate time than at the beginning of the new millennium to talk about philosophy. We are at the dawning of a new and exciting era. The world today is vastly different than the world at the beginning of any other century. And the pace at which it is changing seems to have accelerated exponentially. Asking about philosophy is asking about where the human race is going, how it perceives itself and the world it is creating, and what its place is in the natural, cosmological scheme.

The connection between spiritual vision and revelation is not readily seen by the present-day audience or readership, as the conception of spiritual vision does not appear in the dictionary of modern theology. This is the result of the dogmatic disparagement of all mystical experiences— which are no longer regarded as genuine encounters with the transcendent but as purely psychic phenomena. Spiritual visions are explained as at best hallucinations or pseudo-hallucinations, that is, as psychopathological phenomena, which are a matter for the psychiatrist. As Kant claimed to be forced to believe in the case of Swedenborg, the appropriate abode for the visionary is thought to be the lunatic asylum.