Emanuel Swedenborg

“ The sphere of one's life is the sphere of his affections which are of love and faith. This sphere extends itself far and wide into the surrounding societies, and in proportion as the affections are more interior and perfect. The angels are intelligent and wise according to the measure of that extension. They who are in the inmost heaven, and in the centre of it, have extension into the whole heaven. ”

“ If he were told that in heaven there is no extension of space as in the world, he would not at all comprehend it; for he who thinks solely from nature and its light, thinks of no other sort of extension than that which is visible before him.
But people commit a great mistake when they think in this manner concerning heaven. Extension there is not like extension in the world. Extension in the world is determinate, and therefore measurable; but in heaven extension is not determinate, and therefore not measurable. ”

“ Therefore they who do not perform use to the community, are cast out of heaven as things foreign to its nature. To perform use is to desire the welfare of others for the sake of the common good; and not to perform use is to desire the welfare of others, not for the sake of the common good but for the sake of self. ”

“ All the societies of heaven communicate with each other; not by open intercourse, for few go out of their own society into another, since this is like going out of themselves, or out of their own life, and passing into another which is not so agreeable. But they all communicate by an extension of the sphere which proceeds from the life of every one. ”

“ That there is such a correspondence of all things of heaven with all things of man, has been shown me by much experience—so much, indeed, that I am as sure of it as of any truth that is clear beyond a doubt. ”

“ They then first discovered the cause of that blindness and ignorance; which is, that external things, which are those that relate to the world and the body, have occupied and filled their minds to such a degree as to render them incapable of being elevated into the light of heaven, and of having any regard for the things of the church beyond its doctrinals. For when corporeal and worldly things are loved as they are at the present day, there flows from them into the mind mere darkness as soon as men go a step beyond. ”

“ The heart and the lungs also form two kingdoms in man. The heart rules therein by the arteries and veins, the lungs by the nervous and moving fibres,—both, in every effort and action.
In every man's spiritual world which is called his spiritual man, there are also two kingdoms; the kingdom of the will and the kingdom of the understanding. The will rules by the affections of good, and the understanding by the affections of truth. ”

“ It can in no case be said that heaven is without one, but that it is within him; for every angel receives the heaven which is without him according to the heaven that is within him. This plainly shows how much he is deceived, who believes that to go to heaven is merely to be elevated among the angels, without regard to the quality of one's interior life; thus that heaven may be given to every one from immediate mercy; when yet, unless heaven be within a person, nothing of the heaven which is without him flows-in and is received. ”

“ In heaven, to love the Lord does not mean to love Him as to his person, but to love the good which is from Him; and to love good, is to will and do good from love. And to love the neighbor does not mean to love a fellow-being as to his person, but to love the truth which is from the Word; and to love truth is to will and do it.
I have conversed with the angels on this subject a number of times, and they have expressed astonishment that the men of the church do not know that to love the Lord and the neighbor is to love good and truth, and to do them from the heart ”

“ A great many of the learned from the Christian world are astonished when they see themselves after their decease, possessed of a body, clad in garments and dwelling in houses as in the world; and when they call to mind what they had thought concerning the life after death, concerning the soul, concerning spirits, and concerning heaven and hell, they are filled with shame, and confess that they had thought foolishly, and that the simple in faith thought much more wisely than they. ”

“ By this face were also shown me in like manner the affections of the whole society, according to which the faces of those belonging to it are varied; for, as was said above, the faces of angels are the forms of their interiors, that is, of affections which are of love and faith.
Hence it is that an angel who excels in wisdom instantly discerns the character of another from his face. No one in heaven can conceal his interiors by his countenance, and it is absolutely impossible for him to dissemble and deceive through craft and hypocrisy. ”

“ Since man is a heaven and also a world in the least form after the image of the greatest, therefore there is both a spiritual and a natural world belonging to him. The interiors which belong to his mind and have relation to understanding and will, constitute his spiritual world; but the exteriors which belong to his body and have relation to its senses and actions, constitute his natural world. Whatever therefore in his natural world, that is, in his body and its senses and actions, exists from his spiritual world, that is, from his mind and its understanding and will, is called correspondent. ”

“ The angels of the inmost heaven also clearly perceive and are sensible of the influx; and so far as they receive it, they seem to themselves to be in heaven, because they are so far in love and faith, and so far in the light of intelligence and wisdom, and thence in heavenly joy. ”

“ It is also generally known that every man is such as is the character of his understanding and will; and it might also be known that his earthly body is formed to serve these faculties in the world, and to perform uses in accordance with their dictates in the ultimate sphere of nature. Therefore also the body has no activity of itself, but acts altogether obsequious to the nod of the understanding and the will, insomuch that whatever a man thinks, he utters with the tongue and lips; and whatever he wills, he performs with the body and its members ”

“ They who, in the world, love the good of their country more than their own, and the good of their neighbor as their own, are they who, in the other life, love and seek the kingdom of the Lord,—for there the kingdom of the Lord is in the place of their country. ”

“ All truth likewise is turned into good and implanted in the love as soon as it enters the will. But so long as truth is in the memory and thence in the thought, it does not become good, nor does it live, nor is it appropriated to man; since man is man from the will and thence from the understanding, and not from the understanding separate from will. ”

“ The correspondence of the two kingdoms of heaven with the heart and lungs, is the general correspondence of heaven with man. But there is one less general with each member, organ and viscus, which shall now be explained.
In the Grand Man which is heaven, they who are in the head excel all others in every good; for they are in love, peace, innocence, wisdom, intelligence, and thence in joy and happiness. These flow into the head of man and the things thereto belonging, and correspond to them. ”

“ CORRESPONDENCE.
T is unknown at this day what correspondence is. This ignorance arises from various causes, the chief of which is, that man has removed himself from heaven by the love of self and the world. For he who loves himself and the world above all else, cares only for worldly things, because they please the external senses and delight the carnal appetite; and has no concern about spiritual things, because they please the internal senses and delight the rational mind. Therefore such men reject spiritual things, saying they are too high for their comprehension. ”

“ In a word, all things which exist in nature, from the least to the greatest, are correspondences. They are correspondences, because the natural world and all that belongs to it exists and subsists from the spiritual world, and both from the Divine. ”

“ They who have extinguished it by self-derived intelligence, are not willing to acknowledge any but an invisible God; but they who have extinguished it by a life of evil, are not willing to acknowledge any God. ”

“ It has thus been made evident to me that there are two worlds completely distinct from each other; one of these is called the spiritual world, because all its objects are spiritual; the other is called the natural world, because all its objects are natural:—also that spirits and angels live in their own world, and men in theirs; and further, that every man passes by death from his world into the other, in which he lives to eternity. ”

“ Another reason why the man of the church so believes is, that he supposes no one can go to heaven or hell before the time of the last judgment, when—agreeable to the conception he has formed of that event—all visible things are to perish and new ones to be created, and the soul then to return into its body, and man again to live as a man by virtue of that reunion. This belief involves the other, that angels were created such from the beginning; for it cannot be believed that heaven and hell are from the human race, while it is imagined that no man can enter either until the end of the world. ”

“ Variety in the worship of Him arising from the variety of good in different societies, is not injurious but advantageous; for the perfection of heaven results from such variety. It is difficult to explain intelligibly how the perfection of heaven is the result of such variety, unless we employ some terms familiar to the learned world, and by means of these show how a perfect unit is formed of various parts.
Every whole is composed of a variety of parts; for a whole which is not composed of various parts is nothing; therefore it has no form and no quality. ”

“ All in each society are arranged among themselves according to the same law. The more perfect ones, that is, those who excel in good, consequently in love, wisdom and intelligence, are in the middle. Those who excel less are round about them, at a distance varying with the degrees of their perfection. This arrangement may be compared to light decreasing from the centre toward the circumference. Those in the middle are also in the greatest light, and those near the circumference in less and less. ”

“ For in the most perfect form, the whole is as the parts and the parts as the whole; the only difference being like that between similar things of greater and less magnitude. Hence they say that the whole heaven is such in the sight of the Lord [as a single society is when seen by them] , because the Divine from the inmost and supreme beholds all things. ”