61. Our whole spirit is desire and its consequent thought; and since all desire is a matter of love and all thought a matter of discernment, our whole spirit is its love and its consequent discernment. This is why our thinking flows from the desires of our love when we are thinking solely from our own spirit, as we do when we are in reflective moods at home.

We may conclude, then, that when we become spirits (which happens after death), we are the desire of our love, and not our thought except to the extent that it comes from that desire. We are drawn to what is evil (which amounts to a compulsion) if our love has been a love for what is evil, and we are drawn to what is good if our love has been a love for what is good. We are drawn to what is good to the extent that we have abstained from evils as sins; and we are drawn to what is evil to the extent that we have not abstained from evils.

Since all spirits and angels are desires, then, we can see that the whole angelic heaven is nothing but a love that embraces all desires for what is good and therefore a wisdom that embraces all perceptions of what is true. Further, since everything good and true comes from the Lord and the Lord is love itself and wisdom itself, it follows that the angelic heaven is an image of him; and since divine love and wisdom are human in form, it also follows that this is the only possible form the angelic heaven can have. But I will have more to say about this in the next section.

311. HEAVEN AND HELL ARE FROM THE HUMAN RACE

In the Christian world it is wholly unknown that heaven and hell are from the human race, for it is believed that in the beginning angels were created and heaven was thence formed; also that the Devil or Satan was an angel of light, but having rebelled, he was cast down with his crew, and thus hell was formed. It is a matter of the greatest wonder to the angels that such is the belief in the Christian world, and still more that nothing is really known about heaven, when in fact that is the primary thing of doctrine in the Church. But since such ignorance reigns they rejoice in heart that it has pleased the Lord to reveal to those in the Christian world at this time many things about heaven and about hell, thereby dispelling as far as possible the darkness that is increasing from day to day because the Church come to its end.

[2] They wish for this reason that I should declare from their lips that in the entire heaven there is not a single angel who was created such in the beginning, nor in hell any devil who was created an angel of light and cast down; but that all, both in heaven and in hell, are from the human race; in heaven those who lived in the world in heavenly love and faith, in hell those who lived in infernal love and faith, also that it is hell taken as a whole that is called the Devil and Satan- the name Devil being given to the hell that is behind, where those are who are called evil genii, and the name Satan being given to the hell that is in front, where those are who are called evil spirits. ¹

[3] The character of these hells will be described in the following pages. The angels said that the Christian world had gathered such a belief about those in heaven and those in hell from passages in the Word not understood in any other way than in accordance with the sense of the letter and not illustrated and explained by genuine doctrine derived from the Word; although the sense of the letter of the Word, unless genuine doctrine illuminates it, draws the mind in different directions, and this begets ignorant opinions, heresies, and errors. ²

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