60. 4. There is a clear image of what is infinite and eternal in the angelic heaven. The angelic heaven is also one of the things we need to know about. Every religious person thinks about it and wants to go there. Heaven, though, is granted only to people who know the path to it and follow that path. We can know the path to heaven to some extent simply by considering what the people who make up heaven are like, realizing that no one can become an angel or get to heaven unless he or she arrives bringing along some angelic quality from the world. Inherent in that angelic quality is a knowing of the path from having walked it and a walking in the path from the knowing of it.

There really are paths in the spiritual world, paths that lead to each community of heaven and to each community of hell. We all see our own paths, spontaneously, it seems. We see them because the paths there are for the loves of each individual. Love opens the paths and leads us to our kindred spirits. No one sees any paths except those of her or his love.

We can see from this that angels are simply heavenly loves, since otherwise they would not have seen the paths that lead to heaven. However, this is better supported by a description of heaven.

227. But seeing that the origin of perception, dictate, and conscience needs to be known, it being totally unknown at the present day, let some reference be made to it here. It is a momentous truth that the Lord governs man by means of spirits and angels. When evil spirits start to have dominion, angels set to work to ward off evils and falsities, as a consequence of which conflict arises. And it is by means of perception, dictate, and conscience that a person comes to feel this conflict. These, together with temptations, make it possible for a person to become plainly aware of the fact that spirits and angels are residing with him, provided he is not so totally engrossed in bodily interests that he believes nothing he is told about spirits and angels. Consequently if such people were to experience conflict a hundred times over they would still call them delusions and the result of some mental disturbance. I have been allowed almost constantly for several years now to experience thousands of times these conflicts and the resultant feeling, and also to know who those spirits and angels were, what they were like, where they came from, when they arrived, and when they went away; and I have talked to them.