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.

229. Verses 11-13 And He said, Who pointed out to you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree concerning which I commanded you that you should not eat from it? And the man said, The woman whom You gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat. And Jehovah God said to the woman, Why have you done this? And the woman said, The serpent deceived me, and I ate.

The meaning of these verses is clear from explanations given already, namely that man's rational allowed itself to be so deceived by the cherished proprium, that is, by self-love, that he believed nothing unless he could see and touch it. Anyone may recognize that Jehovah God did not speak to a serpent, and indeed that there was no serpent, nor even that He spoke to the sensory part of man, which is meant by the serpent. Anyone may recognize that these statements embody something different, namely that men perceived that they were deceived by their physical senses, but because they loved themselves they first desired to know whether what they had heard about the Lord and about faith in Him was true before they were ready to believe it.