66. This enables us to understand to some extent a mystery we can call angelic, namely, that every desire for what is both good and true is human as to its form. That is, whatever emanates from the Lord is a desire for what is good because it comes from his divine love and is a desire for what is true because it comes from his divine wisdom. In angels and in us, the desire for what is true that emanates from the Lord seems like a perception of what is true and like thought about it because we are attentive to perception and thought and not particularly attentive to the desire that they come from, even though [the perception and thought] emanate from the Lord as integral to the desire for what is true.

30. It is because the very essence of the Divine is love and wisdom that we have two abilities of life. From the one we get our discernment, and from the other volition. Our discernment is supplied entirely by an inflow of wisdom from God, while our volition is supplied entirely by an inflow of love from God. Our failures to be appropriately wise and appropriately loving do not take these abilities away from us. They only close them off; and as long as they do, while we may call our discernment "discernment" and our volition "volition," essentially they are not. So if these abilities really were taken away from us, everything human about us would be destroyed--our thinking and the speech that results from thought, and our purposing and the actions that result from purpose.

We can see from this that the divine nature within us dwells in these two abilities, in our ability to be wise and our ability to love. That is, it dwells in the fact that we are capable of being wise and loving. I have discovered from an abundance of experience that we have the ability to love even though we are not wise and do not love as we could. You will find this experience described in abundance elsewhere.