15. The reason reality is not reality unless it is manifested is that before that happens it has no form, and if it has no form it has no attributes. Anything that has no attributes is not really anything. Whatever is manifest on the basis of its reality is one with that reality because it stems from that reality. This is the basis of their being united into a single entity, and this is why each belongs to the other reciprocally, with each being wholly present in every detail of the other, as it is in itself.

525. Many people who arrive in the other life from the Christian world bring with them a faith that they are going to be saved out of straight mercy, because they plead for it. When they are examined, though, it turns out that they have believed that getting into heaven was simply a matter of being let in, and that people who had been admitted were in heavenly joy. They have had no notion of what heaven is or what heavenly joy is. So they are told that the Lord does not deny heaven to anyone. They can be let in if they wish and even stay there. Some who wanted to were actually let in; but at the very threshold, at the touch of heaven's warmth (that is, of the love angels are engaged in) and the inflow of heaven's light (which is divine truth), they were seized with such pain in the heart that they felt themselves in the torments of hell rather than in the joys of heaven. Struck by this, they plunged down headlong. In this way they were taught by firsthand experience that no one can enter heaven out of straight mercy.