1. I. THE WORLDS IN SPACE

By the Lord's Divine mercy I have had my interior faculties, which belong to my spirit, opened, so that I have been enabled to talk with spirits and angels, not only those in the vicinity of our earth, but also with those near other worlds. Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from other worlds. With some this lasted a day, with others a week, with yet others for months. I was informed by them about the worlds they came from and in the vicinity of which they were, about the life, behaviour and religious practices of their inhabitants, and other matters worth relating about them. Since I was allowed to gain my knowledge in this fashion, I can describe them from what I have heard and seen.

[2] It needs to be known that all spirits and angels are from the human race; ¹ they are near their own world, ² and know what happens there; and they can inform someone whose interior faculties are open sufficiently to be able to talk and mix with them. A human being is in essence a spirit, ³ and associates with spirits at the interior level. ⁴ Consequently anyone whose interior faculties are opened by the Lord can talk with them, exactly as a man can with another man. ⁵ I have been permitted to do this daily for the last twelve years.

Footnotes:

7802. It is common on that planet for spirits to talk to inhabitants and instruct them, and also to chastise them if they have been behaving badly. Since this is a subject about which their angels have told me many things I would like to mention them in order. The reason why spirits there talk to people is that they concentrate much of their thought on heaven and life after death, and in comparison with this give little thought to life in the world. They know that they will be alive after death, living in a state of happiness that depends on the condition into which their internal man was brought in the world. Talking to spirits and angels was also common on our planet in ancient times, and for the same reason, that their thought was concentrated on heaven and little on the world. But in course of time that live contact with heaven was cut off, as people ceased to be internal and became external, that is, as man began to concentrate his thought on the world and little on heaven, and especially when he ceased to believe any longer in the existence of heaven or hell, or in the presence within himself of a person and spirit that lives after death. For the belief at the present day is that the body lives independently, not that it receives life from its spirit. Therefore unless people today were allowed to believe that they will rise again in their bodies they would have no belief at all in resurrection.

6626. Let me recount some marvels. The Lord alone is Man, and it is owing to Him that angels, spirits, and inhabitants of the world are called men. By His own flowing into heaven He causes the whole of heaven to represent and resemble one human being; and through an influx both by way of heaven and directly from Himself into each individual there He causes all to be seen as men, and angels to be seen in a form more beautiful and dazzling than anyone can possibly describe. He does the same for people on earth by flowing into their spirits. Indeed with an angel, spirit, or man who leads a life of charity towards the neighbour and love to the Lord the smallest aspects of all that belong to his thought resemble a human being, for the reason that that charity and that love originate in the Lord, and whatever originates in the Lord resembles a human being. Those qualities are also what constitute a human being. But the contrary applies in hell, because those who are there are fired by the opposites of charity and heavenly love. They do, it is true, look like human beings when seen in their own inferior light, but in the superior light of heaven they look like horrible monsters, in some of whom scarcely anything of the human form is recognizable. The reason for this is that the inflow of the Lord by way of heaven is not accepted but is turned away, or smothered, or perverted, which therefore causes them to be seen as such monsters. And the smallest aspects of their thought, that is, their ideas, similarly possess forms such as these; for what anyone is like as a whole, so he is in part, since the whole and the part are the same in type and nature. The form in which those people are seen is also the form of the hell in which they exist. For every hell has its own form, which in the light of heaven resembles a monster; and when one sees any of those who are from it one recognizes from their form which hell they are from. I have seen them in the gates that lie open into the world of spirits, where they looked like many different kinds of monsters. Regarding the gates of hell, that they lie open into the world of spirits, see 5852.