304. We have been so created that we have a connection and a union with the Lord, while with angels we have only an association. The reason we have only an association, not a union, with angels is that we are from creation like angels in respect to the deeper levels of our minds. We have a similar purposefulness and a similar capacity to understand. This is why we become angels after death if we have lived according to the divine pattern, and why we then, like the angels, have wisdom. So when we talk about our union with heaven, we mean our union with the Lord and our association with angels, since heaven is not heaven because of anything that really belongs to the angels but because of the divine nature of the Lord. (On the fact that the Lord's divine nature makes heaven, see 7-22 [7-12] above.)

[2] Over and above what angels have, though, there is the fact that we are not just in a spiritual world by virtue of our inner natures but are at the same time in a natural world by virtue of our outward natures. These outward things that are in the natural world are all the contents of our natural or outer memory and the thinking and imaging we do on that basis. In general, this includes our insights and information together with their delights and charm to the extent that they have a worldly flavor, and all the pleasures that derive from our physical senses. Then too, there are those senses themselves and our words and actions. All these are ultimate things in which the Lord's divine inflow comes to rest, since it does not stop in the middle but goes on to its very limit.

We may gather from this that the ultimate form of the divine pattern is in us, and since it is the ultimate form, it is the basis and foundation.

[3] Since the Lord's divine inflow does not stop in the middle but goes on to its very limit, as just stated, and since the intermediate region it crosses is the angelic heaven and the limit is in us, and since nothing disconnected can exist, it follows that there is such a connection and union of heaven with the human race that neither can endure without the other. If the human race were cut off from heaven, it would be like a chain with a link removed, and heaven without the human race would be like a house without a foundation. ¹

Footnotes:

3648. There is also an influx from the Lord by way of heaven into objects of the vegetable kingdom, such as every kind of tree and its fruitings, and every kind of young plant and its increases. But for the constant activity of that which is spiritual from the Lord into the primitive forms existing within their seeds they would never start to vegetate and grow in so amazing a manner and sequence. But the forms there are such that they do not receive any life at all. It is from this influx that they have an image of what is eternal and infinite within them, as is evident from the fact that they contain a constant endeavour to reproduce their own genus and their own species and in so doing to live so to speak for ever and also to fill the whole world.

[2] This endeavour is inherent in every seed. Yet man attributes all those things that are so wondrous to natural forces themselves, not believing in any influx from the spiritual world since at heart he denies its existence. He does so even though he possibly knows that nothing can continue in existence apart from that which comes into existence, that is, he knows that a continuing in existence is a perpetual coming into existence, or what amounts to the same, reproduction is constant creation. Consequently the whole natural order is a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, see 3483. But these objects too, and their correspondence with the Grand Man, will in the Lord's Divine mercy be discussed elsewhere.