399. 3. Love in general.

(a) Our love is our very life itself. The nature of our love determines the nature of our life and in fact our entire nature as a human being. Our dominant or leading love, however, is the love that constitutes us.

Our dominant or leading love has many other loves; they are derived from it in a hierarchy beneath it. No matter how these other loves may look or seem, each one of them is part of our leading love. With it they make one government, so to speak. Our dominant love is like the monarch and leader of the rest: it guides our other loves and uses them as intermediate purposes through which it focuses on and aims for its goal. Both directly and indirectly, this goal is the primary and ultimate objective for them all.

[2] (b) The focus of our dominant love is what we love above all else. What we love above all else is constantly present in our thinking, because it is in our will and ultimately constitutes our life.

For example, if we love wealth above everything else, whether that means money or property, we are constantly contemplating how to get more. When we do get more we are profoundly overjoyed. When we lose wealth we are profoundly grief-stricken. Our heart is in it.

If we love ourselves above all else, we keep ourselves in mind at all times. We think about ourselves, talk about ourselves, and act for our own benefit, because our life is a life of self.

[3] (c) Our purpose is what we love above all else. We focus on it in each and every thing we do. It exists in our will like a hidden current in a river that moves and carries things along, even when we are doing something else, because it is what motivates us. It is the factor that people look for and identify in others; then they use it either to influence the others or to cooperate with them.

[4] (d) Our nature is completely shaped by the dominant force in our lives. That force is what differentiates us from other people. If we are good, our heaven is created to accord with it. If we are evil, our hell is created to accord with it. It is our will, our self, and our nature. It is the underlying reality of our life. It cannot be changed after we die, because it is our true self.

[5] (e) For each of us, all our pleasure, joy, and happiness comes from our dominant love and depends on it. This is because whatever we love we say is enjoyable, since we feel it that way. What we think about but we do not love we are also capable of calling enjoyable, but it is not the central enjoyment of our life. What our love enjoys we experience as good, and what our love does not enjoy we experience as evil.

[6] (f) There are two types of love that act as a source for all forms of goodness and truth. There are two types of love that act as a source for all forms of evil and falsity. The two loves that originate all forms of goodness and truth are love for the Lord and love for our neighbor. The two loves that originate all forms of evil and falsity are love for ourselves and love for the world. When the latter two loves are dominant, they are completely opposite to the former two loves.

[7] (g) Love for the Lord and love for our neighbor are the two loves that constitute heaven in us, as I said. They are the dominant types of love in heaven. Since they constitute heaven in us, they also constitute the church in us.

The two loves that originate all forms of evil and falsity, which as I said are love for ourselves and love for the world, constitute hell in us, since they are the dominant types of love in hell. Therefore they also destroy the church in us.

[8] (h) The two types of love that originate all forms of goodness and truth, which are the types of love in heaven, open and form our inner spiritual self, because that is where these loves reside. The two types of love that originate all forms of evil and falsity, which as I have said are the types of love in hell, close and destroy our inner spiritual self when they are dominant. They make us earthly and sense-oriented, depending on how extensively and powerfully dominant they are.

797. As for Melanchthon, I have been allowed to learn a number of things about the kind of life he had when he first arrived in the spiritual world and how his circumstances changed later on. I learned this not only from angels but also from some interactions of my own with him. I have spoken with him a number of times, but not as often or as intimately as with Luther. The reason the communication was not as often or as intimate was that he was not in a position to have as much access to me, because in his studies he was fixated on justification by faith alone; he was not focusing on goodwill, and I was surrounded by angelic spirits who were devoted to goodwill, and they blocked his access to me.

[2] I have been told that as soon as he arrived in the spiritual world, there was a house prepared for him that was much like the house where he had lived in the world. In fact, this is done for most newly arrived spirits, with the result that they do not realize they are no longer in the physical world. The time just after they died seems to them in retrospect as if they had merely been asleep.

Everything in his apartment was the same as it had been - the same table, the same writing desk with pigeonholes, the same bookcase. Therefore as soon as he arrived there, he sat down at his table as if he had just woken up from a night's sleep. He continued writing, as he had been, on the subject of justification by faith alone. He wrote on this topic for a number of days without making even the slightest mention of goodwill. The angels noticed this and asked him through messengers why he was not also writing about goodwill.

"Goodwill has nothing to do with the church," he replied. "If it were made out to be some essential attribute of the church, people would take credit for being justified and saved, and this would deprive faith of its spiritual essence. "

[3] When the angels who were above his head sensed his answer, and when the angels who were associated with him whenever he left home heard about it, they withdrew from him. (Every new arrival is accompanied by angels to begin with.)

Several weeks after that, the furnishings and supplies in his apartment began to fade away gradually until they disappeared. Eventually, there was nothing left there but a table, some pieces of paper, a pen, and some ink. The walls of his apartment were by then simply plastered with lime, and his floor was made of yellow bricks. He found himself wearing humble clothing. He was very surprised by this, and asked around to find out why this was. He was told that it was because he was removing goodwill from the church when in fact goodwill is the very heart of the church. Every time it came up, however, he strongly disagreed.

He continued to write about faith as the church's only essential ingredient and the only means of being saved, and he kept creating a greater and greater distance between goodwill and the church. Because he did so, he one day suddenly found himself underground in a workhouse where there were others like him. He wanted to leave, but was prevented from doing so. He was informed that this and nothing else was the final outcome for people who threw goodwill and good works out the church door.

Nevertheless, because he had been one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, he was released from there by command of the Lord and brought back to his old apartment, where there was nothing but a table, some paper, a pen, and some ink.

Because his ideas were set, he once again filled that paper with the same theological error. Therefore there was no way to prevent him from going down again to his friends in confinement and then coming back up again. When he came back up, he was dressed in hairy animal skins, because faith that lacks goodwill is freezing cold.

[4] He told me firsthand that there was another room off his apartment at the back, where people like him who had likewise banished goodwill were sitting at three tables. A fourth table would sometimes appear there as well, with various kinds of monsters on it, but he and the others were for some reason not frightened away by them. He said he was having conversations with the other people, and every day they were giving him further support for his views.

Quite a while later, fear did take hold of him, and he began writing something about goodwill, but what he would write on a piece of paper one day would no longer be visible the next day. (Actually, this can happen to anyone in that world. What the outer self writes without the compliance of the inner self at the same time - therefore what is written under coercion rather than in freedom - spontaneously deletes itself.)

[5] Then the new heaven began to be established by the Lord. In the light from that heaven, Melanchthon began to think that he might actually be in error. He started to feel anxiety about what his final outcome was going to be. He became aware of some deep ideas that had been impressed on him earlier about goodwill. In that state of mind he did some research in the Word. His eyes were opened and he saw that the Word was completely full of loving God and loving our neighbor. He came to see that what the Lord said was true - that all the Law and the Prophets, that is, the Word as a whole, did indeed hinge on these two commandments [Matthew 22:40].

He was then moved to another house much deeper to the south on the western side. He had a conversation with me there, and told me that now his writing about goodwill was not disappearing the way it used to; it would fade somewhat, but it was still legible the following day.

[6] I was surprised by the fact that when he walked, his footsteps made a clanking sound, like someone walking across cobblestones in iron shoes.

To these points I might add that once, when some spirits who had recently arrived from earth came to his apartment to see him and speak with him, he called on one of the magic spirits who had the ability to project images to look like furniture and accessories. That spirit decorated his apartment with apparent wall-hangings, carpets with a rose pattern, and a bookcase in the middle of the room. As soon as the visitors left, all that disappeared, though, and the apartment returned to its bare lime-plastered walls and its stark emptiness. But this happened when he was in that first state.