The heart means love. A good heart means love to the Lord and to the neighbor, while a hard or stony heart means the love of self or the world -- riches and things. When the psalmist asks the Lord to search his heart, he wants the Lord to see what it is that he loves. And we are what we love. What we eat may form our earthly body, but it's only temporary, what we love forms our spiritual body, beautiful or ugly as we have chosen. It's interesting to note that the first multi-cellular motion of our embryo is the pulsating that starts in a twist of blood vessel that is to become our heart, and the last motion of our natural body is our heartbeat. It is there for all of our natural life. And of course there is a beating heart in our spiritual bodies when we come to put them on.

171. There is no way to describe briefly how things look to angels in the heavens. To a considerable extent, they look like the things we see on earth, but they are more perfect in form and also more abundant.

We may conclude that there are things like this in the heavens because of what the prophets saw - for example what Ezekiel saw of the new temple and the new earth as described in chapters 40-48 [of his book], what Daniel describes in his chapters 7-12, what John saw as described from the first through the last chapter of Revelation, along with other visions presented in both the historical and the prophetic books of the Word. They saw things like this when heaven was opened to them, and heaven is said to be opened when our inner sight, the sight of our spirit, is opened. For the things that exist in heaven cannot be seen with our physical eyes, but only with the eyes of our spirit; and when it pleases the Lord, these are opened. At such times we are led out of the natural light that our physical senses are in and raised into the spiritual light in which we dwell because of our spirit. This is the light in which I have seen the things that exist in the heavens.