938. 22:4 They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. This symbolically means that they will turn to the Lord and the Lord to them, being conjoined by love.

To see the face of God and the Lamb, or the face of the Lord, does not mean to see His face, because no one can see the Lord's face such as He is in His Divine love and wisdom and live, for He is the sun of heaven and of the whole spiritual world. Indeed, to see His face as He is in Himself would be like entering the sun and being consumed in a moment by its fire. Nevertheless, the Lord sometimes presents Himself to be seen outside of the sun, but He veils Himself then and so presents Himself to those who see Him, which He does by means of an angel, as He did also in the world when He appeared to Abraham, Hagar, Lot, Gideon, Joshua, and others. That is why those angels are called angels and also Jehovah, for Jehovah was present in them from afar.

[2] Here, however, that His servants will see His face does not mean that they will see His face in this way, but that they will see the truths from Him contained in the Word and will know and acknowledge Him by means of them. For the Divine truths in the Word provide the light that emanates from the Lord as a sun, the light which angels enjoy, and because those truths provide the light, they are like mirrors in which the face of the Lord is seen. That to see the Lord's face symbolically means to turn to Him, will be explained below.

The Lord's name being on the servants' foreheads means, symbolically, that the Lord loves them and turns them to Him. The Lord's name symbolizes the Lord Himself, because it symbolizes His every attribute by which He is known and in consequence of which He is worshiped (nos. 81, 584). The forehead symbolizes love (nos. 347, 605), and being written on the forehead symbolizes the Lord's love in them (no. 729). It can be seen from this what is properly meant by the statement here.

[3] The statement, moreover, symbolically means that they will turn themselves to the Lord and the Lord to them, because the Lord gazes upon the forehead of all those who are conjoined with Him by love and so turns them to Him. Consequently, in heaven angels turn their faces only to the Lord as the sun, and this is astonishingly the case in whatever direction they turn physically. So people say in common speech that they have God ever before their eyes. The same is the case with the spirit of a person living in the world and conjoined with the Lord by love. But regarding this turning of the face to the Lord, more accounts may be seen in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Love and Wisdom, nos. 129-144 and in the book Heaven and Hell (London, 1758), nos. 17 123, 143, 144, 151, 153, 255, 272.

151. The opposite holds for the people who are in the hells. The people there do not focus on the Lord as the sun or the moon, but look away from the Lord toward that dark object that occupies the place of our world's sun and the gloomy object that occupies the place of earth's moon. The ones called demons look toward the dark object in our sun's place, and the ones called spirits toward the gloomy object in our moon's place. ¹ As explained in 122 above, the sun of our world and earth's moon are not visible in the spiritual world, but in place of our sun there is something dark opposite heaven's sun and something gloomy opposite heaven's moon. This means that hell's inhabitants have directions opposite to those of heaven. Their east is where they see that dark or gloomy object and their west is where heaven's sun is. Their south is to their right and their north to their left, no matter which way they turn their bodies. Nothing else is possible for them, because the whole tendency of their deeper natures, their whole orientation therefore, aims and strives in this direction. On the fact that love is what determines the tendency of our deeper natures and therefore the orientation of everyone's actions in the other life, see 143. The love of people in the hells is a love for oneself and for the world, these loves being what is meant by the sun of this world and earth's moon (see 122). Further, these loves are opposite to love for the Lord and love for one's neighbor. ² This is why they turn toward the darkness, away from the Lord.

The people who are in the hells also live arranged according to the cardinal directions. The ones who are obsessed with evils that arise from love for themselves are along the east-west axis, and the ones who are obsessed with falsifications for the sake of evil are along the south-north axis. There will be more about them later, though, where we discuss the hells.

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