Time is an aspect of the physical world, but it is not an aspect of the spiritual world. The same is true of space: There is no space in heaven. This is hard for us to grasp or even visualize, because we live in physical bodies with physical senses that are filled with physical elements existing in time and space. Our minds are schooled and patterned in terms of time and space, and have no reference point to imagine a reality without them. Consider how you think for a second. In your mind you can immediately be in your past or in some speculative future; in your mind you can circle the globe seeing other lands and faraway friends, or even zoom instantly to the most distant stars. Such imaginings are insubstantial, of course, but if we could make them real we would be getting close to what spiritual reality is like. Indeed, the mind is like a spiritual organ, which may be why physicians and philosophers have had such a hard time juxtaposing its functions to those of the brain. What this means in the Bible is that descriptions of time -- hours, days, weeks, months, years and even simply the word "time" itself -- represent spiritual states, and the passing of time represents the change of spiritual states. Again, we can see this a little bit within our minds. If we imagine talking to one friend then talking to another, it feels like going from one place to another, even though we're not moving. The same is true if we picture a moment from childhood and then imagine something in the future; it feels like a movement through time even though it's instantaneous. Changing our state of mind feels like a physical change in space and time. The Bible simply reverses that, with marking points in space and time representing particular states of mind.

73. Divinity is in all time, nontemporally. Just as Divinity is in all space nonspatially, it is in all time nontemporally. Nothing proper to the physical world can be attributed to Divinity, and space and time are proper to the physical world. Space in the physical world can be measured, and so can time. Time is measured in days, weeks, months, years, and centuries; days are measured in hours; weeks and months in days; years in the four seasons; and centuries in years. The physical world gets these measurements from the apparent circuit and rotation of earth's sun.

It is different in the spiritual world. Life does seem to go on in time there in much the same way. People live with each other the way we do on earth, which cannot happen without some appearance of time. However, time there is not divided into segments the way it is in our world because their sun is always in its east. It never moves. It is actually the Lord's divine love that angels see as their sun. This means that they do not have days, weeks, months, years, or centuries, but states of life instead. It provides them with divisions that cannot be called divisions into time segments, only divisions of state. This is why angels do not know what time is, and why they think of state when time is mentioned. Further, when it is state that determines time, time is only an appearance. A pleasant state makes time seem brief, and an unpleasant one makes it seem long. We can therefore see that time in the spiritual world is simply an attribute of state.

This is why hours, days, weeks, months, and years in the Word mean states and their sequences, viewed either serially or comprehensively. When the church is described in terms of time, its morning is its initial state, its noon is its fulfillment, its evening is its decline, and its night is its end. The same holds true for the four seasons of the year: spring, summer, fall, and winter.