47. Divine love and wisdom cannot fail to be and to be manifested in others that it has created. The hallmark of love is not loving ourselves but loving others and being united to them through love. The hallmark of love is also being loved by others because this is how we are united. Truly, the essence of all love is to be found in union, in the life of love that we call joy, delight, pleasure, sweetness, blessedness, contentment, and happiness.

The essence of love is that what is ours should belong to someone else. Feeling the joy of someone else as joy within ourselves--that is loving. Feeling our joy in others, though, and not theirs in ourselves is not loving. That is loving ourselves, while the former is loving our neighbor. These two kinds of love are exact opposites. True, they both unite us; and it does not seem as though loving what belongs to us, or loving ourselves in the other, is divisive. Yet it is so divisive that to the extent that we love others in this way we later harbor hatred for them. Step by step our union with them dissolves, and the love becomes hatred of corresponding intensity.

88. Since there is the kind of distinction described in 83 between what is spiritual and what is physical, not a trace of anything from the sun of the physical world can cross over into the spiritual world--that is, not a trace of its light and warmth or of any object on earth. The light of the physical world is darkness there, and its warmth is death there. Still, our world's warmth can be brought to life by an inflow of heaven's warmth, and our world's light can be brightened by an inflow of heaven's light. This inflow happens by means of correspondences, and cannot happen as a result of continuity.