1. I. THE WORLDS IN SPACE

By the Lord's Divine mercy I have had my interior faculties, which belong to my spirit, opened, so that I have been enabled to talk with spirits and angels, not only those in the vicinity of our earth, but also with those near other worlds. Since therefore I was desirous of knowing whether there were other inhabited worlds, and what they and their inhabitants were like, I was allowed by the Lord to talk and mix with spirits and angels from other worlds. With some this lasted a day, with others a week, with yet others for months. I was informed by them about the worlds they came from and in the vicinity of which they were, about the life, behaviour and religious practices of their inhabitants, and other matters worth relating about them. Since I was allowed to gain my knowledge in this fashion, I can describe them from what I have heard and seen.

[2] It needs to be known that all spirits and angels are from the human race; ¹ they are near their own world, ² and know what happens there; and they can inform someone whose interior faculties are open sufficiently to be able to talk and mix with them. A human being is in essence a spirit, ³ and associates with spirits at the interior level. ⁴ Consequently anyone whose interior faculties are opened by the Lord can talk with them, exactly as a man can with another man. ⁵ I have been permitted to do this daily for the last twelve years.

फुटनोट:

7803. With regard to the talking of spirits to the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter, there are spirits who chastise, those who instruct, and those who rule them. The spirits who chastise come to the left side of a person's body and lean round towards the back of it. Once they are there they draw from the person's memory all his deeds and thoughts; for spirits do this with ease, because on reaching a person they immediately enter into all his memory, 6192, 6193, 6198, 6199, 6214. If they find that he has behaved badly or thought wrongly they reproach him and also chastise him with pain in the joints of his feet or his hands, or with pain around the region of the epigastrium. Spirits can also do this with great skill when they are allowed to. When such spirits come towards a person they strike horror and fear into him; this is how one knows of their arrival. Evil spirits can strike fear when they approach someone, especially those who were robbers when they lived in the world. To enable me to know how those spirits act when they come towards a member of their planet one such spirit was also allowed to approach me. When he was near I was plainly seized by horror and fear; yet I did not shake inwardly with fear, only outwardly, because I knew he was one of their kind of spirits. I also saw him; he looked like a dark cloud with little moving stars in it, moving stars being a sign of falsities, but fixed stars a sign of truths. He came to my left side towards my back, and also began to reproach me because of my deeds and thoughts, which he drew from my memory and started to misconstrue. But angels who were also present put a stop to what he was doing. When he realized that he was with someone other than a member of his own planet, he began to talk to me, saying that when he went towards a person he learned every single thing that person had done or thought. He reproached that person severely too, and also chastised him with various pains.

6626. Let me recount some marvels. The Lord alone is Man, and it is owing to Him that angels, spirits, and inhabitants of the world are called men. By His own flowing into heaven He causes the whole of heaven to represent and resemble one human being; and through an influx both by way of heaven and directly from Himself into each individual there He causes all to be seen as men, and angels to be seen in a form more beautiful and dazzling than anyone can possibly describe. He does the same for people on earth by flowing into their spirits. Indeed with an angel, spirit, or man who leads a life of charity towards the neighbour and love to the Lord the smallest aspects of all that belong to his thought resemble a human being, for the reason that that charity and that love originate in the Lord, and whatever originates in the Lord resembles a human being. Those qualities are also what constitute a human being. But the contrary applies in hell, because those who are there are fired by the opposites of charity and heavenly love. They do, it is true, look like human beings when seen in their own inferior light, but in the superior light of heaven they look like horrible monsters, in some of whom scarcely anything of the human form is recognizable. The reason for this is that the inflow of the Lord by way of heaven is not accepted but is turned away, or smothered, or perverted, which therefore causes them to be seen as such monsters. And the smallest aspects of their thought, that is, their ideas, similarly possess forms such as these; for what anyone is like as a whole, so he is in part, since the whole and the part are the same in type and nature. The form in which those people are seen is also the form of the hell in which they exist. For every hell has its own form, which in the light of heaven resembles a monster; and when one sees any of those who are from it one recognizes from their form which hell they are from. I have seen them in the gates that lie open into the world of spirits, where they looked like many different kinds of monsters. Regarding the gates of hell, that they lie open into the world of spirits, see 5852.