904. That 'God spoke to Noah' means the Lord's presence with the member of the Church becomes clear from the internal sense of the Word. The Lord speaks to everybody, for whatever good and truth a person wills and thinks comes from the Lord. With everyone there are at least two evil spirits and two angels. The former activate his evils whereas the latter instill goods and truths. Every good or truth that angels instill is the Lord's; in this way the Lord is constantly speaking to man, though quite differently from one person to the next. To people who allow themselves to be carried away by evil spirits the Lord speaks as though He were not present, or so far away that He can hardly be said to be speaking. But to those who are being led by the Lord, the Lord speaks as one who is quite present. This becomes clear enough from the fact that nobody can possibly think of anything good and true except from the Lord.

[2] The Lord's presence is relative to the state of love towards the neighbour and of faith present in a person. It is in love towards the neighbour that the Lord is present, for He is present in all good, and not so much in so-called faith that is devoid of love. Faith devoid of love and charity is something severed or disjoined. Wherever conjunction exists there has to be a conjoining agency, which is exclusively love and charity. This may become clear to anyone from the fact that the Lord has compassion on everybody, loves everyone, and wishes to make everyone eternally happy. A person therefore who is devoid of the kind of love that leads him to have compassion on others, to love them, and to wish to make them happy, cannot be joined to the Lord because he is not at all like Him, and is in no sense the image of Him. Looking to the Lord by means of that which goes by the name of faith while hating the neighbour amounts not only to standing a long way off, but also to having between himself and the Lord a hell-like chasm into which the person would fall if he wished to go any nearer. For it is hatred towards the neighbour that constitutes that intervening hell-like chasm.

[3] The Lord is present with a person the moment he starts to love the neighbour. It is in love that the Lord is present, and to the extent that a person has love the Lord is present. And to the extent that the Lord is present He speaks to man. No one knows anything other than that he thinks from himself. Yet he possesses not one single idea of thought, not even the shred of an idea, from himself. Rather that which is evil and false he possesses through evil spirits from hell, and that which is good and true through angels from the Lord. Such is influx, the channel by which a person's life comes and by which consequently his soul interacts with the body. All these considerations make clear what 'God spoke to Noah' means. 'Saying to someone' means one thing, as in Genesis 1:29; 3:13-14, 17; 4:6, 9, 15; 6:13; 7:1, while 'speaking to someone' means another. Here speaking to Noah' means His being present, for the subject now is the regenerate person, who has had charity conferred on him.

3889. To enable me to know not only that there is a correspondence of celestial things, which are those of love, with the motions of the heart, and of spiritual things, which are those of faith derived from love, with the motions of the lungs, but also the nature of this correspondence, I was allowed to spend a significant amount of time with angels who were to demonstrate this to me visually. By means of wonderful circular movements, impossible to describe, they formed a resemblance of the heart and a resemblance of the lungs, including all the intricate interior and exterior parts which the heart and lungs possess. They traced the spontaneous flow of heaven, for heaven strives to exhibit that form from the influx into itself of love from the Lord. In this manner each individual part of the heart was exhibited, and after that the union of the heart and the lungs, which union they also represented by means of the marriage of good and truth. From this also it was evident that the heart corresponds to the celestial element of good and the lungs to the spiritual element of truth, and that the material form in which the two exist joined together is the heart and lungs. I was also told that the same applies throughout the whole body, that is, to things of the heart and those of the lungs within all the individual members, organs, and viscera of the body. For where the two are not acting together but each one by turns separately, no motion of life belonging in any way in the will can exist there nor any feeling of life beginning in any way in the understanding there.