The number "two" has two different meanings in the Bible. In most cases "two" indicates a joining together or unification. This is easy to see if we consider the conflicts we tend to have between our "hearts" and our "heads" -- between what we want and what we know. Our "hearts" tell us that we want pie with ice cream for dinner; our "heads" tell us we should have grilled chicken and salad. If we can bring those two together and actually want what's good for us, we'll be pretty happy. We're built that way -- with our emotions balanced against our intellect -- because the Lord is built that way. His essence is love itself, or Divine Love, the source of all caring, emotion and energy. It is expressed as Divine Wisdom, which gives form to that love and puts it to work, and is the source of all knowledge and reasoning. In His case the two aspects are always in conjunction, always in harmony. It's easy also to see how that duality is reflected throughout creation: plants and animals, food and drink, silver and gold. Most importantly, it's reflected in the two genders, with women representing love and men representing wisdom. That's the underlying reason why conjunction in marriage is such a holy thing. So when "two" is used in the Bible to indicate some sort of pairing or unity, it means a joining together. In rare cases, however, "two" is used more purely as a number. In these cases it stands for a profane or unholy state that comes before a holy one. This is because "three" represents a state of holiness and completion (Jesus, for instance, rose from the tomb on the third day), and "two" represents the state just before it.

Instead, spiritual reality is structured on the basis of spiritual state, or the loves and thoughts of angels. These loves and thoughts connect in chains of cause and effect, which angels experience much as we experience time. One thought flows into another on the spiritual level, and angels sense that progression the same way we sense the progression of one moment flowing into another. And when angels have thoughts and feelings that are similar, they experience a closeness that is very much the same as our experience of physical closeness; their idea of “space” is the variation in thoughts and affections held by spirits throughout the spiritual world.When the Bible describes something as “after” something else, then, the spiritual meaning has to do with the progression of spiritual states; it is a new spiritual state emerging from the one before it. And since higher states flow into lower states, the things coming “after” tend to be the lower, more external ones. For instance, the deep, internal desire to be good to others flows of its own accord into specific ideas of specific good things we can do. Those specific ideas, then, would be “after” the desire to be good.According to Swedenborg, time and space don’t exist in spiritual reality; they are purely natural things that exist only on the physical plane. This means that one spiritual thing can’t happen “after” another spiritual thing in time, because there is no time. And one spiritual thing can’t follow “after” another in space because there is no space.