The Bible

 

Genesis 1:26

Study

       

26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Marriage #34

  
/ 126  
  

34. (19) Conjugial love depends upon the wife's love, and such too is the husband's love reciprocally; the wife's love does not depend on her husband's love. The reason is that just as the will acts on the understanding, good acts on truth; that is why it is said that a man ought to cleave to his wife. The reverse is true of those who are not in conjugial love.

  
/ 126  
  

Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.

From Swedenborg's Works

 

Arcana Coelestia #6206

Study this Passage

  
/ 10837  
  

6206. To take the subject further, it should be recognized that all evil flows in from hell and all good from the Lord by way of heaven. The reason however why evil becomes a person's own is that he believes and convinces himself that he thinks and practises it all by himself. In this way he makes it his own. But if he believed what is really so, it would not be evil but good from the Lord that became his own. For if he believed what is really so he would think, the instant evil flowed in, that it came from the evil spirits present with him; and since that was what he thought the angels could ward that evil off and repel it. For influx from angels takes place into what a person knows and believes, not what he does not know or believe; there is nowhere else for it to become firmly established than in something the person knows or believes.

[2] When a person in that way makes some evil his own he acquires the sphere that is a product of that evil. This sphere is what the spirits from hell who have a sphere of like evil around them associate themselves with, for like is linked to like. The spiritual sphere existing with man or spirit is an emanation from the life which belongs to his loves, from which his character is recognized from afar. Their spheres are what determine the ways in which all are joined to one another in the next life, and the ways in which communities are joined too. They also determine the separations that take place, for contrary spheres conflict with and repel one another. Consequently the spheres produced by the loves of what is evil are all in hell, while the spheres produced by the loves of what is good are all in heaven, that is, those dwelling in such spheres are there.

  
/ 10837  
  

Thanks to the Swedenborg Society for the permission to use this translation.