18. 'The face ¹ of the deep' is that person's desires and resulting falsities, of which he consists and in which he is completely absorbed; and because he has no light at all he is like the deep, or something thoroughly obscure. Throughout the Word such people are also called 'the deep' and 'the depths of the sea' which are dried up or laid waste until a person's regeneration starts, as in Isaiah,

Awake as in the days of antiquity, the generations of long ago. Was it not You that did dry up the sea, the waters of the great deep; making the depths of the sea a road for the redeemed to go across? Let the ransomed of Jehovah return. Isaiah 51:9-11.

Furthermore, when looked at from heaven, this kind of person resembles a darkened mass with no life to it. The same expressions embody within them in general the vastation in man, described many times by the Prophets, which precedes regeneration. For before a person can know what truth is, or be moved by good, the things that hinder and offer resistance must be removed. Thus the old man must die before the new one can be conceived.

Footnotes:

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.