Heaven" and "heavens" are used many times in the Bible, with a couple of variations of meaning. Sometimes it is relatively literal, including times when the Lord is identified with it (“Our Father, who art in the heavens,” for instance), meaning heaven as the eternal home for people who chose to do what is good in this life and let the Lord lead them to a love of being good. In other references, particularly when it is paired with “earth” or other lesser ideas (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” for instance), “heaven” or “heavens” means our internal life as opposed to our external life. In a way, these two meanings are really the same. If you think about the importance of your deepest thoughts and feelings, you can see that they are the “real” you, much more so than your body is. The relationship between the spiritual world and the natural world is similar; the spiritual world is the “real” one, and controls the natural world the same way our thoughts and feeling control our actions. So in both cases, “heaven” describes a deeper reality that we will enter fully after we die.

453. 8. A lust to fornicate is serious in the measure that it looks to adultery. People caught up in the lust of fornication all look to adultery who do not believe adulteries to be sins, and who think the same of marriages as they do of adulteries, with the sole difference that one is allowable and the other not. Such people also take all evils and make of them one evil, mixing them together like filth with edible foods in one dish, or like refuse with wine in one cup, and thus eating and drinking. That is what they do with love for the opposite sex, fornication, resorting to a courtesan, adultery in its milder, serious and more serious forms, even debauchery or defloration. Moreover, they not only mix these things together, but they also mix in marriages and pollute them with the same concept of them. After their accustomed promiscuities with the opposite sex, people who do not distinguish even marriages from those other relationships are overtaken with states of coldness, loathing and revulsion, first toward their married partner, then toward others of the sex, and finally toward the entire sex.

It is evident in itself that such people do not have in them a good or chaste purpose, intention or end to exonerate them, nor a separation of evil from good, or of what is unchaste from what is chaste, to enable them to be purified, as there is in those who from a state of fornication look to conjugial love and prefer it (as described in the preceding article, no. 452).

[2] I am able to corroborate these assertions by the following new confirmation from heaven. I have met many spirits who, in the world, had lived like others in outward appearances - dressing grandly, dining elegantly, doing business like others at a profit, attending theatrical performances, joking about the actions of lovers in a seemingly lustful manner, and other like things. And yet angels attributed these things to some as sinful evils, and to others as not evil, declaring the former guilty, but the latter innocent. Upon my asking the reason for this, when the people had done the same things, the angels replied that they regard everyone in the light of his purpose, intention or end, and make distinctions accordingly; and that they therefore excuse or condemn those whom the end excuses or condemns, since an end for good is the end of all in heaven, and an end for evil the end of all in hell. This, too, they said, and nothing else, is meant by the Lord's words, "Judge not, that you be not condemned." ¹ (Matthew 7:1)

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