17. All my experience in heaven bears witness to the fact that the divine nature that comes from the Lord, affects angels, and constitutes heaven, is love. In fact, all the people there are forms of love and thoughtfulness. They look indescribably beautiful. Love radiates from their faces, from their speech, from every detail of their behavior. ¹

Further, there are surrounding auras of spiritual life that emanate from every angel and from every spirit and envelop them. By means of these auras one can recognize even from a distance the quality of the affections of their loves, since these auras flow out from the life of their affection and consequent thought - that is, from the life of their love and consequent faith. The auras that emanate from angels are so full of love that they touch the deepest reaches of life of the people they meet. I have been aware of them a number of times, and they have moved me deeply. ²

I have been able to see that love was the source of angels' life because all the people in the other life turn in a direction determined by their own love. People engaged in a love for the Lord and a love for their neighbor are constantly turning toward the Lord, while people who are engaged in self-love are constantly turning their backs to the Lord. This holds true no matter which way they turn, since in the other life spatial relationships are determined by people's inner natures. These also determine geographical regions, whose boundaries are not drawn the way they are in the physical world but depend on which way people are facing. Actually, it is not angels who turn to the Lord but the Lord who turns toward himself the people who love to do whatever has its source in him. ³ , But there will be more on this subject below, when we discuss geographical regions in the other life.

Footnotes:

938. 22:4 They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. This symbolically means that they will turn to the Lord and the Lord to them, being conjoined by love.

To see the face of God and the Lamb, or the face of the Lord, does not mean to see His face, because no one can see the Lord's face such as He is in His Divine love and wisdom and live, for He is the sun of heaven and of the whole spiritual world. Indeed, to see His face as He is in Himself would be like entering the sun and being consumed in a moment by its fire. Nevertheless, the Lord sometimes presents Himself to be seen outside of the sun, but He veils Himself then and so presents Himself to those who see Him, which He does by means of an angel, as He did also in the world when He appeared to Abraham, Hagar, Lot, Gideon, Joshua, and others. That is why those angels are called angels and also Jehovah, for Jehovah was present in them from afar.

[2] Here, however, that His servants will see His face does not mean that they will see His face in this way, but that they will see the truths from Him contained in the Word and will know and acknowledge Him by means of them. For the Divine truths in the Word provide the light that emanates from the Lord as a sun, the light which angels enjoy, and because those truths provide the light, they are like mirrors in which the face of the Lord is seen. That to see the Lord's face symbolically means to turn to Him, will be explained below.

The Lord's name being on the servants' foreheads means, symbolically, that the Lord loves them and turns them to Him. The Lord's name symbolizes the Lord Himself, because it symbolizes His every attribute by which He is known and in consequence of which He is worshiped (nos. 81, 584). The forehead symbolizes love (nos. 347, 605), and being written on the forehead symbolizes the Lord's love in them (no. 729). It can be seen from this what is properly meant by the statement here.

[3] The statement, moreover, symbolically means that they will turn themselves to the Lord and the Lord to them, because the Lord gazes upon the forehead of all those who are conjoined with Him by love and so turns them to Him. Consequently, in heaven angels turn their faces only to the Lord as the sun, and this is astonishingly the case in whatever direction they turn physically. So people say in common speech that they have God ever before their eyes. The same is the case with the spirit of a person living in the world and conjoined with the Lord by love. But regarding this turning of the face to the Lord, more accounts may be seen in Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Love and Wisdom, nos. 129-144 and in the book Heaven and Hell (London, 1758), nos. 17 123, 143, 144, 151, 153, 255, 272.