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:

5179. On one occasion I experienced an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach, which told me that spirits of that kind were present. I spoke to them, telling them that it would be better if they went away, because their sphere which created the feeling of anxiety was not compatible with the spheres of the spirits who were residing with me. At that time I talked to them about spheres, to the effect that many spiritual spheres surround a person but that people neither know nor wish to know about the existence of them, for the reason that they deny the existence of everything that is called spiritual, some denying the existence of everything that cannot be actually seen or touched. So I went on to say that certain spheres from the spiritual world surround a person, spheres that are in keeping with the life he leads, and that by means of these he exists in the company of spirits whose affection is similar to his own. Those spheres, I added, were also what gave rise to very many things, the existence of which is denied by the person who attributes everything to natural forces or else is ascribed by him to some rather more hidden natural cause such as chance. For experience leads some people to feel quite convinced that some hidden force is at work which they call chance, though they do not know the origin of that force. The fact that its origin exists in a spiritual sphere and that it is the last and lowest degree of Providence will in the Lord's Divine mercy be described elsewhere, when I shall draw on experience to bear witness to it.