268. We may gather how great angels' wisdom is from the fact that in heaven there is a communication that involves everyone. The intelligence and wisdom of one individual is shared with another: heaven is where everyone shares everything of value. This is because the very nature of heavenly love is to want what is one's own to belong to another; so no one in heaven regards his or her good as authentically good unless it is someone else's as well. This is also the basis of heaven's happiness. Angels are led into it by the Lord, whose divine love has this same quality.

I have also been granted knowledge, by experience, of this kind of communication in the heavens. Once some simple people were taken up into heaven, and after they had arrived, they arrived also at an angelic wisdom. They understood things they could not grasp before and said things they could not express in their former state.

5920. 'And the eyes of my brother Benjamin' means especially as a result of perception by the intermediary. This is clear from the meaning of 'the eyes' and 'seeing' as understanding and consequently perceiving, as above in 5919; and from the representation of 'Benjamin' as the intermediary, dealt with in 5411, 5413, 5443, 5639, 5688, 5822. The implications of this are as follows: Because 'Benjamin' represented the intermediary - and this intermediary was interior truth, 5600, 5631, directly dependent on internal good, represented by 'Joseph' - it possessed a clearer and sharper perception than that possessed by the truths beneath it, that is, by the external truths which his ten brothers represented. For the closer truth and good are to the internal, the more perfect is their power of perception; they are nearer the centre of the light in heaven and so are closer to the Lord. For the flow of Divine Good and Truth from the Lord passes through continuous degrees that serve as mediators to one another and are so positioned one after another. As a consequence people who dwell in the first or initial degrees receive the flow with clearer perception, because they are nearer the source, than those who dwell in the middle or outermost degrees. Like light goodness and truth become progressively dimmer at distances away from their source; for the increasingly imperfect things that exist in consecutive degrees make them duller. From all this one may see how to understand the idea of attesting especially as a result of perception by the intermediary; for the intermediary is more internal, while the truths represented by 'Jacob's sons' are more external.

5639. 'And Joseph saw Benjamin with them' means the discernment by the celestial of the spiritual that the spiritual intermediary was present with the truths. This is clear from the meaning of 'seeing' as understanding and discerning, dealt with in 2150, 2807, 3764, 4567, 4723, 5400; from the representation of the ten sons of Jacob - to whom 'with them', that is, the ones whom Joseph saw Benjamin with, refers - as the truths within the natural, dealt with in 5403, 5419, 5427, 5458, 5512; and from the representation of 'Benjamin' as the intermediary, dealt with in 5411, 5413, 5443. The reason the expression 'spiritual intermediary' is used here is that the truths which are represented by 'the ten sons of Jacob' had now to be joined to truth from the Divine, which was 'Joseph'; but that joining together does not take place except through an intermediary that is a spiritual one. Therefore immediately after that intermediary had been recognized, Joseph told the man over his house, 'Bring the men to the house, and slaughter and prepare [an animal]; for the men will eat with me at midday', meaning that they would be brought in and joined to him because they were accompanied by the intermediary.

[2] A further brief statement needs to be made about what the spiritual compared with the natural is since the majority living in the Christian world do not know what the spiritual is. They are so ignorant of what it is that when they hear the term they are at a loss, saying to themselves, What the spiritual is, no one knows. Essentially the spiritual existing with a person is his actual affection for what is good and true, loved for its own sake and not for any selfish reason, as well as an affection for what is right and fair, likewise loved for its own sake and not for any selfish reason. When a person has inward feelings of delight and pleasure, and more so if feelings of blessedness and bliss flow from them, they constitute the spiritual present with him, which does not come to him from the natural world but from the spiritual world or heaven, that is, from the Lord by way of heaven. This then is the spiritual which, when it reigns in a person, influences and so to speak gives colour to everything he thinks, wills, or does, and which causes his thoughts and acts of will to partake of what is spiritual, till at length these too become spiritual qualities present with him when he passes from the natural world into the spiritual world. In short, the spiritual consists in an affection stirred by charity and faith, that is, an affection for what is good and true, and in the delight and pleasure, and even more so in the blessedness and bliss that flow from them, which are feelings residing with a person inwardly and making him someone truly Christian.

[3] The majority in the Christian world are ignorant of what the spiritual is for the reason that they make faith, not charity, the essential virtue in the Church. Consequently, since the few who do bother about faith give little if any thought at all to charity or know what charity is, and since therefore they have no knowledge or any perception of the affection characteristic of charity, an affection that is not present in them, they cannot possibly know what the spiritual is. This is especially so at the present day when scarcely any charity exists with anyone, for now is the final period of the Church. But it should be recognized that in a general sense the spiritual means an affection both for what is good and for what is true, which is why heaven is called the spiritual world and the internal sense of the Word is called the spiritual sense. But more specifically what is essentially an affection for good is called the celestial, while that which is essentially an affection for truth is called the spiritual.