492. As to the first state, the state of more outward concerns, we arrive in this immediately after our death. Everyone has more outward and more inward aspects of the spirit. We use the outer aspects of our spirit to adapt our bodies in the world - especially our faces, speech, and behavior - to our interactions with other people. The more inward aspects of our spirit are the ones proper to our intentions and consequent thought, which rarely show in our faces, speech, and behavior. We are trained from infancy to present ourselves as friendly, benevolent, and honest, and to conceal the thoughts of our own intentions. So we acquire a habitual lifestyle that is outwardly moral and civil no matter what we are like inwardly. As a result of this habitual behavior, we scarcely know our own inner natures and pay no attention to them.

55. Everything in the created universe is a recipient of the Divine love and wisdom of the human God. People know that each and every constituent of the universe has been created by God. Therefore the universe with each and every thing in it is called in the Word the work of the hands of Jehovah. ¹

There are people who maintain that the world in its entirety was created out of nothing, and the idea they entertain of nothing is one of absolutely nothing, even though out of absolutely nothing comes nothing, nor can anything be produced from it. This is an immutable truth. Therefore the universe - being an image of God and thus full of God - could only have been created in God from God. For God is being itself, and from being must come whatever is. To create from nothing, which has no being, something that is, is completely contradictory.

[2] Still, however, whatever is created in God from God is not a continuous extension of Him, for God is being in itself, and created things do not have in them any being in itself. If created things were to have in them any being in itself, it would be an extension of God, and an extension of God is God.

The angelic idea of this is as follows, that what is created in God from God is like something which in the case of a person had originated from his life, but from which the life has been withdrawn, which is such as to accord with his life, but still is not his life. This angels affirm on the evidence of many testifications which occur in their heaven, where they say that they are in God and God in them, and yet have in their being nothing of God which is God. (We will report further testifications on whose evidence they affirm this in subsequent discussions. Let what we have said here serve simply to inform.)

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