1024. The symbolism of with you as a spiritual person who has been reborn is established by a plethora of earlier statements to the effect that Noah and his sons symbolize a spiritual church that took the place of the earliest, heavenly church [§§597-598, 605, 726, 765, 788:1, 851]. Since they symbolize a church, they symbolize every member of that church and so a spiritual person who has been reborn.
Secrets of Heaven #252
252. The meaning of the woman as the church can be seen from the heavenly marriage described above in §155. The heavenly marriage is a relationship in which heaven (and so the church) is united to the Lord through its sense of self. In fact heaven and the church are to be found in the feeling of independent existence, because without it there could never be union. When the Lord in his mercy infuses our selfhood with innocence, peace, and goodness, it still seems to be our own, but it becomes heavenly and full of the greatest blessings, as you may see above at §164.
I cannot yet say, though, what a heavenly, angelic identity received from the Lord is like, nor a hellish, diabolical identity generated by ourselves. 1 The difference between them is like the difference between heaven and hell.
Footnotes:
1. Later on in the work Swedenborg does explore the nature of heavenly and hellish identity; see §§694, 1044, 1049, 1594:5, 3812-3813, 3994:1, 5660:3, 8497. [LHC]
