1880. Furthermore, to speak generally of spirits and angels, who are all human souls living on after the death of their body, they have much sharper senses than people do: sight, hearing, smell, and touch, but not taste. 1
However, it is impossible for spirits (much less angels) to see anything in this world by their power of sight, or in other words, by the eyes of their spirit. To them the light of the world, or of the sun, is like thick darkness. By the same token, it is impossible for us to see anything in the other world by our power of sight, or in other words, with the eyes of our body. To us the light of heaven, or of heaven's Lord, is like thick darkness.
[2] Still, when it pleases the Lord, spirits and angels can see objects in the world through the eyes of a person on earth. This is an experience the Lord does not grant except to a person whom he allows to speak with spirits and angels and to associate with them. Through my eyes they were allowed to see objects in the world, and to see them as clearly as I did. They were also allowed to hear people talking with me. More than once a few of them saw friends they had had during bodily life. Looking through my eyes, they saw these people just as close at hand as before, and it stupefied them. They also saw their spouses and little children and wanted me to tell their loved ones they were present and could see them, and to relay how matters stood for them in the other world. But I was forbidden to talk to these people and reveal that they were being watched in this way. Besides, they would have called me crazy or believed me to be hallucinating, because I knew that although they would pay lip service to the idea that spirits exist and the dead have risen again, they would not believe it in their hearts.
[3] When my inner sight first opened, and they saw the world and all that is in it through my eyes, spirits and angels were so dumbfounded that they called it the miracle of miracles. They were moved by a new kind of joy at the thought that earth would have this kind of contact with heaven, and heaven with earth. This pleasure lasted several months, but now that the experience has grown familiar, they no longer marvel at all.
I was taught that the spirits and angels present with other people do not see anything in the world at all but only pick up on the thoughts and feelings of those they are with.
[4] These experiences established the idea that we were created to live in heaven among the angels at the same time as we are living on the earth among people, and vice versa. If that happened, heaven and earth would come together and form a single whole. We would know what was going on in heaven, and angels would know what was going on in the world. When we died, we would then be crossing over from the Lord's kingdom on earth to the Lord's kingdom in the heavens. It would not be as though we were passing into a different kingdom but into the same one we inhabited while we were living in our body. Instead we have become so body-oriented that we have shut heaven off from ourselves.
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