A company might have executives setting policy and strategy, engineers designing products, managers handling personnel and others handling various functions. They all do different things -- but if they're doing them with a shared underlying purpose, the company -- and the individuals in it -- will likely be successful. The Lord wants all human society to function in a similar way. We have different skills and individual loves, but if we all share a mutual love -- a love of serving others -- then society will function as one, will be a reflection of heaven and will be a good receptacle for the Lord's love. This can also happen within each of us, as we unify our talents and ideas around a central love. And in an abstract sense, it illustrates how a wide collection of varying ideas can be unified around a shared good intention. That is the kind of love pictured when “one” is used in the Bible, either as a specific number or in the sense of several people or objects “being one.” In more casual references -- when used to identify a specific person or object -- the meaning is relatively literal, and is connected to that person or object.

2728. Now because few at the present day know what genuine conjugial love is, as has been stated, that love will now be described from things that have been disclosed to me. Conjugial love has its origin in the marriage of Divine Good and Truth, and so in the Lord Himself. But the derivation of conjugial love from that marriage cannot be seen by man, neither by sensory perception nor by mental apprehending; but it may nevertheless become clear to him from influx and from correspondence, as well as from the Word. It may become clear from influx, in that from the union of good and truth which flow in from the Lord, heaven is compared to a marriage, and is called a marriage; from correspondence, in that when good united to truth flows down into a lower sphere it presents itself as a union of minds, and when it flows down into a lower sphere still it presents itself as a marriage. Consequently the union of minds springing from good united to truth from the Lord is conjugial love itself.