20. Anyone who has learned about God's order can also understand that man was created so as to become an angel, because in him order reaches its ultimate stage (see 9 above). In this stage something of the wisdom of heaven and the angels can be formed, and it can be reconstituted and multiplied. God's order never stops half-way, and forms anything there without the ultimate stage; for it is not in its fullness and perfection unless it goes to the ultimate. But when it is there, then it takes shape and uses the means at its disposal there to reconstitute and extend itself, which it does by reproduction. The ultimate is therefore the seed-bed of heaven.

This too is what is meant by the description of man and his creation in the first chapter of Genesis:

God said, Let us make ¹ man in our image, according to our likeness. And God created man in His image, in the image of God did He create him. Male and female He created them; and God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply. Genesis 1:26-28.

Creating in the image of God and in the likeness of God means conferring on him the whole of God's order from first to last, and so making him an angel as regards the interiors of his mind.

Фусноте:

10. It will be established in the next chapter [14-22] that the human race is the seed-bed of heaven. There it will be shown that heaven and hell are from the human race, which is thus the seed-bed of heaven. It needs to be said by way of preface that just as up to the present, that is, from the earliest time of creation, heaven has been formed from the human race, it will go on hereafter being so formed and enriched.

[2] It is possible that the human race might perish on planet; this happens if it utterly cuts itself off from the Divine. For then human beings no longer have a spiritual life, but only the natural kind of life animals have. People in that state could not form a community or be held in check by laws, since people lacking the influence of heaven, and consequently God's control, would be mad, rushing without restraint into every kind of wickedness and falling one upon another.

[3] But although the human race might by losing contact with the Divine perish upon one planet, an event, however, guarded against by the Lord, it would still exist on other planets. For there are in the universe as many as some hundreds of thousands of planets; on this see my short book ON THE EARTHS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM, CALLED PLANETS, AND THE EARTHS IN THE STARRY SKY. I have had word from heaven that the human race on this earth would have perished, so that not a single person would survive to-day, if the Lord had not come into the world and on this earth put on His Humanity and made it Divine. This would also have happened, if the Lord had not placed here a Word, which might serve as a basis and a link for the heaven of angels. On the Word as a link between heaven and men see HEAVEN AND HELL 303-310. The truth of this can only be grasped by those who think in a spiritual fashion, those, that is, who by their acknowledgment of the Divine in the Lord are linked with heaven; these are the only people who can think in a spiritual fashion.