Emmanuel Swedenborg Quotes

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth — the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture.

The inner self is as distinct from the outer self as heaven is from earth.

Further still, heaven is where the Lord is recognized, trusted, and loved. The different ways he is worshiped — in variations that stem from the difference of activity from one community to another — do not cause harm but bring benefit, because they are a source of heaven’s perfection.

Soon afterward I saw a spirit falling down from heaven. I went over to him and asked why he had fallen out of heaven like that. He answered that Michael’s angels had thrown him down, because he had said that God the Father and his Son are two, not one. He said that the entire angelic heaven believes that God the Father and his Son are one as a soul and a body are one — a point the angels support with many passages from the Word. They also use rational argumentation as support: they say the Son’s soul came from nowhere else but the Father; therefore that soul was an image of the Father, and the body that came from it contained that image. He added that when he was in heaven he of course spoke of one God, just as he used to do on earth; but because his verbal statements to this effect did not match what he was thinking, the angels said he did not believe in any God, because the two views cancel each other out. He said this was why he was thrown out of heaven.

Since the Bible is a divine revelation, every single part of it is divine. Anything that comes from the divine could be no other way. Everything that comes from the divine goes down through the heavens all the way to people on earth. In heaven it is adapted to the wisdom of the angels there, and on earth it is adapted to the understanding of the people there. So the Bible has an inner, spiritual meaning for angels and an outer, material-level meaning for people on earth. That is why our connection to heaven happens through the Bible.

Goodwill has something in common with each of these categories of love, because goodwill is by definition a love for usefulness of all kinds. Goodwill wants to do what is good for our neighbor, and goodness is the same as usefulness. Each of the categories of love just mentioned have usefulness as their goal: love for heaven has the goal of being useful in spiritual ways; love for the world has the goal of being useful in earthly ways, which could also be called forms of civil service; and love for ourselves has the goal of being useful in physical ways, which could also be labeled benefits at home for ourselves and our loved ones.

What could be sweeter to us than to hear and persuade ourselves that we can be saved, even if we live like a savage beast? Even non-Christians see that this is false, and many of them shudder at Christian teachings when they observe how Christians live.

We can see that this underlies all perfection from every instance of beauty, charm, and delight that moves both our senses and our spirits. Such instances arise and flow invariably from a harmonious agreement of many things that are in sympathetic concord, whether they are together simultaneously or follow in a sequence. They do not flow from a single unit that lacks plurality. So we say that variety delights, and recognize that the delight depends on the quality of the variety. We can see from this, as though in a mirror, how perfection stems from variety in heaven as well, since things that happen in the natural world offer us a reflection of things in the spiritual world.d

Others work among the spirits that have just arrived in the world of spirits. Again others raise the children who have died in infancy. Swedenborg ensures the parents of these infants that 'All children whether born within or outside of the church, are adopted by the Lord and become Angels'.

Kindness is an inner desire that makes us want to do good things even if we do not get anything in return. It is the joy of our life to do them. When we do good things from this inner desire, there is kindness in everything we think, say, want, and do.

All religion relates to life, and the life of religion is to do good.

El Señor no envía a nadie al infierno, es el mismo espíritu el que se arroja a él.

for every man’s soul is in a spiritual body after it has cast off the material coverings which it carried about in the world.

At the end, the council brought all its discussions together into a single conclusion: The divine Trinity exists within the Lord the Savior; the Trinity is made up of the divine nature as an origin called “the Father,” the divine human manifestation called “the Son,” and the emanating divine influence called “the Holy Spirit”; therefore there is one God in the church. After the council came to an end, the participants were given shining clothing and were led to the new heaven.

The opposite happens if we remain earthly. Then we greatly desire to rule heaven from our world. All who have a love for power that comes from loving themselves are like this. If we are examined inwardly, it is discovered that we do not believe in any god, but only in ourselves. After death, we believe that we are a god who has greater power than others. This is the kind of insanity that exists in hell. It falls to such a depth that some there say they are God the Father, some say they are God the Son, and others say they are God the Holy Spirit. Some Jews there say they are the Messiah.