Heaven and Hell - Swedenborg Foundation

HEAVEN AND HELL 184
persons are visionaries and enthusiasts; and whatever spirit they
hear they believe to be the Holy Spirit, when, in fact, such
spirits are enthusiastic spirits. Such spirits see falsities as truths,
and so seeing them they induce not themselves only but also
those they flow into to believe them. Such spirits, however,
have been gradually removed, because they began to lure others
into evil and to gain control over them. Enthusiastic spirits are
distinguished from other spirits by their believing themselves to
be the Holy Spirit, and believing what they say to be Divine.
As man honors such spirits with Divine worship they do not
attempt to harm him. I have sometimes talked with them, and
the wicked things they infused into their worshipers were then
disclosed. They dwell together toward the left, in a desert place.
250. But to speak with the angels of heaven is granted only
to those who are in truths from good, especially to those who
are in the acknowledgment of the Lord and of the Divine in
his human, because this is the truth in which the heavens are.
For, as it has been shown above, the Lord is the God of heaven
(n. 2–6); it is the Divine of the Lord that makes heaven (n.
7–12); the Divine of the Lord in heaven is love to him and
charity toward the neighbor from him (n. 13–19); the whole
heaven in one complex reflects a single man; also every society
of heaven; and every angel is in complete human form, and this
from the Divine human of the Lord (n. 59–86). All of which
makes evident that only those whose interiors are opened by
Divine Truths, even to the Lord, are able to speak with the
angels of heaven, since it is into these truths with man that the
Lord flows, and when the Lord flows in, heaven also flows in.
Divine truths open the interiors of man because man was so
created as to be in respect to his internal man an image of
heaven, and in respect to his external an image of the world (n.
57); and the internal man is opened only by means of Divine
truth going forth from the Lord, because that is the light of
heaven and the life of heaven (n. 126–140).
251. The influx of the Lord himself into man is into his
forehead, and from that into the whole face, because the