Afterlife: A Guided Tour of Heaven and Its Wonders - Swedenborg ...

Heaven
come from, whether nearby or remote. This language is
not learned but is innate; it flows from their very affection
and thought. The sound of the language corresponds to
their affection and the articulations of the sound—the
words, that is—correspond to the mental constructs that
arise from their affections. Since their language corre -
sponds to these [inner events], it too is spiritual, for it is
audi ble affection and vocal thinking.
It is recognized that all people have various affections or
moods—one in times of happiness, another in times of
sorrow, another in times of tenderness and compassion,
another in times of honesty and truth, another in times of
love and thoughtfulness, another in times of zeal or anger,
another in times of pretense and guile, another in times of
ambition for respect and adulation, and so on; but there is
a dominant affection or love within all of these, so since
the wiser angels perceive this, they know from conversa -
tion the whole state of another person.
I have been granted knowledge of this through an abun -
dance of experience. I have heard angels discover a per -
son’s life simply by listening. They have told me that they
know everything about another person’s life from a few
individual ideas because these enable them to know the
person’s ruling love, which contains everything in a pat -
tern. This is all that our “book of life” is.
Angelic language has nothing in common with human
lan guage except with a few of our words whose sound
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