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

Heaven
flowed from their own memory into the images of these
peo ple’s thoughts.
Written Materials in Heaven
Since angels do have language and their language is one
of words, they also have written materials; and through
those written materials just as through their conversa -
tion, they express what their minds are sensing. I have
sometimes been sent pages covered with writing, just like
pages handwritten or printed and published in our world.
I could even read them in much the same way, but I was
not allowed to get more out of them than a bit of meaning
here and there. This was because it is not in keeping with
the divine design to be taught by written materials from
heaven, but [only] by the Word, since this is the sole
means of communication and union between heaven and
earth, and therefore between the Lord and humanity.
The occurrence of written materials in the heavens is
provided by the Lord for the sake of the Word, for in its
essence the Word is the divine truth from which both
angels and people on earth get all their wisdom. It has in
fact been spoken by the Lord, and what is spoken by the
Lord passes through all the heavens in sequence and
comes to rest with us. In this way it is adapted both to the
wisdom that angels enjoy and to the intelligence that we
do. As a result, angels have a Word that they read just as
much as we do ours. They draw their doctrinal principles
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