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

AFTERLIFE
the intent that everyone should be saved and should be
most profoundly and fully happy. This is why it is all the
same whether you say “heaven” or “heavenly joy.”
Heaven’s pleasures are both indescribable and innu -
mer able; but no one can realize or believe anything about
their multitude who is wholly wrapped up in pleasures of
the body or the flesh. This, as I have already said, is
because their deeper levels are looking away from heaven
toward the world, which is backward. For no one who is
wholly involved in pleasures of the body or the flesh (or in
love for oneself and the world, which is the same thing)
feels any pleasure except in eminence or profit or in phys -
ical and sensory gratification. These stifle and smother
deeper pleasures of heaven so completely that people do
not even believe such pleasures exist. So they would be
quite bewildered if they were so much as told that any
pleasures remain once the pleasures of eminence and
profit have been taken away; and they would be even
more bewildered if they were told that the pleasures that
take their place are countless and simply defy comparison
with pleasures of the body and the flesh, especially
pleasures of eminence and profit. We can see, then, why
people do not know what heavenly joy is.
We may gather the magnitude of heaven’s pleasure
simply from the fact that for everyone there it is delightful
to share their pleasure and bliss with someone else; and
since everyone in the heavens is like this, we can see how
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