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

Heaven
I cannot say how many of these are or are becoming
angels of heaven. I have been told that most of the earliest
peo ple became angels, because they thought more deeply
and spiritually and were therefore enveloped in heavenly
affec tion; while for later ages it was not so many because
as time passed we became more externally minded and
began to think more on the natural level, which meant
that we were enveloped in more earthly affection.
This enables us to gather at the outset that heaven is
huge simply from the inhabitants of this planet.
Then too, I have talked with spirits about the fact that
peo ple could realize that there is more than one earth in
the universe from the fact that the starry heaven is so
immense. There are so incomprehensibly many stars in it,
each one a sun in its own place and its own system, like our
sun, of different magnitudes. If people think this through
carefully, they will come to the conclusion that this whole
vast universe cannot be anything but a means to an end,
which is the goal of creation, a heavenly kingdom in
which the Divine can dwell with angels and with us. The
vis i ble universe, the heaven spangled with so incompre -
hensibly many stars that are all suns, is in fact simply a
means for the production of planets with people on them
who can make up a heavenly kingdom.
Given all this, rational people cannot help thinking
that such a vast means toward such an end did not come
into being for the sake of a human race on one earth.
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