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

AFTERLIFE
What would that be for a divine being, an infinite being,
for whom thousands or tens of thousands of planets, all
fully inhabited, would be so slight as to be practically
nothing
By a preliminary calculation, if there were a million
planets in the universe with three hundred million people
on each one, and two hundred generations over six thou -
sand years, and if each person or spirit were allotted three
cubic cubits, and if all these people or spirits were gathered
into one place, they would not even fill the volume of our
earth, hardly more than a satellite of one of the planets.
This would be such a small space in the universe as to be
barely visible, since we can scarcely see those satellites
with the naked eye. What would this be for the Creator of
the universe, for whom it would not be enough if the
whole universe were filled For the Creator is infinite.
I have talked about this with angels, who have told me
that they have much the same idea about how small the
number of the human race is in comparison to the infinity
of the Creator. However, they do not think in terms of
space but of states, and to their minds, no matter how
many tens of thousands of planets you could conceive of,
it would still be simply nothing to the Lord.
Because they take a few passages from the Word liter -
ally, some people think that heaven is not vast but small.
For example, there are places where it says that only the
poor will be accepted into heaven, or only the elect, or
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