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

AFTERLIFE
We can see in the human face what correspondence is
like. In a face that has not been taught to dissimulate, all
the affections of the mind manifest themselves visibly in
a natural form, as though in their very imprint, which is
why we refer to the face as “the index of the mind.” This is
our spiritual world within our natural world. Similarly,
elements of our understanding are manifest in our speech,
and matters of our volition in our physical behavior. So
things that occur in the body, whether in our faces or in
our speech or in our behavior, are called correspondences.
There Is a Correspondence of Heaven
with Everything Earthly
All earthly things are differentiated into three classes that
we call “kingdoms,” namely the animal kingdom, the
vegetable kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. Members
of the animal kingdom are correspondences on the first
level because they are alive. Members of the vegetable
king dom are correspondences on the second level
because they merely grow. Members of the mineral king -
dom are correspondences on the third level because they
neither live nor grow.
The correspondences in the animal kingdom are the
liv ing creatures of various kinds, both those that walk and
creep on the earth and those that fly in the air. We need
not list them by name, because they are familiar. Corres -
pon dences in the vegetable kingdom are all the things
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