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

AFTERLIFE
to us, we cannot escape being born into total ignorance,
so that we can be led from there, by divine means, back
into the pattern of heaven.
We can deduce how members of the vegetable kingdom
correspond from a multitude of instances—for example,
from the fact that tiny seeds grow into trees, beget leaves,
produce flowers and then fruits in which they place
another generation of seeds, and that these things happen
in a sequence and emerge all together in such a wondrous
design that there is no way to describe it briefly. It would
take volumes, and still there would be deeper mysteries
suited to their uses that our knowledge could not compass.
Because these things stem from the spiritual world or
heaven, which is in a human form, it is also true that the
details of that kingdom have a kind of relationship to
human characteristics—a fact that is recognized by some
individuals in the learned world.
It has become clear to me from a great deal of experi -
ence that everything in that kingdom is also a correspon -
dence. Very often, when I have looked over trees and
fruits and flowers and vegetables in gardens, I have
become aware of corresponding things in heaven. Then I
have talked with nearby people there and have learned
where these plants were from and what their character -
istics were.
Nowadays, though, no one can know about the spiri -
tual things in heaven to which natural things in the world
76