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

AFTERLIFE
There is a similar correspondence with things in the
veg etable kingdom. A garden, in general terms, corre -
sponds to heaven in respect to intelligence and wisdom,
which is why heaven is called the garden of God and a par -
adise, and why we call it a heavenly paradise.
Trees, species by species, correspond to perceptions and
firsthand knowledge of what is good and true, which yield
intelligence and wisdom. So the early people, who were
absorbed in the knowledge of correspondences, held their
holy worship in groves. This is why trees are mentioned so
often in the Word and why heaven, the church, and
people are compared to them—to the vine, for example,
the olive, the cedar, and others—and the good we do is
com pared to fruit.
Further, the foods we derive from them, especially the
ones we get from crops planted in fields, correspond to
affec tions for what is good and true because they nourish
our spiritual life the way earthly foods nourish our natural
life.
Bread, generally speaking, corresponds to an affection
for whatever is good because it is the mainstay of life and
because it is used to mean all food. It is because of this cor -
respondence that the Lord calls himself the bread of life;
and it is also because of this that bread was put to holy use
in the Israelite church—they did in fact place bread on
the table in the tabernacle and called it “the bread of pres -
ence.” Then too, all divine worship that they per formed
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