90 HEAVEN and HELL §167
creation, from eternity. As my anxiety mounted because of this, I was
raised into the sphere of heaven and therefore into the perception of eter-
nity shared by angels. This shed light for me on the fact that we ought
not to think about eternity in temporal terms but in terms of state, and
that when we do, we can grasp what “from eternity” entails, which was
actually done for me.168 The angels who talk with us never use the natural concepts that are
proper to us, all of which derive from time, space, matter, and the like.
They use spiritual concepts, all of which derive from states and their vari-
ous changes in and around angels. However, when the angelic concepts,
which are spiritual, fl ow into us, they change instantly and spontaneously
into those natural concepts proper to us that exactly correspond to the
spiritual ones. Neither the angels nor we are aware of this; but still, this is
how all infl ow of heaven occurs for us.
There were some angels who were let very intimately into my
thoughts, all the way into natural ones that contained a mass of material
from time and space. However, since at that point they could not under-
stand anything at all, they promptly withdrew; and after they had with-
drawn I heard them talking, saying that they had been in darkness.
[ 2 ] I have been allowed to know from experience what angels’ igno-
rance of time is like. There was a particular individual from heaven whose
nature did allow him to be let into natural concepts such as we have. I
talked with him afterward, person to person, and at fi rst he did not know
what it was that I was calling “time.” So I actually had to tell him how
the sun seems to travel around our earth and make years and days, and
that as a result, years are divided into four seasons and into months and
weeks, and days into twenty-four hours, and that these times recur at
fi xed intervals. This gives rise to our expressions for time. He was aston-
ished when he heard this, and said that he had not known that kind of
thing, but only what states were.
[ 3 ] In the course of our conversation I mentioned that it was known
in our world that there is no time in heaven. We do actually talk as
though we knew, since when people die, we say that they have left tem-
poral things and have passed beyond time, meaning that they have left
our world. I also said that it is known by some that times are states in
origin because they recognize that times are experienced in precise accord
with the states of affection we are caught up in. They are short for us
when we are engaged in pleasant and cheerful pursuits and long when we
are engaged in distasteful and depressing ones, and variable when we are