156 HEAVEN and HELL §291
a. There are angels and spirits with every individual, and through them we have communication
with the spiritual world: 697 , 2796 , 2886 , 2887 , 4047 , 4048 , 5846 – 5866 , 5976 – 5993. Apart from
these spirits with us, we could not live: 5993. We are not visible to the spirits, nor are they to us:
5885 [ 5862 ]. Spirits cannot see anything in our subsolar world of humanity except things [visible]
to the individual they are talking to: 1880.The Union of Heaven with the Human Race
291
IT is acknowledged in the church that everything good comes from
God and nothing of it from us, and therefore that we should never
take personal credit for anything good. It is also recognized that evil
comes from the Devil. This is why people who talk from the doctrine of
the church describe people who are acting well and who are talking
devoutly and preaching as being led by God, and say the opposite about
people who are acting maliciously and speaking blasphemously. None of
this could happen unless we had a union with heaven and a union with
hell, and unless those unions were with our volition and our understand-
ing, since it is from these that the body acts and the mouth speaks. We
need now to describe what this union is like.292 There are good spirits and evil spirits with every individual. We have
our union with heaven through the good spirits and our union with hell
through the evil ones. These spirits are in the world of spirits, which is inter-
mediate between heaven and hell and will be specifi cally treated later.
When these spirits come to us, they come into our whole memory and
from there into all our thinking—evil spirits into the matters of memory
and thought that are evil, and good spirits into the matters of memory and
thought that are good. These spirits are totally unaware that they are with
us. Rather, as long as they are, they believe that all these matters of our
memory and thought are actually theirs. They do not see us, either,
because their sight does not extend to things in our subsolar world.a
The Lord takes the greatest care to prevent spirits from knowing
whom they are with. If they did know, they would talk with them, and
then the evil spirits would destroy them; for evil spirits, being united to
hell, want nothing more than to destroy us not only as to spirit (that is, as
to our love and faith) but as to our bodies as well. It is different when