198 HEAVEN and HELL §355
f. Information is a matter of our natural memory, which we have while we are in the body: 5212 ,
9922. We take our entire natural memory with us after death: 2475 ; from experience: 2481 – 2486 ; but
for many reasons, we cannot pull things out of it the way we could in this world: 2476 , 2477 , 2479.
g. The loveliest colors can be seen in heaven: 1053 , 1624. The colors in heaven come from the light
that is there, and are modifi cations or shadings of it: 1042 , 1043 , 1053 , 1624 , 3993 , 4530 , 4922 ,
4742. They are appearances of truth from good, and refer to aspects of intelligence and wisdom:
4530 , 4922 , 4677 , 9466.from the body. For then we are spirits, and it is the spirit that thinks
within the body.f356 It is different for people who have acquired intelligence and wisdom
by means of their insights and information, people who have applied
everything to the service of their lives and have at the same time acknowl-
edged the Divine Being, loved the Word, and led a life both spiritual and
moral (as described above in § 319 ). For them, learning served as a means
to being wise and for substantiating matters of faith. The deeper levels of
their minds are perceived and even seen as transparent to the light, with
a bright color, fi ery or azure, like that of clear diamonds or rubies or
sapphires, depending on the support they derived, from their learning,
for the Divine and for divine truths. True intelligence and wisdom look
like this when they are presented visually in the spiritual world. This
comes from heaven’s light, which is divine truth emanating from the
Lord, the source of all intelligence and wisdom (see above, §§ 126 – 133 ).
[ 2 ] The focal planes of this light in which the shadings stand forth like
colors are the deeper levels of the mind; and it is the validations of divine
truths through what we fi nd in nature—that is, by learning—that pro-
duce these shadings.g Actually, our inner mind probes the material in
our natural memory and uses the fi re of heavenly love to refi ne (so to
speak) the things there that support it, to draw them off and purify them
to the point that they become spiritual concepts. We are not aware that
this is going on as long as we are in our physical bodies because in this
state, though we are thinking both spiritually and naturally, we still do
not notice what we are thinking spiritually but only what we are think-
ing naturally. However, once we have arrived in the spiritual world we
are not aware of what we once thought naturally, in this world, only
what we were thinking spiritually. This is how our state changes. [ 3 ] We
can see from this that we become spiritual by means of our insights and
learning and that these are means of becoming wise only for people who
acknowledge the Divine Being in both faith and life.
These people are received into heaven before others and live there
with the ones who are in the center (§ 43 ) because they are in more light