226 HEAVEN and HELL §394
difference that [after death] we enjoy a deeper delight because we are
engaged in a spiritual life. This is a deeper life, and therefore more open
to heavenly blessedness.Heavenly Joy and Happiness
395
HARDLY anyone nowadays knows what heaven is or what heavenly
joy is. People who think about either subject come up with such
pedestrian and crude notions that they scarcely amount to anything at
all. I have had a wonderful opportunity to learn from spirits who were
coming from this world into the other life what kind of idea they had
about heaven and heavenly joy, for when they are left on their own, as
they were in the world, they still think the same way.
The reason they do not know about heavenly joy is that people who
think about it at all base their judgments on the external joys of the natural
person. They do not know what the inner or spiritual person is, so they do
not know what that person’s pleasure and blessedness are. So even if they
were told by people involved in spiritual or inner joy what heavenly joy is
and how it feels, they would not be able to grasp it. It would have descended
into an unfamiliar concept and therefore not into their perception, so it
would have become one of those things that the natural person casts aside.
Everyone is capable of knowing that when we leave our outer or nat-
ural person we enter our inner or spiritual one; so we can also know that
heavenly pleasure is an inner and spiritual pleasure and not an outer or
natural one. Since it is inner and spiritual, it is purer and fi ner and moves
our deeper levels, the levels of our soul or spirit.
We may also conclude from this that the quality of our pleasure fol-
lows from the quality of the pleasure of our spirit, and that the pleasures
of our bodies, called “the pleasures of the fl esh,” have nothing to do with
heaven by comparison. Whatever is in our spirit when we leave the body
remains with us after death, for we then live as human spirits.396 All pleasures fl ow from love, because what we love we feel as pleas-
ant. There is no other source of any pleasure. It follows, then, that the
quality of the love determines the quality of the pleasure. Pleasures of the